Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

i actually bought a comets on fire t-shirt solely because the design was so awesome. (it was at a gig, but they hadn't come on stage yet.) then i heard the music and i liked that too. i suppose if i hadn't liked their music, or thought it was boring, it would have posed a problem.

a friend of mine, who shall remain nameless so that alex in nyc doesn't stalk and kill him, bought a huge iron maiden patch when he was 14 and sewed it across the shoulders of his denim jacket. he had never heard a note of iron maiden, but he wound up becoming the biggest iron maiden fan i know, and even sung in a band later, where his vocal style was almost inseparable from bruce dickinson's.

my take on this: do not read hadley freeman.

this resolution made some time ago, stands as strong today as it ever did.

it's a crass and deliberately invidious piece of writing. such an attitude, if sincerely held, could be turned around on pretty much ANY choice of clothing. so forgeddaboudit

the last band t-shirt i bought - robyn!

alan i can't help myself, i know i'm sick and need help.

is there a thread for best band t-shirts? must see

Taste is something that I have. It does not define me. Clothes are something I wear. The statement I am making is "I don't really care about clothes any more."

If I'm going to make a statement about clothes, I'll wear a bright green paisley jacket to a dronerock festival where everyone else is in leather.

I suppose my Hawkwind t-shirt is a statement, it says "ha ha, I'm wearing a Hawkwind t-shirt, I care nothing for fashion, I am wearing the shirt of a band so deeply uncool you can suck my left one because I love them!" But it's certainly not a statement saying that I want to f*ck any of Hawkwind or that I have a musician boyfriend whose Hawkwind t-shirt I'm borrowing, which is the assumption of that article.

> I don't notice many people over 20 wearing them.

*SOBS*

> you wouldn't actually buy a band t-shirt because you liked the design but not necessarily the band tho...would you?

EAR t-shirt with the putney on the front = great. EAR live = terrible. (EAR on CD = ok, plus pram and stereolab were supporting)

"Do you think anyone else cares?"

the core MOTOR of fashion is YES OF COURSE I THINK OTHER PEOPLE CARE THAT I AM WEARING... WHAT'S "IN". no less dumb than wearing something else that forms part of your identity. so it's just a puerile throw away bit of nonsense. heh. fashion in 'being puerile' shocker.

I gave up caring whether I was too old to wear band t-shirts or whatever a long time ago. Really, if you're getting that worked up about what other people are wearing, the joke's on you, I think. To paraphrase - "Do you think anyone else cares?"

Yesterday I wore an X-Ray Spex t-shirt. I am 31. Oh noes.

If a FAC 51 Hacienda T-shirt counts as a band t-shirt, I am wearing one NOW. I am more than 31.

Unless you buy shirts at arena shows or whatever they cost a tenner or less which is cheaper than t-shirts tend to be (aside from plain ones from Primark or something). I guess it bugs fashiony people cos it's fashion for people who don't give a shit about fashion

you wouldn't actually buy a band t-shirt because you liked the design but not necessarily the band tho...would you?

whoa there, people do this All The Time! witness all the motorhead/def leppard/poison tees on sale at top shop/debenhams/whatever.

What's a putney, Andy?

I bought a Mega City Four t-shirt the other week. I bought it cos I like the band and I like their logo, and out of nostalgia.

witness all the motorhead/def leppard/poison tees on sale at top shop/debenhams/whatever

really? since when do those shops sell (official?) band merchandise?

but how do you know people buying them don't like the band (even if it's 'ironic' or just liking the idea OF liking them, if that makes sense) anyway?

i can imagine some people, not just kids or people buying for kids, buy band t-shirts because of the design and without really knowing about the band but can't be that many really. this is even more of a facile 'want to look cool' statement tho isn't it? that sense of knowing what to buy but not really knowing why...

remember the 'little girls wearing Nico 'Chelsea Girl' t-shirt thing (altho i approved of this ha)

Uhm yeah, there were tons of high street chains selling classic rock tees (I presume they just bought a load wholesale).

i figure these are aimed at and bought mainly by teenagers

really? since when do those shops sell (official?) band merchandise?

since AGES, honestly. i doubt your "average" 14-year-old Miss Selfridge customer would have a clue/give a shit who Def Leppard/insert 80s hair metal band here are. it's just a noisy "cool" design that'll make her look a bit like Peaches Geldof or whoever.

I'm sure I remember even Primark licensing some lame/classic 80s band tee designs recently.

and As Matt DC has admitted, sometimes people buy band tees without even realising that's what they are!

nb this whole discussion is clearly on the wrong thread.

Someone was selling MC5 shirts a good few years ago and it was the only place that you could get MC5 shirts so I know loads of people that bought them as they had been desperate for years to get them.
I got mine online but it was probably the same shirt.

a putney

http://www.vintagesynth.com/misc/vcs3.jpg

so called because they were made in putney (not far from you actually, there's a website that gives the actual address of the place they used to make them, cottage industry style, deodor road, sw15).

http://www.ems-synthi.demon.co.uk/snaps/everynun.jpg

Hang on a second, I went to primary school at 49 Deodar Road!!

Oh, I didn't, it was 95-97 Deodar Road (since moved). My best friend at the time lived at 50 Deodar Road, though.

I've got a Synthi t-shirt but my god, I want a t-shirt with that nun on it.

I am currently wearing a T-ahirt of a band that I saw live but didn't like much. It's a pretty design and the band aren't well known enough for many people to even know it's a band T-shirt.

I have had it on since yesterday so should probably take it off soon.

what's the band?

Skrewdriver

Ha. A Swedish indiepop band called Aerospace.

good name/word for t-shirt

i am wearing my robyn t-shirt today!

message for all youse: "i am a 'top 5' kind of person"

back to the guardian...

has anyone else had problems viewing the site this week? nothing (that i know of) has changed on my computer and suddenly instead of a nice clean page, i have just text and links, all in the same size New York font. (and the Guardian is the only place this is true, so I feel like they must have changed something).

the GUARDIAN is good, second only to the BBC

xpost

yes. chinese hackers innit.

Today's free thing: a cut out and assemble yourself model of the Empire State Building.

So in answer to the question, no, apart from the lower case 'g' on the new masthead.

2pm (now playing: Mark Kozelek moaning about some shit):

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2411/1654704013_f0762c363d.jpg

3.30pm (now playing: Happy End, much better):

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2354/1655585806_e112b84d31.jpg

This is really tedious but I have to finish. It's about to get very fiddly. I need a cup of tea. World's shittiest liveblog.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2354/1655585806_9ee35fe917.jpg

7pm:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2229/1657319085_039a52afe6.jpg

It's like my time has no value to me.

This strikes me as a noble way to pass it, though.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2190/1714521192_2c763aaa31.jpg

I win again!

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ruth_fowler/2008/03/the_antichrist_for_feminists.html

A+++++++++ trolling well done guardian u win

I stood on the edge of that enormous comments thread with a sense of trepidation I haven't felt since standing on the edge of the top diving board at the swimming pool aged nine. And then decided to walk back down the virtual ladder, straight back into the changing room, and back home.

Ruth Fowler was born in 1979 and grew up in the mountains of North Wales. She received a first class BA (Hons) in English Literature from Cambridge University in 2000. She is sure they let her in as the token comprehensive school northerner.

After a year teaching in Buenos Aires and three months in India, she returned to King’s College, Cambridge to complete an MPhil. However, realising that she would rather be living life than reading about it, she finished her thesis on Bollywood films within six months and went to live in Nepal.

Post-Nepal, she travelled the world eking out a living from writing, teaching, sailing, cooking and begging. Ruth lived in Argentina, the South of France, the Alps, Florida, the Caribbean and Central America before finding herself in New York in January 2005, penniless and without a visa.

She has worked as a stripper in Manhattan and London, and her book, No Man's Land - about " the murky territory where eroticism and commerce collide" - is due to be published in the UK in June.

This is a made-up character, right?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/eastenders/images/characters_cast/characters/ruth_f/ruth_fowler_large_1.jpg

"But Mark, we cann'ae afford it!"

Man, Eastenders was my shit back in 98/99.

According to Mark's speech to Sharon in his last episode, he only had sex with Ruth once or maybe twice in the course of their whole marriage. No wonder she played away with that rubbish Irish lothario.

This reminds me of many articles about people who have done all right and would like to justify their wealth to people who haven't done all right. I'm not sure what the purpose of such articles is, unless it is for some form of...validation?

Ruth Fowler: she made a g today, but she made it in a sleazy way.

quality shit:

http://img378.imageshack.us/img378/1603/hadleydv9.png

AKA "the worst people in Britain"

it's curious that he was apparently an Mi5 asset and had chatted a lot of shit and put down a bounty of the today-money equivalent of half a mill on the RA provo gang that was running roughshod through London. And there was no police detail guarding his house? Maybe they also thought he was a cunt and just had a leave him to it attitude!

I suspect that's exactly what they thought.

On a lighter note, I was struck by the enormous, nay ludicrous amount of puff-pieces the newspaper commissioned for Lily Allen's new album. There was Lily Allen’s new album shows the pain behind the 'cool girl' myth – that's why women are obsessed with it*, Who is Lily Allen's Madeline about?, Divorce and desire power Lily Allen's autofictional comeback, Lily Allen's West End Girl is funny, sexy, jawdropping etc, Lily Allen: West End Girl (is) a gobsmacking autopsy of marital betrayal, a piece about open relationships that ties in with the album, Why Lily Allen has broken the internet**, and Ace Frehley, Kiss lead guitarist and band's co-founder, dies aged 74, which technically doesn't have anything about Lily Allen in it, but I wanted to make this paragraph slightly longer.

This is without counting the general opinion pieces that mention the album. It "broke the internet" so hard that after peaking at number 2 it dropped out of the top ten a fortnight later. Meanwhile in the United States it charted for two weeks and peaked at #93, which - to be fair - is much higher than I would expect for a mid-2000s cheeky cockney gorblimey throwback.

This grew from a thread on a rival website on the topic of lyric-focused reviews. After skimming through all of the above I still have no idea what the album actually sounds like. The articles either focus on nothing at all, or something that exists in the writer's head, or they're based loosely on a couple of short lyric snippets. Does it have rapping? Does it have synthesisers, guitars? Does it have donk noises? I have no idea.

I mean, given that Allen's BBC podcast has now ended she must be short of a bit of money, and it's great that a bunch of quite well-off white women have clubbed together to give her a bit of a boost, but can't they do so privately? Can't they just write her a cheque, or offer to loan her some money interest-free, or offer to buy something from her for considerably higher than the market rate? It just seems like internal party communication not intended for public consumption.

* "I don't think that's why women of all ages have spent the past week listening to the album over and over on repeat, quoting scraps of it in their group chats" - I must have missed this.

Just yesterday I discovered Lily Allen's debut appearance from 2002. No need for thanks. Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FyuVR4vbZQ

Lily tweeted a picture of her boyfriend's penis dressed up as a golliwog as part of an argument with a black person.

and yet she's somehow become a national treasure