Being an internet refuge for Graeme McMillan
From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:
Children scurry around on East Broadway Street in Sweetwater, Texas, to gather candy tossed from the Christmas parade floats on Monday, Dec. 3, 2012. (AP Photo/The Abilene Reporter-News, Joy Lewis)
So wonderfully atmospheric, and just a little bit scary, too.
From “The Observer’s 20 Photographs of The Week” at the Guardian:
A girl looks at the red algal bloom at Clovelly beach in Sydney. A huge red algal bloom along vast stretches of south-eastern Australia’s coastline resulted in beaches being closed and turned swathes of usually pristine ocean milky pink.
Once again: Nature, people. Just kind of amazing, really.
A relatively recent discovery for me, but I love the echoes to traditional Christmas music this one has (The sleigh bells and backing vocals at 3:07 are my favorite, especially as the backing vocals lead into a joyless “fa la la”), even as the subject matter is far more depressing and dark than the stories of Santa and goodwill that you’d expect from this time of year.
“It’s Christmas again, December is here…” as Aimee Mann sings in this somewhat delicate, prettily melancholy song that marks the beginning of a musical Advent Calendar on this here blog. Yes, between now and Christmas Day, it’s all holiday music all the time because, my friends, I love this time of year. And so, instead of the usual 366 Songs ramblings, expect Christmas Songs with little-to-no commentary. Just enjoy the most wonderful time of the year, dammit.
(Worth noting: This song gets first go not simply because of the “December is here” line, but because of the line that follows: “Hasn’t it been a wonderful year?” There’s something about Mann’s performance of that line that makes me unconvinced that she means it, and that always appeals to me. This year especially; it’s really not been a wonderful year, has it…? 2012, you’ve been trying to kill me and those I love all too often, it seems.)
In a strange way, this song reminds me of McAlmont & Butler’s “Yes” – It’s the jangly guitar and the fact that this song just builds, just grows into an epic that’s irresistible and so exuberant and filled with a particular joy. I love the way it becomes so repetitive, the organ becoming a spiral of riff until it falls into the final notes and everything ends. This is one of those songs that never fails to make me happy, and make me want to dance, as silly as that may sound. This is the sound of the best of Scotland in my head, in many ways; I was never a massive Belle & Sebastian fan, but I shall always, always love them for this.
Working between the crowd and the algorithm in the information ecosystem is where a journalist is able to have most effect, by serving as an investigator, a translator, a storyteller. Without leveraging the possibilities of either the crowd or the algorithm, some kinds of journalism become unsustainable, falling behind the real-time world of data and networks available to audiences through everything from the sensor on their waste bin to the trending list on their Twitter stream. The journalism layer within the ecosystem thus becomes about humanizing the data and not about the mechanizing process.
From here, which is just the introduction to a much larger report.
Putting this here as much as a reminder for me to dig through the whole thing as soon as possible as anything else. I feel like I’m nearing another of my “This is what I should be doing with my time!” brain dumps.
The song that returned the concept of the Wall of Sound to pop music in Britain in the mid-90s, McAlmont and Butler’s “Yes” was a glorious rejection of the jangly-guitar, Smiths and Beatles-obsessed aesthetic at the core of Britpop right as the country was at the peak of its Oasis adoration. Unlike the Gallagher Bros’ output, this is a wonderfully camp, layered song that updates “I Will Survive” for a generation that wished that Phil Spector had produced Gloria Gaynor’s classic.
Bernard Butler’s over-the-top production aesthetic, honed on Suede’s Dog Man Star, went into overdrive with this song; listen to how his traditionally dominant guitar gets lost amongst the strings and the drums, and David McAlmont’s luscious voice, milking the song for everything that it’s worth (The outro, with repeated “I feel well enough to tell ya/What you can/Do/With what you got”s is just epic, an exhausting, rapturous thing to listen to as it keeps building and building). It’s a breathless song that sounded out of time upon its first appearance, more ornate and intentional and grandiose than what we’d become used to, but all the more magical for that. Even seventeen years later, it still has a spectacular majesty to it.
From the Guardian’s 24 Hours in Pictures collection:
Mumbai, India: A man wearing devil horns sells toys on a beach. Photograph: Danish Siddiqui/Reuters
