A little excerpt from the Blur rockumentary ‘No Distance Left To Run’, which documents their 2009 reunion and their eventful and often turbulent existence as a band, and as four individuals. I thought I’d share it to provide a context for the two songs posted below, which I think allows for a better appreciation of them, especially ‘Battle’ which is an almost unrecognisable divergence from Blur’s previous narrative and general musical style. (This excerpt isn’t a conversation but rather separate cuts of them talking about the album and story behind it.)

Dave Rowntree: With 13, things were starting to fall apart between the four of us – it was quite a sad process making it. People not turning up to the sessions, or turning up drunk, being abusive and storming off.

Graham Coxon: I was really out there around 13, which made for some pretty great noise but I was probably a bit of a crap to be around. I didn’t have much of a clue that things were going wrong with Damon and Justine (Frischmann, a member of the band Elastica), although it was probably easy to guess.

Alex James: Singing about characters was a kind of device, but it seemed like there was shift away from sort of artifice on 13, that he (Damon Albarn) was genuinely singing from the bottom of his heart.

Graham Coxon: ‘No Distance’, it became pretty apparent when we were listening to the lyrics of that, and again it was a reminder for me at that point, that Damon wasnt just a ruthless careering maniac who had no feelings, and  it was actually flesh and blood and was hurting quite a lot and you know, that sort of thing makes me fall in love with him all over again, that crikey, he is just like me, he just does it in a different way.

Amazing. Mostly Droga5.

There are two things that I am going to tell the truth about. One. Me and Charlie would have seen Diehard if we could, but it was sold out. Two. At lots of points during Sofia Coppola’s film Somewhere I felt bored. But, on the other hand, the film looked beautiful, the soundtrack was perfect and the acting was completely convincing. The film tells the story of a successful Hollywood movie star who is living the American Dream. He has the car, all the girls he could want and, most importantly, fame. But he isn’t happy. Through painfully long shots, sparse dialogue and few characters Coppola manages to get accross the loneliness and monotony of even the most exciting life.  Johnny (the main character) has a daughter, though, and it is their relationship that progresses the most throughout the film, with Johnny at last telling her that he was sorry he wasn’t “there for her more”. However, one of the problems with the film is that for all of the monotony there is not a particularly exciting plot. The film is 1hr 40minutes, yet it would be difficult to describe what actually happened in it. Yes, there is a huge amount of character development and yes, you really do realise the boredom of Johnny’s life by the end of the film, but you also realise that you yourself have been bored for large portions.  You have to give Coppola time and (a lot) of patience but ultimately it is rewarded as you get a real sense of what real life in Hollywood is like. And maybe that the American Dream isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

When I heard about Priming I couldn’t really believe it. In 1996 John Bargh did an experiment involving participants unscrambling lists of words. One list had words relating to old age and the other had words relating to youth. When the people were done unscrambling the words, those who had unscrambled words related to old age walked more slowly than those who unscrambled words related to youth. Though the people didn’t know it, they had been subconsciously primed to behave in a certain way.

This week in Cambridge there have been interviews. Some 600 people apply for around 150 places in my college, Jesus, and after helping out for a few days I realised that most of them are, unsurprisingly, very nervous. Because of this, I thought that I might be able to use the concept of priming to sub consciously calm them down. I created a series of posters to put around the area where they wait- using a great free font from the Leauge of Movable Type: League Gothic. On the posters I printed the words “calm,” “relax,” and “smile”. These words are more aggressive than those usually used in priming because I thought that this would mean that they would be more immediately memorable especially among the other posters in the room. As people who are more relaxed and less nervous usually perform better, I hope that my priming project had some effect on the Jesus interview candidates!

It is one of life’s rarities, to see high level American politicians talking any sense, so I thought I’d share this. It came as a riposte to Huckabee and Palin’s comments which called for Julian Assange (Founder of Wikileaks) to be executed for treason. How an Australian citizen who has merely acted as a publisher of leaked information – an act replicated by newspapers all around the world which also published, can be executed for treason in America is anyone’s guess.