Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/video/2009/jun/23/bartons-britain-liverpool-tanning

i am enjoying my 16 page pro-biotic pullout today. but then i'm a big fan of bifudus actiregularis...

"Jamie T is a storyteller, a raconteur, the heir apparent to Billy Bragg, blessed with a talent for making the mundane extraordinary. His songs carry all the clutter and dust, the rattle and roll and restlessness of real life; they arrive with a twinkle in their eye, news to tell and dirt beneath their fingernails."

Dear God, Laura has outdone herself today.

You could at least stick up for your brother.

i never understood the joke where you guys call it the Grauniad. Can you explain for a yankee/dumbass

I believe it is because at one time their sub-editing/proofing was legendarily poor, but correct me if I'm wrong...

It's from Private Eye magazine

can you explain it?

Ears are wounds already did

Yeah, it had a reputation (not sure how deserved really) for being worse than other papers at printing typos.

What ears said. Joke is: copy editing was so bad they could have mis-spelled the masthead.

ah, thanks guys :)

Not the greatest joke ever, admittedly, but it got the point across.

I'm not actually sure whether it was the copy editors (usually called subeditors, or subs over here) that were held responsible, or typesetters back in the pre-DTP age.

It's a typical Private Eye joke - was funny, kept doing it until it wasn't funny, becomes part of the furniture. I almost cannot say Guardian without pronouncing it Gruniad.

Grauniad redirects to Guardian on wiki.

And grauniad.co.uk redirects to GU.

I think I need a productive way to spend my free time.

Maybe I'm imagining this but didn't they actually misspell it that way themselves once, in 1981 or something (not on the masthead though)? And then Private Eye picked up and ran with it forever.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jun/27/internet-dating

Barton:

His lyrics pin down a time, a precise moment that records the shifting of language, trends, generations. And so we have Smirnoff Ice rhyming with "head lice", we have "oh-my-goody-gosh darnit" tucked in among the gin-and-tonics and Capri car bonnets. And there's "a bang bang Anglo Saxons at the disco/ A tish you all fall down/ Hound dogs round on the prowl" - three short lines that draw together this nation's fifth-century beginnings, the nursery rhymes of the 1880s, the disco of the 1970s, the rock'n'roll of the 1950s.

yes, she did say "His lyrics pin down a time, a precise moment" ... "this nation's fifth-century beginnings, the nursery rhymes of the 1880s, the disco of the 1970s, the rock'n'roll of the 1950s."

"oh-my-goody-gosh darnit" is up to the minute slang for the kids at the back of the bus I'm led to believe.

wow, talk about dead air:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/video/2009/jun/27/how-to-dress-short-suits

PF did you read the piece about Springsteen yesterday? I couldn't make it past the second paragraph.

by the geezer they always get to write the same uninteresting article about himself and the Boss? if so then my reaction was the same as yours.

Sarfraz Manzoor isn't it? "Growing up in suburban Luton, the Boss was my route of escape, I imagined I was driving down route 66 with a girl at my side rather than sitting in my bedroom blah blah blah etc..."

witnessed the biggest festival hissyfit, g2 columnist tanya gold not being allowed into guardian VIP bit, screaming 'Im on the front cover'

i await her 2000 word article on the subject, taking in many past bfs and attacking society's perceived love for something something disgrace oh god

i think a couple ppl in my family have read sarfraz manzoor's book

well, they read 'greetings from bury park', which i am assuming is the same guy, unless there are two people who write about suburban luton and bruce springstreen, mostly

luton crew represent

Actual Guardian writer picks up on the trend that seems to make Guardian readers here hate the Guardian...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/01/confessional-journalism-women-plastic-surgery

(maybe?)

i was just looking at that in the paper vers. it's pretty good; last couple sentences v good. i think the trend decried in this thread is more epitomised by a G2 cover earlier this week with tanya gold as 'tanya the festival fairy'. (i was surprised to see no hate for that on here, actually.)

also noticed today featured a "20-year-old girl", which is an advance on the "18-year-old girl" someone on here was complaining about.

scrolling up i just noticed that hadley freeman's 'ask hadley' column about band t shirts is what first got this "7-year-old thread" revived

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/video/2009/jul/06/bartons-britain-m1-motorway

'Frail red poppies dance by the roadside ... and the wind comes charging at your legs'

'The M1 [...] is a very, very good road'

I read the Festival Fairy article in the print edition. They're giving her enough rope.

Aarrrgghhh...don't anyone show that M1 thing to Patrick Keiller.

I thought of PK too - it is GCSE project PK, maybe, just as her pop columns were 6th-form Freaky Trigger.

I kind of think of the columns as City and Guilds Greil Marcus.

Joe Moran's new 'On Roads' is a much better version of This Kind Of Thing, incidentally - an odd cross between Marc Augé and Morrissey.

^OTM.

Her voice (I presume that's her voice) is too weedy, the prose is too wet and the shots are sub-Robinson In Space (a guy smoking in his car! the Wimpy and the telephone boxes!). I guess I'm just jealous I didn't think of getting paid for ripping off Keiller so weakly.

well, I now know all about that book. what a terrible opening to this review:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jun/13/on-roads-joe-moran-review

Ow. But then what a bizarrely specialized comparison later:

At the other end of his tonal range is a version of JG Ballard's techno-sublime, which sees roads as both inciting and earthing the psychopathologies of a culture. But most often he sounds to me like the Elvis Costello of "London's Brilliant Parade": a singer of lugubrious songlines, geekily affectionate towards his chosen terrain, but suspicious of any easy declarations of love.

I know and even like that song, but I bet a lot of Review readers don't.

Lynsey Hanley sometimes comes across as a post-punk Anthony Powell. But most often she sounds to me like the Lloyd Cole of 'I Didn't Know That You Cared': singing with languid melancholy into a vast beige canyon of rock sound.

Major pop omission from Moran's book is, of course, It's Immaterial's "Driving Away From Home":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6Nclc1693w

Bracewell's eye for the matter and detritus of the seashore matches that of McEwan's On Chesil Beach. But most often he reminds me of Joe Jackson's 'Nineteen Forever', stabbing through metallic riffs into a fading youthful romanticism.

Oh, that song ... but what about 'Driving Home For Christmas' ???????

Brian Dillon's meditations on memory make one picture a younger W.G. Sebald, one who could finish a day's lugubrious walking by pitching up at a provincial disco. But most of all they are reminiscent of Sleeper's 'Sale of the Century', a jaded vista of fin-de-millennium life through the eyes of a young pop singer on the make.

I was sure I read another review of On Roads that started with Black Box Recorder and..er..I did.
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/06/roads-moran-motorway-strange

by a former ilxor. good to have him bring up ballard, 'making strange' (even 'a making strange', ugh), and interwar architecture. that shit doesn't get enough play in his stuff.

The book starts with a journey upwards, as the arterial roads of the interwar period, lined by semis and art deco factories, are replaced with the total driving experience of the motorway, lined merely by countryside and service stations.

hmmmm

but anyway that 'on roads' book sounds terrible! in both reviews!

His method emerges partly out of recent French ethnography, which has turned its attention to what it calls the infraordinaire, and which practises an equalising semiotic vision (Roland Barthes meets Clifford Geertz) whereby a service station or train-carriage is as semiotically rich a document as a novel or a film.

you have to be really, really bored by novels and films to think this. but i suppose the description 'semiotically rich' is a red rag for me. "how did you like the novel?" "oh, it was semiotically rich."