Egyptian Hip-Hop - Tobago
Another brilliant video from Manchester’s Egyptian Hip Hop, seemingly inspired by the hilarious grainy footage of early acid house raves that pops up on Youtube from time to time. Check out another great video here and get yourself down to XOYO on March 4 to catch them live and feel the love.
21 Feb 2013
Guardian & Telegraph claim town is divorce happy, don't know online divorce firm operates there
Yesterday, The Guardian proclaimed Weston-Super-Mare as the divorce capital of the UK, noting that ‘Some 2,447 divorce petitions were lodged in the coastal town of just 80,000 people last year.’
Today, wiggy Telegraph Cristina Odone wonders ‘maybe it’s something in the water; or maybe it’s about living in a small town, where everyone knows each other’s business and sleeps with each other’s spouse.’ She wants mediation to save everyone’s soul from the sin of divorce.
Neither newspaper noted that divorce factory Divorce-Online.co.uk sends most of its divorce cases to the town.
Weston is not a divorce hotspot. I am the MD of online Divorce company Divorce-Online.co.uk. We send all our managed cases to Weston. 95% of their divorce cases come from our firm and we are based in Swindon with clients from all over the UK. Has anyone bothered ringing the court to ask why this is happening? (Mark Keenan)
21 Feb 2013
Rhye - Open (Ryan Hemsworth Remix)
Mysterious LA duo Rhye’s 2012 single Open has been given a gentle aural facelift by producer/remixer/Nintendo lover Ryan Hemsworth. It’s neat and succinct like a cute gift. Rhye’s debut album Woman is released March 4 through Polydor; their debut London gig, at St Giles Church, March 5, is already sold out – you could just stay at home and put a Sade record on instead of course.
21 Feb 2013
Video: Soho's green roofs are really cool
Would it not be great if the city had more of these?
Video by dustygedge on Vimeo
21 Feb 2013
Boris Johnson asks EU to bail out loss-making cable car
Boris Johnson has asked the EU for millions of pounds to help pay for his loss-making cable car.
The European Regional Development Fund has agreed to pay £8 million towards construction of the link.
The £60 million cable car between Greenwich Peninsula and the Excel centre was promised at “no cost to the taxpayer” but is losing approximately £50,000 a week according to one estimate.
Last year the Mayor attacked the profligacy of the EU in the Daily Telegraph, writing that:
“The EU budget will never be properly policed because the cash doesn’t properly belong to any nation — it belongs to “everybody”. And since it belongs to everybody, each individual country cynically reasons that there isn’t that much harm if its own citizens quietly loot as much of it as they reasonably can.”
City Hall say that they will collect their EU funding “later this year.”
Emirates have also agreed to pay £36 million in sponsorship over 12 years.
TfL hope the remaining costs will be made up from fare revenue “over time.”
However, since the cable car opened eight months ago, ridership has fallen to all time lows as shown by the above graph.
EU funding was secured on the basis that the cable car is a new transport link that will help regenerate the area.
However, TfL and Emirates are increasingly marketing it as a tourist attraction.
The few spikes in ridership have been during big shows at the 02 and the Excel, a fact that has not been missed by the cable car operators.
20 Feb 2013
Sean Nicholas Savage - Taste of Savage: His Pupils Sing His Music
Pasty pop pervert Sean Nicholas Savage is something of an icon on the Montreal music scene, thus one can imagine his label – Arbutus Records – didn’t exactly have to coerce artists such as Doldrums and Majical Cloudz into contributing a track to a weird and wonderful tribute album*. Taste of Savage: His Pupils Sing His Music is available as a free download here; streaming below is one of the standout tracks; check out the video for You Changed Me, featuring the man himself, underneath.
*Don’t worry, he’s not dead, in fact Sean Nicholas Savage plays the Victoria in Dalston on February 27, followed by the Scala on March 5 and Shacklewell Arms, March 7.
19 Feb 2013
What is to be done about Brick Lane's booze and urine problem?
As you probably know only too well, booze and urine go together like…like shame and regret. Around Brick Lane, they form a sticky, smelly cocktail of sin.
“Tower Hamlets Enforcement Officers…from September 2011 to August 2012 made 2146 alcohol seizures, an 89 per cent rise on the previous year. They also made 115 street urination prosecutions…”
Tower Hamlets council think this is a problem, and are consulting on whether to make the area around Brick Lane a “saturation zone”, which basically means that they won’t grant any new alcohol licences unless the people applying can prove that they won’t add to existing problems.
The council are essentially saying that they don’t mind the area getting pissed, which brings in lots of money, they just don’t want it getting too pissed. This is a rather messy compromise position, which abandons principles in an effort to appease conflicting interest groups. All of which means I quite like it.
But why, I ask, In This Day And Age, are we prosecuting two people a week for pissing in the street?
The greatest cause of pissing in the street is a lack of other places to piss. Drunk people need to urinate, and if you accept that people are going to get drunk, which the council does, better ways should be found of helping them do it. You can’t prosecute away piss. It’s going to get out somewhere.
Here’s the full council document outlining the background, which contains several interesting charts and graphs.
Tower Hamlets Council's saturation zone proposal for Brick Lane by Mike Pollitt
19 Feb 2013
Generation Y problems solved #2: I feel too busy to live. But what is it that I actually do?
Dear Gen Y Problem Solver,
I’ve realised that I often find myself turning down wholesome yet enjoyable activities – going to a language course, meeting friends, committing to a ten-lesson spinning class, reading a book – with the mental excuse “I don’t have time to do that.” In many ways, I’ve come to feel that I’m just too busy to live. But on close inspection of my daily routine, I’m not really sure what it is that I’m so busy doing. To paraphrase Fairport Convention, where does all my time go?
Yours frantically,
A Busy Bee
Dear Bee,
Congratulations! You have finally realised the unbearable boredom of being busy.
Is there a more hateful phrase to utter in friendly conversation than “I’m just so busy”? Is there a phrase more self-important, or more mythologising of one’s own success?
Yet people never tire of using this line. The word “busy” is a byword for that most amorphous of things: success. It doesn’t matter whether the activity you are ‘busy’ doing is yoga, watching the entirety of Breaking Bad, or playing on your iPad; you will still feel justified in lamenting the fact that you “never have time to do things anymore”.
You may be busy working 90-hour weeks in a job you love. Or perhaps you’re seeing a different one of your 1000+ Facebook friends every night. If you can combine both, you have officially won at Life, and being busy is the price you pay for it. But a cleverer mind than mine might say that many of us have “chosen to be busy” and then claim to be “imprisoned by it”.
I am not innocent of using the phrase myself, and I even feel a little rush of pomposity as I utter it: “I’m really busy these days, I’m not sure I’ll have time”. But it is so dull, so incredibly dull. What am I trying to prove? Who am I trying to impress?
You may find that your busy lifestyle makes you susceptible to the idea of a ‘simple’ life and escaping the ‘rat race’: living in a commune, tilling the fields, nurturing seeds and vegetables with your bare hands, gardening, and not staring at a screen for 90% of your waking life. Sadly, however, it turns out that being a farmer is actually really hard and probably quite boring. The grass isn’t always greener. Sometimes it’s caked in manure.
So since you’re stuck in this busy, loud and chaotic city, at least eschew that tiresome little sentence for what you really want to say: “I am a golden God and my life is great, so I don’t have the time to do that”. People will applaud your honesty, although perhaps not your modesty.
Peace out, dude,
Problem Solver
Image: A busy person, being insufferably busy.
Follow Kathryn on Twitter @kathryn42 and check out her blogs – Stuff White Brits Like and London Scrawling.
18 Feb 2013
Tempers - Eyes Wide Wider
This exhilarating rush of swaggering sleaze-gaze is the debut single from NYC duo Tempers, aka Jasmine Golestaneh and Eddie Cooper. They’ve been playing together since 2011 and plan to release an album later this year. We can’t stop watching the video (below) – spliced together camcorder footage that didn’t quite make it on to You’ve Been Framed, or perhaps a low budget British skin-flick anyone? Download below.*
*The download is no longer available from the widget below. Find it here.
18 Feb 2013
Kurt Vile - Wakin on a Pretty Day
Slacker minus the hair lacquer, Kurt Vile, is set to release a 69-minute double album Wakin on a Pretty Daze on April 9, via Matador. Best way to build anticipation for said release? Put out a near 10-minute long single with an almost identical title and make it available as a free download, of course.
14 Feb 2013
Snipe Highlights
Some popular articles from past years
- Punk brewery just as sexist and homophobic as the industry they rail against
- An interview with Desiree Akhavan
- Hope and despair in Woolwich town centre
- Margaret Thatcher statue rejected by public
- Peter Bayley has worked for 50 years as a cinema projectionist in East Finchley
- Could red kites be London's next big nature success story?
- The best church names in London, and where they come from
- Nice map of London's fruit trees shows you where to pick free food
- Summer Camp: Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days
- London has chosen its mayor, but why can’t it choose its own media?
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