Cakes and Money 2.0

2006-05-06T17:59:00.000+01:00

Passive Snark

Idiot at work: "...Yeah, but Kanye West isn't like normal hip-hop... he's much better than those guys."

Me*: "Different how?"

Idiot: "He doesn't use beats or samples. In his music, everything you hear is real!"

Me: "What, you mean he doesn't use samples like the ones that 'Touch The Sky' and 'Diamonds From Seirra Leone' are built on, or beats like the ones that are under EVERY BLOODY KANYE WEST SONG EVER?!"

Idiot: "Yeah, he doesn't use those."

Me: "ARGH!"

Why do people who don't normally like hip-hop frequently make such stupid arguments to support the hip-hop they do like? On a related note, why do people keep telling me that only Andre 3000's half of Speakerboxxx/The Love Below was good when Big Boi's cut had its fair share of standout tracks, and from this distance seems to me to be by far the more consitent record? Furthermore, why am I being such a grump today?

Answers on a postcard to the usual address...

*I would like to point out that I'm fully aware that I'm an idiot too. For the sake of keeping this passive snark-fest easy to read I decided against calling myself "Another Idiot At Work". Plus, what's the point in snarking if not to claim a little higher ground for yourself for the most spurious of reasons?

2006-05-06T17:36:00.000+01:00

"It's funny to think that decisions affecting all our lives are being made by men in crotchless panties."

Let's talk about Pink's latest single 'Stupid Girls', shall we? I'll mostly be talking about the promotional video here, because the song... well, if I'm being honest I barely even notice that it's there. It just sort of passes me by, you know?

Most of you have seen the song on MTV by now, right? It sees Pink dressing up as various female celebrities and re-enacting some of their more embarrassing moments, while also taking a couple of more general stabs at female celebrity culture 2006. Which means that we get:

Parodies of the Paris Hilton sex tape and of Jessica Simpson's 'These Boots Are Made For Walkin' video
Pot shots at Lindsay Lohan's driving skills
Jokes about cosmetic surgery, fake tan and vomiting to make yourself thin. More of the usual stuff, really...

It's a critique that is as tired and goofy as it is accurate. I mean, I'm obviously up for a discussion of whether or not women have to dumb down/sex up to make it in the modern world, but does that really mean we need more Paris Hilton jokes? Really?

Anyway, the video's amusing as these things go, but there are a couple of weird things about its ending that interest me. Basically, there's this little girl in the video, who's sitting in front of a TV and getting bombarded with the images that Pink is parodying. When the song ends, she is encouraged by the angel on her shoulder to go for a pile of "boys" toys (keyboards, sports gear) instead of the pink coloured "girls" toys that sit beside them.

I like the fact that Pink plays both the little girl's angel and her devil in this scenario, indicating that she is aware that she is complicit in the cultural climate she is mocking, but honestly: is aspiring towards a clichéd concept of masculinity really the only alternative? Is that really what girls should aspire to? I mean, Jesus fuck, the video ends with the little girl running out the room with an American football under her arm--does it get any more traditionally manly?

The lyrics, from what I can make out, are like the images only a little less specific, with Pink bemoaning the "epidemic" that's taking over the world and wondering where all the "outcasts and girls with ambition" are. Now, the more I think about these lyrics the less I like them, mostly because they're just not very on target.

I mean, there are plenty of outcasts on the outskirts of pop, and many of the women that Pink is taking a pop at here have a lot of ambition. It's just a matter of what sort of ambition is involved, and exactly what the girls in question are aspiring toward. Which brings me back to the question of whether adopting the clichéd trappings of manhood is really the only option available, and furthermore, what exactly this dichotomous worldview entails.

Enter Kill Your Boyfriend, a short, sharp, funny comic book by Grant Morrison and Philip Bond. It's a one-off story about a bored teenage girl who meets a hot, thuggish boy. He kills her boyfriend and then invites her into a world of sex, drugs and random violence.

Here's the girl, all kitted out in a red dress and a blond wig, just getting ready for a night on the town with her vicious deviant of an accomplice. Her life's went crazy, but it's okay--she's enjoying herself--finding a new lease of life. But for those of you who are already gagging at the clichés, don't worry, the girl knows the score and she got there long before you:

I know what you're thinking: Rebellion's all very well but does it really include becoming a blonde bimbo? I'm just a figment of his imagination. I'm no longer responsible. And that means I can do anything.

Kill Your Boyfriend is a dumb pop fantasy, and that's why hits so hard. It's a thrill ride through all the obvious territory that presents a tongue-in-cheek commentary on itself without ever disrupting the fun.

The comic presents us with a whole world of boredom filtered through the twin lenses of teenage angst and broad comedy. There are hapless parents, corrupt police officers, art students who are full of crap, politicians who have a whole heap of kinky gear in the closet... these are obvious takes on obvious targets, just like in the Pink video, but there's a cheeky wit and charm to the execution that sells it.

I mean, for one thing, there's the art. Philip Bond's characters are blocky, goofy and cool all at once. His line work is almost simple enough to work as graffiti, and is charged with all of the energy and character of the best examples of that form. Morrison's infinitely quotable dialogue mirrors these qualities, and the Glaswegian writer also makes sure that the whole thing resonates with a disaffected teenager's view of the world.

Kill Your Boyfriend's pop-tastic surface level ties in neatly with one of its most important themes: that of the various fantasy lives available to us in the modern world. Or, more specifically, the variety of fantasy lives available to women in the modern world. You can see this theme coming through in the quote about becoming a blonde bimbo I provided above. The comic walks an odd line on this issue, dramatising the thrill of giving in to various dreams and clichés while also making obvious the unnerving implications of abandoning yourself to these sort of ideas.

And this is what makes Kill Your Boyfriend a more effective critique than the video for 'Stupid Girls'. It makes fun of social roles in the same sort of blunt way, but it does it with more wit (in my opinion), and while also showing exactly what's so exciting about adopting these personas. The violent excess of its central characters is both thrilling and horrible, which is as it should be. This sort of fantasy can be fun to read about, but horrible is exactly what such extreme pop culture dreams become when transposed so fully onto the real world.

Kill Your Boyfriend also scores major points with me by making it obvious how many different possible clichés/fantasies there are out there for the taking. Here's the girl again, after the bangs and violence has settled, leading a seemingly normal life but still aware of the potentials for carnage and craziness that are available to her:

I'm a page three girl. I'm a Warhol superstar. I'm a dyke. I'm a riot grrrrl. I'm the Queen of Sex. I'm a housewife with a jar of rat poison

The sort of freedom described above seems to me to be a bit Foucualtian. The idea is that we (women in particular, but everyone really) are free to be what we want to be, within the bounds of the choices that society presents to us. This is a somewhat stifling concept, but it is still far more nuanced and, to my mind, accurate than the "stupid girl/manly girl" dichotomy presented at the end of the 'Stupid Girls' video. That view serves Pink well, of course, because her whole shtick is to present herself as a rougher, more credible alternative to most contemporary pop, but it's still bullshit all the same.

It should also be noted that imposing your inner fantasies on to the real world is probably not all that easy or any guarantee of happiness, something that works such as Brazil, Seaguy and The Iron Dragon's Daughter deal with in different ways.

Furthermore, I feel that I should mention that one important angle that Kill Your Boyfriend doesn't cover is the role that good old-fashioned love and understanding plays in all of this. While many Grant Morrison comics (Animal Man, We3, The Invisibles and The Filth chief among them) deal with the role of kindness in a world of cross firing fantasies and oppressive existential roles, Kill Your Boyfriend is notably free from such concerns. This is part of its strength (it's a very breezy and focused work, after all), but it's worth mentioning that all of this talk of taking on fantasy roles, people are still people underneath it all, blah blah empathy cakes...

More on this topic later, possibly.

2006-04-14T16:09:00.000+01:00

About That Last Post Of Mine…

For those of you who don’t know, Karen is my girlfriend of almost a year and a half now. She’s a mild mannered biology student by day and a back-flipping gymnast by night, and as such she is almost too awesome. More to the point, she’s also been in various amateur productions, and was a very enthusiastic drama student when still in high school.

Anyway, I've talked about my previous post with Karen, and she’s slightly concerned that it makes her seem a bit shallow. Now, while Karen’s fondness for shiny things certainly matches my own, I’d like to point out that any shallowness that comes across in my previous entry reflects a fault in my writing rather than in her judgement.

The post in question is a streamlined version of an actual conversation we’d had, which is supposed to dramatise some of the ideas I was dealing with in the Mogwai post. Bearing this in mind, I think it’s obvious that I’ve distorted both of our viewpoints in the name of thematic cohesion, and I hope both Karen and the rest of the world will forgive me for this bit of artistic license.

The basic idea was to make myself sound like a bit of a pompous ass, albeit one who has a point, and to make Karen sound like she was enthusiastically arguing for a different perspective. I think I mostly succeeded in that, though there are still some issues that I feel like I should address:

(1) There are only two bits of accurate Karen-speak in the post. The line about the Shakespeare performance being “obviously Brecht” belongs to Karen. I included it purely because I like the way it flows. The other honest-to-god straight-from-life dialogue snippet is the final line, which I kept because I felt that it as emblematic of the weird discomfort some folk have when they voice this sort of opinion. While Karen definitely has no issue with art that makes direct efforts to push you out of the story, while she definitely understands the intended function of such gestures perfectly well, she doesn’t find that this technique particularly illuminates anything for her. This seems perfectly fair to me, but there have been several exchanges between us in the past that have ended like this one did, with Karen shrinking into herself a little, obviously worried that I’ll look down on her preference for traditional storytelling techniques. You can probably file this under “dangers of going out with a pretentious English student”, but given that I try not to be a completely uppity snob about everything I’m not really sure that entirely covers it...

(2) If anyone is bothered by the one-sided nature of this post and the one before it then believe me, I’m right there with you. I wasn’t sure whether or not I was going to publish my original post at all, but in the end I decided that I was going to get back into this blogging thing at all then I was going to have to try something different... something that compressed a bit more of my actual life down into the blog and allowed me to loosen up a bit. I did invite Karen to comment on the post herself, but I don’t think she wanted to invade my space so she declined (damn her eyes!). So here I am… trying to discuss the issue without making myself look like a complete kook.

(3) It occurs to me that I have read every single Shakespeare play, but that I’ve never actual seen a single one performed on the stage. Sure, I’ve seen various cinematic adaptations or reinterpretations of these plays (some of which were good, and some of which were very bad indeed), but I’ve never actually seen them in the way they were written to be experienced. Then again, if you takes that train of thought far enough, you’ll end up bemoaning the fact that you can’t see the plays in the time period and social context(s) in which they were originally written, which is pretty absurd, really. Or is it just an overly literal extension of the desire to examine a work in relation to the events surrounding its creation..?

That’s enough of that for now. More when the mood takes me.

2006-04-06T13:48:00.000+01:00

A Theatrical Dialogue

Karen: "The worst performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream that I ever saw was one where they decided to do it without any colour or excitement. Everybody was dressed in black, and it was just BORING!"

David: "See, I get why it would seem like a good idea to do it like that... it's a bit like Brecht, you know? Trying to emphasise the artifice of the play and make you think about what's going on in a more detached sort of way."

Karen: "Yeah, I can see that, but it was still boring when I was watching it. I mean, it's the most colourful Shakespeare comedy, with all the fairies and everything, and they made it boring... they took out the fun!"

David: "I guess it's one of those questions of how much you can do that sort of art without taking away the things that people come to art for. The performance you're talking about sounds interesting--"

Karen: "But it wasn't interesting! In the best version of A Midsummer Night's Dream that I've ever seen, the actors all sat around the side of the stage on chairs when they weren't on stage, and sometimes they'd read from their scripts while they were making big speeches, and there was this huge band behind them, so all of that was obviously Brecht, but you still got to enjoy the story."

David: "I don't know... I guess I just don't want to write off art that plays with your expectations, and maybe doesn't give you what you're looking for. I mean, I like the more enjoyable and visceral side of art, and I think it's kinda devalued in criticism. It's like... maybe there's a bit too much of an "eat your greens" approach to art, you know? Like, if it doesn't taste nice, it must be good for you. But... I still don't want to say there's no value in something like a Brecht play. Do you like Brecht?"

Karen: "Well... I've seen Mother Courage, and I get it... I get the alienation thing. But the bit where she's beating the drum, that's a really powerful moment, and when I saw it performed they cut away at that point... they stopped acting it and started explaining it."

David: "Ah, now that's strange, cos in the version of the play that I saw, they didn't break that bit up, and that pushed against the alienation angle they'd established earlier. It made that moment with the drum involving in the way a play is supposed to be involving, which is messed up, because it made it harder to take the play on any one level. It didn't quite work as a play you had to watch from a distance, and it wasn't traditionally engaging all the way through so... I found myself sort of fascinated by the weird mix of styles that I was seeing onstage."

Karen: "I think I just like to get caught up in the story a bit more than you do, and I don't always like it when I get pushed that far out of it."

David: "And do you feel embarrassed about that?"

Karen: "A little."

2006-04-06T09:20:00.000+01:00

Here Be Monsters

For all the cheeky venom of their interviews, when it comes to actually making music Mogwai have always been an earnestly ambitious lot. For ten years now they’ve been pursuing their oddly modernist muse, throwing out much of what normally makes rock music exciting (pace, energy, vocals, choruses) in favour of… well, something else.

And so their new album Mr Beast starts with ‘Auto Rock’, a simple piano part repeating itself over and even simpler beat while a variety of other instruments pulse underneath. This short track is a masterpiece of restraint, with guitars and electronics pushing against the song’s central piano motifs without ever rising above them in a way that indicates that the band are straining to push harder but holding back. This should undercut the song, but in the end it only makes it a more subtle and complicated work. It could easily be a thunderous anthem (and don’t get me wrong, it’d be a bloody good one!) but as it is it’s obviously affecting without being obvious. This idea is important to what Mogwai are really all about, so hold it in mind and I’ll come back to it in a minute.

Before we get into all of that, though, let’s talk about how Mr Beast fits into the steadily-expanding Mogwai canon. Mr Beast is without a doubt the most direct and concise album that the band have ever made, a fact that is sure to draw as much criticism as it is praise. After all, isn’t the whole point of Mogwai that they draw things out and make them difficult? Well... yes and no.

Taken as a whole Mr Beast lacks both the epic scope of the band’s early records and the depth of sound of their most recent albums, but its slim ten tracks each compress one element of the band’s style perfectly. So: ‘Glasgow Mega-Snake’ lives up to its name, with multiple guitar parts twisting and sliding in and out of each other before rising up to strike; ‘We’re No Here’ takes one of the band’s mid song noise fests and makes an entire track out of it; and ‘Folk Death 85’ sees the band using that quiet/loud/really fucking loud dynamic one more time, as if to prove that they can still do it better than anyone else. All three tracks feature some truly titanic drumming, and have guitars that can easily compete with the best of modern metal. As such, these songs will please those listeners who come to every album looking for noise. This raises the question of whether or not Mogwai are the art-rock Woody Allen? You know: "We preferred your earlier, noisier stuff." If so then some quarters might feel that this album is a "return to form", because it’s the noisiest album Mogwai have made in years. Such praise, however, would be incomplete, because there are plenty of quiet tracks here, and they’re every bit as good as the loud ones.

‘Acid Rock’ and ‘I Chose Horses’, for example, are glorious examples of the band’s experiments in texture, layering pedal steel guitar onto soft electronic beats and Japanese spoken word onto ambient sonics respectively. Meanwhile, ‘Team Handed’ is the archetypal quiet Mogwai song, with the band playing hushed alien blues like all the weight of the world rested on their shoulders.

While all of the aforementioned tracks are gorgeously constructed so as to remind us of all the things Mogwai do best, the most impressive tracks on Mr Beast are the ones where the band stretch themselves a little. Since Mogwai are ostensibly an avant-garde rock band, this happens to mean that their least typical songs are also their most accessible.

‘Travel Is Dangerous’ is the closest Mogwai have come to recording a straight-up rock song since their first few singles. It’s relatively up-tempo and has a traditional verse/chorus/verse structure, but its elegantly obscure guitar parts, half-murmured vocals and jubilant bursts of noise ensure that it’s still very much a Mogwai song. Indeed, it manages to sound both defiant and triumphant all at once, its meaning still mysterious though the feelings it conveys are clear. ‘Friend of the Night’ does the same trick the other way round, taking one of the band’s typically delicate instrumentals and building something more solid and melodic out of it. Pianos rise and fall over a gentle wall of drums, guitar and SFX, becoming more and more emotionally resonant as they do so.

This is where we come back to ‘Auto Rock’ and the question of how Mogwai manage to make music that is obviously affecting without being obvious. Both ‘Auto Rock’ and ‘Friend of the Night’ have piano melodies that could be made into huge sop-rock hits, but as they are they have a strangeness that expresses the same big emotions without smothering them in clichés. And this is what Mogwai have always been about, deep down. The wandering, repetitious song structures and layers of strange instrumentation are but means to an end. The sweet, simple melodies and head-melting guitar noises for which the band are famous are very direct and visceral in the end, and Mogwai’s entire project has to be to make these elements more effective by limiting the amount of tired shite they frame them in. Mr Beast is a bold gamble, as it sees the band ridding themselves of a lot of their sonic defences. To these ears, however, it’s an outrageous success, keeping enough of what makes the band unique while opening up their music and letting its sheer formal beauty obvious to all.

Another cheery wave from stranded youngsters then? Yes please!

2006-02-25T18:08:00.000Z

Life With/Without God

After writing about The Iron Dragon's Daughter I went looking for the blog post that made me want to read the book in the first place, and found it. Here's Stephen from Peiratikos, writing about the novel's themes from an angle I didn't approach in my post:

The dangerous thing about finding God and asking your questions is, of course, what if God won't answer? Or can't answer? What if He answers but the answers make even less sense than your own feeble guesses? What if the only useful thing you got out of your meeting with God was a reminder of the idea of free will--and you couldn't even get God to tell you whether you actually have free will or if it's just a comforting fiction you invented yourself? Are you even capable of dealing with the responsibility for your own stupid mistakes and fucked-up life, the liberating and terrifying fine-print clause in the free-will contract? (And why didn't God ever ask if you wanted to sign that contract?)

(In other words, what if you were human?)

That last line's a kicker, isn't it? It certainly got my attention, and the novel was even better than I was expecting it to be from Steven's promising description on it. But re-reading Steven's comments in the context of the entire post (in which he names and comments on some of his favourite books and comics) made me think of Swanwick's novel in a slightly different light, one that makes me want to write a couple of blog posts comparing it to a handful of Grant Morrison comics (Seaguy, Animal Man and The Filth) as well as Alasdair Gray's Lanark, Terry Gilliam's Brazil and a couple of the longer Beckett plays. I don't know whether or not I'll ever get around to writing about all of this, but if I do here are some of the ideas I'll be talking about:

Circular narrative structures and what they can mean; meta-fiction and the difficulties of living in a universe created by a flawed god; the relationship between cruelty, self-delusion and self-absorption; the difficulties of living in a world without any god to give it clear meaning; the power and futility of escapist fantasy, and the question of how much we ever really learn from our experiences.

On top of all that, I'd probably take a stab at showing how all of these themes fit together in the aforementioned texts.

Lofty goals, eh? But when the hell will I get the time to actually write any of this? Who knows, but hey--I figured I might as well note this down here for future reference.

2006-02-11T17:37:00.000Z

New Every Morning... Face In The Grass...

I've seen two versions of Samuel Beckett's Not I in my time.

First of all, there was the live performance I saw at The Arches a couple of years ago. This was good, but didn't quite match up to the versions of Play and Waiting For Godot I saw as part of the same season of Beckett plays. More recently, I saw the cinematic interpretation of the text that Neil Jordan contributed to Channel Four's Beckett On Film project. While not as good as the best films from that endeavor (Endgame, Act Without Words I & II, I'm looking at you here!), it's still hugely impressive all the same.

For those of you not familiar with the play, Not I is of Beckett's shorter, stranger works. A monologue delivered by a woman's mouth in the darkness, it makes for a profoundly visceral viewing experience, either up close or through the relative safety of a TV screen. It's been claimed by some that Not I can be taken as the antithesis to Molly Bloom's monologue at the end of James Joyce's Ulysses. I'm not 100% convinced, but there are interesting points to be made by way of this comparison. For example, where Molly Bloom's words build up a mini-history of a troubled romance that finds its peak as an intense wave of affirmation ("yes I said yes I will yes"), Mouth's monologue seems to be an angry tirade against the whole process of birth, living, thinking and talking that it enacts in gibbering fragments ("flickering away on its own"). This is something that comes across much better when you actually see the play rather than merely read it. When you hear the text read aloud, its rhythms and contours are amazingly tight, the words racing forward, occasionally looping back to repeat a refrain ("god is love") and then turning stacato when Mouth feels as though her status as a third person narrator is being threatened ("What? Who? No! She!).

While the live version I witnessed trumped the filmed one in terms of sheer impact (especially during that strange, jarring scream), Neil Jordan's version strikes me as being a far more successful adaptation on the whole, largely due to the way that the medium of film enhances the robotic, dissassociated nature of the play's central image. I've heard it said that in truly great performances of this play Mouth's body works as an almost subliminal accompaniment to the constant barrage of words emanating from that lonely, isolated orifice. This may be true, but it certainly wasn't the case in the performance I saw. Neil Jordan's version, on the other hand, starts off by showing Mouth (in this case, Julianne Moore) getting into her chair. This is a controversial decision, but I think it works. After all, it neatly foregrounds everything that the rest of the play denies, i.e. the totality of Mouth as a human being. After that odd intro, though... that's when it gets really good.

Jordan keeps the focus in tight throughout the play--holding to the one close-up of Moore's mouth, only breaking to a different angel to accompany one of the text's repetition. It may not be subtle, but it's damned effective, making the monologue a frighteningly mechanical thing, with Mouth's upper teeth remaining still while her lower teeth, lips and tongue shift around frantically, struggling to articulate the maelstrom of thought and un-thought that passes through it. It really emphasises the distance that Mouth tries to place between herself and the words she's speaking, all the while reminding us of the human origin of the words by virtue of how damned fleshy those lips are at such a close distance. It's a mesmerising piece of work, really it is, and I can't help but be held in awe by the steady speed of Moore's delivery.

There's been some debate in the past about whether or not Mouth is describing a rape, and if so whether this is what she's trying to distance herself from by denying so forcefully that she is talking about herself. Beckett himself was apparently appalled by the idea, but for my part I think the words of the text are so vague that while it would be hard to say that this is definitely what the play is about, it is also hard to completely dispel this interpretation. I will say, however, that this didn't strike me as being a concrete part of the play. Instead, I think it's a text that resists such clarification, with the performances I've seen of it instead conveying nothing so much as an overwhelming sense of a self trying to negate its own existence and failing. Imagine trying to talk yourself out of being: how terrifying a prospect is that? And yet, how impossible...

2006-02-05T19:35:00.000Z

Spiral Staircase

A few notes on The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, by Michael Swanwick.

Part coming-of-age story, part grotesque fantasy, this novel plays a dangerous game in its integration of clashing genre tropes. Take the novel’s first sentence for example:

The changeling’s decision to steal a dragon and escape was born, though she did not know it then, the night the children met to plot the death of their supervisor.

There are plenty of words in there that set you up right away for a fantasy story (‘dragon’ and ‘changeling’ chief among them), but the scenario that is hinted at by the overall meaning of this sentence contains the embryo of a different sort of story; a bildungsroman in the Dickensian mould. The novel’s first section develops this uneasy setting wonderfully, creating a dark mesh of both story types that plays one angle that both genres promise to satisfy when they’re played straight: the urge to believe that people can escape their environments, that they can develop beyond their station in life and find a higher, more exciting place for themselves elsewhere. And this is where the danger lies in this particular genre mash-up. It’s certainly not the mixture itself that is risky; as I’ve already noted, the stylistic crosspollination is not only conducive to the perturbed atmosphere of the novel but also works on the thematic level described above. Instead, it is the way that Swanwick plays with the readers’ expectations of both genres that makes this combination of stylistic tropes potentially hazardous.

Let me make my point clearer by way of example. After setting up the possibility of escape in that first sentence Swanwick proceeds to throw a spanner in the works by having Jane escape from the factory with the dragon and then… settles down at a school. This hints at the more difficult aspects of this novel’s mechanics, as while this plays perfectly into the expected progress of a bildungsroman, it somewhat jars with our expectations for fantasy adventure. And what are we meant to make of the fact that while Jane may progress from factory worker to schoolchild to college student, she doesn’t actually seem to learn anything or make any progress as she does so? The fact that this element of the plot is tied into a cyclical pattern that is, in turn, related to the magical “true names” of the people Jane meets in each of these environments is indicative of the ways in which Swanwick subverts both genres through combination. Much has been made of this effect in the field of science fiction and fantasy criticism, and rightly so, because the mixture of Faery and modernity that is at the heart of this novel makes it one of the most avowedly anti-escapist fantasies ever written. Within these pages we have Wicker Queens burning on TV, Dragons that are both sentient bombers and cruelly nihilistic manipulators. These odd combinations serve to make the fantasy elements more potent and jarring by virtue of their incongruity with the more urban/contemporary story elements, thus providing the novel with one of the most perversely compelling fantasy worlds ever created.

Less seems to have been written about this story’s status as a coming-of-age story. It’s possible that I’ve just not been looking in the right places, but it seems equally likely to me that this situation has been created by the fact that most of the people who have given the book the attention it requires are already fans of the fantasy genre. I can easily imagine many readers of a more avowedly “literary” bent turning their noses at this book from the title onward, but maybe I’m wrong and it’s just that this element of the novel excites and interests me more than it does most readers. Whatever the case, the fact remains that the way Michael Swanwick handles this genre fascinates me every bit as much as his treatment of the fantasy stuff does. Coming back to my initial claim that there’s something risky about the handling of genre in this novel, I’d like to further clarify that by saying that to play elements of these two genres against each other without satisfying the promise of escape that they both contain risks leaving the reader frustrated when they reach the final page. In the end, however, this isn’t a failing of the novel; in fact I think it might just be its greatest strength. Jane doesn’t seem to learn much as she moves through this story—really, the mistakes she makes begin to look bigger and bigger as the novel goes on—and while this can be frustrating, it’s also key to the novel’s success. As another character says to Jane at one point:

We are all of us living stories that on some deep level give us satisfaction. If we are unhappy with our stories, that is not enough to free us from them.

This is a tough fact to swallow, and is the opposite of what any number of self-help books would have us believe. It teeters on the brink of defeatest nihilism, and is all the more essential for it. By dangling the promise of escape and transcendance in front of us from the very beginning, and by carefully playing with our genre-based expectations of exactly how this progress will be made all the way through the novel, Swanwick casts fresh light on old questions of exactly how much freedom we can achieve, regardless of how self aware we become. That said, while the web of repitition and manipulation that plays out in this strange, wonderful book is definitely worthy of consideration, you’ve got to be careful to take such ideas as potential descriptions of the world instead of simply projecting them outwards and giving up all hope. This distinction might sound obvious, but as a fan of narratives that thrive on depictions of circularity and human impotence, and a survivor of a course on postmodern literary theory, I’m pretty sensitive about the ways in which such ideas can be taken as absolute, undefeatable fact, crushing any sense of personal and political responsibility before them. As I’ve already said, I don’t think changing your life is as easy as buying a self-help book, but that is not an excuse for being a shit human being, nor should it be taken as such. We’re all bound by crazy social and psychological patterns that are beyond us, but to give in to this, to make it an explanation for your own failings, is a decision that you make and can be held responsible for. The Iron Dragon’s Daughter ends on what could be a note or hope, but could also be the start of another trip round the block. When you think about it, the novel couldn’t end any other way. Jane’s back at square one, and what happens next is up to her. This is both thrilling and terrifying in its open endedness, but not excessivley so. After all, it’s just like real life...

2006-02-01T18:32:00.000Z

Things That Are Currently Rocking My World

Iron Council, by China Mieville. This didn't grip me right a way like Perdido Street Station and The Scar did, but the more of it I read the more impressed with it I became. In amongst all the cowboys and golums, this novel sees Mieville showing his interest in politics far more overtly than before. There's all sorts of mythic and concrete political baggage on display here, which is deeply fascinating in such a high fantasy context, to say the very least. I've still got a good third of the novel to read, so I can't quite judge it as a whole yet, but yes... this is definitely an interesting development.

'The Admiralty Spire', by Vladimir Nabokov. I just read this story in the Penguin 70's collection, and damn is it ever great! Like Pale Fire condensed into fifteen pages. It also reads like a very well told joke, which probably adds support to David Foster Wallace's that the two forms are closely related.

Ghostface--The Pretty Toney Album. I was trying to speed up the arrival of summer by listening to this album on repeat this morning. It didn't work, of course, but it was worth a shot. Well over a year after its original release (in fact it might be close to two years now!), the mix of cold hardman attitude and warm, soppy soul you get on this album still sounds inspired to my ears. I definitely need to start using "Holla" and 'It's Over' when I make up mix CDs for other people, 'cos those songs are just plain excellent!

Lost At Sea, by Bryan Lee O'Malley. This isn't quite as fun and streamlined as Scott Pilgrim, but it's still a pretty awesome encapsulation of a very specific sort of teenage angst. It probably helps to be young enough to vividly remember the sort of thoughts and feelings that this book deals with, though. I get the feeling that the first person narration might serve to distance you from the comic a bit if you weren't able to get into it. Which would be a shame, really, because this is good stuff, and I'm already looking forward to re-reading it immensely.

Paul Auster's City Of Glass, as adapted to comic book form by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli. Hey, all of those other reviewers were right -- the extra layer of visual linguistics that is on display here really does add something to this Babel-obssesed narrative. But is it really an improvement on the original? Y'know, I think it just might be!

'Faster', by The Manic Street Preachers. This harsh, relentless song made the perfect soundtrack to some of my bleaker and more self-absorbed teenage moments, and listening to it right now its punky judder is still immensely satisfying, which is good, because I was actually pretty worried that it wouldn't hold up. So much for that though, eh? "I AM AN ARCHITECT!/They call me a butcher"--ooh, listen to how nasty that guitar sounds! And those drums! And... and... yeah, you get the point I'm sure.

'We Don't Play Guitar', by Chicks On Speed. They may not play guitar. COS may not play guitar. But I play guitar. Bigsunnyd plays guitar. And I love it!

The Three Stimata Of Palmer Eldritch, by Philip K. Dick. Why did it taken me so long to get around to reading this novel? It's brilliant! All of Dick's usual tricks are in evidence, and this time around the nature of the uncertain reality which the characters inhabit is tied very directly into all manner of social factors. This certainly isn't unheard of in Dick's ouvre, of course, but nevertheless the emphasis on hallucinatory spectacle as a sellable commodity is notable here, and not early as cut and dried as I've just made it sound.

Mean Girls. Is this the most quotable movie ever or what? "Danny Devito I love your work"--ha, that bit rules! And, erm, anyway, this is also a good film about cruelty and manipulation, but you knew that already, right?

So... ah, hello world, I guess.

(How many times have I done that routine now?)

Will anyone even see this post, or have I finally shaken off what little audience I had?

2005-05-25T13:18:00.000+01:00

This Might Just Be One Of The Greatest Blog Posts Yet Produced By... Um... Me, I Guess!

Here's a silly question for all of you that was prompted by recent re-readings of Paradax, Rogan Gosh, and other such comics: If Brendan McCarthy was Jack Kirby for the 80s Brit-comics set, would that make Peter Milligan his Stan Lee?

2005-05-21T14:04:00.000+01:00

Sharknife

Nah, I'm sorry, but this comic just isn't working for me. In Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life, the "game logic" angle served worked both as a source of neat throwaway gags, and as an odd literalisation of the emotional lives of the characters. Like, Ramona wasn't just popping up in Scott's dreams because he was infatuated with her, she was there because she was really using his headspace as a shortcut! And not only does Scott have to deal with the mental specter of her previous boyfriends, he also has to fight them in hand to hand combat! These goofy touches are obviously meant to tweak the game playing, manga loving part of the reader's brain, but there's a context for them, and as such they add to the overall effect of the book quite nicely. In Sharknife, you get none of this. Instead you get the occasional beat-em-up stat overlay, a paper-thin plot... and that's about it.

This in itself is fair enough, as Sharknife seems to be aiming more for pure visual spectacle than anything else, but if I'm being honest it doesn't work for me on that level either. It's not that I don't like fight comics or computer games or whatever--on the contrary, I like these things just fine. It's more that I just don't feel that Sharknife plays with these elements in a way that comes off as anything but trite and try-hard. I can feel the comic straining for moments of cool, or computer-geek recognition, but the strain is too evident, and even admirably goofy touches such as the "special moves" sidebar don't save it for me. In the end I guess that it's the lack of rhythm that keeps me from getting more involved in this book. There's plenty of energy on display, for sure, but there's no sense of dynamism here--the story just flops from one action-filled splash to another with very little sense of purpose or pacing. It's too much like an actual beat-em-up, only without the level of interactivity that makes such games relatively worthwhile.

Compare it to, say, Paul Pope's turn on Solo, DC's current creator showcase title. The stories within that volume might not add up to much, but there's a sense of craft there, a basic knowledge of structure with which Pope neatly harnesses the vibrant energy of his artwork. The example seems pertinent, as Sharknife creator Corey Lewis' fluid, inky line drawing seems like the work of a man who has clearly read more than a handful of Paul Pope comics in his life. Don't get me wrong, there are obviously other influences in the mix too, but you can definitely see Pope in there, and looking at the two books (Solo and Sharknife) back to back, the deficiencies of the latter just seem all too clear. Solo is basically just Paul Pope goofing off, but it makes for a far more satisfying read than Sharknife does, because Pope knows how to hit some basic story beats while he's busy cranking out the purty pictures. And that's all I'm asking for here, really--it's not much, but it would help.

I hope I'm not being too mean here. It seems pretty clear to me that Lewis has talent and enthusiasm to burn, so I don't want to shit on his parade too much, but... it seems to me he's still got a long way to go before he can create a truly satisfying comic.

It could definitely be argued that this just isn't the right book for me, and that's absolutely fine. But to my eyes Sharknife still looks like nothing more than a series of lively surface impressions piled up on each other for next to no reason. I can see everything from Street Fighter to Jack Kirby in there, and that's cool and all, but if I'm being honest I had a hard time finding any reason to actually read the comic instead of merely skimming it.

Some further reading for you:

--Ian Brill gave the book a far more enthusiastic review than I did, but even he noted that Lewis is probably capable of better:

"Sharknife is a good piece of work. It is a great representative of a certain subculture of youth. Lewis is a young creator and I hope he is creating comics for a long time. For that to happen it means he'll have to keep growing and challenge himself and his audience. Bringing back memories of the days when shouting "ha-du-ken!" at the TV screen was a normal occurrence is cool but I want to see him use his gifts to give us a lot more. I think he can do it, it's just a matter of will he or not."

--Like me, Jog had a hard time getting caught up in the book. Unlike me, I think he did a damned good job of explaining exactly why this was the case:

"I guess when viewed from a distance, it's an attractive book. But I found it almost impossible to get much closer to the book, so self-contained is its model world of model fighters, an extended comic book of moving model kits."

--Speaking of Jog, he also wrote a pretty good piece about Paul Pope back when Solo #3 came out. Go check it out.

And that's me done for today. Take care out there folks!

2005-05-20T19:21:00.000+01:00

And Then There Were... Damn, How Many Of Us Are There Now?

There's something about that post I wrote about postmodern horror that just bugs me, so much so that I've almost deleted it several times in the past couple of weeks. Somehow, I've not banished it to memory just yet, but I've definitely came close. I've struggled to work out exactly what it is that bothers me about writing here, and in the end I guess that I think that my examples don't really match up very well with what my overall argument seems to be. You can see a sort of dawning awareness of this in the body of the post itself, as I begin to realise that while Shaun Of The Dead and Scott Pilgrim are constructed with a great deal of knowing playfulness, their characters act as though the stories they find themselves in are pretty natural. Since this is a big part of the charm of both works, it irritates me that my post seems to blunder around this fact in its attempts to meaningfully articulate what actually interests me in these stories. These are works that depict characters who could use a little bit more perspective in their approach to life, and while the rom-zom-com/Nintendo realism stylings may make this fact very clear, they also keep us tangled up in the lives of the protagonists. Whatever postmodern effects are at work here, they do not serve to distance us from the characters because there is enough of the original genre's appeal in there to keep us hooked. Shaun may be a bit of a dunderhead, but he's also the charming schmuck boyfriend trying to win back the girl, and someone who's struggling to survive in a zombie movie. These situations are played knowingly, but with sympathy, and this is important here. Similarly, while the various fantasies that Scott Pilgrim wraps himself up in are explicit for what they are on the page, they're also hugely engaging on their own terms.

And then there's Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Ken Lowery wrote a neat post about the terrifying honesty of horror a while back. It started off an inter-blog conversation that I missed out on because I was off trying to work out how to write about pop culture stuff again. Now Buffy can definitely be seen as part of what Ken and others seemed to be railing against, i.e horror that is too busy riffing on genre conventions to truly instill a sense of inescapable dread in the viewer. But while I don't think that Buffy could really stand up as a straight action or horror program, I do think that it uses some of the beats and pulp poetry of these genres to great effect as a part of the extended superhero soap opera that is at the heart of the show. These plays on genre convention are there to heighten the comedy, drama and metaphorical value of its characters lives as well as to provide the odd geeky in-joke. This is why I care about the program so much. Hell, this is why I care about all of the pop culture experiences I've been talking about here: Spaced, Shaun Of The Dead, Scott Pilgrim, etc... These aren't "merely" self-referential genre workouts. For all their use of fantastic genre tropes, there's something grounded, something human going on here, and that's what hooks me; that's what keeps me coming back.

Right... This is all still pretty vague and general, but it's a little bit closer to what I wanted to say in the first place, and that's enough for me right now. Take care, and tune in later for more random wanderings!

2005-05-20T10:09:00.000+01:00

Hey Kids -- Comics!

Sleeper Season Two, by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips:

Shit, this just keeps on getting bleaker and bleaker.

I'm glad I read the most recent issue while I was in the middle of reading Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest for the first time. Despite their wildly different settings (superpowered global spy drama vs corrupt small-town detective work) both stories share an ever-increasing sense of moral murkiness and blurred personal motives that I find both unsettling and hugely compelling. I have no idea what is going to happen in the last issue, but there's no way in hell that I'm not going to be along for the ride! And is it just me or are all of those tight little boxes that Sean Phillips traps his characters in really oppressive and menacing and as such perfect for the story that Ed Brubaker is telling?

Fucking hell, this is good stuff! My only worry is that the ending will clunk slightly in the wake of what came before. This has always been a series that thrived on the sense that there was no end in sight: just more of those little shadow-filled boxes as far as the eye could see. On the other hand, maybe it's a good thing that this is going to wrap up soon. There's only so much gloom that a reader can take, y'know?

Vimanarama #1 & 2, by Grant Morrison and Philip Bond:

This series hasn't hit me as hard as either Seaguy or We3 did, but I've found it to be pretty enjoyable all the same. It's a silly British rom-com with added sci-fi craziness, bascially. In its own fluffy way it's also a pretty neat expression of the feeling of living in a world that isn't always going to play the game you want it to play. All of the bizarre heroes and monsters that Ali and Sofia end up face-to-face with work perfectly for me to heighten Ali's worries that god might just not like him -- especially given the threat to his future with Sofia that her dream connection to Ben Rama seemed to represent.

Issue #2 had some great lines ("My knee... Grazed beyond all redemption!"), and had a very unexpected ending so... yeah, I'm enjoying this for what it is, basically. And hey, Philip Bond can do luminous sci-fi action every bit as well as he does cute kitchen sink drama -- who knew?

On another note enitely, I was somewhat amused to see this book getting mainstream press for its positive representation of Asian characters when those elements of its setting are in many ways very cliched (cornershops, arranged marriages etc). It is a fun book though, and thinking about these issue is generally pretty interesting, so I suppose that it's good that it's getting some exposure. I just hope that it doesn't get a free pass because it's a comic that at least attempts to depict non-white characters as, y'know, characters. Because that'd be setting the bar a little too low, and there's no need to do that on what should be a pretty basic issue.

Intimates #5, by Joe Casey and Giuseppe Camuncoli:

You know, I really want to be able to give this comic a glowing review but if I'm being honest, it still hasn't quite come together for me. This issue, with its teen suicide plot and amusing "hivejournal" interludes, came closer than any of its predecessors to actually making me care about what was going on, but we're five issues in and I'm still not exactly sure what the hook is supposed to be here. The characters always seem to be on the verge of becoming interesting without ever actually getting there, and there's nothing about the stories themselves that stands out. Which leaves, what, the execution? Well... I guess I am pretty intrigued by the bottom-of-the-page info-feed. It's an ironic device that's there to heighten our engagement with these characters by overloading us with secondary information about them, and while that's kinda cool, on its own it's just not enough. I mean, obviously there's something about this comic that has kept me coming back for five issues, but even though this issue was probably my favourite so far I think I might jump ship soon. There's promise here, but I'm not sure that it's going to be fulfilled, and furthermore I'm not sure how long I'm going to stick around to find out. I've got issue #6 sitting in front of me right now, but I've not felt liking actually reading it yet. It'll probably decide whether or not I keep buying this series so... yeah, I'll get back to you on that one.

2005-03-04T20:27:00.000Z

This Is An Adventure

Despite what some of the more negative reviews might have led you to believe, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is an excellent movie, and is well deserving of your attention. If The Royal Tenenbaums saw director Wes Anderson pushing his stylistic quirks the limit while riffing o the old family saga story type, then this movie sees him take the exact same approach and apply it to the adventure story, of all genres. As unlikely as this combination may sound, it's actually pretty fantastic in practice. Or at least, I thought it was -- some of the less positive reviewers may beg to differ.

The ensemble cast, the overt artifice, the pop-centric soundtrack: all of Anderson's trademarks are here, but applied to the wonky Moby Dick knock-off that is the movie's plot, things become fresher and less assured. And I mean that in a good way -- I loved Tenenbaums, but many of my friends didn't, and the perfectly sealed aesthetic world in which that movie took place seemed to have had a lot to do with that.

The Life Aquatic takes place in a equally unreal and hyper-detailed environment, of course, but... I dunno, it's less air tight, and I like it that way. Like when Zissou fights those pirates to the sound of the Stooges' 'Search and Destroy', I can see why it should work, but it doesn't quite. The roughness makes it more charming and affecting, I think. Plus: the cut-away set that they use for the boat half of the time is just plain amazing.

So, erm... yeah: it's an extended riff on fatherhood, privilege, and the thin line between truth and fiction that draws power from its ridiculousness. It's a flawed movie about a very flawed man whose self-centeredness is routed in a weary search for adventure. As such the form of the film -- seabound adventure shot through with deadpan humour and exasperated sadness, and put together in a way that calls attention to its own fictionality -- is perfectly suited to its subject. I might write a more in depth discussion of what I think the movie actually does later, but this'll do as a first impression, I think.

2005-03-03T20:58:00.000Z

Just Like Honey

Happy International Read A Comic Book Naked Day everyone!

I've been meaning to stage and photograph some sort of ill-advised public version of this event for a couple of years now, but I've never actually got round to it, probably because I'm both hugely lazy and just a little bit more sensible than I want to be.

*Sigh*

Ah well, I guess there's always next year...

In related news: I heart Steven Wintle, now and forever. Wait, does that make me sound like a stalker?

2005-03-02T09:58:00.000Z

Secret Pint

Okay, so how excited was I when I discovered that Government Commissions (BBC Sessions 1996-2003), the new collection of live performances from those plucky Glaswegian drone-rockers Mogwai, included the version of 'New Paths To Helicon Pt.1' that got me into the band in the first place?

I've heard a couple of different versions of this song, and all of them have been good, but this version... this version still knocks me out every time I hear it. I can't remember how I first came across it, but I think it was on a mix CD that someone gave me and... it's just beautiful, man. Over eight minutes of the warmest, blurriest noise that I have ever heard in my life. Listening to it now I get a rush of high school memories. In particular, I'm reminded of the last school trip we ever went on, which involved going on a "ghost walk" around Edinburgh. Which basically means that we wandered from one "haunted" place to another in search of... what? Cheap scares? Historical information? I'm still not entirely sure what we were supposed to get out of that particular trip, but it was a very important night for me, because it was the night that the bizarre love-triangle I was briefly involved in really kicked off. Jesus, what a weird night that was! I'll spare you the details as they're too embarrassing and don't generally reflect well on me. My best friend was involved, and so was a girl I ended up going out with for two-and-a-half years--that's all you need to know. On the way home I had that Mogwai track ('New Paths To Helicon Pt.1') repeating over and over on my mini-disc. The night seemed really huge and open and scary and fun and... yeah... this connection has stayed with me ever since.

There's a real sense of possibility to this song, I think, and maybe that's why it seems so perfect in the context of this particular memory. I mean, don't get me wrong--there's a lot of sadness in this piece of music, but the ever-rising waves of distortion that come to the fore during the song's climatic mid-section just sound really positive to me. And you know what? Despite all of the awkwardness and sadness that resulted from the train of events I've been talking about, it still stands out in my mind as a time that was thrillingly full of potential (much of which would be realised, some of which wouldn't). So that's what this song is to me, and I'll always love it as such.

The rest of the album is okay -- some of it's a little too flat and dirge-like, but the good bits are really good, especially the stunning twenty minute long act of audio-violence that is 'Like Herod'. Recommended for confirmed fans only, I guess.

2005-03-01T11:56:00.000Z

There Is Thought...

Some thoughts on Seven Soldiers #0, by Grant Morrison, J.H. Williams and others:

Yes! This is the stuff! Epic superhero comics as I want to read them. Grant Morrison knows why Lord of the Rings is so popular right now, and he knows how to channel that feeling of being a part of something big and exciting into a thrilling superhero story. Thankfully, however, he also knows that it's never as simple as all that.

Making the new Whip both a writer and the story's narrator is a pretty sharp way of foregrounding this theme -- her self-awareness exposes her motives as being both understandable and slightly deranged at the same time. Here's one choice monologue, as narrated to the reader during the climactic action scene:

My apartment and my fears about money and the future and never being good enough... Compared to this, everything seems so fucking stupid and unreal.

How do you know when you've become a superhero and not just a crazy fetish person with a death wish? Is it when you join your first team and finally have your psychosis validated by group consensus? Is it when you ride your first giant spider? And trust your life to a rhinestone cowboy with a silver bullet?

As for the rest of the group she joins, what they most resemble from this distance are a group of Mystery Men level characters who somehow get caught up in an Invisibles sized plot. They're a bunch of fanboys, old timers and weirdos, basically, but Morrison isn't mean to them. As I've already mentioned, he gets the appeal of this superhero stuff, but no way is he going to take it at face value. The little icons that depict the powers of each of these six heroes are key to this effect -- they're initially played for chuckles, but by the time the gang have started to take on the giant spider they just about seem stirring (see also, Dynamite Dan, whose powers are actually much more impressive than you initially expect them to be).

Jumping back a little to take another look at this issue's overarching themes, there's something oddly heartbreaking about that little meta moment where the Spider is dragged off and updated. I mean the build-up in the swamp is a creepy horror masterclass, but those revamp scenes are really something else.

It was my dad's tunic... And my brother... I... I just don't want to lose it. Please... I think I made a big mistake. I didn't mean to come here at all.

What this highlights is that these characters are not only trying to impose their own fantasies onto the world, but are also subject to other people's narrative aims as well. Our six soldiers find this out all too well at the end of the issue, when they suddenly realise that they're not playing the game that they thought they were playing after all. It's a nasty, brutal moment, but an effective one all the same, and taken as a whole I think this issue sets up the playing field for the Seven Soldiers event quite nicely with its odd mix of different genres and low-profile characters.

And J.H. Williams -- what a fucking artist! The way he makes the layout of the page essential to the action is just wonderful, and is utterly essential to the various atmospheres evoked in this issue. The stuff in the swamp is creepy as all hell, with the murky foliage threatening to overwhelm both the characters and the reader. The Whip's acts of urban violence, on the other hand, are fast paced, tightly packed and brutal, while the extended western riff that takes up the bulk of the issue is notable mainly for the real sense of space and wildness that Williams establishes therein. Best of all, however, are the parts of the story that take place in an utterly alien meta-fictional place where solid things turn soft and change (i.e. where the behind the scenes machinations of the series are dramatised on page). Williams makes this overtly surrealised space seem every bit as vivid and striking as its more grounded counterparts, and despite the fact that the transitions between these styles should probably jar he holds it all together through sheer virtuosity.

Ah well, it looks like I'm going to end up getting hooked on these books, just like I knew I would. But fuck it, if the rest of this event lives up to the standards set by this issue then at least I'm in for one hell of a ride!

More on various other comics, movies and pop songs later.

2005-02-19T15:15:00.000Z

Maybe I Should Start Trying To Work My Way Up The Career Ladder After All...

I really want to be able to say no to Grant Morrison's upcoming Seven Soldiers project, or at least to limit myself to only reading one or two of the mini-series as they come out, but... I've looked at the artist list and I've read the online previews and god help me, I want these comics -- and soon!

This isn't entirely a bad thing, of course. It gives me something to look forward to on the comic book front, which is currently a very rare and welcome feeling round my way. But still, my wallet is cringing in anticipation of the year-long financial strain of this particular pop-culture experience.

Eep!

2005-02-19T13:09:00.000Z

Yesterday's Memes Today!

Because all the cool kids were doing it. And most of the uncool kids. And that one weird kid who spends most of his time talking to the water cooler -- I'm pretty sure I saw him doing it too.

1. Total amount of music files on your computer:

There's something like 2GB of music on my PC at the moment. I used to have more, but I'm trying to keep thing more paired down these days because my computer is kind of old and has a fairly limited amount of free hard drive space.

2. The last CD you bought was:

Frank Black's Teenager of the Year. I'm a pretty huge fan of Black's music, so it was good to finally listen to the whole thing from start to finish, having previously heard most of the songs in little downloaded dribs and drabs. And hey, whaddaya know -- it's an awesome pop-rock album that neatly bridges the gap between the Pixies' abrasive weirdness and Black's later adventures in Americana. Also, the line "My heart is crammed in my cranium, and it still knows how to pound" from 'Headache' is sheer lyrical genius and should be celebrated as such.

3. What is the song you last listened to before reading this message?

'Avon' by Queens of the Stone Age. I really like that first QOTSA album--their last couple of albums have been pretty good and all, but there's a compelling economy to their debut that works for me in a way that their other albums just plain don't. Here, the Black Sabbath meets Can stylings work really well as a mesmeric backdrop for some of Josh Home's strangest and most mournful vocals -- it's like party rock that gets trapped in its own groove and goes all sad and woozy as a result, and how often do you get to throw that description around?

4. Write down 5 songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you.

Lets get the most obvious song out of the way first shall we? The Pixies' 'Debaser' pretty much sums up my highschool years for me. It's both a neat sonic representation of the general sense of discomfort and strangeness that I associate with that period of my life, and a pretty good example of the obvious sort of ways that I tired to turn this uneasiness into a defining characteristic. 'Cos the Pixies are, like, this totally amazing band who you won't have heard of, and they sing about, like, surrealist films and stuff and when I grow up I want to be a debaser too! Quite importantly, 'Debaser' is also a lot of fun, and while it's sometimes easy to overlook this fact in favour of broad drama, I had some pretty good times at high school, so, erm, yeah -- this song covers all the bases (no pun intended)!

Moving on, 'Do You Realize' may not be my favourite Flaming Lips song, but it's probably the one I have the most immediate connection with. I regularly wrestle with my atheism and with the general sense that my life doesn't mean shit in the scale of things, and while I may not cover any particularly original ground in my thoughts on these matters, I do mostly manage to come out of these deliberations feeling pretty positive. 'Do You Realize' is the perfect soundtrack to these worries, and while its lyrics are hardly profound on their own, when Wayne Coyne sings them in his weedy little voice... I dunno, it just comes together for me. He can't quite hit those notes as firmly as he'd like, but he gives it a go anyway, and the way that this all-too-human struggle bounces off of and gets caught up in the lush pop symphony that is the rest of the song makes the song's affirmations seem every bit as joyous and hard-won as they should.

It's funny, because 'Rid Of Me' is my ultimate disturbed break-up song, but I think I'm going to go with 'This Is Love' as the PJ Harvey song that means the most to me. There's a whole world of difference between these two tunes, but while 'Rid Of Me' makes for great deranged catharsis, I think I value the weird mix of self-involved joy and external awareness that you get in 'This Is Love' more. It's still deeply visceral and satisfying, but it's also a bit more balanced and, y'know, sane, which just about gives it the edge in my book.

There's no doubt in my mind that 'Bowtie' would have been a huge hit had it been released as a single. It's easily my favourite song from Outkast's last double album, and it makes the list because no other song evokes good times so well for me. The whole thing just struts, swings and swaggers itself silly -- every element of the song locks perfectly into the one fleet-footed, ass-shaking groove, and man do I ever love it!

The last song I'm going to mention here is 'I Only Said' by My Bloody Valentine. Like pretty much every track on Loveless, 'I Only Said' is a glorious wall of noise that almost manages to swallow its various sonic components whole. This may not sound hugely appealing to some people, but to my ears it's quite beautiful -- the way that broken fragments of rhythm, noise and melody weave in and out of the main effect-heavy drone is both disorienting and strangely thrilling at the same time. There's a real sense of freedom in this song, but it's the sort of freedom that it's easy to get lost or trapped in, if that makes any sense at all. Cards on the table, this song is here as a stand in for the whole of Loveless, which is one of my favourite albums of all time. As far as I'm concerned it's the perfect soundtrack for reading Borges' Labyrinths, the Morrison/Case Doom Patrol run and The New Trilogy, which should hopefully give you some idea of what I get out of this music.

5. Who are you going to pass this stick to? (3 persons) and why?

If anyone who's reading this wants to give it a go then fair play to them, but I can't really be bothered harassing anyone in particular here.

2005-02-18T23:59:00.000Z

Blue Monday

Right -- I wrote a different version of this post at the start of the week, only to have blogger chew it up and then lock me out of my account for a few days. Fuck knows what that was all about, but lets see if I can actually get these thoughts up now that I'm able to write here again:

'Too Much Love' isn't one of the standout tracks on LCD Soundsystem's debut album, but there's something about the song that I seem to have become obsessed with... Something that seems to draw me back in again and again.

"What will you do when the day comes, when it's no fun, when it's all done" whispers James Murphy in the flat, worn out tones of a man who is either facing up to the fact that the initial rush of love is about to run out, or has at least convinced himself that this is the case. The music follows suit, providing a minimalist rhythmic backdrop that should probably be boring but somehow ends up being strangely hypnotic instead. Initially there are only a couple of spooky Aphex Twin style noises in the mix to accompany this low-key fare, but by the time that Murphy has raised his voice to sing about having "no memories... to keep you up at night" a wave of broken music box noises have crept into the sonic backdrop. It's at this point that I can't help but think of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Hell, towards the end of the song it almost sounds like chunks of Jon Brion's fragile score are blurring in and out of there or something! Of course, this tune isn't quite as good as Eternal Sunshine, but that's no slight in my book!

I think there's definitely something to this comparison though. Both Eternal Sunshine and 'Too Much Love' are, on at least one level, acknowledgements of the difficulties inherent in maintaining a relationship over time, and while 'Too Much Love' may lack the complex narrative interplay that made Michel Gondry's second film so special, it still stands as a fine evocation of a certain state of mind.

It's also the LCD Soundsystem track that makes me think that Murphy should hook up with Kylie Minogue at some point in the future. They could make some top quality mournful elector-pop together, methinks!

Speaking of which, here's something I wrote ages ago about 'I Just Can't Get You Out Of My Head' (a.k.a. the second best Kylie song ever):

A lot of people I know seem to think that I'm being ironic when I go on about how good this song is, but they are utterly, utterly mad, cos it really is brilliant; a towering slice of immaculate disco, sexy as all hell and yet run through with a weird, obsessive sadness. It's definitely one of my favourite pop songs from the last couple of years. Hell, it's probably one of my favourite pop songs of all time. There's something about the almost flawless, robotic sound of the whole thing -- it's both really shiny and fun, and a little bit sad in a way. Maybe it's just me, I don't know, but I think it adds something to lyrics -- it gives them a kind of hollowness, a lack of fulfillment that is oddly fitting...

"There's a dark secret in me
Don't leave me locked in your heart

Set me free
Feel the need in me
Set me free
Stay forever and ever and ever and ever"

Brrr -- is it just me, or is there a chill in here!

I do hope that no one takes the rather negative look at romance I've provided in this post to be a reflection of some sort of bitter post-Valentines Day mood on my part. I may be a little bit cynical about the whole affair, and a whole lot caught up in the rush of my own love life, but bitterness isn't really my style, even when I actually have something to be bitter about.

Well, that's me done for now. Let's just hope that blogger doesn't throw a fit this time!

2005-02-13T20:30:00.000Z

Those Zombie Blues

A couple more thoughts on the question of how our relationship with fiction effects our relationship with reality, and how this feeds back into the fiction itself:

One of the most interesting things about last year's Dawn of the Dead remake, from my perspective at least, was the fact that none of the movie's main characters thought twice about letting a group of people who'd been bitten by zombies into their little sanctuary. I saw this movie on my own at a time when I was really stressed out (it was the middle of my exam period, so, y'know -- argh!), and for the most part I felt pretty closed-in and rattled by the experience, but when they let those zombies in the making in... I just kinda laughed, y'know? Since I'm aware of the conventions of this genre, this obvious blunder just seemed kinda dumb to me, but... this isn't a fault in the movie or anything. It's just that Dawn of the Dead takes place in a world without zombie fiction. That's absolutely fine, and it doesn't harm the intended effect of the movie at all.

Compare this to Shaun of the Dead, wherein the characters seem slightly aware of the tropes of the genre that they're caught up in, at least to the extent that they can have a conversation about whether using "the z word" is stupid or not. Of course, this awareness doesn't stop them from blundering into a classic zombie movie dead-end, but that's part of the overall theme of the movie, what with Shaun resorting to his local pub both when he's trying to set-up a romantic dinner with his girlfriend and when he's trying to come up with a decent plan to survive the zombie situation. As that previous sentence hopefully indicates, Shaun of the Dead isn't a hamfisted zombie spoof, despite what it's title might indicate. What it is, however, is a comedy, and it plays out with a more overt sort of self-awareness than its less humorous American cousin as a result of this.

Here's another example for ya -- Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The series obviously takes place in a fantasy world, but the way it plays with its characters' familiarity with various genre tropes is intriguing. It's such a weird balancing act when you think about it -- Jolly Joss Whedon and his team really go for all the straight-up trash poetry that they can draw out of their fantastic setting (highschool=the gate to hell, etc), but yet they also have their characters flex their postmodern muscles in their dealings with the world they find themselves in.

It seems to me that this is perhaps slightly different from what I was talking about when I was dealing with Spaced and Scott Pilgrim. In that post I was talking about fiction's capacity to depict the forms of fiction-influenced perception through which we look at the world. This can be achieved using various degrees of self-reflexivity in a story, i.e. through postmodern comedy or drama (like in Spaced and The Singing Detective), through the trash poetry of straight genre work, or through some hybrid of these two approaches. Scott Pilgrim probably falls somewhere in that last category, now that I think about it -- its characters seem to find the world the live in to be completely natural, but there's something slightly more self-aware in the form of the story itself (that'd be that "Nintendo Realism" at work again, I guess).

Anyways, what we have in Buffy The Vampire Slayer is a fantasy story whose characters show some self-awareness of the sort of narratives they're caught up in. This theme can be found outside of genre fiction, of course, but it's more obvious when the narratives in question are so otherworldly. Here we have an even more convoluted train of cause and effect to track -- this is fiction that depicts characters using their fiction-gleamed perceptual lenses to deal with and comment on fictional situations. With this in mind, it is perhaps important to note that in the examples in question this element does not overwhelm the narrative itself -- self-aware genre commentary isn't the be all and end all of these stories, but is instead just another element of the overall fiction in question. This doesn't make Buffy the Vampire Slayer implicitly any better or worse than Dawn of the Dead (nor does it mean that DotD isn't a comment on the genre), but it does mean that a very definite line can be drawn between things like Buffy or Shaun of the Dead and, say, Scary Movie (and thank the great baked bean machine in the sky for that!). There is the question of where something like Scream fits into this scheme of things, but, well... I just kinda hate that movie! Partly I think this is because it's just a crappy movie, but I also think that it straddles that line I just set up between Shaun of the Dead and Scary Movie in a couple of grating ways.

So, erm, yeah -- I'm going to chill on these thoughts for a while before I end up getting even more confused than I already am.

2005-02-13T19:00:00.000Z

Some Days I Quite Fancy Doing A Little Bit Of This Myself...

2005-02-11T17:50:00.000Z

Steer Your Career!

All of this Scott Pilgrim talk reminds me -- there's an awesome post about the series up on intriguing new comics blog GraphiContent right now which I highly recommend you to check out!

The post's writer, one Pete Mortensen, works wonders with the comic throughout the course of his essay, coining the term "Nintendo Realism" and discussing Joycean self-awareness and Grant Morrison's Animal Man along the way. But wonderful as these musings are, he saves his bets flourish for last, and fuck it -- I'm going to quote a whole chunk of it right here and now:

"Self-discovery and a strong base of support are more important in life than the things that will make up a biography. Job title, salary, pants size, eye color, warp pipe brain, car color don't add up to anything. Seeing life for what it has to offer makes Scott a character worth celebrating. This is not a tale of angst, it's a story of joy and discovery -- none of which has to do with the often fantastic framing of each vignette. Rather than dwell on the inevitable period of your 20s when the best you can muster is the occasional venture out with friends and the ability to sleep for 16 hours straight, O'Malley crystallizes the new experiences that make that time survivable and rewarding... For many of this generation, simply making friends laugh or kissing another human being who brings out the best in you is a triumph -- squandered potential be damned"

Scott Pilgrim is a pretty aimless and self-centered character in some ways, but yet I still feel a huge rush of joy when I read about his precious little life, and I think that Mr Mortensen hits the nail on the head pretty damned perfectly in his explanation of why this is so.

2005-02-11T16:23:00.000Z

Welcome To The Real World, Suckers!

I'm not going to pretend to have any clue as to whether or not Edgar Wright is going to make a movie version of Scott Pilgrim, but what I will say is that while I'm as sick as all hell of movie adaptations, there's definitely something to the idea of this particular director taking on Bryan Lee O'Malley's comic book.

You see, ever since I read Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life it's been bracketed off in my head with Spaced, the British TV series that Wright directed before finding something a little bit closer to international fame with Shaun of the Dead. The connecting point, as I see it, is that these are both 20-something slice-of-life stories that occasionally tip over into the sort of pop culture fantasy that their protagonists are immersed in, such as when Scott Pilgrim becomes a beat-em-up, or when the Spaced posse find themselves up against some Matrix style secret agents at the start of series 2.

While there are certainly differences between the ways that both series handle this idea (Spaced is slightly jokier and more self-aware than Scott Pilgrim, I think), I'm pretty sure that Wright can handle this sort of material as well as anyone, and if there's going to be a movie of this comic, I'll be thrilled if he turns out to be the man behind it.

On the whole I'm a pretty big fan of the style (or styles) of storytelling I've been describing here, and I can't help thinking that maybe these stories have something in common with another one of my favourite British TV series, Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective. It seems to me that The Singing Detective dealt with the ways that our perception are shaped and informed by the various sorts of pop culture we consume in a manner that resonates quite strongly with the stories I've been talking about so far. The cultural cuisine in question may be different (detective stories and old pop songs instead of computer games and comic books), but there's something to this comparison beyond such details. Life isn't like a Quentin Tarantino movie, but we do live in an age where people can easily process most of the myriad of references that make up his cinematic palette. This postmodern pop-culture overload definitely has an effect on the way people look at the world, and while there's room for horrible smugness in this approach it's still good to read/watch works of art that deal with this fact, either playfully, as in Spaced and Scott Pilgrim, or in the feverish, internalized drama of The Singing Detective.

2005-02-05T16:34:00.000Z

Behold -- The Ballpoint Pen Thieves Have Returned!

It's been a while since I did a bit of the old link-blogging, so lets see if I've still got anything approaching a knack for it.

--Kieron Gillen and Graeme McMillan have both linked to it already, but this Alan Moore interview is well worth reading for his observations on the craft of writing. That photo of Mr Moore that balances preposterously across the top of the page is a bit much for my tastes though.

--Since I was talking about Seaguy earlier this week (and because the series is now available in a new shiny trade paperback edition), I think this is a pretty good time to link to this neat little review of the ace Morrison/Stewart comic book, which I stumbled across on this Barbelith thread.

While I'm as skeptical as anyone about the need to legitimise comics and make them acceptable (it just reeks of desperation, really), I was at least pleased to see that the reviewer in this piece is quite comfortable to discuss Seaguy alongside Marjane Satrapi's second Persepolis graphic novel and Posy Simmonds' Gemma Bovery. Indeed, he even makes a point of stressing the more traditionally comic booky pleasures of Seaguy over what he feels to be the undernourished pretentiousness of Simmonds' work.

--Here's Jon Brion talking to the Onion AV Club about his score for Punch-Drunk Love:

"Paul knew he wanted to have a harmonium in the movie. And we knew fairly early on that we wanted a musical nod to Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, in terms of there being a melody that develops in the movie that has a reference to the plot, however oblique. We also knew that we wanted some sort of romantic theme, the feeling of an old Hollywood musical without people ever breaking out into song. That's one of the many ways Paul and I fit together: We like to look around and see what things people have been neglecting or have given up on. The other thing is how outrageously corny some of the orchestra stuff is. Like when they're kissing and the strings swell, I was laughing hysterically, and he was going, "No, bigger, bigger, bigger." It still cracks me up whenever I see the movie. But there's something beautiful about that at this point, because people have gotten so far away from that that it was fresh again. It was so funny to be on sessions and conducting the orchestra and looking at the screen--it was like 1938 all over again."

The rest of the interview is pretty damned good too, by the way, and is well worth a read if you're at all interested in Brion's work either inside or outside of the movies.

And, erm, that's about it for now. Looks like I need to do a wee bit of browsing before I try to do one of these posts again, dontcha think?

2005-02-03T21:46:00.000Z

I Heart Huckabees

As those who know me in real life will already know, I loved David O. Russell's most recent movie so much that I'm currently wearing an I Heart Huckabees badge on my favourite jacket. Sure, it's a mess of a film, but it's an interesting sort of mess that trips itself up in all manner of wonderful ways. And as I wrote to a couple of friends immediately after I saw the movie, existential slapstick is a genre I could get into!

This post on the ever marvelous Clap Clap blog is pretty much exactly on the money, particularly in the way that it stresses the importance of the comedic aspects of the film. Crucially, Eppy points out that the movies humour is not mocking or nihilistic in the end. Asking difficult questions is important, the movie seems to say, but keeping a decent sense of humour about these questions (and yourself) is pretty necessary too.

Doubling back for a second, I'd just like to point out that the best part of Eppy's post is his analysis of the role that Shania Twain plays in the movie. The twist in the Shania Twain plot that pops up at the end of the movie is pivotal, I think -- it's maybe the movie's most absurd moment, but it's also its most leveling and affirming in a way. As Eppy says:

It's a funny scene--I mean, it's Shania Twain yelling about environmentalism, how could it not be--but it's also an important one, because it flips our expectations on their head. We may want to make her into this cardboard cutout, this symbol of things we dislike, but those things are human and complicated and real, and every once in a while they need to show up and whack you on the head to make you realize what's going on.

There's more great stuff like that over on his blog -- go check it out. And if you've not seen the movie yet then make sure you do so as soon as you can!

That's me for tonight folks. Take care, and I'll see ya later.

2005-02-03T20:30:00.000Z

For Scott McAllister

This post on the undeserved cancellation of the Crew gave me a real "I saw this and thought of you" feeling. You should probably check it out.

2005-02-03T20:27:00.000Z

Sound And Fury

So I was reading through the new issue of The Comics Journal the other day, and somewhat unsurprisingly I found myself drawn to the short review of Seaguy that lurks on page 265. Now as you may recall, I was a pretty big fan of this particular comic book, and Bryan Miller's review is a playful look at what did and didn't work in the series that makes for pretty good reading unto itself.

The weird thing about this review for me is that while I can't really find much in there to disagree with intellectually, I still find myself unable to properly connect with it in a couple of key ways. Like, when Miller says "...it's difficult to be too emotional, what with all of the talking mules and space mummies and Egyptian dog warriors to get to" I just find myself thinking "nah!"

For me, the bizarre world that Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart created was utterly essential to its emotional impact! I do agree with Miller that there's probably too much going on in there, but if I'm being honest I quite often like that in a story! There are quite a few elements here that seem to exist beyond the utility of the narrative, and I'm a fan of this when its done well, as it seems to give the sense of a world that has life outside of its relation to the main character. Of course the question here is whether or not these elements overwhelm the story itself or not, and while I'm open to arguments to the contrary, I tend to think that most of the elements at play in Seaguy work together pretty well.

The point I'm trying to make though, is that it's exactly this peculiar window dressing that makes Seaguy so viscerally appealing to me. There's nothing particularly new about the story itself: it's the story of a young guy who wants to go on some sort of high adventure in a bizarre uber-branded society that doesn't seem to have any space for that sort of thing anymore. The three issue mini-series (potentially the first of several, depending on sales of the trade paperback) details his attempts to do just that. Of course, it all goes to hell in the end, with the ramifications of his attempts at being a superhero turning out to be much more complex than he ever seems to have imagined. Don't get me wrong -- this is a solid set-up for a series, but its the weird world that's conjured up somewhere between Grant Morrison's words and Cameron Stewart's visuals that gives this comic its kick. For example, the attacks on consumerist spectacle that Morrison offers up here are neither new nor particularly subtle (although the role played by Xoo in series does add a nice twist to this element), but I'll be damned if I don't find Mickey Eye hella unsettling! It's like with Punch-Drunk Love, where the visual/musical stylistics carry the meaning of the story for me, y'know? In both cases I understand that that not everyone is going to have my reaction to these elements, but they resonate heavily with me nonetheless.

Anyway, while I'm talking about Punch-Drunk Love again, I should probably mention that ever since I first saw the movie it's had this weird connection in my head with 'Letter to Memphis' by the Pixies. I mean, just check out the lyrics:

"The day since I met her
I can't believe it's true
She came here from Memphis
Across the ocean sailing
And I saw her
And I pleaded
Why do you come so far?
And she said trying to get to you
How I tried to get you
Trying to get you

I'm sending a letter
I'll send it right to you
I'll send it to Memphis
I know that someday
Everything I needed and I wanted
Used to be that my head was haunted

And all these sirens, they make me mad
And all this violence it brings me down
I feel strong I feel lucky
Trying to get to you
Said I'm going to get to you
Trying to get to you."

Those last five lines rub up against P.T. Anderson's movie particularly well as far as I'm concerned. The sirens, the haunted heads, the distant communication and the feeling of unlikeliness... it's not just me here, right? And as for sci-fi stylistics, well, this song may not be about UFOs, but there's a reason why critics are often guilty of overstating the role that flying saucers play on those last couple of Pixies albums, and it's that even when Black Francis wasn't singing about them he normally sounded like he could be!

Anyways, I think I've wondered far enough off topic for one post so I'm gonna call this one to a close before it really gets away from me! Take care y'all!

2005-01-31T14:12:00.000Z

"You’re pillaging and out-tapped..."

First impressions of LCD Soundsystem's self-titled debut album:

Precision is the key here. The same mixture of thrilling musical economy and perfect detail that makes 'Losing My Edge' so effective as a take down of analy retentive hipsterism* is deeply ingrained in every facet of this album. The first disc (the album proper) consists of nine tracks that collectively clock in somewhere just over the forty-five minute mark. This is important to what I'm talking about here: out of these nine songs, only one ('Never As Tired As When I'm Waking Up', which kinda sounds like a Beatles ballad or something) hasn't grabbed me on my first couple of listens. Now I like a good sprawling pop album as much as anyone (Speakerboxxx/The Love Below I'm looking at you here!) , but there's something to be said for keeping it short and punchy, y'know? Much as the current internet-happy musical climate may make it easy for folk like me to cherrypick the good songs from an album and ignore the rest, I'll admit there's a part of me that's still quite attached to the idea of an album working as a thing unto itself.

Yeah, I know this is quaintly old-fashioned and auturist or whatever, and I'm in no way dissing messy pop albums or those that filter through them for the good bits, but what the hell, sometimes it's nice to have a change of pace.

The album's second disc (the bonus CD, I guess) is curious when listened to with this in mind. It collects together various singles and b-side that came out way back when, and in its high-quality grab-bag way it actually reinforces the point about the importance of consistency to the LCD Soundsystem project. This second disc is full of good songs, and contains at least three great ones, namely 'Yeah (crass version)', 'Beat Connection' and the aforementioned 'Losing My Edge', but they obviously aren't designed to be a part of the album itself. They were made to stand as singles -- little pockets of music that stand or fall on their own merits, and their inclusion as extras here rather than as a part of the main album adds emphasis to this idea as much as it disrupts it.

Anyways, the music on the main disc is pretty damned excellent too, and again, precision is the word here. For the most part James Murphy just lets his insistent bass-driven grooves dominate the songs, while never being afraid to throw in whatever textural/rhythmic counterpoints would best serve the track as it plays out. There's a lot of restraint implicit in this approach, but Murphy gets a lot of mileage out of it in terms of tone and effect. Songs like 'Disco Infiltrator' and 'Daft Punk Is Playing At My House' are a lot of straight-up goofy fun, but forays into musical criticism ('Movement') and drama ('Tribulations') are also very successful to my ears.

I'll hopefully be posting more on some of the individual songs from this album at some point in the near future, but first I have a very serious question for everyone. Brothers, sisters, I ask you -- is it wrong that I really like the fact that James Murphy occasionally sings/shouts/rambles like Mark E Smith with a blocked nose on this album?

*Because to get all the references in the song (or, indeed, to write the damned thing in the first place!) you've got to be at least a little bit guilty of the sort of attitude that it's critiquing.

2005-01-31T11:40:00.000Z

"A life of leisure is no life you know"

So I'm going through one of those phases where I rediscover Elastica and, as always, I've ended up getting hooked on 'Waking Up' again.

Now I've just taken January off, to all intents and purposes, having saved up enough money over November/December to glide by while working no more than a couple of days a week, and it's been good. I've got some writing done, though not as much as I'd like, and I've had some good times with my friends, though again, not quite as many as I would have hoped to.

But while it's been good to recharge for a while, there's an oddly indulgent sort of melancholy that's began to creep in around the edges, and this is what 'Waking Up' captures brilliantly. It's sonic decadence with a hint of sadness at its heart. In fact, I'd go so far to say that the sadness is the most decadent part of the song! The whole thing crashes, drones and swaggers in a way that mimics the seemingly effortless cool of Justine's vocals, and it's just like... how can you make lazing around and feeling a bit sad about it sound this appealing, y'know? It must be some sort of crime or something!

But then I get to the following couplet...

"I'd work very hard but I'm lazy
I've got a lot of songs but they're all in my head"

...and I start to think "Hang on, those songs aren't all in her head! I'm listening to one right now, and it's a fucking good one! Maybe I should get around to finishing that story after all..."

But still, part of me wonders: was the real reason it took Elastica so long to follow up their debut album that they spent so long listening to/playing this song and thinking "Cor, this is good -- I could go a bit of this!" or am I just being silly now? Okay, okay, it's clearly the latter, but hey -- I'm aloud a couple of cute little delusions, right?

2005-01-29T11:39:00.000Z

These Are The Headlines... God Knows, I Wish They Weren't

David Fiore asked me the following questions as part of a meme that was doing the rounds sometime deep in the middle of 2004. I asked him to throw some odd queries my way in the hope that it would get me back to blogging, but as it worked out I half-wrote the following answers and then disappeared back off into the odd sulk I was in at the time.

Well, since it now looks like I've decided to give this blogging thing another go, I figured I might as well finish off answering these questions, because, y'know, they were good ones. I apologise if any of the following answers are a tad disjointed, but picking up your train of thought after such a long delay isn't too good an idea, and besides I'm a little out of practice when it comes to writing this sort of thing.

Anyway, with that in mind, here we go...

1. You loved Punch-Drunk Love. That is correct. But why?

I'm so glad that David asked me this as I've been meaning to write about this film for a very long time, as any long-term readers I still have will know all too well!

In an attempt to get around my slight block on articulating exactly why this movie rocks me so much, I'm going to write about this movie by way of another one of my favourite romantic comedies -- Woody Allen's Annie Hall.

In Annie Hall, a wide variety of techniques are used to give the viewer some idea of what's going inside the head's of the two romantic leads. These techniques are kinda goofy and playful, but they're also an important part of what the film achieves. The interior monologues, subtitles expressing thoughts that lurk just below character's conversations, and clever split-screen tricks are all key to this movie's depiction of the amusing and often troubled interaction between Annie and Alvy. Just think about how much un-interrupted conversation you get to observe in this movie--it's insane, isn't it?--and then bounce that off of the fact that most of the elements that disrupt these conversations provide us with a more direct presentation of the characters' thoughts.

To phrase it fairly crudely, a lot of the joy of the movie is in the way it lets us in so closely on this meeting and parting of minds, and much of this is down to the variety of neat techniques that Allan and co use to allow us to observe what Alvy and Annie say to each other and what they don't.

Punch-Drunk Love, on the other hand, gives the viewer very little to go on in terms of what either of the two romantic leads are thinking. Or rather, we don't really get much verbal insight from either Barry Egan or Lena Lenard while we're watching the movie. What we do get, however, is a great audio/visual expression of the confusing multitude of thoughts and feelings that come with their attempts to get together, held together by a couple of hugely charming central performances by Adam Sandler and Emily Watson, and mainly focused through Barry's POV.

The movie hops back and forth tonally between moments of great, waltzing sweetness, out and out strangeness, and sudden violence at will, sometimes blending these elements around the edges as it does so. Jon Brion's score is essential to this effect, mixing swooning orchestral moments with jerky, atonal barrages of rhythm to great effect. I've heard more than one person complain that the uncomfortable sections of this film (where Barry's loneliness and lack of communication skills lead him into awkward situations ) were too restless partly because of these musical flourishes, but it seems to me that this effect is entirely deliberate, and highly successful too.

As I indicated above with my comment about the POV that we get in Punch-Drunk Love, it seems to me that the mechanics of the film conspire to give us something that is probably quite close to Barry's view of the world. Just think about how quiet and lonely the quiet bits of the movie really are, or how Lena just seems to drop out of the sky. Sometimes it feels like you're watching a science fiction movie rather than a skewed romantic comedy (the slow, drifting camera work adds to this affect, and when I read somewhere that P.T. Anderson apparently told Emily Watson to act as though she'd just walked off of a space ship, I can't say I was surprised). On other occasions everything tilts in the opposite direction, and you begin to suspect that it's going to turn into a musical any minute now. Just think about the way the world seems to come to life in exquisite silhouette when they kiss in Hawaii, or the way Barry backs out of his office, shuffling back first at the camera, one step at a time.

All of this is utterly essential to what makes this movie work for me because to be honest with you the plot itself could easily seem quite disagreeable to me were the execution not so thrilling.

As Rose Curtin said as part of this conversation about Sideways:

"I'm sort of sick of movies about emotionally stunted men and the smart, sensitive, hurt women who care for them..."

This is something I was talking about with my girlfriend Karen the other day -- the way that romantic plots in movies that focus on male protagonists rather than female ones often seem to view romance as a a sort of salvation for the inward looking male character, with the other love interests motivation in the whole process being left sketchy at best. I'm making some huge generalizations here, but bare with me. In some ways it's almost as though the disagreeable "kidnap victim as provider of undeserved love" elements of Buffalo 66 are a more direct variation on this theme, with Christina Ricci's character literally being taken along for the ride only to find herself all too glad to provide redemption for guy who dragged her out of her tap dancing class and into his movie.

I enjoy some movies that employ this formula more than others, but let's not shy away from the fact that Punch-Drunk Love engages with this tradition in a couple of key ways. Barry Egan is more than just socially awkward and inward looking; to him, most attempts at communication with the outside world devolves into so much menacing acid-chatter, and one of the primary results of his attempts to, y'know, talk to someone in the first act of the movie is that he gets tangled up in a sex-line scam. (You should probably pay attention to the importance of phone calls in this movie in this movie, by the way--conversation is often distanced here, but that's the subject of another post entirely). But for all my talk of Lena being some sort of alien who drops into Barry's world, it's way more complicated and less cheesy than that in the movie itself. Lena has a unique role in this movie -- she's both completely othered and also the sole note of harmony with Barry's worldview, and this is important, as while the vocabulary of science fiction is definitely being called on here, it is being done so in a very musical way. Which is to say that while we don't get that much of a sense of what Lena is 'about' here we do, at the very least, get the sense that she is 'about' something.

A lot of this comes down to two elements in this particular composition that I've so far neglected to rave about in any depth; the performances that Sandler and Watson give as this movie's romantic leads. While much has been said by other critics about how well the whole movie provides an uneasy but still sympathetic context for Sandler's traditionally emotionally unstable man-child character, less time has been given to describing exactly what Watson brings to the table here, probably because (A) she isn't the centre of this world, and (B) her role here is way harder to define, as I'm rapidly discovering as I try to articulate my thoughts on the subject. But... there's definitely something weird about her, and I mean that in a positive sense! Watson's performance suggests something just outside the edge of the movie's focus, and that's important. Her stalking of Barry in the background of one early scene indicates that he's not the only unstable one here, for one thing! This may not sound like it's too much a validating factor, but here's the thing -- this isn't a movie about Barry's redemption. The last line of the film is something like "Well... here we go" and I think that's essential to understanding what's going on here. Instead of being about Barry finding someone to save him, Punch-Drunk Love is, instead, about two people who share some sort of unexplainable wavelength coming together. Taken as such it's mix of giddiness and discomfort makes much more sense -- this is falling in love writ large, a sensory frying experience expressed largely through strange visuals and music. The ending isn't the end -- it's the beginning of something, and as hard to read as Watson's performance is, she does share a convincing, nervous chemistry with Sandler that wins the day here.

Anyways, all of this ties back into the basic point of my use of Annie Hall as a launchpad for this discussion. The two movies stick together in my mind because they're both formally very rich and expressive, but in totally different ways. Annie Hall, while very cinematic, is an overtly wordy movie, and as such its subject is, at least in part, the many ways in which its romantic leads frame their relationship in language, either internal or external. For me, Punch-Drunk Love does the same thing, except using non-verbal languages instead. I mean, for all that there's some great dialogue in there, the ways in which P.T. Anderson's movie matches Annie Hall for articulation is in the sci-fi musical landscape that its romantically entwined characters find themselves in.

2. Post-graduate education--how do you feel about it? (as an option for yourself, I mean)

This is a question that I've been asking myself a lot recently, as while I was very glad to be done with University when I graduated, I now find myself struggling to work out exactly what I'm going to do next. Additionally, it has recently occurred to me that I'm currently way more in the correct mindset to study Literature than I was throughout my honour years at University. I'm not sure quite what I mean by this, except that my last two years as an English student were spent mostly paying more attention to my life outside of University than anything else. This isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but while there's no guarantee that the same thing wouldn't happen if I gave academia another shot, I'm beginning to think that I might like to give it a try, at the very least.

There's also the big fact that I'm currently struggling to work out exactly what else I can do, y'know? I mean... I'm always going to write, and if I can eventually support myself financially with my writing, then all the better. But that's not an overnight thing, and while I am going to try to make this idea seem plausible, realistically I have to work in one context or another while I give that a go. The big appeal of doing more academic stuff is that I can at least see myself managing to care about it, y'know? Especially since my Studies would probably be on a more limited field this time round. The bookstore I work in is great, and the people are lovely there, but it's not something I can see myself wanting to do for too much longer, even though I don't really think there are many other jobs out there which would suit me better.

So... I'm still thinking this question over right now. We'll all have to wait and see what comes of this deliberation, but it's an appealing option at the very least.

3. Do you see any aesthetic/philosophical commonalities between Grant Morrison and Daniel Clowes? ( I only ask because it has often served me well--or at least entertained me--to think of two artists I particularly like in juxtaposition)

Hmmm. Tricky one. On a basic aesthetic level their work is so different that it's sometimes hard to trace the links that are probably there between elements of their work, but that's not to say that it's not worth trying!

So, erm, here we go:

Most of Morrison's writing rattles along in a state of permanently heightened excitement, while even the more fantastic parts of Clowes' work maintain a muted, quiet tone throughout, even when the events he depicts are very strange indeed. This is indicative not only of the different environments in which their work is created (the monthly serial format vs the released when it's done world of alt comics), but also, I think of the way that both artists approach one of the themes that they share -- that of the outsider in society (or should that be the outsider in a society of outsiders?).

Morrison's characters tend to be dreamers and fantasists who get drawn into their fantasy (or, quite often, someone else's!), and his storytelling style reflects this in its pop-tastic and sometimes disorienting machinations. Clowes' characters on the other hand tend to start off in a world gone weird, and stay there until the end of the story, something that his static art style plays off of quite nicely. There's quite a lot you could do with this dichotomy, mostly involving the many, many points where it doesn't hold up, and the even more plentiful areas of overlap between these two ideas, but I'd really need to think about it a bit more before I comment further.

Aside from that I could probably find a couple of other areas of discussion, but the only one that comes to mind immediately is the treatment of authorship in their respective works, particularly the way that Morrison presents himself in Animal Man as a character who seems all-powerful but is actually open to outside forces vs the rigidly powerless showing Clowes gives himself in Ghost World. Actually, this can probably be tied into my previous points in a couple of fun ways, so there you go!

4. How do you feel about the Jacobites?

I'm somewhat ashamed to say that my grasp of this chunk of history is wonky at best, and that even though my Scottish Lit classes did get into the whole Jacobite rebellion thing at least a little bit, I'm not confident enough to even pretend that I have an interesting answer to this question.

I dunno... I'm pretty embarrassed by how little I know about this sort of stuff so I'm going to move on to the next question now in the hope of sparing my blushes.

5. What are your favourite breakfast foods?

I used to be a devote of any breakfast cereal that was coated in sugar, but somewhat alarmingly my tastes seem to be mellowing these days. I've lately developed a deep love of Raisin Wheats and, god help me, Fruit and Fiber, though I still like to eat Ricicles and the like now and then.

I wont get into that Pop Tart obsession I developed a couple of years ago though. My teeth ache just thinking about it!

2005-01-28T17:34:00.000Z

To Hell With Good Intentions

A little glimpse of what I was doing with myself during my absence from blogging: the first page of The New Testament, a six page comic strip that was drawn by the mighty Tim Twelves for the second Commercial Suicide anthology.

I don't normally write in the bratty and bombastic register I used for that strip, but it was great fun to do so. I was trying to riff on Frank Miller and Chris Morris while also having a little joke at the expense of some of Grant Morrison's favourite story ideas. I think the script came out okay, but it's Twelves who deserves most of the credit for this one. Some of the later pages are practically exploding with verbal and visual information, and his linework perfectly conveys the sense of grotesque media overload that I'd was aiming for when I wrote the damned comic in the first place.

The other thing about this comic is that it was written over a couple of dark, rainy days to the sound of all three Mclusky albums on repeat. Since then the band have split up, which is a shame, as the delirious mixture of noise-rock and crabby playground vitriol that was their speciality was pretty much the perfect soundtrack for those days where you find yourself regressing to teenage angst-ville. Sometimes there's nothing like a bit of spikey humour and thrashing punk rock to bring you back to reality, y'know?

Well, that's me done for the day. I'll write more tomorrow if I have time, but right now I need to get ready to go out tonight!

2005-01-28T15:17:00.000Z

Deal With It

I think it's about time to get back into this blogging game. After all, it's been a while, and... I really need to write something other than the one paragraph book reviews that I do for my work. I mean... I might as well be answering crossword puzzles for all the fun I get out of that (and man do I ever hate crossword puzzles).

There were any number of minor technical and personal reasons for my prolonged absence, and I can't imagine that many people still check this place, but none of that really matters, so fuck it.

Anyways, from now on I'll be writing about comics here rather than on Insult To Injury. One of the problems I was having last time I tired this was that I found it really difficult to separate my thoughts on the comics I was reading from my thoughts on, y'know, the rest of the pop culture garbage I consume.

But, erm, this post is sounding a little glummer than I wanted it to so I'm going to finish it off now.

Watch this space.

2004-08-29T18:54:00.000+01:00

Sad But True

Sometimes it takes a comic book as exciting as Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's We3 to get me comics-blogging again.

Actually, there's really nothing particularly sad about that -- if you're going to write about comics, you might as well write about good comics, y'know? And hell, anything that motivates me to write that much nonsense gets a big thumbs up from me any day of the week!

2004-08-28T19:19:00.000+01:00

"I'm not swaying darling, I'm dancing -- there's a difference"

I highly recommend that you go download the new Pixies recording of 'Ain't That Pretty At All' that's available on Fluxblog right now if you haven't done so already. As Matthew notes, it sounds exactly like an old school Pixies tune, but it does so without coming on like a dull re-tread -- needless to say I love it!

But you know what? For all that 'Ain't That Pretty At All' is a better showcase for what made the band so damned great in the first place (Deal's cool as fuck bass/vocal lines bouncing off of Black's dementia and Santiago's bizarre surf-punk leads, etc*), 'Bam Thwok' is still way more fun.

It's a fuzzy, repetitive little number, for sure, but that's part of its charm. From the first line onwards the lyrics are almost savant-like in their simplistic zeal:

"I can hear the buzz and modulations of the universe, but you're the first to make me feel it!"

This is brilliant stuff, an absurd, cosmic statement of joyous intent that is both stupid and vital at the same time. The music follows suit as best as it can, with both Black and Deal booming openly and unevenly over the noise they're making. It's weird, silly fun, and by the time they're brashly announcing that they love both the universe and all the listeners, I'm just completely there, y'know? It's an odd little pop-gem that is buzzes with beatific goodwill, like the sonic equivalent of Mike Allred's Madman comics or something.

Writing this now I am reminded of what I left out of my original analysis of what made the Pixies great -- their ability to create weird little pop-rock songs that you wanted to listen to again and again and again. 'Bam Thwok' is one of those songs, for me at least, and right now that's more than enough.

*I'm not trying to dis David Lovering here by the way -- he's a good drummer, but when I think of the Pixies it's not the percussion that I think of first, y'know? Maybe that's my bad, maybe it's not, but either way it's true. **

**I get the feeling that I've ripped someone off (S/FJ maybe?) in my description of the Pixies' sound, but I'm not sure. Feel free to tell me what I'm riffing on here, dear readers!

2004-07-24T10:59:00.000+01:00

Shake It!

How the hell can it still do this? How, after almost a year of constant over-exposure, can it still make me want to dance in the middle of a busy shopping centre. Why, when I hear it down the shops or in a club, do I still smile like that?

Beyonce's 'Crazy In Love' ladies and gentlemen -- still doing it for me one year on! Why? Because it's a damned good pop song, that's why! This has been today's statement of the obvious. Message ends.

2004-07-23T14:42:00.000+01:00

Quote Vs Quote

"A wise man told me don't argue with fools/ Cause people from a distance can't tell who is who"

(from 'Takeover', by Jay-Z)

"If you're not willing to take an artistic risk because you're afraid of looking like an idiot then you're even more of an idiot!"

(also from Conversation #1, by James Kochalka and Craig Thompson)

Fight!!

Truthully, though, I'm not that bothered about looking like an idiot. I've spent most of my life being an arse, so lets be honest, I'm used to it. But at the same time, there are some arguments that frustrate the hell out of me even when I'm pretty sure I'm making sense, so I guess I can kinda dig where Jay-Z is coming from on this one.

More later!

2004-07-17T22:34:00.000+01:00

COOK THE DOCTOR!

Have I ever mentioned the fact that we have a shop Dalek before? God knows why, but we do. The metallic bugger's even recommending books these days, as you may be able to tell from the above photo. Yeah, it's recommending a cookery book right now. You got a problem with that? Didn't think so. Anyways, I'm done with the internet for today. Time to finish off the comic book script I've been working on, do a little bit of reading, and then go to bed.

Take it easy out there!

2004-07-17T16:12:00.000+01:00

The Power Of The Sun In The Palm Of My Hand

I thoroughly enjoyed Spider-Man 2 on the whole, but boy did bits of it ever fall flat. And when I say "flat" here you can be damn sure I mean Flat Stanley flat.

Oh yes, there are quite a few bad things about this very entertaining movie. The speeches, for one thing, could've done with a bit of work. This Peiratikos post by Steven nails this point perfectly -- the movie gets its thematic points across better when the characters don't spell them out for us in grotesquly clumsy detail (Aunt May, I'm looking at you here!). Why in a movie with so much good storytelling in it do such wonky elements exist? I honestly can't fathom it out! Uncle Ben's ghost is another offender. Again, there was no need for this clunky, clunky scene. At least the jesus christ pose scene was funny (Toby Maguire's gurning face cracked me up, I'll admit). This scene... god, it was just painful.

As for the romance plot... well, it was fine in and of itself, but I just don't think that either Toby Maguire or Kirsten Dunst really work in their respective roles here, and I find the scenes they're supposed to carry between them really, really uniteresting as a result of this. Peter Parker may be a dork, but why does he look like he's about to drip right off the screen in this film? And as for Mary Jane, well, she's a little bit too sleepy for me I'm afraid!

The lack of quippage was another weak spot for me. Sure, there were one or two good quips in there, but "one or two" doesn't really cut it. I know that you cant fit as much dialogue into an action scene in a movie as you can in a comic (especially not when you go for the high-octain style of action that Raimi and co have went for here), but I guess this really comes under my "Peter Parker is a bit too drippy here" complaint.

But as much as these elements stink up the place, the good bits are definitely good enough to make up for it.

Doc Ock, for one thing, was spectacular. Alfred Molina puts in a damned good turn here; his Octavious seems interesting enough, and when he turns into a scenery chewing villain, you can consider me officially fucking happy! The filmmakers do an absolutely amazing job of translating this character to the screen, and the tentacles were deeply, deeply menacing and "real" looking. Cartoony as they may be, there's a threatening solidity and gravity to them here that scared the crap outta me. The scene in the hospital where Doc Ock wakes up is case in point -- it's just superbly handled, and is exactly what you were hoping for when you thought of Sam Raimi doing a big budget superhero movie. It's nasty, visceral, and completely OTT, just as it should be.

In fact, the special effects in general were pretty good. As in the first movie, the SFX flit back and forth between looking "real" and looking like really good SFX. Needless to say, I'm largely sold on them regardless of where they fall in this set up. The fight scenes look very, erm, fighty and intense, while the shots of Spider-Man swinging around town are very bit as joyous as they should be.

Another thing I really like about the movie is the way that it fearlessly shifts tone at the drop of the world's most figurative hat. Like the first scene with Peter's landlord in it -- the doorway to his room is like the doorway to some other movie! Or the way they have the little lady playing/singing "Spider-Man, Spider-Man/ Does whatever a spider can" -- what the hell?! Where did that come from?

My personal favourtie comedy scene is the one with a fully costumed Spider-Man in the lift... the amount of time that scene goes on for... man, it's just perfect! The obligatory Bruce Campbell cameo was pretty damned funny too. But then, I would say that, because I kinda recon he's the man, so maybe you shouldn't pay too much attention to what I say on this point.

J. Jonah Jameson, on the other hand, is undeniably spectacular in this movie. Does J.K. Simmons ever look and act like he's been mysteriously transported straight from the pages of a comic book and onto the screen or what?! Simmons' comedy contribution to this film is so big that it deserves a seperate post all to itself, but I don't have the time for that right now, so I guess this mention will have to do for now. The fact that Ted Raimi is one of his comic foils doesn't hurt matters either... damn, but I love this stuff. In fact, come to think of it, it's the less-prominent characters that truly sell this movie for me. Take the landlord's daughter, for example. She's the star of the movie's weirdest scene, and provides a hint of romance that, to me, is far more interesting than any of the Parker/Mary Jane interaction, despite her extremely limited screentime.

Anyway, that's enough of that for now. Take care out there y'all!

2004-07-15T10:48:00.000+01:00

Don't make me use my stuff on ya, baby!

It's true that Bubba-Ho-Tep would probably have been a better movie if it was either more serious or less serious than it acutally is. It's far too sad and slowly paced to work as a full-on goofball comedy, but too much of a silly B-movie to work as a serious bit of poetic fantasy.

However far from perfect the actual finished version of the movie may be, it still has much to recommend it -- one glance at a summary of the film's plot ought to tell you that!

Here's one I stole from the back of the box:

"Mud Creek, Texas, is about to get all shook up. when mysterious deaths plague the Shady Rest retirement home, it's up to an aging, cantankerous "Elvis" (Bruce Campbell), and a a decripit--and black--"JFK" (Ossie Davis) to defeat a 3,000-year-old mummy with a penchant for sucking human souls! Can the king show the world that he can still take care of business?"

Now obviously the above summary wins bonus points from me for including the word "cantankerous" and the name "Bruce Campbell" in the same sentence, but even without those two elements this sound like exactly the sort of stupid shit that I love. And the movie works for me on that level, pretty much. Watching a performer as physical as Campbell rain himself in while playing an aged Elvis is quite wonderful, and lends the action scenes a certain special quality that far outstrips their budget. He's also not half bad at handling the darker material -- watching this old guy try to find a bit of dignity for himself is both amusing and affecting at the same time... it's just the rest of the movie that doesn't quite maintain this balance!

Being, as I am, a big Bruce Campbell fan and a lover of weird little stories like this, I enjoyed Bubba-Ho-Tep a lot. Its charms are distinctly low-key, but all the more endearing for it.

Tonight -- Spider-Man 2!

2004-07-15T10:24:00.000+01:00

Shake It Off

Hey, howsit going? Long time no see. Enough with the cliches -- here are my answers to a few rather odd questions. This quiz via David Fiore, among others.

--What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

Total isolation, baby.

--Where would you like to live?

In my own personal version of Legoland. Failing that, the West End of Glasgow would do just nicely.

--What is your idea of earthly happiness?

Probably some sort of massive party with everyone I love.

--To what faults do you feel most indulgent?

Laziness and vanity.

--Who are your favorite heroes of fiction?

Cliff Steele, Leopold Bloom, Donnie Darko and Alec MacGarry. Flex Mentallo too, now that I think about it.

--Who are your favorite characters in history?

Oscar Wilde, Hugo Ball, Rosa Parks and Jo Ann Robinson.

--Who are your favorite heroines in real life?

PJ Harvey and the members of Sleater-Kinney.

--Who are your favorite heroines of fiction?

Emma Frost and Willow Rosenberg. Also, Enid and Rebecca from Ghost World.

--Your favorite painter?

I like quite a bit of Dali's early work (yeah, I know -- it's a crushingly boring choice, but my knowledge of art is terrible!)

--Your favorite musician?

Frank Black when he's playing with the Pixies.

--The quality you most admire in a man?

Compassion, though it helps if it's tempered with an absurd sense of humour.

--The quality you most admire in a woman?

The same.

(Given my enthusiasm for these traits in men, women, and works of art alike, is it any wonder that I love the Morrison/Case Doom Patrol more than almost anything else?)

--Your favorite virtue?

I'm not sure how to answer this in the light of my responses to the last two questions, so I'll just say kindness and move on.

--Your favorite occupation?

Goat herder.

--Who would you have liked to be?

Jimmy "Slim-Jim" Jameson, the world's most famous goat herder. In all seriousness though, I wouldn’t really want to be anybody else. Cos if I was, then I wouldn't get whatever the supposed benefits of being this other person would be, because I'd no longer be me, would I?

Also -- I kinda like being me, sad as that may seem.

--Your most marked characteristic?

My randomness. That, and my huge ego.

--What do you most value in your friends?

The conversation. It's also kinda handy that they don't freak out when I consume obscene amounts of sugar.

--What is your principle defect?

Aside from my copious sugar-consumption, that would have to be my tendency to turn inward at every opportunity.

--What is your dream of happiness?

It’s probably the same party scenario I described when asked about my earthly idea of happiness, except that since this is a dream I’d like the party to be perpetual.

--What to your mind would be the greatest of misfortunes?

Bono, Sting and David Gray teaming up to make a record together. I only say this to avoid writing some crushingly grim answer to the above question -- seriousness, it seems to me, is not always a virtue.

--What would you like to be?

Way smarter and more sensitive than I am.

--In what country would you like to live?

Truthfully, I’m not that bothered. I’d like to live in America briefly, but in the end I’m fairly happy right here in sun-scorched Scotland.

--What is your favorite color?

Blue.

--What is your favorite flower?

Never been much of a flower person.

--What is your favorite bird?

Never been much of a bird person either, but I once had a pet Finch that was quite cute.

--Who are your favorite prose writers?

Paul Auster, J.L. Borges, James Joyce, Flann O’Brien and the wobbly but brilliant Philip K. Dick.

--Who are your favorite poets?

William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Edwin Morgan and Allen Ginsberg.

--Who are your heroes in real life?

Shouldn't this question have been sequenced with the other "hero/heroine" questions? Ach well -- I like local boys with a good line in bullshit, so Grant Morrison'll do for an answer here.

--What are your favorite names?

Judging from my various attempts at writing fiction, the names Dan and Lanna seem to be favourites of mine.

--What is it you most dislike?

The fact that the wealth and comfort in the world is so fucking unevenly distributed (good god I'm getting ernest and angry here!).

--What historical figures do you most despise?

Pretty much any dictator you care to mention. Also, Maggie Thatcher.

--What event in military history do you most admire?

Piss off!

--What reform do you most admire?

Fucked if I know.

--What natural gift would you most like to possess?

I'd like to have a totally foolproof metabolism so that I could eat what I wanted to without worrying. Like, ever.

--How would you like to die?

I’d really rather not.

--What is your present state of mind?

Is silliness a state of mind? If so, then there’s your answer!

--What is your motto?

"Being clever's a fine thing, but sometimes a boy just needs to get out of the house and meet some girls."

Admittedly, this motto would need some serious reconsideration should I ever find myself feeling strong bi-curious urges, but it’ll do for now.

2004-06-14T16:49:00.000+01:00

A Brief History Of Time

On the whole, reaction to the latest Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, seems to split very neatly into two distinct groups.

The first group consists of those who like this movie less than the first two because it moves too quickly, fails to explain a couple of plot elements properly, and doesn't do enough to build up the idea that Sirius Black is a serious threat.

The second group is made up of folk who reckon this movie blows the pants off of the previous two because, y'know, it actually moves at all!

As you may have guessed from my brief summary of these two positions, I fall firmly into the later camp. I've read the first four Harry Potter novels, and will most likely get around to reading the fifth one soon (perhaps when it comes out in paperback next month), and hey -- I enjoy them. J.K. Rowling certainly isn't a very exciting prose stylist, but I find her characters to be consistantly charming and her plots to be deeply compelling, so I have a fair amount of time for her creations, despite my slight bafflement as to why this particular series of kids novels has taken off in such a big way.

Anyways, getting back to the movies, I've always wanted to like the cinematic adaptations of the Harry Potter series more than I actually have. It seemed to me that since I wasn't particularly attatched to Rowling's prose, a movie version of the novels would be perfect for me, but alas, I found the first two films to be fairly sluggish on the whole. Don't get me wrong -- they were entertaining, in a quaint sort of way, but they never really felt like they had much energy to them. It seemed to me that the people involved in making the movies were trying really hard to make Hogwarts feel like a very real and enchanting place and largely failing, rather than focussing on the plot.

Thankfully, the plot is about all you get in this third film. Most of the background characters are pushed even further into the background, but that's okay, because after the slightly wonky sub-Roald Dahl opening, this film is just plain great fun. It's an old fashioned British kids adventure, no more, no less, and as such I enjoyed it hugely.

I don't have the time to get into it in any more detail right now, but this Barbelith thread is, on balance, pretty on the money with regards to the relative ups and downs this film, so if you want a more in depth discussion of the film, I'd recommend that as a good starting place.

2004-06-13T18:39:00.000+01:00

Leviathan

What the hell is this?, I hear you ask. Well, quite simply, it's an interview with cartoonist John Cei Douglas conducted by yours truly. Enjoy!

2004-06-11T22:17:00.000+01:00

Scratch Mix Vivaldi

"I've been doing a great deal of thinking, and what I've come to is this: amid all the bangs and the drama and the grand passions, it's kindness and just ordinary goodness that stands out in the end."

(from issue #6 of the third volume of the Invisibles, by Grant Morrison)

"They say that 'time assuages,'--
Time never did assuage;
An actual suffering strengthens,
As sinews do, with age.

Time is a test of trouble,
But not a remedy.
If such it prove, it proves too
There was no malady."

(Emily Dickinson)

"Come night, I'm gonna step outside
Take a walk, I'm gonna clear my mind
The radio, still playing our song
You got me jumping like a cat on the wall"

(from 'Cat on the Wall', by PJ Harvey)

"As we strut, skip the line
Through the glass window glance
We look fine, right on time
As we step in the place the nursery's crunk we've come to play"

(from 'Bowtie', by Outkast)

"With a ragged diamond
of shattering plate-glass
a young man and his girl
are falling backwards into a shop-window.
The young man's face is bristling with fragments of glass
and the girl's leg has caught
on the broken window
and spurts arterial blood
over her wet look coat.
Their arms are starfished out
braced for impact,
their faces show surprise, shock,
and the beginnings of pain.
The two youth's who have pushed them
are about to complete the operation
reaching into the window
to loot what they can smartly.
Their faces show no expression.
It is a sharp clear night
in Sauchiehall Street.
In the background two drivers
keep their eyes on the road."

('Glasgow 5 March 1971', by Edwin Morgan)

"They play the radio in my dreams
Takes me back to when I was 17
Dancing in circles on the kitchen floor
I'll play this song 'til I can't take anymore"

(from 'Cat on the Wall', by PJ Harvey)

2004-06-11T22:11:00.000+01:00

"We're not going to war with you this time. No guns, no bodies. This is nothing you'd understand."

I've been re-reading Grant Morrison's messy, messy comic book series the Invisibles this week, and it's interesting, because much as I love its tangled, fascinating cosmology*, it's becomming clear to me that so much of the book's appeal the first time I read it was in the little romantic moments where the characters sit around talking about how they want to change the world, or about whatever weird experiences they've had. There are better Grant Morrison comics, but... I still have a big place in my heart for the Invisibles, probably because I read it at just the right time in my life. It tuned into a lot of what I was feeling at the time -- that sense of almost infinite possibility coupled with a blooming understanding of the complexity of the world that hit me towards the end of high school -- and even reading it today, fully aware of its faults and strengths as a series, I still get a bit of that feeling off of it. The world still seems just as, big, frightening, and full of potential as it always has. "Who's for a knees up?"

*Does anyone else remember when I wrote about the Invisibles as abstract-prop? I should get back to that idea sometime!

2004-06-11T21:57:00.000+01:00

Recommendation

Stereo Sanctity -- a great new music blog by one of Barbelith's more interesting denizens. Go check it out.

2004-06-11T18:13:00.000+01:00

Good Things

Well, it looks like I managed to get myself a pretty good English degree after all! That's right folks, the results are in, and I didn't fuck-up -- woo-hoo! On the whole, I feel like I gained a fair amount of worthwhile knowledge during my time as an English Lit student, but I'm really enjoying reading on my own timetable at the moment so I think that's me done with academia, for the time being at least. Maybe I'll be driven to do a post grad when the "real world" starts to drive me batshit crazy, but until then I'm outta there!

As to what am I up to in the here and now, well, I'm currently working irregular hours at Ottakars bookstore, and can also be found putting together vague plans to take over the world some time with my friends in between my clumsy attempts to write my first novel. Basically, I'm having a blast right now, despite the unpleasant summer cold I seem to be coming down with!

On the blogging front, I wrote a pretty good post about Daniel Clowes' Eightball for Insult to Injury today, and I'll be writing about the latest Harry potter movie here some time over the next couple of days, and you should definitely look out for that if you're interested.

Take care y'all!

2004-06-09T09:49:00.000+01:00

This Man Will Not Hang

God, I really need to get back into the habit of blogging regularly.

More later.

2004-06-01T12:41:00.000+01:00

Zatoichi

I really wish I had something insightful to say about this samurai movie, because I certainly enjoyed it a whole lot. Alas, though -- I was too busy wondering how Takeshi Kitano and crew were pulling off this bizarre mix of slapstick comedy, gory (if deliberately artificial) violence, and small scale character moments to analyse the film too deeply. I am, however, very sure that it is a masterfully made movie; it doesn't sound or even feel like it should work, but it does. Weirdly enough, I think that one of the film's more incongruous elements (the little rhythmic comedy sections that punctuate the plot) may somehow hold it together -- no matter how grim it gets, there's this baseline of silliness moving things along, and the way that this pays off in that final celebratory dance scene is most satisfying. To be honest with you, I'm not sure that there is that much too it beyond the surface, but that's no bad thing in this case -- it's a fine story brilliantly told, and I've got plenty of room for that.

More on this subject when I've seen the movie again!

2004-05-31T17:46:00.000+01:00

Mmmmmmmm... Refreshing

The city breathing
The people churning
The convesating
The price is -- what?

The conversating
This place is heaven
I put on lipstick
The price is -- what?

Life makes echoes
If you see them
Life makes echoes

Come together
Come together
Come together
Come together

(from 'Echoes', by the Rapture)

Man, I love this song. It's not the best track on the album it shares a name with (that'd be either 'I Need Your Love' or 'Olio' by my reckoning), but it's damn fine all the same. It's like they stole the vocal line from PIL's 'Careering', sped it up a bit, and wrapped it in an urgent but still ass-shaking rock track for good measure. There's something on edge, almost hysterical, about the song (particularly during the frantic "Come together" section), but I still kinda want to dance like a fool to most of the song -- this is an odd combination, but one that I, personally, enjoy the hell out of. Off to re-listen to the song now -- wheeeeeeeee!

2004-05-27T17:03:00.000+01:00

Mclusky -- '1965 And All That'

It occurs to me that in my two recent posts about this band I didn't once clarify exactly why I like their lyrics. To state it bluntly, I have a silly and possibly very immature sense of humour, and as such Mclusky are perfect for me. Their best songs have a genuinely witty sort of childish absurdity to them that I find almost irresistible. Sometimes, however, I also think they hit on something a little bit more important than that.

'1965 And All That' is one such example. This is not so much an anti-war song as it is a disgusted, bewildered spit-ball hocked directly at rhetoric with which people attempt to present the mass loss of human life as being somehow acceptable.

"Come on out and count the dead/ I think we've got a scrabble score/ Keep your killing clean my love/ Just keep your killing clean" sneers Andy Falkous over a a wall of stuttering bass and sawing guitar noise. Nuanced critique is not on the menu here, and neither is satire, but that's okay -- in fact, the song is all the better for it. The concept of associating corpses with some sort of banal word game is offensive, but no more so than the idea of viewing the annihilation of human life as a statistic. When the song swings into its wig-out sections there is a flailing, inarticulate quality to the music that matches the sentiment behind the lyrics perfectly; how can you compose an articulate response to this sort of destruction? The humour here is not black so much as it is blackened, and it hits home hard.

2004-05-24T18:26:00.000+01:00

Morrissey -- 'The First Of The Gang To Die'

I've always felt a bit odd about Morrissey -- while I do feel very warmly about large chunks of his back catalogue (both solo and with the Smiths), I've never quite become fanatical about it. At the same time, while I can certainly find much that annoys me in his musical output, I've never felt the urge to set him on fire either. Basically then, I like a lot of the man's work, but have been moved to either devotion or hate by him, unlike many others. I don't say this to assert some sort of superiority over people who get more worked up by him, by the way -- I only mention this so that the following comments have some sort of context.

Anyway, while I've only heard about half of his latest album You Are the Quarry, what I have heard has largely failed to impress me so far. The problem is not that songs such as 'America Is Not The World' and 'Irish Blood English Heart' are strained, but rather that such obvious effort fails to yield anything with much bite to it.

'The First Of The Gang To Die' is the one track from the album that I've really wanted to re-listen to as yet, and while it's definitely not subtle stuff, it's most certainly memorable and effective. This is classic Morrissey -- all exaggerated romance and odd humour. And it's not simply a re-treading of old ground either. Here the tragedy and silliness finds a relatively new setting; this song is widely being read as Morrissey's tip of the hat to his apparently massive Hispanic fanbase, and its sunny gang drama feels striking and unusual, like most of Morrissey's best work. The music matches up perfectly with the words here; not quite whimsical, not quite swaggering, it's good pop-rock'n'roll with an atmosphere to match the story. Shame the rest of what I've heard of the new record hasn't been quite this good. Ah well...

2004-05-24T18:07:00.000+01:00

Restoring Public Confidence Since 1903

Today I wrote a song. It's called 'Maeve Binchy Is Not The World', and its lyrics are as follows:

Maeve Binchy your head's too big
Because Maeve Binchy, your right hand is too big
And I love you
I just wish you'd stay where you is

Maeve Binchy, the novelist of the free, they said
And of opportunity, in a just and a truthful way
But where the main character is never black, green haired or gay
And until that day
You've got nothing to say to me, to help me believe

Maeve Binchy, she brought you the humbug
Well Maeve Binchy you know where you can shove your humbug
And don't you wonder why in the library they say
"Hey you big humbugging pig
You humbugging pig, you humbugging pig"

Steely Blue eyes with no love in them scan the shelf
And a humourless smile, with no warmth within, greets the reader
And I, I have got nothing, to offer you
No-no-no-no-no
Just this heart deep and true
Which you say you don't need

See with your eyes, touch with your hands, please
Write with your pen, know in your soul, please
For haven't you me with you now?
And I love you, I love you, I love you
And I love you, I love you, I love you

Bet you can't wait to hear the music, eh?

2004-05-21T17:52:00.000+01:00

And If You Believe/ They Put A Man On The Moon

This is funny and wrong in equal measure. Make of it what you will.

2004-05-21T17:42:00.000+01:00

Harsh And Ashamed

I reviewed the first issue Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart's excellent new comic book series Seaguy for Insult to Injury today. I also wrote this brief follow-up post, if you're interested. And in this instance you really, really should be -- Seaguy is ace; go buy issue #1 now if you haven't already done so. Now I say!

2004-05-19T21:29:00.000+01:00

Dumb -- Dumbest -- Dumbo

Warning: Van Helsing is even dumber than you think it is! I like stupid, entertaining movies, but this movie was quite simply too stupid to be fun for more than about ten minutes.

Weirdly enough, I think Seth's Van Helsing drinking game probably tells you more about the movie than any review/summary I've seen. The only problem with it is that it makes the film sound better than it actually is. Ah well...

That's me for tonight, folks -- take it easy, and I'll see y'all later!

2004-05-19T20:54:00.000+01:00

Posted For Hoots And Grins

In case anyone ever wondered what the hell I look like (which you almost certainly didn't, but bear with me here), here's a picture of me looking slightly tired at an ungodly hour in the morning some time last year:

And because I don't feel like that one makes me look quite silly enough, here's one of a very sober me looking slightly sozzled last Halloween:

The point of all this? Well, obviously I'm in a weird, exhibitionist sort of mood right now, but aside from that, I dunno... I guess I'm always just amused when I see what people who I know on the internet look like. Somehow the face never matches up with the text voice, and I, personally, find that fascinating.

2004-05-19T18:12:00.000+01:00

The Wonders of Snail-Mail

Put the pen
To the paper
Press the envelope
With my scent
Can't you see
In my handwriting
The curve of my g?
The longing
Oh

Who is left that
Writes these days?
You and me
We'll be different
Take the cap
Off your pen
Wet the envelope
Lick and lick it
Oh

I need you
The time is running out
Oh baby
Can't you hear me call?

It turns me on
To imagine
Your blue eyes
On my words
Your beautiful pen
Take the cap off
Give me a sign and I'd come running

Oh
It's you
I want you

Those are the lyrics to PJ Harvey's 'The Letter', by the way. As a single, I like this song a lot -- it's not the best PJ Harvey tune ever or anything, but it is a good one, and accessible with it. It's also not as immediate as something like 'Good Fortune', but from what I've heard of it, this album is a little less shiny than that one, so it only seems fair that its lead single should reflect this. The central guitar/vocal riff is pretty repetitive, but in a good way -- it's insistent, and it stays with you -- and the song is pretty damned hot too. Writing down the 'oh's like I have above doesn't really convey quite how, y'know, full of "longing" they actually sound -- which is pretty funny given the content of the lyrics! Which brings up the question of whether or not handwritten 'oh's would be any hotter or more urgent? Depends on the handwriting and your relationship with the person it belongs to I guess. Which is what's awesome about the lyrics, in a way: being a commercially released rock song, it's in the public realm, but it's all about private, individual communication. "Who is left that/ Writes these days?/ You and me/ We'll be different" -- this hits on such a wonderfully common feeling of heightened intimacy. Of course we'll be different when we write (or, for that matter, talk) to one and other. Wont everyone? There's a sense of desperation here, both in the music (those 'oh's are as anxious as they are lusty), and in the lyrics. The lines "I need you/ The time is running out/ Oh baby/ Can't you hear me call?", in particular, are tinged with a deep urgency, and it's this (mixed with the aforementioned sexiness) that makes the song so fucking compelling.

All in all then, well... I love the hell out of it! But then, you knew I would, right?

I'm still having trouble finding full versions of most of the songs from the new PJ Harvey album, though. What -- you mean I'm actually going to have to wait till it comes out? What's that all about?

2004-05-16T23:50:00.000+01:00

The Cult Starts Here

Retraction time: y'know how I finished my last post off by claiming that the song 'Slay!' from Mclusky's new album The Difference Between You And Me Is That I'm Not On Fire isn't very good? Well, I've actually kind of changed my mind on that one. At first I thought the song was just another fairly dull take on the loud/quiet formula (to be honest, I came very close to using the line "blah-blah-Slint-cakes" in my last post), but now... well, I think the band explore the range of this dynamic in a way that is high-contrast enough to make it interesting, and the riff in the verse has revealed itself to be kinda catchy after repeated listens, so fuck it -- I was wrong about this one!

The Difference Between You And Me Is That I'm Not On Fire is kind of a grower, I think. It's not as immediate as either of their previous albums, but the monumental sludge of this record is every bit as compelling as their earlier wild flailings once you get into it. Songs like 'Without MSG I Am Nothing' and 'You Should Be Ashamed Seamus' are definite keepers, and there are also a couple of tracks where the band try something a little cleaner to great effect; the wonky indie-pop of 'She Will Only Bring You Happiness' and the cartoon western soundtrack of 'Forget About Him I'm Mint' both sound like nothing else the band has ever done, and are all the better for it. The latter track is even fleshed out by a nicely woozy trumpet part for god's sake!

All in all, another fine collection of off-kilter, high-personality alt-rock then. I think personality might be the key word here -- while Mclusky aren't perfect, there's a very evident sort of character to their music that helps to distinguish them from all the other low budget nosiemakers out there. A lot of this comes down to the distinctively garbled humour that's present in Andy Falkous' singing voice and lyrics, but the music supports this demented feel perfectly throughout. The backing vocals are particularly important to this effect -- see the way they build up the strangeness of the line "Our old singer is a sex criminal" in 'She Will Bring You Only Happiness' for a perfect example of this. That line would sound weird if only one band member was singing it, but the way that it builds to the point where it's looping in and out of itself three time over just pushes it to another level or wrongness!

Anyways, enough of this bollocks -- I'm off to bed. Take care out there folks.

2004-05-14T20:01:00.000+01:00

I'm Beginning To Get The Impressions That We've Been Had

Q: Is the refrain "Our old singer is a sex criminal" from McLusky's 'She Will Only Bring You Happiness' the greatest rock lyric of all time?

A: It might well be, in an inexplicable sort of way. The song's damned good too -- classic indie-pop brought to life with an odd sort of mischievous absurdity. The above lyric should give you a fair idea of what to expect on the randomness front.

Q: Is its parent album, the equally well titled The Difference Between Me And You Is That I'm Not On Fire, any good then?

A: Yeah -- like their previous two albums, its uneven, but there are enough tracks full of wailing, rumbling, clanging noise-pop and mean bizarro humour to keep this listener happy, at the very least. My one big problem with the record: there's a song called 'Slay' on there that's just not very good, and that's a shame, because... well, I like it as a name for a nasty rock song. A stupid complaint, I know, but it's the little things that make all the difference in the end.

2004-05-14T18:14:00.000+01:00

Two Times

Heh -- here's an excerpt from an e-mail I received this time last week:

"Lightning struck the University yesterday afternoon causing the failure of a number of components across the University. The server holding your data has failed as a result."

There's a lot of lightning doing its thang in Western Scotland right now, eh?

2004-05-14T17:51:00.000+01:00

How Many Comebacks?

Graeme wasn't kidding you know -- my internet connection really was scragged by LIGHTNING!!

As a result of this bizarre incident I've been without internet access for almost a week now, and have fallen way behind in terms of e-mails, message board threads and blog posts. I hope you'll all forgive me if I've seemed to have been giving you the silent treatment lately, either publicly or privately -- it wasn't deliberate, honest! Barring any more lightning strikes, things should return to normal shortly. Take care in the meantime!

2004-05-06T16:12:00.000+01:00

"I'm not killing people... my future's in television."

At least one reader has written in to take issue with my claim that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the first Charlie Kaufman script to not be a comedy. The focus of this contention? Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which, while not as dramatic as ESotSM, isn't primarily a comedy either. So what is it then? Good question -- I like to think of it as a really colourful song and dance number by Rockwell and Clooney, with some fun supporting flourishes from the other cast/crew members. I believe that Kaufman isn't too fond of the finished movie (Clooney didn't allow him on set, and re-jigged bits of the script without Kaufman's advice etc), but the things Kaufman complains about (the hollowness of the movie, mostly) are actually what I feel gives it its strength. The whole thing is this big showy routine that always leaves you wondering if there's anything going on underneath, which is just perfect for the story of Chuck Barris as presented here -- talk about form matching content!

Anyway, I think that's me done for today folks -- take care out there, and I'll speak to all of you later.

2004-05-06T15:54:00.000+01:00

Stored For Future Reference

I just want to move something I wrote in yesterday's comments out into the main body of the blog in case I want to expand upon it at some later date. It's about PJ Harvey, specifically the albums Rid of Me and To Bring You My Love. I said:

"The songs on both albums are pretty simple, but they're played with such an incredible amount of visceral theatricality that... I dunno, they just end up sounding really vivid and complex somehow."

Which seems, to me at least, to hint vaguely at something, though as I admitted right after that comment, my thinking in this area needs to be refined a little. I have the odd feeling that I'm one or two comments away from declaring that PJ Harvey's music is very "performative", which is about as insightful as pointing out that sticking your hand in a toaster isn't a terribly good idea, but hey!

2004-05-05T18:21:00.000+01:00

A Note on my Critical Style:

I'm in the middle of preparing a piece on Peter Milligan/Mike Allred's excellent X-Statix comic book for Insult to Injury right now, and it's just occured to me that I ascribe a sort of inherantly contradictory nature to at least 50% of the comics/movies/novels I write positive pieces about.

I did it when I was writing about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind earlier this week, for example. The phrase "it's both/and, not either/or" wasn't mine, but it was a neat summination of a lot of the reasons that I loved the movie. I'm going to do it again in that post about X-Statix, where I'm going to claim that it's both an ironic take on this whole superhero malarky and a really excellent superhero comic. This seems to be my main trick: I take two seemingly contradictory statements, and claim that they're not only both true, but that the fact that the work in question balances these two positions is its strength. This realization has got me wondering -- is this merely a sign of my laziness as a writer, or does this say something about about my taste in art? Or, on a slightly different note, is it indicative about what I want to see in the art I do like? I'd say that it's a mix of these three ideas, and probably a couple of others, but I'm not sure... I need to think this through a bit more. I may write more about this later, if I think of something particularly interesting to say on the matter, but this observation will do for now. It's a start, anyway.

2004-05-05T17:34:00.000+01:00

Blowing Kisses

If anyone's interested, I just posted a short review of Adrian Tomine's Optic Nerve #9 on Insult to Injury a couple of minutes ago. It's a damned fine comics, and I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't read it yet.

2004-05-05T13:23:00.000+01:00

Meet Ze Monsta

Good news everyone -- there's a new PJ Harvey album on the way!! And it's out soon. Real soon -- as in the 31st of May!

I saw PJ Harvey play at last summer's gig on the green, and god were they ever good! Sure, there were a lot of dumb bastards shouting stuff like "get your tits out" in the crowd (which was really fucking annoying, I can tell you), but Polly Jean and the band ripped through a good chunk of the Rid of Me album and it was just... perfect, really. Raw, rhythmic blues on a sun-scorched afternoon -- that's what summer's really all about, isn't it?

Right, with that burst of enthusiasm out of the way, I'm off to see if I can find any songs from the new album on slsk.

2004-05-04T11:56:00.000+01:00

The Short Version

One last thing about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind -- for now, anyway! My friend Scott McAllister came out with the following paragraph in an e-mail exchange about the movie:

"In some ways, I can't help shake the feeling that they've managed a brilliant job of making everyone think it's this sweet, romantic movie, and it's actually this terrifying psychological horror movie. Job's a good un!"

Which certainly hits on a lot of what the movie achieves, except that, as Seth has been saying in this Barbelith thread, it's both/and, not either/or!

That Barbelith thread is well worth checking out by the way. There are some good posts in there by Seth, Suedehead and others, and the whole thread's definitely worth a read if you're interested in reading other people's opinions of the movie. I know I am!

2004-05-03T00:18:00.000+01:00

A Word Of Warning

The mammoth post I just wrote about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind may be a little rough for two reasons: (1) I only just saw the movie this weekend, and (2) I'm a bit out of practice when it comes to writing about films.

Despite this fact, I hope you all enjoy it, *SPOILERS* and all, because it does represent, at the very least, a genuine attempt to figure out what the hell I made of the film!

Anyways, I'm through with being apologetic for tonight -- take care out there, and I'll speak to y'all later!

2004-05-03T00:12:00.000+01:00

You Watched It -- You Can't Un-Watch it!

Forget what you've heard -- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a pretty simple movie after all! Sure, the labyrinthine rush through memory that makes up the film's middle section is wonderfully disorienting, but when it comes down to it this is a movie that deals with one or two simple themes in a wonderfully complex way.

The movie's central conceit is a pretty straightforward one, really: Joel Barish (Carrey) finds out that Clementine (Winslet) has had their relationship erased from her memory and, devastated, he decides to do the same. What separates this from your average Philip K. Dick adaptation is (surprise suprise!) the execution. Carey and Winslet are simply, but effectively, employed against type (he's introverted, she's a big bundle of energy, yadda yadda yadda), and both actors put in stunning performances, walking the movie's well observed tightrope of circular bleakness and hopeful romance with skill that shouldn't surprise anyone who has really paid attention to their previous work. Director Michele Gondry achieves the perfect balance between visual fancy and emotional realism, and writer Charlie Kaufman turns one of his most ingeniously structured scripts yet. Ah, the structure... it really is almost perfect you know, but we'll come back to all of this a minute.

First I've got a gripe about some of the reviews people have written for this film: one of the most common comments seems to be that, unlike Kaufman's other work, this story had heart rather than just cool ideas and a complex structure. This, by the way, is rubbish: in Kaufman's writing, the gimmicks serve the characters, not vice versa. The portal in Being John Malkovich becomes as a focal point for the fucked-up disappointments and desires of the three main characters; the meta trickery of Adaptation wasn't a joke at the expense of Hollywood so much as a genuine attempt to cross-pollinate the worldviews of both Kaufman brothers; and so on.

The real difference between Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Kaufman's other works is this: it is the first of his scripts to not to be first and foremost a comedy. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in the dialogue: gone is the highly stylized verbiage of BJM or the witty back and forth of Adaptation -- the more dramatic moments of the later movie are allowed to bloom fully here into something strange and interesting. This isn't to say that the movie is without humour, though. Gondry brings all of the dreamy lo-fi inventiveness of his pop-promo work to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and in doing so he conjures up moments of visual illusionism both rib-tickling and emotionally loaded. The scenes where Joel revisits his childhood memories provide the most obviously hilarious moments in the movie, but the inspired visual lunacy that characterizes these scenes is present throughout the film; it's just that Carrey gets to ham it up more in these scenes than anywhere else that makes them seem more overtly comical, really.

Anyways, lets get back to the structure for a second, yeah? Rather fittingly, I want to talk about the film's astonishing middle section first, okay? This, I guess, is where most of the complexity of the movie lies. But at the same time, I can't help but feel that any difficulty experienced by the viewer here is utterly essential. That initial burst of disorientation is exactly right for what Joel is feeling as the process begins. This is just one area of the film that the structure is utterly essential to -- it works perfectly to keep the viewer with Joel from start to end. The other big part played by the movie's intricate design is connected to this, but also feeds back into the movie's handling of memory, particularly as it relates to other people.

Since the movie's middle section takes place in Joel's head, it is important to note that the picture of the relationship between Joel and Clementine that we see during this section of the movie is Joel's version of events, just as all of the other memories in this scene (including Clemantine's childhood recollection) are his versions of these events. This doesn't make them less interesting or necessary; quite the opposite. Memories are not important but essential precisely because of their constructed nature; they're a part of one of the primary bridges we have between our own private existences and the outside world! This is something that bounces nicely off of Clementine's "I'm not a concept" speech, one of the finest bits of dramatic writing in the movie. If this bit of dialogue sounds a little forced then that's because it is! It's clearly a little monologue Clementine has prepared for herself, but for all that it still does a very good job of pointing out how... solopsistic our perception of people we are close to can be. We make up our version of the world up even as we interact with it, and this is something that Kaufman, Gondry and co nail wonderfully in this movie. Furthermore, they do it in a pretty neat way: here, the very complexity of the film's construction becomes a part of its inherent simplicity. There's no need for lengthy monologues about the nature of memory here -- the movie dramatises this process (or at least, a version of it) in a way that is every bit as direct and powerful as you could hope for it to be.

In his review of the movie David Fiore talked a lot about predistination and acceptance, and this is where the start and the end of the movie come into play thematically, alongside the "real time" subplot that runs through the mid-section*.

Said Mr Fiore:

"As I see it, what's really at stake is this: can you accept the fact that the people we are drawn to romantically are destined never to give us the things we think we want from them? The "spots" on the mind aren't "bad experiences"--they represent bitterness and love recanted..."

To which I can only say, eeexactly! This is what the events that frame the erasing process explore so well. When, after the memory erasure process, we rush through the start of the film again, we do so with, for the first time, a head-start on Joel -- but this doesn't last long! The final section of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is nothing short of spectacular. It's a headlong rush of uncomfortable awareness for the two main characters, and, in an odd way, what it reminds me of more than anything else is Donnie Darko. Now, before anyone shouts "what the fuck", let me unpack that one a little. While I know that stylistically and thematically there's a lot separating the two movies, what it seems to me that Donnie Darko captured so well was a feeling of confusion that gradually transformed into some sort of weird mixture of knowledge and acceptance in the face of overwhelmingly deterministic forces. Something similar happens at the end of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, with Joel and Clementine facing up to the reality of how their relationship is likely to work out, and deciding to go with it anyway.

It occurs to me that the garbled theories I've just spent several paragraphs constructing may not immediately seem like the best argument in favor of the idea that this is, above all, a simple movie. But... well, lets just put it this way; the ability every one of us has to accept the distance between what we feel we need and what we know that we will end up getting from any given person is both sad and wonderful, and I can think of no more eloquent and poetic expression of this than the final looping segment of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Thank you, and good night!

*This subplot, which focuses on the technicians behind the procedure, has been picked out by some critics as being a bit weak, but I'm with David Fiore here -- I think it's essential to the movie, highlighting some of the effects of the process very nicely while setting up the devastating finale. It's also played much more for laughs than the rest of the movie, to begin with at least, but I don't think this runs contrary to my aforementioned theory that this is less of a comedy than Kaufman's other scripts. It is a subplot, after all!

2004-04-30T01:20:00.000+01:00

The Dread Phonetic

Well... that would be my exams done then, wouldn't it?

I'm in a weird place right now. I really don't place any significance on my education as a measure of my intelligence, so I don't want to make much out of the fact that I've (hopefully) just completed an honours English degree. But yet I still want to go visit a couple of high school English teachers who told my parents that I'd never manage to pass standard grade English just so I can laugh in their faces. I know this urge isn't entirely irreconcilable with my aforementioned position, but I still feel weird that I have this (admittedly quite childish) urge at all.

Ach well, enough of that garbage: hopefully I'll get back into the swing of updating this thing regularly sometime in the next week or so.

In the meantime, here are a couple of links for you:

--I really, really, love this livejournal post by Toddius -- the idea that Thomas Pynchon is secretly behind all spam mail seems bizarrely accurate to me on so many levels, and the concept of using spam as a source of character names is totally inspired.

--The defense of South Park offered up by Eppy in this post is pretty wonderful, and I wholeheartedly agree with the man! What can I say -- I know the show is deeply uneven, but I still have a certain soft spot for it, and Eppy nails why better than most anyone else.

--They're releasing Visionaries on DVD? Jesus Christ -- it's like watching the last part of the dismembered corpse of your childhood come flopping in the front door on a Tuesday afternoon! Ok, maybe it's nothing like that at all, but what the hell is going on here?!

--Anyone interested in reading an ancient interview with comic book writer Grant Morrison that was conducted by then-aspiring writer Mark Millar should go right on over to this website and download away. There's nothing particularly illuminating in there; Morrison's Morrissey-aping archness is quite amusing, but while I was oddly excited to see Morrison list Flann O'Brien as an influence, I doubt this will be a feeling shared by many other readers out there. O'Brien's dead good though, and if you've never read his work before you could do far worse than to read The Third Policeman and At Swim-Two-Birds. They're both excellent post-Joycean novels that explore (among other things) what happens when language and imagination turn in on themselves and become cancerous. Rather importantly, they're also funny as all hell; seriously people, O'Brien is one of the funniest writers I've ever read and, erm... I think I've pimped him hard enough for now so I'm just going to stop!

--ITEM! Jebni is right, this is the greatest concert review ever written!

--Being, as I am, a huge fan of both cartoonist David Muzzucchelli and of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, I've always been curious as to how the comic book adaptation of the first part of the trilogy, City of Glass, came off. After reading the various bits and bobs about the comic on the Indy Magazine website I have to say that I'm even more eager to read this particular sequential adaptation. Lucky for me the damned thing's being reprinted this year, eh? Thanks to Flat Earth for the link.

2004-04-23T13:52:00.000+01:00

The Shake Up

via a couple of different livejournal users.
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

"They dug a hole and buried her."

From The Heath Anthology of American Literature, edited by Paul Lauter.

And I'm back, again. As you may have worked out already, I've decided against whipping myself in public over my exams. The first two "exam diary" entries I wrote were pretty much the end result of the weird mood I was in at the time, but since I'm over that now it's not something that I'm going to continue with. I've only got three exams left to sit, and by this time on Wednesday afternoon I'll be done.

After then you can expect mucho postage about movies, music etc, so look out for that. In the meantime I'm away to read some 20th Century American poetry -- take care, and have fun out there y'all!

2004-04-15T17:52:00.000+01:00

Exam Diary: 15/4/04

Exam #2 was Paper 15, Literature 1640 to 1785. The topics written on were as follows: Reader-Author Relations in Dafoe -- Swift, Rochester and the Defensiveness of Satire -- The Value of Samuel Johnson as a Literary Critic.

The topic that should have been written on in place of the latter: Ideas of Nature and Society in Congreve.

Here's a little something about this morning's exam that I wrote earlier:

"So, I'm two exams down the road now -- am I really 1/4 done already? It would certainly seem so!

Today's key word is time. I really need to work on my time management skills. Today, I wrote two excellent essays (I'm not being smug here -- my answers were really, really good!) but took far too much time to do so. My last essay was written in half an hour (in a three hour exam), and was a bit messy and weak as a result. It was a bit of a bum move all round -- not only did I not leave myself with enough time, but I also chose the more complicated of the two questions I felt equipped to handle, thus compounding my initial error. There was another question which I could have written on more easily, but no, I had to go and try to write an essay about how the real value of Samuel Johnson as a literary critic lies in comparing the ideas and attitudes he expresses (which are very much of his time) with those of later critics and writers such as William Blake (on Milton and Paradise Lost), Nathaniel Hawthorne (on the romance novel), and Oscar Wilde (on whether or not writing can/should be either moral or immoral). Now this is a topic I know well, and could write a very good essay on, but I don't think that really came across in my frantic scribblings. Still, the basic outline was there, so hopefully it'll be okay. I'm sure the other questions will prop it up a bit, and I've just got to make sure I don't make this mistake again.

I'm going to be much more strict with myself in tomorrow's Renaissance Literature exam -- 15 minutes to read the questions and decide what I'm doing, 45 minutes on each question, and then 30 minutes at the end to finish all three essays off. No deviation allowed."

Well, I certainly over-used the word "questions" in that last paragraph, didn't I? Blogging be dammed, I'm off to read over some Donne right now. Hope you're all having a good time out there. Take it easy.

2004-04-15T17:38:00.000+01:00

Exam Diary: 13/4/04 -- 14/4/04

Time to bore the tears right out of your faces by making my exam experiences public methinks! It should be noted that revisions were made to the initial exam timetable I posted here that spaced the exams out a bit better and pushed the starting date forward by a couple of days.

Exam #1 was on the 13th of the month, and was Paper 18, Literature Since 1900. The topics written on were as follows: Time in Larkin, Vonnegut, and Borges -- Chaos, Order, Sterility and Violence in Conrad and Eliot -- Narrative and Dramatic Patterns vs Realism in Pinter and Kafka.

Here's what I wrote about it on the 14th:

"My first exam went pretty well, I think -- if anything, I'd actually over-revised for it. The amount I wanted to say about some of the questions felt like a hinderance to my time-management skills, but aside from that, yeah, I feel pretty good about it.

I'd completely forgotten that the most important thing in an English Lit exam (after a decent working knowledge of the texts in question of course!) is the ability to take the questions they give you and make them work for you. Putting the right spin on them to allow you to show off is the name of the game, really -- once I get that down I should be fine.

Still: one down, seven more to go. I've got one tomorrow in fact, and am thus currently occupied re-reading some choice excerpts from the work of Jonathan Swift. This would normally be a good thing, but, well... I'm rediculously fucking tired right now. As a sort of post-exam celebration I dissapeared off to West Kilbride last night with a couple of friends (cue much messing about on rainy beaches and other such silliness). Long story short: I stayed the night there and didn't get much sleep.

The good: I've packed a fuckload of revision into the last 24 hours.

The bad: I'm a completely energy-free wreck right now.

Oh well -- I'll get a good night's sleep tonight and everything will
be all right."

2004-03-29T20:38:00.000+01:00

Your Own Real Life Top 10

My current top 10 things:

1. Dueling Malkmus style (no, this joke doesn't make any more sense from the inside).
2. Listening to the Fiery Furnaces on the bus (rapidly changing scenery = key).
3. Dancing badly with people who can dance well.
4. Marlowe's Dr Faustus - god is this ever good!
5. Briefly meeting someone who claimed to be related to Peter Falk by marriage.
6. Drinking copious amounts of orange juice. Mmmmm... orange juice!
7. Downloading episodes of TV shows I've never seen before on slsk.
8. Listening to Pulp's This Is Hardcore again and realizing that hey, I do really like this album after all!
9. 'Miss Teen Wordpower', by the New Pornographers.
10. This. It's kinda obvious, but it cracks me up anyway.

This idea stolen from ilx, because there's not a single original thought in my head.

p.s.

Yeah, yeah -- I know that lists are pointless, but the purposefully vague/throwaway nature of this particular type of list feels really fun to me!

2004-03-25T18:36:00.000Z

Out Of Control

Here's a short review I wrote in work the other day (for those of you who don't know, I work in a bookstore at the weekends). I'd originally intended to write a review of the book in question that was both informative and usable, but things spiraled out of control from the first line onwards, so the book will have to sit un-reviewed on the new titles shelf for the time being.

The review:

"Love All The People, collected bits and bobs scrounged up from Bill Hicks' back pocket.

Are you that boring bastard that somehow manages to turn every conversation into a discussion of how right Bill Hicks was about everything?

Do you want to be?

If so then this is the book for you! Packed full of Hicks' rants, routines, and observations, this book is perfect research material for all of you "free thinkers" out there who like to reguritate the man's opinions at every possible opportunity. Intense stage presence and critical adoration not included."

Now, the weird thing about this review (snide and pithy as it may be) is that I don't really have any problem with Bill Hicks himself. He was very good at being both angry and funny at once, and as I jokingly hinted in the review, the man's sheer presence crackles even on CD or video tape. But yet... there is something slightly icky about the way that some people cough up his routines and opinions as unquestionable truths. And some of them can get quite carried away with it. For example, one of my friends has this story about a guy who she went out on a date with once. He was a couple of years older than her, and she'd fancied him for ages before they met at a club one night and he asked her out. So far so good, right? Well, when it came to the date itself, what did our man do but spend the entire evening talking about Bill Hicks. And we're not just talking about a guy nervously bringing up one of his favourite topics here; no, apparently this guy turned almost every single conversation into a discussion of Bill Hicks, and when they later retired back to her house he actually produced a Bill Hicks tape from his back pocket and subjected her to it in its entirety. As far as she could work it out, his entire philosophy on life was modeled on Hicks' comedy routines, with little or no deviation! In addition to making for a lousy date, this also served to put my friend off Hicks' comedy for a good two or three years (she's still not sure whether she could watch/listen to Hicks again yet).

So what are the morals of this story then? That buying wholesale into someone else's fiery individualist philosophy is bloody annoying, and that dragging dead comedians with you when you go on a date makes you less attractive to HOTT girls/boys of course! But then, you knew all of this already, didn't you?

2004-03-25T18:11:00.000Z

BLAM!

"Only a bitter little adolescent boy could confuse realism with pessimism."

(from Flex Mentallo #4 by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely and others)

"...you know, Victorian sentimentality is something we all sneer at now and find very funny... but I think people will look back at us and sneer at the way we've looked at the world, too. Because cynicism and sentimentality are just two sides of the same distortion."

(from this interview with author Paul Auster)

Sorry folks -- just compiling a couple of quotes I quite like. I've been thinking about the difference between maintaining a questioning view of the world and being a flat-out boring cynic/pessimist a lot lately.

It strikes me that this is not entirely un-related to some of the brief conversations David Fiore and I have had about Sleater-Kinney and Seaguy, where we've talked about how art, like life, can be fun while at the same time being full of tricky emotional and political stuff. Not that there's anything wrong with having something that is either entirely fun or entirely serious, but sometimes it's good to be reminded that while the world may be a complicated and frightening place, that doesn't mean it has to be a hopeless/joyless one.

This is one of the things I love the most about Sleater-Kinney's All Hands On The Bad One album; a lot of these songs tackle misogyny in popular culture head-on, but for all that this is evidently a very serious business, the band tear through these songs with a neat side-order of verbal and musical wit. The first song is called 'Ballad of a Ladyman' for god's sake -- it's not hard to work out that this is an album that is as playful as it is angry, something that is more than born out by the mixture of sunny harmonies, handclaps, and punchy pop-rock riffage with which the band embelish these songs. All Hands On The Bad One is the sound of a band who are enraged, but still confident enough to have fun while they're at it, and I like that.

2004-03-25T15:16:00.000Z

"I'm a quitter. I come from a long line of quitters. It's amazing I'm here at all."

Ah, Black Books -- the British sit-com that makes drunken logic look good! Needless to say, I love it!

I'm just saying, is all...

p.s.

Forget the Dawn of the Dead remake, Shaun of the Dead is where it's at!

2004-03-24T14:20:00.000Z

File Under "Links I May Come Back To"

A positive review of the new Courtney Love album.

(Thanks Dan!)

2004-03-24T14:19:00.000Z

Who Rocks The Party?

Cross-posted for hoots and grins:

Bringing to your attention "Joycore Comics - recommendations?" -- a Barbelith thread dedicated to fun, poppy comics!

Good suggestions that have been put forward so far:

Love & Rockets -- Some of the liveliest comics I've ever read. There's a fair bit of angst in there, but the work of both Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez is just so damned vibrant that I can't help but recommend it regardless!

Madman -- He's got a yo-yo! He fights Street-Beatniks! He's drawn by Mike Allred! Of course he's joycore!

Calvin & Hobbes -- Pretty much everyone I know loves this, even folk who normally claim that they don't like comics! It's just so damned charming, y'know?

Kill Your Boyfriend -- Mmmm... improper joycore deluxe! Sure, it's a black comedy, but man, what a rush!

Kyle Baker's a good nomination too -- he's sharp, funny, and draws real purty to boot!

Anyone else got any suggestions?

2004-03-23T17:09:00.000Z

Thinking Out Loud - Literature Since 1900

Right, so this exam, which was originally going to be my last one, has now been moved forward to April 13th. Which would make it my first exam then. Shit. Okay, what authors am I going to take on in this exam?

Hmmm... at a rough guess, the list would look something like this: Kafka, Borges, Nabokov, Eliot, Conrad, Larkin, Pinter, Orwell, Huxley. My Irish and American 20th Century Lit exams take out a lot of the other obvious candidates right away, so yeah; looks like these are the authors I'm going to have to focus on. Hmmm. That's cool, I like most of them and have something interesting to say about the others, but I still can't help thinking that maybe I should re-read a bit of Woolf, just in case things get a bit tricky during the exam itself...

2004-03-23T16:53:00.000Z

Encouraging The Overlap

Over on Insult to Injury I just stitched together a couple of other people's opinions about Grant Morrison's excellent New X-Men run and tried to pass it off as a post. Go check it out if you like that sort of thing!

2004-03-23T13:20:00.000Z

So Crazy Right Now

Here's a little pseudo-review of the new Courtney Love album that I wrote a week or so after it came out:

"Regardless of some of the harsher beatdowns it's recieved in the press, the new Courtney Love album, America's Sweetheart, sounds pretty good to me. I don't think it's particularly brilliant or anything, but it's certainly not terrible either!

So far only 'But Julian...' and 'I'll Do Anything' have really left a big impression on me... I still can't decide whether or not I like the album's lead single 'Mono' yet - I seem to go back and forth on it constantly, thinking it sounds a bit flat one minute, and pretty damned great the next. Weird...

Anyways, right now, I'm not particularly interested in how this album compares to any of the records Love made with Hole -- my main concern is how well these songs stand up on their own merit, and... well, as I said before, I like it just fine, but it's not exactly blowing me away either. I'll give it a couple more listens to see if any of it grows on me particularly, but hey - if it's just an okay album, it's just an okay album, and there's nothing wrong with that really."

And hey, whadda ya know - it has grown on me since then! Oddly, I'm still not sure whether or not I like 'Mono', but on the whole I'm pretty damned into it now - warts and all! I really think that Flyboy was on to something when he said that the record is "a distillation of the artist's public persona which captures the things which are great about them, the things which aren't so great, and the things they've been castigated for by the media (including both the previous categories and also simple media fictions)" -- yes! This is perfectly expressed in the lyrics - both the witty ones and the clunky ones - and is implicit in every cracked vocal, every scuzzed up guitar line... basically, I love it!

Anyways, to get back to the press reaction for a moment, the majority of Love's critics really need to stop being so completely fucking boring -- "Who's writing her songs for her this time?"/"She killed Kurt Cobain the stupid starfucking bitch!"/"Her only talent is to draw attention to herself" etc = stop being so bloody tedious you bastards!

Look: I've got no problem with people not liking the music that Love makes (that's just, like, your opinion, maaaan), and if you find her public personna disagreeable and/or tiresome, then I can certainly understand that. But please, please, please try not to be so dull and obnoxious next time you write her off! I mean, pretty much every review of America's Sweetheart that I've read felt like it had been created using some sort of random Courtney Love insult generator for god's sake! People, critics -- if you've gotta complain, at least put some effort into it for a change!

2004-03-22T15:10:00.000Z

MP3 Watch

Today's MP3 of choice - 'Blueberry Boat', by the Fiery Furnaces, which is available on Fluxblog right now.

I liked the first Fiery Furnaces album a lot, but this song is just something else. Gallowsbird's Bark was a really nice, playful collection of folky, bluesy, dubby pop-rock songs that was shot through with a very evident love of strange, but sometimes quite beautiful, narratives. This song, which is the title track from their upcoming second record, sees the band really push this approach to some sort of charmingly wonky extreme. Suddenly the fact they namedrop The Who a lot in interviews makes much more sense! 'Blueberry Boat' is a keyboard saturated slice of prog-pop storytelling, and as such it's a little out there, but after only two or three listens I'm already finding it to be an incredibly rewarding slice of music, and if this is as indicative of the new album as Matthew says it is, then you can consider me officially excited!

2004-03-22T13:51:00.000Z

Warm Up Post

Testing, testing, one, two...

Right - here we go then: Cakes and Money 2.0 -- the same as the first version, except better (hopefully).

We're still supposed to be doing the whole group comics blogging thing over on Insult to Injury at the moment, but I have a really short attention span, so to blog about comics and only comics doesn't really appeal to me in any big way.

With that in mind, there should be a nice mix of material up here - I want to write about movies and music mainly, but since my final exams are only three weeks away I'm probably going to use this place to think out loud about certain English Lit topics from time to time, so watch out for that!

Anyways, I'm off to write a couple of posts now... take it easy out there.
David