Apparently The Freebutt, a lovely local live venue has a PR intern. Ed is nice, sounds like a real human, and a good example of seeding. He sent me a promo CD which now has a home at Jonathan’s. Chimes & Bells are a classically trained multi-instrumentalist turned Copenhagen indie scene type story. I’m starting to get a few emails dropping through for Bored of Brighton and PR pitching’s quite nice when done right. I hope it always looks this pretty.

When I went home for Christmas my Father dragged out an old camera of his. Apparently he used to have lots of fun habits including rally driving, motorbiking, and using hip leather-bound cameras. Brilliant coincidence.

I’ve never really used analogue and the camera’s got a separate light-meter which was lovely but prompted two pages of badly written notes in case I forgot everything the minute I took it out by myself. I’ve now progressing to the photo-taking speed of a bumbling tourist, which is progress. I left the flashgun and bulbs at home, because they’re fuzzy magnesium one-use-only and I don’t trust myself with analogue. My only previous experiences of it include watching my Father hide inside a heavy velvet curtain to change film. I always looked at film pots with some sort of awe.

But it’s lots of fun, and I’m very proud of the camera in a strange way. Although it occurs to me that I have to take the film out at some point.

I bought nice pens (nice for me as I do not buy pens aside from 10pence biros) and an artist pad, and we spent Sunday filling it with terrible drawings of dinosaurs that looked like dogs, dinosuars with unfinished shoes, and dinosaurs rebelling against corporations, and watching lots of Star Trek.

There are things I care more about than Prada or hectic fashion trends, but I was reading Fashionista this morning after reading about a recent PR blunder aimed at their writers. The top story this morning is Parada’s FW 2010 move to a Seventies Urban Jungle which sees an “unselfconscious take on retro dressing.”

I love this, mostly because whilst I come from a family with no inclination of following fashion, half of this can currently be found worn by my Father either as old jumpers reused for engineering, tree-felling and odd-job outfits, or hidden in an old wardrobe. I occasionally pop in to the wardrobe see if either of my parents’ 70s brown sheepskin-collared coats have suddenly decided to suit me but it never changes. (Adrian Mole would envy me though)

The above image is a dead cert of what my Dad wears to fix cars, minus the jacket. On the other hand, I suspect the catwalk sound track is less of his thing. (More on this at BitchBuzz)

In appealing to my love of vile cheesy music, I love this mix up. But I’m also pleased that I don’t know half of the songs. DJ Earworm (yes), the author, recommends ‘Ableton Live‘ music software, which I might trial but I’m abundantly terrible with music and suspect there’s not enough software in the world that’ll help this.

It wasn’t all bad in 2009 though. I suddenly leapt on the Cat Stevens band wagon and got stuck into the Harold and Maude soundtrack (a film I love) for a long time. I heard some fantastic live sessions via BBC 2 I need to hunt down. Brilliant recordings, and he’s such a damn hippy.

I saw this today and ooh ooh it’s very good. It’s made solely of music segments from Disney’s ‘Up’. The music’s all made by Pogo. Unfortunately with a library of songs made of copyrighted material he’s not on Spotify (just last.fm instead…).

It reminded me of Alice, a similar track that cuts Alice in Wonderland in the same way which turns out to be by the same guy. This made sense when I found out. I saw Alice on yoooooooooutube.com – a site which delayed and tiled Youtube videos to make strange and hypnotic patterns – and made it all look mad. Yoooooooooutube seems to be gone now though, which is sad because it was silly and nice.

I’m working on my digital media project today (It really needs a snappier name than this). In theory we’re experimenting around our ideas rather than making them (because we’re a theory course, a notion I find very strange) and my proposal comes out something like the stopmotion below. It’s in HD so choose this function if you’re a fan of legibility. There’s more about it here, joining the trend that one day we will exist solely in a world of blogs.

“A stop motion visualisation of my digital media project. Will scan a twitter feed for tweets talking about Windows 7, pick out keywords grouped into 6 major emotions categories and display one of six video (will be 10 seconds) depending on the most popular emotion at that point in time. Video will display emotions acted out by a PC man of Mac vs PC adverts fame – acted out by my dear friend Liam, who will be rotoscoped.”

I’m currently rotoscoping scenes of a friend vibrantly acting out the role of PC, beautifully displaying the six emotions of “disgust, happiness, anger, neutrality, sadness and surprise”. For ‘sadness’ we decided drinking and weeping was a good way to portray this, so he drank cold coffee (for the colour, and to avoid doing shots) for a couple of takes out of a whiskey bottle. The disgust was authentic.

I mentioned Sci Fi last post, and whilst I was tempted to write a long list of films I’ve seen recently (because I have seen an absurd amount recently, including the perhaps over-hyped Heat) it occurred to me that this is not massively interesting for anyone.

I thought I’d talk about something more interesting I’ve seen. This covers Sci Fi I’ve been watching, namely the BBC’s Day of the Triffids, which surely the world must have already seen and I really quite rate. It initially keeps a slow pace similar to the book, although the plot deviates sinfully, which I don’t really mind about. Alas, it’s no longer on iPlayer but I did stumble across a Charlie Brooker commentary on Sci Fi mentioning the 1981 version which pleased me nonetheless.

Another video I’ve been surprised by liking is Matt Smith in Dr Who’s series five trailer. It’s hard to judge a new character in thirty seconds after David Tennant’s just disintegrated himself and many women’s hearts, so I try not to (although having appeared on every BBC program in existence over Christmas his departure didn’t dismay me as much as it might have done, even if he was an ace Doctor). This looks good though, very good compared to the 30 second snippet. I found it via Rob’s Blog which is made up of 90% of Dr Who gushing.

Faris recently Tumbled this image. Interesting, I thought. But I have no radio (and in other news my TV watching stretches to iPlayer, surfthechannel, and 4od, the latter of which I rarely go near out of interface laziness) and wasn’t sure this average quite applied to me*, so I reflected upon my week of insane laziness and drew a picture of what I’ve probably done.

*or perhaps I was just fidgety and had a tablet handy.

I suspect that the book part is in fact fictitious. I’ve been halfway through 2001: A Space Odyssey for three months now, although perhaps this is because I’m more of a Phillip K Dick fan, rather than having a dislike of books (which I do not).