His Clancyness - Zenith Diamond

Jonathan Clancy hints at a gritty debut.

Win tickets to In the Woods Festival 2013

Those lovely people over at In the Woods are giving away a pair of tickets to the sold-out festival, which takes place August 30/31 at a secret location in Kent. All you have to do is write an old-fashioned letter (remember those?) to someone else at the festival. The letter will then become part of an interactive installation whereby it’ll be picked up by a postman, delivered to someone at the festival who’ll then write you a reply. Neat huh? So channel your inner penpal or rehash that long-forgotten Santa letter (it must’ve got lost in the post right?) and get scribbling. More details are available via the image above.

Cuushe - Airy Me

Old music/new images from Cuushe and Yoko Kuno.

Art stunt dyes the river Lea green. Upstream, 100s of fish are choking to death

Artists dye the water; in the water fishes die

The 2012 London Olympics did not make more Londoners play sport

The Evening Standard just did a “one year on from the 2012 London Olympics” opinion poll. This produced a pretty positive news story and accompanying editorial which you’d have to say is fair enough. One of their headlines, however, did make me wonder. It ran:

83% think Games made more people play sport

It’s nice that 83% of people think the Olympics encouraged more people to play sport.

What would be nicer if is the the Olympics had actually encouraged more people to play sport. Can we find this out?

Happily, the latest figures on sport participation came out last month (Jun ’13). The London news?

“The proportion of adults in London participating in at least one session of sport each week has decreased from 36.5% in 2011/12 to 36% in 2012/13”.

Similar picture nationwide.

Gah.

Walls - I Can't Give You Anything but Love

Teeth-shattering techno from Natalizia and Willis.

Five ways you could defend the culturally embarrassing royal baby coverage to your future kids

We need to start thinking about how we can explain our collective behaviour to future generations.

Redder - Faster

Finnish duo out to spoil the heatwave party.

ARMS - Comfort

Todd Goldstein reaches for indie-pop perfection on his new EP.

South Londoners do not want the Tube claims Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson today claimed that south Londoners do not want further tube extensions because they would feel like they are being “colonised.”

Johnson said that that he was personally in favour of extending the tube south but warned that this would not be popular with South Londoners.

He told the London Assembly this morning:

“These [tube extensions] are not popular in South London. People think “well if the tube comes we really are being colonised we really are becoming part of London. We want to think of ourselves as leafy suburbs.” I’m just putting it out there.”

Boris’s claim followed calls from the London Assembly for him to approve a new tram extension to Sutton.

He refused to commit to the plans and warned the Assembly not to “fetishise” trams over underground links.