Anal Anal Animals

DC Comics: the New 52

2011-09-10T09:29:00.003+01:00

I read a bunch of comics and want to tell people about them! So I'm using the blog! Plus I have rated them on both the quality of the premise and the quality of the issue itself.

DC Comics has relaunched its line of super-hero comics by cancelling everything and restarting the comics from new number 1 issues. They are two weeks into the launch now, and here are my thoughts on the first fourteen number ones.

Action Comics
Premise: 10 - Superman as pissed off socialist.
Issue: 10 - Does what is says on the tin: action, and lots of it. The book never stops moving, yet is still full of character moments. Superman's new status quo is quickly and clearly sketched out, and it is quite an interesting one. Clark's not working for the Daily Planet, and his best friend is Jimmy Olson. I imagine them as young journalists, sitting around coffee shops, bitching about corruption and hustling freelance money. I read this and immediately wanted to make other people read it.

Animal Man
Premise: 9 - Celebrity super-hero beloved by college kids and hipsters.
Issue: 8 - Does a great job of setting up who Animal Man and his family are, and his place in the DC universe. The plot is a bit thin, but this is an establishing issue done right: stuff happens - though none of it earth shaking - but we come away really liking Animal Man and understanding him and where the series might be going.

Batgirl
Premise: 5 - A girl who used to dress up as a bat to fight crime is now dressing up as a bat to fight crime again
Issue: 3 - Boring. Batgirl is still a boring character, and this issue is even less interesting than the character of Batgirl herself. Her new status quo is shown, but it is nothing that hasn't been seen in every short lived series before; nothing really engages.

Batwing
Premise: 6 - African Batman
Issue: 5 - African Batman gets some help from American Batman and we learn that Africa is a corrupt place. Despite the fact that Africa is a continent. In Batman comics, Gotham is often a character, but it is a city, very different from other cities, because each have their own character. Except here, the writing is so exacting, the city and even Dr Congo itself is just generic Africa. And all of the characters speak precisely and without elision, as if English is their second language, despite the fact that they probably would be speaking French to each other.

Detective
Premise: N/A Batman is exactly the same as he has always been.
Issue: 6 - I don't understand the hate that the internet seems to have towards artist Tony Daniel. His art is clear and exciting, and he does a nice Batman in the Neal Adams mould. He is also writing the comic now, and while I am not going to put him up as a great writer yet, there is nothing terrible or even bad about this comic. The problem is that it is just a Batman comic, and I wasn't reading Batman before and this doesn't give me any reason to start reading it now. The cliff hanger, however, is quite good, and does indicate that something significant might actually be happening.

Green Arrow
Premise: 7 - Steve Jobs as a weapons master. See also: Batman
Issue: 6 - A fun, traditional super-hero comic that could have come out any time in the last thirty years. This is actually a compliment. Oddly structured in that it climaxes in the middle, but it sort of comes across like the first fifteen minutes of a TV show, and exciting introduction leading to some setting up going into the first ad break. Not great, but enjoyable, and I will probably keep reading it.

Hawk and Dove
Premise: 4 - Hawk and Dove are the avatars of the Gods of War and Peace, except the original Dove, who was Hawk's brother, was killed and replaced by a girl
Issue: 1 - This is the worst comic I have read in a long time. I haven't read a comic illustrated by Rob Liefeld since the early nineties, and back then I liked his art for its energy. I wasn't prejudiced to dislike this out of hand. But this is just terrible. There isn't even continuity between the pages, the cockpit of the plane they are in changes from page to page because he can't even be bothered to check his own work. And the script and story is equally terrible, with lots of bad exposition and awkward action. I'm not going to dwell on it, but this was a stinker. It does get bonus points for actually bothering to retell Hawk and Dove's origin, something a lot of the other comics could have bothered with, but then it loses those points for it being a terrible origin retold poorly.

Justice League
Premise: 10 - The world's greatest super-heroes team up to fight crime
Issue: 6 - Two of the world's greatest super-heroes meet up and banter at each other. Not a whole lot happens, but still enjoyable. It will almost certainly read better in the trade. There is some funny dialogue, Green Lantern and Batman are well established, but as the key relaunch title, it kind of fails terribly. But if you are a fan and look to the long game, this one is going to read better in the months to come.

Justice League International
Premise: 6 - The world's greatest second-string super-heroes team up to fight crime
Issue: 5 - This issue shows potential more than quality. This could be an interesting team, but for a first issue, it doesn't really explain a lot about who is on the team, or even what their powers are. This is a team assembled by the United Nations, and it seems like a bureaucratic team, put together by someone who was filling slots rather than actually building team. While it contains a good number of the eighties JLI, they developed a reason to be together, these just seem like random characters in suits.

Men of War
Premise: 7 - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare starring Sgt Rock's grandson
Issue: 4 - It starts well, letting us know who the new Sgt Rock is, but then it goes into combat mode, where everyone dresses exactly alike and adopts code names, so the names that you just spent ten pages learning become useless, as now everyone looks the same and has different names. I had little idea what was going on, or even why it was going on. The back up story was better, though.

OMAC
Premise: OK, I don't actually know what the premise is for this one.
Issue: 9 - Despite that, this was an awesome comic. Not my normal cup of tea, but it is Keith Giffen doing an extended Kirby homage of things hitting each other for twenty pages. I really loved it. Bright and colourful, this issue also contained the very first actual narrative caption that I have seen in a comic in years. I've been somewhat annoyed about the removal of the third person narrator and replacing it with first person narration in order to eliminate thought balloons. But here, for one caption box only, we get a narrator again, explaining to us that yes, the awesome thing that we are seeing is indeed awesome.

Static Shock
Premise: 4 - Kid with powers of some sort fights crime
Issue: 3 - A whole lot of words and pictures that actually said very little. Full of sound and fury signifying nothing. After reading the issue, I have no idea who Static Shock is other than a dick who wishes he was Spider-Man, or what his powers are. I like his dad, though.

Stormwatch
Premise: 8 - The world's greatest super-heros are poseurs next to these guys, the real world's greatest super-heroes. But shhhhh! Don't tell anyone.
Issue: 5 - The issue started very well, it looked like this was going to be one of the best of the bunch. But then it all went to crap. In between repetitive "I don't want to work for you guys!" [runs away] bits, one point a character, in the best Claremontian tradition, actually explained who they were and what their powers were to an enemy in the middle of battle. I like old school comics, but heavy handed, unimaginative writing is another matter. Maybe this is all the more disappointing because Paul Cornell is an awesome writer. And there is a lot of potential here, so I will probably keep reading on.

Swamp Thing
Premise: I don't know.
Issue: 6 - The issue does a good job of explaining itself and what is going on, but doesn't actually get around to explaining what comic is all about. This looks like it is going to be a horror comic set in the DC universe, but how everything relates to each other is still up in the air. The characters are well presented, and their situations, and there are moments of real creepiness going on, but the comic loses a bit by being a "Chapter One" sort of story rather than a proper first issue.

The Avengers: Hot Snow/The Girl on the Trapeze

2011-03-22T21:26:00.006Z

MK and I have decided to start watching 'The Avengers' from start to finish. Because, why not? So we started with the first series tonight, of which two and a third of the original twenty-six episodes survive. Which, for televisual history's loss, is our gain. Because the first one and a third are kind of terrible.

Of the first episode, 'Hot Snow,' only the first act survives. It is a fairly realistic thriller of which it is unfair to judge. It is far more interesting from a historical viewpoint than a story viewpoint. The most interesting thing in it, as far as I was concerned, was the appearance of a police box in a street scene.

The thing about the first series of 'The Avengers' is that John Steed is the second lead, and there is no Girl. The lead is Ben Miller look-a-like Ian Hendry as Dr David Keel. He is a pretty decent performer, as far as one can judge, but the opening fifteen minutes of this episode bear no resemblance to the show I am looking forward to watching. But there is a camp gangster, which is kind of neat.

But the full episode we watched, "The Girl on the Trapeze", was absolutely terrible. It was scripted by Dennis Spooner, who would go on to write much better television in the decade to follow, but in this fifty minutes, MK reckoned he was writing some sort of proto-"24": 24/61. Every little detail of events were shown on screen. I have seen more than my fair share of vintage television, but I have never seen anything this primitive in terms of its storytelling. No narrative expediency is made at all, no short cuts to get the plot moving. The camera lingers on Keel's nurse watching television. We are watching her watch television. Soon, she and Keel have to go through a weeks' worth of newspapers and magazines to find a picture of a dead girl. So we watch them flipping through page after page. Somehow, this is supposed to be tense, watching them leaf through the papers. Until all hope is lost and the nurse finds another magazine under a cigarette box on top of the tele. Phew! That's where the picture was! This then leads Keel and the nurse - Steed is absent from the episode, sadly - to go to a Not-Russian Circus. Where they buy their tickets, where we are told how much the ticket costs, what Keel uses to pay for them, and what his change is and in what coinage. He then goes back and buys a program. We learn exactly how much it costs, what he uses to pay for it, and what his change is again as it is counted back to him. Oh my fucking God this thing just kept going on. There was like twenty two minutes of plot in the fifty minute episode, which can be OK if the rest of the time is filled up with character, but much of the rest of this was filled up with pedantic minutia.

Having said that, the plot, when it came together, credited the audience with being able to put it together themselves, and then, just to be sure, explained it clearly, but in a reasonable and intelligent manner that came out of that same plot. I was reminded of CSI:Orange, which I sometimes enjoy watching with MK, just to rate it on this weeks' level of fascism. It insults its audience again and again, holding our hand as it belabours explaining the plot over and over. So I will give Avengers 61 some credit.

We have one more series 1 episode, and this one apparently has Steed in it, and then it is on to Honor Blackman, and maybe, just maybe, the plots will move forward at a speed quicker than "glacial".

(Oh, and 'The Girl on the Trapeze' did feature stock footage of lions riding horses, so it had that going for it)

Inception - Calvinball: the Movie

2010-08-04T11:41:00.003+01:00

I saw 'Inception' the other day; I had really been looking forward to it as I think Chris Nolan is a fantastic, intelligent film-maker, and the trailer looked astounding. I saw a lot of really good reviews, many of which commented on how intelligent the film was. Unfortunately, it turns out 'Inception' was terrible. I mean, enjoy it as empty action spectacular all you want, but do not confuse overly complicated with intelligent, because it wasn't. But beyond being insulted by the intelligence of the film, which is usually how I confront cinema and so is nothing new, 'Inception' had some seriously bad film making going on.

Ok, let's just start with possibly my most personal and subjective criticism. I think Leonardo DiCaprio is a terrible actor. I find his performances wooden and stagey. At one point in the film, he says, "Yes, yes," and I swear it was the worst line reading I have ever heard in a Major Motion Picture. I just hate him. He always looks like he is acting. Having said all that, it doesn't help the film in any way that I find the lead in the film to be terrible. Of course, what he has to do as a character adds to it, but that's the next paragraph. In the meantime, he is on screen with two of my favourite actors (Juno, the Kid from Third Rock) and one of the funnest, archest performances I have seen in ages (the Camp Guy). OK, aside from my ongoing in jokes amongst MK and myself over how I name people, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is just an amazing young actor, who will hopefully have a wonderful career in supporting roles in big films and lead roles in small films, and won't become a movie star, because that would suck. He's just astounding. And Ellen Page continues to be just a great screen presence. Both she and Gordon-Levitt don't have much "acting" to do in the film, but they always hold the screen. Tom Hardy, on the other hand, takes third support and just chews up the screen with almost Goldblumian charm. He's far and away the most entertaining thing in this film. Add to this Ken Watanabe and Cillian Murphy doing their job well, and you have a cast full of great actors centred around far and away, to my eye, the weakest of the bunch. And the one who has the only real emotional role. The others are fine actors who do very well in serious drama, but only have to do Action Movie Acting here, and the one probably best suited to Action Movie Acting is the one who has to do the serious drama. It left, for me, a huge hole at the centre of the film, and whatever emotional heart was supposed to be there, couldn't be.

Now at that emotional core, we have Cobb's relationship with his dead wife (Cobb is Leonardo DiCaprio's character's name. I actually remembered it!). And this is where my explanation of why 'Inception' is a terrible movie gets as tangled up as the movie itself. Because to try to pick the strands apart and discuss one thing at a time, I am afraid it is going to be difficult. And possible repetitive. But that is appropriately par for the course, I reckon. Anyway, the emotional core of the film is Cobb and his wife's relationship. So much so that the climax of the film is built around this relationship rather than the actual plot of the film, or perhaps we could say that the plot hinges, finally, on Cobb's relationship. The thing is, you have this great epic of a film, this giant, twisting, narrative, built around an incredibly trite issue. Cobb is responsible for his wife's death. OR feels responsible. Build up and build up and build up and that's it? Really? Could Nolan have found a more obvious issue to have? We are talking about the psychological complexity of a shitty late nineties Harrison Ford "drama" right there. The thing that really bugged me about this is that for a film literally set within the human mind, I seriously expected something beyond cheesy pop psychology of a morning talk show variety. The monumental build up to a groan inducing reveal was just heavy handed and somewhat insulting. Clearly, what Cobb needed was Sassy Black Woman to stand up in the audience and tell him to get over himself, wherever the suicide idea came from, his wife still made her own decisions, so man up.

This is part and parcel with the notion that if you are going to set a film inside the human mind, this lends itself to crafting serious psychology onto the film. But there wasn't any. The characters were no more interesting than any other action film. But they shouldn't have been. I think Nolan's last film, 'The Dark Knight', is a good example of the richness of psychology that can exist in a big budget action film. I am not going to claim that that 'TDK' was working on a particularly deep level on par with Bergmann, but there was a richness of character in it in the relationships between Batman, the Joker, Harvey Dent and Jim Gordon that lent the film a much deeper air than 'Inception'. And the ideas behind the characters beliefs and ideas and ideals were discussed and foregrounded. That doesn't happen here. There is nothing beyond Cobb's guilt. It doesn't motivate his actions at all. His team is engaging in one last heist so he can clear his name and get home to his kids. I mean, that is tangentially related to his guilt, but all Cobb's guilt does in the film is allow complications to be thrown in the team's way. If you remove Cobb's guilt, just take it out, nothing in the film would change other than Ellen Page would be less concerned and the film being twenty minutes shorter. The final complication is barely necessary. The overall arc of the film, the main plot, would not need to change at all. But in 'TDK', take away any of the characters' issues or beliefs, and the whole movie would fall apart. So its just disappointing that when you have a writer/director who seemed to have a handle on how important psychology is to motivation and to plot, and you have that director set a movie inside of the mind itself, well, the triteness of the film is just amplified.

So if you are making a film set inside a dream, a film that seems to want to ask questions of what is reality and how we build it and interpret it ourselves, you would think that the film would actually ask those questions. They are hinted at, they are touched up, but shouldn't that actually be your film? It's like setting a film in World War II and ignoring the war. It's just confounding. Instead, at the centre of the film, we have … I don't know. Nothing? In the end, the setting of the film, the premise itself, is nothing but an excuse to have some special effects and set pieces that don't actually have to have anything to do with each other.

A lot of the praise the film has received has to do with the special effects. They are, of course, really good. Unfortunately, most of them are there for the sake of being special effects rather than actually having any relationship to the plot or moving it forward. Some of the most striking imagery of the film comes early on when Ellen Page has just been introduced to ~~the Matrix~~ the dream space, and she starts to play with it. Of course, nothing comes of any of this. All that she can do, all that can be done, becomes irrelevant. The effects are essentially there to be impressive. Empty calories. The possibilities of the environment are unnecessary to the plot, and ignored. The only effect of not that is tied to the plot is Joseph Gordon-Levitt's zero gravity fight. It doesn't so much move the plot as at least relate to it. But most of the bravura effects were just there to show off and not really help the film at all. This is somewhat related to the levels of the dream which Nolan seems to be using the shifts in location as excuses to create action set pieces that have no relation to each other. He wants to do a James Bond thing with baddies on skis, he can. Does it have to do with anything else in the film? Nope. But wouldn't it be kewl?

The film also has a very strange idea of how to introduce us to characters and their world. It becomes clear soon enough that 'Inception' is a heist film, but instead of opening with Cobb and his team showing off their skills, we see them fail. So we don't even get a sense that they are good at their job, our first impression of them is one of failure. We know that Cobb is on the run from … something, but the mystery of what he is on the run from just emphasises that he is a loser. He's on the run from justice, from the company he failed to steal for, from the guy he failed to steal from. Instead of giving us a sense of desperation and sympathy, he just comes across as a loser. And this is how he is introduced.

I did like the genre touches of the film. You can't go wrong with a putting the team together sequence. And the planning out the job. All build around, of course, it being one final score. But Nolan can't just making a fucking heist film. After he laboriously explains how a heist from the sleeping mind would work, after he sets up the rules of this, he then decides it isn't going to be a heist, stealing something, but instead putting something in its place. Like if 'Ocean's Eleven' was about putting $150 million inside the Bellagio vault. Except that doesn't sound nearly as interesting, does it? So when we root for the protagonists in heist films, we want three things: 1) them to get away with it and not get caught; 2) them to get away with the proceeds as well; 3) the man to get stuck to (it is vitally important, in a heist film, to have a villain that really needs a good sticking to). But in Nolan's heist film, he ignores 1, 2 and 3. If they don't succeed, they can't really be caught, as such, there are no proceeds to get away with, as they are putting something in instead of stealing it, and the "villain" was a pretty sympathetic guy whose issues with his father were being exploited by the team. I actually felt a bit sorry for him. So Nolan sets up a heist film, and then, I guess, "to make it more interesting," guts the genre. The only real motivation we have for any of this is that Cobb "wants to get home," like he's in 'Quantum Leap' or something. Its such a vaguely expressed idea to be somewhat insulting to the audience. It's just cheap, the level it is expressed on.

If we are discussing the rules of genre, I guess I might as well mention all the rules set up in the film. But just as Nolan breaks all the rules of the genre, to no great effect, he also chucks away all the rules he sets up for the world. The film goes out of its way to set up the rules of the dreaming. Again and again, the rules are explained to the audience. I have no problems with this, the movie is set within a completely fantastic "universe" with rules of its own, and if the drama is to work, the audience has to know what the rules are. Ellen Page is new to the dreamscape, so Cobb and Gordon-Levitt explain to her - and the audience - what the deal is. But once the rules are explained, and everyone is up to speed, and the big plot finally gets underway, then the rules start changing. OK, dying in a dream causes you to wake up. Except when it doesn't. Then you go to limbo, in whosever's head you are in. Except Cobb has control of it, for no particular reason I can fathom. And in limbo you go crazy, no one can stay sane. Except Cobb did. And he is the one telling people that they will go insane. Whatever. If you are going to go out of your way to set up the rules of the game, do not change the rules halfway through. That isn't fair; that's just Calvinball. And Calvinball is only fun when you are playing it and making up the rules yourself. Hmmmm … Calvinball: the Movie. Yup. That works for me. I'm going to make that the title now.

One of the most frustrating things about the movie was its complete failure to even try to actually engage in building a realistic dreamscape. Dreams are wonderfully flowing and shifting, and what was really annoying about 'Inception' was how it insisted dreams were fixed, concrete, sensible things. When you go and watch or read or whatever to anything described as "dreamlike," they always have this wonderful, illogical shifting flow to them. Something this film lacks. In fact, one of the recurring motifs of the film is the antithesis of this: the use of modernist architecture. There is nothing further from a dream than Chicago style modern architecture. Maybe Mies Van Der Rohe's dreams looked like this, but even then, probably not.

The thing though, is that it doesn't even try to embrace the flow of dreams. With the effects budget of the film, imagine what a series of shifting backgrounds could have looked like. I understand that the characters were building artificial dreamscapes in order to have some control over them - and control is such a theme in this film - but that runs counter to the very nature of what the nature of dreams are. It just seems a rather forced, artificial constraint to be put on the film. It's like saying you are going to set a film on the moon, but you want it full of trees.

In the end, I have to wonder if some of my problems with the film have to do with my existing expectations. When I head that Nolan, who has always made good films (even if I hated 'Memento' I recognised it was good) was making a film about a man who steals dreams, fuck wow, that sounded amazing. But instead, we get a film with a poor actor playing a weak protagonist, a lack of psychological depth to the characters and their actions, a genre whose strengths are ignored and weaknesses emphasized, special effects used for the sake of special effects rather than advancing plot or character, and an intriguing setting whose very nature is ignored and shuffled to the side until it is empty. I’m glad I went to the cheap matinee.

The Raggedy Doctor and What's In the Box?

2010-06-20T10:54:00.002+01:00

Dear American readers - the first four paragraphs are safe for you to read. After that, please look away. Hysan, DO NOT READ THIS. Seriously. I am going to talk about Episode 12 of Doctor Who, and it is far and away for the best, the absolute best, that you know little about it other than it does what it says on the tine: The Pandorica Opens. There are spoilers and there are ruiners, and knowing much beyond the title is pretty soon going to lead you to ruiner country. I will say, it is awesome, but you can wait three weeks for it, it will be far better.

First, I have to say, I felt like I had done some time travelling this week, having got to see "The Pandorica Opens" on Wednesday at a BAFTA screening, along with Moffat, Smith, Gillan and Rory, who did a Q&A afterwards about the episode and the season. That was cool.

I got there fairly early, saw Moffat coming after doing an interview (I think) outside, and wondered if a celebrity sighting counted if it was a celebrity you were at a location to see. Determined that it wasn't (although it was not five hundred feet away from where I once saw Laurence Lewelyn Bowen. Anyways, the sidewalk outside the BAFTA theatre, to be charitable, was full of Nerds. Capitol N Nerds. Several grown men dressed as Matt Smith. A lot of bad skin and hair. Ridiculous shirt choices. As someone who identifies as "nerd", it made me feel really uncomfortable, because I was pretty far away from these guys now. Many of them had plastic wallets full of magazines and stuff to sign. It was pretty desperate looking. Additionally, I was expecting more children and women to be present, but it was a lot of sad looking men who I am sure get happiness out of who they are, I hope. I mean, even the crowd I've seen at comic conventions looked better than this lot. It made me feel bad. I though we nerds had moved forward in society, we had geek chic and all that. But a nerd can stay a nerd, I guess, and never move up to geek, sometimes.

(It turns out too, that most of those waiting outside didn't even have tickets - they were just there to see if they could see the stars and stuff. The crowd inside was a lot more normal, with children and women and stuff. And the only person I saw inside dressed as the Doctor was six years old.)

Of course, after the screening, I did witness the most terrifying thing I've seen this year, it made me sick to my stomach. After the Q&A, Smith and Gillan were hustled out of the theatre and to a waiting car, and when we got outside, the car, as this is London, was caught in traffic just outside the theatre, and it was swamped with nerds. There were some proper paparazzi too - there had been four or five outside the theatre - but the nerds were covering the car, taking pictures, trying to get things signed. And they stayed with the car, inching up Piccadilly, flash flash flash. It was like teenage girls and the Beatles, but these were adult men, supposedly.

That horrorshow over with, what happened in-between? So, UK and torrenters (Hysan, you watching torrents? If not, go way. Really. SPOILERS. LA LA LA LA SPOILERS), wow.

One of the things that really impressed me about the episode was that it didn't come across as part one of two, it was very much presented as part twelve of thirteen. The opening, precredit sequence, taking in Vincent, Churchill, Kettlewell, River Song and the Bloody Queen really tied the episode, right from the get go, to the rest of the series. showing us a real, interconnected universe. And Mos Eisely, where River Song pulls the ol' Lau Che on an old, retired member of the Blue Man Group.

Watching the episode on the big screen was fantastic, it really did merit being blown up that big. What a great looking episode. When you are quoting films like Star Wars (which Moffat has done numerous times this season), its great that the show can visually back it up.

Anyway, I'm not going to rehash the plot, but I have to say that Moffat did an amazing job with the fake out involving what's inside the Pandorica. So much emphasis was put on what's inside of it, the idea that there might not actually be anything inside just didn't even enter my mind. And the realisation as to why that was, the complexity of the trap and Amy involvement, all of which is happening while you are also realising that Rory isn't really back, oh it was powerful and heartbreaking. The way the Doctor, Amy and River plots all came together was terrific. This was bravura storytelling, so fucking tight.

And Rory - did not see that coming. I mean, I always had a sense that he would be miraculously restored at the end of next week's The Big Bang, but his appearance as a Roman came from nowhere (and wasn't the scene with the Doctor missing what is right in front of his face just played perfectly, right down to the way the Doctor taps Rory on the chest to see if he is real, and the way Rory leans back from it. Verbally and physically great). The thing about Rory first appearing in this episode as a shadowed Roman, I actually thought he was going to be revealed as the Other Doctor, the coated Doctor who comforts Amy in the second Weeping Angels episode. But Rory? Great surprise. Moffat asked us at the screening not to talk about that. He acknowledged that we would talk, but he asked if we wouldn't reveal that. Actually, all the people I talked to, they didn't know what was going to happen. And I wouldn't have told them had I know, because that would ruin things. Well, no, I watched the episode the second time last night, and it was still good, but this time I was looking at its construction rather than having the extraordinary feeling of watching it uphold and fall into place.

And since I have wandered from Rory, I will return to him to say when we find out that he is an Auton, oh, its crushing. He isn't back, he's just a plastic man imprinted with Amy's memories. That was so sad. And then he shot her. Wow!

So this is what I hope isn't going to happen next week:

Long legs and ... hmm. Why should I care about Rory?

2010-06-06T21:32:00.000+01:00

I haven't been feeling the writing lately. That would be the blog has been mostly silent, beyond some haikus, and I can't ever write seventeen syllables every day right now. Work has just shot through a tough bit, and and RPM fried me creatively. I seem to have lost the ability to write a song at all, let alone a good one, or write anything else. Whatever. June always brings quiet, though, and things get recharged.

But I've been thinking about Doctor Who. Like I often am. And I've been trying to figure out why this series of Doctor Who is not resonating with me.

First things first: Matt Smith is terrific. And I love Karen Gillan. But I think Amy Pond has been a problem. On the whole, I am really enjoying every episode (except for the second Silurian episode, which was terrible). But the series, on the whole, doesn't give me the buzz it used to, or that it should be, maybe.

It's an odd beast of a season. In a lot of ways, Stephen Moffat hasn't managed to put his own stamp on it yet, in many ways it feels like Moffat doing Russell Davies. But maybe it just means both are making Doctor Who. All I know is that the bankerly inventive ideas that Moffatt brings to his episodes (and Gatis brought to the middling Dalek episode) has been missing. Or seems to have been. Moffat doesn't seem to be imprinting his stamp the way that Davies did. Or maybe it's that Moffat's work is characterised by plot and Davies by character, and it is easier to redraft scripts to include that than rewriting from the ground up to bring in that odd approach to plot and structure that Moffat does so well.

But I think that plot versus character divide is what brings me to my issue: Amy Pond.

I love Karen Gillan - this isn't a criticism of her performance, but instead a criticism of what she has to work with. Sort of.

The thing that made Rose Tyler work was that we knew who she was and where she came from. We knew her mum. Her boyfriend. Her life. We saw it in 'Rose,' and then again in 'Aliens of London' and 'Father's Day'. And so on. Billie Piper brought a charm to a rather selfish, self absorbed teenager, and after we saw where she was coming from, we loved it. That first, twenty-first century series of Doctor Who set up everything to follow: companions could no longer just be pretty faces with character descriptions that included the word "spunky"; there had to be more to them, and we saw that again with Martha and Donna. But Amy? What do we actually know about her? How much of Amy can be summed up with the word "spunky"?

One of the things that made Rose work is because we knew so much about her and what she has in her life. But so much of what we know about Amy is defined by what she doesn't have: her parents are dead (probably), her aunt (whom she lived with) is absent both when she meets the Doctor and when he returns, and she has a boyfriend that she seems somewhat conflicted about. If we look at Rose, it was all the things that she had that defined her, and even the thing that she was missing - her father - returns to provide a real shape to that hole, so that his absence actually is reversed to being a presence. But Amy? Everything is missing, and now even her boyfriend is missing and lost to time. Perhaps Amy's greatest trait was her abandonment by the Doctor - another absence.

And what of Rory? He seemed pretty nice. Bright. Good bloke. Spunky. But virtually everything we knew about him as a character was defined by his relationship with Amy. When he dies - both times - I was left unmoved, because the only emotional investment I had in him was in his relationship with Amy. I wasn't losing him as a character, she was, and no matter what conclusion Amy came to in "Amy's Choice," there was still enough doubt left in her actions (even her surprise at still being with Rory in ten years time), that Rory never became a character in his own, he was always dependent on Amy, and she clearly had some issues with him. How could I care about him when the woman that he is engaged to didn't seem to care a lot of the time? Rory never got to be a character on his own, like Mickey did, and so his deaths meant little. Plus he kept dying. It's hard to care when we keep seeing it.

And so what we are left with is a season of Doctor Who with no nearly enough crying. Seriously. Back in the old days, Doctor Who was about hiding behind the sofa. Now its about crying. And there has been a sure lack of crying. I mean, sure, last night's excellent "Vincent and the Doctor" killed me, but it wasn't the Doctor or Amy I was crying for, it was Vincent Van Gogh. Rory's death(s) left me cold, and that just seems way off for the Doctor Who I have loved this century. I am not feeling the characters like I once was.

The funny thing is, I suspect that all of the holes that define Amy, they will all come into play in the series conclusion. The arc of the year, I reckon, is not just the crack, but Amy herself, too. I hope so, at least, I want more from her, I want her to be more than a gorgeous void.

Or maybe there is just too much plot and not enough breathing space for the characters. The Doctor Who Confidential episode for the first Silurian episode revealed that that episode was an hour long in the first edit, and showed a wonderful character scene between Amy and the Doctor that got cut. Maybe this is part Moffat and his team's learning curve - how to actually pace out the scripts. Some of the episodes clearly under ran - forty minutes instead of forty-five. Or maybe they are shorter to include more commercials in America. I don't know. But I know, I have felt this season as being "off". I'm not connecting emotionally in the same way, despite it being quite a good season. "Amy's Choice" didn't excite me too much, as it was all a dream, and I was really disappointed by the crapness of the second Silurian episode, particularly since I though part one might have been my favourite episode since "The Eleventh Hour". A shocking drop off in quality.

And that's all I have to say about it today.

Haiku of the Day

2010-05-24T08:43:00.001+01:00

Brick walls heating up
Taking in all of the warm,
Not letting it out.

Haiku of the Day

2010-05-14T08:38:00.001+01:00

Ink marks the paper,
Page by page it builds and builds;
Stories unfolding.

Haiku of the Day

2010-05-13T08:37:00.000+01:00

The blinds are all up;
Spring streams into the classroom,
Green, yellow and blue.

Haiku of the Day

2010-05-12T09:14:00.000+01:00

Special announcement:
Due to lack of interest
Spring has been cancelled.

Haiku of the Day

2010-05-10T08:38:00.001+01:00

Hurtling on through May
Too soon crashing into June
Glorious spring blur

Song of the Week: TV Dreme Theme Song

2010-05-09T20:47:00.002+01:00

So I found the guitar in the bushes. It was obvious what to do with it.

The song came to me in a dream. I dreamt this was the them to 'The Gilmore Girls,' so when I woke up I recorded it. While it is no 'Yesterday,' it's pretty OK for coming from a dream. You can download the song for free here, as part of 'The Great Twenty-Eight'.

5.4/5.5 Doctor Who and the Evil Statues of Death

2010-05-08T09:00:00.002+01:00

I think I just might be the only person in Britain who didn't particularly care for these episodes. I mean, they were certainly well written, well acted, well produced, all of those things that go into a great episode, but they really left me cold. I think that might be it; I recognise that they are very good, but they left me cold.

Maybe it was all the people in uniform, glossily shot as if in some episode of Stargate or something, maybe it was the change in River Song's character, maybe it was just something intangible, but the episode never really flew for me. I think it might have been the lack of whimsy. Maybe I wasn't ready for the dark two parter yet. Those usually come later in the season. But I've really been enjoying the strange, magical whimsy of the season so far, the Spitfires in space, Britain on the back of a space whale, the Doctor's culinary adventures. And this episode, while full of magic - a forest in a space ship, jumping while the gravity fluctuates, the most audacious escape ever - it was never magical, not in the way I wanted. Because this is about how I receive the show, and I didn't want a big serious episode yet. I want this magical madman and his crazy sidekick.

And now I just have to bitch about the Weeping Angels. What the hell happened? It was so disappointing with how such an amazing creature from 'Blink' just became another monster. They starting breaking necks rather than sending their victims back in time, and they now have the ability to see each other. And they can't move if they think you can see them? Sna? These sorts of things didn't hamper my enjoyment of the episode, but because my reception was off anyway, I couldn't gloss over these things like I could with the utterly dumb Spitfires in space, which are awesome. But the Angels were a shadow of their former selves, with typical monster motivation - conquer the universe - and in this episode they just became another collection of people in suits out to do bad things. Disappointing.

But the scene where the Angel comes out of the screen? Amazing.

Haiku of the Day

2010-05-07T10:15:00.001+01:00

Red, blue or yellow;
The people have all spoken
And can’t quite decide.

Haiku of the Day

2010-05-06T08:48:00.000+01:00

A day of choices -
The future of our country
One vote at a time.

Cat's co-workers make me keep making these. Blame them.

2010-04-27T20:47:00.002+01:00

5.3 The Raggedy Doctor and the Old War Movie of Doom

2010-04-18T16:42:00.006+01:00

This was a good episode, but in many ways, it felt like the first part of a two parter. Except who knows when part two will be arriving.

This was also the first episode of the new series that I had some misgivings about. The presentation of Winston Churchill was really off, to me. He was too light a character, and the actor cast as him didn't really resemble him at all. He really lacked gravity, and that left a bit of a hole in the middle of the episode.

Of course, the episode also suffers from having the best bit of the episode be the first third of it, when the Doctor has arrived in the Cabinet War Rooms and the daleks are offering everyone tea, which was wonderfully fucked up. A dalek saying really trivial stuff, really out of character stuff, is just creepy, and the episode was fantastic with this, particularly with how they kept surreptitiously taking long looks at the Doctor.

Once the action moved to the dalek ship, the episode shifted. It wasn't as good - not bad, but that shift from spooky to "here we go again" didn't help. The return of the daleks, for me, was a bit of a disappointment. Not the actual returning, but the idea that here was another episode with them. In the five seasons the show has been back, we have had six dalek stories - and who knows if there will be another one this series. The sixties, during "dalekmania" also had six. The seventies had five. The eighties three. They are just wearing out their welcome, at least to this viewer. On the plus side, this episode saw the Doctor failing to defeat them once and for all, unlike the last few times, so next time, their return will probably be less annoying in that they have really returned proper rather than giving us some new lame excuse why they weren't really finally destroyed. So there you go.

On the plus side, space Spitfires are cool, regardless of how little logical sense they make. A little bit of technobabble, the professor talking about what he had been thinking of, turning into three functioning space Spitfires in the space of ten minutes, it stretches credulity, but c'mon: space Spitfires.

One thing that I am really liking about the new series is how the three episodes so far don't look like the last four series. The directors have given them a very new sheen that is a welcome break from what had been more and more a house style. Even with the same designers and the same sfx people, the show looks different, more modern. I'm loving it.

I think the image that really sums up the episode, however, is this one:

Here we are watching the Doctor confront the daleks, on TV, in black and white. The show is making explicit where its dalek heart is, in the wildness of the sixties dalek episodes, and in the technicolor movies, and in the comic strip. But here we have a stand off between the Doctor, threatening the daleks with his jammy dodger, and the big, bright, shiny dalek, in glorious black and white, a reminder of Hartnell and Troughton mouthing off to the Dalek Supreme or the Emperor, pulling rabbits out of their lapels to defeat the daleks again and again. I love it. Even if this time the Doctor loses by only saving the earth.

And the new look daleks? I don't like the hunch back, but I like the rest. Big and nasty looking, and wonderfully technicolor. I love the colour in this series, in that it has a colour other than orange. The series seems simultaneously old fashioned and cutting edge, for the first time since Eccleston piloted the TARDIS, and I've loving it.

So, to sum up this poorly written and barely thought out post: I liked it.

"Victory of the Daleks" preview

2010-04-16T16:34:00.002+01:00

MK's co-workers made me make another one. I assume tomorrow's "Victory of the Daleks" will be virtually identical.

A Game of Thrones

2010-04-13T09:50:00.001+01:00

My friend Kevin has a rule when it comes to fantasy novels, he calls it his "rule of thumb": if the book is thicker than his thumb, he doesn't want to read it. Kevin doesn't read much fantasy anymore.

It's a pretty solid rule. The last fantasy novel I read, bar a re-reading of 'The Lord of the Rings' and 'The Hobbit' in the run up to the movies, was probably the fifth book or so of the 'Wheel of Time' series, a by this point never-ending series that refuses to end. Even the death of the author can not kill this series, whose final "book" is being written by someone else from the author's notes. And the final book has apparently been split into two volumes. What. The. Fuck. I stopped reading the series as it was more and more turning into wheel spinning, and the books were more and more about the things that stopped the plot from happening than the plot actually happening. I was pretty disenfranchised with fantasy novels by then, and reading a lot more real literature, and it was time to move on.

The general problem I have with fantasy novels, and this comes from spending a lot of time reading fantasy novels as a teen, is that too much time is spend sucking the dick of the emaciated corpse of John Tolkien. Even when the writers aren't finding it necessary to fill their magical worlds with elves and dwarfs, even when they cut down on the magic, they were still these multi-volume monstrosities that were simply incapable of saying all that needed to be said in one three hundred page book, not when it could be said in 1500 pages instead.

But when I read that HBO was preparing a series based on George R.R. Martin's 'A Game of Thrones,' I became curious. It was to star Sean Bean, and further down the cast list, the rather brilliant Harry Lloyd, who I just missed seeing with Tasmin Grieg and Gemma Arterton in 'The Little Dog Laughed' which ended its run in the West End at exactly the time I realised it existed. Anyway, as I age the more I realise that the stuff I liked when I was younger is still the stuff I like, so maybe it was time to read a fantasy novel again. So I ordered 'A Game of Thrones,' without doing much research on it. All I knew was that it was highly respected fantasy work, and particularly well written.

Well fuck me when it arrived in the post. It was a nine hundred page paperback actually thicker than most bricks. And then a poke on the internet, it isn't even from a trilogy, but a seven book series, where, according to the list of novels inside my copy, the third book has been split into two volumes published separately! Holy fuck!

But I decided to read it anyway, or at least give it a sufficient chance.

I'm about ten percent through the book, and slowly, slowly, a plot is beginning to appear. One of the interesting things about the novel is that it seems to be the sequel to an unpublished trilogy - a great war happened fifteen years ago, a man rose from nothing to overthrow the tyrant on the throne, great and legendary battles were fought by a motley band of adventurers, etc, and now we have the sequel fifteen years later. Of course the first part was never published, its just backstory, leaving us instead with a book about the oncoming of middle age and the horror of getting what you fought for and finding out its a bit crap. Except I don't think that is what the book is actually going to be about, it seems instead the book is going to be about people plotting against the king and other such bullshit. The character that appears to be our protagonist - and I say appears because there are eleventy bajillion characters, who all have eleventy bajillion children, all of whom get chapters about them so seem to be important - is named Ned Stark, probably no relation to Tony Stark, and he rules the North for the High King (or whatever), his old buddy from the old days, who was once a lion on the battlefield but is now fat and pampered. So this old buddy rolls up, and in Will Ferrell tradition, hilarity ensues he says he's tired of playing politics, so asks Ned to come down south with him and be his butt monkey and do all the hard work for him. Hmmm … somehow that took ninety pages of the book.

"Ruling has become much too wearisome and I am tired. Come south and be The Hand of the King."

"I desire it not, but honour compels me."

Boom, there you go. But instead we get all these fucking children running around and thinking about how great/how sucky it is to be them, etc. I'm sure fantasy fans love it for its "beautiful characterisation" and "rich world building," but blah blah blah, everything I've read so far reeks of being set up. Lots of set up. And the kind of set up that you don't actually need. It's just dicking around.

Granted, I will give you that for a fantasy novel, Martin writes well and creates engaging characters. There was an early pull to the novel, but my good will for it is fading as it just keeps not moving fast enough. And the writing is not good enough to make me want to savour every word as it troddles along. Martin is a good storyteller, but not a great writer (and there is a huge difference between being a storyteller and a writer, at least for the argument of this blog post, and there is nothing dishonourable with being a storyteller. Telling and interesting and engaging story in an interesting and engaging way. But a writer, at least by my terms here, is someone doing something else with the words, who isn't just interested in telling a story, but in the art of language itself. Literary writing, so to speak. And there is literary fantasy - Neil Gaiman and Susanna Clarke spring to mind, even Michael Chabon if you want to look at him that way - they just aren't writing high fantasy trilogies).

I just finished reading chapter about one of Ned's kids, an seven year old called Bran. Marting spends the chapter making Bran a really interesting kid, showing us his worldview and giving us a really great insight into his personality, making him really warm and sympathetic. And then Martin kills him.

It's manipulative writing like that that really sours me on a work. We don't know a thing about this kid until the chapter he is killed in, and the only reason, it turns out, we learn anything at all, is to be shocked when he is killed at the end of the chapter. All novels are manipulation, but when your manipulation is showing, something is wrong. It's like a magician showing how his tricks work. Its shoddy and cheap.

On one hand, of course, Martin is laying out his cards, letting the reader know the stakes of his novel, that children and dogs aren't safe from what will be going on around them. In Philip Reeve's "Mortal Engines," he got huge points in my book when he killed the dog near the end of the novel. For a children's novel, that was huge, and it really showed the scale of the story and the stakes that were at hand. Then he trumped it by killing the plucky girl protagonist as well, and holy fuck, if I hadn't already been in love with the book, I was then. But the difference between "Mortal Engines" and "A Game of Thrones" is that Reeve did his killing at the end of the novel, and the killing wasn't just to shock you, but show the scale of the novel and also to play with the expectations of the genre. But Martin is just fucking with us. If he hadn't just introduced us to this character, if his authorial intent wasn't so baldly transparent, maybe I could forgive him. But I can't. I've already had a lot of misgivings about this book - and the genre - and he isn't giving me a huge amount to keep going with.

I'm going to keep reading, and maybe I'll update the blog about how its going, but I move forward hesitantly.

5.2 The Raggedy Doctor and the Secret of the Space Whale

2010-04-12T11:50:00.003+01:00

If you poke about on the ol' interweb, one of the things that quickly becomes apparent is that most Doctor Who fans hate Doctor Who. So this week, many of them seem to be wailing about the betrayal of Stephen Moffat because both of his episodes this year have not been scary enough and too much like Russell Davies Doctor Who - ie aimed at a mass audience containing children amongst their number. They point to this weeks episode, "The Beast Below" as evidence, because it is just like "Gridlock," as both are about a society with a secret. Of course, by this reckoning, both are exactly like "Soylent Green" and "Logan's Run" as well. So there you go as well.

But I reckon that if you have to compare this episode to another episode, like I was actually compelled to do after the fact on Saturday night, I would compare it to 'Gridlock', as both episodes are strongkingly weird examples of that sort of 2000AD s.f. sensibility that makes eighties British science fiction comics such an acquired taste. Both reject reality and "real" sf - actually thinking through the possibilities of society's advancement - and just ignore all that juxtapose elements of the modern and recent past with a "futuristic" setting that might not make sense in fact, but does in spirit, which is usually more "real" in the guts anyways. So here we have Austerity Britain living on a spaceship. Like you do.

I quite enjoyed this episode, but it wasn't for the setting (charming) or the plot (straightforward and surprisingly linear) or even the guest star (Sophie Okonedo as ass kicking Queen Elizabeth X), but simply because, as good as all of those were, the real greatness of the show is the Doctor and Amy. I wanted more scenes with them, more time for them to talk, more time to hang out with them. I love them and I want more of them. I trusted Stephen Moffat from the beginning, but Matt Smith is just phenomenal as the Doctor, all elbows and awkwardness, and Amy is just a treat, spunky and determined, and around the edges, clearly fucked up, and you just want to hug her and help her and hang out with her.

This episode also had one of the sweetest endings, and unlike far too much of the Russell Davies years, it feature a resolution that was earned through thought and observation, rather than through a McGuffin or a Deus Ex Machina. Amy noticed things, just like the Doctor told her to do, earning her place on board the TARDIS in a way like no other companion has done. She out-Doctors the Doctor and shows him up, and she does it because of who he is. It really was a great example of the theme of the 2005 series - the Doctor makes people better, not physically, but in the greater sense of being a better person.

So, I quite enjoyed the episode again. Not as much as "The Eleventh Hour", but it lacked the extended interaction between the Doctor and Amy, but this was still a highly enjoyable episode. Favourite line: "[I'm going to go] what I always do. Stay out of trouble. Badly."

Dalek Impressions

2010-04-11T11:54:00.002+01:00

It is a well known fact that MK does a hilarious dalek impression. But now the daleks are doing impressions of the Dread Pirate Roberts!

I don't know how he turned out Scottish. Blame Amy.

2010-04-09T08:42:00.002+01:00

I think this happened during one of those bits in 'The Eleventh Hour' when the Raggedy Doctor or the Not Raggedy Doctor were in the TARDIS being late in picking up Amy. It's the only logical excuse.

Listen to the words, my friends, and believe

2010-04-07T23:58:00.001+01:00

"Fucking magnets, how do they work?"

5.1 The Raggedy Doctor and the Giant Eyeball of Doom

2010-04-07T09:09:00.002+01:00

Short Review: it was awesome.

Long Review: First things first: this was the very first episode of 'Doctor Who' that I ever watched in Belgium. It was killing me that I had to be in Belgium for the premiere of the new series, but it was a Sacrifice worth making. And then, after all my stoic gloom at having to wait twenty-six hours (if I didn't download it in the hotel), it turns out our hotel - our fantastic hotel - received BBC 1. An awesome suite and BBC1, what could make the weekend better? (Waffles. Lots of waffles.)

So, anyway, I got to watch it when it was on. And it was great.

Surprising me not the least, Matt Smith is terrific as the Doctor, and spend a good chunk of the episode with one of the best companions ever, Amelia Pond, plucky little girl. The scenes in the kitchen were simply fantastic, in which we learn that ~~Tiggers~~ Doctors don't like ~~honey~~ apples and it must be one hell of a scary crack.

The first half of the episode is beautiful, magical and wondrous, where a garden, a kitchen and crack in the wall can be all you need to create a beautiful, terrifying fairy tale. But then Amelia grows up.

The Doctor not quite being able to work the TARDIS is a long running gag on the show, going back to the very first episode, and the back in ~~five minutes~~ twelve years is great. And so is grown up Amy. Not as great as Amelia, but Amelia is full of wonder, and Amy is pretty annoyed, and one of those is more entertaining to watch, at least in this show. It's kind of the reverse in "Harry Potter," but actually none of that is entertaining to watch, just the Wide Eyed Wonderment of the first movie makes *me* annoyed.

The second half of the episode, set in the present day, is not as good. Not that it is bad, but the lack of a real, tangible threat holds the episode down. Ostensibly, the main thrust of the story at this point is building the relationship of Amy and the Doctor, and it succeeds very well in that regard. They are going to be a treat to watch over the next twelve weeks. But the underlying plot is not as good. The threat of the Eyeball Snowflakes (who look really cool - and while looking kind of cheap in standard def, look great in HD, which is the opposite of what I expected) is abstract at best. They are going to destroy the world in twenty minutes. They say. But we never get to see them at any more than a distance, and so their threat remains distant. We only have the Doctor's word on it, which is normally pretty good, but still we have an unseen threat that is going to do something, basically, unseen, in twenty minutes. Or more. Maybe.

What should have been the more tangible threat, Patient Zero, made threatening faces with scary teeth, but never really tried to do anything other than standing around and talking out of the wrong mouth, which was simultaneously creepy and goofy, and so not quite effective. But the not trying to kill/threaten/eat the Doctor, Amy and Rory also undercut the threat. This is supposedly a creature that the Eyeball Snowflakes - wonderfully alien aliens - are prepared to destroy a whole planet to stop from escaping, but there is never really a sense of threat from it. All of which leads to a lot of running around and being generally entertaining, but not being as involving as it should be.

I'm going to cut Stephen Moffat some slack on that last part. Clearly his intention was to showcase the Doctor and Amy, and much like the Autons back in 'Rose,' the action/adventure plot comes secondary to the characters. Which is fine, I suppose, for a pilot - and this very definitely is a pilot in spirit if not in fact. On the plus side, while there wasn't as much threat as I may have liked, unlike much of the Russell Davies years, the threat(s) at least made some sense on a level beyond McGuffin.

So, a very good start. The final conclusion, the rooftop confrontation, was excellent, as the Doctor, like a cross teacher, calls the Eyeball Snowflakes back for a word and a threat. He doesn't just save the world, he has the balls to call the aliens back to let them know he is pissed off and it better not happen again. That was cool.

Kneel Before Zod

2010-04-06T20:55:00.001+01:00

Everybody was kung-fu fighting

2010-04-06T17:44:00.001+01:00

EVERYBODY. So don't go and tell me you fucking weren't.

EVERYBODY.

The Great Twenty-Eight

2010-03-28T21:39:00.003+01:00

OK, ready for release, my new album, "The Great Twenty-Eight", a sprawling, magnificently bloated mess of a double album (if it were on vinyl, which it isn't). Twenty-eight tracks completely written (and all but a dozen words that were rerecorded) and recorded in the twenty-eight days of February, 2010, as part of the RPM challenge.

You can find the album at http://analanalanimals.bandcamp.com/, which I think is going to be my new musical home. It is available to download in a host of formats for the low, low price of free. You can also preview the tracks, the whole album is streamed there as well, and if you want to share any of them on your own blogs, feel free. You can click on each song and then click on share and you can embed it where ever you want, which is cool.

And please feel free to tell me anything about the record, even that it sucks donkey balls. The vacuum of loneliness is the worst sound of all.

Some preview tracks:
<a href="http://analanalanimals.bandcamp.com/track/i-hate-tesco">I Hate Tesco by Anal Anal Animals</a>
<a href="http://analanalanimals.bandcamp.com/track/kit-marlowe-part-1">Kit Marlowe, Part 1 by Anal Anal Animals</a>
<a href="http://analanalanimals.bandcamp.com/track/i-got-you-and-you-got-me">I Got You and You Got Me by Anal Anal Animals</a>
and the lead track:

Almost there!!!

2010-03-27T08:10:00.003Z

OK, I haven't posted about it yet, but the only thing more exciting than Scott Pilgrim is the new series of Doctor Who starting NEXT SATURDAY!!!!! Oh Ehm Gee, I am so totally excited. Each new clip makes me more and more excited. Each new interview I read does the same. From all the glimpses, I think I am going to love The New Kid as the Doctor, even if he is a wee bairn. Moffat has been talking about "fairy tales" in his interviews, and that kind of romantic, magical tone that he does so well in "The Girl in the Fireplace" makes me incredibly excited for a whole series with that sort of feel. And the clip even has Bill Hartnell's library card!

Of course, as MK is incredibly sick of hearing, I won't be able to watch the first episode live as I have to be in Belgium. I will live - barely - but thank you Sky+.

Haiku of the Day

2010-03-26T07:33:00.001Z

Spring comes padding soft,
A cat coiled to attack
In riot green.

Scott Pilgrim Trailer - Rating: Awesome

2010-03-25T19:39:00.007Z

I don't know how to embed this, but right over here is the trailer for "Scott Pilgrim Vs the World". It looks awesome. Lets take a closer look via a poorly formatted blog post! (man is the formatting all messed up. Sorry. But you're bright, you'll figure it out)

Yup, that's Scott Pilgrim. He's still wearing those. And he has his Plumtree t-shirt, and his bass, and the way Michael Cera says "Hey, what's up," he even sounds like what Scott Pilgrim sounds like to me. I really like how the trailer starts like a sweet indie comedy, and then exposes its true intent. The thing that is potentially going to be weird about this film is the messing about with genre it does. The first Scott Pilgrim volume doesn't quite get the balance right in it, it seems a bit off, but charming enough to go back for more, where Bryan Lee O'Malley really gets it working.

Yup, that man is turning into coins when defeated. It appears to be one of Gideon's henchmen, and it is a lot of coins. Those seem to be pretty big coins, Loonies even (though Gideon is New York based). Oh the speculation! What is the currency and denomination of the coins!?!!

MK is not at all sure about the use of the comic book sound effects, but I sort of think in for a penny, in for a pound. I'm pretty sure the characters will be able to see them as well. In the books, a big deal is made out of the lines coming out of Ramona's head, so it makes sense that the graphic nature of the graphic novel will be carried over. I also liked the sound of the K.O. when Scott defeats Matthew Patel.

The Seven Evil Ex's, left to right: Kyle (or Ken) Katayanagi, Gideon, Matthew Patel, Lucas Lee, Ken (or Kyle) Katayanagi, Todd Ingram, and Roxy.

It's harder to see in the screen cap, but I love Gideon's digital sword that pixelates everything in its path. That's hilarious.

I like how on the side of the bus there is a barely legible advert for Lucas Lee's new movie.

I also like how the gauge in Scott's head has a little maple leaf certifying that it has been approved by some sort of Canadian Certification board. Like you do.

The striking thing, of course, is how graphic the movie seems to be, and the extracts from the Matthew Patel fight are fantastic examples. The dynamics of the lightning and the sound effects, and the reverse silhouette is fantastic. I'm loving it and can not wait for the movie.

Haiku of the Day

2010-03-25T07:47:00.000Z

Rain on the pavement,
Old smells mix with spring blossoms –
A damp nostalgia.

Haiku of the Day

2010-03-23T09:48:00.001Z

The rustle of wind
Meeting the scritch-scritch-scritching
Of pen on paper

Haiku of the Day

2010-03-22T13:54:00.000Z

Never too early!
Monday's the exciting start
To a whole new week!

Yes yes!

2010-03-19T17:36:00.002Z

20 July!

Haiku of the Day

2010-03-18T08:45:00.001Z

And it was just there!
Turn your back for a moment
And suddenly spring.

Speechless

2010-03-18T07:47:00.001Z

Alex Chilton, 1950-2010

Yes yes!

2010-03-17T18:09:00.000Z

An epic of epic epicness. I'll buy that.

Haiku of the Day

2010-03-17T08:43:00.003Z

Feeling better now,
The punches inside my head
Are now just light taps.

Achilles

2010-03-16T17:02:00.004Z

Poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy released her new poem today, "Achilles," a poem about David Beckham's ankle injury.

I can't find a consistent pagination of the poem, but the BBC has Duffy reading it and one pagination that seems a little off and more related to the size of their sidebars than to how Duffy probably laid out the poem. The lines don't move right in it, and her reading just emphasises this. But maybe I am wrong.

Regardless, I really like the idea of this poem, a poem about heroes and tragedy. If anyone says football is just a game on these islands, they don't know what they are talking about, and if anyone says Beckham is just a player, they are fools as well. All the arguments you can make about him - too old, past his prime, more interested in fame than the game - are irrelevant in the face of what he represents and stands for, intentionally or not. Duffy rightly picks up on the shear, tragic beauty of Beckham's fall coming from his Achilles tendon and nails it in the poem - sibilance heavy like a ball through grass.

I've very pleased Duffy is writing poems "ripped from the headlines," poems about Britain, today. I like how she treats the subject matter as worthy, not as something ironic and playful, a joke. She treats it seriously, because the people of this country take it seriously. Nice.

(and by connecting Beckham and Achilles, it also reminds us the Greeks won the Trojan War without Achilles, and so we can win the World Cup as well)

2010-03-14T20:48:00.003Z

I spent the day watching about a dozen episodes of "Parks and Recreation," all of which were driving MK mad because I kept singing this over the credits:

Damn you, person who made this video!

Flippers - now fixed so people can actually watch it!

2010-03-13T09:51:00.003Z

MK woke up and asked me if she could use the computer to print something, I said sure, why wouldn't she, and she said I was probably in the back recording a song about flippers. So I guess I had to.

2010-03-13T08:43:00.001Z

Haiku of the Day

2010-03-10T11:40:00.000Z

Waking up early
Hot shower opens the eyes
Wrap’d in warmth

plus bonus haiku:
Seventeen years old
On the edge of the whole world
Awaiting her soon

Girl Don't Tell Me

2010-03-09T19:43:00.004Z

Over the weekend, BBC 4 rebroadcast a documentary about Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson and it got me listening to the early Beach Boys albums again. Boy were they bad. Really stinky. I mean, you may think you have heard some stinky music, but man could the Beach Boys fill up their albums with crap. Its no wonder no one took rock albums seriously back in the day, when one of the top bands was releasing dreck like this.

I reckon it wasn't until their ninth album they they released a full length that was mostly good, 1965's Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!). It still had some stinkers, such as the not even as good as it might sound "I'm Bugged at My Ol' Man", but on the whole the classics ("California Girls", "Let Him Run Wild," and for the second album in a row, "Help Me Rhonda") and good tracks outweighed the bad and strange ("Salt Lake City", where "the kids talk so cool". Yes really. Thank you Mike Love).

But the thing that really caught my ear, even though I've heard it lots before, was the song "Girl Don't Tell Me". I actually began to wonder if it was a Beatles cover, it was so Beatley. It just sounded so different to everything else the Beach Boys were doing at the time, and actually sounded like what a lot of the rest of the pop world was sounding like. It was a pretty forward sounding track, a really stripped down sound for the band, not a lot going on, a real nice acoustic rhythm, not even backing vocals. Turns out it was one of the few Beach Boys tracks actually recorded by the Beach Boys band itself rather than the session folks Brian Wilson usually turned to. According to Wiki, Brian said he wrote it for the Beatles, but who can say.

Anyway, I fell in love with the song today and wanted to share it.

and the Beatles repay the favour:

Haiku of the Day

2010-03-08T08:50:00.001Z

Beautiful sunshine
Crowning over Essex greens
Welcoming the day.

Newham 10K

2010-03-07T18:17:00.003Z

I completed my first organised 10km run this morning, though the construction site that is the Olympic Park and Stadium in Newham. I had been sick for most of February - just low level cold, but enough that I stopped training to make sure I didn't make things worse. So I wasn't physically ready for it (only two warm up runs earlier this week, a 7km and an 8km) and the 10 was hard. I actually had to walk for a bit between the eight and nine km mark. Despite that, I still came in at under my target time, and way under my expected sick time. I thought I would run the 10 km in about 65 or 70 minutes, my goal had been to do it in an hour, but I actually managed it in 56:30, which tells me I ran it way the fuck too fast and it is no wonder I was destroyed, because my body was/is not ready to run that distance at that speed - and I even walked for a few minutes! Blah blah blah, no one cares about this but me.

So, in the future - like in my next run in two weeks - it is vitally important that I don't forget my running hoodie if it is going to be cold. I got it out, packed my bag, and left it laying on the couch cos I am special ed. And, even if it is cold, over that distance, shorts will be better than sweat pants. My legs were seriously overheating. The flannel undies probably didn't help with that. The two short sleeved shirts I wore were good, by my hands were painfully cold and made me tense up, which didn't help the early stages of the run.

But I got a medal and a t-shirt, and I finished in a time below my target, so all is good. Now lets just hope my body doesn't freeze up during the night!

What I did in February

2010-03-06T19:28:00.004Z

My RPMing started quite well, but then my ambition got the best of me. I succeeded in my goal - twenty-eight tracks in twenty-eight days - but pretty much everything else had to be set aside. I'll have the whole album available to download soon enough, but in the meantime, here is the possible/probably final mix of the first track, "It's All Music to Me". I think it is great. The video features bits of a couple of George Melies films, "The Broken Violin" and "The Magic Lantern".

Haiku of the Day

2010-03-05T12:03:00.001Z

One year old today:
The itteh bitteh kittehs,
Twins, Squirrel an Dean!

Haiku of the Day

2010-03-04T09:12:00.001Z

Olympic mittens -
Keeping hands toasty and warm
On cold morning drives.

Haiku of the Day

2010-03-03T09:08:00.000Z

Purposeful design -
Romeo and Juliet,
Exquisite torture.

Haiku of the Day

2010-03-02T09:04:00.001Z

Out through the windows
A glorious spring morning -
Until you step out!

Keepin' it real since 1522

2010-03-01T19:23:00.000Z

Haiku of the Day

2010-03-01T07:43:00.001Z

Day, week and the month:
Fresh beginnings all around,
Everything starting anew.

Pitchfork 500: 30. Wire – Outdoor Miner

2010-02-09T11:20:00.000Z

Oh man, I was bitching about Wire's "Ex-Lion Tamer" back at number 16, but here is some proper Wire. This song is just fucking fantastic and is much more "Wire-y", at least what Wire is to me. Smart and massively hooky, "Outdoor Miner" is just pop-punk awesomeness. I mean, it isn't even pop. Or punk. But it is. If anything, nineties indie rock might start right here. The song features actual songcraft, it isn't starting and playing as hard as you can until you stop, it is measured, arranged, considered. Things are held back, and that makes the song even more taught, even more exciting when everything starts coming back in with the backing vocals in the outro. And it still doesn't rock the way it could. I mean, that is one of the things that are so genius about it, it very clearly could just rock, but Wire don't want to. They want to let it just sort of saunter along with a wistful, knowing smile. Perfect.

Tomorrow: Joy Division – Disorder

Pitchfork 500: 29. The Misfits – Night of the Living Dead

2010-02-08T11:06:00.000Z

Back when I lived in Chicago, I used to work with this guy called Punk Rock Eric. He loved the Misfits. He had numerous Misfits tattoos, including a pair located on his head. He really loved the Misfits.

And they did an instore as well, and the were really nice and cool, I am told, but I had that day off and didn't come in because, well, come on. I mean, everyone is entitled to make a living, and if you can do it making music, fantastic, but the current Misfits and the actual Misfits, while containing many similarities, such as the songs, and the bass player, are missing Glen Danzig. But good on the bassist for keeping it going!

But 'Night of the Living Dead'. It just howls. I mean, there are lyrics, I suppose, but I have no idea what they are. They sound pretty frantic, I must say. The song is pretty frantic, and pretty awesome. Coming right after the Cramps, the Misfits played the same sort of junk culture games, but where the Cramps went for an updated retro sound, the Misfits sound like a punk band, and on this one, a damn fine one at that.

Tomorrow: Wire - Outdoor Miner

Pitchfork 500: 28. The Cramps – Human Fly

2010-02-05T11:06:00.000Z

````````````````````AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR5 (and that is why cats should not help write song commentaries)

I never got into the Cramps - I don't even know if I have a song of theirs on a mix or a comp. Their sort of eighties voodoo rockabilly never connected with me. Possibly because I don't like singers who sing low. Because I am funny that way. But "Human Fly" - well, still. I don't get the Cramps. That kind of backwards looking, cultural trash embracing thing has never really captivated me, at least musically. They sort of sound like a Tarantino film feels - but only if you take all of Tarantino's french influence away. So all you are left with are old board games with missing pieces and a third generation bootleg of Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill!.

I suppose the sheer act of cultural highjacking is enough, at least back in the day, but there is nothing in this song beyond a stolen sound and a b-movie lyric. There is no art in it. I bet the Cramps were fantastic live, I bet they sold it in performance. But as a recording, twenty-nine years later, this song is empty. As an act of fandom, though, it is powerful. But outside of the moment, outside of fandom, is that enough? Does it need to be?

That said, I do really like the fuzz guitar they put under the riff, and the drums do sound massive. But then the song is over, before it ever really seems to get going. And after thinking for a few minutes, maybe I do get the Cramps, and I just don't like them because their fandom is not my fandom; and while part of me really wants to love the junk culture of the fifties and sixties, the other part of me recognises that outside of a few moments of accidental brilliance (the aforementioned Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill! for example), most of it was junk.

Monday: The Misfits – Night of the Living Dead

Pitchfork 500: 27. Magazine – Shot by Both Sides

2010-02-04T11:05:00.001Z

For an art rock post-punk track, this track really doesn't move the game forward much. Original Buzzcock Howard Devoto left the band to be more interesting, but he doesn't really do much here to justify the move. Magazine later would, but this, their first single, is an engaging punk song but little more.

Having said that, it is clearly played by people who know what they are doing, which is a huge step beyond punk. There is a tightness to the sound, and the dynamic shifts feature far more subtlety than most of what had come before. But baby steps.

And then I listened to the album version. It is pretty much the same song, but with one remarkable difference - keyboards. It thickens and enriches the song to no end. It doesn't take a lead role, but just its presence in the mix spackles any holes. It tightens an already tight song. The song starts with the riff as well, rather than the punkish rhythm guitar opening of the original version. And when the second vocal comes in, late in the song after the breakdown, instead of seeming a bit off, it sounds exciting and when the drums are full back in, after the build of the cymbals, it sounds magnificent.

The album version:

Tomorrow: The Cramps – Human Fly

Pitchfork 500: 26. Gang of Four – Damaged Goods

2010-02-03T11:03:00.001Z

I think it is safe to say we are now safely into the post-punk section of the Pitchfork 500. I'm not the biggest fan of post-punk; it's one of those genres that is important to have happened, but has left little worth listening to in its wake. The the UK post-punk revival of the mid-noughties was not a great time for music, but the best of the bunch (the magnificent Bloc Party being the best of the best) redeemed themselves with looking beyond old Gang of Four records. So here we have the Gang of Four.

Strangely enough, for what I just wrote about post-punk, and Gang of Four being perhaps the post-punkiest band of all, their "greatest hits" compilation, A Brief History of the Twentieth Century is perhaps one of my most listened to albums of all time. For most of my many years at university, a tape of it sat permanently next to my computer and got play during the writing of most of my essays. And I wrote a lot of essays. And I can honestly say I never particularly liked it. But I kept listening to it.

The second track on A Brief History of the Twentieth Century is "Damaged Goods". And to be honest, when I was listening back to the track, I couldn't remember it from the tape. I think the thing that appealed to me about the tape, listening to it while writing, was the feel of the songs, the aggression and tension of the songs perfectly fit the manic pressure of writing my essays. I wasn't listening for melody, or hooks, or lyrics, I was listening to get me writing and moving - well as much moving as you can do while sat at an old, ugly yellow office chair in front of Windows 3.1.

So listening to the Gang of Four right now is completely linked to that space, my little work station in my old basement. Trying to even separate it, to hear the song on its own - I don't want to.

Haiku of the Day

2010-02-03T08:48:00.001Z

Who let the cats in?
I thought we had agreed
Kittens ruin sleep.

RPM Day Two

2010-02-02T20:45:00.000Z

Cross posted from my RPM blog.

Day two and progress is being made. Finished a good basic track for another song - though it needs a second verse - about how much I hate going to our local Tesco grocery store. It's a bit of a punk thrasher appropriately titled "I Hate Tesco". I also record a ukulele instrumental that may get words in the future, or may remain an instrumental lullaby.

Additionally, I read today that Broken Social Scene recorded way too many songs for their new album, but some of the ones that didn't make it were like "808s and kazoos". So I thought, I'll try me a bit of that! And I threw in a harmonica as well. It is not good.

So, probably little progress tomorrow as I have to work till 9, which sucks. I'm going to take my ukulele to work with me for lunch time and the down time between school finishing and my evening work starting, where I stand around and try to convince kids that don't care to take English literature at Sixth Form. Maybe I'll write a song about why English is awesome.

Haiku of the Day

2010-02-02T15:00:00.001Z

A warmth in the air
No longer seeing ones breath –
The first hints of spring.

Pitchfork 500: 25. Public Image Ltd. – Public Image

2010-02-02T11:02:00.000Z

Hello! Hello! Hello! I love the opening of "Public Image", the repeated "Hello," as if Johnny ~~Rotten~~ Lydon is asking if this thing is on. And it is. More guitary and aggressive than much of what would come later with Public Image, Lydon is now playing with some musicians that have a bit of a clue (well, Glen Matlock had a clue, but the wrong sort for Lydon's taste, I reckon). Ditching Malcolm "actually I did everything" McLaren's weaselly "management," this is the end of Rotten and the beginning of Lydon.

And this is a great rock song. Interestingly, the song sounds like exactly what it is: a bunch of punks trying to play Krautrock, but without any keyboards or subtlety. And as such create something far more interesting.

Like a lot of krautrock, it starts and goes until it stops, with little change along the way. Of course, Lydon can't help but rant over the top, refusing to actually help build the cool germanic groove that the song demands. The tension between his vocals and the teutonic drive of the instruments is what makes this a great song. The two shouldn't go together, but they do. Fanstastic.

RPM Day One

2010-02-01T22:11:00.002Z

A cross post from my RPM blog:

My plan this year is fairly ridiculous - write and record twenty-eight new tracks. Not all will be songs, not all songs will be long, but all together, make a CD of twenty-eight tracks, sort of like a mix-tape, full of little bits between the songs, but all by me.

And so far, I'm off to a better start than I reckoned, with two songs, two proper songs, written and recorded. Both need more - one might need a full rerecord, the other will just need other instruments, but I have a week off coming up in two weeks to do all the detailing, if I can things going by then. I hope to have at least ten tracks in working state by next Sunday, so fingers crossed.

If you are just reading this, and don't know me, I wrote a lot of songs this past year, at least one a week, and I wanted to use RPM to get this out of my system, spooge a huge amount out at once, and then slow down my songwriting to try to focus more on detail in it, rather than just plunking them out. So this is the month of maximum plunking. And two plunked out already! (and lyrics written to a third).

So, day one, good start for me. Now off to bed.

(I think you can listen to those songs here)

Pitchfork 500: 24. Marvin Gaye – Got To Give It Up

2010-02-01T11:00:00.001Z

It starts by suspiciously sounding like "Low Rider," and then the Bee-Gees take over. When one thinks of Marvin Gaye, it isn't his falsetto. He had such a rich voice, to sing in this falsetto is almost a crime. But one should never fault someone for changing it up from week to week.

The thing about this song, listening to it now, is that it sounds like a bit of a Frankenstein of a song. An early seventies instrumental track with a Saturday Night Fever influenced vocal, and not sounding like a particularly good version of either. Its funny - I certainly recognise this song from Back in Tha Day, but I had not idea it was Marvin Gaye.

And then it just keeps going. About the time you start getting bored, it just refuses to fade out - at least in the album version. It is a good example of why I often prefer single edits to album versions, my attention in songs rarely can survive beyond four minutes. (and the single edit is a full two minutes shorter than the album version)

I suppose in the end it is a good song from the tail end of disco, but not a particularly great song all in all. This is one of those songs that I actually have to wonder why is in Pitchfork's book, and I have disappointingly little to say.

Tomorrow: Public Image Ltd. – Public Image

BBC news crawl

2010-01-31T11:13:00.004Z

The LATEST: crawl on the BBC News web page just had the following headline:

Man arrested on suspicion of murder of man found fatally wounded outside a Blackpool pub

I love how "man" appears twice. I also love how murder is not repeated, but replaced with "fatally wounded". I do wish the headline had read:

Man arrested on suspicion of murder of man found murdered outside a Blackpool pub.

That would have been awesome.

Pitchfork 500: 23. Parliament – Flash Light

2010-01-29T11:24:00.000Z

I'm really out of my element with disco/soul/funk/dance from this period. The rise of disco, and the movement away from my beloved three minute, melodic single, really has left me without much interaction to the music. In fact, listening to this song, I can't even make sense of it, it sounds like two 16-bit video game soundtracks being played at the same time. It's Sonictastic. Play any two levels of Sonic simultaneously, and "Flash Light" might just spontaneously happen.

In fact, all I am hearing, really, is the future sounds of hip hop in the nineties. I keep expecting the stoned drawl of Snoop Dogg to wander in over top. I suppose for that fact, that is going to put this song on the list. I can hear its influence, and I don't even like it or the genre. I have some experience with nineties hip hop, but even then, I'm much more of a bluffer than anything.

Monday: Marvin Gaye – Got To Give It Up

Haiku of the Day

2010-01-29T09:11:00.001Z

Dark blue fades to grey -
Cool tap of rain on windows,
Chills you to the bone.

iPad

2010-01-28T12:35:00.002Z

While I often complain and am regularly unhappy with, well, life and my fellow man, I have been a pretty forward looking guy. I like the future, new stuff is awesome, everything is great.

But the iPad is making think I might need to get fitted for some fogey pants. Because I have no idea what this thing is.

It isn't a phone - except it is, albeit even bigger than an eighties brick mobile - and it isn't a laptop - except you can either type by touchscreen or adding a keyboard to it. So it is both of them together. Sort of like Skype then. Or something.

I guess you can also read books on it, like a Kindle, but bigger. Or something.

The genius of the iPod was that it was a product that when introduced - and it wasn't the first MP3 player, but it was in the first wave - it was a product that we wanted but we just didn't really realise it yet. But as soon as you heard about it, wow, it just sounded perfect. Your whole CD collection in a little box? And half the size of my one album at a time discman? I'll start saving! But the iPad? Why do I want it?

Seriously, can anyone explain what it is for? Or is it for everything, and I just can't see that because I am too used to everything having its own specialised thing? Would I "get it" if I had an iPhone? Because that seems to be more than a phone, which is intriguing, because I sure don't really want the phone.

So I don't understand it, I can't see the use in it, but, of course, sadly, I want one. Apple shiny!

Haiku of the Day

2010-01-28T12:33:00.000Z

Still feels a bit odd,
Waking up to see the sun -
Winter slides away.

Pitchfork 500: 22. Michael Jackson – Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough

2010-01-28T11:09:00.000Z

It is actually kind of remarkable. Pop music and image are completely intertwined. When it comes to more traditional texts - books, films, etc, I am fairly unbothered by "the author". I think for the most part they are irrelevant to how I react to or interpret a work. Authorial intent, to me, is a waste of time. Not for me. I don't care what they "wanted" to do, all I care about is how I receive it. Which is kind of what this whole Listening to the Pitchfork 500 is all about.

(There are some exceptions to this in non-pop music media. The films of Quentin Tarrantino come to mind. It is almost impossible to divorce them from him, which is one of the reasons he is such a polarising figure. I should note that this also doesn't mean that I don't see some authorial "branding" as a trade mark of quality, but even with, say, the Beatles, I still question the quality of their work; I was doing this with their early albums just last autumn. This is part and parcel with my ability to actually not like records by some of my favourite bands. Joe can't understand how I can do this. But I digress)

But pop music, particularly post-MTV pop music, is different. The product itself is not just the music, but the image too. The author is the product. It's fucking genius, but theoretically maddening at times, as the world won't bend to fit my critical framework. So there you go.

But Michael Jackson is completely fascinating. Despite the fact that he was a creepy pedophile, a frightening man-child that used his shitty childhood as an excuse to never grow up. And despite the two ex-wives, and the children, I can not for a second ever imagine that he ever had a physical relationship with a woman that wasn't experimental, brief and awkward. I find him reprehensible, and by the very nature of pop music, I should find his much much the same way. And when I listen to his late-career ballads, all of his Jesus-juicing is inescapable. But the other stuff, the adult solo stuff from his four listenable solo albums, the stuff - the good stuff, when you listen to the last two of those four - is stunningly remarkable.

"Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" is, very clearly, about fucking. It starts with Jackson mumbling sweet nothings - and even if they aren't about fucking, the fact that this monster of a track starts with whispering can only be interpreted as the sweet nothings Song Jackson is whispering in your ear. Because Song Jackson is going to fuck you. He's wondering if you can "keep on" because has "a lot of power". Oh yeah. And the song goes on for six disco-stringed minutes of glorious falsetto and groove.

The thing is, I think, that where Madonna and (now) Lady Gaga have created images that are completely built around there music, Jackson didn't. Public Michael Jackson - and everything was public for Michael Jackson back in the day, wether he wanted it to be or not - bore no resemblance to Song Jackson. Song Jackson was a love machine. Public Jackson was a virgin man child. There was this gap between the two, and in that, you can find the songs. Madonna lived her songs and the videos reflected that. Jackson almost never appeared in his videos. Some guy that looked like Michael Jackson appeared in them, but no one would confuse the Public Jackson with the cool dude who swears "the kid is not my son" in "Billie Jean", or the average kid out on a date - with zombies! - in "Thriller". And the Michael Jackson in "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" doesn't even look like Michael Jackson. (Not that you can tell from the video below, because the official clip doesn't allow embedding).

And that is why I can listen to Michael Jackson without throwing up.

Tomorrow: Parliament – Flash Light

Haiku of the Day

2010-01-27T10:28:00.002Z

Just one small mistake -
A traffic bump spreads and grows,
making thousands late.

Pitchfork 500: 21. Gloria Gaynor – I Will Survive

2010-01-27T07:41:00.000Z

As I was listening to the frankly offensive 'Don't Leave Me This Way", and wondering about it and 'I Feel Love's sexism, I was quite hoping 'I Will Survive' would pop up next, a wonderful juxtaposition that was clearly intentionally made by the Pitchfork editors and intended to act as an answer and commentary.

It is hard, very hard, to listen to 'I Will Survive' and not have the song corrupted by any of its many, many pop cultural uses. Battery adverts, films about cross dressers in the outback, more battery adverts, shitty film montages about getting over a guy, this song isn't a song anymore, it is part of the underlying structure of popular culture. Even listening to it with fresh ears doesn't really bring much to it. It's a good song, with a powerful message, but there really isn't much beyond that message. It's one of those songs where you would normally go, "Oh! It has verses too!" except even the verses are part of the cultural domain. There are very few songs where the whole freaking song enters the public consciousness. If you have ever karaoked or Singstarred or Rock Banded with a group of people, you would be amazed how people just lose it on tons of famous songs when the verses kick in. The chorus, no problem, but the verses? And this song is so omnipresent in popular culture, even the verses wouldn't throw anyone. And remarkably, the song isn't a standard. It is always this recording, always this performance. I mean, there must be some covers of it somewhere, probably a few ironic ones from the nineties at the very least, but all in all, it is just this one recording, culturally remixed, reused, recycled, over and over again.

Run Run Run

2010-01-26T17:47:00.003Z

Hey!

So on March 21 (MK's birthday, fact fans!), I'm going to be down at the Embankment, running 6 miles (10 km) for Comic Relief's Sport Relief program. I am looking for sponsor's to help me reach my fundraising goal of £100.00. You can sponsor me here.

The money raised doesn't go to sport, so there is no need for you arty types to get upset, the money is used in Britain and abroad to help the vulnerable - you can't read about it here.

So please, if you can spare a quid or dollar or five, I would really appreciate it.

The Swedes have the best awards shows

2010-01-26T17:13:00.000Z

Pitchfork 500: 20. Thelma Houston – Don’t Leave Me This Way

2010-01-26T07:39:00.001Z

Another entry into the powerless disco female canon. Houston's song is frankly disgusting in its sexual games. The narrator literally "can't stay alive" without her man. Not surprisingly, the song was written by a man - well, three of them. But, perhaps more surprisingly, it was originally performed by men as well. I have to admit, I have never heard the original Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes' version, but the song would have a very different message.

But Thelma Houston's version is the one under discussion. Regardless of the original intent of the song, but placing this lyric onto the lips of a woman, the song becomes a song about weakness, about disempowerment, a sexist, misogynistic disco stormer. Now, Darren, the people say, its just a song, chillax. But every act is a political act, and just because people don't choose to look any deeper into stuff doesn't make it go away. Jade Goody dying of cancer doesn't forgive her ignorance, and being "just a pop song" doesn't change 'Don't Leave Me This Way's sexism.

And to complicate the sexual politics of the song further, the absolute best version is by Jimmy Sommerville and the Communards.

Pitchfork 500: 19. Chic – Good Times

2010-01-25T07:37:00.000Z

This is a really interesting song in that it is exactly just too slow to dance to, but it is exactly the right speed to groove to. You can't dance to "Good Times,", you can only groove. Sweet.

This is one of those songs where when you listen to it you are reminded that at one time it had verses. It doesn't anymore, of course, just the chorus hook is all that is left in popular culture. But the verses? Wow, they are some of the most … ridiculous things I've ever heard. When listening to it, it quickly became a "predict the rhyme" game. I think the song was in fact not written my man, but by a hyper intelligent rhyming dictionary. The whole "narrative" thrust (as it were) of the song seems to have been completely determined by available rhyme. The only slightly unpredictable rhyme is probably unpredictable because it is thirty years later: when "participate" is rhymed with "roller skates". I mean, of course it is.

Another interesting thing, listening to this song in 2009, is I kept waiting for the rap to come in. Hip hop has sampled this song like crazy, going back to the awesome "Rapper's Delight" back in tha day, originally released just two months after "Good Times" hit number one. Of course it is easy to hear why it is so sampled, they rhythm and baseline are just so good, and writers Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers were sensible enough to realise that in the future a fortune could be made from allowing samples, so made sure there were a lot of clean instrumental breaks on the record, perfect for sampling, or even just playing over. Those guys were smart.

It's Slinky

2010-01-24T17:36:00.000Z

Star Wars: Deleted Magic

2010-01-23T08:44:00.004Z

So last night I watched a - gee, I don't even know what it was, technically - a thing about Star Wars called Deleted Magic. Basically, it was the original Star Wars retold with deleted scenes, alternate takes and behind the scenes clips. It was sort of a documentary and sort of an alternate edit. It was weird in format but an interesting watch.

A couple of years ago I read the very excellent The Making of Star Wars which went into great detail about, you guessed it, the making of Star Wars, and how it was a very difficult process from script to shoot to edit to screen. And with Deleted Magic, it makes it visually clear how close Star Wars came to completely sucking.

The first edit of Star Wars was so successful, the editor was fired and replaced. In the style of the seventies, he (and I can't remember/won't bother googling his name) was concerned with letting actors have some space to give their performances. When you see bits of this, from the film or from the audition tapes that are cut in to Deleted Magic at the appropriate script point, holy fuck is Star Wars boring. The actors dominate and the plot is reduced. Instead of the actors being there to move the plot forward, the plot is an excuse for the actors to be there. So in the final version, Lucas and his other re-editors cut dialogue, cut in reaction shots and cut the space in between the dialogue, paced it all up.

And then there are the deleted scenes, almost all of which come from the first half of the movie. Even as I am watching this stuff, Luke hanging out at Toshi Station, and enjoying seeing "more" Star Wars, part of my brain is thing, "Jeez, just fucking get on with it!" As a result, Luke is introduced much later in the film, but the movie is moving so fast you don't notice. Han's encounter with Jabba, reinstated in the Special Edition with shitty digital Jabba, is also interesting, but ultimately unnecessary and wisely cut (one of my colleagues back at the 'Toban disliked the Special Editions, not because of the digital crap, but because all the extra scenes slowed the movie down. It is hard to disagree with that).

But the thing that Digital Magic put into the forefront of my mind was how perfectly Lucas ended up straddling the line of too much and not enough, was the little world building details that gave these characters a real universe to inhabit and real lives before these droids wandered into them. With the Biggs scenes cut, Luke's references to him and the now unseen Toshi Station become far more interesting. We get enough of the sketch of Luke to fill in the details ourselves, and Luke's whole life can live in our imagination, rather than Luke and Biggs standing around talking about how the Empire is Evil and is going to socialise everything, and Luke's uncle still needs him for another season and the Empire is Evil, because we might not have realised that when the army of Death's Headed, faceless soldiers led by the giant Man in Black who strangles people for information, attacked that ship with the virginal, white-clad Princess.

Of course, probably the best example of the small details that live in the imagination are the Clone Wars. In fact, Luke's first conversation with Ben is full of unexplained details that are far more interesting, far more inspiring and imaginative than the actual Clone Wars.

Star Wars actually asks a whole lot of its audience in the imagination stakes, and that is one of the reasons, I reckon, it has been so successful. Of course, the original script, before cuts, often went too far, and wandered into cheese ball territory, with too much strange back-story, and silly sounding details. I can't remember any off the top of my head, sorry, though I wonder that if some of them had made the final cut, whether they would be as mysterious and compelling as "the Spice Mines of Kessel", or whether they really would have just plunked down onto the floor.

Watching back Deleted Magic I have to wonder what the cast actually thought of what they were making, because stripped of its cinematic shine, the music, the grading, the sound (and the sound design is so good in Star Wars), the actual filming looks pretty stupid. People in stupid costumes saying stupid lines about stupid things. Saved in post production. Or rather made in post production.

Anyway, Deleted Magic is an interesting document for the serious Star Wars fan. I'm sure its on the Youtubes somewhere - I downloaded mine from Demonoid - but if you get a chance, it is really nice to see and just makes you wonder what Criterion could do with Star Wars if Lucas ever allowed anyone to actually release the real, original Star Wars and put together a significant making of package for it.

Pitchfork 500: 18. Giorgo Moroder - The Chase

2010-01-22T11:38:00.000Z

If it wasn't clear what I am doing with this series is I am listening, with only cultural baggage, to these 500 songs Pitchfork has determined to be important / great / vital / insert superlative as required. And this is the first song (probably of many) that I have no knowledge of and is outside of my normal musical frame of reference (I hadn't heard the Vic Goddard track before, but I certainly had listened to a lot of UK punk/post-punk/indie to be able to make sense of it). So this song is interesting. It sounds very 1979: disco, but forward looking, futuristic. I turned seven in 1979, and this song so much reminds me of listening to the radio and eating breakfast, though its incredibly unlikely that it would have been played on the radio at breakfast time in the highly progressive city of Saskatoon. But it does sound like the records my dad was starting to bring home as he began the early days of his mid-life crisis and attempting to not loose his youth via buying albums again.

Its an instrumental from Italian producer Giordio Moroder, the man behind Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" and later Blondie's "Atomic". And you can hear both of those in this one, the rhythm, that almost tremolo underlay, runs through all three. Ultimately, the track does little more, it sounds like a particularly well put together bit of late seventies ephemera, lost in time, pointless without its context.

Mr Bakay

2010-01-21T21:29:00.001Z

We got this flyer through the mail-hole today. MK made me - MADE ME - do a dramatic reading of it. Blame her.

Haiku of the Day

2010-01-21T15:19:00.001Z

From out of nowhere,
Discomfort under my foot -
A rock in my shoe.

pitchfork 500: 17. Donna Summer – I Feel Love

2010-01-21T11:37:00.001Z

Listening to these tracks on CD, the first thing I noticed about 'I Feel Love' was how big it sounded compared to the tinny punk blasts that preceded it; but that shows the audience and venue for listening. The punk songs were seven inches of rebellion, snuck into the house and played on old mono dansettes turntables. 'I Feel Love' was made to be played very loud in very large clubs to very large groups of people. And that fast synth arpeggio just sounds huge, slamming back and forth across the stereo spectrum.

Giorgio Moroder created just a monster of a backing track for, well, I suppose Donna Summer. That's what the label says. But the vocal performance is devoid of any personality, any tonality. She performs the song like glassy eyed monologue belonging to a girl right in the middle of getting fucked. Her performance comes across like a wet dream. She isn't black, she isn't white, she's just a plaything for you. Moroder places the narrator, who is "feel[ing] love" with "what you do", double tracked and fuzzy, high in the song, floating over the power and strength of his arpeggios. Donna Summer is another instrument for him, a tool, in a song about a woman giving over power to a man, and needing that man for validation.

Pitchfork 500: 15. The Adverts – One Chord Wonders and 16. Wire – Ex-Lion Tamer

2010-01-20T11:32:00.006Z

There comes a time when one just has to step back and say they've had enough. Yes, punk was a great idea. Yes, in the UK, it was hugely important on a cultural and musical level. Yes, these are punk classics. But shorn of the importance of UK punk at the time, are these songs worth listening to?

I know they, and a dozen others, are one "The Best Punk Album in the World" and a dozen dozen other complications. But pretty soon the Adverts and Wire are on these compilations not out of merit but because of the roles they played: the Adverts were smart and sinister pop culture junkies, Wire, smarter than everyone, the intelligent band. The Clash were political. The Buzzcocks heart on sleeves. The Sex Pistols the angry and alienated explosion that everyone found their reflection in.

Maybe I'm just being cynical. Maybe I've had a stressful week. But these songs aren't doing anything for me. The Adverts one starts and goes and complains, and Wire show themselves to be possibly the one UK punk band that listened to someone from New York other than the Ramones. Or maybe I think the Advert's "Gary Gilmore's Eyes" and almost everything else by Wire are better than these. It's kind of funny, I like Wire's Pink Flag a lot, but I've never rated this song as anything really other than an album track. It doesn't even sound particularly like Wire; it's very in thrall to the the Velvet Underground school of New York cool that Richard Hell and his Voidoids were tramping around with. And as for the Adverts song, the idea of the song, the political intent of it, was and is far more interesting than the actual song. A statement of musical individuality and not fitting in, putting the ethos of punk into two and a quarter minutes, the intent is fantastic, but the song is just another track on "The Best Punk Album in the World", fantastic if you are in the right mood - or were there, man - but otherwise just some frantic guitar and drums motoring along until they stop.

Haiku of the Day

2010-01-20T08:08:00.000Z

Florescent bulbs buzz,
Hang suspended overhead -
Like angels watching.

Pitchfork 500: 14. X-Ray Spex – Oh Bondage! Up Yours!

2010-01-19T11:29:00.002Z

"Some people say little girls should be seen and not heard". Well, that's what many people say after hearing this song. Everything wrong with the amateurism of punk, this is a noisy squall with the most grating use of one of the shittiest interments in rock: the saxamaphone.

The saxophone has committed many crimes, but the worst of all, even worse than any solo on any song by any ex-member of the Eagles, is taking inspiration from Free Jazz and applying it to rock'n'roll songs. Just because it can be done doesn't mean it should. Plus, Ornette Coleman could actually play his saxamaphone; he didn't just make it squawk because that was all he could do. And is Laura Logic's saxamaphone made of plastic? Did someone get paid real money to record it?

Of course the playing is not really that free jazz at all. Its just the overall effect of the poorly recorded squawking combined with the wounded animal vocals make the playing seem worse than it is. Because the worst crime of the song, is Poly Sytrene's even more grating than free jazz saxamaphone vocals. She was a twenty-year old ne'er-do-well who could shout. A lot. Very little tune, just shouting.

Punk is a great idea. Anyone can make it. But not everyone should have to listen to it. As an artefact of a cultural idea, this record is fantastic; as a listenable piece of discreet music, I think you maybe had to be there.

Haiku of the Day

2010-01-19T09:12:00.002Z

Smothered by blankets;
Crawl out from them, one by one -
Trying to wake up.

The Monday Trade: The Unwritten Vol 1 - Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity

2010-01-18T20:05:00.001Z

Mike Carey and Peter Gross's The Unwritten is a fantastic comic book, but this is a lousy trade collection.

One consistent from Vertigo Comics is that when you buy one of their trades, you are going to get a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. Granted, these stories are usually part of much larger stories, but each trade collects one arc of a series in wonderfully complete form. Vertigo is a trademark of quality, and you know what you are getting. Usually.

The first volume of The Unwritten, however, breaks from this. Volume One, collecting the first five issues of the title, is by no means a complete story. We have a start - a very intriguing one - but nothing in the sense of a middle, let alone a conclusion. It makes for a very frustrating read.

Over the summer I started reading Naoki Urasawa's 20th Century Boys, my first foray into manga. Going in, I knew each volume was more like an American issue, and I wasn't going to get full stories as such, but at a couple hundred pages per volume, I was getting a lot of story and a lot of development per book. Now The Unwritten Volume One has a fantastic premise: Tom Taylor, the son of the author of a classic series of children's fantasy novels starring Tommy Taylor, a character based on Tom, begins to discovers that there is more truth to the fiction than he initially suspected. Along the way, Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity also begins to set up the notion of the power of fictional geography and the power of fiction impacting the real world. It is quite interesting stuff. But all we get here is set-up, set-up, set-up.

Taken on an issue by issue basis, The Unwritten is a very interesting, very engaging comic. The story often slips between Tom Taylor and the Tommy Taylor stories, woven between newspaper articles and message board postings. The first two issues are very much made up of this collage and are very effective in creating the world(s) of the story. The third and forth issues shift the story somewhat, away from that pop cultural collage into something more traditionally Vertigo, and then issue four ends with a rather big and interesting cliff-hanger, which is completely ignored in the fifth issue. Instead, the fifth issue is a short story narrated by Rudyard Kipling, shedding some light onto the strange conspiracy that Tom Taylor is beginning to find himself wrapped up in. On their own, each issues is quite good, though the fifth issue seems to be a little premature in its revelations, when there is barely a sense that things are even there, let alone need revealing. If anything, it posits Carey and Gross's ambition, that The Unwritten is going to be a lot more than "What if JK Rowling had a son name Harry Potter and he was the Harry Potter from the novels?" But the execution and packaging is very frustrating. This isn't a story, it is a bit of a story, and a very frustrating read as there isn't enough of this premature release to make this collection any way satisfying.

Pitchfork 500: 13. Vic Godard and the Subway Sect – Parallel Lines

2010-01-18T11:44:00.000Z

Unlistenable
Clattering cacophony
Falling down the stairs

Haiku of the Day

2010-01-18T09:17:00.000Z

Dull grey normalness;
All the blizzards and snowstorms,
Were they just a dream?

Brainiac 5

2010-01-17T16:11:00.002Z

Hey! I made a video!

Two years ago, I wrote and recorded "Brainiac 5" for the second Anal Anal Animals collection, and always thought it would be a neat idea to make a video of it with clips from the animated Legion of Super-Heroes TV appearances and panels from the comic books. And now I have.

(Brainiac 5 is a member of the Legion of Super-Heroes, a group of teens/young adults/grown-ups that have battled crime one thousand years in the future of DC comics for the last fifty-one(!) years. Brainiac 5's super power is that he is super smart, though in the animate Legion series, he was also part machine and could do crazy japanese robot stuff.)

I've never done anything like this before, and it was fun and frustrating. Being limited to clips from some shows, rather than creating stuff myself, that was a bit frustrating, so maybe I'll have to try to actually tape my own video. But that's a different sort of planning and thinking, rather than throwing a truckload of television into iMovie and cutting stuff away until you have a video.

Anyway, I'm really proud of the song (even if I was sorely tempted to re-record the vocals), and I think the video turned out alright too.

Cultural Production in the Age of Youtube

2010-01-17T08:07:00.005Z

Last night, the Girls from Philly were in town, and conversation at one point turned to Lady Gaga and art, as it does. And it reminded me of this video, which I had seen a couple of days before.

I really like the song, I found it really heartening as a statement on art and making art. Aside from the feminist aspect of the song (and feminism is the simultaneously both the wrong and right word to use), and the direct relation to Gaga and Madonna and the conversation we were having last night, it also tied into another aspect of our conversation, that of art itself and Jeff Koons in particular. MK and I went to an excellent Koons exhibit when we were in Chicago a couple of years ago and then he played an important part of the Tate's ending today Pop Art exhibit (did I blog about my visit to that? I should have, it was fantastic).

If you don't know who Koons is, he is probably best known for making ballon dogs of various scales, but making them not out of balloons, but of metal. They are really quite fantastic. But he does a lot more than that, and around the turn of the nineties, he was married to infamous Italian porn star Cicciolina. He documented their sexual relationship in a series of highly stylised, heavily saturated, very graphic, very very graphic, large scale photographs (and I am not going to post those images - you can find them yourself on the interweb, I'm sure). What MK and I took away from it was the confrontational nature of it, and in Koons's production, where is often literally a "producer" and ideas man, and his assistants do most of the grunt work, we found that very often we felt his art was confronting us with the notion "But is it art?" The answer we came up with, and one that probably is obvious to anyone knows what they are talking about, is "Of course it is, DuChamp and Warhol started and ended this conversation. Why are we still asking this question?"

The "But is it art?" question seems to be one that should have been answered ages ago - it is if you say it is. Yet clearly, even among educated people, as the ongoing cultural Babelogue shows, that isn't always the answer we want to give. And coming back to where we started, Lady Gaga is a great case in point. She claims what she is doing is art. A lot of people want to bring her down and say it is, but if she says its art, isn't it? (The question of whether it is good art is another matter, and one I won't get into).

But I really like Amanda Palmer's song. I love the directness of it, and I really like her take on art in it. I am not normally a fan of her music - its usually too florid (not quite the right word) for me - but I like this song alot. Could be the ukulele, could be the directness, blogginess of the lyrics, could be that it makes me feel better about painting ducks and making music few, if anyone besides myself, actually likes. So I'll take a bit of strength in that, and enjoy the song, and still not like Lady Gaga's music ('cos its just not my thing) but give her a chance beyond that.

Dobby the Hat Elf

2010-01-15T13:14:00.004Z

This is funny. Dobby the Hat Elf, from actually successful hip hop (or whatever) group N'Dubz, was on The Chris Moyles Show on Radio 1. Some kid texted in to say that she didn't like them, and he surreptitiously took down her number and started texting her back.

Now I know that all the enjoyment I get out of Dobby is from his annual visit to Never Mind the Buzzcocks where he fails to realise that most of the half hour is spent taking the mick out of him, but here his affable-dumb-guy-that-doesn't-realise-how-not-on-the-ball-he-is thing kind of shows he might actually be as foolish as he appears. He texted "your [sic] gonna die" to this girl and "U sent a very bad msg towards Ndubz on The Chris Moyels [sic] Show yesterday Morning and for that reason u will never be left alone!!! If u say sorry I will leave you alone." How special ed do you have to be to do that? And then when she calls the number to find out who is texting her, he shouts at her? N'Dubz are successfull, they actually sell a lot of records, what was he doing? And the biggest irony? Dobby and N'Dubz are spokespeople against cyber bullying. It's kind of like that time Princess Diana got caught planting the landmines.

Pitchfork 500: 12. Buzzcocks – Ever Fallen in Love? (With Someone You Shouldn't've)

2010-01-15T11:43:00.000Z

I think the Buzzcocks just might be, theoretically, my favourite UK punk band. Their singles are just pure singley goodness. They are like a Ramones that can articulate themselves. The Ramones would write about how they feel, but the Buzzcocks songs were about why they felt that way. If anything, this song in the Pitchfork 500 is perhaps the most important of the early punk songs, the echoes of this punk-pop gem still echo today. The Sex Pistols were pure anger and contempt, the Clash were political, but the Buzzcocks were real. The title is a question, and a whole lot of people can answer "Yes" to it. Pile on some great guitar hooks (and a tom tom riff to lock it in), a terrific melody and a rhythm that doesn't let up and you have punk-power-pop perfection. The introspection that the Buzzcocks brought to the game are what gave punk/college rock/alternative/indie/etc its legs, and this song is a great set of legs. Wow, what a stupid metaphor.

Haiku of the Day

2010-01-15T09:06:00.001Z

Snow turns to puddles;
Favoured dreams of winter white,
Melts to memories.

Up in the Air

2010-01-14T21:54:00.003Z

Up in the Air is a very good movie. Staring George Clooney as some sort of George Clooneyesque man whose job it is to travel from town to town, firing people. And he loves travelling. To him, home is airports and airplanes, that homogenised, antiseptic world of convenience and service, particularly when one has a loyalty card and a bazillion points. Clooney's character, Ryan (and Ryan is a name that doesn't sit well on Clooney's magnificent face) has no real home and likes it that way. He has excised himself from his family back in Wisconsin and occasionally gives motivational speeches encouraging others to reduce their lives to nothing, both in terms of physical goods and in terms of emotional baggage.

Into this world, a young female whippersnapper is dropped, and he as to show her the ropes of firing people, and he meets another citizen of teh skies, and seems to make a more significant connection with her than he intents or expects. Needless to say, with a title like this, his once ordered life is now "up in the air" ha ha ha etc.

My boyfriend George Clooney, as always, is charming and charismatic. You can't help but be taken in by his character and how director Jason Reitman presents him: in control, the master of the universe. He is an engaging lead character, and his "friend" Alex is equally as charming, as they try to arrange layovers in the same cities. You really pull for these characters to have some sort of epiphany and find each other, but of course the movie can't be that easy.

And in some ways, that is where the film falls apart. I hope I'm not giving anything away, though I probably am, so be warned, but the elusive openness of the ending is a frustrating thing. In a way, it is completely appropriate for the film, a film about transitions (Ryan doesn't actually "fire" people, he is a "career transition counsellor", and this is a movie about transitions. But transitions into what, or who? Up in the Air doesn't let us have that answer. Its a frustrating conclusion, but one that will probably stay with me longer than had the story tied itself up nicely in a bow. So maybe the landing is bumpy, but the rest of the flight was excellent.

Kids in the Hall: Death Comes to Town

2010-01-14T21:04:00.003Z

In which the bloated ghosts of nineties comedy troop The Kids in the Hall come back from the grave and get inspired from the kids they inspired

The first, most obvious thing, is that the return of the Kids in the Hall to television can only be disappointing. Middle aged and grown fat on Hollywood cameo paycheques, the Kids clearly can not have the chops they once did. During the late eighties and early nineties, they proved themselves to be the funniest sketch comedy troop ever. Ever. And now, fifteen years later they are back on TV. Except, somehow, miraculously, it doesn't suck. At all. So far, after one episode, it is rather good.

I think the thing in the Kids favour is that they haven't come back with a sketch based show. Rather wisely, they have taken inspiration from the League of Gentlemen and have built an eight part serial with recurring characters and multiple roles for each Kid. The story, set in the town of Shuckton, presumably a little north of Toronto town, appears to be a murder mystery. The town, not surprisingly, has just failed to win host city duties for the 2028 summer Olympics, and the town's beloved mayor is murdered by a mysterious, trench coated figure at the end of the first episode. I assume an investigation will ensue along with wackiness.

The first episode, broadcast by the CBC a couple of nights ago and spread around the internet starting yesterday, is all set up. Death, played by a pot-bellied Mark McKinney literally comes to town, and we spend the bulk of the episode meeting the residents of Shuckton. All seem to be new characters, thankfully, with the exception of the two cops from Police Department, now apparently having left Toronto behind for life outside of the big city. I was quite taken by the new characters, and rather disappointed that Bruce McColloch's mayor met his demise at the blunt end of a TV remote. He was a classic McColloch character, in that pretty much once McColloch is in a suit, all his characters are mostly the same, over confident loud mouths. But how I love that over-confident loud mouth. I could list a whole bunch of other characters and say I liked them, but that is probably a bit silly. So I won't. But I liked them.

The Kids have not aged particularly well, it has to be said. To a man, they look old. As a group, they are about fifty, but they look old skool fifty, not fifty-is-the-new-forty-George-Clooney-fifty. It is a little jarring to see the heroes of my youth looking like old men, but it never gets in the way of their performances, and indeed, the characters they are choosing to play more or less reflect their ages; no one is playing someone clearly outside of their age range.

Overall, it really worked for me, I was quite happy with the result. I think as the weeks go on and the characters and their beats get more familiar, it will get funnier. While each character had a sort of sketch to introduce them, a sketch in a sketch comedy show and how these characters were introduced are very different things. MK didn't seem to be enjoying the show as much as me - it might have been the small town Canadianness of the thing or something else, but she had a harder time getting into it. I loved it though, and was very happy to see the Kids in the Hall not only making TV again, but making good TV.

Pitchfork 500: 11. The Clash – (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais

2010-01-14T11:42:00.000Z

This song is absolutely incredible until the vocals start. Then the song heads south to Jamaica and stars to suck my balls, but not in a good way. To say that I dislike reggae is an understatement. The only music I dislike more is ska (though strangely I really like rocksteady, the Jamaica music that was accident in between ska and reggae). And white guys playing reggae? The Clash are just a step away from being the Police here, all that is holding them back is a complete lack of melody. So yes, "the only band that matters": worse than the Police. Well done [slow clap].

But the first fifteen seconds are fantastic.

Haiku of the Day

2010-01-14T08:45:00.000Z

British wintertime
Returns with a wet vengeance
In the pouring rain.

Rule of Three broken! Is this the start of the Rule of Four?

2010-01-14T08:12:00.002Z

In sad news, everyone died yesterday. Well, not really, I just got up this morning and found a sursprisingly large celeb death list waiting for me. Always entertaining indie rocker Jay Reatard, smooth soul sensation Teddie Pendergrass, reggae legend Yabby You, and Wax Trax records co-founder Dannie Flesher all died yesterday. This is Truly a Bad Day for Music.

Of course, the really important thing is what does this mean for the celebrity death Rule of Three? Because four died! Should we be expecting two more today? Is Tracy Jordan safe? Or is the new Rule four?

And lets not even get into the fact that three of those who passed are celebrities only in fairly small circles. Do we count Reatard, You and Flesher as a Hipster Rule of Three, and Pendergrass part of an actual, real celebrity Rule of Three? It's just so complicated! I think we need to go to the Anal Anal Animals Maths Team on this one. Dread Pirate Roberts, where do we stand?

Peter Serafinowicz is Paul McCartney

2010-01-13T13:49:00.004Z

I've been trying really hard to not believe that Robert Zemeckis is really going to make a remake of Yellow Submarine. It just seems pretty stupid on most every level. I suppose there is some claim to showing the universiality of the Beatles, but with the contextural framework of "1968" removed, Yellow Submarine is a pretty ridiculous film that isn't really worth remaking. Particularly since half the Beatles are dead.

Of course, the Beatles didn't actually do their own voices in the original. So recasting The Boys isn't as big a stretch as it might seem. And Zemeckis, if reports are actually to be believed (and these are reports on The Internet, so who really knows - I'm sceptical because they sound too good), has really cast the Beatles surprisingly well. I mean, Peter Serafinowicz as Paul McCartney. For real? Really real? And Dean Lennox Kelly, the personification of dirty charm, as Lennon? Really real? Like, if someone cool was casting the movie, they are who they would cast. But cool people never cast movies.

Oh, and Cary Elwes as George. That's just funny.

So, I guess this was his audition: Serafinowicz as McCartney. I hope this is exactly what the movie is like!

Haiku of the Day

2010-01-13T13:15:00.000Z

A gentle dusting,
Waking to quiet and peace –
A morning snowfall.