Mirror

I came across this rather fabulous camp charity-shop mirror in the ladies' at Woodthorpe Library this morning (not when we were open, obviously...)

Been catching up the last few days with a few bits and bobs, musically, that I've had lying around for a bit, much of it courtesy of our friend in the North, middleman. A very pleasant alt.-folky, world-musicky stew of Meursault, eagleowl, Sylvian and The Dirty Three it's been, too. I'm Particularly enjoying the latter's new 'Towards The Low Sun' album (great title too!) which has more of a post-rock jazz-noise feel to it than I was expecting but is much more immediate, accessible and generally 'big'-sounding than that might imply - kind of like a funky Tortoise, if you see what I mean (I'm thinking of the band rather than the reptile, but, hey, whatever works for you...!) I particularly like this track but that's probably just down to the fact that I'm a sucker for the way Warren Ellis makes his fiddle sound like an electric guitar (plus I like that whole 70's dinosaur-rock jam vibe...)

I've just started John Harvey's new novel, 'Good Bait', having decided to take a sabbatical from Dorien Lynskey's book after the chapter on hidden gay political messages in disco last week to read Jo Nesbo's latest as a bit of light relief and not feeling quite ready to plunge back into the heady world of protest songs again just yet. The Harvey book is good, though - whilst it's not up there with his Resnick books it has some of the ensemble character feel that was so compelling in those (and lacking, conversely, in the more typical 'loner-protagonist' Frank Elder books.) In a sense, in it's lack of pathological detail and flash tricks, it's insistence on procedural pacing and subtlety of detail, it feels a bit 'old school', but it's nice to feel a plot pulling you in for a change rather than grabbing you by the scruff of the neck. In other crime-related news, we'll hopefully see the procedural and the pathological skilfully combined in this new Danish/Swedish TV thriller, 'The Bridge', that Beck's been downloading and trying to get me into to fill the 'The Killing'-sized hole in her schedule. Watched the second one last night and it was pretty good - only eight more to go...!