Bug Video

I will be checking out some music videos at BUG next week which is run by Adam Buxton(from Adam & Joe). It's on at the BFI on the Southbank.

www.bugmusicvideos.com

Lucozade do Drum N Bass and skating

Lucozade Advert - Sport Lite - Feat Louder - 2011 found on Dance

May - Red Marks play!!!

If you like rock then you will love these beasts. Red Marks growl and make ladies giggle, they are hairy and big and manly and play the guitar with their teeth. If you can handle a bit of blues rock and are not scared of powerful guitar solos then get involved.

They play:

18th May Elixir Bar , 162 Eversholt Street, Camden, London, NW1 1BL
21st May Urban Bar, 176 Whitechapel Road, London, E1 1BJ.

More dates TBA.

www.redmarksrock.com

Chris Cunningham

I really like his work. I'm a fan of Windowlicker which is a video he did for Aphex Twin. He collaborates with Aphex Twin quite a bit and they mostly do the music to his work.

I really like contradiction and there is quite a bit in this video. He puts disgusting faces on hot cheerleaders which is pretty funny. The faces are actually caricatures of Richard D. James's face, who is the Aphex Twin dude.

You may not know that he directed Madonna's 'Frozen' video too. You can see some idiosyncrasies that are classic of his work in this and it definitely has a bit of a sinister edge.

He likes to freak his audience out and seems to like the scariness of insanity and weirdness. It makes for compelling viewing anyway, whatever he's up to!

I'm loving this...

but it's not long enough.

Californication

I love a bit of Foxy Mulder. Well it's not actually Fox Mulder, it is David Duchovny playing Hank Moody, a talented but down and out writer living in LA, a rouge with a heart and a penchant for the booze and the ladies.

There are quite a few naked women and smutty jokes in each episode but as long as you can handle that then you can sit back and enjoy the ride! The writing is really good and the one liners are pretty sharp.

I think he plays the character convincingly. You don't feel as though some alien abduction is about to take place or that Scully will swing by any second to investigate the paranormal activity happening in some women's fake breasts. Although the parties he goes to do seem out of this world!! (wah, wah, wah). He wrote it and starred in it, just like Paul Hogan did with Crocodile Dundee!!!

They are playing the fourth series in the States on HBO right now so it seems to be going down a treat. Watch and enjoy.

Charlie Kaufman

Is the man! I love his screenplay. He stretches your mind's ability to comprehend what the hell is going on.

He's done films such as Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind which featured Kate Winslet and Jim Carey, it's one of the few films where Carey plays a straight role. He can do more than slapstick which is good. The story is really orignial and compelling. I loved it.

He's also done Being John Malkovich, Adaption and Synecdoche, New York; which are all fairly trippy and mind bending films. I suppose they are a bit Alice in Wonderlandesque but for adults. All weird and wonderful. I would lap up anything he wrote. He's a very playful and intriguing playwright.

Steve Hughes

This guy is an Aussie comedian and has a great angle on being gay.

Paul Foot

I went to Soho Theatre on Saturday to watch Paul Foot do some stand up. The dude looked crazy.

His jokes were nice and random. It was directed by Noel Fielding, the king of random so it was suitably nonsensically hilarious.

It started off a bit slow and I wasn't laughing at much of it but then he warmed up and meandered his way through his repertoire. He always started off telling a story, then went off on a complete tangent of bollocks talking only to bring you back neatly to his first point. This is when you'd go 'oh yeah, I forgot why he started talking about that'. It was definitely a (emotional) roller coaster of thoughts, fun but a bit mental.

He did jokes about people being racist and homophobic but in a very non-standard way and took on the persona of a homophobic shire horse! He told everyone that he was gay and was talking about the different levels of homophobia. A on the scale was very homophobic which was punching people for not punching gay people. He said that him trying it on with a straight man and them not enjoying it was also a level of homophobia, ha! Anyway, he was mixing it up and fondling boys in the audience which got some laughs.

He is well worth a watch as I did LMFAO!(laugh my fucking ass off). Always good on a Saturday night.

Radiohead's got a new album

I haven't listened to the whole album yet but I do like the song on their site, 'Lotus Flower'. I think it's going to be a good un. Bring it on!

Tastebuds.fm

Move over My Single Friend and match.com, here comes tastebuds.fm!

So if you love your music and can’t get enough of gigs and live events then you are probably put off by the idea of dating someone with no taste,bad taste or just no interest in music. These people do exist, apparently! Being a music snob myself I would not consider dating someone unless they were seriously into their tunes man!

So this great new site has been born: www.tastebuds.fm. The idea is that you choose people to date because of their music taste. It is linked to your last.fm account so it takes your likes from there but you can delete these if they make you look like a loser and add as many new ones as you like. It also links to facebook so you can choose some pictures for your photo gallery from there and the best thing is - it's free!

You can also add a link to your favourite song on youtube or to a favourite website to show potential dates what you are into.

I think it's a winner and already have 3 dates lined up with people who have great taste in music, get in there!

Justin.tv

I have just discovered something quite exciting. It’s similar to chat roulette in that people can watch you live, however, justin.tv give you your own channel to broadcast from.

You can log into the site and attach a webcam or mobile phone (with a video function, of course) to the software and start broadcasting yourself immediately. During the 20 minutes that I was live I had managed to attract 23 viewers that were IMing me with advice on how to block people and asking where I was from, it was quite overwhelming at first.

If you are not shy,a bit bored and fancy broadcasting something live then it’s quite entertaining. They do have a warning banning lewd and violent behaviour luckily and I was told that your channel is pulled quickly if they detect you breaking the rules. If you can behave yourself however, then your channel will go out to 250 countries live, so if you fancy your chances at stardom then this could be the start of something beautiful! Your sessions are recorded and you can send a link so that people can watch you live or a link to the recording of the session so they can watch it at a later date. It hooks up to facebook, twitter and the usual.

There is an option to make your channel private and to put an access code on it so if you want just your friends to see what your doing then that can be arranged.

On the whole it's a great online find that could potentially be a lot of fun!

Justin.tv

Censored!

I just read an article on www.socialmediatrader.com that showed a map of the most censored countries in the world. It lists all the social networking sites that are banned in each country. It's pretty interesting, some are obvious. China for instance bans youtube and wikipedia. Information overload! Access denied! Wikipedia is arming people will knowledge and knowledge means danger, disorder, revolution. Obviously.

The first prize goes to Iran. It is the number 1 censored country in the world!!

It makes me glad to be living in one of the most liberal countries in the world.

Here is the list of sites banned by country:

Brazil- YouTube, Wordpress; China- YouTube, Wikipedia; Ethiopia- BloggerIndiaBlogger; ndonesia- YouTube, MySpace; Iran- Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, Orkut,; Morocco- YouTube; Pakistan- YouTube, Blogger, Wikipedia; Saudi Arabia- Flickr, Orkut; Syria- Facebook; Thailand- YouTube; Turkey- YouTube, Wordpress; United Arab Emirates- Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Orkut

I did like the fact that google attempted to stand up for freedom from censorship in China at the time when the Chinese government tried to ask google to censor and ban certain searches. In response google ran google China through Hong Kong but this stopped and google have effectively bowed down to the Chinese government and given into their demands. Shame!

I didn't realise Brazil was so tight on censorship but I suppose it is a highly religious country. It's not all extreme body waxing and carnival. They do love any excuse for a dance though, so it's not all bad. My kind of people!

I love(d) Seabrook crisps

I was just thinking back to when I first wanted to get into social media and I just remembered that I was so in love with Seabrook crisps (www.seabrookcrisps.com), which were these awesome crisps that they used to only sell up North, that I actually made a myspace page for them and started to get loads of fans. Actually, not awesome crisps, bloody great crisps! That sounds more Northern. Anyway, people started to add me and write on my wall saying, 'Seabrook rules!' and telling me what their favourite flavours were.

I didn't tell anyone I was doing it as they would have thought that I was a right weirdo, spending time promoting a brand I was not working for, but I thought it was funny. Anyway I did email Seabrook to say that I wanted to market them down South but they ignored me. How rude! Now they are available down South and they have not really made any great waves in the market place. I know if I'd have done the job I would have created a much bigger fuss. Anyway, they did go down hill a bit after they changed the packaging. I think the crisps changed a bit too and didn't seem quite as good as they used to but, hey, they didn't employ me as their marketing manager so that is their problem!

Here is my original site from back in 2006, www.myspace.com/seabrookcrisps,when myspace was rocking it out! It took Seabrook 4 months to catch up. Someone must have told them what I'd been up to. Here is theirs www.myspace.com/officialseabrookcrisps. They even had to put 'official' because I stole the good url. Anyway, I forgot about that little moment in my life.

I still love you Seabrook! I have many a happy childhood memory of eating a nice bag of Beefy crisps!

Yes, the love of a good crisp can make you do crazy things.

Broken Bells

I went to see Broken Bells at The Royal Festival Hall on Monday night and it rocked. It was a sit down affair but was still great. (Monday night is not really conducive to a mosh pit session anyway). I did get involved with some serious foot tapping though. One maverick dared to stand and wobble about a bit in a show of appreciation and I did think about joining him for a millisecond but I would have been far too embarrassed, or was it far too sober, to do silly thing like that!

There are so many good songs on the album but one of my favourites is Mongrel Heart. It goes on and on but in a good way. You think it's going to end but then it keeps coming back to give you a little bit more.

They blend guitars and drums with some funky/kitsch electronic sounds that sort of sound like samples of old 70s keybaord demos, if you know what I mean. They have great harmonies too which add some soul to the tracks. If you are not swayed yet then perhaps me telling you that they've got a trumpet player in the band may prick up your ears. Always a good edition, I feel! One of the 6 members is the Hip Hop producer Danger Mouse, who is a natural dude. They even swap instruments throughout the set; just because they can!

Anyway, I would recommend them highly if you like good music. If you don't, forget it.

Pacific Ocean

California is beautiful. Cruising along Route 1 in our convertible Mustang was not too shabby!

Big Sur

I love Giant Red Woods!

The Madonna Inn

Me and my friend stayed in a place called The Madonna Inn which is in San Luis Obispo, CA. There are 130 uniquely decorated rooms which are definitely not ordinary. We stayed in Swiss Rock which was decorated in a very sexy red colour and had a shower made from rock. It was like posh Flinstones. This picture is of the rather fancy steak restaurant which served some very satisfying steaks. It was like Barbie's dream!

I love lamp (shade)

Lampshades, Santa Cruz, CA.