Where Have I Been All Your Life?

I've been trying to get this up and running.

*UPDATE* - it appears my Technical Director, and brother, has got some issues. If you type http://www.haslehurst.net/wordpress/ into your browser you should be able to actually see something.

Oh, and moving flat, changing jobs, and other general life movements.

But mostly the review site...

Corporate Blogging

Check this out - my colleague, and sometimes personal friend Anthony "Brown Bear" Brown has gotten himself into the corporate blogging scene, on quite a well-respected site no less.

I "subbed" the article, so thought I'd stick a link up here.

Enjoy!

Happy Anniversary Gavin

Yesterday was a special day indeed for the Haslehurst family - Gavin, my only brother, saw Supergrass for the Twenty Fifth time.

This is quite an achievement for a music fan, especially when you consider that he's only been of "gig-attending" age for about 10 years. 2.5 Supergrass gigs per year is a fantastically impressive number.

Gavin's obsession with the sometimes-excellent indie popsters is all thanks to our cousin Joe, who brought "I Should Coco" with him when he visited us one summer. Inbetween insanely reckless downhill skateboarding antics and setting traps for our pet cat we would rock out to "Caught By The Fuzz" and "Lenny".

Since that summer Gavin hasn't really listened to anything but Supergrass. He hasn't really bothered seeing any bands unless they're Supergrass. And he hasn't bought a T-shirt unless it's had "Supergrass" written on it.

Gavin, for your commitment to Supergrass, we salute you.

Incidentally, the gig - at "Get Loaded In The Park" - was relatively disappointing. Even Gavin agreed that "The 'Grass" didn't play enough of their old classics, focussing instead on their fairly dull new material. They were also badly let down by the sound system, which was too low - due to the posh bastards of Clapham kicking up a fuss about 1 measly gig a year in their precious park.

Mean Music

I decided on the bus home to give "Elephant" by the White Stripes another listen. I've recently been investing some serious time and money into diversifying my musical tastes through genres like "dance" and "hip-hop". I'm always going to be a guitar guy at heart, so I felt like the lonely ride on the 26 was a good opportunity to revisit my rock roots. "Elephant" has always, at least, up until tonight, been an album that I haven't been totally comfortable with. It has seemed on previous listens to be fragmented, lengthy, and perhaps just a touch too conceptual for my liking.

Tonight, however, suddenly everything about this album made sense. Maybe it's because of my recent musical diet, but the whole album seemed to hang together - to have some kind of common message, and...way of pointing in the same direction. As I listened, I realised that the common element was Jack White's guitar playing. "Elephant" is an especially mean album. That is to say, Jack White plays the guitar at his meanest throughout it.

Mean is a way of playing guitar. It's perhaps best summed up on the album by "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself", a song where White is so sparse with his guitar that, outside of the chorus, he almost might as well not be playing. This style ends up emphasising the overall tone of anger, frustration and bitterness better than the lyrics. It sounds pretentious, but it's about the notes that White doesn't play. The restraint makes me think about a man holding back a punch...but only just.

If you want to look to other artists to demonstrate a similar style, a good starting point would be Kurt Cobain and Nirvana on "In Utero". The album's tone of brutality and emotional rawness is created entirely by the harsh, abrupt guitar playing of Cobain.

I've got a lot of love for this way of playing. And I defy anyone to listen to "Ball and Biscuit" from "Elephant" and not understand what I'm saying. But there is another way of using the guitar that can be equally compelling. Who can argue with bands like the Stone Roses, The Verve, or McFly? Yet their guitar work, in the main, is generous and inclusive. Perhaps "twiddly" or "flourishy" are the best words to describe it?

Anyway, enough bollocks from me - have a listen to some examples to get your head around what I'm on about:

The Meanies:

I Don't Know What to do With Myself - warning, Kate Moss dances in this link
Serve The Servants - warning, might make you love Nirvana forever
All Along the Watchtower - warning, the best rock song ever

The Giving Types:

The Waterfall - it's going to make you wish you were on a train to the coast
Lucky Man - some of the nicest little guitar flourishes here

Time to Fly South For The Summer...Almost

Well, it's definitely the British Summer now. Every year, Famous Jon's birthday heralds the season of disappointing barbecues, rainy weekends, and sitting at work staring out of the window at glorious sunshine as it gets wasted on builders and the unemployed.

Time, methinks, for a holiday...

Come Wednesday Louise and I will be kicking back in the Med, soaking up the rays, olive oil, and reasonably-priced Chianti.

And if the promise of the greatest food, wine and weather in the world isn't enough, I can also look forward to tear-and-vomit-inducing bus rides of terror at every turn - apparently Sorrento (where we're headed) is well known for some of the scariest/most nauseating in the world.

A Beginner's Guide to Networking - Part 2

click on the image for a full size version

A Beginner's Guide to Networking

I've been wanting to write a comic about my job for a really long time but until today I hadn't got around to it.

In the recruitment business you come across a vast amount of funny/weird/unpredictable scenarios, and in the "New Media" world you can pretty much double it. I don't much enjoy just plain ranting about stuff on here any more, so a cartoon presents a great opportunity to discuss things I come across in my job, but also take them further/make them weirder...as you'll see below.

I've done my best to keep everything very fictional and light-hearted. This isn't about having a dig at anyone, or making fun of my job. It's more an opportunity for me to share some observations that I make in the day to day of my job, in graphic form.

Incidentally, if you're wondering why I decided to go with aliens/bug creatures/strange mutants as the main characters, well...firstly, I can't draw humans worth squat, and secondly, if you spent some time in my shoes you'd realise that everything in the digital recruitment world can be pretty alien at times.

click on the image for a nice big, readable full-size version