Aesthetics On Wheels

BEACHES SHUT OVER SPLINTER FEARS

A couple of days ago, I was driving along the front at Worthing and saw for the first time the amazing spectacle of the drifts of wooden planks washed up in the recent shipwreck. This was days into the operation to clear the spill and long after sunset, yet the timber loomed unignorably two storeys into the air for minutes of my driving at thirty miles an hour alongside the beach. The mad scale of it doesn’t come across in the pictures in the papers or online. It’s like the Gods are playing pick-up sticks. If you live in the area and haven’t seen the wood mountains yet (and if they haven’t been cleared up) then I recommend you check them out. They’re awe inspiring in a way that crappy contemporary artists wish their Tate Modern turbine room gimmicks were.

I’ve linked to “The Truck Driver’s Gear Change Hall Of Shame” before, but this morning I choked on a bagel when I heard the tail end of Rod Stewart’s cover of I Don’t Want To Talk About It, so ugly was the key shift at the end, which gave me an excuse to bounce over there and read the relevant page, where there’s also a rant about Ben Elton and dodgy compilation musicals in general. Also worth reading—despite being rather too forgiving of Oasis—is Dominic Pedler’s muso’s intro to the TDGC, which I’d not seen before.

8 Comments

  1. xoggoth
    Posted 27Jan08 at 20:08 | Permalink

    Saw them at Birling Gap couple of days ago. Why couldn’t we get BMW motorbikes and stuff? Not fair.

  2. Asher
    Posted 27Jan08 at 22:36 | Permalink

    I hadn’t realized Rod Stewart’s version of “I don’t want to talk about it” was a cover. Whose song was it originally?

  3. Posted 27Jan08 at 22:38 | Permalink

    Follow the link above and you’ll find the answer.

  4. Asher
    Posted 27Jan08 at 22:41 | Permalink

    Oops. ..I should have clicked on the link in your post before asking that question a moment ago.

  5. Asher
    Posted 28Jan08 at 21:41 | Permalink

    In my defense: I was tired when I missed that link at first yesterday. Still, I feel I should make up for yesterday’s oops by recommending a cover I hope you _will_ like: Stacey Kent’s cover of Stevie Nicks’ “Landslide,” on Kent’s new album, Breakfast on the Morning Train. (..Couldn’t find a clip of it to link to.) ..Heard the cover version for the first time a few days ago, and now I can’t get it out of my head.

  6. Asher
    Posted 28Jan08 at 21:43 | Permalink

    ..that should be Morning _Tram._ ..Tired again tonight.

  7. Posted 28Jan08 at 21:54 | Permalink

    I once shared a dressing room with Stacey Kent—before she was famous obviously. While we were waiting to go on she told me all about how she’d left New York for Britain so that she could become a professional jazz singer. I nodded and smiled and silently marked her down as completely daft.

  8. Asher
    Posted 28Jan08 at 22:29 | Permalink

    Well, okay. But you should still hear that cover.

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