Thursday, September 14, 2006

Listening today to Oxford's finest, Ride, made me appreciate again the joy of really bad lyrics. This, from their very sweet song "Crown of Creation", made all the more hilarious by the sincerity with which it is sung:

"You are the crown of creation,
I wanna be your relation,
I'm getting off at your station..."

But my current favourite bad lyrics are from one of the most incredible albums ever, Lou Reed's Berlin. This, from the title track:

"In Berlin
by the wall
you were five feet
ten inches tall"

- which is so howlingly awful it's genius, in a camp kinda way.
And this, from "Caroline Says 1":

"Just like poison in a vial
she was often very vile"

- which is just rotten on every conceivable level.

To balance things out, though, here's my current favourite pop lyric, from "Lucy's Hamper" by Gorky's Zygotic Mynci:

"It was the most miserable night
That I'd ever seen
And the rain came down
Like something obscene
And we cried in our pints
For no reason at all
Except that our lives were shite
And we wanted so much more..."

(sigh)

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

It must be such a headache having to be on all the time when you work in a newspaper office. This doggedly cheerful excerpt from an email I got from an editor chum:

"We're in the market for lots of exciting, smart *humdingers* (today's buzzword)."

Somehow a really depressing sentence, and not just cos of the use of 'buzzword'. You just know that your idea of 'exciting' and 'smart', not to mention your misguided, eager-to-please approximation of what precisely a 'humdinger' might be, will not tally with the paper's. Cue several days of rewriting, cutting, pasting, gnashing of teeth etc, to produce something that is neither yours nor theirs, nor interesting to the world at large.

Better, surely, to just stay in bed instead.
First post of the month - hurrah! No, that's not right, I am not at all the sort of person to say 'hurrah'.

Last night I saw Adrift. Good movie and all, but why didn't they think of the obvious plan? You know, wait until the baby's about 3 years old, then call out instructions for her to climb aboard the deck and press the button to release the ladder. Easy-peasy.

Yesterday was my little brother's birthday. I didn't buy him anything, partly because I'm sore that he never played the CD I made him last year, which I spent ages putting together, and partly because we rarely get one another anything, because we don't really know each other anymore. We're both very moody, up and down, hot and cold.

In fact, he just walked in a few minutes ago and said, "Remember when we used to go into London all the time and do things?", and it was sorta sad, outta the blue, 'cos we did used to be very close. Actually, it is nice when you get him something and he loves it - for instance, one of the stupid things I got him at Christmas was a key-ring with Mr T's voice. He absolutely loved it, he thought it was the funniest thing ever, he was whooping in this shrill, girly laugh he has. He's a sweetheart but I don't know how to help him with the problems he's got. Nor, I expect, would he want me to.

Today I have to:
a) write a review of a film that I didn't like, but which most people do, which is always fun.
b) start work on a course I'm helping to teach.
c) watch a reputedly disgusting film.
d) make time for some more all-singing, all-dancing posts on this blog.