rosie rosie rosie

I promised to myself that I wouldn’t abandon this blog when I got back to university, and I’m trying my hardest not to, but Auden is currently beating down my door. Well, that’s a lie – but I should certainly be reading about him & love & “building the just city” in his poetry, rather than just writing this. So here’s what I’ve put together in a small amount of stolen time – I thought I’d show you some of my friend Rosie’s animation & drawn/painted art. She’s currently applying to do a degree in illustration & animation. She did the animation above as part of her art foundation degree a couple of years ago.

fur and blotting paper

you can see the above picture in its full (& much bigger) glory here.

kiss kingdom

and again, you can see this much bigger at rosie’s deviantart. This drawing was used as the front cover of an issue of an online magazine I guest-edited – YM:Crash. Why not take a look? and finally, i’ll leave you with one more drawing of Rosie’s, this time black & white:

people

click here to see this one bigger. rosie’s drawings are great, and fun, and varied – click through from one of these links to her gallery, and you’ll see what i mean.

sorry to not put together a proper, written, post – one of those is coming up, i swear. but until then.

the fight for history

I got back from Gloucestershire (via London, where money seems to just osmose out of me) today, and on the journey back this song came up on my mp3 player’s shuffle. I then proceeded to play it about a thousand more times. It was written in 2004 in reaction to what people (well, mostly the media, I think) said about the death of Ronald Reagan, but six years on, and despite the fact that Margaret Thatcher hasn’t died (which the song kind of hinges on, but it’s not really about that – more on this later), and despite the fact that the UK’s political landscape has changed (as much as a two-party/two-and-a-bit-party system can) in the intervening years, it seems to pretty much nail what’s happening in UK politics at the moment.

First of all, it’s not a song about the death of Margaret Thatcher. No, really, it’s not. I know one of those when I hear it. It’s about the way that modern political history gets rewritten – the way that politicians who did horrible things while in office start rehabilitating themselves by turning up on the telly whenever it’ll have them. He sings about Steve Norris and Edwina Currie becoming personalities rather than politicians, and all I can think about is Ann Widdecombe on Strictly Come Dancing, and how awful she is, and how people found her entertaining and funny and voted to keep her in for weeks. She’s against abortion, when she was an MP she consistently voted against equality for gays and lesbians, she voted against removing hereditary peers from the House of Lords, and she doesn’t believe in climate change (that’s a fairly horrible website and I don’t want to give them hits, but I can’t find her actual column anywhere else). If you’re interested, there’s a list of the abhorrent things she’s done here.

He sings these lines, and she dances through my head, while people from the telly say inane things like “you always get a contestant who brings humour and fun to the show. I love Ann”:

All the smiling lying psychopaths we finally deposed
Are now creeping into reality TV and phone-in shows

Yeah. Happening again. And we need to fight it, you know? Because this is the kind of revisionism – the kind of short-sightedness – that allows us to forget what the Conservatives did in the 1980s. The kind of short-sightedness that makes us giggle at a politician who only stood down from her position as an MP in May this year. May! And before Christmas everybody couldn’t wait to talk about how much they giggled at her on Strictly. It’s this kind of revisionism that leads to what features in the next verse in the song, after a description of how “preening pamphlet-headed peacocks” only ever talk about ooh wasn’t his hair glamorous and mad in the eighties etc.:

As if the miners’ strike, the poll tax and BSE never happened
As if Section 28 was never passed into the law
As if Osama Bin Laden wasn’t paid to fight our wars
As if the institutionalised weren’t turfed onto the streets
Into a new society they said did not exist

This is it. This is it exactly. David Cameron showed, earlier this year, how out of his depth he was when it came to gay rights. He wasn’t an MP when Section 28 became law – but he didn’t turn up to the vote to repeal it, either, and in Europe the Conservatives are aligned with a Polish party who are peddling the same sort of homophobic views that we finally managed to expel – at least in law – seven years ago. In 2009, one of his MEPs even defended a homophobic insult used by the party’s leader – claiming it had been taken out of context. As if homophobic abuse is something that can just be explained away. David Cameron mostly just tries to shrug off talk of his party’s past in this sort of area as if it’s a faint but inconsequential embarrassment.

It’s his party’s lying that caused 2010′s second budget to be known as an “emergency” budget, so that they could start a regime of unnecessary cuts, that hit the poorest hardest, no matter what various members of the coalition say. It wasn’t working particularly well when it came to polling day – despite an incumbent Labour government that nobody liked, led by the increasingly blunder-ridden Gordon Brown, the Conservatives didn’t manage to win a majority of seats. But they joined up with the Lib Dems (as was always going to happen – there was a reason that I voted Labour) and their combined “wave of lies”, to use M.J. Hibbett’s words… have kind of beaten the media, and a lot of people, down. Why is nobody other than like Johann Hari, Laurie Penny, and the people at UK Uncut talking about the weird economic lies that the coalition – and the political establishment in general, Labour have done this too, to a lesser extent – use to justify cuts, use to justify the austerity that we’re now facing? They’re all great, and I thank them – but we need more people in the media talking about this, and less just repeating what the politicians say. They’ve shown time and time again that they can’t be trusted. They’re just waiting to retire with their millions and a quick route into telly fame.

The Conservatives cut themselves off from their past – as M.J. Hibbett sings about here, and as Stewart Lee talks about here (go about two and a half minutes in), and this is what allows them to continue to lie, continue to do the same things over and over again. Yes, regeneration is important to any political party, and new leaders and members believe in different things, and can legitimetaly break with what went before. But the Conservative party was unpleasant in the past, and remains unpleasant now –  it tries to pretend that it’s not full of old men who rubbish the hard times that people less well-off than them are facing. It tries to pretend that it’s not full of MPs who don’t believe in equal rights for people and couples of any sexuality, but… the evidence keeps popping up, like garden weeds. They said they’d be the greenest government ever, but they’re going to sell off the forests and don’t seem to have started any radical plans to help stop climate change. They’re cutting funding for regional public transport. They’re allowing train ticket prices to rise to the point where nobody will be able to afford them, and will end up just using their cars again. They pretend that they’ve changed when they haven’t, and it’s the short-sightedness of the media and voters that lets them get away with it. Ann Widdecombe is being used as some sort of distraction from what’s really happening. This song recognises what her appearance on the show was really about, six years before she even pulled on a pair of dancing shoes. Because it’s a constant cycle of lies and apologies and every year the same thing.

In his long commentary about the song, M.J. Hibbett says:

It’s a strange experience to stand on stage singing songs about something which feels so current and relevant to me, in front of adults who were only toddlers when it was all happening. Sometimes it feels like a history lesson, sometimes it feels like Folk Music, but sometimes I see people my age with a gleam in their eye when I sing it, and it’s always lovely to talk to them afterwards. It’s nice to know I’m not the only one who feels like his adolescence is being re-written.

I was born in 1989, and I’m writing six years after his own commentary. But I still think this song is important – I think the ideas it contains need to be expressed. I think that what it says is true. It’s what allowed Boris to become mayor of London.

Politicians are not celebrities. I wish the programme controllers or whoever the fuck it is who books people for all these programmes about famous amateurs doing something in a studio every week would fucking realise it. They are, or were, important, and we need to not let personalities and wardrobes and all that shit get in the way. It’s hard enough to understand who’s telling the truth and who is responsible for what without all of this cluttering everything. STOP. Stop now. Don’t help them push their agendas, don’t laugh at what they say. An aide who did a weekend course in comedy probably told them to do it anyway. Just stop.

And finally. Of course this song isn’t about wanting Thatcher to die. Come on. It’s not an empty, earnest, political song, the type that people love to say they hate. It’s so much cleverer than that.

tracks of the year #3

I know, I know, it’s now 2011 so this is late. But I wanted to tie off my first two posts about my favourite tracks of the year with one last list of songs that I liked. Here are some more songs that I enjoyed from the year just gone, but by no means all of them. Shout at me about those I missed in the comments.

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Titus Andronicus – A More Perfect Union (buy album here)

I need to listen to their new album properly – but I’ve listened to this one over and over again. The video’s great, which is why I’ve embeded it, but if you’ve not heard the full seven minutes nine seconds of this that’s on the album then you need to search the full version down (it’s on spotify here). It’s beautiful, uses spoken word samples with purpose, and writes New Jersey as somewhere to be escaped from; at times it sounds like he believes New Jersey needs to change, but really it’s clear that the need for escape is something primal, irrational within the narrator. He wants a ‘cruel New England winter’, yet eventually he wants ‘to realize too late I never should have left New Jersey’. He is stuck inside himself, but he knows this now.

The song’s also full of references to the American Civil War, which I’m not going to pretend to know anything about. Just listen to it.

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Johnny Foreigner - Tru Punx (buy single here)

This is probably my favourite of the millions of songs that Johnny Foreigner released this year (I’m not kidding – their wikipedia lists three EPs, there seems to be even more at their bandcamp, and they released a split 7 inch with Stagecoach, which this song is taken from). It’s short, melancholy, and full of references to a song that  was on their debut EP, ‘Champagne Girls I Have Known’; this kind of continuity and reference to what has come before won’t seem alienating if this is the first song by them that you’ve ever heard, but for me… it’s important, it’s almost heartbreaking. In this song, Johnny Foreigner make me want to write their lyrics across my pillowcases/pencil cases/eyelids/fingers/kneecaps. Or just shout them out, loud. Other Johnny Foreigner sings released this year include the amazingly titled ‘Who Needs Comment Boxes When You’ve Got Knives’ and ‘Elegy for Post-Teenage Living’, both on the (take a deep breath) ‘You Thought You Saw a Shooting Star but Yr Eyes Were Blurred With Tears and That Lighthouse Can Be Pretty Deceiving With the Sky So Clear and Sea So Calm’ EP.

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The Indelicates – Jerusalem (buy here)

Yeah, I hate the tories too.

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PS I Love You – Starfield (buy here)

I’m not sure why they chose this name. It’s a pretty great song, though. And the vocalist’s voice is all weird and thin and jerky, like all the best voices are.

why are women’s magazines anti-feminist?

So, last term I attempted to put together a feminist radio show, for music played by women & discussion of women in the media. We recorded one episode, I’m not sure if the station ever put it out, and basically it was a disaster. I am still interested in regularly writing and talking about magazines and television, etc., from a feminist perspective, so I’m going to start a series of posts looking at them here. This post serves as a kind of introduction to the problems I see with women’s magazines, and focuses on More!, a weekly that’s aimed at twenty-sometimes who like high street shops and sex tips illustrated with barbie dolls. Full disclaimer: this was first published in a student paper that I write for back in October. I’ll try and post something new up in the next few days.

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WHY ARE MAGAZINES ANTI-FEMINIST

all that more! cares about with lady gaga is whether men find her attractive

There are swathes of women’s magazines available in any shop that carries periodicals, from corner shops to supermarkets – they range from weeklies like More!, glossy monthlies such as Cosmo, full of interviews with Jordan, high street fashion photoshoots and tips on how to give blow jobs, to magazines for older readers like Women’s Weekly. These magazines are mostly shallow and thoughtless, and are at worst actively anti-feminist.

In an average issue of More!, a writer asks 40 young men what they deem ‘ONE BIG QUESTION’. In the edition from the 30th of August, these men were asked ‘What’s the one thing you’d change about your girlfriend?’. The double-page spread makes depressing reading – one guy wants his girlfriend to ‘have bigger boobs and blonder hair’, while another says he wants to ‘sellotape her mouth shut’, and a third wishes that he could ‘transform her into Cheryl Cole’. More! didn’t necessarily feed answers into these men’s mouths, but it gives them a prominent place in the magazine, and claims to have found what men ‘really wish was different about us’, as if this is important, and casually sexist jokes made by a few men are representative.

On the cover of the same issue, the magazine advertises a piece on three men who are ‘YOUNG, HOT…’ and ‘SLEEP WITH PROSTITUTES’. Inside, the first question asked to each man is ‘is sex better with a prostitute?’, followed with ‘do you ask them to do things you wouldn’t ask a girlfriend?’. No questions are raised about safety, beyond that of whether the men can tell if the prostitutes are over 16, to which one says he has never thought about it – the focus is firmly on the sexual inadequacy of girlfriends. More! goes out of its way to present the men as wild and desirable – the first describes himself as ‘not the best-looking guy’ and the second says that he has been open with ex-girlfriends about sleeping with prostitutes and wouldn’t pay for sex while in a relationship, yet More! claims that they are ‘HOT’, and that ‘unlike Peter Crouch… [they] don’t care if they get caught’.

MORE! is filled with articles like this. It is casually transphobic, with another cover asking readers ‘which of these girls used to be A MAN’. It belittles women like Julia Roberts for not removing body hair, using the ‘ONE BIG QUESTION’ format to make the issue all about men’s desires rather than women’s thoughts about their own bodies. Other magazines are little better – Grazia recently had a piece that claimed that by wearing leather and having pale skin, celebrities are ‘toying with their sexual identities via the medium of their wardrobes’, as if sexual orientation is a product of surface and little else.

Why do publications about music, business, sports and current affairs often get placed under the ‘for men’ section in shops, as if women should only read the regressive magazines that are written for them on the basis of gender alone? Magazines like More! and Grazia are vapid, harmful, and are read by hundreds of thousands of women every week, every month, and there is no obvious alternative to their endless barrage of mindless sexism and deference to the attitudes of random men towards women’s bodies, behaviour and lives.

2010 miscellany

I don’t feel up to writing a handful more song reviews now, but I still want to make a post as part of my year-in-review before I vanish off to Gloucestershire, as 2010 is almost over and I want to cram in as much fun as I can. So this is a miscellany – the things I liked this year that I can’t construct a list out of. In the next couple of weeks I hope to finish my year in review postings – I want to write a few more track reviews and make you all a mix on 8tracks, and I also want to write about my favourite books of the year (which is why I haven’t included those here). I hoped to finish it all before the year was out, but it doesn’t seem like that’s possible. Ah well. 2011’s going to be terrifying for me (my final exams, hopefully I’ll get a degree, hopefully I’ll move somewhere else and get a job and other things)… I may as well start it by looking backwards.

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main regret

(photo by bobaliciouslondon)

Not going on any of the student protests.

I supported them, but didn’t go on any because I got too nervous at the idea – I figured I would have been no fun, one extra person wouldn’t have made much difference since it was clear that lots of people were already going, I hate being in a big crowd of people that I can’t escape from… the actual conditions of the protests themselves sound like the kind of thing that would have just made me cry from some kind of overpowering fear of nothing in particular (although obviously the violence from the police means that protesters did have something to fear, and they went anyway, because they had to).

Basically, protests are not for me, but. You know. They were important. They are important. And I feel that I should have gone.

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radio shows I love:

Lauren Laverne’s show (on 6music),

Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service (on 6music),

All Songs Considered (on NPR),

Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me (on NPR),

Just A Minute (on Radio 4),

Shaun Keaveny’s breakfast show (on 6music),

Huw Stephens (on Radio 1),

Tom Robinson’s shows (on 6music).

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favourite new magazine

issue 1!

Oh Comely. I got given a copy of this at a garden party run by the women’s campaign at my university this summer (the event itself was wonderful, with nice food and a school sports day-style “olympics”), and have bought each issue since (although I’m still searching the most recent one out). It’s beautifully designed, and the articles in it are interesting, well-written, and not just about fashion or celebrities or anything else. They review toasters, they did a long piece in the second issue about which unlikely things will make it through the post and which will not (basically, unwrapped porn), they interviewed Emmy the Great, had a piece about homebrewing from a kit, a feature over a few pages about a handful of writers’ ex-best friends, and they profile illustrators and artists… It’s not a massively taxing read, and sometimes I wish the articles were a bit longer, but that’s all. I just want more of it.

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tv shows I watched and loved, to varying degrees

How I Met Your Mother (okay, season five was shit, but I’m enjoying the new one so far),

True Blood,

Man vs. Food,

The QI Christmas Special (although QI is VERY variable),

The Trip,

You Have Been Watching (pretty much just most things with Charlie Brooker, really),

Horrible Histories (the video above is a song from it. I think it’s the BBC’s best sketch show).

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favourite clothes wot I bought

I know, right. Clothes. But just look at these trousers! I got them in Zara, and they cost slightly more than I’d usually spend on trousers – but it was worth it. I wear them almost all the time (and when I’m not wearing them, I’m wearing some blue cords that are cut in a similar way). They’re comfortable and they’re more interesting than skinny jeans, while being almost as versatile and less likely to make my legs feel horrible and squeezed. Also, when I wear them with a comfy jumper I feel like I’m dressed as an old man. Yay.

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favourite photo that I took

I liked a lot of the photos I took in Rotterdam, too (more on that below), but I like this photograph of a streetlamp on New College Lane. Largely for the lighting, but the lamp itself is nice too. Especially when you walk past it on wintery evenings, and it beams through strange heavy fog. Click here to see it bigger.

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favourite foods I had never eaten before

Hot and sour soup
Ohhh, it’s so good. Especially when you have something less hot after having the soup as a starter, and your mouth slowly cools down through the meal. It just tastes so good.

Lamb
Well, I’d always hated it before. Then I had some slightly minted skewers done on a barbecue down by the river, and they were wonderful. When it’s done right – minted, well cooked – it’s just so good. Maybe I’ll try some seafood soon and realise that I love it. Who knows.

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favourite stately home visit

I’m so sorry. I’m now of the age where I like visiting big old houses (YES, I even belong to the National Trust now), and Snowshill Manor is a particularly strange one. It’s kind of like the Pitt Rivers Museum, if it was all just crammed into one dark house that was really meant to be lived in. It had cabinets that I could barely see into, machines that I didn’t understand, toys, whole suits of samurai armour, bicycles, musical instruments… It was brilliant.

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favourite holiday

hello tom

My boyfriend and I went to Rotterdam by ferry – I suggested the trip, booked it, got out guidebooks and mostly decided where we went. I’d been to Holland a few times before, but always when I was much younger, or on a school trip. I could probably have been more adventurous with our itinerary – on the last day we meant to go to the tax museum (!) but ended up just playing chess in the communal area of the hostel we’d stayed in, but by that point we were tired and kind of aware of the march of time. But while we were there we got to go to the Boijmans museum in Rotterdam (it’s my favourite art museum, it’s so great), we visited the sex museum in Amsterdam (definitely less fun, it was hideous), we ate in the same Moroccan restaurant two days running because it was so delicious, and we found a Waterstone’s in the middle of a foreign city, just selling English language books.

We got to just wander by canals. We got stupidly lost in a strange bit of Amsterdam while it was raining. We didn’t get to visit the cat museum, so I have a reason to go back one day. It was just fairly exciting having to sort everything out – although at times (like when trying to buy a train ticket from Rotterdam to Amsterdam, jesus christ they’re expensive) I did kind of wish somebody else would just tell us what to do. But you know, it was our first holiday by ourselves. We had fun. At some points Tom just stopped still and said “We’re in Rotterdam!”

I even enjoyed the ferry.

tracks of the year, #2

Here’s the second part of my list (in no particular order!) of my favourite tracks of 2010. The posting of these might slow up for a while, since I’m off to Gloucestershire for a week on Thursday (if the trains are working) and probably won’t pack my laptop, but I’ll try my best to get as many of these done before the new year rings in as I can, anyway. Leave a comment if you agree/disagree/want to share anything with me!

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Janelle Monae – Oh Maker (buy album here, or the track here)

I could easily have picked other songs from The ArchAndroid to write about, but there’s already been a lot of attention paid to Tightrope and Cold War (especially its video, which I love), and this is my other favourite, although it’s more understated than the others – at first, anyway.

At the start, Monae sings over an acoustic guitar, and it feels almost out of place on her album, like she’s suddenly made a retreat to something safer, less interesting. But what starts off quiet and slightly droning – like the rainy day that it describes – suddenly becomes loud, showier than it was at first, and the images that she uses are unexpected and expansive without being jarring or pointless. She asks if the addressee knew that ‘this love would burn so yellow / becoming orange and in its time / explode from grey to black then bloody wine’. The lyrics don’t show off – but they also avoid sounding like anything staid, like any other pop songs.

I know that The ArchAndroid is meant to be part of a wider science fiction narrative that Monae has constructed, and it’s often been referred to as a concept album, but this track, and the other great songs on here, stands alone; the story of love and destruction that it tells unfolds, restrained and sad, amid quietly changing styles of production and instrumentation.

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Metric/The Clash at Demonhead – Black Sheep (buy Scott Pilgrim soundtrack here, although it’s got the Metric version on. As far as I can tell, you can’t buy the version with Brie Larson singing anywhere. Boo!)

I prefer the version of this that’s used in the Scott Pilgrim film (which is where the video clip above is taken from, although it’s an extended version of the scene), with Brie Larson singing, over the version that’s just done by Metric, although both are good – it’s slightly less produced (although obviously it still doesn’t sound much like a live performance), and I possibly prefer Larson’s voice. I’m not even sure when Metric put this out, but the Scott Pilgrim soundtrack came out this summer, so I feel justified including it here. Every time I listen to it, I just think, how could I not?

It’s got such a great opening – in the film it works really well having Envy start it with “hello again, friend of a friend”, considering what you’re about find out about Ramona and Todd on bass’s relationship – but, just thinking about the song by itself, I love the way that the vocals sound kind of staccato, almost spoken. It sounds like a challenge. Not sure quite what the lyrics mean, if I’m honest (and neither do the people over at songmeanings.net, but then they never do), but when I hear her sing, it’s clearer. It is a challenge.

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The Hold Steady – We Can Get Together (buy album here, or buy the song here)

Surely the year’s most surprising namecheck has to be in this song, when Craig Finn sings about 90s indiepop heroes Heavenly. But it doesn’t feel like he’s just referencing them for the sake of it – part of their story gets woven into the song, and they become a way of remembering somebody else, somewhere else, something that they are a reminder of.

I don’t think this is thought of as one of The Hold Steady’s best albums – I certainly haven’t got through it much – but I keep returning to this song. I think it’s the opening – there’s something about the repetition of ‘heaven’ in it that tugs at me. Most pop songs seem to rhyme, and so does this one – but when words, or parts of words, are deftly repeated, it helps something paint itself inside my head. These are the two lines that open the song:

She played “Heaven Isn’t Happening”, she played “Heaven Is a Truck”
She said Heavenly was cool, I think they were from Oxford…

It shows a kind of sideways thought process, a way of remembering different things that ‘she’ liked through word-association, rather than by thinking about all of the songs by one band that she liked, or the music that she used to listen to the most. It doesn’t feel like wordplay, but the repetition still helps it become memorable, still works like internal rhyme. The backing vocals (on the studio version) that go ‘baa-baa-baa’ are beautiful, and fade out at the end after the rest of the song has finished – they’re never overpowering or too insistent, which makes a lot of difference in a song, like this, that is not a big dumb pop anthem; it’s too clever for that. Not that there’s anything wrong with those songs; but this one talks about other bands and their myths of origin, about growing up and old, about imagining what you can’t really remember. It’s about listening to music, without being self-congratulatory, nostalgic without being shit.

I listened to it so many times this summer that I’ve created a whole kind of internal life around it; when I hear it I just imagine being in Oxford, sitting on Headington Hill, listening to it on repeat, even though that never even happened.

tracks of the year, #1

I spent a few days thinking about how best to present a review of the music that’s been released this year; I had to compose a personal top ten as part of a staff poll at the student paper I sometimes write for, but I’m not very happy with it and don’t necessarily want to write about each of them. I do really get into a small number of albums, but the only one that’s really grabbed me this year is Los Campesinos!’s Romance is Boring (it’s only a fiver at the moment!), and writing about ten albums as if I know them and have considered them intimately when I like a handful of songs from each would be dishonest and probably kind of boring. Instead, I’m going to write a series of track reviews, in no particular order, followed by a simple list of a top fifteen or so once they’re done. Here are the first few reviews – I hope you like them. As always, leave me a comment if you agree/disagree, or want to discuss anything further. More reviews will follow over the coming week – I’m not sure how many track reviews I’ll write in all, I’ll probably keep writing them until my spotify ‘best of 2010′ playlist dries up (or I do).

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Meursault – Crank Resolutions (buy the album here, and there’s a free download of the track too)

I saw Meursault at Truck festival this summer (which was, for the most part, a dreadful experience). I saw a lot of bands there, but I think their set – early in the day, shorter than I wanted – was my favourite. They can repeat one phrase over and over again, and make me feel like I’m being punched in the stomach. This song is a good example; it’s emotional and upsetting, as he sings, slightly broken, ‘as they carry you away’, but it’s not histrionic or overblown. Meursault are never sentimental, but they’re sincere, in a lovely, sad way. The instrumentation is sparing; this makes it all the more moving when the electronics are there, when another member of the band doe sstart playing. It all matters. When he sings “I broke down – on New Year’s Day – and I mixed my drinks – and I lost my way”, and when he yells out after the line ‘they carried you away’ repeats, it makes me ache.

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Darren Hanlon – Scenes From A Separation (buy album here, and the song here)

This isn’t the single from Hanlon’s latest album; that’s All These Things, and there’s a charming video for it that’s worth watching. But I think this is the better song; while the other one is a duet (although Hanlon sings more), this is just him, singing about a relationship breaking up. It’s a break-up song, but it feels quiet, not overpowered with grief; the song starts with the lines ‘we earmarked our August vacation / as a fine place to fall apart / then heard that a trial separation / was a quaint idea for a new start’, and it almost starts to feel safe, as if everything was planned, as if no emotions were involved. But as the song develops, it becomes clear that this isn’t the case; towards the end, Hanlon sings the lines ‘I wouldn’t trade one heartbroken minute / for a year’s worth of dull happiness’. He can see the relationship and its end for what it was; he and his partner did fall apart, he was heartbroken – but it was still worth it, for what he felt and experienced. It also allows him to sing, at the very end of the song, that although, he’s moving on, he knows that the person he addresses is ‘worth mourning for’. He can see the good and the bad in what has passed; this is why no one emotion overpowers him. But there’s still a quiet pain in the song, even as he sings about what he has learned. It takes time.

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Kanye West, feat. (a fuckload of other artists but mostly) Nicki Minaj – Monster (get the album here, and get the song free here)

This song contains possibly some of the most ridiculous lyrics of the year, and not in a good way – who can forget Jay-Z saying “everybody want to know what my achilles heel is / LOOOVE, I don’t get enough of it…”, or Kanye West’s ‘put the pussy in a sarcophagus’? But Nicki Minaj just makes this song. Listen to it all the way through once – the rest is still competent, and quite funny in places, although Bon Iver grates – but then, if you’re anything like me, you’ll find yourself going back to 3:35 over and over again in order to hear Minaj start her onslaught. She changes her voice’s tone, pitch, accent from line to line, she’s sweetly sarcastic, then she shouts, and then she screams.

Her writing and timing make her untouchable. She addresses an unnamed adversary, incredulously: ‘so, let me get this straight, wait, I’m the rookie / but my features and my shows ten times your pay / fifty K for a verse, no album out? / yeah, my money’s so tall that my barbie’s gonna climb it / hotter than a middle eastern climate’, turning masculine chart-rap’s lyrical obsession with money as a shorthand for status and dominance on its head. But apart from all of this; she’s gloriously fun. She raps about cheesecake and barbie dolls, she shouts that she wears ‘gold teeth and fangs / ‘CAUSE THAT’S WHAT A MOTHERFUCKING MONSTER DO’, and she blithely spells out ‘f-u-c-k’ in a way that had me just repeating it in my head, mindlessly. You’ll want to hear it again. She packs so much in as she steamrolls over what is ostensibly Kanye’s song; it’s instantly catchy, and dense enough to reward twenty, thirty, forty rewindings.

films of the year, pt.2

Here’s the second part of the list of my favourite films of 2010, with the best two that I saw. It’s gone midnight here in the UK, so if you celebrate it, I hope you’re having a good one. Anyway, onto the films. As before, there are probably spoilers here, if you care about that.

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2. Dogtooth

something's about to go very wrong here

I’ve seen this film discussed a lot elsewhere, and it was number 1 in the (excellent) list over at Tiny Mix Tapes. I went in not knowing much about it, though – it wasn’t a particularly high-profile release – all I really knew was that it was meant to be about some parents who taught their children the wrong meanings of words. But it’s so much more than that – the film is about a family who exist in their house and garden, and only their father can ever leave. The three children are now grown up, but they still act like they’re pre-pubescent; the two girls have no idea what sex is (the parents get in a woman to have sex with the son, setting the events of the film in motion, as apparently his sexual urges are difficult to ignore), and they aren’t allowed to watch anything that hasn’t been taped by the family of themselves. Their world has been reduced to a tiny, enclosed area; they are told that outside their home there is only wasteland. The ocean is reduced to their sofa.

The film that results from this premise is beautifully shot – the scene towards the end where the two sisters dance is one of the most incredible and visually powerful parts of a film that I have ever seen. It’s disturbing, and upsetting, and although it seems to be often read as a kind of allegory or commentary on the world around us, it’s not reductive, and it’s not simplistic. It contains one awful, horrible, moment of blunt violence, and it contains Frank Sinatra songs that are played to the children, who believe it is their grandfather singing. When the father wants to have fish for dinner, he puts fish in the swimming pool. When planes fly overhead, the parents throw toy planes into the garden and pretend that they have fallen out of the sky. And when the older sister discovers something about the world outside – that the world outside exists – she tries her hardest to understand, and it doesn’t seem like she ever quite makes it. I can’t even begin to discuss here the extent of the problems and fragile moments that Dogtooth encompasses. It’s wonderful and horrible, and it doesn’t try to be beautiful all the way through. That’s why it works. Some people have described it as an offbeat comedy. Don’t believe them. There’s nothing comedic at the heart of this film; there’s nothing funny about the older sister’s despair and attempted escape, about the way that she and her siblings have been utterly ruined.

1. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

stacey pilgrim and her little brother

So, finally, this is my top film. It was probably the most visually exciting and individual of all the films I saw this year, except probably Toy Story 3 (Pixar are still the best at computer-generated animation, and it was stunning). Toronto in the snow looks kind of amazing, and the bright colours and wonderful sets were all perfect. Some reviewers seemed to find the film and its visual concerns irritating, as if they saw the video game tics and features that pop up throughout it as somehow separable from the rest of the story, or unnecessary. But video games are integral; the film works so well because it functions both as a film that tells the kind of story you can imagine a video game telling, and because it functions as a film about the ways in which video games make people think. The story can just be fantastical, and I find it the most enjoyable when I just think of it like this; but it is also about the reference points that an entire younger generation of people use when they think about what’s happening around them.

I saw Scott Pilgrim twice, unlike any other film on this list, and I’d like to see it again (why wasn’t it released on DVD in time for Christmas?!) – it depends so much on the small, intricate details, and it really rewards rewatching, deep engagement. It’s also just so funny, and it often caught me by total surprise. Kieran Culkin as Scott’s roommate Wallace totally steals every scene that he’s in – he has the best lines, and delivers them with a perfect mixture of self-awareness and surrender to the role. Ellen Wong is great, too, as Knives Chau – she goes from being a very young high school pupil, whose relationship with Scott is chaste but still weird, to being angry and powerful. There are so many great characters who only play smaller parts in the film – Anna Kendrick as Scott’s younger sister (although she still calls him little brother, because she is so much more grown up than him) is wonderful, as are Brandon Routh, Chris Evans, Alison Pill…

Scott Pilgrim’s funny because it’s not afraid to play around with various genre conventions, because it knows what people think about, what people care about, and shows how that affects them. But it’s a great film because it does not necessarily like its main character. Scott is not shown as particularly wonderful – he’s a dick to his girlfriends (he doesn’t even dump Knives Chau before he starts seeing Ramona, and Wallace has to practically force him into even bothering at all), he’s too caught up in his own projected ideas of what other people are like (he’s obsessed with Ramona before he even knows her, and he’s excited about dating Knives because she goes to high school, not because of who she is), and he doesn’t have a job or do much with his life at all. I believe that the film makes his personal, numbing fecklessness quite clear, and is critical of it. But it’s still fun, and exciting, and it shows in extensive detail exactly how great and weird and terrible all the people around him are and can be, too. It’s a film about being shit and living inside your own head, and about the problems that can cause. But the inside of your head can be great and fun. You just have to realise that it’s not always the best place to live.

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So, now that that’s done with, here’s a list of films that I didn’t see this year that I wanted to:

Youth in Revolt, Winter’s Bone, Tiny Furniture, Easy A, Life During Wartime, Made in Dagenham, Tamara Drewe. Never Let Me Go and Black Swan, too, but I don’t think they’ve had a UK release yet, so hopefully I’ll still get to catch them. Do leave a comment if you want to discuss anything I’ve said here, or if you want to disagree with my order/my reasoning. Next, I’m hoping to write something about my favourite songs of the year.

films of the year, pt.1

I’m going to split this list into two posts, because it’s reaching unwieldy proportions. This first part is about two unlisted films, and then numbers 5-3 on my list of films of the year. I’ll conclude the list tomorrow.

Now that I’ve got my podcast list out of the way, it’s time to turn to one of the more typical topics for these lists – films of the year. I’m going to say straight away that I don’t get to the cinema that often, and I can’t promise a top 10, but I have a top 5 and some comments to make about the other films that I watched this year. Because of the way that films have various different release dates depending on where you are, and depending on whether you can make it to film festivals or not, a handful of these may usually be thought of as films that came out in 2009. I don’t live in London and can’t usually make it to films on limited release, so as far as I am concerned anything that was on wide release in the UK in 2010 can be included here. The order of these films, as in most of my lists, is fairly arbitrary – the ones I’ve actually numbered are all great, I liked them a lot, and they’re worth seeing. Although, I’d make sure you’re prepared for the film at number two. Leave some time after it to have a think and read/watch/do something cheerful and happy before you go to sleep. The films that I’ve written about, and haven’t numbered? Well, we’ll come to that now.

Oh, and these reviews contain spoilers. In case you care about that.

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SPECIAL MENTIONS

Inception

I’m afraid I can’t include this in my actual list – it’s certainly not one of my favourites of the year, and I don’t think it can possibly be one of the best films when considered objectively, either. It’s beautiful, and the way it was filmed, and the ideas behind it, are exciting. I love how they’ve thought out the concept of dream architects, and the different layers of the unconscious (it’s bullshit, but quite fun, elegant bullshit). But I tend not to like thrillers, especially not thrillers that have massive, stupid, gaping plot-holes (see the image that I’ve inserted below – once you’ve read it, you can never go back), and certainly not when their deepest concerns are with money and big business.

The film is not about Cobb’s relationship with his kids, or his dead wife. It’s about him making some money for somebody else, which is, because of some tired film conventions, the key to him getting back to his kids. It’s a film full of characters that have boring, lacklustre convictions and motives, devoid of compassion or any believable reason to lack it. It’s about stupid, overblown plot machinations that the writers haven’t even had the grace to fit to their own internal logic. It’s capitalist to its core, and it’s stupider than it should be because of it.

Also, it’s too long. But the actors are mostly quite good, even though almost all of their parts are humourless and underwritten. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, especially, can do better than this. But he’s committed, which makes a lot of difference. it’s not quite unbearable.

At least it’s well made.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, pt. 1

oh, remus.

A lot of people have been talking about how the book really should have just been made into one film, because it doesn’t feel like there’s enough material here to hold it together. I don’t quite agree – I think that there was a lot of good material in this film, and I’m glad it had time to breathe. I loved the camping scenes, I loved them travelling around a darkened, empty vision of sad, rural Britain. I especially loved the scene in which Harry and Hermione dance to Nick Cave’s otherworldly, booming voice; nothing is alright or fixed because of it, but it’s kind of important anyway. But it does feel weirdly uneven; the film also contains a stupid, shambling heist in the Ministry of Magic, an unnerving scene in which lots of different characters polyjuice themselves into looking like Harry and feel disgusted with their borrowed bodies, and a ridiculous opening in which Voldemort and his followers sit around a massive table, and drain the scene of any menace it could have had.

I like the Harry Potter books, and I know these scenes are mostly based on what J.K. Rowling has written. I often like films that veer wildly between totally different tones, too, but somehow these just don’t work. It’s because the film is kind of trying to be a children’s film, still, despite everything. But it also wants to be grown up and smart and sad. J.K. Rowling’s book, I believe, does manage this, but the film just… doesn’t. One of the most terrifying parts of the book, when Bathilda Bagshot is revealed to be a possessed, rotting corpse, just doesn’t work onscreen – the whole sequence is a bit limp. What is scary when being read at 4am, when the reader has space to imagine everything exactly, intimately, is not what is scary in a film. The film is at its best when it shows the characters struggling with what has to be done, when it is not trying to be funny and becoming an atonal exaggeration in the process; the filmmakers are not, it seems, as adept at weaving together vastly different moods as J.K. Rowling. They don’t give the viewers enough imaginative space to allow the scenes to exist alongside one another.

I imagine the next film will be more of the same, but I’ll still go along and cry stupidly when Remus dies. And there’s enough good stuff here – the beautiful animated retelling of the fable of the deathly hallows, the shots of the forest, inside the tent, the radio – that I’m excited about seeing more.

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5. A Single Man

So in America this film came out last year, but it only got a wider release here in about February. I actually only saw it last month at the Magdalen Film Society, but I’m glad I finally got around to it – it’s beautiful. It’s such a quiet, non-verbal film – so much of the story is shown in the way Colin Firth moves, the way he arranges his things. I thought Nicholas Hoult was quite a weird casting choice, and it almost didn’t work, but his scenes are with a great mix of uneasiness and just utter, utter sadness and despair, which feels right. I just wish looking at him hadn’t jarred me out of the film quite so much. Julianne Moore is pretty great, but mostly as a foil to Colin’s George, as she is ridiculous and strange and he is… not. Not quite. Not any more.

My favourite parts of the film might be his memories – all tinted, faded, bright colours, all movement, all glimpse and then nothing. And oh my god, the conversation he has on the phone – it makes me want to curl up and wait until I can stop thinking about it. It’s just too painful to bear.

4. Toy Story 3

"we're number 4 in the list! how wonderful!"

I saw this in 3D. What a waste of money that is – I wear glasses already and resent having to perch another, clunkier pair on my stumpy little nose as well, and after a few minutes I couldn’t even tell that it was 3D anyway. However.

This is the first children’s film in ages that really shook me up, really made me forget the kind of conventions that the writers and filmmakers were working within. The scene where they all hold hands in the incinerator tore at me, and I really felt like the characters were in danger. I genuinely thought, for a horrified minute, that it might all go wrong – that they might be destroyed, together. They held hands and just stared at this insurmountable obstacle, the fire before them – and it wasn’t what I’d expected. It wasn’t anything I was prepared for. My problem with a lot of books for younger readers, a lot of films for younger viewers, is that the danger often doesn’t ever seem real. The plots never have convincing points at which everything could fail, and everything could go wrong. But this film got it right. It could have failed them, and they could have been destroyed. But somehow they were saved. It felt miraculous, precarious; it didn’t come across as some kind of big, blustering filmic destiny. And that’s right. That’s how it should always feel.

3. The Social Network

I haven’t seen, as far as I know, anything else that Aaron Sorkin has ever written or been heavily involved in, so I wasn’t particularly aware of his writing style before seeing this. It works really well, and manages to be full of incredible one-liners without seeming too mannered, too much. Jesse Eisenberg says his fast, sharp lines like he’s trying to be dead-eyed, like he’s trying not to care. Except that he does care, about some things, but he’s not sure how or why or what to do about it. He puts in an incredible, awkward, complete performance around the smart phrases that he wrings out, and that’s why the film’s great; because there’s so much beneath the script, and nothing is neglected. It’s easy to sound smart and dickish; it’s harder to get beneath that. Andrew Garfield is wonderful, too, at being cocky and wounded and struggling to deal with what’s happening around him, and his loss of control. I’m not sure about Justin Timberlake, which is a shame since this is a film that so heavily relies on its actors’ performances, but I think he just about pulls it off.

It’s possibly a bit too long for a film that’s really about some guys suing another guy, but it’s never really boring, and it rarely ever feels like it’s even about that. Because it’s about relationships (but not in a naff, stupid, ‘let’s look at the facebook-generation’ way), it’s about young people and capitalism now, and it’s about being smart and curious and not understanding what the people around you care about, and why. Before I saw it, before I was told that I needed to see it, I thought it would be boring. I’m so glad that I was wrong. Inception’s plot requires this big, capitalist MacGuffin for the plot to be able to hang together even tenuously, and its arbitrariness shows. But here the hyper-capitalist reality that the characters exist in is important, as it is both the film’s frame and the root of many (but not all, or even most) of the divisions between them. It’s critical, it’s funny, and it’s important, too.

picture perfect forever #1

World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893. Click here to see it larger – it’s better that way.

One thing that I’ve discovered this year that I now love fairly deeply is the Flickr Commons. It’s basically a searchable archives of copyright-free photographs (and illustrations, maps, etc.) held in museums’ collections from around the world. There are a lot of really old photographs here – the one above is from, as the link says, 1893. And it’s beautiful – I’m fascinated with the 19th and early 20th century world fairs, expositions, etc., and here you can see the beautiful, ornate structures, temporary monuments to the manufacturing and electric industries, and they’re perfectly sharp, unmoving. Below them, the people are a blur – it’s a tell-tale sign that it’s a long exposure, that this is an old photograph. The people seem more transient than the structures around them – but the people would have mostly outlived the structures that tower over them. All that beauty for a large, industrial fair; a temporary exposition. Incredible.

I’m going to make a series of posts looking at my favourite photographs from the Flickr Commons. If you want to suggest one, leave a comment or drop me an email.