Hey, I never did my traditional "best music & movies of the year" list. So here it is.
Best Music of 2005
There was some good music in 2005. Madonna even released a good single. There was crap too, but fuck that for now.
Blackalicious put out The Craft, a solid release but not up to the highs of Blazing Arrow. More live instrumentation but less excitement.
Stevie Wonder released A Time 2 Love, easily his best album in a quarter century. It's no Talking Book but it's better than most modern RnB.
Alice Cooper released the solid, unpredictable, and unsurprisingly-ignored Dirty Diamonds. Turns out that cat can still sing after all, and this had a Johnny Cash/Nick Cave feel that surprised and pleased me.
Common dropped Be, which despite featuring some of his best lyrics yet (which is really saying something) was let down by same-y production from Kanye West. Not a patch on 2002's amazing Electric Circus.
Missy Elliott proved she can do it without Timbaland with The Cookbook. Awful, awful, AWFUL skits - and at the beginning of songs so you can't skip 'em - let it down massively.
Fat Freddy's Drop released Based On A True Story to near-universal orgasm from Wellingon to Austria and back, but I still prefer Live At The Matterhorn by a wide margin.
Mylene Farmer's oddball pop reached its apotheosis to date with Avant Que l'Ombre. The whole album is erotic -- I think it is anyway, the only English-language lyrics are the shouted title of the song Fuck Them All, which I'm pretty sure is a double entendre.
The best album of 2005, however, was the most recent release by the virtually unknown alt. country singer Grey DeLisle. Iron Flowers blew away all the competition, thanks to De Lisle's virtuoso vocals and brilliant songwriting, and a band who can run the gamut from quiet ballads to garage rock to radio pop and beyond, even throwing in a bit of Queen-styled stadium rock. This girl seems to get better with every album (by my counting this is her fifth) and sooner or later someone's gonna notice.
Weirdly enough, Cat Power released a new album called The Greatest in January 2006, setting her latest batch of songs against a backdrop of Memphis soul musicians, and it was better than anything anybody released in 2005. I expect a lot of things from Chan Marshall, but I didn't think she'd ever be better than Dusty Springfield! You can download the title track here.
Best Movies of 2005
There were no good movies released in 2005.
Recent news:
Lost rock star flatmate, gained movie star flatmate.
Saw Johnny Cash movie Walk The Line, dug it (probably dependent on digging Johnny Cash).
Read Clive Barker novel Sacrament, first Barker book I'd read in about fifteen years, loved it.
Started learning to understand Swahili but still cannot speak or spell any of it.
Discovered the secret of time travel, rotated through time to alter past events, arranged George W. Bush to be elected US President twice in a row just for kicks, now cannot remember how to put it back. Still chuckling about that faux pas -- people will wonder for centuries how sadistic braindead shitkicker with no charisma, political smarts or English speaking ability came into high office.
Saw stoopid bugfuck Russian vampire movie Night Watch, liked it OK (would have liked it much less if it was non-Russian, best thing about it was the subtitles, no homo; otherwise was typical waste-of-millions Hollywood-style blockbuster, Michael Bay with an Eastern Block accent - still can't quite understand why $5 million usually seems to buy a better movie than $100 million; concluded that most people who watch movies these days are morons).
Set fire to Don Brash's head, disappointed that nobody noticed.
Started blogging again. Sort of. We'll see.
Instructions (because you need to be told what to do):
Listen to this speech by Bruce Sterling, and this follow-up interview.
You might want to go hog-wild and read this freeware book by Sterling.
Sterling claims to be a disciple of Harlan Ellison. His speaking voice reminds me weirdly of Jello Biafra. I love them both, but to my mind Sterling is more reasonable and balanced than either, and probably smarter too.
Recently saw Waking Life, Richard Linklater's trippy computer-rotoscoped dream movie, which seems to be a sort of prequel to A Scanner Darkly, Linklater's trippy computer-rotoscoped Philip K. Dick movie. There will be spoilers -- in as much as it's possible to spoil this movie.
James Berardinelli's review of Waking Life says this:
When he introduced the film at its Sundance 2001 premiere, Linklater posed one question to the audience, and it goes a long way towards setting the stage for Waking Life. "How many of you out there are on drugs?" he asked. When a number of hands went up, he added, "Good. This is for you. The rest of you, just bear with me."
So I set the stage for myself and dived in. An lo! I did enjoy it very much, and forsooth! there was synchronicity in what it had to say to me -- there's been a lot of synchronicity in the things I've watched and read lately.
Waking Life is basically a dream narrative, as a young fella swims his way through various dreams mostly consisting of people talking in monologues. Some of them are spouting philosophical or scientific concepts, some are venting at the world, and some are just talking. The young fella starts off passive but is eventually prompted towards taking a more active role in his dreams, and in what seems like a nod towards Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie he keeps waking up from one dream into another. At a certain point the movie shifts from relatively light & fluffy to relatively dark & sinister, though it never quite tips over into frightening or disturbing.
To me, the movie was about people wandering around lost inside their own heads, circling around their pre-occupations (whether they be ideals or concepts or revenge fantasies) and never living in the moment. Towards the end when the narrator expresses his confusion and dismay about being unable to leave the dream-state to a dream-character, the character says "Just wake up!" I think it's relevant that this character is played by Linklater himself.
In three words, Linklater conveys all the profundity that was missing from the oodles and poodles of philosophical mutterings in the first half of the movie.
Years ago, a psychedelic experience fuelled by dancing & LSD revealed the secret of life to me: "The only reason we exist is because it feels good to be flesh." I have tried to communicate this to people I thought would understand, but no luck so far. One day though...
Wake up. Just wake up.