01 – Who Could Win a Rabbit? – Animal Collective
02 – Good Things – Rival Schools
03 – Colossal Insight – Roots Manuva
04 – Roygbiv – Boards of Canada
05– Crosses – José González
06 – Silent Night – Johnny Cash

It’s been a very busy month but a good one and I feel like I’m ending the year on a glorious high note for a variety of reasons. I’ll post up two reviews of the PS2′s Dragon Quest VIII tomorrow, one which is lead review in edge this month, the other which I’m just finishing for Eurogamer. This is some of the music I’ve been listening to while working on these and other things over the last couple weeks – some of my favourite current songs are in here although there’s little to link them other than that.

Still, I hope you enjoy them and, moreso, I hope you have a wonderful Christmas.

You can download the full .mp3 mixfile here or or subscribe in iTunes (’Advanced’ > ‘Subscribe to podcast’, then paste this link).

ATEI is the UK’s main arcade industry event and, in amongst the ten thousand angry, blinking gambling machines you find the occasional Sega or Konami stand. It’s always fun to go along for a day of freeplay arcades and this year I got asked to write up the show for Edge. I tried to have some fun with the reporting and, to be honest, most of the news here is still the latest news on the arcade scene, so I don’t feel too cheap uploading it here … ATEI 2006 runs from 24-26 January 2006 and you can book tickets here

Edge magazine. E151.

In the economics of gaming, as with all maturing capitalist markets, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. ATEI continues to be the grubby, worn down flipside to the ECTS coin. Boothgirls at the former clearly hired from a slightly cheaper agency, make-up spread marginally thicker and drooling attendees sporting significantly wider waistlines.

The yearly rhythm and tone of our reporting on the UK’s only major arcade show is well established now: Arcades are dead; long live the arcades – in all their emaciated contemporary anti-glory. Of the hundreds of exhibitors from the leisure industry exhibiting only four were major coin-op videogame developers: So it’s business as usual for the ATEI then.

Everyone acknowledges the strangulation of the local videogame arcade at the hands of home console owners and the chance of any radical antidote surfacing at Earl’s Court on a freezing January morning was unlikely. So instead we took the show at face value, as apparently did a surprisingly large number of gamers, all turning up to sift through the gambling machines and novelty pool tables in search of something worthy of credit.

If drawing a direct comparison with last year’s show then Sega would appear to be in rude health. Clearly the lead player in the quartet of publishers present, their booth sat proudly at the centre of the exhibition hall with easily the most expansive carpet dominance. This prominence provided an all too overt reminder that without their final-bastion input and output, arcade videogaming would long since have trickled into British oblivion.

Pride of place went to the four linked Outrun 2 Special Tours sit-in cabinets. This iteration, dubbed Outrun 2 SP, is clearly placed as the definitive Outrun 2 package with 15 new courses, 10 new cars, additional game modes, internet ranking and, of particular interest to historical fanatics, the original 1986 Outrun soundtrack. The sit-in car cabinets gleamed glorious with their beaming yellow decals but, in cost-cutting effect, emphasising how arcades now lag behind in new technology rather than spearhead it, all Sega’s output was running on rear projection monitors.

Cashing in on terror came the Confidential Mission styled Ghost Squad from Sega Chihiro, boasting the Republican rallying tag line: “Zero tolerance on terrorism.” To augment the plot by numbers ‘fight terrorists to rescue the president’ banality, USPs came from a single shot/ 3 shot burst/ fully automatic option on the submachine lightgun and a saveable “IC” card in the Initial D style.

Speaking of Sega Rosso’s anime themed racer, Initial D 3 code was loaded into Sega’s magnificent Cycraft pneumatic cabinets. The stuff of eighties schoolboy prophecy, the sit in cabs first debuted last year with link up F-Zero on offer(and were cited as our game of show). While, for the more traditional arcade drifting of Initial D, the outlandish hydraulics seemed a mite overkill there’s no denying that these are still the most exciting, if largely unobtainable, experience arcades have to offer.

Virtua Striker 4 was less of a success story. Despite its new ISS styling and player card technology (allowing team customisation and home stadium improvements) the controls were sluggish and flow of play rudimentary. At least the hardware was running on some slinky Naomi universal machines providing a renewed purpose for what are arguably Sega’s finest cabinets since the Astro City. In testament to their on going appeal Sega had two of the new Naomi Deluxe sit down cabinets on display, their 38” CRT monitors allegedly screen burn proof.

Sega’s catalogue was clearly bolstered by the incorporation of Sammy’s Atomiswave hardware and branding into their own. This effectively doubled the number of games on offer, while – it wouldn’t be unfair to say – drastically lowered the average quality. Everything on offer, bar Neowave King of Fighters was sub standard and derivative although the sight of rotund businessmen gunning down cuddly animals with Mafioso glee in Extreme Hunting was nothing if not memorable.

Konami’s booth was far more densely populated than last year thanks in main to the new European Dancing Stage Fusion cabinet greeting attendees as they entered the hall. Needless to say, the employed Konami female “expert” demonstrators, once ushered off the machine looked on with no small amount of disquiet as showboating London arcade veterans stepped their way through the toughest tracks on offer. Still, Konami’s successor to the astonishingly popular Dancing Stage Euromix 2 cabinet, while perhaps a little tardy, nonetheless does everything it should to continue being the highest videogame earner in British arcades.

Seemingly at rest from last years Space Invaders anniversary celebrations Taito had little to offer save their Transformers-esque Zoids: Zoids Infinity machine enticing purchasers with the triplet sound bytes: “Feel the Ride”, “Make dreams by a Card” and “Fascinate the Players!” Similarly Namco had very little in the way of output on display nestling all their eggs in the Tekken 5 basket, which attracted crowds three deep throughout the show.

So where does that leave us? Underneath the spattering of new arcade titles, ATEI as a show still feels sleazy. In contrast to Japanese arcades (and arcade shows) videogames here are firmly associated with the world of slot machines and gambling. Although both arcade cabinets and slot machines fundamentally exist to earn small change, the experiences they offer, as well as the communities surrounding each, are poles apart. With public opinion currently set dead against Las Vegas style gambling complexes it seems a shame to have arcade games have to fight the tide of public opinion as well as that of consolisation. Gambling apologists were rife so ATEI had videogames helping fight a battle that isn’t theirs. Until British based visionaries can begin to crowbar public gambling and public gaming apart and reinvent and remarket what local videogaming arcade means– the yearly rhythm and tone of our reports will play on.

Beetlemania

Sega’s low ball, and perhaps the most unlikely IP of the event, came from the diminutive Mushiking cabinets. The unlikely hybrid marriage of scissor paper stone to giant stag beetle fighting sim was a massive success in Japan last year thanks in large to the collectable card element. The display cabinets stuffed with Mushiking merchandise almost transported onlookers to Harajuku’s famous Kiddy Land toy store – where much of Mushiking’s merchandise was sold last year. Indeed, it’s clear which market the Mushiking bandwagon is aiming for- the cabinets stand just 1.3 metres high and carry a recommendation for 5-12 year olds.

A couple of week’s ago I watched BBC2’s docu-experiment, Making Slough Happy

The eponymous task involved taking a sample of Slough’s residents, getting them to answer a questionnaire to ascertain their level of well being and then trying to increase this score over the course of a few weeks. A team of six happiness experts were employed and tasked with “using ideas and techniques from the groundbreaking, new science of happiness”, to get the desired results and, predicably, make Slough happier.

It was a cute series although the hour-long episodes should probably have been cut in half.

At one point during the experiment expert Richard Reeves, journalist and director of the Intelligence Agency, visited a local Slough school. He led an assembly during which he challenged the young people gathered to re-evaluate their economic values.

The idea was to break, or at least provide a counter-cultural voice against the notion that earning loads of money and buying loads of stuff brings happiness. His eloquence and, crucially, the truth that underpinned his words, were met, at least ostensibly, with a positive response from the school leavers.

It was all good but one thing he said stuck fast in my mind. He pointed out that, once a human being has their basic needs provided for i.e. food, water and shelter, then material possessions do very little to increase their happiness levels. Rather, happiness then hinges on a complex mix of a well-balanced life, health, good enriching relationships and a supportive, loving family.

Then he said: “No-one ever became happier by moving from VHS to DVD.”

I haven’t been able to get that out of my head since. As someone that works with technology and specifically the technologically fast-moving area of videogames, it’s something that I think about a lot. Videogames deal in the currency of fun, and fun is closely linked to happiness. Also, with videogames it’s very easy to see the evolution of the species over a short period of time: we theoretically move from VHS to DVD every couple of years – developments which are proudly emblazoned on our front pages alongside reams of meaningless technological feats.

This has created a relationship in the mind of gamers whereby the fun and happiness they derive from games is directly related to technological acheivement.

So we cry for better graphics, closer realism and brighter sounds, thinking they will make the fun better and the happiness sweeter.

But, once the basic needs of a videogame are provided for, (the visuals, sounds and interaction), fun becomes a far more complicated mix of elements and relationships that simple, surface improvements have nothing to do with.

I’ve played videogames on a Gameboy then a Gameboy Color, then a Gameboy Advance, then a Gameboy Advance SP then a Nintendo DS. I’ve gone from Genesis to Saturn. I’ve Super-sized my NES, turned my Playstation into a Playstation 2 and added 359 degrees of incremental brand improvement to my Xbox. I’ve drunk in delightful and simple NES chiptunes then more complex multi-layered midi in Final Fantasy VII and finally fully, interactive orchestral manoeuvres in Dragon Quest VIII. Each hardware iteration has brought clearer, better defined graphics and sounds.

Sprites to polygons, 2D to 3D, digital to analogue, 50htz to 60htz, Mono to Stereo to 5.1, floppy to cartridge to CD to DVD, standard definition to high definition: the list of upgrades is interminable.

But has the happiness I’ve experienced during a good game ever changed? Of course not; just the ways it gets to me.

So then, let’s turn to the next generation of consoles. Here the BBC lets the editors of the next set of official videogame magazines defend and sell their respective badges.

This is what each said (underlining for emphasis is mine).

Steve Brown, editor, Xbox 360: The Official Xbox Magazine:

Xbox 360 is the first console to take advantage of the new high definition standard. All games made for the console will run in this new widescreen graphical format which, if you have the correct screen, is the biggest leap forward for games graphics since the first home 3D games in 1995… Even those without a high def screen will notice a considerable step up in graphical prowess for the games they play on Xbox 360… This is most notably in the tiny details that helps make games seem real – spectators faces in the crowds of sports games, for instance, or the stitching on the leather upholstery of one of the supercars in Project Gotham Racing.

Tim Clark, associate editor, Official PlayStation 2 Magazine UK (on the PS3):

The display of raw power that followed was little short of astonishing… Here, finally, was a games machine capable of pumping out the kind of eye-watering visuals you would normally associate with high-end special effects used in movies… the PS3 is roughly 250 times more powerful in raw processing terms than PS2… To really get the most out of the PS3, you are going to need to get involved with high definition TV.

Tom East, editor, NGC magazine:

Nintendo, with their amazing new controller, are promising to change the way you actually play games forever… With other consoles, you will be playing better looking versions of the games you have already got. Sure, the games will be smoother, prettier and offer levels of realism that have yet to be seen in video games… But when you are paying more than £200 for some new hardware you should expect a great deal more than shinier cars and realistic grass that moves in the wind… The message is, similar to DS, it does not matter if you are young or old, male or female, you will have fun playing games on Revolution.

Spot the odd one out.

The Fire Emblem series is wonderful. Originally produced by the late Gunpei Yokoi (the man that invented Nintendo’s Gameboy itself) it is Nintendo Does Chess. The mechanic whereby any fallen ally is gone forever brings out the obsessive compulsive in me and occasionally, if the high difficulty means I can’t get through a level without losing a comrade, I’ll just freeze up and leave the game where it is – which says something about both me and the game. Possibly. Play its recently released Gamecube sister if you don’t have a GBA: It’s lovely too.

Edge magazine. Issue 152. Gameboy advance

To call Fire Emblem a medieval Advance Wars would be lazy and, certainly with this richly textured iteration, only a half-truth. For, while Intelligent Systems’ two strategy wunderkinds share something of visuals, systems, mechanics, and characterisations, Fire Emblem inhabits a more solemn and deeper cleft niche than its rival’s lighthearted warmongering.

This, the third GBA game answers some of its recent handheld critics by reintroducing a spattering of its earlier SNES era intricacies. But these, such as where characters can form beneficial offensive link relationships if they are continually positioned next to each other, are hidden well below the surface and to most, the game will seem identical to its two most recent forbears save the new storyline slipped into its venerable framework.

Your team of fighters, magicians and healers, all richly coloured-in with back-story, engage enemy units in battle, visiting shops and villages during battle as well as picking up new recruits in the field. All but three characters (whom you can choose to level up as you wish) follow a predefined profession, while the series’ hallmark, whereby fallen characters stay dead and unusable for the rest of the game, remains, providing many a hair-tearing moment for the obsessive-compulsive RPG completist.

The most contentious issue in this release of Fire Emblem is the introduction of an Ogre Battle-esque over world map enabling the revisiting of areas to buy weapons (previously only possible by visiting shops in the field during a battle) as well as providing optional random dungeon maps. While this might not seem like a major development in a genre that has always provided extra-curricular leveling opportunities, it has removed the developer’s usual strict control over the game’s difficulty. For a game thats distinction has traditionally been forcing players to agonise over positioning and deployment through a perfectly arced difficulty curve, this is counterintuitive. Over-leveling is all too easy threatening to undermine Fire Emblem’s uniqueness in the genre. It’s a problem easily sidestepped by both choosing an appropriate difficulty level and tempering your leveling but nevertheless the option is unwelcome.

But manage to find the difficulty level best suited to your playing and you’ll find the experience a delightful tightrope walk on the tension of pain and pleasure. It’s a frequently infuriating game, even if you disregard the extreme caution necessary to ensure your entire team makes it to the closing credits. Often the sheer shock of a misread attack that sends one of your nurtured avatars to their eternal limbo, draws in the red mist, making even the most even-tempered gamer impetuously scramble for the off switch. But where many games would be cast aside at this point, the wonder of Fire Emblem is just how quickly you turn it back on again in the search of strategy perfection.

Eight out of Ten

Story telling

Much of Fire Emblem’s appeal comes from its story, which bludgeons you into caring intimately for the characters you spend so much time investing in. The story deftly twists and turns with Ridley Scott-esque self-conscious coherence. There’s no denying it does what it does very well but, even so, the pseudo historical storyline will polarize players depending on their aversion or attraction to lip-trembling homilies, elegiac soliloquies and black and white Nintendo morality.

01 – Your Love Means Everything – Faultline
02 – Too young – Phoenix
03 – Summer Guest – The Go Find
04 – My Angel Rocks Back and Forth – Fourtet
05– Hotel Borg – Jóhann Jóhannson
06 – Chan Chan – Buena Vista Social Club

It’s been a great weekend. On Friday night I joined the Triforce for their triumphant Triversary party in Piccadilly where we celebrated their website being one year old, an event which was not nearly as geeky as it sounds. I got to make lots of new friends. It was like being at the pub (in part because we were like, literally at the pub) except here you could talk to anyone knowing that they would talk friendly back.

I also joined ten thousand previous voices in berating attendee Goldeneye producer Martin Hollis for helping make me nocturnal during my first year of university. I also asked him which is the best videogame to which he replied: ‘Minesweeper’. A little too practised that joke perhaps…

Anyway- here is some great music I listened to afterwards. I keep meaning to talk about each track and why I’ve chosen it but really, truly, honestly it’s probably quicker if you listen, work out whether you like it or not, then find out more.

You can download the full .mp3 mixfile here or or subscribe in iTunes (’Advanced’ > ‘Subscribe to podcast’, then paste this link).

You can imagine Sony’s marketing team sitting round on plush, bright beanbags, brainstorming which cultural avenue to next storm with their ocean deep advertising budget.

Then someone laughs emptily: “Why don’t we just like, literally hit an avenue. Graffiti’s still in, yeah? Let’s daub walls with spray up outlines of kool-kid characters playing Sony PSPs. It’ll wow the subculture plus, it’ll be outside: just like you when you play PSP, LOL?!”

“Yes!” crows another, Gucci crinkling with the gathering excitement. “We’ll pick downtown areas of San Fran, NYC and LA; hire the use of walls from cheap restaurant owners for a fortnight. Those places are so tagged up and filthy no-one will care. The fact that none of the residents can afford to buy PSPs is neither here nor there. Theirs is just a suitable gritty, urban backdrop; poverty chic ripe for the borrowing. Then we’ll whisper what we’ve done to Wired readers who will spread the word and lo, unto us, a Christmas meme is born.”

At least, this is how you imagine the conversation to have gone if you’re anything like the angry people living in the areas of downtown San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles who daubed over Sony’s latest marketing campaign idea for their ubiquitous handheld game’s console with some slogans of their own.

“Get out of my city,” and “Buy more shit” are the anti-captitalist warcries hastily slapped over Sony’s hired-hands’ work. At San Francisco’s Casa Maria, a café which received around £57 for ‘granting’ Sony the use of it’s walls for two weeks, someone daubed ‘Fony’ on the adverts, stealing back from ex-Sony artist George Michael who used the same bitter pun in his video for Fast Love.

On a wall outside a beer garden in San Francisco’s ‘bohemian’ Mission District someone has spray-painted over every PSP playing character, adding the commentary: “Advertising directed at your counter-culture.”

So did Sony’s guerrilla marketing campaign for PSP backfire this week?

At first glance it appears so. But Sony’s marketing men get paid more than you do for a reason. I doubt very much that the conversation went like that introduction. Microsoft, IBM and US TV network HBO (for Sex and the City) have all been criticised by the underground subculture communities in the past for similar campaigns so this would have been no surprise to Sony. Besides, the backlash has fuelled ten thousand news sites, blogs and forums the internet over in the past few days.

‘There’s no such thing as bad publicity’ is a worn out and insufficient maxim but here it applies well. Did any of you read about the marketing campaign before people added their own messages? I bet you didn’t and I bet Sony knew you wouldn’t.

We’re a year on from PSP’s Japanese launch and, with no long line up of big name games coming up, getting PSP on the lips of opinion formers the world over three weeks before Christmas was going to be tricky. So why not irritate some precious street artists? Especially when the worst to come back is ‘negative’ commentary from the likes of Jake Dobkin, editor of Gothamist who said: “Appropriating the authenticity of street art to promote a product is totally lame. Some marketing agencies might try to position these campaigns as ‘cool’ or ‘real’ but we are not fooled’

Excuse me? Ineloquence aside, this is surely naïve. The same happens everywhere, every day in most every advert. Any subculture should be well used to being jumped upon by the marketers these days; the fact that companies frequently employ people already at the top of their game within the subculture to bring authenticity to the campaign is neatly ignored here. Indeed, this kind of cross pollination often brings a sub-culture to a wider audience. So then perhaps the reason everybody’s so irate is because of the hate of the mainsteam: don’t touch our baby.

So, what if the product being promoted had been an independent record or an underground movie? Would the vitriol have been any less as a result? But it would still be functioning on the same capitalist principle, no? Is Sony just not achingly indie enough for you? What if it had been commissioned by the local council for a local artist to do the work, perhaps promoting one of the council’s projects as has happened in many cities over the years? Is that ‘real’? If so then where is the line?

Besides, I think the critics are acting out their role in Sony’s campaign just like the good little counter-culturalists they were pre-empted to be.

At least, that’s one way to look at it. Another is to side with the residents of the area: non-graffiti artists, annoyed at having the landscape of their problems used to sell a suit’s product.

One San Francisco resident said: “The people that live in the mission area were genuinely pissed off by this; the area isn’t a lovely spot on the whole and is pretty graffed up; some areas on that street have enough problems with homelessness, gangs and drugs… The local latino graffiti crews do some really, really amazing themed (religious / cultural) commissioned work, paid for by the community and church groups to keep the place looking relatively better than when the walls are all tagged to f**k. They were genuinely pissed off that Sony decided to add to the problem.”

Now saying that Sony have added to the problem is a little strong, but sure, they certainly haven’t done anything to help. Is Sony appropriating culture to fund it’s very oppression? That’s a little strong but there’s a grain of truth in there. Ploughing £57 into the local café isn’t going to pull anyone out of urban poverty.

So the moral quagmire deepens.

In addition to the outraged sentences slapped on by residents, other graffiti artists have even worked new pieces over the entire wall where Sony’s work sat. In the example above, the artist just left the PSP poking out below his intricate design, the word ‘Toy’ sprayed in purple over its screen: the most damning of graffiti’s inter-critical slurs, indicating that the artist who drew the original is talentless. So, finally, there’s the artistic merit of the actual ‘subverts’ to chew on. Many complaints from Internet users have been that the actual quality of the art is sub par. The Sony works are what graffiti artists refer to as ‘throw ups’: quickly daubed – usually to evade detection – principally in one or two colours only: outline and fill. Not so much art as a public calling card.

Contrast the wit, intelligence and style of artists like Banksy’s work (e.g. pictured below) and you soon see that Sony haven’t really applied any of these contemporaries’ flair nor indeed any of their own clever slogans or leftfield third place advertising of their previous print work.

But, whether right or wrong, I doubt Sony will care. They just set the Internet alight with debate over the most important three letters in their IP this Christmas. All using just £57 and a can of black spray paint.

Eurogamer. 07/12/05. PS2

This month I’ve started writing for Eurogamer, which is just about the only good mainstream videogames website I know of. Obviously the pitch and style is quite different to other things here on Chewing Pixels but the acre wide word-count review limits are fun. The sub (understandably) changes some of my more convoluted, artsy sentences for collections of words I would probably never use, but then that’s life.

I hope it’s helpful for anyone looking to buy Shining Force Neo and I hope it’s entertaining for anyone that isn’t.

…There’s some scope for potentially appealing plot manoeuvres but, perhaps predictably, these never appear. The writing lacks flair, is bloated, long-winded and dripping in clichéd anime embarrassment.

In yet another case of sloppy localisation, the ham fisted textual expression is accompanied by dire, lifeless, hammy American voice acting, which grates and irritates like an interminable aural prodding. Even the artwork stills which accompany the spoken interaction of characters, an area where Sega should gleam and sparkle with imagination and beauty, is mired in tedium, boasting plain deigns we have witnessed a thousand times; identikit pictorial characterisation that has none of the bristling imagination of the game’s forbears…

Read the rest here.

My grandfather turned eighty years old last week. I spoke to him on the phone and asked him how it felt to be eighty. He told me it felt terrible. “Life is short,” he said.

Both he and his wife are still wonderfully active, being farmers by trade, and provide most of their vegetable food from their sizable garden. They still get more answers than me correct on the crossword, and are as lucid, intelligent and intelligible as I will ever be.

So, last time I was at their home a few weeks ago, it was something of a shock to be taken round their house and told to point out what I’d like from them when they die.

Under each trinket, piece of furniture and book they have placed sticky label onto which they want to write the name of a family member to whom ownership will be transferred as and when they both expire. A startling number of emotions race through your head at this kind of situation; everything from disgust, revulsion and indignation right down to, in all honesty, a sniff of bodysnatching greed immediately followed by the former responses over again.

But there was no hint of melancholy in their request; these are two human beings fully reconciled to their mortality, delighting in the fact that they can pass on some enjoyment through the mere possessions that their lives have gathered along the way. Understanding that moved the whole exercise from the morbid to the bearable.

Unbearable, however, was the phone call I had in the same week reporting that one close friend’s brother had suffered a heart attack that morning and died. He was 28 and had died of Sudden Adult Death, the grown-up version of a baby’s cot death. We had shared a fair few drinks and he was a good man. Whereas my grandparent’s request seemed, on reflection, celebratory, orderly and with foresight, this other news seemed rude, unnecessary and just plain vindictive; a cut to the cheek to make your lip tremble rather than your blood boil.

So the bookending of a couple pre-empting their deaths at the end of a long, happy and fruitful life with that of a young man, struck down by a biological failure had philosophical balls bouncing around my head all week. Coming to terms with your ceasing to be is perhaps the hardest challenge of being. Some buy a Porsche, trade in their partner for one a decade younger or take up obsessive fitness training. At least my grandparents were generally thirty years too old for that and my friend’s brother twenty too young.

So as to chewing pixels? A TV advert keeps irritatingly prodding at my head. It’s an advert dubbed ‘Engine’ for Lucozade Sport featuring Stephen Gerrard, that has been playing for a few months on and off now. In the advert Gerrard runs, shoots and scores, the grey washed out filter intermittently cutting away his skin to reveal that, under the flesh, a mechanical engine whirs, one that presumably needs the oil of Lucozade to keep it functioning at its best. Its not a great advert, one-dimensional marketing at best, but it serves its sportsman serenading purpose I suppose. But that’s not my point.

What annoys me is the constant marketing and media drive to convince us we are machines. Play with the analogy a bit. By de-biologicalising humanity, cell degradation is pushed aside; good upkeep will keep your engine running forever. When applied by a salesman the analogy teaches attainably immortality.

In Michael Moore’s film Bowling for Columbine there is an interview with goth/ metal marketing genius and church-baiter Marilyn Manson over his alleged role in the school shooting around which the film pivots. The families, or the media, I can’t remember which, claim that the two boys who took an arsenal of heavy weaponry to their school mates, were avid listeners to his music, and so try to create a link between the two. In the interview he comes across as intelligent, gracious and calm, in stark contrast to our expectations and his opponents. He talks eloquently about the storm of dissatisfaction advertisers whip up in teens these days citing spot adverts as a prime example of how companies keep teenagers feeling bad about themselves so that they keep buying products; a relentless siren call to consumerism.

To me it seems that marketers want to convince you of three things in every advert they show you: Firstly, that you are dissatisfied, secondly that their product holds the answer and, finally, they want you to believe that you are immortal, or, if that’s too strong, to do everything in their power to distract you from your mortality. Immortality when wedded with dissatisfaction is the most potent of consumerist potions.

As soon as you tell people they really are actually finite then they have no real need to upgrade last year’s mobile phone for this year’s incrementally superior iteration. Much easier to distract with Porches and diamonds, and feed us home, car and bodily makeover TV dinners to sow dissatisfaction and reap sales.

But I am not a robot. I don’t have metal parts that just need Lucozade to keep them running. I hope if, or when I reach eighty I have the presence of perspective to write names on the things I’ve accrued to pass on to those I love. Sentimental value maybe monetarily free but it has a weight attached that an empty-eyed marketing man could never perceive. That weight is, in part, what it means to be human and so to miss that point, is to, in a small, representitive way, miss the point of you.

You can see the Lucozade advert here if you really want to.

I try not to just link to things that I just read about on other blogs but in this case I’ll make an exception. non-stuff pointed out the marvellous, if perhaps not-quite-fully-realised, www.pandora.com where you can discover new music in a similar style to an artist or specific track you like. It’s fun, has a clever interface and occasionally throws up a gem.

Below enjoy another eclectic and internationally furnished chewmix. As ever I hope you find something you like you didn’t know about before and feel free to comment.

01 – Send me you – The Butchies
02 – Faking the Books – Lali Puna
03 – Playground Love – Air
04 – Small Deaths are the Saddest – Mum
05– It’s Been Eight Years – Radio Dept
06 – Eerybody Wants to be a Cat – The Aristocats

You can download the full .mp3 mixfile here or or subscribe in iTunes (’Advanced’ > ‘Subscribe to podcast’, then paste this link).