Here's what happens when I can't think of anything to say for myself for a while; the obligatory media round up. It's all I ever talk about with my friends whenever we catch up, so maybe this will eradicate even those fun-sized pockets of conversation.
Music: I take back wholeheartedly what I said about the Jonas Brothers. I actually can't believe they've covered no less than TWO Busted songs; Year 3000 and What I Go To School For. They've even given them a weedy Disney Channel makeover, taking away all the thickly-veiled innuendo (taking away the words "ass" and inexplicably replacing "Michael Jackson" with "even outsold Kelly Clarkson" as if any of her songs has remotely troubled the stratospheric sales of Thriller). Annoying, because Busted never troubled any teenagers outside of the British Isles, Yankee Doodle Donny and his teenage slagwagons will lap it all up, and if illegibly spelt Youtube comments merit anything these days, they will also think that Billy Boy Jonas wrote the bloody things, rather than a record company hack dabbling with genius. Changing Busted lyrics is like dabbling with the core existence of teenagers. Not pretty. What is pretty though, is the new recommends features on Last FM, which has kindly nudged me in the back and persuaded me to investigate Swedish electropop again. I was tempted to give up after hearing so many rave reviews of Lykke Li's album I thought I'd implode, and then didn't like it, but Andreas Kleerup's album, and his lending of one of his songs to the ridiculous new Cyndi Lauper album has reset the balance, and I can step up to the table and show my hand: Familjen, Gentle Touch, Juvelen, Le Sport, Lo-Fi-Fnk, Pacfic! and Zeigest are all completely brilliant, even though a lot of it just sounds like rejigged versions of Knife songs. Added to the fact that Yearbook 2 by Studio is fast becoming one of my favourite albums of the year, despite it all being remixed, and I've pretty much settled that my summer heatwave soundtracking will be performed by plugged-in-Swedes for the second year running. There's more of the Scandinavian influence below.
Not that it's all pop punk and roses; I've also added a few more of the 2008 speciality (epic indie rock with no edit feature) to my year's favourites, including the power-chord excellence of Miasmal Smoke and the Yellow Bellied Freaks by Wintersleep, who were knocked off the shortlist for the Canadian equivalent of the Mercury Music Prize, and better yet, a little song called Mysterious Skin by a little band called Orphans and Vandals, which reminds me a little of Jack and the Tindersticks, as well as pretentious indie post rock circa 1999, although the singer sounds like Johnny Borrell breathing through his nose and ears, but it's essentially a perfectly pretentious spoke-sung tale of journeying to France, lost memories and bad sex. It's better than that sounds. I've also got no idea who Iglu and Hartly even are, or what the hell they think they're doing, but In This City is looking like a beast and all.
Films: I've now seen The Dark Knight twice, making it the first film I've seen twice in the cinema since, well since forever. I actually can't think of the last film I saw twice in the cinema except maybe Saw, but that was back in 2004 and mostly regrettable, especially because I paid both times. I did enjoy Batman, but I can't help that I enjoyed it twice as much because I thought Batman Begins sucked big old monolithic ass, and didn't have especially high expectations for this one. But rather than being like that mismatch of failed ideas, I though The Dark Knight was great, although it was essentially an even longer version of Heat with silly costumes. Even more exciting was The Mist, which came from nowhere and knocked me sideways, and is about as superior as a B movie could ever hope to be, it's really quite something, right down to the ending, which somehow manages to turn an essentially silly Stephen King adaptation that's not entire dissimilar to previous King atrocity Maximum Overdrive, into a morbidly depressing thought-piece, and ended with almost nobody going home happy. If anyone can show me a horror movie better constructed that that one, then let's all hear about it. I though Hancock was silly and shit, and Journey to the Centre of the Earth was just utterly ridiculous, not least for the fact it tried to present Jules Vernes original novel as a factual text. Often I look out of the windows upstairs at work and look across at all the cranes and builders and busy worker ants acting out Richard Scarry books across on the building site, and I wonder what the world is coming to, building shit everywhere, but then I think that in 2008 it's possible to go and see one dumb action adventure starring Brendan Fraser at the cinema, and see a trailer for another dumb action adventure starring Brendan Fraser at the same cinema beforehand, then I think maybe everything's going to be alright. Such as it turned out in Wall-E, which is like taking an Etch-a-Sketch to your own misery. Any building up of woe or angst you feel you might have bubbling under your surface waiting to jump out of your throat and try and make conversation with someone, hop on down to watch Wall-E and you'll find yourself jibbering for a few days. It'll come back no problem, but for at least a few hours after watching Wall-E, you'll realise nothing can really be that bad. It did fill my heart a little bit though, when I realised that robots with no discerned brain can fall in love with beautiful stranger robots with no bran, despite not being able to speak more than three words between them. Maybe there's where I'm going wrong; too many words, and not enough robot dancing. I can see what they see in Peter Crouch Now. I also had the fortune to finally watch one of the Lord of the Rings films, over sixty years after everyone else did. Whilst it was obviously a good yarn, I found my main two thoughts about The Fellowship of the Ring being how they got away with it being a PG when there's decapitations and big tentacles and all sorts of nonsense, and how ridiculous the concept was that I had to change discs in the middle of the film. It reminded me of having to put in Disc 5 of Monkey Island, because that was the one with all the animated sequences in,
Television. The only TV I've watched in the last few weeks was half an episode of Richard and Judy, where they had a desperately humourless berk in the studio showing Richard and "Judy" (who for that night's episode, was inexplicably Emma Bunton) boring clips of babies on Youtube. It was horrific, but it was still better than leaving the room and looking up pictures of babies myself on Youtube. I don't find babies even remotely funny. Then they showed a clip from QI was was infinitely better than anything and was an incredibly stupid thing to do before introducing a guest. It's like introducing your friend who can do keepy-uppy for ten kicks by showing them extended highlights of the 1970 Brazil World Cup Squad. The guest, whose name I luckily forget, was someone who'd written a book about trvia, and was so unutterably dull that Richard and "Judy" had to resort to showing voxpop clips of buffoons of Brighton Beach telling us there own (mostly fabricated) trivia. One plank's "trivia" was some shit about deep sea diving and penguins that was so off-the-scale for not being trivial, I'm surprised the cameraman even let him walk away, let alone stuck him in the show.
Books. As usual, I've fifteen on the go that I've got no hope of finishing, but even if I don't finish the Alex Cox, Matt Ridley or Tonya Hurley books that are propping my door open I know I'll finish The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson tonight or tomorrow. It's simply incredible, a quasi-political thriller meets twee "locked room" crime mystery, only I love it not just just because it's set in Sweden, but because it's MASSIVE and this is only the first book, and has a rotating cast of ridiculous characters, and can range from heart-wrenching scenes of aging businessmen weeping over the missing links in their family tree, to newspaper stories about people being killed and having parakeets shoved up their vaginas. It's had ridiculous comparisons to War and Peace, which I can't fathom and explanation for except for it being quite long, but I think comparing Larsson to Tolstoy is ever so slightly over-egging the pudding. Not least because I can't ever see myself investigating War and Peace in the near future, even if it was set in Sweden and was about twee electropop.
Love: Oh, too much to talk about.
Music: I take back wholeheartedly what I said about the Jonas Brothers. I actually can't believe they've covered no less than TWO Busted songs; Year 3000 and What I Go To School For. They've even given them a weedy Disney Channel makeover, taking away all the thickly-veiled innuendo (taking away the words "ass" and inexplicably replacing "Michael Jackson" with "even outsold Kelly Clarkson" as if any of her songs has remotely troubled the stratospheric sales of Thriller). Annoying, because Busted never troubled any teenagers outside of the British Isles, Yankee Doodle Donny and his teenage slagwagons will lap it all up, and if illegibly spelt Youtube comments merit anything these days, they will also think that Billy Boy Jonas wrote the bloody things, rather than a record company hack dabbling with genius. Changing Busted lyrics is like dabbling with the core existence of teenagers. Not pretty. What is pretty though, is the new recommends features on Last FM, which has kindly nudged me in the back and persuaded me to investigate Swedish electropop again. I was tempted to give up after hearing so many rave reviews of Lykke Li's album I thought I'd implode, and then didn't like it, but Andreas Kleerup's album, and his lending of one of his songs to the ridiculous new Cyndi Lauper album has reset the balance, and I can step up to the table and show my hand: Familjen, Gentle Touch, Juvelen, Le Sport, Lo-Fi-Fnk, Pacfic! and Zeigest are all completely brilliant, even though a lot of it just sounds like rejigged versions of Knife songs. Added to the fact that Yearbook 2 by Studio is fast becoming one of my favourite albums of the year, despite it all being remixed, and I've pretty much settled that my summer heatwave soundtracking will be performed by plugged-in-Swedes for the second year running. There's more of the Scandinavian influence below.
Not that it's all pop punk and roses; I've also added a few more of the 2008 speciality (epic indie rock with no edit feature) to my year's favourites, including the power-chord excellence of Miasmal Smoke and the Yellow Bellied Freaks by Wintersleep, who were knocked off the shortlist for the Canadian equivalent of the Mercury Music Prize, and better yet, a little song called Mysterious Skin by a little band called Orphans and Vandals, which reminds me a little of Jack and the Tindersticks, as well as pretentious indie post rock circa 1999, although the singer sounds like Johnny Borrell breathing through his nose and ears, but it's essentially a perfectly pretentious spoke-sung tale of journeying to France, lost memories and bad sex. It's better than that sounds. I've also got no idea who Iglu and Hartly even are, or what the hell they think they're doing, but In This City is looking like a beast and all.
Films: I've now seen The Dark Knight twice, making it the first film I've seen twice in the cinema since, well since forever. I actually can't think of the last film I saw twice in the cinema except maybe Saw, but that was back in 2004 and mostly regrettable, especially because I paid both times. I did enjoy Batman, but I can't help that I enjoyed it twice as much because I thought Batman Begins sucked big old monolithic ass, and didn't have especially high expectations for this one. But rather than being like that mismatch of failed ideas, I though The Dark Knight was great, although it was essentially an even longer version of Heat with silly costumes. Even more exciting was The Mist, which came from nowhere and knocked me sideways, and is about as superior as a B movie could ever hope to be, it's really quite something, right down to the ending, which somehow manages to turn an essentially silly Stephen King adaptation that's not entire dissimilar to previous King atrocity Maximum Overdrive, into a morbidly depressing thought-piece, and ended with almost nobody going home happy. If anyone can show me a horror movie better constructed that that one, then let's all hear about it. I though Hancock was silly and shit, and Journey to the Centre of the Earth was just utterly ridiculous, not least for the fact it tried to present Jules Vernes original novel as a factual text. Often I look out of the windows upstairs at work and look across at all the cranes and builders and busy worker ants acting out Richard Scarry books across on the building site, and I wonder what the world is coming to, building shit everywhere, but then I think that in 2008 it's possible to go and see one dumb action adventure starring Brendan Fraser at the cinema, and see a trailer for another dumb action adventure starring Brendan Fraser at the same cinema beforehand, then I think maybe everything's going to be alright. Such as it turned out in Wall-E, which is like taking an Etch-a-Sketch to your own misery. Any building up of woe or angst you feel you might have bubbling under your surface waiting to jump out of your throat and try and make conversation with someone, hop on down to watch Wall-E and you'll find yourself jibbering for a few days. It'll come back no problem, but for at least a few hours after watching Wall-E, you'll realise nothing can really be that bad. It did fill my heart a little bit though, when I realised that robots with no discerned brain can fall in love with beautiful stranger robots with no bran, despite not being able to speak more than three words between them. Maybe there's where I'm going wrong; too many words, and not enough robot dancing. I can see what they see in Peter Crouch Now. I also had the fortune to finally watch one of the Lord of the Rings films, over sixty years after everyone else did. Whilst it was obviously a good yarn, I found my main two thoughts about The Fellowship of the Ring being how they got away with it being a PG when there's decapitations and big tentacles and all sorts of nonsense, and how ridiculous the concept was that I had to change discs in the middle of the film. It reminded me of having to put in Disc 5 of Monkey Island, because that was the one with all the animated sequences in,
Television. The only TV I've watched in the last few weeks was half an episode of Richard and Judy, where they had a desperately humourless berk in the studio showing Richard and "Judy" (who for that night's episode, was inexplicably Emma Bunton) boring clips of babies on Youtube. It was horrific, but it was still better than leaving the room and looking up pictures of babies myself on Youtube. I don't find babies even remotely funny. Then they showed a clip from QI was was infinitely better than anything and was an incredibly stupid thing to do before introducing a guest. It's like introducing your friend who can do keepy-uppy for ten kicks by showing them extended highlights of the 1970 Brazil World Cup Squad. The guest, whose name I luckily forget, was someone who'd written a book about trvia, and was so unutterably dull that Richard and "Judy" had to resort to showing voxpop clips of buffoons of Brighton Beach telling us there own (mostly fabricated) trivia. One plank's "trivia" was some shit about deep sea diving and penguins that was so off-the-scale for not being trivial, I'm surprised the cameraman even let him walk away, let alone stuck him in the show.
Books. As usual, I've fifteen on the go that I've got no hope of finishing, but even if I don't finish the Alex Cox, Matt Ridley or Tonya Hurley books that are propping my door open I know I'll finish The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson tonight or tomorrow. It's simply incredible, a quasi-political thriller meets twee "locked room" crime mystery, only I love it not just just because it's set in Sweden, but because it's MASSIVE and this is only the first book, and has a rotating cast of ridiculous characters, and can range from heart-wrenching scenes of aging businessmen weeping over the missing links in their family tree, to newspaper stories about people being killed and having parakeets shoved up their vaginas. It's had ridiculous comparisons to War and Peace, which I can't fathom and explanation for except for it being quite long, but I think comparing Larsson to Tolstoy is ever so slightly over-egging the pudding. Not least because I can't ever see myself investigating War and Peace in the near future, even if it was set in Sweden and was about twee electropop.
Love: Oh, too much to talk about.
No comments:
Post a Comment