2010 Review: A Year In Stuff I Liked

Album Of The Year
Enter The Magical Mystery Chambers - Wu Tang Vs The Beatles / Tom Caruana
Conceptually a weaker effort than Dangermouse's Beatles breakbeat benchmark 'Grey Album', but for my (admittedly Wu Tang fanatical) dollar this mash-up is a far more entertaining listen front-to-back. The tracks that work far outweigh those that don't, and a handful (the bludgeoning, 'I Am The Walrus' sampling "Run", a re-make of "C.R.E.A.M." almost as smooth as the original, & the centre-piece, show-stopping "Uzi (Pinky Ring)") have remained heavy rotation heavyweights on my ipod all year. Precisely the sort of post-modern irreverence that Lennon woulda loved.

Book Of The Year
Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams - Nick Tosches
Everything you need to know about mid-20th Century US pop culture is here. A serious - but never remotely dry - book, packed with punchy, profane prose, placing the vacant, solitary anti-hero figure of Dean Martin at the centre of a wide ranging cultural discourse on pop music, film, showbiz, television, sex, money etc etc...and however black the oblivion of Dino's empty megastardom gets, you still wind up with the impression of Martin as the Rat Pack's true hipster - a dispassionate, untouchable, grade-A bad-ass - "the cool guy's cool guy".

Film Of The Year
Toy Story 3 - Dir. Lee Unkrich
In which everybody is forced to recognise the shocking frailty of thier own mortality via a fiery pit-hell incinerator scene where Woody, Buzz and the Toy Story Gang take one another's hands and accept their own imminent and certain doom with quiet, heart-breaking dignity. Peerless popular art, bursting with imagination, and with an emotional depth of resonance greater than any number of the "serious" middle-brow movies with which Pixar will compete - I suspect fruitlessly, mores the pity - for a Best Picture Oscar come February.

TV Show Of The Year
The Office (An American Workplace) / Curb Your Enthusiasm
I'm gonna have to chicken outta making a definitive call on this one. Overall, these are very different shows; the former has a warm, beating heart the size of a watermelon and gets slushier by the episode, happily embracing it's position as the closest any post-Friends sit-com has come to reconciling the briefly un-cool merits of A Bunch Of Likeable People Who Actually Like Each Other mainstream comedy with the edgier, taboo-trampling brinksmanship of Gervais / Merchant's British original, while the latter is characterised by a no-holes-barred barrage of mind-boggling "WTF" moments that re-invents the Seinfeld formula of jaw-dropping social awkwardness + astonishingly tight narrative structures + self-reflexivity + people who hate themselves and everyone the know, on an operatic scale, making Gervais / Merchant's efforts seem conservatively quaint by comparison. I admire and enjoy them both equally. A dead-heat, then - The Office, for the sheer number of hours of pleasure it has given me this year, and CYE, for those spectacular, fan-pleasing Seinfeld reunion episodes.

Songs Of The Year

.1. In Tha Park - Ghostface Killah Crunching, distorted, heavily fuzzed, block-party rockin', psyche-soul, old-skool flavoured hip-hop ticks every one of my boxes. With deliberate nods to P Diddy's "Bad Boy For Life" and MC Shan, In Tha Park stands proudly along side the strongest Wu releases from any era. This is how that BlakRoc LP shoulda sounded.

.2. Groove Is In The Heart - Crocodiles Pure, unadulterated nostalgic 90s kid indulgence - shoegazing indie-rock fetishists covering a 'contemporary' 1990 pop masterpiece. About as authentic an impresssion of an ealy 90s John Peel session by some B-list sub-Chapterhouse outfit as one could possibly imagine. Smart, funny, trippy, and undeniably groovy.

.3. Boyfriend - Best Coast I guess basically like a gazillion records sounded pretty much exactly like this in 2010, but for whatever reason Best Coast's particular take on the year's ubiquitous early 60s girl-group + slacker 90s indie formula lodged itself in my skull like no other.

The Amazing World Of Star Wars Stuff Made Out Of Gingerbread

Whilst munching my way through a couple of delicious homemade ginger biscuits at work the other day I offered my colleagues the following bold, rhetorical question: "You can't beat good gingerbread, can you?" Nobody disagreed. Or, y'know - cared. There's something magical about gingerbread that puts it in a different league to other biscuits. I guess it's the whole gingerbread house / gingerbread man vibe...gingerbread has the flavour of fairytales and Christmas. Gingerbread houses are so appealing that there's an actual architectural school (originated in quaint ol' Victorian New England, predictably) that mimicks their highly ornate, storybook style. There are few things more desirable, more bewitchingly mouth watering, than a gingerbread house, frosted with snow white icing.

And then there's stuff like this gingerbread AT-AT, which perhaps doesn't have quite the same appeal, at least not as Actual Food. Making Star Wars vehicles out of gingerbread takes a particular type of genius, doesn't it? Imagine you call up your friend - "Aright mate, what you up to...uh-huh...you're making what?" I think you'd be impressed, to an extent. Impressed slash bemused. Elsewhere on the internet there are pictures of gingerbread Tie-Fighters, and a gingerbread Landspeeder. I guess if you wanted you could call it Folk Art, or Outsider Art...but the reality is people just dig making Star Wars stuff out of gingerbread.

Them's The Breaks #2987 - Elvis Presley Edition!

So this looks like a pretty terrible record, right? Just another generic El Pres Is Dead cash-in LP from those erstwhile hawkers of A1 mondo trasho compilations over at Camden Records...awful sleeve design...rubbish photo...no hit songs yadda yadda yadda. However - and this would have been a pretty redundant post had there not been a 'however'...I mean even more redundant than it already is - I was actually really stoked to pick this up for a couple of quid the other weekend. Heresforwhy.

I've written about The Funk Of The Memphis Flash before a couple of times, most expansively here at Mof Gimmer's Electric Roulette. Elvis was essentially a synthesist; overt hoodlum sexuality aside, Presley's most significant contribution to pop music was his innate, entirely effortless ability to fuse various root forms of southern rock and roll; gospel, blues, country, soul etc. Elvis did it all, and continued to internalise and adapt contemporary styles as they developed during the course of his career, with 60s-70s funk/soul no exception. Crate diggers looking for breakbeats in unusual places have long known that there are a handful of super-funky Elvis tracks, nuggets of sampleable gold packed with clattering drums and fuzz bass lines, that would come as a surprise the casual Presley fan. David Holme's use of 'A Little Less Conversation' on the Oceans 11 soundtrack (and the subsequent JXL re-mix, exponentially lamer than the original Presley track) served to shine some light on this particularly dusty corner of the Elvis archives - a classic reminder that there's treasure everywhere.

And so it proves with the 'Please Don't Stop Loving' LP, which despite being generally as dismal as the sleeve suggests, manages to contain a couple of gen-u-inely brilliant RnB tracks (the up-tempo floorfilling smasher 'Rubberneckin' - also laterly subject to a diabolical dance re-mix, and the sizzling, southern-fried country soul of 'Clean Up Your Own Backyard'), and one kitschy movie theme song ('Change Of Habit'...from a movie about, yep, nuns) which begins with a phenomenal fuzz-bass & drums break, fat enough to be sampled by DJ Format. Enjoy!

Sgt Pepper's Lonely Star Wars Band

Pretty cool, huh?

Moon - 'Clangers-esque'

Caught Moon at the cinema the other night. You can find a buncha reviews elsewhere if you really wanna read up on it. I just thought it was an exceptionally cool film, with a hugely impressive one-man-show performance by Sam Rockwell, and enjoyed the spectacular moon-buggy / lunar landscape 'exterior shots' 'cos they look sorta Clangers-esque, which comes as something of a relief after having billions of dollars worth of CGI rammed down your throat by the likes of Transformers et al. Moon is about ideas, not explosions, and there are moments that I can see becoming cultishly iconic - if 'Spaced' was still being made, you can bet your ass there woulda been a Moon pastiche in the next series.

I've seen a few reviews that have criticised how heavily Moon leans on that 70s cycle of working-stiff-in-space movies; Silent Runnings, Soylent Green, Dark Star etc. I guess this is a preference, but I'm not sure whether 'derivative' is a valid criticism in itself. 'Bad copy of' is a fair criticism, but 'copy of' maybe isn't. Moon wears its influences (most obviously 2001) on it's sleeve, deliberately references them in parts, and makes a convincing stab at placing itself as a worthy successor to those movies. So I don't really see what the problem is - it's not like multiplexes are over-flowing with quiet, thoughtful sci-fi, and I'm just glad somebody has had the good taste to rip off some cool old films rather than a current Cartoon Network franchise.

The Empire Strikes Back: The Adventures Of Luke Skywalker (LP)

It's become such a cliche to say that 'Empire' is your favourite Star Wars movie that you almost feel obliged to express a preference for 'The Phantom Menace' just to break with orthodoxy...but goddammit, even I'm not that perverse. In all honesty it's a close call for me between 'Empire' and 'A New Hope', but that moment when the AT-ATs first lumber into view over the horizen of Hoth (seen initially through the grainy, shaky viewfinder of the rebel recon guy's electro-binoculars, just one robo-elephantine foot filling the whole screen, until the image zooms-out to take in the terrifying size of the thing...only to reveal there's actually three of the bastards!) and the subsequent arctic wasteland battle just about tips it in Empire's favour. And that's before we get to Boba Fett.

Anyways, I picked this LP up from a record stall on York market this weekend. I just liked the cover art, am a sucker for pretty much anything Star Wars related, and thought it'd be sweet to spin when I DJ. It's actually better than I hoped, 'cos in addition to John William's score it features full narration by some cat called Malachi Throne (including the introductory crawl - "It was a dark time for the rebellion...") and lots of dialogue from the movie. All-in-all, perfect DJ-nerd type stuff, I picked it up for a fiver and you can probably do the same if you hunt around. May the crate-digging force be with you.

*****************************************************************

In Other Star Wars Record Collecting News, I've finally (after years of searching) landed myself a copy of 'Battle Of The Planets' by Fader Gladiator, which many folks will recognise as 'That Cool Hip-Hoppy Star Wars Instrumental From 'Spaced''. I found this video featuring the track on something called 'Youtube'.

Ennio Morricone -'The Ecstacy Of Gold'

I watched 'The Good, The Bad & The Ugly' a couple of weeks back. I've sorta half-watched it before a buncha times, but it's a long-ass movie and I've got a short attention span. This time I watched it for real, beginning-to-end, maximum attention, totally focused. I'm a sucker for quick-fix pop trash of all kinds, probably to an indulgent, unhealthy degree, I mean I can still shed a tear when I hear 'Rush Hour' by Jane Weidlin, so it's nice to be reminded now and again that I still have the ability to be emotionally and intellectually shaken by something which is just classically great...ART, something that demands of you some genuine investment of time and mental concentration, and was itself built as a labour of love and grand design. The pay-off for sticking with a movie of 'TGTB&TG's calibre is huge. The emotional weight just builds and builds. I just got a ton out of it.

It goes without saying that Ennio Morricone's score is worth the price of admission alone. I often spin the title theme when DJing. But maybe even greater than the title theme is 'Ecstasy of Gold', from the movie's climax. It's a total knock-out. In the course of Googling 'Ecstasy of Gold' I discovered that Metallica have covered it. I checked out their version on youtube, and good luck to them, but it really sucks. Jay-Z's 'The Blueprint 2' samples it pretty effectively I guess...but nothing can compare to the sweeping majesty of the original. Enjoy.

Hollywoodland: The Legend Of Albert Kothe

So dig this. The Hollywood Sign, set in the rugged scrub land hills of Mount Lee in Los Angeles CA, was originally erected by real estate developers Woodruff & Shoults to advertise their Hollywoodland housing scheme. That was way back in 1923, and was never intended as a permanent landmark. The LA Chambers Of Commerce ordered the removal of the last four letters in 1949, to reflect the district rather than the development. The letters stood 50ft high, and were illuminated by some 4000 light-bulbs.

Albert Kothe was the sign's official caretaker during the twenties & thirties. He lived in a cabin behind the first 'L', and it was his job to change the bulbs when one went out. One day he got drunk and drove his 1928 Model A Ford into the 'H' and knocked it down. When Woodruff & Shoult's maintenance grant expired in 1939, Albert was dismissed. That's about as much information as I can find about Albert Kothe.

So my question is this: why haven't the Coen Brothers made a movie about this guy? His job was to change the light-bulbs in the Hollywood Sign. That was his job! How do you get a gig like that? S'far as I can see, the Legend Of Albert Kothe is a movie that must be made. It's got it all. The era - dawn of the New West, early Hollywood, the Jazz Age. 'Chinatown' vibes. A great, iconic location. The pathos of a man hired to keep a monument to fame illuminated at all times, while he himself lives in isolated anonymity. I mean, it's perfect. Granted, you'd have to pad out the narrative a little, get a little factional, maybe throw some romantic interest in there for Albert or something. Like, you've got this story about Albert getting drunk and driving into the 'H', and there's another story I read about an actress called Peg Entwistle who committed suicide by throwing herself off the same letter in 1923. Maybe you could write it like Albert and Peg were in love or something. Or maybe she didn't commit suicide at all, and like the real estate guys threw her off the 'H' to generate some publicity for their development. Anyway, whatever. I'd maybe get the cat who played Max Cherry in 'Jackie Brown' to play Albert.

I'm off to write this script right now.

Network (Dir. Sidney Lumet, 1976): How Jon Stewart Is A Real Life Howard Beale

"I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore."

So I just watched this for the first time today. It won a bunch of Oscars, stars one of my favourite actors - William Holden, you may know him as Pike 'If they move, kill 'em' Bishop from The Wild Bunch - as well as Faye Dunaway (terrifyingly good) and Peter Finch (pictured, insanely good), and I've heard Jon Stewart reference it now and again, which figures. Broadly speaking, 'Network' is a darkly comic, but deadly serious, satire of US TV news. S'bout an old-school, Ed Murrow-era type anchorman called Howard Beale, works for a failing TV network. One day, during a live broadcast, he goes nuts and starts preachin' The Truth About American Society, and instead of pulling the plug, ball-bustin', power-crazed producer Faye Dunaway thinks they might finally have A Hit Show on their hands, so they let Beale keep going on live TV being wacko and ranting and raving, and the show becomes the top-rated news show in the country, this huge cult builds around him and yadda yadda yadda, news-as-entertainment, dwindling journalistic standards in the post-Watergate era, cult of personality, you get the picture. Beale's rants are scripted brilliantly ("This tube [TV] is the gospel, the ultimate revelation; this tube is the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world!"), and performed by Finch with bug-eyed relish. The scene in the Black Panther-ish commune, where a super-bad ass Angela Davis type gets sucked into the world of TV legalese ("Don't fuck with my distribution costs!"), is just one stand-out scene in a film full of 'em. The movie is a stone-cold killer, and undoubtedly deserves every accolade it's ever had.

What I really dug was that while Beale may be 'mad as hell', 'Network' itself isn't, it doesn't come off angry, it doesn't sneer at the world it's satirising. Instead the tone is one of bewildered desperation, and black-humoured amusement. Anybody who enjoys The Daily Show should really check out Network, becuase I'm sure it's a movie Stewart and the whole team must think about alot. To some extent, Stewart's persona on the Daily Show is very similar to that of the post-breakdown Beale - the last honest anchorman, pulling his hair out, screaming at the insanity of the world and the moral vacuity of those we rely on to tell us about it, trying to get somebody's, anybody's, attention, to get people to listen. Like the fictional Beale, this persona has afforded Stewart bone-fide, international cult anti-hero status. He has become an oracle, somebody who can be trusted, somebody who is not willing to play along with the rules of a game that hurts so many people. The image of The One News Guy Telling The Truth, in a spin-dominated culture where we have come to numbly accept half-truths, quater-truths, subterfuge, gossip, dumbness, laziness and lies from our media, has a greater currency now than it did even in 1976.

The Candidate (1972)

You wanna watch a good movie sometime? Try 'The Candidate'. They made it in 1972. S'all about this Bobby Kennedy-ish type kid played by Robert Redford. He's a good-looking community organiser who gets sorta dragged into running as a Democratic candidate for Senator in California. The cars and the interior design and the clothes are cool as hell. The whole vibe is pure Watergate, the whole sixties fall-out scene. The pay-off line, the last line in the movie, is a killer. I ain't even gonna spoil it for you. Natalie Wood has a cameo playing herself. So does legendary TV newsman Howard K Smith. (A dude I dig so much I named the only band I've ever been in after him.) At one point some comedian at a political roast says of Redford's chracter 'he shoots from the hip, and he's hip when he shoots', which pretty much sums up the whole film. If you wanna watch a good movie sometime, try 'The Candidate'.

Michael Jackson 1958-2009

It's like a planet dying. Michael Jackson, Indiana-born recording artist and entertainer, was undeniable. What you think of him is as irrelevant as what you think of the wind. Michael Jackson happened, and his influence on Western pop culture was a great as it is possible for any individuals to be. When he sailed a 32 foot statue of himself down the Thames many mocked the rampant egotism of the gesture. The reality is that if he had erected an edifice which truly reflected the scale of his achievements, he would have had to build a statue at least twice as tall.

I cannot claim, as so many millions can, that Jackson made a major impact on my conscious in my youth. I was aware of him, of course, because it was impossible to not be. I had 'Bad' on cassette, but it didn't get played nearly as much as the first Kylie album or my 'Collection Of Beatles Oldies' tape. I never practised moonwalking or sang Beat It into a hair brush. It seems to me, like so many things, that if you didn't get into MJ when you were a kid, you probably never really got into him. That sense of wonder, of magic...it puts a kink in your mindspace that never gets ironed out. If he got you, he got you early, and never let go.

So I can't honestly say that I've ever been a Jackson 'fan', much less a fanatic. There are elements of his career that I actively have a problem with, and his music - unlike the music of Elvis or John Lennon, whose careers are equally pot-holed with highly questionable behaviour - never held enough sway with me to temper those reservations. I am, in all instances, naturally allergic to reverence in pop culture, the deification of artists, and few artists have inspired more unquestioning, blind obsessives than Jackson, while even fewer did more to actively encourage this particular type of fanaticism, through iconography, symbols and signs, than Jackson. I find this difficult to excuse.

It is pointless, however, to judge Michael solely by the excesses of his adulthood. History shows that international fortune and fame on the scale experienced by Jackson is something which simply cannot be coped with entirely successfully by a child. Judy couldn't handle it, Michael couldn't handle it, and Britney is currently not handling it. The process damages people, and it is fair to say that it clearly damaged Michael, for various specific reasons I'm not going to rake over, more than most. One can only understand the excesses of his adulthood with reference to the excesses of his childhood. It doesn't make Earth Song acceptable, but it does mean many of his adult accesses were just sorta sad, pitiable, the product of a warped sense of reality and a shocking lack of self-awareness, rather than deliberate, manipulative megalomania. Look at what he did to his body, his skin, his face. These are not the actions of a well-balanced individual.

Michael Jackson was a fragile, unhappy man. He wasn't a criminal - no court ever convicted him-, and he wasn't a saint. He made some wonderful pop music. He made some awful pop music. He was a hell of a dancer, maybe the greatest ever within the pop arena. He was black, he was white. He made the biggest selling album of all time. He revolutionised music video, but made terrible movies. He was a beautiful young man, but paid surgeons to cut and slice away at his body until it became unrecognisably ugly. His band's first hit replaced the Beatles at Number One in America, and eventually he became so rich and powerful he was able to buy the Beatles. He was 50 when he died, but ageless by any regular standard. He altered the fabric of pop music at an elemental level. Where he went, millions followed. Michael Jackson was undeniable.

********************************************************************
Thanks to my fiance Rebecca and her sister Claire's childhood obsession with MJ, my indie-snob issues with Jackson have thawed in recent years, and I'm happy that when he passed away on Thursday, I had already made my peace with his place in pop history. I've always loved the Jackson 5's 'ABC', and a chance encounter with it on the radio last year ("Man. Does pop music get any better than this? Those voices. That fuzz-bass. That drum-break. This is awesome.") prompted me to start digging around his J5 material, and early solo work. I found lots to enjoy; Philly soul, pop-psyche soul, like a junior Al Green, or a mini-Temptations. They even cut some great straight soul stuff before joining Motown. For what it's worth, here are my...

Top 5 Old School MJ Fave Raves

.1. ABC (The Jackson 5, 'ABC' LP, 1970)
.2. Ain't No Sunshine (Michael Jackson, 'Got To Be There' LP, 1972)
.3. Big Boy (The Jackson 5, pre-Motown debut single, 1968)
.4. I'll Bet You (The Jackson 5, 'ABC' LP, 1970)
.5. Euphoria (Michael Jackson, 'Music And Me', 1973)

So here's the pre-Motown Jackson 5, with 'Big Boy', from 1968

Them's The Breaks #189: Les Baxter - Hogin' Machine (1969)

Dig that break at 0.41. Makes me wanna rumble. This whole soundtrack is absolutely killer, coming fully loaded with bags of everything you want out of a 60s hammond/fuzz/breakbeat biker movie soundtrack LP. Which is basically loads of hammond, fuzz guitar and breakbeats. Check Jeff Simmon's 'Naked Angels' LP for similar fuzzy biker-flick kicks.

Imperfect Aesthetics: Lennon, Clerks, Space Invaders And Sister Ray

As a fan of trashy or off-kilter pop culture, it frequently occurs to me that the most interesting, attractive and iconic features of a piece of art are often the consequence of limitations - budget, time, technology, talent - exerted on the creation of that thing, or on the artist, rather than the consequence of a vision being fully realised. It is in the gap between vision and execution that the character of a work of art is found, in the falling-short of the grand design. The sound of Strawberry Fields Forever is a combination of John Lennon's sonic ambition and the limits of available production methods. The look of Clerks is a combination of Kevin Smith's visual ambition and the fact he had no budget to make a movie and B&W film stock is cheap. Would Strawberry Fields sound closer to the sounds in John Lennon's head if he'd had the chance to make it over - undoubtedly, and he spoke about re-recording Strawberry Fields Forever right up to his death, unsatisfied with the original recordings, hearing only the sounds he didn't get on tape. I mean, that's crazy, right? To be unsatisfied with the sound of Strawberry Fields Forever.

Early in my Film studies it was drawn to our attention that the development of sound, and then colour, were treated by many serious-minded filmmakers with suspicion. They argued that the lack of sound, or the monochromatic nature of film, were what gave cinema it's otherness, were precisely what made cinema a unique art form. Colour and sound were advances only good for making film more like real life - and this is an engineer's goal, not an artist's. On one hand, the attitude is almost unarguably wrongheaded, surely informed by sheer reactionary snobbery as much as anything else. But on the other hand, in a broader sense, I can see there was a legitimacy to their fears. I would point to video games as a perfect example of how a relentless, single-minded emphasis on making the product more life-like has robbed a medium of its drive towards...anything else? Space Invaders is iconic, it has a look all of its own. The reason it has a look all of it's own, and thus the reason that it is iconic, is that it was made using bullshit technology. Clearly it was cutting-edge at the time, but that isn't the point. The point is that it is distinctive, unique, and looks un-real, because available technology permitted nothing more / less. As consumers, we have been encouraged to base our criteria for how impressive we consider a video game's graphics to be on how 'realistic' they are - "wow! It looks just like a movie!" In painting, photorealism was a particular genre largely defined by a handful of American artists operating between the late 60s and mid-70s; in video games a focus on photorealism has come to define the entire medium, at least in the mainstream. Space Invaders is abstract by default, I guess in the same way that hieroglyphics were abstract by default. Are we waiting for a Playstation Picasso to break open the medium?

So on principle, I agree that an all-consuming desire for photorealism is unhealthy for any visual art form, just a desire for sonic perfection is potentially misguided in the field of pop music. Money and time and energy can be spent just as well on other aims. But I would argue that ultimately the anti-colour film brigade actually had little to fear, just as my concerns about video games are unnecessary. At every step of technological evolution, the gap between perfect life-likeness and the technical limitations preventing perfect life-likeness exists, and wherever that gap exists, however slender, a particular aesthetic is produced. The engineer's ideal of photorealism is, I would argue, inherently unachievable, it is doomed to failure, and therefore this window of aesthetic possibilities will always be available, even unavoidable.

Finally, I think it is worth noting that the imperfections of one artist's work often become models of perfection for subsequent artists. Contemporary pop musicians can spend their entire lives trying to make records that sound the same as Strawberry Fields Forever, and this cannot be achieved by exploiting cutting edge technology. It can only be achieved by being wrong, in precisely the right way. A young garage band who want to make a record that sounds like The Velvet Underground's Sister Ray must aim for gonzo, bug-eyed sonic imperfection on a grand scale. A recording session conversation is likely go along the lines of "No! The organ isn't distorted enough! The vocals are too coherent! I don't even wanna be able to tell if there are drums on the track at all! Muddier! Muddier!" The imperfections have become fetishised, idealised. What has persisted is the abject wrongness of the Sister Ray sound.

So these things go full-circle. The Jesus & Mary Chain, for instance, may have aimed for the perfect imperfection of Sister Ray, but they missed, they fell short of that ideal. In doing so, they minted a different sound, one filtered through their own experiences, talent & technology. Now kids are trying to sound like JAMC. They will also fall short, and so it goes, around and around, ever onwards - the Aesthetics Of Imperfection is an on-going dialogue between the present and the past.

This Week In AT-ATs

I'm on a pretty heavy Star Wars kick at the moment. I've been re-reading the annotated scripts, and I finally bought myself the original trilogy on DVD, which means I'm now sat watching the un-CGI'd 1977 theatre- release of 'A New Hope' for the first time in...what...maybe 15 years or something? It remains a magical experience. While Googling around I stumbled across this 'GRAFF-AT', produced by hella geeked-out NY art-punk project Suckadelic. It sold at auction in 2002 for like £1200 or something - not bad for a Hasbro action toy with some doodles on it. Apparently all the tags are written in 'Aurebesh', a fictional language which features in the movies. All in all, stupidly cool

...and in other stupidly cool AT-AT news, check out this:

That's right. It's an AT-AT boombox. Freakin' ridiculous. I can't quite work out what the deal is with this - whether it's like a one-off art piece, or a bone fide might-at-some-point-be-commercially-available product. I kind of get the impression it's probably the former, which sucks. More AT-AT news this time next week.

Cobra

Watching Cobra (1986) on FiveUSA. Appears to be ticking every box in the 80s Action Movie playbook with a vengance and I gotta say it's pretty enjoyable shlock so far. Infact, the genre cliches are being hammered so hard I'd almost say it was meant to be parodic, except I don't think it is and don't really want it to be either. Stallone is 'The Cobra', an outlaw, plays-by-his-own-damn rules LA cop who works for a department called The Zombie Squad. Wow! He drives a car with the license plate 'AWSOM50', has a gun with a picture of a cobra on it and lives at the beach by himself and eats cold pizza. The film is set at christmas (see also: Die Hard & Lethal Weapon), the dialogue is exceptionally hard-boiled stock stuff, and when some psycho threatens to blow up a mini-mart, Stallone says "Go ahead. I don't shop here." Which is a pretty good line. As I write this there is a music montage happening which features a v. 80s modelling shoot with robots, soundtracked by a sub-Phil Collins ballad apparently called 'Angel Of The City.' Really, this is a great movie.

My B-Movie Life: Over The Edge With Jonathan Kaplan

I have a bit of a thing for late 70s - early 80s dystopian / urban breakdown / teen rampage / post-apocalyptic wasteland sorta flicks. Assault On Precinct 13. Mad Max. The Warriors. Escape From New York. I just read about 'Over The Edge' from 1979. Looks pretty great. Turns out the guy who directed it, Jonathan Kaplan, has built a whole career on knocking out blunt, punchy exploitation movies. My kinda guy. He seems like a smart cookie, a B-Movie director in the classic sense, able to turn his hand to whatever genre was doing box office business at any time, like:

THE EARLY 70s SOFTCORE SEXPLOITATION MOVIE a la Russ Meyer: 'Night Call Nurses'(1972)
THE MID 70S BLAXPLOITATION ACTION MOVIE a la Shaft: 'Truck Turner' (1974)
THE MID 70s TRUCKER ROAD MOVIE a la Convoy: 'White Line Fever' (1975),
THE LATE 70s SOCIAL URBAN BREAKDOWN MOVIE a la The Warriors: 'Over The Edge' (1979)
THE MID 80s TEEN ADVENTURE MOVIE a la War Games: 'Project X' (1987)
THE EARLY NINETIES SEXY THRILLER MOVIE a la 'Basic Instinct': Unlawful Entry (1992)

So here's to Jon Kaplan: doing it second, and with a smaller budget.

Now Showing: The Not Necessarily Hip Movies Hot-Wired To Your Soul

While there are some movies which burst into your life once, slam you in the subconscious and lodge 'emselves there for eternity whether you ever encounter them again or not, I guess there are others, perhaps less epochal type affairs, which influence your life on more of a rolling basis, not sacred cows or personal totems, but simply those movies which you return to, for whatever reason, again and again and again throughout your lives. Let me give you an example. I've seen The Wild Bunch, from bloody beginning to bloody end, maybe five or six times, max, in my life. The first time I saw it, lets say 8 years ago, it pretty much totally destroyed my mind. It is A Work Of Genius. Ask me what my favourite movies are, The Wild Bunch is gonna be in there, maybe Top 10, certainly Top 20. But five or six viewings in a lifetime is nothing, given that I watch Ghostbusters half a dozen times every year, or - thanks to Film4's ridiculously narrow selection of movies - that I seem to find myself sat in front of The Day After Tomorrow pretty much once a fortnight. So which has had the greater IMPACT on me? On my...subconscious? The Wild Bunch, or Ghostbusters? And the reality is, you gotta go Ghostbusters. I'm talking not about those movies which you consider to be the greatest works of art, (ie, The Wild Bunch), but simply those movies of which you have never tired, have spent the most time in the company of, and which are therefore hot-wired to your soul. The movies about which you can honestly say, without trying to be hip : "To really understand me, you've really gotta know..." I'll be updating my list on here as and when the inspiration takes me, and I'm gonna begin today by talkin' 'bout...

.1. Shaft (1971, Dir. Gordon Parks)

Yeah, odd one, right? I dunno. I dont suppose that it's a remarkable movie on any level really, except perhaps for the soundtrack, which - while it was undeniably very influential - I actually think is kinda overrated. But there's a quality to 'Shaft' I really enjoy, something I find really watchable. So what's 'watchable'? Well...I like Richard Roundtree's super-cool, but never cliched, performance, and I like the the clothes, and gang boss Bumpy Jonas' sweet office decor, and how the whole affair is sorta low-budget and...well, I guess the word would have to be funky. I like the pace of the thing, a steady pimp-rolling mid-tempo pace, punctuated by flashes of sudden violence. I like the fact that Bumpy is played by some cat called Moses Gunn, which is the coolest name I've ever heard, and have always fantasised about starting a band called The Moses Gunn. The jokes are monumentally lame, but otherwise the script is tight and punchy. I dig bad-ass- with-a-social-conscience Ben Buford, and his outlaw gang of grim, angry-young Panthers. And while I'm certainly interested in this period of the 20th Century, and undoubtedly share the regular white-liberal-long hair romantic fascination with the Black Power movement, I don't even think that's what appeals primarily here...I mean, if I really wanted to get a fix of genuine Black Power By Any Means Necessary socio-history, I could spend my days watching Bobby Seale documentaries or Sweet Sweetback's Bad Asssss Song or whatever, which I don't. It's damning the movie with faint praise to say that I just find it comfortably undemanding, but I mean that sincerely and as a compliment. It ticks a lot of boxes, and does so without shouting about it. Can you dig it? Right on.

Nixon, Watergate, Robert Redford & All The President's Men

So I'm pretty much spending all my free time at the moment obsessing about Watergate and Nixon's 'Final Days' at the White House. I'm a fun guy. I read Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein's 'All The President's Men' over the Summer, understood I guess maybe 75% of it at a push, but dug the whole thing and thought it was a heck of a piece of writing. It's a complicated business, right? I've just finished watching the movie, which is, lets be straight, an awesome piece of cinema. If only for Robert Redford's sweet tan suits. I don't know what the received wisdom is on this, but for my dollar, Redford kicks Hoffman's ass in this movie. I guess he maybe has the easier ride of it. Hoffman has to be all ticky and quirky. All Hoffman-y. Redford gets to be...cool. Captain America. My Mum has been a huge Redford fan pretty much her whole life, and I gotta say he's shaping up as one of my faves too. I just caught 'The Candidate'(1972) for the second or third time on telly, and he's exceptionally cool in that. And I watched Quiz Show (1994) again recently - essential viewing in the wake of all the television phone-in scandals - which Redford directed, and that's a hell of a movie too.

"I thought we were gonna get television. The truth is...television is gonna get us."

So to sum up: Robert Redford Is Cool.

In other Obsessing About Nixon news, I'm halfway through David Frost's recollections of his 1977 interviews with the Ex-Prez - Frost/Nixon - which is fascinating, and I'll be watching the recently released DVD of those shows...later this week sometime. The movie with Michael Sheen is meant to be pretty neat too, isn't it?

My 15 Point January Survival Plan

.1. Barack Obama: Audacity Of Hope (Book)
.2. Frost / Nixon: Watergate (DVD)
.3. Seinfeld: Season 8 (DVD)
.4. Black turtle neck sweaters
.5. Babysham, Bombay Mix and other assorted festive leftovers
.6. Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons: 'Watchmen' (Graphic Novel)
.7. Matt Helders: 'Late Night Tales' (CD)
.8. The 9/11 Commission Report (Book)
.9. Alex Ross - 'The Rest Is Noise' (Book)
.10. Judy Garland: Judy At Carnegie Hall (CD)
.11. All The Presidents Men (DVD)
.12. Old copies of Mojo Magazine I've dug out from the loft
.13. Making a horrible racket on my Stylophone
.14. Albert King: King Of The Blues Guitar (LP)
.15. Austerity

My 15 Point Winter Survival Plan

.1. GZA - 'Liquid Swords'
.2. Gin and Tonic

.3. Old Batman comics

.4. New black suede Beatle boots

.5. New Yorker magazine

.6. Bootleg Hendrix LPs

.7. Calvin & Hobbes anthologies

.8. My fiance's homemade Mexican chilli

.9. The Star Wars Trilogy on ITV

.10. Good coffee

.11. A black Pea Coat

.12. Trying to follow the Knicks

.13. The Guy Fawkes Inn, York

.14. The Ackhorne Pub, York

.15. Christmas shopping in London