The Last Shadow Puppets: The Age of Understatement

Track Listing for the album due out in April:

1. "The Age of the Understatement"
2. "Standing Next to Me"
3. "Calm Like You"
4. "Separate and Ever Deadly"
5. "The Chamber"
6. "Only the Truth"
7. "My Mistakes Were Made for You"
8. "Black Plant"
9. "I Don't Like You Any More"
10. "In My Room"
11. "Meeting Place"
12. "The Time Has Come Again"

What do you do in the Studio?

 I was hanging around the studio the other day and decided to photograph the most recent work. I'm not sure even if this is that recent - I just haven't been there that much this year. I'll post some more on Flickr when I get round to it.

Allotment: The Fox

allotment: The Fox
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

There's a very tame fox at our allotment.

The first year we were there one of our pumpkins disappeared over night. The very nice and hard-working chairwoman for the allotments suggested it might have been a fox. I said "Don't be silly, foxes don't do anything for Halloween."

Peter Doig at Tate Britain

Went the the tail end of the press view for Peter Doig's show at Tate Britain. By then all the serious journalists had left (probably off for lunch at Black's) leaving just me and Sarah Kent and the very nice guy who told me I couldn't take pictures because I wasn't a proper photographer. I was, like, how did he know I'm not proper?

We bumped into Peter (see what I did there?) on his way in as we were leaving. He was his usual charming self and despite being in an obvious hurry stopped to chat. He'd helped work out the room layouts as he had very specific ideas about the way that one picture should be visible in the corner of your eye or the way that the diagonal sight lines are very long. He was also really pleased to be at Tate Britain rather than Tate Modern. Having been there the day before with his dad he said that it was for people going for a nice walk rather than going to look at the art. I think the default position for many visitors to London is to go to Modern simply because so much fuss has been made about the building whereas (within their own remits) Tate Britain has a much better collection.

I don't know why I'm promoting these bad people

I took some pictures of the artist Peter Doig's studio in Trinidad last year. I then let Design Week magazine use them in the print version of their magazine on the condition that the pictures were credited and I retained copyright. They didn't pay me but as the writer of the piece is my wife I figured it was fair enough. Now it transpires the pictures are on the Design Week website but without the credit I asked for, and as far as I'm concerned without my permission as I only supplied them for print. Anyway, Peter's work's great so make sure you have a look before the feature, with or without the pictures, disappears under Design Week's subscribers only archive.

Peter Doig at the Saatchi Gallery
Peter Doig on Wikipedia
Peter Doig at Victoria Miro
Studio Film Club: what's on

Me by my niece

Me by my niece
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

This is a more up to date view of me (see two entries previous for me in my prime) by my niece just over two years ago. I prefer Paul's (although my niece is obviously incredibly talented).

Dad and me

Dad and me
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

I like this one.

Me by Paul Clarke

Me by Paul Clarke
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

From around 1990 or possibly earlier. Thinking about it I was still living in Chantry Point so 1989 or even earlier. He did it from memory and got most things right: I smoked, I had (and still have) round glasses, a penchant for black, not shaving and hair cropped at the sides. If only I looked this good now...

Car near Brick Lane

Car near Brick Lane
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

Apparently it's a Honda Z600 or so my friend Steve says. It was a very nice day, clear and dry with the sun coming in low from the south the way it does in the winter in England. We went to the Beigel shop and had herring (for me) and a cream cheese and smoked salmon for the wife. We walked down Cheshire Street afterwards carrying our stewed cup of tea looking at the pirated sportsgear and being accosted by gangs of chinese selling pirated porno. It's Brick Lane, everything's knocked off.

4oD over Christmas

21_12_07_blackbooks
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

I spent most of yesterday putting together the pages on 4oD for the Christmas break. Do you promote the Catch Up stuff that's on telly or the huge amount of archive that we've just added - what will people want? You run through the different scenarios of how people's TV consumption changes over Christmas alongside questions of whether they'll have broadband access and the like. I had an argument with nice guy Charlie, the 4oD marketing guy, about the rates of broadband penetration in the UK ("Will people have broadband access if they're at their parents?"). The head of new media operations overheard us bickering and suggested as it was past 6pm on the channel's last working day maybe we should just head home. Anyway, I've gone for promoting the archive up to Boxing day and after that it's the four free series of Shameless on 4oD in anticipation of the new series that starts 1 January.

Back in the day when there were only three channels people used to complain about the number of repeats. Now we have whole channels that are effectively the repackaging of repeats (any channel with the word 'gold' in the title). I guess the other way of looking at video-on-demand services is that they're just repeats on demand or repeats that you missed the first time around. Happy Christmas.