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1. Recipes for the delica­tes­sens of the future Discussions of the recent communist conference have me thinking about the relationship between theory and practice, again. Conveniently, I was reading Poulantzas today on the role of theories of the state in revolutionary action: They can never be anything other than applied theoretical-strategic notions, serving, to be sure, as guide...
2. Best ofs Thinking some more about the decade just ended, one thing seems clear: Girls Aloud were the band of the decade; indeed, I can’t think of any other group that’s even a contender. Well, as long as by “band of the decade” we mean, if not the best band of the...
3. The most boring can­di­date in the world Is John McCain’s creepy linguistic tic an attempt to cash in on those rather annoying Dos Equis adverts?...

There is, though, one significant exception to this indifference: “Fly on the Wall” is absolutely fantastic. All the elements of the song work together perfectly: the tense build-up of the verse spills over into the psycho-sexual bass rumblings of the chorus; better still, the industrial clanking of the drums suggests a social context for the whole thing.

Related posts:

1. Dancing com­mu­nist pirates on a train = rev­o­lu­tion Discussing the question of when the Russian Revolution changed from revolution to counter-revolution, a friend of mine gave, I think, the only unassailable answer: in 1920, when Trotsky stopped fighting the civil war by traveling around on a train with a brass band. I was reminded of this when &catherine...
2. “While you’re getting your cry on, I’m getting my fly on” It took me an unconscionably long time to listen to Rihanna’s Rated R (and, given my slow pace of blogging of late, even longer to write about it); unconscionable because it’s such a great record, a development of some of the best features of Rihanna’s earlier records. Luckily, the forthcoming...
3. Hip-​hop is dead You can tell, because KRS-One made a record saying that it wasn’t.The funny thing about KRS’s track, and (even more) the video, is that it’s all about the past....

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.

1. Sally Shapiro – I’ll Be By Your Side

   I don’t generally follow Pitchfork-approved pop, so I hadn’t heard of Sally Shapiro until recently. My loss; Disco Romance is a pretty great album, from which this absolutely beautiful song is the standout track. It’s perfect for early February, the beginning of spring, when the weather is still freezing cold and isn’t actually getting any better, but you can just about imagine that, perhaps, at some point, it might.

2. tATu – 220

   I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m still listening to it; and now it has a video, featuring Yulia and Lena as 1930s burlesque robots, which is, you know, pretty awesome. Tatu were supposed to be playing nearby last night, but apparently they’re ill. I was wondering why they were playing in suburban San Jose rather than metrosexual San Francisco; but actually, it makes perfect sense because, if Internet message boards are to be believed, Tatu’s main fan base is made up of bicurious suburban teenagers. They should probably play Fresno (and isn’t “bicurious” a stupid word?).

3. Charlie Parker – April in Paris

   I’ve recently become, for reasons I may explain at a later date, interested in the post-war aesthetic; which translates in my music collection to Charlie Parker (although now that I think about it, I should dig out my Best of Buddy Holly, too). I’ve also been listening to “All of Me” a lot, but this was an obvious choice for the meme. It’s such a splendid spring song, right from the opening flourish of trumpets that crunch like a sugar-snap pea, or a grape.

4. The Ting Tings – That’s Not My Name

   Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong have certainly done the world a favor by choosing a terrible, terrible name, in order to warn people off their unbelievably shit music. The Ting Tings have managed a more subtle example of the same thing, in that their name is perfectly calibrated to their level of kind-of-annoyingness. “Shut Up and Let Me Go” is absolutely tailor-made for an iPod advert, in that it’s funky but, you know, tasteful; but the rest of their album is wierdly reminiscent of mid-90s American indie of a Jo Whiley/Steve Lamacq sort, most obviously in “Be the One” (which I kind of think sounds like Belly, though I may just be imagining it) but more unexpectedly, and more interestingly, about three minutes in to this track.

5. Sugababes – Surprise

   I can’t quite place exactly what it is, but there’s something very soothing about the last Sugababes album. Like a barbecue on a spring afternoon? I may be stretching the metaphor a bit. I’ve no particular reason for choosing this track over the Strokes-sampling “About You Now,” or the anti-Obama anthem “Change” (“Ain’t it funny how you think you’ve got your whole life planned/till you find out it was never ever in your hands/Change”), or the Ian Carey remix of “Denial,” all of which I’ve also been listening to a lot, unlike the album’s one miss-step, unfortunate rocksteady track “Back Down.”

6. Taylor Swift – Our Song

   Taylor Swift is another album it took me a while to notice; I saw “Teardrops on My Guitar” on MTV, and then jane dark wrote about her and last.fm started encouraging me to listen to her. Anyway, I’ve been listening to the album again recently;  I particularly enjoy the casual homophobia of “Picture to Burn” (“So go and tell your friends that I’m obsessive and crazy / That’s fine; I’ll tell mine you’re gay”). I’m also intigued, and perhaps this just shows that I don’t listen to much country, by the world-weariness of some of the tracks, like “Should Have Said No” and “Tied Together With a Smile.” But this song is my current favorite and, conveniently, the best one for this meme, being one of those songs that produces an imagine of summer spreading out indefinitely in front of you.

7. Alabama 3 – Whores of Babylon

   And this song enacts that feeling of an infinitely long summer, the infinity of the early hours of a summer morning; it shares this quality with a million other dance records, but this is the one I happen to be listening to right now.

Related posts:

1. So, the di­rector of the forth­coming t.A.T.u. film used to work on Coro­na­tion Street. Perfect. It’s a good Fall for music: I like the Sugababes album (though it does seem a little mean of them to have stolen Mutya’s idea of making a northern soul record), and I’m obviously eagerly anticipating the new Britney and Girls Aloud records that are on their way. Meanwhile, the...
2. The 90s pop war did not take place Especially as it was preemptively won by Alistair’s definitive top 100 songs of the 90s. I must admit, I found the short lived outbreak of 90s-pop hostilities a little depressing. Not because the songs were terrible, although some of them certainly were, indeed the opposite; the music of the early...
3. “Is it better, is it worse?” Cheryl Cole’s new song is really quite incredibly good: 01-Fight-For-This-Love-Main-Version.mp3 It reminded me of something about pop music that occurred to me when The Saturdays’ album came out. I thought, while listening to the album, that it sounded like the Sugababes, which then struck me as odd, as there are...

I think the only thing that could make Girls Aloud better would be if they started filming their videos in Britain’s decaying industrial heritage.

In other music news, two great Alabama 3 remixes.

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1. I really really really want a… A day when the Spice Girls are rumored to be reforming seems like an appropriate time to mention my surprise that, according to Google, no-one has made the obvious “zig-a-zig objet petit a” joke. Or maybe ten years ago it didn’t occur to anyone to use a global computer network...
2. “Like beau­tiful robots dancing alone” The steampunk genre is all about historical discontinuity, about universes where some event happened at the wrong time or in the wrong way, the invention of computers in the 19th century, or a post-WWII British space program displacing NASA. Something similar might explain Girls Aloud; they certainly don’t sound like...
3. Dancing com­mu­nist pirates on a train = rev­o­lu­tion Discussing the question of when the Russian Revolution changed from revolution to counter-revolution, a friend of mine gave, I think, the only unassailable answer: in 1920, when Trotsky stopped fighting the civil war by traveling around on a train with a brass band. I was reminded of this when &catherine...

Aside from that, I’ve been:

• Worrying about Britney Spears. Everything I saw about the VMA performances was talking about if Britney is fat or not (she isn’t), which misses the more serious point. Britney Spears the supposedly “real person” seems to be having a bit of a tough time, but it’s not like any of us know her, so any sympathy is pretty abstract. More worryingly, the VMA performace was so uninspired in terms of coreography, design, costume; it suggests a serious crises in the Britney Spears machine. Further evidence: she has an album coming out soon, and her website is still totally insane.
• Studying for an exam in contemporary political theory, which has persuaded me of the deep wrongness of political philosophy. Attempting to come up with a philosophical explanation of why certain political disagreements are invalid is not politically useful. See also this post in which Brian Leiter quotes the excellent Raymond Geuss on Rawls, and a number of people miss the point spectacularly in the comments.
• Posting stuff on Twitter. Those of you who read this site via RSS may not have seen the twitter posts in the top right. You can read those via RSS too, if this blog isn’t trivial enough for you.
• Inventing a song about Max Shachtman to the tune of awful Beatles record “Taxman.” My favorite couplet so far involves rhyming “Fourth International schism” with “bureaucratic collectivism.”

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1. Britney Spears ful­fills my fan­tasies Once upon a time, I suggested adopting Britney’s image as a kind of collective anonymous identity for protests, rather like a more stylish version of the white overalls. In her last video, Britney herself adopted the idea, although admittedly in the struggle against the paparazzi, rather than against global capitalism....
2. How La­canian A wholly splendid article by Raymond Geuss on Richard Rorty, including a defense of internationalism which culminates in: The reason [for the fact that the Pope always turned out to be Italian] most commonly cited by these nuns was that, as Bishop of Rome, the Pope had to live in...
3. “Crazy as a motherfucker” A while back, I was listening to Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon,” in which Kathleen Hanna performs the hysterical subject demanded by contemporary gender roles, and it occoured to me that this would be a good direction for Britney Spears. Everyone thinks she’s mad anyway; why not embrace that madness? She sort...

The decision by tATu to attend Gay Pride in Moscow does strike me as genuinely admirable and even courageous; they are as charming as ever in an interview on the topic. And, in other tATu news, part of the novel on which tATu’s forthcoming film is based is available on the website of its author, Russian MP and pornographer Aleksey Mitrofanov.

I see that the theme for this year’s parade is “Pride Not Prejudice.” Good to see some innovative thinking there. The previous years’ themes of “Shame and Discrimination” and “Hatred and Regular Violence” were surprisingly poorly received.

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1. So­cialism = Soviets + Electro The new tATu single “220″ has apparently been causing some controversy among fans, which is pretty incomprehensible, as it’s wholly excellent. I don’t think I’ve mentioned their last single, either. I saw somewhere that they thought its video carried an anti-abortion message, which is disappointing; we may have to count...
2. I really really really want a… A day when the Spice Girls are rumored to be reforming seems like an appropriate time to mention my surprise that, according to Google, no-one has made the obvious “zig-a-zig objet petit a” joke. Or maybe ten years ago it didn’t occur to anyone to use a global computer network...
3. I’m Mrs Extra! Extra! this just in k-punk, recently: The denials that the News of the World would be salacious which Murdoch made when he took over the paper in the social democratic era give way to neoliberalism’s claim to be only giving people what they want. What may be even more damaging about the claim that...

I was reminded of this when &catherine posted something about the tATu best of, which I wasn’t aware of but which is pretty good. Apart from most of the tracks from Dangerous and Moving, the album includes the closest tATu have yet come to dubstep, a pleasingly eerie remix of “Cosmos,” and a “Bollywood” version of “Craving.” Which works surprisingly well, but more importantly served to remind me of a great film I saw a while back (with, coincidentally, the same friend who so wisely analyzed the Russian Revolution), Bhagam Bhag.

The film is about a group of actors from India who come over to London
to do a show and, broadly speaking, hilarity ensues. They accidentally
get mixed up with drug dealers, then get embroiled in a Vertigo-esque
mystery, while being chased around London by an enraged  ex-rock star.
And, of course, they still find time to put on their play which is, for
reasons that are never made clear, about communist pirates on a train.

Related posts:

1. The di­alec­tics of in­ter­plan­e­tary rev­o­lu­tion The Pacific Film Archive is currently running a series on Soviet science fiction, surely the genre than which nothing greater can be thought. Today’s entry was the amazing 1924 Bolsheviks on Mars masterpiece Аэлита. Engineer Loss, a man who “is only happy when he is building a new Russia,” is...
2. So­cialism = Soviets + Electro The new tATu single “220″ has apparently been causing some controversy among fans, which is pretty incomprehensible, as it’s wholly excellent. I don’t think I’ve mentioned their last single, either. I saw somewhere that they thought its video carried an anti-abortion message, which is disappointing; we may have to count...
3. So, the di­rector of the forth­coming t.A.T.u. film used to work on Coro­na­tion Street. Perfect. It’s a good Fall for music: I like the Sugababes album (though it does seem a little mean of them to have stolen Mutya’s idea of making a northern soul record), and I’m obviously eagerly anticipating the new Britney and Girls Aloud records that are on their way. Meanwhile, the...

Where next for Russian space station promoters?

Moves to get official backing to send Madonna into space have been blocked.

My own answer is, I suspect, rather predictable (picture from the always-wonderful Chinese Propaganda Poster Pages, via Dwayne M.)

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1. Britney, or, The New Heloïse For my part, I am convinced that it would be as easy to change a blonde into a brunette as a fool into a man of genius. — Rousseau In other Britney news, nice to see the Daily Mail targetting her for a bit of health-as-discipline propaganda....
2. Dancing com­mu­nist pirates on a train = rev­o­lu­tion Discussing the question of when the Russian Revolution changed from revolution to counter-revolution, a friend of mine gave, I think, the only unassailable answer: in 1920, when Trotsky stopped fighting the civil war by traveling around on a train with a brass band. I was reminded of this when &catherine...
3. It’s wrong to wish on space hard­ware Is it? These Soviet space program matchboxes (linked to by owen) suggest not....

Related posts:

1. Dancing com­mu­nist pirates on a train = rev­o­lu­tion Discussing the question of when the Russian Revolution changed from revolution to counter-revolution, a friend of mine gave, I think, the only unassailable answer: in 1920, when Trotsky stopped fighting the civil war by traveling around on a train with a brass band. I was reminded of this when &catherine...
2. What’s the deal with the RCP? I’ve been hanging out recently with a woman from the Revolutionary Communist Party, who has the endearing quality common to recent recruits to Leninist organizations – an enthusiasm born of half-digested Marxism and vaguely remembered liberal pieties. There’s a lot to like about the RCP’s theory: their recognition of the...
3. Thesis titles I won’t use I’ve been thinking a bit about what I want to end up writing about; I’m having difficulty not scoring potential topics on the basis of how many Maoist poster titles I could work into the chapter titles. My current not-actually-going-to-use title is Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy: Action and Utopia...