Friday Miscellany

I have twenty minutes to post something – I feel I have to post something – before I dive into a training day of some kind.

1) BROOOCE has a new record out. Regular readers will know my tendency to highlight smaller, less known or more ‘challenging’ bands but the older I get, the more totemic figures like Springsteen appear to me. Perhaps it’s a response to my own dysfunctional relationship with my father (are all father-son relationships dysfunctional at some level? Are all relationships in general dysfunctional?) but I do a have tendency to hero-worship figures like Bruce and Neil Young (I could write a book on my Neil Young hero-worship and the different things it’s meant to me). Anyway, the Boss has a new record out and it’s an event.

Here’s Bruce discussing Wrecking Ball and looking in disgustingly good shape for a man old enough to retire.

2) The Hindenberg via @brainpicker. When I was younger, I was utterly fascinated by the Hindenberg and it’s peers . If they’d used helium instead of hydrogen, air travel (and perhaps even the environment) might have looked very different.

3) I’ve been playing with ‘This Is My Jam where my current jam is Karen O and the Kid’s version of Worried Shoes. It made me cry. You’ll also have heard it if you’ve ever seen the Spike Jonze ‘Where The Wild Things Are’

4) I’m half way through (this is a Good Reads link) China Mieville’s The City And The City. I’m not sure, yet. Compared to Kraken, it feels a teeny bit like a dish made up, very skillfully, from left-overs. Brilliantly done but…Worth sticking with, though.

5) And lastly, a picture of a thing on my desk. No, I don’t know why someone would make this either.

Weird thing on my desk.