Monthly Round-Up: June

This months links round up has been delayed by Mar­garet Atwood’s The Blind Assas­sin of which I still have roughly 30 pages left to read. The only reason I am not read­ing it right now is because I’m expect­ing a phone call some time in the next hour and don’t want the end ruined by not being able to think about it properly.

I’ve also read The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake this month. The former was a good as I remembered it being when I first read it as a teen­ager. The lat­ter you would have had to pry from my cold dead hands to stop me from fin­ish­ing it.

So June 2009s sum­ma­tion comes fueled by Mar­garet Atwood. Who is amaz­ing. You should all read her books right now.

Other things that have taken up time in June have been La Roux’s debut album which appeared around two weeks ago. It’s obvi­ously writ­ten by a 21 year old girl who’s been in a bad rela­tion­ship for what seems like forever. It’s more than likely com­mon know­ledge by now that there were floods and rivers of tears pro­duced dur­ing its record­ing because music journ­al­ists love to make a point of it (although I sup­pose I’m just as bad now). In fact the only thing people like to com­ment on more is her hair cut or choice of clothes, like musi­cians should all dress in clothes from Top­shop and be wear­ing fruity mass pro­duced unique hip­ster bo-ho head bands just like that Shir­ley Man­son chick or that David Bowie dude.

But who cares about all that? Her per­sonal groom­ing is her own busi­ness and we’ll all be 21 once whether it’s now, earlier or later, and we will all do dumb stuff. What really mat­ters is that the album is a tight little work filled with hooky synth lines and clever lyr­ics that Elly Jack­son really means. What else do you want in your wonky synth pop?

Speak­ing of Elly Jack­son and La Roux I also have to touch on other, sad­der news — which is of course that her album was in fact bat­ted from the num­ber one spot here in the UK by the resur­gent interest in the now dead and once again pop­u­lar Michael Jack­son. I may hold per­sonal opin­ions of Mr Jack­son which don’t seem to match up to those of other people but I felt the same way about my fam­il­ies memor­ies of my grand­father when he died so per­haps this is what death does to people and their feel­ings. I wont lie though, and tell you I was a fan of his music, because I was not. I watched Moon Walker as a child and couldn’t pos­sibly avoid see­ing every video of his ever due to the omni­present media machine that was his career but my most vivid memory of him is Jar­vis Cocker’s interup­tion of Earth Song dur­ing the 1996 Brit Awards.

I am sorry I can’t fake enjoy­ment as a trib­ute to him but I can play Alien Ant Farm’s cover of Smooth Crim­inal over and over. I think it’s what he would have wanted.

And that was June.

(I could go on to men­tion Perez Hilton’s ter­rible month but I’d rather pass you onto Mat and Trey of South­park who covered the issues nicely in an epis­ode called Breast Can­cer Show Ever. If you’re out­side of Amer­ica and can’t watch the epis­ode I’m sure you can fig­ure out another way to man­age it.)