The WOMBLES are some of the nicest anti-capitalists you could hope to meet, and they’re not stupid, either. So, if they are involved in this planned blockade of parliament, they probably know what they’re doing. Still, this action sound rather heroic: in the positive sense, but in the sense of “heroic failure,” too. Good luck to them, anyway.
And the mediocrity of Sexy/Back (like a disappointingly restrained knock-off of “Maneater”); FutureSex/LoveSounds really is heartbreakingly good. “My Love” is a great example of cold pop, a sort of wierd ghost-rave (but not at all hauntalogical; more hammer horror, or Scooby Doo).
k-punk is great on the Christina Aguillera album. He’s particularly right about the charm of the perfect anachronism of a number of tracks. The simulacra World War 2 of “Candyman” is the perfect soundtrack for the War on Terror, it’s actually painful to listen to. Which is also a useful reminder that the Iraq War is all fucking Spielberg’s fault. Or rather, of all that rather bloated WWII nostalgia. You want to shake Christopher Hitchens and tell him to get over his Oedipus complex (he’s not fooling anyone by sublimating it into an Orwell complex). This explains why Peter Hitchens is much more congenial than his brother: Peter is a nice healthy reactionary (with charming ruddy cheeks), he doesn’t bottle it all up like poor Christopher. I worry that that last sentence makes me sound like a character out of a Dorothy L Sayers story.