2012/2013
2013-01-12 ~ 12:40 a.m.
I went to the petrol station to fill up my car today and as I was getting out of the car, a young man bounded up and offered to fill it up for me. He invite me to wait in the shop, so I had to stand around for a couple of minutes looking at the various chocolate offers till I was able to pay. And it was more expensive than Morrisons, though less likely to result in running out of petrol on the way.
Brief holiday in Belfast over the festive period. Mainly we found a wide range of interesting bars, including the Crown Liquor Saloon which is famed as the only bar owned by the National Trust. Lots of fancy wood carvings and tiles and little booths with doors that shut so you can drink in privacy or carve your name on the wood panelling (the latter seemed to have been quite popular). Also, Boojum does a nice burrito.
Just watched Dark Horse, Todd Solondz's latest. Solondz is one of those filmmakers who keeps making similar films to a doubtless small audience, but he has actor friends who'll appear for cheap, and I guess somebody watches his films. It astonishingly features Christopher Walken, Mia Farrow, and his semi-regular Selma Blair. I completely adore Selma Blair, going back to her awesome teenage geekiness in the likes of Cruel Intentions, as well as the not-brilliant but diverting Zoey, Duncan, Jack, and Jane, and later Hellboy 1 & 2. Allegedly in Dark Horse Selma Blair is playing the same character ten years on from Solondz's earlier Storytelling, which is also bad but at least features Blair being more animated and sexually perverse. Dark Horse has some kind of plot about a nerdy, fat, 30-something guy who lives with his parents and collects toys, who falls for Blair, who's almost comatose through most of the movie (ill, possibly). There's a lot of fantasy scenes, which are sometimes even more mundane than the real-life scenes, and it doesn't really go anywhere. Walken has a funny wig, though.
I've failed to do my traditional review of the year 2012. Mainly because I didn't go to the cinema, only went to about 1 gig, and the popular music selection wasn't brilliant. But I'll make a feeble effort.
Best Album
It kind of depends on how I feel but for now I'll say
1. Lana Del Rey - Born To Die
2. Marina and the Diamonds - Electra Heart3. Farrah Abraham - My Teenage Dream Ended
All of these may be controversial. Del Rey is completely ridiculous, but the glorious swooning quality and the often bizarre lyrics with far too many rhymes make it at once brilliant and endlessly amusing. It's not emotional music, it's not going to move you or tell you anything profound about life. But whether riding in a coach through rainy Ayrshire or simply driving to work, it's the soundtrack to all your moments of sleepiness. Marina and the Diamonds's latest album was an attempt to copy Britney Spears that was considerably better than Spears's latest - great pop, great titles (Bubblegum Bitch, Primadonna, Homewrecker, Teen Idle). And Farrah Abraham was just fascinating and weird - former star of MTV's Teenage Slapper Teen Mom, for no particular reason she came out with an album where random quotes from her are autotuned to death and thrown over a slightly bland dance backing. Some people hated it with a passion, some adored it or speculated that it was some kind of clever audience-trolling prank or compared it to legendary hipster-faves witch-house act Salem (nope, me neither) or Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti. Oddly compelling would be my description - it also resembles a Britney Spears album, but one considerably more honest and moving than any Britney's managers would let her make.
Best Tasteful Indie Album
As I grow older I find myself hating tasteful indie even more than I hate tedious "guitar music is still relevant" shit like The Drums or The Vaccines (sadly I don't think I've listened to any new punk in the past year). But Bat For Lashes' The Haunted Man picks up from time to time and has a nice cover in this post-cover art age.
Least successful saviours of rock and roll
Spector, who bounded onto the music scene with a fistful of ridiculous 80s-influenced indie anthems like Chevy Thunder, wowing everybody with their live performances (including myself at T in the Park), then murdered a woman like their namesake released an underwhelming debut album full of over-simplistic wannabe-anthems and the atmosphere of a Duran Duran tribute act, and everybody sighed a bit and decided they liked Alt-J.
Best Single
Starships by Nicki Minaj. Obviously. For sounding like a cross between the Prodigy and the Tweenies. (Although the video is deeply crap. Aside from Minaj's impressive bikini-stuffing, if you like that sort of thing.)
Best Single With A Dubious Message For The Young Girls Of Britain
"Black Heart" by Stooshe is a glorious slice of retro girl-group pop with lyrics like "Daddy I've fallen for a monster. Somehow he's scaring me to death. He's big and he's bad, I love him like mad..." Possibly not the best message in the year of Chris Brown's comeback, but it's better than anything Rihanna's done this year. Stooshe then ruined it by covering TLC's Waterfalls, so now everybody hates them, even me. Popjustice hates them for ceasing to do bright and chirpy pop and going all serious and soulful. So there are many reasons for detestation.
Best dubious sex metaphor on a Mercury Music Prise-winning album
Alt-J are a bit boring all in all but Tesselate remains the math-themed anthem it's ok to fuck to. (This may have been released in 2011 but I can't be bothered checking.)
Best Film
Ahem, I don't think I went to the cinema at all last year. I have seen a few films on DVD that were released in the UK early in 2012 (The Descendents, Martha Marcy May Marlene, The Iron Lady, The Hunger Games, Dark Horse) of which The Descendents is definitely the best, for what that's worth, which isn't much.
Best TV
(Based on UK screening dates) I would say Homeland based on series 1, but series 2 was quite a lot stupider, and even Mandy Patinkin gets repetitive after a while. Fresh Meat was maybe not quite as good as series 1, or maybe my expectations were higher, but it still had many great moments, generally involving Vod and/or Howard. Who can forget Vod's protest against the oil industry? Or Howard throwing handfuls of meat into a pan? All other TV was shit, though, including Peep Show, which is making Dobbie horrible and everyone else so repetitive. And The Voice wasn't very good either.
Worst Song Of The Year
Ne-Yo's "Let Me Love You (Until You Learn to Love Yourself)" still makes me cringe with its blatant narrative of picking up girls with low self esteem. And then if you take the title literally dumping them as soon as they get higher self esteem, or if you take the way Ne-Yo wants, building them up with your enormous love-skills like an entirely imaginary romcom hero. It also sounds really bad in purely musical terms.
Worst Pop Person of the Year
Will.I.Am put up a sterling challenge all year - after promises that Black Eyed Peas were on hiatus, I was enthusiastic, but sadly he's much worse without Fergie and her elaborate, sophisticated breast and vagina metaphors or songs about falling over. Rihanna has tried her best. Ne-Yo tried hard, David Guetta never tries to do anything except the least amount of work on each of the 1000 songs he released in the past 12 months (though Titanium's not bad I guess) and Rihanna's last 10000 singles have started to tread into diminishing returns.
Best gig of the year
Vic Godard and the Subway Sect, pretty much by default, though he was better than he's been for a long time, almost certainly not due to the presence of ex-Sex Pistol Paul Cook on Drums. His album We Come As Aliens was also very good, with some tuneful pop. And I went to T in the Park, where it rained.
Biggest thing I pretty much ignored of the year
Some sports in London?
I do have more to say. Later.
Finally found someone I love more than the rain - 2013-09-17
Taxi driver, be my shrink for the hour, leave the meter running - 2013-08-29
Dear friend, I cannot tell the reason why we started well - 2013-08-06
I saw this movie one time called Imitation of Life. The movie was really kind of shitty but I loved the title. - 2013-07-12
Catch the bus by half past three otherwise you'll find you're walking home - 2013-07-10
mail note tunes cabbages sprouts
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