devioustree

I’m guessing, dear visitor, that you have heard of Twitter. If you haven’t, it’s a website that allows you to publish miniature blog entries of 140 characters of less; it’s better than it sounds trust me.

Anyway.

A couple of days ago I decided to read about Watergate. Why? No reason apart from being curious. It’s such a well known scandal and I felt my understanding was very incomplete.

Nixon on Twitter

So with that in mind I headed to the fountain of knowledge and started reading. It’s fascinating stuff and so I became very engrossed. But while reading about people such as Ellsberg and Ehrlichman an idea popped into my head.

“Twittergate”.

And lo, Twittergate – a recreation of the events of Watergate twittered through the eyes of the participants – was born!

All of the accounts are in correct – as far as I could tell – chronological order but are, of course, not in real-time as that would have taken several years rather than a few hours.

I have no idea how this will appear to the naïve reader as I myself find the whole thing rather strange but listed below are the twitter accounts of all involved in the order they first join our…story, for lack of a better word. A journey perhaps?

• Daniel Ellsberg
• Richard Nixon
• Anthony Russo
• Neil Sheehan
• New York Times
• Henry Kissinger
• Egil Krogh
• John Ehrlichman
• The Plumbers
• Frank Wills

So there’s the cast, feel free to do what you will. I leave it up to you as to how you interpret it (as I can’t make head nor tales of it). Is it art? Is it saying something about the state of current affairs? Is it commenting about the usage of technology intruding into our privacy?

Please, feel free to make up your own wild guesses as to what goes on in my mind and let me know!

UPDATE
The NYT twitter account I created for this got renamed. Spoilsports!

Following on from my previous list of The Honourably Mentioned Albums Of 2008, I hereby grant you access to the albums I enjoyed most last year. As before, the list is ordered alphabetically.

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10 hours without a toilet break

This was sent to me by Jonathan during Sky 2’s epic two day long 24 marathon.

Is this how America treats its heroes? By forcing them to withgo from basic bodily functions? If that’s their attitude then I’m afraid I shall have to resign from The American Heroes League. I expect Horatio Caine and Peter Griffin to also tender their resignations.

And yes, I should be writing a report at the moment; don’t judge me.

So it’s that time of year again – The End. And what is there to do at the end of the year other than make lists? I didn’t know either so lists were made and here I present them to you. I have decided that I shant put them in a numerical order as it would be, at best, arbitrary. But they must be ordered somehow otherwise they would overlap and you wouldn’t be able to make head nor tail of what was written; so I chose my favourite means of sorting: alphabetically.

So what will happen is that in this here blog post I shall press upon you the albums that are highly recommended but fell just short of being in the best albums of the year. Some time in the future I shall write up the list of my favourite albums of 2008 but, as this one took me so long to write, it shall have to wait a while.

I must add that, of course, I did not listen to every album that was recorded this year so this list should not be considered a holy writ. It is merely the albums that I enjoyed and thought you might too (especially you, Alan).

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Merriweather Post Pavilion album cover

So I have just returned from the delightful Monorail where the new Animal Collective album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, was being played ahead of its release on 12th Jan. I am a late passenger on the Animal Collective train as I only really started to listen to them this year after much prompting from Richard. And lo it was Richard again who convinced me to go tonight. He really loves his Animal Collective! But anyway, you’re not here to read about Richard (or are you?).

The new album is quite a departure from Strawberry Jam (of which I am most familiar with) but Richard asures me that this is par for the course with AC; they are consistently inconsistent. Opening track In The Flowers lets you know this straight away as it’s a completely different kettle of fish from Peacebone, which opened their previous album. While their rampant usage of weird-and-wonderful-sounds-which-somehow-meld-together is still here, there’s a more natural feel to these sounds; as if Mother Earth had given the band a collection of samples from her mixing decks. But it’s the vocals that really differentiate Merriweather from their past work. Put simply, they’re sublime. Put slightly more complicatedly, it’s as if they are channeling The Beatles to produce some lush, multi-layered harmonies that tingle the ears.

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Monorail Music

Summertime Clothes contains probably the best examples of this new vocal work but since I don’t have that on mp3 you shall have to make do with My Girls. And by “make do”, I mean “enjoy lots”. Another notable track would be the album closer, Brothersport. A bit dancier than the rest of the album, you could tell that every person in the room was itching to cast their chairs to the side and strut their funky stuff.

Or that could have been just me.

All in all, it seems to me that Animal Collective has a winner on their hands. The album has a nice flow and I’m rather looking forward to it. It is probably worth noting that if you don’t like their other output then I don’t think this will change your mind.

As you can probably tell, I’m not a music journalist so please excuse my rather crappy descriptions and, as I have only heard the album once, I make no claims of this being accurate. It is just based on my admittedly flawed memory.