Albums

1. Hot Chip – One Life Stand

2.Mount Kimbie – Crooks and Lovers

3. Arcade Fire – The Suburbs

4. Brian Eno – Small Craft on a Milk Sea

5. Four Tet – There is Love in You

The Hot Chip album is easily their most cohesive effort to date and takes the winner’s medal for being chock full of stuff that is catchy, clever and, occasionally, wildly romantic. In case you hadn’t realised, these things, in the right combination, almost always make for great pop music and Hot Chip have lined everything up quite majestically. The Mount Kimbie record got me really quite excited for its dislocated bumpy beats (I’ll avoid the word dubstep) – Fat Roland does a better job than I ever could of explaining why it’s great here. Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs is a similarly coherent album that contains, as usual, a couple of outstanding songs (Sprawl II is vigorously excellent) as well as a lot of very good ones. Eno not only because it’s Eno but also because it’s good and Four Tet for being nicely, and surprisingly, housey.

Books

1. Jonathan Franzen – Freedom

2. Dave Eggers – Zeitoun

I didn’t read that many books that were released this year, hence only a top two. Freedom is outstanding and you can see how it took Franzen about 400 years to write it. I can’t remember reading a novel where each sentence is so carefully thought out and each page is so densely packed with brilliant prose. Zeitoun is incredibly moving and is easily as engrossing a work of narrative non-fiction as Capote’s In Cold Blood. I’m just starting Paul Auster’s Sunset Park, which might get better but at the moment I can’t imagine it will top these two.

Films

1. Inception

2. Monsters

3. The Social Network

4. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

5. Rec 2

I know it’s a bit low-brow and predictable to select a massive blockbuster as my favourite film of the year but Inception is an exquisite movie, executed brilliantly, that manages to retain a completely satisfying narrative logic and is hugely entertaining for the entirety of its 142 minutes. The conclusion, in particular, is beautifully economical while managing to be emotionally and intellectually rich. Monsters, an ultra-low budget (£500k) semi-improvised road movie – with aliens – really surprised me and is a genuinely remarkable filmmaking achievement. The Social Network is Aaron Sorkin at the absolute peak of his powers, managing to create an engrossing drama from what, on the surface, looks like the most meagre of real-life material. Bad Lieutenant, narratively a fairly bog standard, hard-boiled police caper, benefits hugely from rampant Herzogian hysterics, while Rec 2 was inventively shot and constructed, elegantly concise… and full of demonic zombies.

Television

1. Mad Men (Season Four)

2. Wounded

3. The Trip

4. Welcome to Lagos

Mad Men continues to be extremely enthralling for all the reasons it always has been. The writing is as sharp as ever, the characters continue to evolve in interesting ways and there’s still that ever-present, darkly tense undercurrent, which makes the outcome of each episode pretty much impossible to predict. Wounded was a stunning one-off documentary about the rehabilitation of soldiers who had lost limbs in combat and is as moving a TV programme as I can ever remember. The Trip started a bit shakily but evolved into something rather deep, poetic and manly, as well as looking stunning. The three-part Welcome To Lagos was a true feat of documentary access that opened your eyes to a hidden world.

I’ve probably missed something obvious. Feel free to comment below.

Word reached me this week of the High IQ Haiku World Cup Project. I’ve never tried writing haiku before but this idea appealed.

They’re inviting haiku relating to the forthcoming World Cup, or to World Cups past. So I went with Italia 90, the first World Cup I properly remember. Obviously this was the World Cup that first gave England its penalties complex but I thought it’d be a bit obvious to go for the semi-final heartache-type angle. It is, however, about another specific moment from that tournament.

If you can remember the opposition team and the name of the assisting player then I award you an imaginary £5. Well done!

The journey starts at the City of Manchester Stadium in east Manchester and continues through Manchester city centre via Deansgate and St Peter’s Square to Old Trafford. Luckily I managed not to crash the thing. Although that probably would have been quite an exciting ending.

Jaguar Manchester from David Quinn on Vimeo.

Salford (the Eccles bit was recently bolted on to the constituency) is Labour through and through but during the time I’ve spent there during the last few weeks, it’s become obvious that there is little real backing for the party or its candidate. On polling day, I witnessed a Labour canvasser bawling in favour of the pint-sized MP through a megaphone and an old lady on the pavement mutter, quick as a flash, “I’d rather vote for Adolf ‘Itler”. Nonetheless, many people were happy to admit that they will vote for Blears anyway because they don’t want to open the door to anyone else.

On the night, Blears’ share of the vote fell by 15%, off a 55% turnout. Out of a constituency of around 75,000, just 16,655 people actually voted for the victorious MP, who singled out the Conservative candidate, Matthew Sephton, in her thank you speech.

Despite Blears’ declining share of the vote, the traditional left doesn’t seem to be winning the argument in Salford. David Henry, whose Hazel Must Go ticket was backed by the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition, did manage a respectable 730 votes. But that was less than a third of the total achieved by the BNP candidate, Nick Griffin’s PA Tina Wingfield, who racked up 2,632 votes. Blears has promised to listen to her constituents as never before and her most pressing task now is surely to win back support from those whose disillusionment with her brand of politics and house-flipping antics has resulted in a rise in support for the far right. Unless the issue of immigration is properly discussed and debated by the main parties, I really fear for places like Salford, where anti-immigrant sentiment on the doorstep is regularly fairly shocking.

As for what happens now, it would be nice to see some form of proportional representation come out of the situation. In Salford, the votes of 60% of those who voted counted for nothing, which simply can’t be right. I have a feeling, though, that despite honourable intentions, Nick Clegg and the massed ranks of the Liberal Democrats will be no match whatsoever for the entrenched political elites who want to preserve the power base afforded by first past the post.

I finally escaped Buile Hill Visual Arts College, where the count was held, at 5.43am. Towards the end, under the fluorescent lights, the atmosphere got very unusual indeed. Although the only chemical about the place was adrenaline, there was this really odd feeling of a bizarre all-nighter populated by wide-eyed, rosette-wearing geeks.

It’s not especially likely that David is going to win. Despite the problems Hazel Blears has faced, Salford is an extremely strong Labour heartland and the latest odds from Ladbrokes rate a Labour win in Salford at 1/12. Still, I’m hoping that there will still be some drama in this David versus Goliath battle. Either that or we will end up with quite a pessimistic film in which, despite the ingredients for change being very much present, everything eventually ends up being the same.

From what I’ve seen so far, apathy and disenfranchisement from the political process seem to be a major problem for all the candidates. Among the few issues voters really want to talk about is immigration. Where disillusionment with Labour is to be found on the doorstep, people admit that they are considering voting for the BNP, whose candidate, Tina Wingfield, is Nick Griffin’s PA.

We’re going to be filming for the whole of the campaign in an observational style. It should be an interesting process.

It was my first time at a protest of this sort and it started quite amicably before getting a little bit unpredictable later on. There was some heavy-handedness on the police side. Its strategy of entering the square, arresting UAF leaders and moving a line of officers forward in an attempt to pen anti-fascist protesters into a small area seemed over the top. It struck me that the police were happy for the UAF to remain in Victoria Square but as soon as they started to march, they felt the need to crack down.

I also found it odd that the police had split the town centre into two, with a kind of Berlin Wall type arrangement running down across Victoria Square. Predictably, neither side was ever going to pay much attention to this and, at about 11am, the UAF lot marched off towards Knowsley Street, in the opposite direction from the blockade. I’m not entirely sure what happened after that but the police formed a line, there was a lot of pushing and shoving, and the UAF group got split in two, with a second group forming on Old Hall Street.

Around the same time, a number of coaches arrived and the group in the square swelled. The police moved officers into the square, which was seen by the UAF lot as an aggressive encroachment into an area of peaceful protest (I’m inclined to agree with them). The police then arrested a number of UAF leaders, which of course didn’t go down very well at all. The riot uniforms and dogs soon appeared.

I saw quite a lot of people getting dragged off by police, including a number of bespectacled women who, to be perfectly honest, didn’t look even slightly threatening. An old guy of about 80, clearly a pacifist who was holding a sign imploring British troops to leave Afghanistan, was bundled to the ground by an advancing plod (image, right).

We saw some smoke bombs and then, ludicrously, found ourselves on the other side of the police line at the northern side of the square, looking back at the anti-fascist protesters. It struck me at this point that there was a bit of pointless posturing going on. One minute I was on the protesters’ side of the line, the next minute I was on the other. I couldn’t work out the point of this police front line, which was made up of riot police and dogs, since there was nothing but other UAF and media people on the other side of it. Around this time I saw a young blonde police woman in full riot gear laughing her head off. Perhaps she found it strange, too.

After hanging around a bit longer we decided to leave. The subject of the film (I’d best not name him just now) had left after his mate got arrested and a couple of his friends sustained injuries. Police claim there were 2,000 EDL supporters and 1,500 anti-fascists in Bolton today. I would estimate that there were more anti-fascists (I’m not an expert on protests, as I say, but I’ve been to music festivals and football matches, and I know what a thousand people looks like). The only EDL group I saw numbered less than half a dozen numbskulls waving St George flags – although it could be that the bulk of the group had assembled elsewhere.

I’ve previously been a bit sceptical about UAF protests and it’s tempting to argue that if you just ignore the EDL they will eventually go away. On the other hand, why should racists be allowed to parade through the streets unchallenged? Either way, town centre businesses will have taken a big hit today. There isn’t a shop open and, away from the protest, it felt like a ghost town.

EG is a fine publication but I figured it was about time that I did something else with my career, after spending virtually the whole of my professional life there. I’ve always had an interest in documentary and have been lucky enough to find myself in a position where I can take a year out to (hopefully) forge a new career.

I will also be performing a “launch” of myself, as marketing people say, in the field of freelance journalism, copywriting and (possibly) blogger-for-hire. I know there are lots of high-powered people who for some reason look at this blog, so if you fancy giving me a job (after mid-August, natch) then please get in touch. As part of my “launch”, I have created a new website, catchily titled davidquinn.co.uk, which is now live. Go and have a look at it, it’s completely and utterly amazing. No, really.

• Penguin Crime – a set on Flickr
• Penguin Books – a set on Flickr
• Penguin & Pelican Collection – a set on Flickr