FUCK OFF, YEAR.

So, in the courageous spirit of total blog cliché, we give you a very brief e&v round up of our last little spin round Old Mother Sun.

2008 – we’re fucking glad it’s over, but 2009 has a strong chance of being much worse.

LISTENING
We aren’t really in a position to discuss the year’s best music, because our dire financial situation permitted us the purchase of no more than a dozen or so albums / individual releases across the whole year. Hooray. Sadly, some of these few purchases were from the wonderful shop Sound323, which has now closed, no doubt the first of many such caterers to minority interests we will lose in the coming period.
Out of the pathetically slight dribble of music we did treat ourselves to, we can recommend Philip Jeck’s ‘Sand’ and The Caretaker’s ‘Persistent Repetition of Phrases’. On a related note, the ‘Hauntology’ symposium in the summer was interesting, entertaining and probably the best musical event we managed to attend all year, even if it answered very few of its own questions. A genuine Hooray for Mark and Jon for setting that one up, and another hooray for Jon, this time for all the sound seminars that we’ll miss now that we’ve gone.
Also, a dubious highlight was the ‘Jelly', some of the disgracefully small amount of original sound/music that we wrote this year, but also the most prominent, though that had very little to do with us.

WATCHING
Being told off for giggling at ‘Threads’ was our cinematic highlight of the year.

READING
Zizek was disappointing, Meillassoux tantalising, we were told to read fiction and thus found the Safran Foer thrust into our hand rather mawkish, we went back in time and read Kant and Hegel, covering brain holes. We returned to Beckett countless times, also to Lacan, finally beginning, as all those who endeavour with him must do, to draw out our own lessons from his acting up. Wikipedia gave us countless hours of wonderfully democratic ‘fact’ accumulation, but combined with iPhones, it promises to ruin pub conversations forever. Collapse IV was fantastic, but the flaws in Benatar almost made one think life worth living. The Wire was still the best game around, and Savage Messiah gave us the chance to dream about London.

ARCHITECTURE
Globally- it’s not really going very well, is it?

Personally- E&V gained a few extra letters after their name this summer, to what looks thus far to be no avail. After six years of repeatedly making ourselves ill, ruining a number of perfectly good relationships (and maybe some less than perfectly good ones too) and just generally falling to pieces, all in the service of an unbelievably inefficient, rarefied and backward pedagogical system, we were told that our recent massive attempt to intellectually reinvigorate the haunted history of the exhibition palace typology would have been ‘more interesting if it had a tie-rack in it’. What glory…

Then of course it turned out to have been a waste of time, thanks to the fuckups of the massed armies of greedy bastards, but then wasting time is all that we’d have been doing for the last six years anyway…

PREDICTIONS
More misery for all. Obvious, really. If we’re lucky, the misery will be more evenly spread than it has been in the past, but that’s a bit too optimistic to be plausible.

Actually, fuck it, we promise to be lovely in 2009. In fact- we promise to update regularly and find some contemporary architecture that we genuinely like.

Hooray!