Mindless Ones

Sorry I’m late, been ill. Consider this white and creamy palmfull my contribution to the first annual Mindless Ones Dot Com todgersonthetablefest.

Hero of the Year

2008 – Year of the Bat

Music

Only one album properly got under my skin in 2008: Sea From Shore by School of Language. It’s like the last thirty Protean years of guitar pop being struggled with by a skinny chap, alone, echoing bedroom, four track, smoke, windowpane. The album’s short but incredibly dense for a bit of old indie jangle. The key to getting it is laid out as clearly as possible in the four part Rockist track, which bookends the album as a whole and serves as its obscurantist coda.

School of Language- Rockist (part 1)

[youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=loBjjI44V_E]

Wasn’t that smashing? The subsequent chapters of this multipart megasong proceed to melt its recursive guitar and underpinning sampled vocal loops, the sounds of a song singing to itself, into further constituent parts and aspirant paths, before reassembling it all back into a perfected psych-pop workout for part four. And, if like me you don’t know how to get your your CD player off the setting where it starts again at the end, before you know it part four and part one merge into a seamless dream of Big Star guitars and lysergic introspection, like Finnegan’s Wake or some shit. The album tracks in between are like the noises buried in the sandpit underneath Brian Wilson’s lunacy-piano, all harmonies heard down a mile of tunnel and echoing rhythms like it would sound, on a plane, if you dropped a drumkit, piece by piece, onto a minefield. It’s difficult to put my finger on why I found this album so compelling last year. I think that’s its own answer – like the view of the Sea From Shore, there’s something so big there it defies description, but the noises it makes are bewitching. (Wow, that’s clever – if in doubt, say the title of it again – linguistic processing bias much?)

Other great sound-things to cross my eardrums and slip happily into the old planum temporale in 2008:

Everything Everything – Suffragette Suffragette

[youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=WFM_kTAYVsU]

This track speaks for itself really – it’s fucking ace. You can’t tell if they’re singing ‘who’s gonna sit on your fence’ or ‘who’s gonna sit on your face’ (answer: it’s both) which is so puerile it’s clearly a kind of genius. I really thought Foals had killed off that herky-jerky mathrock-derived ‘we really like Talking Heads. (And Radiohead.)’ sound for me for the next decade or so, but actually no, there’s life in those syncopated guitars, black country rock riffs and whiny harmonies yet. Doesn’t seem to be much of Everything Everything in existence yet, but they’ve got to be one to watch out for in 2009.

Probably the most important song I heard in 2008 was this next one though, and it wasn’t made or released in 2008, but with history continuing to collapse into the present with the accumulation of mouse clicks, it got a vital rebirth in 08 and that’s good enough for now. About seventeen years ago the only access I had to hiphop was Jeff Young’s Big Beat show on Radio 1 on Friday nights (amazingly, this was pre-Pete Tong, when Westwood was just a wee twinkle in a pirate’s eye), and I’d tape each show to sustain me for the week ahead. There was one song Jeff played only once, far as I caught it anyway, and it arrived at the halfway mark of the tape when it would stop and you’d have to flip it over and press record again quick as a flash. So the only version I ever heard of this track, on a tape lost at least a decade ago, had an endlessly long gap in the middle, and a huge chunk of the song missed. What there was of the remaining song was all wobbly sounding – the grandparents and cool tape DIY revivalists among you will know, the tape never sounded right when it got to the very end of a spool – but it still left kind of an impression. These flaws didn’t stop this track from being the most brilliant thing I’d ever heard. Finding the record it came from was effectively impossible round my way, and the track became something of a holy grail for me. It was the first thing I searched for when I discovered Youtube (I bet it hasn’t got… Oh, it hasn’t…’, ); first song I tried to download. But it arrived online in this wonderful year of 2008. Job done, quest won. My lost treasure of a song is pure-perfect Bomb Squad production without the PE polemic, Shocklee and co. moving away from the James Brown ‘Furious Soul’ stylings of Fear of Black Planet and into a looser Clinton-Funkadelic sound that completes the path from Sly Stone, though Prince and forward into Outkast. In his end of year list The Beast Must Die talked briefly about hiphop’s golden age – for me this track is the jewel of what that time was all about, and I’m very pleased to have it back in my life. Thanks internet:

Son of Bazerk – This Band Gets Swivey On the Wheel

[youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmDdUUVhnfk]

Just realised – picked up all my favourite music of 08 after hearing it first on the radio. That’s not deemed cool in some quarters, but I think radio’s a lot better than it used to be.

Finally, while we’re having a ‘yearning music’ show-and-tell: very happy as I am to have been awoken to the charms of Diamond Vampires and their chillingly infectious (in the scary, relentless way) soundtracks to unmade Argento movies, do they really yearn any better than this? My toe tapped to it a lot last year.

Those Dancing Days – Hitten (Not strictly an 08 song, though I’m pretty sure it got a rerelease in January, and flagging it again here certainly won’t do anyone any harm.)

[youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ILuNZYmAs5o]

Happy new yearn.

Books

Politics & Paranoia (local publisher too, good stuff), the latest by greatest living Englishman Robin Ramsay was the winnest for me this year. As the sanest civilian expert on parapolitics – in fact, as probably the sanest man in the world – Ramsay’s work is always essential reading for those who want to know what to know. P&P is basically a collection of transcripts or, more properly, lecture notes for a number of talks given over the past twenty years or so, footnoted where appropriate to indicate subsequent new information. As such it’s a fascinating document of the development of the author’s thoughts and views – the move from his one-time acceptance of the JFK/’mob did it’ hypothesis to the current and seemingly conclusive ‘LBJ did it’ theory is an exceptional illustration of how secrets can grow and change over time, and how a flexible mind should best interpret them as the years pass. It’s to Ramsay’s further credit that he allows his past errors to be seen in plain view, in such stark contrast to those he writes about. Due to the subject matter Ramsay’s work is always a dramatic and troubling read, ever rescued from outright depressing horrorshow by his usual crisp and questioning, expertly journalistic and precise yet informal English.

Honourable mentions must also go to two books read back-to-back this year in the grounds of an old Venetian island-asylum. Violence by Slavoj Zizek, the first book I’d read by the man, having been alerted to his presence by his psychodoc movie ‘The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema‘ a couple of years ago. Here he thinks in his wild way about the the hidden and unconsciously sanctioned types of violence that prop up our cultures of commerce, politics, sex… I was pleased to discover that his frenetic (coke-fuelled? Hyperactive Disorder?) presentational style survived into his prose (or at least, it does these days – having dug a bit since I found his earlier work uses far more specialised academic terminology that I personally have to struggle with.) The soaring inversions and raging ideas in Violence threaten to similarly surfeit and overwhelm, but he has an excellent trick of picking a exactly illustrative quote at just the vital moment, dropping fine words or examples from Heidegger, Brecht, Chesterton or Gaiman(!) just when you need them. The final chapters’ exploration of the notion of Divine Violence, something detached from social or personal interest, done only out of absolute moral necessity as a kind of innocent reflex action of the body politic; and whether such a thing can exist outside the hypothetical – was a bit difficult to get my head round as I closed the final pages. Luckily, the other book in my hand-luggage, Generation Kill by Evan Wright (published 2004, but a key part of my 2008), provided a perfect illustration of the point. As GK shows, Divine Violence can exist in the individual, generated by all sort of internal pressures and external cues, but ultimately is manifested by men like the Recon Marines Wright was embedded with in the first weeks of Iraq, men for whom violence, through social sanction and gentle/not so gentle encouragement by the world around them, find their only personal satisfaction in roles most of us would prefer were forgotten atavisms. They use awkward terms like ‘Warrior Spirit’ and call themselves ‘Hunters’, and are disgusted by civilian casualties as a job badly done. As an insight into the continuing plague of war on the species, it was second to none – nothing ever says ‘What if you and your buddies were brilliant at war and loved doing it?’

I dunno, it seemed to fit, the two books in tandem like that, one making real in all ugliness the theories put forth in the previous. No pictures of course, but books can still pull all that magic shit on you.

Telly

So yeah, Generation Kill would be in my top two here as well. Maybe I was at an advantage watching it so soon after finishing the book, but the benefits there are arguable – I was all too aware of the points where actual dialogue from the book had been mixed with expository sections from the book, which was obviously a blow to the all-important naturalism that they were going for, and actually made me worry a little about how much might also be true of the apparently hyper-authentic dialogue in The Wire. The book definitely did help with some of the show’s basic mechanics though, as knowing in advance who all the characters were was a great help when they’re all dressed identically and wearing helmets. And although this was a big HBO project with all the usual high production values, one of the things the book gets across so well is just the enormity of the enterprise – the invasion of Iraq was the biggest show on earth, and the TV just a can’t get across the endless scale of the pyrotechnics and hardware. Because the old brain was always making these comparisons across the two versions it took a while to get into the telly one, but by the end I was hooked and desperate for it not to end. The rhythm was peculiar for an apparent drama, eschewing standard narrative tempos for a documentary adherence to the book and recorded history, resulting in long unusual scenes and episodes where nothing happens except for events and characters coming slowly into focus,= out of the blank anonymous desert, thanks to an absolute, keep-up-if-you-can commitment to the mis-en-scene and some incredible performances from the huge, deep focus cast. Burns & Simon try to pin things together with a kind of bosses bad-grunts good, cammo-collar theme, but bigger and subtler than is the story aborted strategies and frustrated tempers constantly boiling away in the bomb-hot background, like layers of sand catching in your throat. You forget this all, with some obvious necessary interpolations, actually happened, and when the memory returns a whole new dimension opens up on the narrative, and a new insight appears into the whole bloody awful thing that’s been occupying the planet this decade.

This weird new rash of war-porn for lefties (Unknown Soldier should get a mention here, even though it’s a comic – guilt drips from its pages) finds a natural fan in me, and I was pleased to see Generation Kill, easily the best-looking and noisiest show of the year, give us definitive representations of all the essential genre features: drugged and dehumanised killers, bullet-riddled consciences, bombed-out roadsides, humanitarian disaster, boisterous downtime, burning towns, desert fatigues, chiselled jaws, gun-covered humvees, refugee convoys, implacably stupid military-industrial complexes, the illicit sniff of chemical weaponry… Not much not to like.

Other best telly in 2008 was Dead Set. Charlie Brooker has been the TV world’s best critic and debunker for years now, and in with this high-concept – Zombies meet Big Brother* – he finally put his money where his mouth was and came up with the freshest, goriest, scariest homegrown telly since the Triffids took over. It’s the only bit of Brit drama in years hard enough to stand up to the best from the US, and in Davina McCall’s turn as her own zombie self, the greatest zombie actor ever was discovered (even better than whoever played the Hare Krishna guy in Dawn of the Dead). I really fucking fancy Davina now.

In Nathan Barley, his previous major contribution to an original show had a genuine, certified TV genius to shift the weight and take the blame, and an unforgiving sitcom slot and format that hid the careful, funny study of a time, place and character type that was really happening. Dead Set was clearly as much Brooker’s show as Screen Wipe is, and demonstrated an awareness of the diverse qualities of direction, performance, zeitgeist, satire, genre, format, time-slot, casting & cameo that everyone I know who watches telly understands instinctively, but that the people who make telly all too often seem to be completely clueless about. Apparently you have to have a name and mouth as big as Brooker’s before you can be allowed to put a horror show on each night of the week leading up to Hallowe’en; or have the nicely packaged and extra-ed up DVD on sale the Monday after broadcast to pick up on the buzz and bypass the torrents, even though both ideas are clearly as simple and sensible as things get in this complicated world. Let’s hope this kind of thinking becomes fashionable.

Honorable mention in this category should really go to No Heroics. Rich Johnston went on about it a bit too much initially, but whether you’re clearly desperate to write a script for it or not you should broadly agree with the plaudits he threw its way. It was just the right side of geeky, mixed the mundane and bizarre aspects of its design with a good eye for both flash and grime, and most importantly, had a smart cast who could tell good, sometimes surprisingly dark jokes.

*Very Dishonorable mentions also due to the recent series of I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here, which in featuring both David Van Day and Robert Kilroy Silk was a treat for we connoisseurs of English z-list celebrity supervillains; X-Factor was it’s usual, amazing, unmissable parade of huff-and-puff shitty singers and dazzling Cowell-tooth; and best US reality show to be shown over here was a dead heat between Rock of Love and Rock of Love 2 – I didn’t really know who Bret Michaels was before these shows, and now I feel like I don’t really know anybody else.

Film

Best film I caught this year was easily [rec], a low-budget Spanish realtime FPS shakycam zombie flick that’s recently been remade in the US as Quarantine. I know that zombies are a bit noughties, and that really we should be into emo vampires by now, but in this and Dead Set 2008 was the best year for zombies since the seventies. I realised I was watching the best horror movie since Blair Witch about the point where (spoilerish) a zombie was chained to a banister and reaching through at people’s ankles as they tried to get up the stairs; and during the endlessly fraught and painfully long scene which where they’re desperately searching for a set of keys in a stranger’s darkened flat. Horror films should give you bad dreams, but when bad dreams give you a horror film, something special has happened. To see a horror film aspire not to be dreamlike, but to be literally like a dream, like a fucking awful, everyday nightmare rescued my faith in horror movies after I was so disappointed by the awful Diary of the Dead that I nearly swore off them for good. The roughest, pulpiest movie school of all, was just about to break itself again under the weight of its new torture porn franchises (fuck off, eighties). Claustrophobic, intense, original and successful in making a virtue of all its beautiful limits, [rec] was a timely rescue. The remake’ll be shit though, won’t it?

Comic of the year

This is the hard one of course. Don’t want to pick anything too obvious, so All Star Superman and the better issues of Batman (673, 679, 682) are out. The loss of Punisher Max is still too sore to talk about again; Casanova 14 was about as smart as I can hope for a mainstream genre book to get;. Ditto anything too greyscale, so that Houdini one which I liked so much is out, mainly for trying so hard to be worthy, when it was actually doing what it was meant to: Be Fun! On the other hand 08 was the year I finally got into the Walking Dead as well, but the night in which I blitzed 40 or so issues is such a time unto itself that it’s like it didn’t happen in an earth-year at all, but off in some pocket dimension where there are only three fundamental forces: zombies, emotional manipulation and breast-beating.

My thoughts keep coming back to two Warren Ellis books though, weirdly, in a quietish year for him: Ultimate Human #3 and Thunderbolts Faith in Monsters (trade released January 08). Neither’s a formal masterpiece or even especially conceptually extravagant, but they do both get the whole superhero thing exactly right. They’re superhero comics you don’t have to hate yourself or apologise for reading, that use all the quirky history, conventions and bizarre compulsions of the genre to produce slick, sharp and perfectly modern pulp fiction for the 21st century self-respecting babyman.

UH3 is like an SAS knife stabbed between the second and fourth ribs of an otherwise pretty standard Ultimate universe mini-series, arriving just as that once-proud offshoot of the Marvel enterprise properly started disappearing up its own arse.. Detailing the secret origin on the Ultimate Leader, it’s a taught talky-heads piece, all office politics and spooktalk, tight rows and rigid grids constraining pager after page of sparse cubicles and talking heads covered in scowls and bad hair. Information is conveyed using sarcastic remarks and taut captions that come up out of know where, depositing information in the readers head without asking for permission, and twisting the reader’s preconceptions of the characters and their motivations into nicely unsettling new configurations. Ultimate Pete Wisdom is not the ‘mouthy arsehole with a heart of gold, great to have a pint with though’ that you might expect.

Faith in Monsters is a similarly interesting modern cape book, in a straight down the line ‘continuity-gone-good’ kind of way. Writers and actors are forever saying how baddies are always the best roles – fine, so fill a book with ’em. The cheesy ‘redemption’ themes of past incarnations of the T! Bolts! have all been ditched in favour of a cast of characters who are all assholes shitting on each other. This plays well to Ellis’ strengths, likeable people isn’t something he’s ever even tried, but the characterisation is effortless and unnecessary – we all know who and how evil Norman Osborn is – the economy this allows is the very seldom seen payoff for all the badgeek, continuity-mad bullshit that the genre’s always found itself steeped in.. Between the moments of withering, energetic satire, which targets everything from the post 9/11 media, managerial insanity, political spin and the Marvel U itself (and its many branded franchises), there are some of the best action set-pieces this side of Garth Ennis, deconstructing the traditional landscapes of the superhero battle (skyscrapers, car parks, back alleys, military interiors – everything is a weapon) and reimagining the authentic exoticism within America (a city called Phoenix? Far out!) that, to us foreign subjects of the empire, the superhero comic has always been about. For all his ‘real writer‘ blather, it’s these deft little work-for-hire exercises that make Ellis an interesting person to have around, and that might in the long term make him the saviour of the genre he, and all of us, purport to hate so much. Til capes are hip, brethren.

Wow, were those really my comics of the year? Did I really dig those more than The Drifting Classroom? Nah, not really, but they’ll do.

Villain of the Year

We’re Falling Into Some Kind Of Hell Where Everything is Darkseid.
Ah right that explains quite a lot actually.