New Skies

So I'll be up ludicrously early tomorrow morning, and off to the sunnier climes of the SW USA for three weeks.

To keep you all out of trouble until then, can I recommend a few aural treats:

-the new Filmwasters podcast.
-new series of In Our Time, covering Antimatter and Socrates so far.
-some samples from the new Stray Light album (more will be streaming on the Myspace page soon). A much too diverse affair to give any sort of representative selection...

See you all in November!

Three Men and a Sarcophagus

[See this picture at a larger size in the Zone section of the gallery.]

Okay, so here's what caused all the trouble - Reactor 4 at Chernobyl nuclear plant. This is a worrying place - the concrete sarcophagus was built extremely hastily after the accident and has been slowly crumbling ever since. Collapse is probably inevitable at some point, and the construction of the huge new enclosure (starting with that gantry you can see at the front) is years behind schedule and constantly running out of funding... After this we drove out of Chernobyl through the Red Forest, with radiation dosimeters going cuckoo. Fun times.



[See this picture at a larger size in the Zone section of the gallery.]

Overall, I preferred the slightly less petrifying confines of Pripyat - and photographically it's these abstract little bits of business that have most pleased me.

As you can see, I've started putting everything up on the site in The Zone section, there's still a little bit more to come, and there are also a few Kiev pics going up here and there.

Pop picks this week: A very good bootleg of Rachel's live in LA, October 2005. Also, David Lynch's song, Ghost of Love, from the Inland Empire OST.