well sinister, I only just purchased the cd. I have had the album i would say close to a month, and been weighing it up and down, and some of you will remember I said i didn't like it very much and that it was overproduced yada yada. Got a bit of a public dressing down from Robin Stout.(he apologised though, what a nice fellow) But i have to say that when I took it out of its box, put it into cd player a kind of magic took over. I sat crossed legged on the floor and read Stuart 's liner notes, which were grate. (mailing his jacket back to his house is my favourite bit). It all made sense with the notes and it playing out my stereo, the sun shining in the window. A composite piece. There is a lesson here kids, mp3's are the tool of the devil. I download all my stuff at uni, on their ultra fast connection, but i have noticed something. The more twee or fay the music, the slower the connection the other side. If you set about downloading, say the new strokes album, good ole fashioned(almost) rawk, the users all have an upload speed of about 100, but the more twee the music the weaker the transmission speed. I had a bastard of a time getting camera obscura and Isobel's new album. Anyway, because i'm wanking about trying to get a user on soulseek that can give me the song at a good speed i want to be instantly blown away when I've finally procured the damn thing and play it on my headphones, and then of course they are all out of sequence. Its just not a nice experience. Even when i have it all loaded in the right order and playing away it just didn't do it for me. But the act of coming in and loading the disc and reading what stuart has to say made me warm to it more. I think music is instantly contextual, and if the context is looking over my shoulder to see if the network administrator has found out that I've hacked the websense filter then it changes the music too. Anyway long story short I am quite enjoying the record. ****Dear Catastrophe Waitress**** I was sitting in a café in once with a friend of mine, we had been playing chess and he had been beating me, I decided to blame my poor performance on the fact the café was getting very loud and busy. I was getting a bit sulky really because I don't like to lose. So I stared into space and he read a book, I think it was the unbearable lightness of being, and he was underlining my copy. It was one of these evenings that we were really just passing time and that is the only phrase for it. I hate that phrase to "pass time"; I mean what is one passing time till exactly? I know this sounds a bit trite, like pop psychology rhetoric, to make every moment count or something, but really it saddens me to pass time. That is also the best reason I can come up with when people ask me why I don't wear a watch. I like to give my affectations solid theoretical grounding, and with the eyes to heaven they nod as I explain. So the café was quite dark but it was the cosiest place we could find on a cold night. A girl in the corner had caught my eye from the very start of the evening. She looked really nervous, she was a waitress but she looked as though she were new. She was pretty, not overly so but her manner naïve enough to give her charm. I caught her eye a few times as she served the tables next to mine. I was looking at her when it happened; she dropped the entire tray of cups all over the floor in front of me and a look, this look of sheer annoyance, almost grief like in its contortions came over her face and she bit her lip beautifully. It seemed to over-compensate by far for the crime. She hissed a sorry to me for getting coffee on my chords but all I could do was sit there and think of this look. My friend turned to me and said exactly what was on my mind. "Did you see her face as she dropped the cups, wasn't it beautiful" . In my minds absence she had all but cleared up the mess but I decided to make a show of helping her clear it up. She smiled and awkwardly turned back towards the kitchen with her nervous walk. I must admit to passing time up until that point, but after that I basked in how sexy I thought this girl was and her nervous annoyance. You must understand that it wasn't an angry moment it was embarrassment it was vulnerability, it was perfect. Since then when I'm asked what kind of women I like I maintain that I like "girls that drop cups in cafes". It's the feeling that they are slightly inept at their jobs, my friend suggested. That perhaps they are inept because they do something else, perhaps artists or writers he continued. Perhaps this is the case, perhaps not, but since then I have noticed that she has many counterparts and partners in crime all over the world. An honourable mention is to the girl that used to serve me espresso everyday in a café at Place de la Sorbonne in Paris (she actually tipped my table over) , she used to brush her hair in the back before she came out to take my order I could see her face in the mirror. I was too shy with my French to ask for anything more than an espresso however. Richard (Rask) P.S "Bunking off though you're a toff" = playing truant even though your posh +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-+ Snipp snapp snut, sa var sagan slut! +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+