dear sinister, i think we're growing apart. all you ever seem to talk about these days are gigs you know i couldn't go to and videos you know i haven't seen. or smut (prurience doesn't pay you know). i've never claimed to be the bands biggest fan (and wasn't it mark e. smith who said that the fall were a band for people who don't have a favourite band? - well i don't have a favourite band) but... what am i trying to say here? that i feel left out and that it's my own fault? probably. but as i type man utd have just gone 3-2 up against aston villa, and i'm no football fan but my brother is - a man utd fan as it goes. and since most of his mates are villa fans he's understandably euphoric; united hadn't been looking themselves for most of the game, villa scored two in two minutes, ferguson brought on van nistelroy (sp?) and suddenly the tide has turned. but can i feel any of that joy? nah. "but thats not the same thing is it?" i hear you cry "you're a fan of belle and sebastian aren't you?" which is true, but it's better if anecdotes are fallible, they make better talking points then. it seems customary to remark on how long it has been since you last posted somewhere near the top of your post (bless me father, it has been seven and a half years since my last confession and these are my sins...) but i honestly can't remember - the churlish amongst our readers will be thinking i could just check the archives, but then i could give you the exact date and even tell you what i was on about that day and such is the realm of the pedant. if i were to do that then small children would point at me on the street and shout "PEDANT!" at me, and be well within their rights to do so. well, what have i been up to since whenever it was that i last posted? have i been poised, cat like, notepad in hand, collating my experiences ready to type them in here for your delictation? at which point does experience lose its lustre twixt mind and paper, between keyboard and computer screen? will anything i tell you register in the way i want it? how can i possibly let you know everything? do i even want to? what may i already have lost throught the holes in my recollection or throught my multitudinous delusions? if only there was something you could experience as i did... but wait! such a thing exists thanks, in part, to the magic of computers. i downloaded an mp3 quite by chance from audiogalaxy (in wishing to further broaden my horizons i had decided to try some of their recommended avant-garde flavour artists), a song called 'nipples' by peter brotzmann and it is utterly fantastic. one of the most startling things i have ever heard. depending on your standpoint i suppose it's as good or as bad as free jazz gets. perhaps i sound doe-eyed and naiive - free jazz not being something i'm particularly au fait with, but there was a lot of free jazz amongst the shedload of songs i downloaded and that was the choice cut, so give it a go. there were other things i wanted to tell you. i wanted to tell you about working at the glebe farm library the day after boxing day, with barely ten people visiting the library all day, and having to endure heart FM (tinpot local radio) the whole day. in a library most probably with fewer books than you have in your house - fewer books that are actually worth reading anyway, does that make me sound like an intellectual snob? don't care. i recall that some of my last post was dedicated to telling you about my annoyance at end of year best of lists. well allow me to elucidate further, because to my (and i'm sure your) amusment some people posted comedy lists which i found highly amusing, a gold star for them (if only i could remember their names - damn). and then just the other day the fast show spectacularly sent up such lists, as well as those horrible nostalgia programmes whilst also showing some of their best clips. did anyone else see that? fantastic. one such best of list, which despite falling foul of all the faults i described in my last post, and is almost criminally predictable, but always manages to pique my interest is the john peel festive fifty. and while i don't think there was a bad song in it this year, subject to debate obviously (that cuban boys song for example isn't particularly palatable the second time you hear it). but if i were john peel i would be a tad annoyed that the list was dominated by, as peel himself put it: "cute white kids". he must play two or three reggae records every show, two or three dancey type records and yet the only dancey type thing in the whole chart was squarepusher's somewhat tongue in cheek 'red hot car'. most disappointing. that said i suppose i was glad melys won, because that is a great pop record. far too much white stripes and strokes though, obviously. aren't minidiscs good? do you think you could tell what i look like just from reading what i've written to sinister? could i do it for some of you? something to think about isn't it? or perhaps i strike you as some epicine entity, as smoke curling through binary numbers, transcending appearance. being just words. it has always struck me as sort of odd that people on the net who belong to things like sinister put their pictures up for people to see - surely it defeats the purpose of this new unbiased method of communication? or perhaps not, perhaps i'm looking into this too much. i'm certainly not saying that showing people your picture is a bad thing, but if it changes their perception of you then surely my point is vindicated? i suppose that'll do for now remember, eccentricity is the last refuge of the played out bourgeois bye then - kieran _________________________________________________________________ Join the worlds largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ 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! +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+