Russell Davies

job description

Simpsons episode where Homer's in a Taxicab Confessions thing. He's a bit drunk. The driver asks him what he does for a living. He says, 'oh, you know, I'm a guy...at a place'. Damn right.

earspan

there's no way you could call me a dog person. yet, this makes me laugh.

the edge of echoes

I was listening to late junction on radio three last night. lots of ambient twiddling, mixed with ethnic field recordings. you know the kind of thing. pleasant but backgroundy.

it reminded me of what we used to call the echoes dilemma. why? a longish story.

i used to live in portland, oregon and echoes used to be on NPR late most weeknights, just as we were going to sleep. it was a 2 hour programme of new agey ambient twiddling. and every night I'd be kept awake worrying whether each piece of music was any good or not. was the ambient twiddling interesting and evocative in an eno stylee, or was it undemanding new agey bollocks. there's a very thin line between the two.

and i think the echoes dilemma is a very pressing 21st century issue. so much of what used to be bad has got a lot better. and so much of what used to be good has been flirting with kitsch and rubbish, that it's hard to know where the good/bad line is any more. especially with all the so good it's bad stuff going on.

of course, just thinking about this stuff makes me a tosser. but never mind.

orange will do it

from BoardX in Battersea Park; the Daily Telegraph pinning a lot of hopes on the transformational power of flourescent paper. A great example of inappropriate sponsorship

artificial nostalgia

here's how you use one brand to position another; but it wouldn't work if Starbucks didn't mean so much

dummy

the amount of stuff we're happy to be stupid about is incredible

without borders

Border's on Oxford Street recently re-organised their shelves; do they have a covert anti-business agenda?

skate kitchen

skate culture will appropriate anything; even middle-class kitchen fetishism

authenticity

the kids talk authenticity (from The Face)

lovely imperfection

from the Mal Maison Hotel in Manchster; a great example of a company or brand acknowledging it's imperfections and talking to you engagingly and directly about them