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Ok, so first of all my New Year's Resolution this year is... to not write this blog daily!
Woo!
Yeah, so 568 posts in and over a year of daily posting (barring a couple of vacations) I think I've kind of proved... whatever it was I was trying to prove to myself. I'd rather use my brain for other, more creative things in 2010, so I'll just post here randomly, like any other sane blog and not fit one post every day like I have been doing. I promised Andy I'd do another post about Girls Aloud and I want to do one about the Kouhaku Utagassen, and I hope I can keep adding stuff to my Sapporo Map, so I'm certainly not done here completely. But output will be sporadic to say the least. If you've been reading while I spout off every single day then thanks a lot but it'd be better for me to spend some time writing more songs or maybe even finishing one of the many novels I've started.
Also, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest is a huge book, I really need some time to get cracking on that.
And I need to get a job.
Still, I'm very optimistic about this year. Why? Because of my omikuji.
That's me in the freezing wind and snow outside Hokkaido Shrine where I went on New Year's Day to draw omikuji - divination by lots (check out the wikipedia link there, it tells you all about it). You make a donation, take a piece of paper and it tells you how your future is going to be. For the last two years on New Year's Day I drew Shou-Kichi - small blessing, which is probably the most common one. Nothing too bad, nothing great this year. This year though - Dai-Kichi - Great Blessing! That's as good as it gets. It comes with a lot of reminders to give of myself, my wealth and my strength; to be aware when I am blessed - but it also has nothing but good messages about my future.
Using it even only as cognitive fuel I hope to have a great year, and I hope you will too.
Happy New Year!
So this year I had more time and thus found more music. It seems to be as simple as that! I read a bunch of people saying that 2009 was a crappy year for music, but, y'know, those people are idiots. It's never a crappy year for anything, it's just impossible to be exposed to everything that might possibly be good. Give yourself a break, give the world a break, just... can't we all just get along?
Anyway I got you seven albums that I loved, ten albums that I really liked, a couple that I know sucked but still kind of liked, and a few that I haven't decided about yet. Some of these I've written about before, and I'll try not to repeat myself but... hell I repeat myself enough in real life so that would just be an accurate reflection of myself. Once you have an actual thought in your head you owe it too the world to get as much mileage out of it as possible, right? Right? Don't leave me hanging here.
Themselves - Crownsdown
It's like they set out to make a real hip-hop album, but they've accidentally evolved beyond musical genres, so for all the references and put-downs they throw in - they've kind of already won because they've transferred to a different league and are kind of on their own there. The hip-hop references are delicious though, and while it didn't blow me away at first (I was still pretty impressed) it was a massive grower, and I really love the record now. Just writing about it makes me want to listen to it again, and this is one of my favourite videos this year:
Converge - Axe To Fall
Every now and then I go back to this album and think - do I really like it or am I in awe of it? The answer is probably both. I'm not exactly a die-hard hard-core fan, so I can understand some people thinking that they're either a) stuck in a rut or b) moving too far into the mainstream (though it's kind of surreal that those two criticisms - the main ones I've read - come from completely opposite directions) because they probably know more about hard-core than me. But I like this album a lot, it's my favourite thing I've heard by Converge and it sounds like terrible, powerful things being given form.
The Flaming Lips - Embryonic
So basically, and quite surreally for a band who put on one of the most stunning stage shows ever, I totally lost interest in the Flaming Lips after Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots. That album, to sum it up, sucks, and I figured that all the craziness and invention that I had loved about them until that point - and especially a certain demented flame that always seemed to drive them - had gone for good. This album was not just a return to form but sounds like they've evolved into a whole new strange, wonderful, disquieting band. It's just so fucking exciting to hear a band that's been going for so long metamorphose so powerfully and convincingly into this kind of monster. The levels, the sound, the songs, the structure, the album - everything is too much, and it's amazing.
Charlotte Hatherley - New Worlds
I reckon in the end, I just like the way she writes songs. I really, really like the way she writes songs.
Jay-Z - The Blueprint 3
I think I said before I don't know why there's people running around saying that this was a let down. The last track - Forever Young - is a travesty, contemplating the existence of which upsets me greatly, but the rest of the album is impressively strong. Well worth the hype.
OneOne - Aooooon
Beautiful, folky music, and I really like everything that Tenniscoats and Deerhoof put out, but this one captured my imagination a lot more than I expected it to.
Future of the Left - Travels With Myself And Another
Like some deranged, musclebound dictator of the land of half-forgoten pop culture who's angry. Angry! Always angry! And churning and riffing and spitting and grinning and occasionally calming down enough to make you think it's making sense, but really it's still half out of its mind on pop-tarts and real ale.
Those albums, I loved. These ones I liked a lot, but not enough to really gush about them.
Chuck Prophet - Let Freedom Ring
Shiina Ringo - Sanmon Gossip
Health - Get Color
Young Fresh Fellows - I Think This Is
Eyedea & Abilities - By The Throat
Luke Haines - 21st Century Man / Achtung Mutha
Grand Duchy - Petit Fours
Monobright - 2
Boredoms - Super Roots 10
Annie - Don't Stop
And the ones I know kind of suck, but I liked anyway were:
Kid Cudi - Man on the Moon : The End of Day
Teriyaki Boyz - Serious Japanese
And the few that I picked up at the end of the year, and dug to varying degrees but don't feel good about properly rating were:
St Vincent - Actor
Gallows - Grey Britain
Clipse - Til The Casket Drops
Ah, music. Bring the hell on 2010 already. Give me more. MORE! MY HUNGER CANNOT BE SATED!
Again, apologies - posting from the safety of January 4th. And now that I come to think of it, I watched both of these movies after New Year, so it should be impossible for me to make comments about them on the date this post was made. That my friends, is either me being psychic, time travel or... blog magic. I'll let you decide which.
Juno was wonderful - funny and touching and better than I expected. The plot was interesting, the characters were just... implausibly likable and the dialogue (which I'd heard so much about) was playful and witty without being smug. I mean, it was smug at times, but it was meant to be smug within the banterous little universe they'd created there. It's not perfect by any means but I really liked it, and it had the best performance I've seen Michael Cera give yet. I mean, come on, I'm willing to be proven wrong here but so far in his burgeoning career Michael Cera seems to be a terrible actor. He gives exactly the same super-geeky performance in everything I've seen him in, and while that generally works and I like it well enough, it's only because the film makers are crafting the parts specifically for him. In Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist he was really fucking pushing it, playing the kind of romantic lead where the relationship - cute though it was - didn't ring true for me. I'm kind of worried about him in the upcoming Scott Pilgrim adaptation, because everything else about that seems utterly awesome.
Enough about Michael Cera. Juno was really good and the worst thing about it is the smugly twee faux indie films that have probably been green-lit because of it.
I liked Inglourious Basterds too, having finally had a chance to watch it, but I'm fairly bemused at the praise it has recieved. I mean, I liked it because it was a kind of demented pop-culture mash up - just Tarantino watching a bunch of second world war movies and thinking - man I'd love to make something like this, with Jews hiding from the Nazis and commandos in the French countryside and the tension of The Great Escape and the camaraderie and like... something to do with The Dirty Dozen... And then he just mixed all that up and slapped it together into a series of tight, very Tarantino-esque scenes and the whole thing is really kind of fun if you like Tarantino's directorial voice.
But by any kind of objective standards that I can think of, it's a terrible fucking movie.
I mean none of the characters were believable, likeable or interesting in anyway. They were mostly annoying in pretty deliberate, entertaining ways, but that doesn't really count. One would think that a lot of the drama of WW2 movies is symbiotic with the idea that the people are in real danger within... well, within World War Two. Inglourious Basterds is famously cavalier with historical facts, and I have no problem with that, but it just makes the slow boiling tension that Tarantino is trying to capture in most of the scenes seem cheap and pointless. The characters are cartoons, the setting is a cartoon... there's no reason to care about anything so it all becomes really uninvolving.
And even more absurdly by the time the finale has come around the ending is so clearly signposted that there's no tension at all! It's just a kind of Nazi bashing free-for-all which... y'know, is fine. But I didn't really like any of the heroes, and I didn't really feel like those Nazis were real Nazis so much as random baddies dressed up in Nazi uniforms, so I turned off completely.
The movie is divided into a small number of long scenes that act like mini-plays for Tarantino to basically play around with war-movie tropes. They're each kind of fun, but they make the whole thing seem very stilted and they sap any momentum the movie might have as a whole. Again, I'm sure the structure and its pros and cons were very deliberate choices that the director made, but... it really kinda sucks.
The one thing that I was technically impressed with was the way in which Tarantino moved the plot along. He used the stilted, extended-scene structure and in every scene gave you exactly what you needed to know to get to the next 'vignette', cutting away all the exposition inbetween. That - paring it down to just the long, tension building scenes that he obviously wanted to get cracking on - was a really nice way of telling the story. It's just that the tension seemed to be pointless since I didn't care about any of the characters, the whole thing seemed utterly contrived and it certainly never seemed to bear much resemblence to the actual historical conflict.
Also the music was interesting but terribly used. Really awfully used.
And despite all that griping I still liked it, but mostly because I like car-crash art, and entertaining, interestingly-bad art and there were plenty of bits that I just plain loved. All the typefaces and text throughout, the main bad guy, Mike Myers (why?), the Bowie track - all awesome. But the movie? Appalling.
I recommend it.
What can I say about this? I was a little burned out over Christmas and New Year? I wasn't really, I just wasn't really in the mood to blog. These posts then, all from January 4th with small notes of apology attached to each one. And with reference to that please read the post dated December 31st! I'm going to be blurring the laws of time on these few post-Christmas / pre-New Years posts so events might not occur in order. I'm also padding a little with some book, comic and movies stuff. Just so's you know. Today = Comics.
The Goon
#33, no dialogue just pictoral thought bubbles. Eric Powell is a bleedin' genius.
Someone should give him a big gold medal or something. Maybe just a lot of money. Whatever makes him happy. Then again he already has his own Girl's Roller Derby team - what else could a man want?
Ah yes, just to bring you down from Christmas with a bump, a quick post about a notoriously depressing masterpiece:
In fact I found Cormac McCarthy's The Road
(coming soon with extra Mortensen to a cinema near you!) to be not nearly as depressing as I'd feared. The story is bleak for sure, but it's so beautifully written as to be almost uplifting. It's a wonderful book and I would certainly recommend it to anyone who can avoid getting hung up on the apocalyptic nihilism of the story.
