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.

TV Review: 50 Greatest Comedy Catchphrases

50 Greatest Comedy Catchphrases - 9pm, Sunday 17th Jan, E4

So this was pretty much the most pointless three hours of television ever conceived, a show whose singularly limited appeal can be summed up in one sentence:

"Oh yeah, I remember when that used to be funny."

Comedy catchphrases have an intensely short shelf life, and operate on two, and only two, settings: 'tolerably zeitgiesty' and 'hopelessly lame.' There's no middle groud, no grey area. One day they're harmlessly amusing, the next day they're obnoxious and outrageously uncool, and remain in that state for eternity. Nothing is more un-hip than the out-dated catchphrase. A drunk dad at a wedding party yelling "Yeah, baby!". A gaggle of science students guffawing at Monty Python lines. Your idiot mate who still answers the phone with a gargled "WHASSSSUP!" These are some of society's greatest ills. Ricky Gervais made two whole sit-coms about it.

The whole point of comedy catchphrases is that they're so fundementally Not Funny that once the novelty has worn off, you cannot fathom why you ever thought of them as being anything other than monumentally irritating. The only thing comedy catchphrases have going for them in the first place is their newness - consequently a three-hour TV show listing 50 old ones just made no sense at all. The regular cast of assembled talking heads had precisely nothing of value to say about any catchphrase, because there is precisely nothing to say about them. At most (Ali G's "Is it 'cos I is black?") they distill the essence of the character to whom they belong, and in most cases ("Watchoo talkin' 'bout, Willis?") they're just some random phrase that for some reason struck a popular chord at a particular time.

The Fast Show's shock & awe approach to catchphrase comedy rendered the exercise utterly obsolete anyway - you could do a Top 50 of catchphrases from Fast Show alone, and you could fill another Top 50 again with sketches from post-Fast Show efforts like Little Britain, Bo Selecta and Catherine Tate. To top it all off, the Number One Comedy Catchphrase was..."Nice to see you, to see you - nice..." which isn't even a comedy catchphrase, any more than "I've started so I'll finish" or "I have a dream" are comedy catchphrases. It's a catchphrase, sure. But it isn't funny. It isn't the punchline to a joke, or part of a comic routine. This is the second time a Channel 4 Top 50 has ended with a dull, off-beat thud - the winner of the Top 50 Kids TV Shows was revealed to be The Simpsons, which, similarly, isn't a kids TV show.

In conclusion: "D'oh."

A Tale Of Two Offices - Why 'An American Workplace' Is Better Than 'The Office'

The Office: An American Workplace (Mondays, 8pm, ITV4)

"All my favorite comedies are coming out of America. Always have been, really." - Ricky Gervais

Rick Gervais & Stephen Merchant's 'The Office' remains a holy grail for fans of smart situation comedy, a watershed for British television, and a benchmark for all that came after it. Initial scepticism about how the show would translate across the Atlantic was an understandable, if depressingly predictable, response from the sort of Union Jack waving Brit-comedy fan boys whose knee-jerk to the mooted 'American Office' was generally "oh, but The Office is so dark and awkward and quintessentially British, it's exactly the sort of thing Americans could never make."

And, in the first instance, they were right. The early episodes of An American Workplace leaned way to heavily on the UK original, and they suffer in comparison to it. But as the US show has developed and moved further and further from the tone (if not the spirit) of the UK version, An American Workplace has turned into the one thing those nay-sayers could never have predicted it would do - a fundamentally better show than the BBC original. Four seasons in, An American Workplace has matured into The Office' warmer, livelier, better scripted, more consistently funny and emotionally complex cousin.

This should come as no surprise. Many Brit-comedy fans chose to understand The Office as a triumph of 'quintessentially' UK humour, a black-hearted antidote to bland, self-satisfied, formulaic US sit-comedy, and they hailed Gervais as their hero on this basis - but this reading of the situation was always fundamentally flawed. The Office is not 'quintessentially British' at all; its enormous - and thoroughly deserved - impact was due precisely to the lack of a precedent for it on British TV (except perhaps The Royle Family - discuss). If The Office was an attack on anything, it was on bad UK sit-coms (something Gervais took to nauseating, bewilderingly self-indulgent lengths with Extras). Gervais & Merchant's key influences for The Office - Seinfeld, The Larry Sanders Show, The Simpsons, and especially This Is Spinal Tap - were all American. Series-long story arches, the documentary style, the focus on social faux-pas and taboos, naturalistic & improvised performances - The Office was built on an American model, not a British one. This being the case, it makes perfect sense that the Americans should do The Office better than we did. They haven't just changed the British version (Americanised, godforbid) - they've taken it as a starting point and, with the resources, acting talent and writers available to them, improved on it. If anybody could have predicted this turnaround, it would be those all-time US comedy fan boys, Ricky Gervais & Stephen Merchant.

Sesame Street: Subverting Capitalism Since 1969

Sesame Street was a post-modern experiment, conceived at inception as a parody of adult television, offering a knowing commentary on the conventions of the medium, then appropriating those conventions as educational tools.

By patterning the animated educational segments on TV commercials - the use of jingles, visual motifs, hip language, the repetition of snappy slogans, quick edits, entertaining characters - the Children's Television Workshop engaged in a subversion of the hard-sell techniques of consumer, capitalist culture. Sesame Street holds up a distorted circus-mirror to television, reflecting back a psychedelicised, rainbow-hued re-vision of the medium. The aim is to educate; the joke is at the expense of commercial television.

It is gentle satire, but satire nonetheless - very much a product of a late 60s. John & Yoko exploited the methods of Madison Avenue to 'sell' peace - Sesame Street exploited them to sell education. Monty Python & The Firesign Theatre ingested television whole and regurgitated a crazed version of it back into the mainstream with anarchic countercultural zeal -Sesame Street ingested television whole and regurgitated a day-glo, fuzzy-felt version of it back into the mainstream with the right-on zeal of progressive hippy educators.

Way back when, the Childrens Television Workshop could not have possibly envisioned Sesame Street becoming the global multi-billion dollar mega-industry it is today. I don't know if it has become 'part of the problem' or not, I'm not a socialist or an anti-capitalist myself, but I guess it has certainly become something different to the thing it once was. Episodes from early 70s have a loose, spontaneous vibe to them which is inevitably far less evident now. But while it continues to educate children in an entertaining and smart way, it would be churlish to regard Sesame Street as anything less than one of television's unqualified triumphs, a programme which is funny, fun, creative, and ultimately A Good Thing.

Here's my all-time favourite clip, a skit starring Cookie Monster (Who made the top 5 in my All-Time Fave TV Characters list on a post years ago) and the world's most beloved frog, Kermit. This clip is genuinely laugh-out loud funny, and appears to have absolutely no educational content whatsoever. An overused word, but what the hell: genius.



(I like to quote "Life not all guessing games, frog" every chance I get!)

Live From New York - It's Saturday Night Live...Vs Spider Man!

Yoinks! What's cooler than one cool thing? Why sir, that'd be: two cool things. And what's cooler than two cool things? Howabout two things that are already cool coming together to make a third even cooler thing! And to prove this equation, here's this exceptionally cool edition of Marvel Team Up from 1978, featuring Spiderman...and the cast of Saturday Night Live! That'd be the classic 'Not Ready For Prime Time Players' line up - Belushi, Chase, Ackroyd et al. Just ordered it from ebay for £2...a bone fide bargain for a fun piece of gen-u-ine Americana, albeit one that I'll read once, and then leave on a shelf slowly disappearing under a pile whatever other pointless crap I buy subsequently from ebay. With great buying power comes great irresponsibility.

Vic Mizzy: 1916 - 2009

Word to my man Vic Mizzy, who passed away at his home in Bel Air a few days ago, aged 93. Based in New York for most of his career, he wrote hit records for Doris Day & others during the 40s / 50s, before moving into TV & Movie scoring.

His most enduring piece of music, recorded over 40 years ago and revealed in the video clip below, has embedded itself more deeply and unmovably in the firmament of Western pop culture than the work of even our most revered songwriters. It is part of our DNA, it's opening riff illiciting an instinctive pavalov's dogs reaction amongst anybody who hears it, generating not just a vocal response, but two physical finger clicks. Try it today at work or college; go up to somebody and utter a"dur-dur-dur-duh". Nobody can resist the two-click answer. It's like casting a spell - mysterious and spooky, indeed.

Adventures In Crate Digging - A Few Records I Picked Up This Weekend

Dennis Coffey - 'Gettin' It On' (45)
Typically freaked-out slice of heavily fuzzed, evil psyche-soul from the geetar supremo, as sampled on the very first track of...

Public Enemy - 'Yo! Bum Rush The Show' (LP)
Lo-fi, rough & raw, needles-in-the-red , drum-machine clattering 1987 hip-hop debut. Hits hard, relentlessly. By the time they came to record their next LP, PE's sound had become a bewilderingly complex collage of noise and layered samples, but the tough minimalism of their debut still impresses on its own uncompromising terms.

The Not Ready For Prime Time Players - NBC's Saturday Night Live (LP)
Sporadically great '76 compilation of sketches from SNL's debut season starring Dan Ackroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin and others. A fun document from the early days of US comedy's 70s - 80s golden age, characterised by the freewheeling, improvisational, irreverent, prepared-to-miss-as-often-as-you-hit attitude common to so much great live comedy. "Live from New York - It's Saturday Night!"

Frank Sinatra - Come Fly With Me (LP)
The Chairman of The Board's carefree, atomic-age, jet-set lifestyle concept LP. Peerless late 50s popular art. Almost ten years since I first bough this on CD, the impressionistic, pastel shaded Moonlight In Vermont ("telegraph cables, how they sing down the highway, as they travel each bend in the road") remains one of my very favourite pieces of music...

John F Kennedy - The Kennedy Wit (LP)
Probably not strictly accurate to describe this is being 'by' JFK, this is a collection of prize Kennedy-isms selected from 'speeches, press conferences and Off-The-Cuff Remarks', released the year after his assassination. An opportunistic cash-in, no doubt, but a fascinating and ultimately saddening artefact nevertheless.

Taxi, Season 2: The Golden Age Of US TV Comedy

So I was watching the 1978 second season of Taxi this weekend with my folks. This is real Golden Age of US Comedy stuff. The quality of the cast is just mind-boggling. If this is your bag, watching Judd Hirsch, Andy Kaufman, Christopher Lloyd & Danny DeVito riff off one another in Taxi is no less than the equivalent of watching the Rat Pack swaggering on stage at the Sands or CSN&Y harmonising at Woodstock.* By all accounts relations amongst the Taxi cast were not always easy, which is hardly surprising given the highly volatile mixture of clashing creative egos on set. Kaufman alone was about as erratic and unmanageable as they come, and it's amazing he survived within the button-down constraints of Sit-Com land for as long as he did. The 'Taxi' of this era is simply magical, peerless popular art. Treat yourself to a copy of Season 2, here.

*I'm not kidding about this era being a spectacular time for US comedy. While the '78 season of Taxi aired, the Saturday Night Live cast counted Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi amongst it's number, Steve Martin was at the very height of his success, and Richard Pryor recorded his magnificant 'Live In Concert' concert film. In-sane.

And that's the way it was: Walter Cronkite, 1916-2009

Few words have been as undermined and devalued by the relentless, hyperbolic, exaggerated mis-use of language which characterises so much rolling news as the word 'legend'. Walter Cronkite was a newsman known for his precise, honest and measured use of the English language. And few media figures deserve the correctly applied epitaph 'legend' as he.

Anchorman for the CBS Nightly News between 1962 and 1981, Cronkite's voice was the authoritative, humanitarian voice of every major news story in America during some of the nation's most troubled and uncertain times. He is admired not only for having been a reassuring voice, but for being an honest voice, a straight-shooter, from the Ed Murrow-era old school of TV news - he was known simply as 'the most honest man in America'. When he felt the American people deserved to know that he no longer considered Vietnam to be winnable war, he told them so, and President Johnson famously responded that 'if I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America'. Johnson did not seek re-election for a second term.

Having watched Network recently and noted how the movie must surely endure as a constant touchstone for Jon Stewart and the Daily Show team, obituary assessments of Cronkite's reputation confirm once again how powerful the image of 'the honest anchorman' remains in US mainstream media - largely because there appears to be so few of them left. American TV News now wallows in a weird dichotomy - shockingly blatant partisanship in endemic, while a lack of plainly spoken, honest journalism is cowardly explained away as the consequence of fearing repercussions from the regulators for exhibiting 'bias'...as if 'the truth' can be biased.

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams confirmed during a (hugely entertaining) interview with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show this week that he knew Cronkite was unhappy with slipping journalistic standards on TV, and that he thought 24 hour news had created a situation where being first was more important than being right. The reality is that the 24 hour news cycle is here to stay, and consequently Cronkite's passing is particularly sad because in 2009 we need honest TV newsmen like Cronkite, newsmen who value basic integrity and independence of the press over 'access' at any cost, more than ever. One hopes that he was not the last of his kind.

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.

Stuff They Don't Really Seem To Show On Telly Anymore #962:

Those Shows Where They'd Just Show You A Bunch Of Early 90s Movie Stunts

When I was in my late teens, before satellite telly had really taken off and digi-boxes were the stuff of Jetsons-style fantasy, the mid-morning summer holiday / mid Saturday afternoon / day time bank holiday TV schedules were junkyards of US cable network trash. I used to really dig this sorta thing. My faves were Stunt Shows (I've had to come up with that genre title myself). Shows about Hollywood stunts and the 'craft' or 'art' of stunt men. D'you even remember these shows? Until I Googled 'em this week I sorta thought maybe I'd just dreamt 'em or something. Sometimes they'd do a show about the 'magic' of special effects, or animatronics, and they were OK, but not as good as the Stunt Shows. They were called things like 'Hollywood's Most Dangerous Stunts' or 'The World's Most Dangerous Stunts' or 'Hollywoods Greatest Stunt Men Do The Most Dangerous Things' or 'When Stunts Attack'.

ITV was the really daddy of this kinda programming. It was like they'd bought these shows as part of some package along with the one good show they really wanted, like Knightrider or something, and then when they found themselves with nothing else to show at 2.15 in the afternoon on August bank holiday just threw on whatever other garbage they had left in the box. Often the shows appeared to be part of a series, only you'd only ever see one episode, then you'd never hear of it ever again. Stunt Shows all started like this:

Troy McClure-type smoothie in a sports jacket who nobody in England has ever heard of is hanging out for no reason on the set of a low budget action movie in Hollywood, California. To camera:

"Hey there! I'm here on the set of Final Death Blow 3: The Deathening. Since the earliest days of Hollwood, movies have had stars. Sometimes these stars are real people, like Steve Gutenberg or Fatty Arbuckle or Free Willy. But these days the real stars are the stunts, the hold-on-to-your-popcorn feats of expert engineering, precision timing and all-out GUTS that really reduce an audience to a mindless mass of gibbering automatons willing to go see any old piece of crap just as long as there's a helicopter crashing into an oil tanker at some point in the trailer. Join me now as we go behind the scenes of...HOLLYWOOD'S MOST DANGEROUS STUNTS!"

Cue credit sequence consisting of multiple explosions, bearded men with walkie-talkies, buildings collapsing, heavy stars 'n' stripes action, more explosions, guys on fire, and HOLLYWOOD'S MOST DANGEROUS STUNTS spelt out in huge metallic block lettering. Which then explodes.

And I'm like: 'awesome'.

I don't know if they make these shows anymore, and even if they do, I imagine they lack the charming early 90s cable TV gonzoness of the classics they used to make. I bet they're all slick and CSI-ish now. I remember one where they demonstrated how they did 'The Jump' from Speed, and one where they did something with the Golden Gate bridge, and...that's about it, really. They were great. If 'Dave' wants to put one of these shows back-to-back with that old BBC show about a squirrel who runs assault courses to the Mission Impossible theme next Bank Holiday, they've got a loyal viewer in me for an hour.

A Book Report On Evan Wright's 'Generation Kill'

Evan Wright's 'Generation Kill'
Rolling Stone journalist's account of his time embedded with US marines during the 2003 Iraq invasion - NOW A MAJOR HBO SERIES OR WHATEVER

Hyped on the cover as operating on the same level as Micheal Herr's Vietnam War record 'Dispatches' - pretty much the highest accolade anybody could apply to any work of art as far as I'm concerned - I was, perhaps inevitably, sorta disappointed with Wright's book. The publishers are right - 'Dispatches' is the bench-mark for this book, I just don't think it meets that bench-mark. It's a good book, but it ain't a permenant brainscape demolisher like 'Dispatches'.

Wright had a much tougher war to write about than Herr did, no doubt about it. Both literally and figuratively Iraq is a much drier war than Vietnam, with a much smaller palette of colour and experience for a writer to draw on. I'm not a war-freak, so when I read about 'Nam I'm reading about it in terms of social history, in terms of having some sense of what the war meant both for those fighting it in the jungle, and against it America. You cannot understand Muhammad Ali, James Brown, the Chicago riots, Kent State, the MC5, The Wild Bunch etc etc without understanding the Vietnam war. It defined the tone of western popular culture, and western popular culture defined the tone of the war. As Fancis Ford Coppolla says, 'Nam was "a rock and roll war."

The Iraq war, on the other hand, is not a 'rock and roll war' on any level - WW2 was clearly way more rock and roll than Iraq, and Richard Hooker's wonderful and vastly underrated 'M*A*S*H' makes a strong case for Korea as a pretty swinging scene. This lack of rock and rollness simply makes a story about the young men fighting the war a harder sell, particularly to somebody with my particular dumb, low-brow sensibilities. There just ain't enough kicks here - and I guess that's the point. Wright's combat troops aren't hunkered out in the field for months on end smoking drugs, preparing for the black power revolution back home and grooving to Jimi Hendrix. The troops of Wright's novel have no access to alchohol even, radical politics are nowhere to be found, and the major pop music touchstone is Avril Lavigne. Instead of actual Playboy Bunnies to entertain them, they have one copy of Playboy. Clearly the lack of an energised popular culture back home, and the political vaccum the troops appear to be operating within, is kind of the point. Like - 'at least the guys out in 'Nam had The Temptations; these guys have to make do with Avril Lavigne. It's a bunkrupt culture - what are they even fighting to defend - MTV?" There's a real blankness here, and while I appreciate this is precisely Wright's point, it doesn't make it any more satisfying to read about.

The Vietnam War has been dangerously over-fetishised in books, pop songs and movies, I suppose to an ultimately unhelpful degree...but godammit, I woulda just dug it if Wright had decided to do a little myth-making of his own. He is a Rolling Stone journalist afterall. Perhaps there just isn't the latitude, the freedom, for any journalist to do this now, and moreover, perhaps the material simply isn't there, and military-press relations are just very different today etc etc. I guess I was just left thinking...how would ol' Hunter S have faired out in Iraq? That's the story I was hoping for. Fear And Loathing In Baghdad.

"We were somewhere around Basra on the edge of the desert when the drugs started to take hold..."

The bottom line is that Iraq is either still waiting for its 'Dispatches', or else it is simply not possible to write a 'Dispatches' about Iraq, it having been fought and lived so fundementally differently to previous international conflicts invloving US troops. I'm still hoping for the former, and in the meantime, 'Generation Kill' makes for an adequate stop-gap.

The Pink Floyd Panther

Having worked at HMV for three years in my early twenties, (Oxford Circus & Doncaster branches) I sorta get The Fear when I enter a branch now. I find myself wandering around in an agitated mild panic, automatically re-sorting the A-Z racks and putting artist's most recent albums at the front of their 'pockets'. It's like an acid flashback, with a Ting Tings soundtrack. It's horrible. "How did I work here for three years? This is brutal. It's so loud. Why are the T-Rex albums under Marc Bolan? They don't put The Beatles under Ringo Starr do they? How can they only have one Public Enemy album? What sort of record shop is this? This sticker is on wrong. Maybe I should tell somebody. Wasn't this Ting Tings song on already? I need to get out of here."

But a visit today paid off, when I landed a DVD box set of all 120+ original Pink Panther shorts for a tenner. They're wonderful. They're not hilarious - though there is a peristant daftness which produces the odd out-loud chuckle, but they're gently off-kilter and exceptionally hip, plus Henry Mancini's score is of course flat-out beatnik cool jazz brilliance. Of particular interest are those episodes which lampoon some contemporary fad, and I imagine the cod-Filmore poster acid kelidoscopia of 'Psychedelic Pink' is a favourite amongst Pink afficionados. You can dig our rinky-dink hero's journey into his third-eye, here.

Obsessing About The Whole Schoolhouse Rock Thing

While the best British kids telly of the 60s and 70s was all acid-folky wooziness a la Bagpuss and The Clangers, the equivilent Quality Educational Programming being done in America adopted a tone of street-smart funkiness a la Sesame Street, The Electric Company..and Schoolhouse Rock. First airing on ABC in 1972, Schoolhouse Rock was a series of Saturday morning animated shorts which used a broad range of pop music idioms to teach the Youth Of Nixon's America about all sortsa useful things, from politics to science. The recently re-issued Multiplication Rock LP is one of I think two LPs put out during the show's original run, and is quite simply a wonderful selection of kooky, fun, pop-folk-funk songs, including Schoolhouse Rock's 'hit record', 'Three Is A Magic Number'. After purchasing the record at the weekend and a subsequent 48 hours of obsessive Googling, I'm very happy to report that for Fans Of This Type Of Thing, 'Three Is A Magic Number' represents only the tip of an exceptionally funky iceberg.

The thing about This Type Of Thing is that in so many ways the music produced for Schoolhouse Rock and similar enterprises is more interesting, original, useful, fun, cool and witty than most anything being put out by 'legitimate' pop performers of the time. There is care and craft here, a dedication to making Good Music, but there is not an ounce of the other bullshit which rock and roll culture wades around in. There's no navel gazing, there's no ego, there's no money-drugs-girls, there's no portentous statements or leather trousers. I like the fact it has a purpose, and that the purpose is an inarguably righteous purpose, and the fact that the people who put it together had the good taste and sensibility to tie the purpose to genuinely hip music. In 1972, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell and John Lennon were releasing entirely self-regarding records about themselves, and trying to convince us that The Pop Artist can write honestly only about themselves, or else it ain't art. Bob Dorough, the key architect of the Schoolhouse Rock sound, was releasing records which featured songs as good as anything Taylor-Mitchell-Lennon were putting out, and contained about a zillion better ideas, and were - to some extent, certainly to greater extent than Taylor-Mitchell-Lennon's out-put - for somebody else's benefit.

Anyway, here are a couple of examples, I think they're pretty great, and so what. The best thing Dylan ever did was that song about God naming all the animals from 'Slow Train Coming', and that's about as Schoolhouse Rock as Zimmy ever got. Dig, y'all.

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?

Why I Don't Get The Whole Charlie Brooker Thing

Given that there appears to be an internet-wide consensus that this guy is Like Really Good And Junk, I know I'm gonna annoy a lot of people with the following post...but here goes.

Why I Dont Get The Whole Charlie Brooker Thing

Brooker-roos dig Charlie because He Cares So Much About Stuff That Sucks, And He Totally Tells It Like It Is And Shit. The main thing Charlie really cares about is The Telly, and he made his name writing splenetic, twisted broadsides on the subject. The Brooker persona is of a man consumed by the digital age, driven to a fevered, almost hallucinatory delirium by rolling news and reality TV. He is wired, A Man On The Edge. This 'gonzo' approach to Watching Telly is at the heart of my failure to 'get' Brooker.

.1. If the 'joke' is how disproportionate his rage is in relation to the subject matter, like 'excessively passionate television criticism is inherently ridiculous because television does not matter enough to justify it', then it is a joke ultimately undermined by the fact that he has spent ten or more years writing television criticism. The parody is flawed. For the joke to work, Charlie must genuinely question the value of passionate television criticism, and if he does genuinely question the value of passionate television criticism, after a decade of producing ironically passionate television criticism I would suggest that maybe his point would be more forcibly made by just writing unironically about something he really does think is worth writing passionately about. Anything. History. Politics. That would be a brave thing to do.

.2. Alternatively, we take the gonzo shtick at face-value, and buy the idea that this guy is a dangerous insomniac loon wired 24/7 to the boob-tube. Again, I consider this to be fundamentally flawed. Gonzo is defined by interaction with the story. Watching television is defined by a lack of interaction with the story. It is the most passive, un-inolving pass time possible. You cannot be gonzo sat at home on the sofa watching telly. Or maybe you can, it's just that it's a spectacularly lame, watered-down sort of gonzo-ism, and the subject matter doesn't warrant the response, which just makes it weird. (If the gonzoness is parodic, refer back to my first point).

Either way, I find myself shrugging.

However wrongheaded I find his shtick, Brooker is undoubtedly a very talented writer. A standard of Brooker's style is the Darkly Comic Flight Of Fancy, wherein a popular mainstream television scenario is distorted into a nightmarish fantasia of disturbing sex and violence, with satirical consequences. I guess how much you dig this depends on how many times you wanna read about a fictional episode of Jeremy Kyle which ends with the host masturbating a smack-addled chimp or something, and how many times you think it's worth Brooker making the point that, "Hey, Telly Is Already Sicker And Crazier Than Anything I Come Up With Here, Right? You Think This Shit Is Weird And Twisted? You Wanna Be Offended By The Orgy Of Fucked-Up-Ness I've Imagined? If You Really Wanna Be Offended, Take A Look At The Insidious, Vacuous Amorality Endemic In The Real TV Schedules! That Shit's REALLY Fucked-Up! I'm Just Holding Up A Mirror, Buddy!"

Charlie now has the opportunity to make this point over and over again On Television, where he hosts a weekly clips show about the State Of Television. Brooker is a doughy, Mr Potato Head sorta looking dude who rocks an as-standard Kermode BBC culture critic quiff, and is an entirely charmless, almost relentlessly sneery, joy-sucking on-screen presence, whose every on-screen second undermines whatever criticism of telly he is making at that moment because he's such an unengaging presenter and he's presenting such an underwhelming show.

Anyway, my point here is just that I think Brooker's shtick is just sort of pretentious, superior and misguided. If he really wanted to piss off the Nathan Barleys of this world, he coulda just spent his time writing about how he likes Friends, or Westlife, or anything else The Alternative Mainstream, Radiohead fans, to whom Brooker is a bone fide hero, has decided isn't cool. But he couldn't do that, because his tastes are naturally pretentious and know-better. So if he has concerns about the mentality of his fan-base, if he is increasingly aware of the the depressing fact that he is essentially enjoyed by people who like Banksy and for precisely the same reasons, then he only has himself to blame. He has not been able to distance himself from that Banksy worshipping culture, and the reason he has not been able to distance himself from that culture is because there are fundamentals of his work which are sympathetic with that culture. What Brooker offers now is the hum-drummest of hum-drummery - a misanthropic old dude pointing out that a lot of mainstream popular culture is dumb and damaging, but Heroes is pretty good. Who needs it?

I'd be keen to hear what Charlie fans think of all this, 'cos I know he's a well respected writer, and I really feel like I'm missing something here.

Three non-brave children based observations about last night's Pudsey In Need telethon

.1. Tess Daley is so bad at presenting she makes Ferne Cotton look good. Like, Cotton is Walter Kronkite compared to Daley. I was actually relieved when Daley 'threw' (or bungled awkwardly) to Cotton. I have never experienced 'relief' when Cotton has appeared on the television before. A desire to sink into death's cold, numbing embrace, yes. But not relief.

.2. Was I dreaming, or did Steven Fry defer to somebody elses knowledge during QI last night? The Wogan / Fry Battle Of The Broadcasting Giants was always likely to produce some interesting telly, but who knew that Fry would allow himself to be corrected by the Tog-Father. Of course, the topic was Eurovision - a topic only an insane fool would question Wogan's authority on - and the show was being conducted in the spirit of Pudsy bonhomie, so one cannot presume this will set a precedent. Fry got his own back with the kangaroo thing later in the show anyway.

.3. Whoever is dressing Duffy, an engaging, likable and highly watchable young performer, as a drunk middle-aged hooker, needs to stop. (Wasn't sure about her new single at first, quite like it now.)