Culture Vulture Zine

Builders…Yuk…I hate dealing with builders. What’s worse though is when someone who’s never dealt with a builder before naively arranges for one to come round your flat and do some unnecessary work on your behalf. I was fuming in the build up (no pun) to our sometimes -leaking roof to be replaced. In my experience y’see builders always tend to be late and our one even smelled like booze and slurred a lot – bit worrying. Needless to say, he filled us with false promises regarding completion of our dodgy roof (btw: it reminds me of the ones on the shacks we used to build in the fields when we were whippersnappers) and backed up every stereotype ever made about his trade. Eventually though, after a lot of huffing and puffing, the job got done yesterday. Now instead of seeing the sky through the windows when I’m sitting ere on the computer I can see…slate…wonky slate. The clear low point of the fiasco though would have to be when Samanth discovered he’d been storing his snacks in the flower boxes + had crushed some good-uns. This sparked MAJOR controversy. I’d take a leaking roof over this faff any day. I want to move.

Dear people who send things to CVHQ for review. Thanks for all your stuff. I love post. Seriously now, I really love post. If I’m flat out in bed and I hear the letterbox go my reactions are phenomenal. Anyway, now is definitely the idealistic time to submit things like music (including demos), comics, zines, dvds etc to be reviewed in CV10 as I’ve now officially began hustling articles for it + the cover’s currently being done in Oceania.

Usually without trying you end up finding something decent to review – I generally don’t review something I don’t like, why would you? So, things turn up but this time I thought I’d request submissions. I listen to, watch and read 1000000% of mail however bad/rad it may be.

One of my top cuts from the last few months was a submission from Canada (Pictured). Brian Joseph’s ‘Skeletons’ is a phat sound crossing a Dan Johnston style lo-fi vibe with back yard hip hop beats from Beck’s ‘Mellow Gold’. Bizarrely, it’s also very appealing to me that you cannot find any information on the release whatsoever, besides a quick few lines on the label’s website. This is obviously a refreshing change to the desperate dossiers people to submit as press releases nowadays.

I’ve learnt first hand from my woman that there comes a time in a ladies life when she starts arranging regular ‘wine & nibbles’ evenings with her friends and some (I’ve heard rumours) have even been known to take interest in display cushions and garlic crushers. Now, similarly (ish), there comes a time in a man’s life when he needs a massive tele. I’m not sure why, (poor eye sight?) but I can assure you, for me it’s nothing to do with ‘manly pride’ or any of that poppycock. Seriously, it’s not. I would admit if it were. My desire to improve my DIY skills could probably be linked to this - the purchase of what I’m about to explain though is not.

That above is an artists impression of my new TV. I called him Steevy…Steevy the TV. Please note though, this is not to scale. Steevy is at least one zillion times bigger than this.

Y’see, it all started when my fat old and once trustworthy Toshiba started making a constant weird noise and threatening to blow himself up, so it was time for my hang-me-down tele which took up a third of the flat to go. Enter Steevy, the slick television which looks as if it was beamed into my living room straight from the future nestled in amongst our bizarre collection of ‘oldey worldy’ furniture.

At 37” Steevy seems colossal in comparison to the mere 28” of the chunky Toshiba and I think the narrowness of the room makes him seem even bigger. Last night we watched Location Location and Phil Spencer’s head appeared at least 8 times the size of ours and on Steevys first Pro Evo outing I felt like I was in the game like the Super Furry Animals ‘Play It Cool’ video. So, on average I buy a TV every decade which leaves me wondering what the next TV from the future be like? I hope it can talk and make tea.

Last night Gav and me checked out Kung Fu Panda and it did not disappoint. Now, Jack Black’s voice is practically animated anyway, when he talks you can see a hairy man bouncing and spinning around with his weird enthusiastic jibs. He supplies the voice of Po, a fat and lazy panda who dreams of being a martial arts ninja but instead waits tables at his old man’s noodle shack – and to top that, for some reason his dad appears to be a large bird! The opening scene is one of Po’s dreams of glorious triumphs, in which onlookers were in his eyes ‘blinded due to overexposure to pure awesomeness’ but to whom he nevertheless extended the generous assurance of: ‘There is no charge for awesomeness or attractiveness’. It’s a great intro.
Meanwhile, up in the secluded temple in the misty, cloudy heights of the mountain, a weird community of fighting animals are preparing for the final reckoning. They are led by (Part Yoda, part Spilnter, part Mr Myagyi) Master Shifu, and his legendary followers: Tigress (This character’s annoying), Monkey Crane Mantis and Viper. These fighters are perpetually snapping alertly into combat formation, but to my eyes had very little in the way of actual enemy danger. Nevermind that though, this lot are well up for a ruck.
Needless to say, it does all kick off BIG TIME when their deadliest enemy – the trash talking snow leopard Tai Lung escapes from prison. The five exercise as much arse kicking as they can but it’s ultimately down to Po who has undergone some unbelievably funny training schedules with Shifu after being chosen to become the Dragon Warrior via attaching fire works to his chair to get into the arena. He may have become a ninja and be entrusted with the mystical Dragon Scroll, but he still needs his asthma pump when he climbs the stairs to the temple.
The Panda cuddles more than thumps and the story is a bit gone off – but there were flashes of comedy gold e.g. Po fighting Shifu for a dumpling and the mystical finger hold…Both hilarious. See it on a big tele.

These used to be an endangered snack, the Giant Panda of the Walkers flavours if you will. The newsagent over the road had about 5 packs on their shelf one day and I cleaned them out. Now, low & behold, they have a box of the suckers AND so does the corner shop just up the road. Needles to say, as the revival hits full swing, I’m ploughing through them and as a result my tongue’s sizzling from all the Pickle action.

I’ve also had a tip off that you can now get them by the box in Makro. So, I’d love to stop and chat, but I’m just off to Makro….

Our cat Vashti (pictured) keeps parking her breakfast (pooping) in the bath. I’m serious. She keeps pooping in our bath. We can’t leave the door open because she’ll go in there and poop. Clearly something’s up and seeing as she can’t talk I’ve decided to ask you people of the internet if you’ve experienced this. I mean, not you personally pooping in the bath, but your cat. Does anyone know what to do if your cat wont go No 2 in her tray no more and instead makes in your tub?

We’ve learnt (the hard way) that Sully (just outside Penarth)’s car boot sale is once a month + as yesterday proved…it’s tremence (+ that’s nout to do with the doughnuts):

Car Boot Scores:
Singer sewing machine £4
Green Curtain tassels £1
Wildlife coasters 50p
Toy Dinosaur 80p
Dio live video £1
Mini wooden shelving unit with drawer 50p
Brown bowls 20p
Red bowl 50p
Busdriver ‘Cosmic Cleavage’ CD £1
Santana Greatest Hits on vinyl £1
Marvin Gaye ‘What’s Going On?’ on vinyl £1
Best of Dixieland Jazz Vinyl Record
Black Sabbath ‘Black Sabbath’ on vinyl £1
What Our Grandmothers Knew book £1
Old wood side table £3
Framed bronze map of Belize £1

The next chance to go there + leave with as random a collection of things as above is Sunday August 10th.

Street Art (above)

This is the first blog I’ve ever written about floating cities, so bare with
me. This all stemmed from a microscopic article in the very respectable
national newspaper I was reading at work yesterday. It appears that architect
fella Vincent Callebaut has put forward a bizarre and yet brilliant
alternative vision for the future. He believes that floating cities are the
way to go in terms of rising sea levels and that. These floating metropolises
(or ‘Ecopolises’) are inspired by Amazonian lillypads and are conveniently
self-sufficient using solar power, water and wind for power!

Has Vincent solved the problem of over population and climate change in one
fall swoop? He’s probably at his desk now sorting out the credit crunch. I
wish he would so the people on my television will stop banging on about it.

Night before last was Shape Records function 005 in Buffalo Bar.

To me, the scenes begun somewhat bizarrely when throughout Sweet Baboo’s set our DJ visuals were left playing, giving his boozey minimal folk a backdrop of Kermit The Frog scratching on a turntable. It didn’t fit but I dont think the band saw…or cared! There were two short films made for the night y’see by both CV + Shape which looked unreal and were enjoyable/amazing to make. The projections went down a storm - A man at the bar even asked me where we got the films! ‘Eh?’ I said and then ‘…From us mate, we made them. We’re nerds’, to which his response was an impressed expression utilising his eyebrows + bottom lip.

Lake and Half Handed Cloud were (and still are I’d imagine) the same band standing in different places onstage, each sounding to me quite like Deathcab sharing a sandwich with Arcade Fire in the shower with Broken Social Scene (that’s journo talk there). Massive props to the bands from the US too for bringing cassette based merch.

Disc Jockey-wise, the clear highlight came after almost everyone had left as we pummelled the mixer and CD decks into the dirt. N.b. playing records backwards, looping them and scratching the shit out of them makes some lovely squelchy noise.
This was our low budget/minimal skilled DJ version of an encore. I’m going to look into getting some pyrotechnics for next time. That’s all we’re missing…Pyrotechnics.