Having given up on the Manic Street Preachers in about 1997, the presence of this song in this list is even more of a surprise to me than it is to you.
…and another link as the youtube one is blocked in the UK for some reason
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1rxlth_manic-street-preachers-walk-me-to-the-bridge-2014_music
Twin Peaks alt-country, suggested by Duncan.
I’ve never really *got* Spoon, perhaps I still don’t, but this is excellent in any case.
I’m still not sure how I feel about her voice, but for now she’s on the right side of the brilliant / annoying divide.
Hello friends / relatives / internet people / SEO robots. In a departure from the usual list of tracks in December I’m going to spend the first month and a half of 2015 posting a song every day. This should be more easily digestible for you and easier for me to organise.
Let’s start with number 50 then – Neneh Cherry returned in 2014 with her first album in nearly 20 years, the complex, uncompromising, relentlessly creative ‘Blank Project’. I’ve listened to it quite a bit, but it works more as a whole and doesn’t have an obvious standout track, so this should be taken more as a sample than a highlight.
2248 people who died in 2014, taken from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_in_2014.
I like to watch films with my wife, and this means spending a good chunk of my free time faffing about with subtitle files. If we buy a DVD it’s a bit better, but we still encounter subtitles that have been machine-translated or simply plucked from the imagination of the transcriber – last month we tried to watch The Family Way and the subtitles had no relation at all to the dialogue.
The worst / best example I’ve seen is this clip from 127 Hours where the protagonist is discussing the inadequate tool he’s using to try to free his hand from a boulder. To be fair, the subtitles were fine for the rest of the film, but this section apparently aroused the translator’s nationalistic ire, and, well…
Dialogue
“It hasn’t been very useful. Lesson; don’t buy the cheap made-in-China multi-tool. I tried to find my Swiss army knife, but…. This thing came free with a flashlight. The flashlight was a piece of shit too. I kept it in my truck for emergencies.”
Subtitles
“我这玩意儿很管用。 不要买美国的垃圾产品。 现在该干什么好呢？我用的东西都是中国生产的，性能很好。 千万不要小瞧了中国人”
Translation of subtitles
“I have found this thing very useful. Do not buy American junk. Now what to do then? I use things that are made in China, they are excellent quality. Do not underestimate the Chinese people.”
Last Night A DJ Killed My Dog Podcast #30 – Year of the Horse <—- right-click here, choose 'save link as', enjoy.
Every year I make a mix of songs and speech clips for the Chinese zodiac. This year it’s insanely late, but I did actually finally get it done.
There are over forty different clips here – these are the longest ones, the rest I’ll leave you to guess.
Add N to (X) – Ann’s Eveready Equestrian
Why? – A Sky For Shoeing Horses Under
Chemical Brothers – Horse Power
Laid Back – White Horse
Señor Coconut – White Horse
Oneida – Wild Horses
Bat For Lashes – Horse and I
Bitcrush vs. Dryft – I Kick A Dead Horse
Charlotte Gainsbourg – Trick Pony
Sufjan Stevens – Year of the Horse
Quickspace – They Shoot Horse, Don’t They?
Klaxons – Four Horsemen of 2012
Theo Beckford’s Group – The Horse
Roy Rogers & Sons of the Pioneers – (Ghost) Riders in the Sky
Charles Trenet – Vous Oubliez Votre Cheval
Patti Smith – Land – Part I: Horses
The Albion Band – Poor Old Horse
Last Night A DJ Killed My Dog Podcast #30 – Year of the Horse <—- here's the link again, right-click, choose 'save link as'.
If you can think of more horse songs then well, just keep them to yourself, I'm done with horses now. Sheep / goats, however…
Our baby had been in the world outside the womb for 24 hours when a woman arrived. Her job is to look after women and their babies during the month-long confinement (“yuezi”) almost every Chinese woman goes through after they have a baby. This is not an unusual job. Obviously I was pleased to see her, and managed to get off home that evening to have a proper sleep.
The next morning I came back with a load of special yuezi food, V’s mother and M. While we’d been in the hospital V’s mother had noticed that M’s “neck was too hot” so she’d given him a haircut like Henry the 5th. He wasn’t allowed in the maternity ward, but V’s mother got around this by just picking him up and taking him in anyway. The nurses didn’t think it was worth the trouble to argue with her. M made friends with the baby, who he insisted was named “Momp.”
The next few days were spent between the house and the hospital, trying to make myself useful in any way I could. V slowly got better, but it was still a few days before she could stand up and as I write this a week and a half later she’s still pretty far from full fitness. Here she is looking just about internet-post-acceptable.
On the Thursday they decided to turf us out. The national holiday had begun, and she was off the drips and could just about walk – and the baby was doing great, of course. We had a bit of an ordeal getting home though – I went to the front of the hospital to get a taxi, then tried to direct the driver inside the complex to where V was waiting. Instead of driving the whole way though, he just parked about 50 metres away, then honked his horn and shouted at her to come more quickly. I tried to explain that she couldn’t walk well and that we had a newborn baby, but this just made him even more furious for some reason. When she got to the car he announced that we were too much trouble, he wouldn’t take us and I should pay the fare and leave. Obviously I didn’t want to pay him anything, but he refused to open the boot and let us have the bags back, and showed he was serious by starting to drive away, so I had to pay up, then he sped off through the hospital shouting various obscenities at us. We were a bit shaken by this, V called the taxi company when we were inside another (very friendly and professional) taxi, so hopefully something will happen to him.
I hope this doesn’t all come off as extremely negative. We’re very happy with our baby, and happy that V is out of danger too. I wouldn’t say the hospital was terrible either – for China, at least. We could have gone to a private clinic for ten times the price, but the likelyhood was that for all their expensive decorations and free tea, the facilities would have been worse, and we couldn’t take any risks. We would’ve liked to go to Hong Kong, but they hate mainland women giving birth there. We would’ve liked to go back to the UK, but V isn’t allowed to use the NHS, even when she’s risking her life to give birth to a British citizen. So that’s just how it went.
We’re a week and a half into ‘yuezi’ now. Our little flat is full of people, to the extent that I’m not really needed, and have cancelled my leave and went back to work yesterday. My job so far has been taking care of / entertaining M, which has been just brilliant, honestly. Usually I only see him in the morning / evening and at the weekend I just want to rest, but this week I’ve just taken him all round the neighbourhood and forgotten about trying to get any chores done. Writing this, for example.
And the baby, of course, shouldn’t forget him, though there’s not that much to say. He’s tiny (still under 3kg – he was born at 37 weeks, so basically a month younger than M when he was born), and he still doesn’t do much apart from sleep and drink milk. Even crying is fairly minimal. Now’s the time that people want to hear about him, but at 37 weeks there’s just not that much to say. We don’t need to register his birth for another couple of weeks, but I suppose he sort of has a name now. ‘Theodore’ on paper – either ‘Theo’ or ‘Ted’ (not ‘teddy’) in real life. No real story behind this one – it was just the name that neither of us objected to. Middle name is still TBD, as is his Chinese name. He has to be 梅书-something, we’re just missing that third character. Apparently 梅书馆 and 梅书房 are not acceptable.
The “delivery” or “operation” had been scheduled for 7am, then was postponed to 1pm, then at 11.30am V was suddenly told it was time, and was wheeled away. I didn’t even really have time to see her as she disappeared, and there was a flurry of activity as I tried to intercept the doctor and the nurse sent both me and V’s mother on errands to buy the same thing from shops downstairs.
Eventually we reconvened behind the giant metal door on the stairwell that led to the operating theatres, and V’s mother cornered the doctor to ask what the situation was. He hadn’t seen her yet, but stentoriously listed his dire warnings and strode away. We hadn’t given V’s mother much detail before, so this was a bit of a shock to her.
Eventually we were shooed away and told to wait on the 10th floor obstetics ward.
V’s mother sat on the chairs, I did some pacing for a while before giving up and sitting down too. Somehow I’d passed through panic into relative calmness, not something I really understand to be honest. We waited there for an hour and a half before the baby emerged from the lift in a bassinet, and got the merest of glimpses of him as he was wheeled to be weighed and measured. He was as white as chalk, though that quickly faded into a normal skin colour.
We waited another hour and a half for V to return. Obviously I was excited about the new baby, but three hours in the operating theatre is just too long. I kept walking over to the lift thinking “she has to be coming out now, it can’t be any longer” and the doors always remained shut. Then suddenly she was there, hooked up to an astonishing variety of machines and looking the very essence of ‘pale and weak’. Later we found out that she’d needed well over a litre of blood.
Soon after V’s mother had to leave, and the longest shift began. V needed constant massage, changing of various drips and cleaning up of blood, and was in too much pain to get out more than a couple of words. The nurses would help, but that required going out into the corridor and nagging them, and there was that newborn baby to take care of too, of course. It was a long night, but amazingly we each managed to get an hour or so of sleep, mainly due to the fact that the nurses had moved us to a room with two beds.
We were sharing with a woman who’d had premature twins, both being kept in the intensive care unit. She had her sister-in-law staying on her fold-up chair, and she seemed to be either a midwife or a nurse, and was willing to help out a little when I realised how little I remembered about taking care of newborn babies. Together we got through the night.
The next day V was a little better, though still looking far from healthy. I was doing my chores on autopilot and waiting for sleep, and had barely time to take in how nice our new baby was being. Perhaps our expectations were set low after the baby in the 6-bed ward, but he seemed to like sleeping and drinking milk a lot, and wasn’t that keen on crying. My only complaint was that he kicked his bedclothes off every half hour, but he might just’ve been too hot (they really do love to wrap them up tight here).
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