"Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings." ~ Søren Kierkegaard

There's a new Sun Kil Moon album which you can listen to on Spotify but it's Mark Kozelek's early output with RHP that still draws me in.

In my opinion this is the most plaintive song about the fading of youth ever written and it was the very first song on RHP's début album. What a way to introduce yourself and your band to the world!

Red House Painters, 24

Lonesome George has died. The Darwinian in me knows that millions of species have come and gone over the billennia but losing something so unique still pulls on my heart strings. At least he finally escaped the melancholy that must have afflicted him as the last of his kind.

Cocteau Twins, Cherry Coloured Funk

"The archbishop of Canterbury has denounced David Cameron's "big society", saying that it comes across as aspirational waffle that was "designed to conceal a deeply damaging withdrawal of the state from its responsibilities to the most vulnerable".

Petite Noir, Disappear

"In a post-crash era where Wall Street trials almost never make it into court, and even the harshest settlements end with the evidence buried by the government and the offending banks permitted to escape with no admission of wrongdoing, this case finally dragged the whole ugly truth of American finance out into the open – and it was a hell of a show."

Grimes, Genesis

Cat Power, Lived in Bars

Sonic Youth, 100%

The Original Position

Goosebumps, always!

The Charge of the Light Brigade

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

1.
Half a league, half a league,
 Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
 Rode the six hundred.
"Forward, the Light Brigade!
"Charge for the guns!" he said:
Into the valley of Death
 Rode the six hundred.

2.
"Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
 Someone had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
 Rode the six hundred.

3.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
 Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
 Rode the six hundred.

4.
Flash'd all their sabres bare,
Flash'd as they turn'd in air,
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
 All the world wonder'd:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro' the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reel'd from the sabre stroke
 Shatter'd and sunder'd.
Then they rode back, but not
 Not the six hundred.

5.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
 Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro' the jaws of Death
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
 Left of six hundred.

6.
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
 All the world wondered.
Honor the charge they made,
Honor the Light Brigade,
 Noble six hundred.

Against Me!, I was a Teenage Anarchist

Do the left wing react the same way to some austerity measures as some environmentalists do to GMO farming? Are measures such as labour law reforms eschewed because the left wing have the same paranoid concerns about the influence of big business as the environmentalists? Should politicians and economists adopt a more evidence base approach to social and economic changes? Is an evidence based approach even possible in the emotionally charged popularity competition that is politics? Do ideologically driven politicians even care about evidence?

Clarity about Austerity

"It is only in I960 that Lacan develops his classic opposition between jouissance and pleasure, an opposition which alludes to the Hegelian/Kojevian distinction between Genuβ (enjoyment) and Lust (pleasure) (cl. Kojève, 1947: 46). The pleausure principle functions as a limit to enjoyment; it is a law which commands the subject to ‘enjoy as little as possible’. At the same lime, the subject constantly attempts to transgress the prohibitions imposed on his enjoyment, to go ‘beyond the pleasure principle’. However, the result of transgressing the pleasure principle is not more pleasure, but pain, since there is only a certain amount of pleasure that the subject can hear. Beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this ‘painful pleasure’ is what Lacan calls jouissance: 'jouissance is suffering' (S7. 184). The term jouissance thus nicely expresses the paradoxical satisfaction that the subject derives from his symptom, or, to put it another way, the suffering that he derives from his own satisfaction (Frend's ‘primary gain from illness’)." ~ Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis.

"By constant communion with others we hope we shall be able to accept the horrible fact of our total solitude." ~ Ingmar Bergman

"This is an exciting time."

Modest Mouse, Broke