Waiting on NuChoons

I recently rid my iPod of my life-worth's collection of music. Although it was the perfect archive of geetars, electro-mites, soul, rock n' roll, hippy-hop and POP, ennui set in after 4 months without my computer to update the neglected collection. So I wiped it in favour of a brand spanking new collective of shiny new choons in lieu of the ability to add to a somewhat genius, bedazzling library.

It was not just my favourite iPod, it was everybody's favourite freekin' iPod. I'd receive up to ten calls a day asking for me to come out and play: "Come out. You are well good, like" they would say. I would then turn up to find out it was the shiny musical pod they coveted, not me. That was almost poetry.

Getting rid of what had made me the musical goddess I'd come to be known as (OK, I'm blowing this out of all proportions here) was a bit of a mistake. As much as I heart blasting Friendly Fires out in the afternoon, shaking a tail feather to Neon Neon and frying bacon to the dolcit sounds of Metronomy via Crystal Castles (and I DO heart doing them things), these too have started to wear a bit thin. I miss the 'classics' - I need Dusty, Martha and Marvin back in my life. I need the cheesy rock of Tonic and 80's power ballads. I need dance mash-ups, lo-fi, hip-hop. Nineties gems Jeff Buckley and Nirvana. I need Thomas Newman scores to mellow the fruck out.

So I'm compiling a list of songs/albums/artists needed, old and new to bring it back to perfect iPodian status:
Those Dancing Days (when are they going to release their next LP, little pop critters that I love so much. Top o' the list)
The Smiths (This I miss like no other)
The Ultimate Soul Collection Pt. I and II (I'm not messing around. Parts One and Bloomin' Two)
Marvin Gaye - What's Going On?
Cold War Kids (Loyalty to Loyalty is etched in my memory for November. Less than 2 months to go!)
The Killers - Day and Age (The third studio album - not including Sawdust here - WILL be a return to form. i.e. indie eighties nostalgia you can dance to. No more moustaches sil vous plais)
Jeff Buckley - Grace
Annie (Electro dance pop. My favourite kind of music, cannot wait to curl my hair and sip cocktails to this beauty)
Blondie - Singles Box
Lykke Li - Youth Novels (Sweden has burst out with some reet corkers this year, like it's had a cork in it's bum and now all this wonderful pop diarrhoea has been let loose. Have ABBA just set a cage of pop nymphets free or what? I should have it by now but was holding out for a friend to lend it. Alas, this promise is STILL is yet to come to fruition)

And the rest:
Frou Frou
KD Lang (Yes, it's cringey. It's a highly unpopular guilty pleasure but it reminds me of sleeping in my parents bed, listening to Miss Chatelaine in the middle of the night)
Interpol (Turn on the Bright Lights and Next Exit)
Delays
Girls Aloud - The Sound of Girls Aloud
Kitty Daisy and Lewis - Kitty Daisy and Lewis
Thomas Newman
The Rolling Stones
Attack! Attack!
Blur - The Great Escape
The Pipettes
Handsome Boy Modelling School
The Go! Team
Lovvers
Plush - Fed
Ryan Adams (get his back catalogue in time for New York. 'Hotel Chelsea Nights' is sorely missed)
BtVS Soundtracks (All 3 of them bad boys)
Flaming Lips
The Departure - Dirty Words
The Streets - Original Pirate Material
Rilo Kiley
Art Brut

I'm sure there are plenty more. And they will be added.

Polaroid: Extinct

This is a sad time for art. And life. And culture. And anything that means anything. Next to this bit of prose (ramble) is a collection of Maripol's polaroids.

Basements, drugs, paint, New York, eighties, shades, bangles, Warhol, lipstick, nightclubs, iconoclasting Madonna, Studio 54, disco...she lived a Bret Easton Ellis cliche. Brilliantly. And look at the images that came from it!

We're careening towards the end of an era as extinction closes in on Polaroid film stock. I feel like the last dinosaur who snubbed the DeLorean to get back BC and clambered for the newest iPod instead.

So many occasions I thought about buying a Polaroid camera and didn't. I wish I could tell my tiny ten year old self to save all my pennies, go out and get snap happy.

So what's our equivalent from '08? The digital image? Comparatively cold and hostile against the polaroid, which existed for us to look back on and get all "oh, memories". The digital image is a platform of self-promotion for the facebook masses. It's boring but I never realised how boring until the prospect of something exciting was taken away.

Where's a DeLorean when you need one?

There's something innately impure about that flawless digital image. Although great for commercial purposes, it gives nothing to the personal photograph. I can get nostalgic looking at a polaroid seconds after taking it. It's more a representation of a moment, like it didn't really happen. Encapsulating a feeling rather than mimicking its subject.

You could be the shittiest photographer of all time and still get away with a decent shot of a dog's backside...if you wished. Plus they're pocket-sized. And who doesn't love all things mini?

And it's tangible! There's nothing more isolated than a digi-image staring back at you all bright and HD-ed up to the eyeballs. Why were we not all out buying polaroid cameras and film all these years? We should have spent that bit extra and stuck them on lamp posts and walls as our own glossy graffiti. Flawed images to reflect a flawed world! It would have been beautiful! Except when psychos started putting up pictures of themselves covered in pig's blood, eating their mate's foreskin.

Maybe I'll start getting into the disposable. Or analogue. Film is not dead! I won't let it die!! OK, enough of the dramatics...

No more Maripols.
No more Warhols.