Le Flâneur

I can understand that you did, you probably aren’t as flawlessly tasteful as me, but I really can’t believe that I fell for it too. I resisted the Block Party hype and laughed at Arcade Fire’s stadium prog. But CSS? Not only did I tolerate them, I actually paid for the album. I even put one of their songs on a compilation cd that I made for a girl who I was trying to court. Now, only a few months later, I hear a bar of one of their songs and instantly recoil. It may that they remind me of the rough side of a particularly debauched week in Spain this summer, or it may be that they are not ‘just a bit of fun’ any more than Robbie Williams’ Angels is ‘actually quite good’. They’re both total utter shit in their own ways, and CSS’ way, screaming art school whimsy, is only slightly less offensive than Robbie’s good bloke pop. I’ll sign off now and put my CSS cd where is belongs, somewhere between the Darren Emerson and Libertines releases, in the What The Fuck Was I Thinking section.

Not so much a post as a quick plug for the philosophy bites podcasts available form itunes. David Edmonds, who wrote the hilarious Wittgenstein’s Poker, and Nigel Warburton, of whom I’ve never previously heard, interview top names from modern philosophy on topics as diverse as Physicalism and Wine. The programs only last Ten to Twenty minutes (hence the ‘bites’ of the title) but they don’t dumb things down at all. Rather they take an irreverent issue past perspective and focus on modern ideas rather than they history of philosophy. Easily the best podcasts I’ve come across since little atoms.