reeeeeal life shit

So I haven't been keeping up much with This Week's Kerrang recently. To be honest, I wanted to make a few posts here and there - I wanted to share this with the world come Christmas time - but as always, apathy really got to me. I've been off at university working on the show, my dissertation, family stuff, money problems and, at the sake of seeming petulant, it sucks when nobody wants to read your blog no matter what. Really, I've just needed time to chill and watch some movies, hang out with my girlfriend and not think about FLFD/TWK. As a matter of fact, I don't even know what's going to happen with FLFD over the next six months - a lot of things I had planned have had to shift recently. "Life is what happens when..."

But I've been reading some awesome blogs - shout out to VINYL IS HEAVY, who've inspired me to write more about the films I see. There will be another podcast soon, maybe some of the Foot Village/Gallows stuff that I recorded for the show but we'll have to see. This is more of a freewheeling thing now, and whatever I want is going up on this. Which is fun!

I know this barely matters being the internet and all but I like doing this enough to write a bit of a fuss over it. I didn't listen to enough albums in '09 to make a list, but have my favourite song of last year just because it's great.

Jeans Wilder - Tough Guys

HNY.xx

confusion and new wave

As a journalism student, you're directed pretty early on to two specific texts about the state of modern journalism - Nick Davies' "Flat Earth News" and the academic article "A Compromised Fourth Estate?" Both are definitely worth checking out if you have the time, and they're definitely enlightening, showing how much of our mass media is dictated by PR releases. Think about how much of the news on TV or the internet refers to acts in the future tense: from today's online edition of The Guardian, "Chris Huhne, the [Liberal Democrats'] home affairs spokesman, will call the Tory record on law and order a "disgrace" in a keynote speech... will warn that a new Tory administration would mean a soaring number of offenses". Check out the article here and see.

Now, the reason I bring this up is due to a little bit of guilt - it turns out that this morning someone I know sent me a press release for the upcoming release of teenagersintokyo's upcoming "Isabella/Long Walk Home" 7". I went and checked out the tracks on their Myspace because, well, I've dug the band for a while, having played "Very Vampyr" on FLFD a few times. But something makes me feel a bit off about re-fitting this information to you guys - even if teenagersintokyo's songs are worth checking out (which they are) the things I learnt in journalism class are peeking over my shoulder. Old boss, same as...

Then again, maybe I should just get on with it. I guess it's expected of bloggers to do this - everybody needs a buzz, and Popjustice have done a great job of helping us realize just how silly the whole deal is. Just a search for "press release" on their website should clue you in to how they address 'em, my favourite being this classic. Still, it's something that crossed my mind this morning and while I want you guys to check out the music below, I thought it wouldn't be bad to put some garbled confusion up because, well, blogging and "Media 2.0" (my least favourite term in the world) make you do that.

teenagersintokyo - Isabella

teenagersintokyo - Very Vampyr

"Isabella/Long Walk Home" is out on Back Yard on October 5th.