Misc

Am too traumatised at the moment by the combination of a severe hangover and living on the London marathon route to be able to write anything of consequence - instead, go and read these:

The Mire, the Wire's new blog space, with a nice pithy format and fine posts by K-Punk, Derek Walmsley and others on Dopplereffekt, Velvet Goldmine, nu-language...Boredom is Always... on the 80s-90s Gotham that haunts the urban dreams of those of us born after the 1970s (another example of that curious thing, postmodernism acquiring a history); and Iron Curtain Call, a new blog tackling the vexed questions of Ostalgie, memory and museum culture with admirable rigour...Also, in this month's Wire you can read me being somewhat mean about Ben Kelly, and Dominic Fox on black metal...plus this on London's grotesque inequalities: 'life expectancy falls by one year for each stop that is travelled east from Westminster on the Jubilee Line'