Hey kids! Magazine round-up time;

I got the new Plan B in the post yesterday, and it’s just swell. Haven’t had a chance to give it a through going over yet, but from the bits I have read; Miss Amp nails my mixed feelings on the new look Le Tigre perfectly, Neil Kulkarni’s column is essential reading for absolutely everybody (but of course!), even if I don’t agree with him 100%. The Peel tributes are lovely, the illustrations are stunning, little contributions from Jeff Lewis, Herman Dune and the mighty Bearsuit are a pleasure, and, hey, the LCD Soundsystem feature is pretty cool too. I nearly wet myself reading a sentence in a proper magazine that invokes both Fluxblog and It Came From The Sea as “cutting edge tastemakers”! And to think people laughed at me when I told Barbelith was where the cool kids hang out! Well, actually they didn’t laugh at me because I said nothing of the sort, but maybe I should have done.

Also, everybody should get the new Terrorizer (or at least read it in the shop) purely for the hilarious and totally Tap-esque Gorgoroth / 1349 tour diary. It’s written by a German fanzine dude who’s clearly a huge fan, but yet he seems absolutely oblivious to the damage he’s inflicting to the fine line between Black Metal’s mysterious power image and it’s farcical reality;

“After a long discussion and Infernus seriously threatening to cancel the gig, the local organiser finally convinces a local woman, who turns out to be the housekeeper, to offer her private bathroom.
‘It’s nice to have some young guys around’ volunteers the woman in her 40s, and her teenage daughter seems to agree after Infernus takes his turn in the bath. ‘What a nice guy,’ flirts the youth.
…
The mother and daughter seem to recover after the show and sit happily talking and drinking tea in their kitchen with 1349, who are still in full stage dress waiting turns to shower. A bizarre scene with Frost still clad in his black cape! Meanwhile, Infernus tries to explain his musical vision; ‘Black Metal has to deal with Satanism or a Satanic outlook on life, without that it is by definition not Black Metal!’”

You said it dude.

I also picked up the new Wire as well. I haven’t had a chance to read it or listen to the free CDs yet, but with a cover feature entitled ‘In Praise of the Riff’, it’s sure to make good reading.

I’ve turned into such a magazine whore since I lost my internet access. I’ll be out looking for the new ‘Loose Lips..’ today too.

Here for you to enjoy is part 2 of my Film Watching Journal, covering four films which I watched over the course of one day a couple of weeks ago. There’s some fairly obvious exposition of reasonably well known films in there perhaps, but this might end up in Gist at some point, so I thought I may as well do it in full magazine style. Writing about films is weird. Unlike music, which has a well-established framework of writing convention to fall back on*, it’s difficult to know quite where to start when trying to fully convey your impressions of some utterly bugfuck movie. It tends to take a lot of words and, in this case, the valuing of clarity and honesty over linguistic style. Hang on, what the hell am I doing here? Self-critique? Fuck that, let’s just get on with it!

*well ok, cinema has one, but I haven’t read enough of it.


FILM WATCHING JOURNAL PART TWO;

22/10/04

Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Russ Meyer, US, 1965)

Found a copy of this in the market for £4. Gear!

Those already familiar with this particular legendary piece of pop culture dynamite can probably live without my comments, but for the uninitiated, read on;

Russ Meyer is often perceived as being purely a porn director, but I think that sells him a little short. This astonishingly titled feature for instance involves little more than a gang of bad-ass Amazonian go-go dancers driving fast cars, cracking wise and beating the shit out of people. All good clean fun. It’s generally regarded as Meyer’s masterpiece, if not the defining film of the whole exploitation cinema ‘movement’, and not without good reason – it’s little short of mindblowing, especially placed within the context of other ‘60s b-movies.

You see, b-movies from this period are usually pretty disappointing. With their sales pitch based more heavily than ever around their salacious posters, taglines and titles, the films themselves tended to end up as little more than mildly diverting kitsch oddities. Much to the chagrin of modern day losers like me trying to get some kicks out of them. Faster Pussycat on the other hand delights all concerned by turning out to be a terrific blast of punk rock filmmaking, and one that actually delivers on all its lurid promises.

After a brilliantly nonsensical opening monologue sets the scene, Meyer’s girls bestride the earth like avenging giants, towering over puny mortals and scattering them in their wake. (Regardless of his obvious chauvinist agenda, the way Meyer presents women as such insanely powerful beings is truly unprecedented, even by today’s standards.) A never-ending stream of the most ludicrous faux-hipster put-downs in film history are alternately bellowed with gusto and sneered through curled lips. The editing and direction is as whacked out and lively as anything the post-MTV generation can come up with, and the totally bizarro storyline actually manages to become pretty engaging, as a brutally minimal kidnap/greed/revenge drama starts to assert itself amongst all the craziness.

Best of all though is the VIOLENCE! It’s mental! The gleefully psychotic parade of beatings, stranglings, stabbings and car wrecks that draw the film toward its gristly conclusion are some of the most shocking and gratuitous ever seen in American cinema up to this point, and the way Meyer orchestrates all this sexually-charged carnage is just insanely joyful.

What more can I say? Quite simply the holy grail of trash cinema.

Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, US/UK, 1999)

For one reason or another, I’ve never got round to seeing this, despite being a moderately heavy Kubrick fan. Probably I was put off by the underwhelming “Kubrick goes out with a whimper” press reports, the snoozeville storyline, and the presence of the ever-despicable Tom Cruise.

So… the verdict? Well it’s a flawed film, no arguments there, but on the whole it was a lot more interesting than I had reason to expect. And it is also, I would contest, a very weird film indeed. Not weird in the sense that it’s full of crazy mad shit – it has a slightly more insidious and low-key kind of weird. It’s just full of so many baffling anachronisms - it’s rare to see such a widely released, expensive film in which it’s so difficult for the viewer to make sense of exactly what was going through the filmmaker’s head.

For example: the New York street scenes are obviously filmed on really unconvincing sets – melodramatic lighting, almost entirely deserted, no graffiti or litter or anything, probably two-dimensional buildings if you look hard enough. I guess this is probably a result of Kubrick’s famous refusal to film outside England (which you’ll remember also led to the rather unconvincing looking Vietnam in Full Metal Jacket), but nevertheless it looks ridiculously corny in this day and age, and you’d think they’d have made a bit more of an effort.

Related to this, various minor details just seem, well, just plain wrong really. When was the last time you saw a jazz club where the anonymous pick-up band playing inside (the film identifies them as such) have their framed photographs on the wall outside to entice customers in? And assuming such a club exists, would random shmoes wandering in off the street be treated to “would sir care for a drink?” personal waiter service? Does that happen in New York? And what about the bit where Cruise has a run-in with a well-dressed and well-spoken street prostitute on a central shopping street, who proceeds to take him back to her spacious city centre apartment? What the hell? These weird inconsistencies seem to point to the work of a man completely removed from the realities of day-to-day life. You could claim the film was deliberately stylised, were it not for the frequent and unexplained shifts in aesthetic tone – in complete contrast to the ludicrous street scenes and the baroque stylings of the Kubrick set-pieces, the bits dealing with Cruise’s office and home life are clearly (and hopelessly) striving for realism.

Also unusual is the film’s meandering and fragmentary narrative structure. Like some previous Kubrick films (A Clockwork Orange in particular), Eyes Wide Shut seems devoid of any strong beginning/ middle/end framework. It just lollops around for a bit heading nowhere in particular, goes through a series of carefully planned scenes and random events and then just ends after a while without seeming to make any real point about anything. No wonder the critics couldn’t get on with it – there are certainly few other Western film directors who’d ever be granted the privilege of spending so long making such a vague and strangely pointless film

Beyond all this though (and I’d hesitate to actually class the above as faults), Eyes Wide Shut still has a lot to recommend it. Primarily I’m talking here about the whole of the central orgy / cult happening sequence. Absurdly baroque and excessive in both style and subject matter, it recalls the ‘60-‘70s S&M decadence of directors like Ken Russell, only with far more in the way of pomp and classicism. It’s an absolutely stunning slice of filmmaking, as good as anything from one of Kubrick’s masterpieces. It manages to capture all the potent power/hidden secrets themes that come from that whole decadent-aristocratic-satanist vibe a thousand times more effectively than Roman Polanski’s dismal ‘The Ninth Gate’, which it superficially resembles.

It’s a pity nobody could have convinced Stanley to release this section as a short and ditch the rest.

Actually, that’s not entirely fair – there are plenty of other good scenes. Like the bits where Tom Cruise visits that costume shop in the middle of the night… they’re just, like, totally bizarro! And hilarious! And make no sense! It’s, like, suddenly ‘David Lynch directs!’ or something! Amazing!

Oh, and one more thought before I finish; does it occur to anyone else that all of Tom Cruise’s style, mannerisms, dialogue, behaviour etc. in this film is uncannily close to that of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho? It’s really rather disturbing, although come to think of it, Cruise is rather like that in all his films…. Man, considering all those creepy yuppie characters he played in the ‘80s he should SO have been cast in American Psycho, it would have been post-modernism-tastic!


Horror Express (Eugenio Martia, Spain/UK, 1972)

On, now this is cracking stuff. Apparently cooked up by the Spanish producer because he had a big model of a Trans-Siberian railway train left over from making a Russian historical epic, this ropes in Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee as rival scientists travelling from Mongolia (or, y’know, some other poorly defined cold Oriental place) across Siberia. Lee has dug up a frozen apeman of “vast scientific importance” which he’s keeping in a heavily padlocked crate. There’s a fine selection of Murder-on-the-Orient-Express style walking clichés in support, including a Mata-Hari-esque Chinese spy lady, a Polish Countess and – yes! – Rasputin (or a thinly veiled fictional version of him). You’d think the rest would just write itself really, but there’s some unexpectedly ingenious craziness to enjoy along the way.

Instead of just coming back to life and eating people, the apeman is in fact inhabited by an ancient disembodied intelligence that moves from body to body, absorbing the knowledge of its victims by boiling their brains and making their eyeballs explode. Cushing performs an onboard autopsy on some unfortunate guard and discovers “his brain.. it’s smooth!”. By some means I didn’t quite understand, Lee puts a slide of the apeman’s eyeball under a microscope and discovers that he can see visions of dinosaurs, primordial slime and – bloody hell! – distant stars, hyperspace and the formation of the solar system! Far out!

Meanwhile the train murder mystery scenario rumbles along at a lightning fast pace, with the bodies piling up so fast that you’d expect any sensible passengers to leap from the windows and hope for the best. Rasputin hams it up brilliantly, turning up every five minutes to rave about “Ze poweeeyyr ov Saaaatan!!” and wave his crucifix around, Cushing gets a classic bit of dialogue - “Monster? But we’re English!” - and before you know it Christopher Lee is fighting off an entire train carriage full of reanimated soldier corpses with a sabre and a shotgun! And just when you think it can’t get any better, Telly Savalas turns up as some kind of cigar-chewing Cossack warlord with a New York wiseguy accent and starts beating everybody up. Incredible.

Gummo (Harmony Korrine, US, 1997)

Reviled by critics and shunned by audiences upon release, Harmony Korrine’s only feature length film to date (he’s otherwise well known in certain quarters for directing shorts and music videos, writing the script for Larry Clark’s ‘Kids’ and hanging about with indie-cinema royalty) has gradually built itself an impressive cult following, and it’s easy to see why – it’s certainly unlike anything else you’re likely to catch on late night TV. Ostensibly a freeform roving camera examination of the depraved and hopeless lives of underclass white trash youth in an isolated mid-west town, Gummo presents an engaging, unusual and perhaps even beautiful picture of America as a sickening dystopia in which drooling malnourished imbeciles raised with barely a shred of education or guidance scrabble to maintain their undignified existence amid the ugly remnants of gutter level pop culture and junk food mass production.

It’s not quite as much of an ordeal as that description suggests, and although the endless parade of shock value subject matter could make difficult viewing for the squeamish or easily offended, things are lightened by black humour, morbidly fascinating attention to detail and a crew of oddly sympathetic characters, their potential as human beings destroyed not by their own failings but by the relentlessly hellish environment forced on them from birth. The film concentrates throughout on the destructive and tragically confused adolescent behaviour given free reign by such surroundings, but even the most perverse activities are filmed with a careful and observant eye, imbuing the whole film with a sense of almost loving naivety and innocence which is in part strangely reassuring, and in part utterly disturbing. This contrast is perfectly expressed by the film’s soundtrack – a jarring mixture of FM chart pop and Norwegian black metal.

Beyond it’s many cinematic strengths though, Gummo leaves a bad taste in the mouth, and one that has nothing to do with dead cats, spastic drool or mouldy hamburgers. Basically, the film’s main mode of expression is that of a psuedo-documentary, complete with shakey, poorly focused camera work, dogme style naturalism and even straight-to-camera ‘interviews’ with the protagonists. This is generally handled well, resulting in scenes that are both comically exaggerated and utterly convincing. Are herein lies the problem: no matter how much is cribbed from neo-realist film traditions, Gummo is NOT real, it’s a deliberately crafted fiction. And isn’t the idea of a bunch of film school grads and LA movie brats (Chloe Sevigny’s in it for krists sake!) pretending to be grotesque inbred rednecks and presenting the results as reality rather, well, conceited and distasteful..?

Gregg Araki’s ‘teenage apocalypse’ trilogy of films explored similar themes and imagery, and achieved a similarly challenging impact from within the context of a stylised and exaggerated nightmare world. From an ethical point of view if not necessarily a cinematic one, Korrine may have been wise to follow that lead. It’s telling that (for my money) the most affecting sequences in Gummo are the ones which most strongly diverge from realism – the lo-fi TV imagery/voiceover montages and the beautifully surreal scenes featuring the kid with rabbit ears.

Don’t miss a chance to see it, nevertheless.

I can’t be bothered to really write anything much this week. I’m sorry.

I’ve got no excuse though, cos last weekend I went to the big record fair that takes place a couple of times a year in Leicester and went through my standard procedure of gawping at all the fantastic psychedelic rarities / cool-ass bootlegs on offer, then pointedly not buying them and heading straight off to spend all my money at the dodgy stall selling CD promos of new releases for £2 each.

So hence for once I should be able to give you some potted reviews of a variety of recent music which is actually considered relevant… but I can’t be arsed. Sorry. I also got a good haul of stuff from the library, meaning that if nothing else I’ve certainly been able to subject myself to loads of groovy new sounds over the past week. If I tried to hammer out a workable summary of it all over a couple of lunch hours though it would all be a bit businesslike and full of glib remarks and lazy comparisons, so fuck it, instead I’ll wait and see what parts of this week’s gear seep into my soul, and tell you about them when I really feel the need to.

In summary though, this week’s new featured artists are:

Todd, Kaito, The Shop Assistants, Amusement Parks on Fire, the Coachwhips, Mission of Burma, The Fucking Champs, Camper Van Beethoven, Alice Coltrane, Electrelane, Devendra Banhart, Adam Green, Charles Mingus, Milky Wimpshake, The Bevis Frond, Terry Riley.

(guess which of the above I’ve decided to dislike and win a prize!)

The hours I’ve spent listening to all this wonderful stuff have helped to counteract the droning (and not, like, good droning) banality of the barrel-scraping commercial radio that provides the soundtrack to my grey working days. Now don’t get me wrong here, I’m not such an uppity, self-righteous git that I sit there howling in existential agony every time I’m subjected to eight seconds of Texas. While I’m actually in work I couldn’t give a shit to be honest, I don’t particularly hate it, it’s just there, like drizzle or the humming noises computers make. A couple of times a week they even play something quite good, like early Madonna or Destiny’s Child.

But what’s really, really horrible is the extent to which this stuff slowly infiltrates your mind, subconsciously colonising the space where I prefer to keep my recollections of, say, the nice music I’ve listed above. There’s this one particular song, I won’t mention what it is, partly through sheer distaste and partly to save you from being infected, but it’s a singularly infuriating little ditty of the worst kind, and EVERY NIGHT when I go home on the bus, there it is, twittering away in my brain, making me want to stab my face off and spew blood indiscriminately all over my fellow penniless and bored bus passengers. Sometimes it’s still there in the morning, as I trudge back to reinforce it with another day’s exposure. Clearly this is the sort of thing that calls for an immediate response – I’ve been playing all the mind-tricks I can think of to try and dislodge this shit from my head… concentration, selective memory, trying to re-establish my own musical dominance of my headspace. I thought I was fighting a losing battle, but then imagine how cool I felt when I was sitting on the bus yesterday, and realised I actually had John Fahey’s ‘Jesus is a Dying Bedmaker’ playing along in my head! What a result!

We’ve been considering a possible outing to Nottingham on Saturday to see Joanna Newsom, vague plan being to go drinking afterwards, hang around for a bit and catch the late/early bus back at 5am… but I don’t know if that’s looking very likely now. The snow is falling, and whilst that in itself is quite nice, it is most assuredly not the kind of weather in which farting around on the streets of Nottingham in the early hours of the morning sounds like a good idea.

If I ever track down the person who devised the Leicester/Nottingham train timetables, I’m gonna skullfuck them to death with a toilet brush. Which is the sort of empty threat it’s very easy to throw around in this desensitised age of ours, but nevertheless, I mean it – he or she is fucking dead.

If those flea-ridden, skag-peddling poxy bloody train barons could only get it together to trundle an extra wagon forty minutes down the line in the right direction at a sensible time of the late evening, this weekend I could be enjoying performances by the Blood Brothers, Joanna Newsom and the Detroit Cobras!

As it is I’ll most likely be weeping into a barrel of wine* and watching an old video of Casino Royale.

Damn them. Damn them all to hell!

Have a good week, and wrap up warm!

Over and out.


*Well ok, not actually a BARREL as such, but it’s a pleasant figure of speech.


POST-SCRIPT:

I should also say something I suppose about the sad passing of Ol' Dirty Bastard, which I'm aware about only from a tiny little article in a free paper -"weirdo rapper dies in studio" or some such thing. Now I can't claim to be much more than a dabbler in the world of hip-hop, but nevertheless I bow to no one in my admiration for the Wu, and ODB was fucking brilliant. People more qualified to do so can proably write better obits, but none the less I'll have a shot;

I think his death probably immediately makes mainstream hip-hop about 50% lass interesting from my perspective. The way rapped was just joyous and hilarious - I love his bits on the early Wu-Tang records, where in a purely technical sense he's not half as good as the others, wondering off the beat all the time and stuff, but his mental rantings are always the highlight... I love the way he always sounds like he's kind of puffed out, like he's just run up a big hill, but he's still really excited and has lots of stuff to tell you. And just the fact that he was called 'Ol' Dirty Bastard'!! Obvious I know, but, really, how crazed and funny is that?? Just a perfect example of his kind of mad sense of humour which you could never quite get an angle on... what a guy.

And unlike certain other dead rappers, it's impossible to ever imagine stuff like inner-city street kids painting inspiring murals of him, and people talking earnestly about what a genius poet he was an' shit... I haven't had a chance to read any of the memorials or anything, but I'd imagine when they corner all the big money rappers for a soundbite, the last word's gonna be "OBD, he was, well, um ... he was fucking mental." And I think that's a good enough headstone line as can be imagined. RIP dude - long may your deranged antics and cryptic pronouncements have those angels tearing their hair out. I can't even imagine what he'll have to say to the big man in the sky, but I wish I could hear it.

Man, is it the season of death or what? So much death in the past few months... not just famous ones, but distant relatives, obscure acquintances... everybody seems to be losing someone. To say nothing of the recent triumphs of death in world affairs. Shit.

And on that uplifting note...

THIS WEEK BLOGPOST;

Things of note I’ve done this week;

MUSIC;

Last Friday: Having previously not had a chance to hear any of her music, decide to watch Joanna Newsom play on that despicable Jools Holland programme. With a belly full of pizza and red wine, after half an hour or so of MOR soul and NME-band slop, myself and Pete were both rather taken aback by Joanna’s startlingly unusual Lisa Simpson-esque voice and almost malevolently odd harp playing. Hopefully viewers across the country were too. On a personal level, I’m not really sure whether or not I even liked her song or style of performance that much, but regardless, there’s something fairly primal and unique going on there and further investigations are a certainty.

One of the records I’ve been rocking the most this week has been ‘Dopethrone’ by Electric Wizard, which I inexplicably stumbled across in Leicester library. It is some seriously nasty, heavy shit. It’s is the kind of album I’m probably never gonna lend to anyone, never put anything from it on a mixtape etc. – the audience for this stuff is pretty specialist. To the majority of people, even the vast majority of music fans, it would undoubtedly be received as a hideous, monotonous, ugly dirge with no redeeming social value whatsoever. But to the select few who share my weird cultish metal fetishes, it.. is… SUPERB.
Utterly, utterly vile, misanthropic, creepingly slow stoner-sludge doom, obscenely overdriven, massively downtuned, caveman riffs grinding on for ten minutes at a time. ‘Dopethrone’ sounds like it was recorded at horrific volume on a boombox in the darkened basement of an abandoned church… feedback on EVERYTHING, bass crackling around the edges as it beats your puny speakers into submission. This is the sound of three wild-eyed West Country stoners raised on a diet of Sabbath, gore movies and HP Lovecraft dredging up the darkest depths of mindless violence and cosmic terror they can find within their blackened souls. The vocals are amazing – lyrical fantasies compiled from a lifetime of frustration and resentment channelled through the narratives of comic books, weird tales and hammer horror, howled seemingly through a megaphone by a man undergoing the worst torments of the Spanish Inquisition, intermittently rising and fading through the brainfucking wall of sludge.
I absolutely love it. The album’s thanks list gives a shout out to “HPL, REH, CAS, WHH”, and if those initials mean anything to you then I guarantee you will dig this. Total fucking doom classic, dude. Perfect music for the current grim times.

Also on a generally nasty tip, I’ve finally got round to checking out The Icarus Line’s ‘Penance Soirée’. It’s… hmm, well I’m in two minds about it to be honest.
It’s not as good as ‘Mono’, let’s make that clear from the outset. When they sacked their rhythm section, I’m afraid the band sacked a big portion of their initial power, and the first album’s gloriously jarring post-hardcore structures and Jesus Lizard-style rampaging, unpredictable foundations have mostly been ditched in favour of a rather uninspired load of lumbering, straightforward LA drug-rock. Similarly, Joe Cadethingy’s viciously fucked hardcore shrieking has disappeared, giving way to an unconvincing “I’m a jaded badass and I do lots of drugs” Iggy Pop impression which gets pretty tedious after a while, bordering onto almost Marilyn Manson-like ridiculousness, an impression lot helped by the tendency of the (often quite good) lyrics to slip a bit far towards “throw as many drug references as we can think of in a hat and see if any of them rhyme” banality in places.
The album’s not without it’s heavy strong points to counteract these disappointments though. The guitars, courtesy of mainman Aaron North, really hit the spot – they’ve clearly spent a long time with a stack of underground-classic albums going “right, let’s make this bit sound like THAT”, so spikey cyber-metal riffola rubs shoulders with Jesus & Mary Chain feedback whiteout, shredding Thurston Moore string abuse, Spacemen 3 black hole freakouts and evil mutant blues ala Penthouse. And it’s this heap of constantly shifting, lovingly layered noise that really keeps this record’s shit together and provides it’s strongest link with the primal violence of ‘Mono’. Also, this stuff just has a basically great atmosphere, dripping with the aesthetic of the cold and twisted LA damaged-glamour-punk self-destructive frenzied world that the Icarus Line would like us to believe they live in – drunken girlfriends passed out in bathtubs, bodily fluids splattering the walls of luxury apartments, taking heroin and forgetting how to wash your hair, non-existent rock clubs where every surface is black and shiny and the clientele don’t eat and carry knifes – this is the territory they’re wading through here. If you were gonna do some kind of Gregg Araki style transgressive goth-slacker-apocalypse movie, and you were doing a scene set in a rock club, The Icarus Line would HAVE to be your soundtrack of choice. No question. As contrived and irresponsibly romanticised as Motley Crue it all may be, but when it’s cannibalising from the spirit of Black Flag and the Stooges and played by… who was it who coined the phrase “the kind of young men who look like they want to stab their mothers”?.. it’s pretty damn irresistible. If you can ignore the obvious flaws and crank the volume up enough, this is an unbeatable “let’s get fucked up” album.

So nothing for you but angry man noise in this week’s blog update I’m afraid, but, aah, just thinking about this kinda stuff helps me numb the pain of the unspeakable and unrelentingly horrid FM commercial radio banality thrust upon me all day at work. Sorry pop kids, but that castrated and stifling offspring of popular music traditions is just pure slop, and as a result the good pop is gonna be getting short shift from me whilst I’m still working at this dump. Don’t worry, hang on in there, everything’s ok, just close your eyes and think of detuning and distortion pedals…

FILMS;

I’ve watched quite a few films of interest this week, but annoyingly I’m going to compile my thoughts on them later for my hopefully-soon-to-be regular film-watching journal thingy. I bet you can’t wait.

COMICS;

I’ve been reading a copy of that big American Splendour anthology released to cash in on the film. It’s really good stuff too – better than I expected. Harvey Pekar passes the test of a genuinely great writer, in that he takes this stuff which is initially like, well, that just sounds incredibly dull, who the hell cares, and makes it so lively and engaging and fascinatingly detailed that you can’t stop reading. What’s painful however is the extent to which Harvey’s life as presented in these comics IS A NIGHTMARE VISION OF OWN FUTURE. Seriously, the similarities are uncanny. He is I and I am he and we are all together.

DREAMS;

I dreamt on Wednesday night that I auditioned to join a Japanese girl-punk band, but didn’t get in. Their manager was this bloke who looked a bit like Billy Bragg, and he just wasn’t into what I was doing. I don’t know if there’s a message in that, other than perhaps a really stupid one (damn you Billy Bragg!), but it was an interesting dream.

Last night I dreamt that I went to a firework display to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Eiffel Tower. All but the most daring of amateur psychologists had better steer well clear of that one I think.

OTHER STUFF;

I wish, I wish, I wish I was at home in the countryside and didn’t have to go to work. It’s amazing how you end up taking such paradise for granted, and once you’ve lost it… a leisurely breakfast, a wander around Tenby’s boat sheds and a slice of almond sponge is all I crave.

Oh well, back to the doom metal.

Until the next time, Vinnum Sabbathi!

Ben

I just learned that the monthly contract for my current reasonably nice job unexpectedly hasn't been renewed. My notice? One fucking day.

So internet access after tomorrow might disappear again as I'm transfered to a really shitty sounding job out of town.

Worst. Fortnight. Ever.

Take care of each other, see you later.. apologies if I owe you an email or something.

So yes, we now live in a world where John Peel is dead and George Bush is king.

Right, I'm off to fucking kill myself.

Fuck.

...

Fuck.

So far this is about the most depressing result imaginable.

Fraud, deception and gross apathy I could get my head around, but to think the US public turned out in record numbers, including however many newly registered voters...

..and the fucking chuckleheads voted for Bush.

Not by a big enough margin for us all to immediately concede the fate of the civilized world and go drink ourselves to death in a dark hole, but by just enough to ensure that things are slowly going to get more and more fucked as our hope something good might happen slowly drains away, by which time we're well and truly trapped in the cycle of fucked-ness, waiting for the boot to hit our face.

I've always tried to avoid the whole "Americans are so dumb" mentality, but god (fuck god!), it's such a tragedy that so many ordinary people in the USA don't seem to realise what damage another Bush presidency is going to do to their own lives, let alone everybody else's. It's obscene that Bush's sponsors and powerbrokers haven't even bothered trying to offer the people a carrot, instead they've just beaten them senseless with a fucking stick and haven't even tried to hide their greed and self-interest.. and instead of kicking them out on their ass like in any sensible democratic country, so many citizens have just followed through and voted for them. The American public have once and for all proved themselves prize fucking chumps, and Bush & friends are just gonna be laughing in their faces for another four years.. it's so depressing.

Sorry for being so defeatist before the final score is actually in, but best get it out of the way now I guess unless a couple of hundred thousand people in Ohio all suddenly had an unexpected change of heart at the last minute.

Of course, thank god (the fucker!), there’s a readymade conspiracy theory waiting to make us feel better. As Our Lady puts it on Barbelith:

In unsurprising news 1/3 of the voting population have reported problems with touchscreen voting. This needs to be shouted loudly, after the 2000 there seemed to be a sense of 'well Bush didn't win but he's there now so let's not rock the boat'. People are reporting flaws in an electronic system owned and run by friends of George W. Bush.

Interesting thought, no? Large voter turnout, many exit polls etc. suggesting could-go-either-way with a distinct swing towards the Democrats.. then as soon as everybody’s entered their choice into the guts of a sinister ‘voting machine’ built and declared reliable by.. who exactly?.., bang!, big swing to the Republicans.
No doubt a bunch of research would sort me out with dozens of reasons why this is completely implausible, but for the moment.. hmm.. think about it.

I certainly wouldn’t put it past the ol’ GOP to try something like that – the only problem is that given their history of barefaced and unashamed deception over the past few years, I’m sure that if they did have the whole deal fixed they would have taken the opportunity to make their victory ridiculously swift and decisive rather than as subtle as it has been.

So almost certainly not true, but it makes me feel better.