Vdio Killed The Rdio Star

Something like six months ago, I subscribed to rdio - if you don't know what it is, you should check it out. It's by far the best music subscription service out there - there's very little that they haven't got. Honestly speaking though, it might not be the best - I don't know because I've never looked at the others. I have plenty of friends who moan a lot about their services but with rdio, I haven't had much cause for complaint at all. There's a few things I'd like to see done differently in the interface but it's early days and they'll figure it out. If you're already a member, you can find me here - for £10 a month, I seriously hammer it but it's without doubt the best £10 a month I have ever spent on music since the digital revolution. A few weeks back as a bi-product of this, I found myself with a free trial subscription to their new movie streaming service called vdio (natch) - along with a £20 sweetener so that I could test the beta out. Again, I have to tell you - it's pretty freaking solid. Absolutely zero glitches in the streaming. Excellent quality. There's an awful lot of material there that netflix don't have (I watched Marathon Man a couple of days ago - superb as ever) and even though I think it's a little on the expensive side, it's certainly a far superior experience to going to a rental store. All they need to figure out is how to let me buy the damn film on my iPad (as opposed to buying it on the Big Machine and then it appearing on my iPad) and we just might be in long term business.

Tonight though, all is forgiven because I've just seen that they have Rob Zombie's new movie Lords of Salem available for advanced viewing. So for the next couple of hours - that's me all figured out...

Reap The Whirlwind.

Via the magic of cross pollination somewhere on the web, I came across this today:

The Tiny Wife is one of the greatest books ever written. It should only take you a few hours to whip through it but what it says will stay with you for the rest of your years.  I've already bought two copies of this in the last year and given them both away. I have no doubt at all that the one I still have will go the same way eventually. It's an Andrew Kaufman masterpiece that quashes even the incredible All My Friends Are Superheroes. Tom Percival's art only adds to the experience.

One thing I didn't know was that Tom also does the cover art for Skullduggery Pleasant - on which note, if you're not familiar with, you need to get in the car sometime today and get the hell on with it. One day, when I get myself some money, Tom's is one of the first doors I will be knocking on.

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Also on my travels this morning, I see that Rob Zombie's new movie Lords of Salem is almost upon us:

The guy is a genius film-maker. If you've never seen his reworking of Halloween, it totally grounds the original premise into the ground - and as he moves forward, he only gets better and better. The reason for these two things appearing here is 'inspiration'. So long as there are always people out in the world raising the standard all the time of what's achievable, I'll always have something to push against.

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Which brings me neatly onto what the hell is going on here. Last night, as stated, the tumblr feed began to be whittled away at, the eagle eyed amongst you will see that the 'social' widget has also disappeared. It doesn't make me anti-social, honest! I think I have seen the light though. The temptation with building an online HQ is to reach as many people as possible in the hope that your name will spread and help you along the way, but it doesn't work how you think it does.

Having given it a push for a good few months, I found myself trying to feed smaller and smaller parts of myself into the grinder - and that's not what I do. There's a few scraps still lying around that need addressing but over the following weeks, I look forward to eeeking them out as well. It's surprising how you can get dragged into the psyche of the world and what it thinks is a good idea.

Anyway, that decision is made. It's a good decision too. Let me tell you why. Take a look at this graphic.

Every single one of those orange rectangles is time taken away from spending it with people I love, time for writing big things - or small things even. Hell, there are eleven rectangles there and you can probably add a few more for every year that goes by. The last sentence on that slide is a lie. People are inherently lazy and don't back track - certainly not from a space like flickr. People are also easily distracted and every single one of those places will pimp something sexy at you to keep you within their own space at the single click of a button. This is business for these people.

I feel better having written that.

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Being as I've already posted two clips for you to watch while you pretend you're doing something else today, figured this would be a fine place to pull in an old tumblr post.

The great Robert McGinnis - all of which have been used as classic pulp covers - I kinda like how they look in their original form, so here they are… I believe Robert is still working - for Hardcase Crime.

Good work Mr Smith. More later... maybe.

Rock Me Like A Hurricane

Very disappointed that the storm wasn't the Babylonian wind fest that I had been promised. That said, I can live without a tree on my car - which is precisely what happened to Sarah on the train today. An hour is a long time to sit with strangers when you have somewhere to be. I remember breaking down on a National Express bus once going from Birmingham to Victoria. Imagine my delight at finding I was on the same trip as the National Express mascot "man with six cans of Special Brew". Lovely. For those of you stuck without something to watch these days, I can heavily recommend a sleeper show called Breaking Bad which revolves around a chemistry teacher who discovers he has lung cancer and turns his hand to making and selling the purest cracked cocaine in town in order to provide for his family. It's very dark and shouldn't be funny but when he kills a rival dealer by accident and gets rid of him by melting the body in a bath of acid, you kinda know that one of these writers has to have some British blood in there somewhere.

I've just been chatting with my buddy Seb about magazines and design, and he wrote this which fair warmed my heart: "I remember you saying a while back that you didn't look at other mags when you were working on Burn, you looked at other stuff... I vaguely got it at first, but having worked in an industry totally disassociated from music, I think I get it properly now - every building we do, no matter how small or insignificant, it has to have something special to it - it's gotta rock like a motherfucker, otherwise, why bother? Same for music. Same for writing about music. Everything has to have it's special thing, otherwise, it'll be cock and you'll have to stand by it and look stupid."

Hoofuckingray! We have a winner. Nice to see a hundred pennies drop on the floor all at the same time. I'm not sure that's what we always delivered but it was always the vision - it can be hard though when people are bred these days to accept a genre stereotype - especially when there's money involved. That made my day!

The biggest issue of the day is exactly what to do with this facial hair growth. Currently looking like Rob Zombie, it's time to shape it. If I give it another couple of days, I think it will be long enough to actually be classed as a beard and not a goatee (or similar). I'm not being very successful at the Fu Manchu style, the George Michael is quite appealing but required far too much work on a day to day basis to be of practical value. Thus, it must be my old favourite, the Dr Strange (aka The Master) - who it must be added, probably go for this style for much the same reason as myself. You can't play with demons and look great if your goatee requires too much maintenance. I even have the white bits in the correct place - it's a gift from the Gods as a token of their appreciation.

More later. Must attend to the Monster Club and do rock things like put some washing on.

Where did it all go so wrong...

Clip of the day: The Sun and The Sky | The Violet Burning Bonus clip: The Healer (Live) | Crown of Thorns