Brooklyn Christmas

This was a street in my neighbourhood two days ago. There's nothing like silence sudddenly descending on a city to make you feel Christmassy, or that war has been declared and no one told you.

So with that happy thought, it's time to sign off on this blog experiment for a short while, take a calorific holiday, then get back to work making the music that will either heal the world, or finally put it out of it's misery. I am nothing if not a humanitarian.

Have fun whatever you're doing, and see you in 2009.

P.S There's a little download you can grab of a Christmas classic - butchered, bled white, and slow roasted by me, on myspace. As soon as I can figure out how to put MP3s up here, I'll do that too.

Vampire Movie Mix Up

In my world, which approaches heightened levels of optimism at this time of year, I imagine the following scenario.

Mom calls up local movie theatre to find out if the vampire movie with kids is showing. It is. She takes her three corn fed kids and two of their fiends to see what they hope is 'Twilight'... instead they end up going to see 'Let The Right One In' - a Swedish movie, dark and funny, disturbing but deeply moral. It changes their collective world view. Mom and the kids throw away their terrible novels, start going to see films with subtitles, and occasionally read things with longer sentences and bigger paragraphs, without such a mind-numbing christian bias. The world becomes a better place for them and for us.

What actually happens is they go see 'Twilight', eat pop corn, get fatter and stupider and spend the next saturday night trying to phone vote for this week's pop idol.

Be like the smart people this Christmas. If you want to see a vampire movie, go see this, before the re-make comes out next year. Sentences you never hear at dinner parties: "the remake was so much better than the original". For this there must be a reason.

Despite taking it's title from a Morrissey song, it's a fab film. Let the Morrissey hate mail begin - it's not like I haven't framed most of those letters you know. My library in the west wing has a whole wall devoted to them.

Charting The Passage of Time

How time passed today between 6.23pm and 7.55pm today. This time of year can take my introspection to absurd levels. And drawing a circle seemed easier than finishing a song. I also tried listening to Sigur Ros. But you would need an electron magnifying microscope to see how little time I could actually manage. Enya for Guardianistas. But that's just my thoughts.