Lobby Loyde RIP

Up there with G.O.D and a few other legends...

Thanks to the anonymous bloke who informed me of this via this Blog. Nice to see some people read it! 'Thats what mamma says' off BALL POWER still sounds transcendent. I was lucky to see the Coloured Balls last ever gig in December last year. Lobby was just one of those legend guitar players that occur once a decade. Total rock intensity, originality, method, attack and transcendent/psych/jazz/freestyle woosh. The stuff that, I swear to you, puts goosebumps on my arms and makes me wanna plug into a valve amp and just turn the fucker UP! The missing link for the *true* Melbourne rock guitar sound..Here's a link to probalby Lobby's last ever online interview...Now to check out his 'spacerock' stuff! Have a peaceful time out there.....

more crock action...

You know I'm fat, I'm fat, I'm really, really fat...ham on!

The ears are ringing, the joints are aching, but old man Goldblog here is a strong believer that loud high-energy music (well high-energy doesn't always have to be loud ya know) is good for your all-round life, taken in the right doses!

Wednesday night was spent in a shitty big-commercial rock-barn watching that forever to be trendy Boston band the PIXIES, play in Australia for the first time. Now I didn't give a shit whether I saw this band or not, but a last minute call convinced me otherwise, as well as all the well presented hype on our national broadcaster ie: 3 hour specials of live shows, interviews, etc.., which sorta helped me build some faint hope of excitement. The Pixies were and are a 'first two albums of the late 80s band', up there with Dinosaur Jr, Sonic Youth, etc...etc..etc..In my universe it means that these were bands that I really loved as a late teenager, but seemed to 'magically' lose complete interest in after their second album, when the formula kicked in and all the sonic tricks had well and truly fallen off...But I digress, I paid my drachmas and was lucky to score a ticket after the concert had sold out on the Internet faster than a mouse click. I'd made a choice, but everything was pointing to a dull-night-out (I'm getting that way more and more, only to have things turns around - must be the depression or lack of sex or something....) The venue was bad, the venue was filled

and full of bald guys near or beyond 40 in jeans and t-shirts talking about how 'Trompe Le Monde' is the Pixies most underrated album. There were fat-chicks in black t-shirts everywhere, and the support band 'the Panics' made Crowded House seem like a heavy-metal band, and I HATE Crowded House more than, shit, not much...! And so the Pixies appeared: Two short baldies, a fat-chick with black hair who chain-smokes and a bearded, blading guy who looks like a nutty-professor/hobo. The thing that useta irk me alot about the Pixies, is that despite their first two albums having quite a nice 80s-post-hardcore-punk propulsion, they never seem to translate it on the live recordings I'd heard. Well in this particular live setting, it was good to see that a band nearing 50 in age or whatever, they still had that propulsion. Highlights for me were their 10 minute 'cornfed dames' cover 'Vamous', the two versions of 'Wave of Mutilation' and 'Gouge away'. I was pissed they didn't do 'Broken face'. I mean everyone with a reasonably sharpened head knows in the long run, the Pixies are more Violent Femmes than say Mission of Burma or even Husker Du, but I dunno, maybe not playing together to 15 years or something was a good idea for this band, as they had plenty of zip to highlight that their songs are quality, and the simple fact that the Pixes are infintely BETTER than every fucking shitful band that copied them (no mean feat).

Last night my mates the PINK STAINLESS TAIL launched their 3^rd maxi-mini album THE INIFINITE WISODM OF...Now when I first heard these guys, I though they sounded like some Fred Negro St.Kilda band bulldust. Coming off like some sort of sleeper-cell of the Melbourne Mafia (ie: Nick Cave and all his look-alike/sound alikes eg: Dirty 3, Brian Hooper, Dave Graney etc...) - well Harry, Rowland S.'s bro' is in the band, so I guess the link is genetic – the

band are one of those rare entities that seems to have improved over time. Their rollicking, loose, almost retarded shmutter - driven with rusting Teutonic precision by Zonke Rickertson, the most psychedelic-bass-player-in-Melbourne-since-Tim-Hensley, Nick Dodington, and fronted by suit-wearing-Englishman suffering from a rare form of Tourettes-Syndrome as being a well-know skin-flick archivist, Simon Strong – was in top shape last night. Playing a MARATHON set that went well into the night, the boys blew the support acts off the stage, and may have inadvertantly blown half the audience out of the room at the same time! On their night the PST are actually some sort of sloppy

British-invasion-big-beat-garage band for aging intellectuals on one level, or possibly the best 'post-punk' 80s-revival band (in the Fall/early Happy Mondays mould culture), minus the Calvin Klein/Collette Dinnigan/Stella McCartney DNA. But if that's what you want (or definitely wanna fuck), well the kids were definitely there earlier to see Melbourne's seminal guitar legend Rowland s Howard ejaculate his mumblings and two Lou Reed covers over the very good-looking under-25 crowd that were all sitting on the floor, smoking cigarettes and checking each other out. Fellas, if you want to perv at genuinely hot chicks at gigs, well go to an RSH gig. He's the Pied Piper of Melbourne! The other supports included 'New Estate' who I think are ex-members of the hardcore-C86 indie scene. They sounded in parts like YoLaTengo and the AuPairs and had a really nerdy dude playing bass with his fingers which was admirable and really odd at the same time.

Opening slot was by Biddy Connor, who plays fiddle (unlike me who just fiddles), who uses ambient loops and stuff and at times sounds like Henry Flynt, but at others the Dirty3 or Sigur Ros...I guess she's only young, but......

Oy! Those shicksers!

NOTE: When I was younger it useta to shit me that my Semetic genes didn't allow me to have have as good a hairstyle as all those Nick Cave cunts here in Melbourne, and hence I couldn't score those sophisticate art-school biotches that I'd have crushes on that would hang out with drug-addicted-'romantic' creeps like that. I also resented the fact I didn't have a really WASPY sounding surname and most importantly THE MIDDLE INITIAL! I was at one point tempted to change my real name - Aaron Goldberg - to something like Lou Reed or Bob Dylan or Ron Jeremey or Thurston S Howell the 3rd, but I couldn't be fucked, and I ended up fucking one of those sophisticated art-school biotches anyway..NB: Nick Cave's new song is called 'no pussy blues', Iggy sings 'my dick is turning into a tree', now who's the real deal? )

some hot stuff around the traps

LAND OF LOOK BEHIND (Dir Alan Greenberg, 1982) – For many years I used to tell people I liked reggae when I really didn't. When I was a kid the sound of it used to freak me out. Bob Marley used to freak me out. He looked weird, and at the time (very early 80s) there were all these sex-cults run by Rajneeshies and shit, and Bob Marley looked liked one of those guys who ran such a cult. And that wacka-wacka sound that is the reggae groove seemed weird since I'd never heard something sound like that before...SO I generally stayed away until I was a Uni student, via hiphop and that Gary Clail Tackhead On-U stuff. I sorta dabbled in dub, but still didn't get it..It was just, boring, and didn't really seem 'psychedelic' music. Then this dude I went to Uni with was telling me about all this reggae stuff, and took me to a boring gig by the Wailers, but he lent me this video that was really neat, it was a docco about the history of Jamaica as told by musicians and had all these wild interviews with guys like Lee Scratch Perry filmed in his studio, with dogs and cats and little kids running all over the place, and guys with teeth growing out of their lips smoking pot in cigar sized joints, it all seemed so scungy and raw, and started to seem more interesting. Also all these fucking Israelis and Jewish stoner bums who went to Habbo would be into it, especially the Bob Marley stuff, coz they wore Moogen-Doovids and didn't hate or want to kill the Jews, but all those creeps reminded me of the stoopid hippie love-cults I mentioned earlier... Bit I still didn't get reggae. About five years ago I went to this DJ gig run by that Soul-Jazz record label, and well, for some reason on that night I FINALLY GOT REGGAE! I guess it was hearing it in the right environment, and people playing the right tracks, and mixing it with hiphop and shit like that, but there was something that suddenly clicked. Suddenly this aimless, hippy, jockbonghead music seemed incredibly HEAVY. SO I started learning about the Studio-One and Wackies labels, and listening to records by Prince Far-I and Horace Andy and all this German techno on the Basic Channel label...and these days I pretty much can't get enough of the music from Jamaica. It's just played so well, and there's all these little subtleties and inflections in the guitars and keyboards, and the lyrics seem so positive and soulful...ANYWAY, my new favourite DVD label SUBVERSIVE CINEMA had this upcoming film called LAND OF LOOK BEHIND in their 'coming soon' list online. It was their first 'music' film, and the trailer looked interesting and really raw. The music by GREOGORY ISAACs and BOB MARLEY sounded interesting, but this whole package seemed to fit into that raw pre-digital Studio-One style Jamaican music that I have been hooked on the last couple of years. BASICALLY, LAND OF LOOK BEHIND is a documentary in the trippy-transcendent style of Kraut cinema-hero Werner Herzog. Directed by ALAN GREENBERG who worked with Herzog on HEART OF GLASS (and apparently friends with Dylan etc..etc..) and filmed by JORG SCHMIDT-REITWEIN who shot Herzog classics like THE ENIGMA IF KASPAR HAUSER, WOYCZEK and the awesome THE GREAT ECSTASY OF WOODCARVER STEINER (about a ski-jumper!), LAND OF LOOK BEHIND very much looks and feels like a Herzog film. Greenberg went to Jamaica in 1981 to film Bob Marley's funeral and ended up shooting hours of footage of the locals who live in a dense jungle area of Jamaica called the..LAND OF LOOK BEHIND..

You basically have eccentric characters describing their lives, talking about Jah, smoking lots of pot and thats about it. The film drags a little in the middle, but some great live footage of Gregory Isaacs brings thing back in line. The film was shot in 16mm, so has a raw, grainy feel which adds to it's rootsy ambience. The initial soundtrack music done by electronic muso K.LEIMER has that very trippy

Popul-Vuh synth type vibe that works really well with the surreal landscapes. Extras include some great interviews with Greenberg and Herzog himself, a commentary track and a nifty booklet written by director Greenberg talking about the difficulties making the movie. Also the first 5000 come with a soundtrack CD that has nice tunes by Marley and Isaacs amongst others. The soundtrack has been OOP for quite some time, so hardcore reggae nuts will probably want this pretty soon. All up a good night in with a joint and brew or two.

...I guess everyone in the whole world knows there's a new STOOGES album out. The STOOGES gig at the Big Day Out was one of the biggest disappointments in recent times for Moi. Stuck in a field with 25000 bogens, with the sound waffling through the air and watching Iggy via a video screen wasn't inspiring to say the least. I'd already seen Fat Ron Asheton blow my ears with DARK CARNIVAL and saw IGGY at his legendary BDO gig about 12 years ago, so I'd pretty much seen what I needed too..ANYWAY, I heard some tracks of the STOOGES new rec on the radio, and they made me wanna vomit. The song MY IDEA OF FUN sounded like a shit Sonic Youth song, with Iggy sounding like a male version of Kim Gordon, who any person with an IQ higher that 5 realises, shouldn't be allowed near a microphone. I downloaded the record, and initially it sounded like the last two shitty Iggy albums. Underplayed, over -emoted rubbish. Albini's production is underdone to say the least. The wanker can't record anything that isn't plugged into a wall. His recording of Steve McKays sax is pathetic. Albini really needs to be punched up badly. He's a smart arse dork who thinks he knows everything, but is really a one-trick pony when it comes to recording. His future is well and truly behind him...Pushing that simp Albini aside, though, the real winner here is RON ASHETON. His playing on the WEIRDNESS is FANFUCKINGTASTIC, his solos fly, he still has some weird riffs up his sleeve and the wah-wah still wah-wahs all over the place. Scott Asheton pounds mechanically away, and Mike Watt really pins down the rhythm section, though it'd be nice if Albini recorded it BETTER..and Steve McKay back on board is pretty cool, though I wish he played on more of the tracks..Iggy sings HORRIBLY on some tracks but really well on others, and I don't mind his idiot lyrics, I reckon they're funny. There's some really bad press going around about this record, but I think time will treat it better than well, the real let-down being Albini's uninspired production more than anything chronic...So far my fave tracks are 'Trollin', 'Free and Freaky' and 'Mexican Guy'..It's funny, the better tracks on this album sound like something CRIME woulda done back in the mid-70s, in fact a lot of the album sounds like CRIME, maybe the STOOGES shoulda got Eliot Mazer to produce it instead of Mr.Al-Weeny?

The Psychadelic Stooges

THE STOOGES - EXTENDED PLAY (Easy Action)

I been on a bit of a Stooges binge lately. It's funny you know, coz I picked up the first album and FUNHOUSE 2-disc re-issues new in the bargain bin at the JB HiFi chain stores here in Melbourne. In some weird cosmic-rock synchronicity I picked up the first album on vinyl for 10-bucks in a bargain bin at a suburban import-shop some 18 years earlier! Anyway, I'm one of the 100 or so fucken sad-freaks that has 'adopted' that failed sonic technology called DVD-audio. The 00s version of Quadraphonic-4, DVD-audio basically pipes your musique into a 5.1 speaker layout. Technically, or in terms of soundspace that means you have the vocals in the centre, gtrs/keys/bass in left and right, and drums in the surrounds, or the band in the front three and FX or crowd or farting noises in the surrounds. Either way, a good mix can emulates that 3D-psychedelic sound you get when you take hallucinogenic substances (which i don't do anymore)...SO think of my surprise when I found out that THE STOOGES have a DVD-audio 5.1 mix! I thought, shit, I'm having a drug relapse or something. But I didn't expect much, because really these 5.1 'remixes' can only be done with good source material, and considering most of the STOOGES source material was fished out of rubbish bins, well, what can you expect...This recent 'Extended Play' is basically 5 tracks done in DVD-audio 5.1 Hi-Definition and 3 on normal CD..Apparantly these recordings in their current state or whatever have never been released before, and there might be some STOOGES archivists out there that can prove this. They seem to be either RAW POWER out-takes or demos done around the time the band were based in London. Regardless, the recordings still prove out-right that the Stooges were the greatest modern-rock-n-roll band. THE band that invented 'heavy metal' as we know it, laid down the template for grunge, and punk and any other minimalist/maximalist mega-heavy rock as well know it. The bands that re-arranged the 'chugga-chugga' and 'boogie-woogie' or the old rock n' roll and turned it inside out into this new, technologically refined greyhound of sonic crunch n thump n grind. The 5.1 surround opener 'I got a right #1' sounds fucking GLORIOUS. Williamson has this pure crunch guitar, the song speeds along laying the raunch template for Poms like Motorhead and Williamson spazzs out well before Greg Ginn. The surround mix is slight and a bit gimmicky, but the sound quality reproduction here in terrific for a demo. The 'Louie Louie' cover is pretty crappy, and 'Gimme some skin' and 'I got a right #2' have pretty nice mixes and pack into more chorderama which of course would be mimicked by Radio Birdman. You can here it all in pure and simple detail on this DVD-audio, which will make your ears cry.
The CD sticks to the typical bootleg fidelity we're all used to for rare Stooges recordings. Though this one is really good, they've used some sort of technology to get rid of the waffly sound caused by shitty tapes, and the rock action is all smoking.'Hard to beat' is basically another version or 'Raw Power' with some burning soloing, 'Head On' well we all know that's the great unrecorded Stooges classic, though this version doesn't sound as spiteful as the one on the Whisky Au-Gog-Go bootleg, but still sounds like a meaner version of the Exile Period Stones via the Doors. CD closes out with an VERY psychedelic version of 'I got a right' that features Iggy's vocal acid-echoed to the max. It will blow your fuck from your bonged-out loungeroom to Uranus or somewhere.

Favourite songs

DENNIS

1. RIVER SONG - DENNIS WILSON : The sound of what happens when a Beach Boys finds god and cocaine simulataneously. Also he was the drummer, so this piece of ULTRAPURE (columbian) pop swings and rollicks in its epic glory. You WILL beleive.
2. FINAL SOLUTION - PERE UBU : Flat chat white-soul-funk. Laughner's guitar solo is the great air guitar solo freakout ever.
3. BLANK FRANK - BRIAN ENO : simulataneously acknowledge the Velvet Underground and Bo Didley, throw all meaning once the beat kicks in and the machine gun electronics take over.
4. HOLIDAYS IN THE SUN - THE SEX PISTOLS : smash your head! smash the fucken!
   
5. OH SWEET NOTHING - THE VELVET UNDERGROUND : more religious hand-holding, the song 'Hey Jude' never was!
6. FOUND A JOB - TALKING HEADS : just for the last 5 minutes where they rip off Parliament.
7. ROCKS OFF - THE ROLLING STONES : more mileage out of a high E chord than any band except the Velvet Underground.
8. BOSS HOSS - THE SONICS : this song makes me want to get drunk in a good way.
9. MOTHER SKY - CAN : a song that starts in the midlle of a song and never stops with the second best guitar wank lead break ever
10. BONZO GOES TO BITTBURG - this song by the Ramones makes me cry.
    

About a tree and a well

Painting a Quince

As you can see from my reviews, I like to mix the very high with the very low brow's of art, though my general orientation is towards the low-brow stuff...But every now and again I like to have my synapses massaged by some really slow, really artsy-fartsy Euro cinema, where nothing happens, landscapes are everything, psychology is thrown out the window and EXISTENCE is all that matters. Victor Erice is one of those Euro directors I describe as 'elemental'...His films ooze natural rhythms and colour, most of them being orange browns and dark greens, and the sounds are ambient winds and rains. I saw his 'Spirit of the Beehive' a few years ago in a cinema after smoking a few joints, and yes the slow languid arthouse pace was almost putting me into a coma, but there was something else going on, from the rustling trees to the endless landscapes to the slow shots of a young girl walking across a barren landscape – the whole spaciousness of the film riveted me. Erice's cinema's is organic and wide. So after having it sit on my shelf for some special occasion I pulled out his 90s film 'El Sol Del Membrillo' (the Quince Tree of the Sun), which is basically 2 and a bit hours of Spanish painter Antonio Lopez painting a quince tree (interesting to note that Lopez does lots of moderns urban landscapes). Yep, a movie about a guy painting a tree. Now this is no ordinary tree, a Quince tree is like a pear tree. The Quince has a firm, rounded texture and is is bright yellow. It is, by for all intents a purposes and very 'artistic' tree, in that is has lots of surfaces and textures. Erice doesn't miss a beat in capturing thought surfaces and textures, but then capturing the more important aspects that surround or enliven the tree visually – light, shadows, visual composition. This is a move as a painting and a film about making a painting. Erice takes the 'visuality' of cinema to the core of all visual art – painting – a makes it interesting in it's own right.

The jungle

In between Lopez battles with elements, talks with other artists about like and art, while the world around his changes in complex synchronicity with his emerging work. This is deep stuff without hitting you on the head with morality and psychology, it's a film that just happens – a tree grows, a painter paints it as it grows, and then the fruit falls, dies, decays until next season. Life.

Life is a rotten quince..

The DVD I got is a killer, it's a Spanish release with English sub-titles. It's not perfect hi-def quality , but image quality is nice, there are screen artifacts to keep it all real – the print is approved by Erice himself. There's also some great extras including s Spanish TV interview with both Eric and Lopes and a fantastic video sketchbook of Lopez painting done by Eric himself. All up a quality film and a quality, 'exotic' DVD package.

I finally watched the bootleg I've got of Budd Boetticher's fantastic western 'the Tall T'..Boetticher is quickly becoming 'the bloke' when it comes to American westerns in my headspace. His compact, violent and meaningful B-westerns are all worthwhile. The ones I've seen – 'Seven men from now' and 'Commanche Station' – are all A-grade stuff contrary to their status, but 'the Tall T' is what I'd call a killer. Randolph Scott once again plays the good moral guy Pat Brennan, who comes to a small outpost and promises the son of a friend some candy. On the way though he loses his horse, and hitches back with a newly web couple. Upon return to the ranch they find it taken over by ruthless thugs, his friend and son both murdered, and a hostage situation ensues when the pussy-husband uses his wealthy wife as a bargaining chip for their freedom. This is dark, violent stuff, especially for a 50s movie, but it proves that
even in violence and immorality you can still play tough but fair: Brennan shoots the motherfuckers in the front not back, which in todays fuckhead world is the norm.

Dont mess with Mr. T..!

It's also proudly politically incorrect, having one of the thug be a psycho Asian called 'Chink. Scott is once again solid as a rock, Richard Boone adds complexity to Frank Usher, the thug's leader, and Henry Silva, known for his roles in Italian poliziescos, like the classic 'Manhunt', plays the outta control 'Chink. It's a crime that such a great, brutal Western like the 'Tall T' isn't on DVD, and buggered if I know why it's called 'The Tall T'!

Turkish Delight!!!

This film looks totally fantastic. And that psych-guitar!

On a faraway beach...

Sealers' Cove : 4th Jan, 2007, 7:41am

Heppy News Year! (well thats how my mum says it)..And according to my horoscopes this will be my best year in 10 years because Jupiter is in the way of Saturn blocking out the view of Pluto rising between the Sun and the moon and arrr, fuckit...Anyway hopefully they represent something good since 2006 was officially a grande annulus horribulus for this blogger... So I kicked off 2007 with a 20km round-trip hike that has left me awed and sore..As you can see the loverly beach I ended up at was called Sealer's Cove down a Wilsons Promontory, one of the most spectacular spots on this here lucky-Cunt called Australia. And it was all WORTH IT. This was one of the first decent hikes I been on for nearly 14 years. The last was in the early 90's, climbing Mt. Warning in Northern NSW, and before that, I went on a hike to the Dead Sea in Yeretz Yisrool on my birthday , to be treated to 'Biblical' views of some desert and Masada, coupled with soldiers graduating and F16's buzzing the joint. It was pretty kewl...

But back to the bizniss of this Blog, which is me talking shit about shit I like. 2006 was a Pathetic year for anything 'new'. No interesting music, a smattering of films and book. So I'll start:

BEST MUSIC 2006 : THE ZEN VISION:M 30gig multi-media MP3 player etc...I finally was bought of those new Walkmen things after 5 years too late, and after research picked the Creative anti-iPod. It sounds great, has a video player that I never use, displays photos, magazine, Podcasts etc... So basically I have been digitising my own records that I hardly have time to listen to and listen to them again. Rediscovering that Nick Cave is horribly dated and BORING and should be put out to pasture, indie-music of the 90s doesn't cut it with me at all for the most, though the first couple of Palace records could be genius. Yo La Tengo are another band with a serious law of diminishing return , up there with Dinosaur, Pavement, shit ANYTHING on Matador Dreckords. The first Teenage Fanclub record and SeaMonsters by the Wedding Present were the best two English records of the 90s, or even this decade for that matter. Techno music is as dated as Nick Cave. Hip hop has a great future behind it. BOOTLEGS ARE THE ONLY WAY> Unadulterated, shitty recordings of bands in their prime (or worse) never seem to date. Hence I been listening to bootlegs by the Rolling Stones, Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, Palace Music, etc..etc... But the BESTEST sonic adventure this year would hafta be the bootleg DTS-DVD 4.1 mix of Pink Floyd's DARK SIDE OF THE MOON...Yep, the ultimate drongo album, biggest selling record of all-time bootlegged off a SURROUNDSOUND mix done in the 70s by Alan Parsons or someone, and it sounds t-riffic, especially on my 5.1 surround system. In fact it's one of the very few 'surround' recordings thats worth the listen on this new format. And it's FREE via a torrent download which took me nearly three months to complete. Oh well, good things take time I guess.


BEST FILMS : a few goodies actually: 1. MIAMI VICE – coulda been better, and really it was just an episode of the TV series with a bigger budget, more explosions, blood and swearing, but boy was this film one of the nicest to look at this year, if anything else (and aint cinemah supposed to be a 'visual' medium?)
2. CLIMATES – Turkish arthouse film, also done on the HiDef digital. Like all decent arthouse films, the story of a love-affair breakdown, done with slow shots, landscapes and a pretty rough and ridiculous sex scene. It also looked really nice and moderne just the way I like to see movies.
3. THE PASSENGER – Antonioni's 'lost' movie got a cinema release before getting the 'budget' DVD release. Jack Nicholson goes for an identity swap in an Arabian desert while getting to bonk Maria Schneider and then have something 'mysterious' happen.

4. THE RED DESERT – yeah so I been on a bit of an Antonioni trip this year, watching the Passenger, La Notte and L'Eclisse, this baby got a semi-decent DVD release here in R4/Australia. LURVELY and surreal movie and Antonioni's first in colour, so he's made everything pretentiously perfect and lurid and composed, but fuck, thats alright with me. But the RED DESERT is foremost seminal , esp. on the like of Tarkovsky, and sheeit, even the Turkish guy who made CLIMATES.

another faraway beach : The Red desert

5.SUCCUBUS - I also been on a bit of a Jess Franco trip. Yeah, that crazy Spanish guy who is compared to Ed Wood Jr, and made really bad pornos, but his late 60s/early 70s stuff is really, really good – shit I'd say 'great'. Geared specifically for the 'counter culture, Swinging 60s crowd', Franco's drug-fried kinky mod-sex sagas make little sense, over-use the zoom-in, but generally have great soundtracks, sexy-chicks, confused vampires and sex- demons and shots of exotic locales. If you have at least 3 seconds of time for say David Lynch, you'll have plenty for Franco. SUCCUBUS involved some woman who does a live S&M show, some guy who wants to bonk her, trippy soft-focus nude frolics and people namedropping Stockhausen and the Rolling Stones. I mean what's NOT to like?

6. THE PARTY GIRL – got this off a torrent. Nick Ray does it again. Hard-boiled story of a stripper and her links to the mob. Shot in Scope, it's as colourful and gay as a musical is supposed to be, even the bits where a mob psycho pistol smashes a guy in the face! Yep.

7. MATCH POINT – Voody Ellen does a good one. In fact he does a Chabrol film but with Scarlett Johansen's ass in it. This will prolly be the last decent film Ms. J does before she becomes the new Melanie Griffith or something.

8. THE RED QUEEN KILLS 7 TIMES – you know what, I can't get enough of these crazy European psychological ghost/vampire films. From the hot Euro babes, to the crazy stories of infidelities to the wonky mythologies of hauntings and vampires, to the classy Modish locations and decadence. Yep it's all so early 70s exploitation, grindhouse vernacular cinema and while some may pass these films off as camp and trash, well there seem to be heaps more going on (thematically, visually) than yr general arty-farty flick and they're FUN to watch to boot, well at least better than drunken fathers and gay cowboys – thats for sure!

9. THE DUST DEVIL – I had reservations about this flick and the guy who made it – uber goth-geek Richard Stanley – who made one of the worst, most rubbishy films I've ever seen (but a cult with heroin addicts and fans of industrial music like Ministry)HARDWARE..I read an interesting article with Stanley in a book a few years ago and he was crapping on about Leone and Tarkovsky, and how DUST DEVIL was him trying to be like that..Well sorta...More Leone than Tarkovsky, the film is really 90s pulp-kitsch, but it had enough moments to keep me in there, and the fact that it was a genre film that was creating it's own mythology made it a moire than interesting experience. I guess the fact that this was an el-cheapo release with 5 discs of doccos and interviews of varying quality prolly touched my inner schnorrer more than some other grander aesthetic thing, but in the end I enjoyed the sucker more than say the Departed....

10. MARY – Abel Ferrara is still one of the best directors in America, and seem to be the only director who knows how to get a performance out of Matthew Modine. MARY made PASSION OF THE CHRIST look like the bloated, gory, self-important and ultimately stooooopid film that it was. Unlike Gibson's chest-beating Fulci movie, Ferrara actually gets religion and its inherent paradoxes, without actually having to preach it.


11. A SCANNER DARKLY – just. Not a great film, but still the most 'literal' and true PKD adaptation.. He coulda done just as good a job without the bullshit Macintosh animation crap.

BESTEST BOOKS

Hmmmm....I really liked James Lee Burkes' TO THE BRIGHT & SHINING SUN, Jonathan Lethem's AMNESIA MOON, Burroughs NOVA EXPRESS & Artuads WATCH FIENDS & RACK SCREAMS..

...non-fictionally I dug FX Feeney's MICHAEL MANN coffee tabler, Legs McNeil's THE OTHER HOLLYWOOD, and Mikel J Koven's LA DOLCE MORTE about the giallo genre.. the very worst book I read was Bret Easton Ellis' LUNAR PARK. What a piece of shit.

There's a time to f@ck, and a time to crave..

Welcome to the 'new life'

LA VIE NOUVELLE - Dir: Phillipe Grandrieux

..if there's one concept the French are really, REALLY good at it's nihilism. This is probably due to the fact that they're a pack of hypocritical cowards, that love to pick fights, but to not actually fight them..And when it comes to culture, they are 'experts' at nihilism. I've recently been reading the excellent 'Watchfiends & Rack Screams', a collection of the late-period writings of French nut-bar visionary, Antonin Artaud. An ex-surrealist, Artaud spent most of his life in mental asylums scribbling a feverish poetry that explored the boundaries of human-physicality, yet he despised sex, so instead or yr 'Salt, Saliva, Sperm and sweat' (asper Phillip Brophy's experimental short film), yr left with ;Salt, saliva, sweat and ...*cough,cough*, Kaka! Yep Artaud was a pretty out-there case, and he's poetry of self eruption, while at time hard to read, seems to get under yr skin. It's pretty powerful, abstract stuff, but reading it, it's undeniable to see how his work influenced the likes of Jim Morrison, Patti Smith, Bukowski, Arrabal, Jodorowsky, hard-core metalheads and self-headjob-giving performance artists amongst others. That he was kicked out of the surrealists for being anti-politics and Marxism adds to his enduring legend and their subsequent demise as a relevant creative movement..

..Artaud started his own movement called THE THEATRE OF CREULTY in which he used extreme performance relating to the body, sound and vision to 'shock and awe' audiences.. Mexican surrealists like Arrabal and Jodorowsky were heavily influenced by Artauds' THEATRE of CREULTY and recently watched a torrent-bootleg of the oh so very nihilistic and French and Artaud influenced movie LA VIE NOUVELLE by French experimental-nihilist film-maker Phillipe Grandrieux, which could be described as a CINEMA OF CRUELTY circa 2003. Now I been reading about Grandrieux for a while, especially here and here. And just like every other these uber-hip film that 'everyone must-see' that you read about (no different to the music of the same must I add), it's almost impossible for the average-schmo like myself (who is always curious to expand the parameters to these types of culture) to actually see (or hear). So after about a week of torrenting, I was able to download a bootleg of this film. Luckily the film has very little dialogue, it plays like a silent film, that gives it vastly more visual and experimental edge. Let me just stress now, if you like David Lynch you will love this film, if not, stop reading. The story basically revolves around a love-triangle that revolves around an Eastern European sex slave her captor and an American client. The film uses a very natural, modern visual style for the most, made up mainly of close ups, shaky handheld and natural light, as is the norm for contemporary Euro-cinema. But Grandrieux takes things an extra step utilizing blur, out-of-focus and night-vision to push the film into a really edgy, surrealistic realm. The film plays a lot like one of those really nightmarish Chris Cunningham videoclips where everything is based on extreme claustrophobic sensation, and the threat of extreme violence lingers at the edge of every frame, made even more powerful by the fact that no-one really says anything. Obviously the paradigm is sex and death, throw in the location of Eastern Europe - where life is cheap, nasty and very COLD - and you have a dark nihilism personified. Music and sonics play a big role in this film. The whole film has that dark-industrial drone through it that bedrocks the feel of pervasive thread, and the throbbing 'doof' of the sex-club makes the film come off like some post-decadent techno nightmare. Throw in Grandrieux's dizzying 'concrete' visual style and you've got the cinematic equivalent of a Jeff Mills Detroit-techno album. LA VIE NOUVELLE is a dark, modern, nightmare, where the human soul is bought,sold and pulverised at 125bpm.

..in Eastern-Euro HELL!

G.O.D in my backyard.

The Coloured Balls - Ball Power (Aztec Music)

Sometimes you get lucky living in the Lucky Country especially when it comes to popular-gulcha and music. I mean, I must confess, for such a little pisher country, we produce some very fine hedonistic, psychedelic rock n' roll music un-fettered by politics , Political correctness and bad artists in general. Another thing is that I was fortunate to be a city-slicker (well suburban slicker) in my up-bringing, as opposed to 95% of Farmer and Faygel nobs that make up the 'cultural elite' that gives Aussie art and culture such a snore inducing rep in the first place. Well anyway, as a kid, I remember once some family friends of ours son came over, he happened to be some sort of burnt-out drug-casuality who'd been in rehab and mental hospitals and the like, and somewhere along the line he mentioned this bloke LOBBY LLOYD, and was saying things along the lines that Lloyd made (Billy) Thorpie look like a Poonce. He was MENTAL, his guitar was louder than anything on earth, and he used to live in Centre Road East Brighton ( a reasonable, though not ostentatious upper-middle class suburb to boot!), which was around the corner from where I grew up! SO I had Aussie punk rock history in literally my own back yard! Now at the time I was getting into a lot of garage punk music via 80s bands like the PAINTERS and DOCKERS and COSMIC PSYCHOS, and LOBBY LLOYD's name useta get mentioned as he owned or had something to do with RICHMOND RECORDERS here in Melbourne, that was where all these shitty Melbourne punk bands used to record and end up sounding like rubbish. ANYWAY, in the late 80s and early 90s I used to see loud-garage rock bands from Geelong and Camberwell (funny how in Australia you had rich kid dropouts making music with poor drop-outs and they all rocked the same, I guess that's DEMOCRACY in the purest sense, eh?)...But this Lobby Lloyd influence would never go away. He produced the Aussie X, the Painters and Dockers, the megaultrahardcorethrashmetal DEPRESSION and I think a BORED! record or two. BORED! covered 'Human Being' in their live sets, and I was lucky to hear the Cosmic Psychos version of 'Guitar Over-Dose' in the studio, where it sounded great, until I heard the CD version. Then this mate of mine had an art teacher called Phil Brophy, who useta dress up like a 'sharpie' which was pretty much the main subcultural audience of the COLOURED BALLS. The 'sharpies' were this mutant working-middle class youth culture of the 70s here in Australia, that mixed the look of English 60s mods/skinheads and David Bowie Ziggy Stardust(!!!) into one. But instead of them being bisexuals, they'd drink beer and break each others noses and knife each other and shit. Initially the 'sharpies' meant the way you dressed, but this was quickly punched-in-the head, and came to mean the sharpness of yr flicknife you carried, or bottle you smashed to rearrange some bozo's face with. The 'sharpies' existed for most of the 70s until punk came along. The 'Sharpie' look is sorta trendy now, but alot of it moved to the country and mutated into the 'bogen' subculture, which the Cosmic Psychos cashed in on in the 90s. But it was the Psychos who kinda piqued my interest in this Lobby Lloyd bloke, as this 'G.O.D' track was awesome, amphetamine, motoronic pounding psychedelic ROCK. I said to myself meekly that Lobby Lloyd was a legend. And yesterday the stars aligned, the bank balance was in the black and a beautifully remastered, repacked and LOCALLY PRODUCED CD version of the long out-of-print, impossible to find BALL POWER album emerged. In my hand I had the new Bob Dylan record and BALL POWER, and I said fuck-it, I will support my own PRODUCT!!! Bought the bugger, popped it in the car CD abd floored it all the way home as 'Flash' blasted out of my quadrophonic-4 stereo system via the tunes' Who-meets-MC5 propulsive "yeah"! Then you get some so-so boogie-woogie numbers until the Sabbath rifferama of 'Human Being' and a really up-beat version of 'Whole Lotta Shakin' comes along, but Lloyd plays the chords in a higher key that makes it more psychedelic and droney than the usually chugga-chugga style. Album killer is the 10 minute plus neo-Pink-Fairies workout 'That's what Mama said' that features some very nice primal-electronics that sound like Sun Ra's Kahoutek mixed in via a rousing chant like chorus that'll get even the most drunken slob dribblin the words out in no time. There's a collection of six singles as extras, that vary from some dated boogie-woos Oz-Rock vomit, to prolly the best song on the whole albumand the best song the Who never did 'Love me girl' and the very Punk Fairies or High Time MC5 rocker 'Devil's disciple'... Album closes with a totally remastered to get blastered-to 16 minute version of 'Guitar Overdose' recorded live at Sunbury in 1973. You are unlikely to find a more transglobal, psychedelic, elevating, teeth gnashing, smash yr head more than an Islamic Mullah dose of energising rock anywhere in the known universe. And it makes me feel even better that G.O.D lived in my back yard! Amen!

another TEN on the ZEN

..a proper post soon to come, but here's some filler for the toilet break, random Zen shuffles:

1. JANDEK - 28-8-05 LIVE @ AUSTIN bootleg - part of the Perplexed-one's on-going world tour. His guitar meanders down the fret board as he whines about wanting to be loved, really he's not that different to Elton John or someone, ya know.
2. U2 - IN GOD'S COUNTRY - Christian rock, it even has that fucken tooty-flooty sort of sound that Briar-butt boys play. Gee the Irish are a pack of cunts.
3. MUSIC MACHINE - TALK, TALK - Nuggets gold. Fuzzed out to shit with lotsa keyboards. This one reminds me of THE SHOWER SCENE FROM PSYCHO, that Melbourne 80s band. Could also sound like one of those Timbaland tracks.
4. MY BLOODY VALENTINE - TREMOLO - this sounds like the Beatles when they went psychedelic, especially something George woulda done. There's even a timbla or whatever those Indian percussion things are called.
5. WIRE - KIDNEY BONGOS - a mate of mine reckons this is perfect 80s pop. It's actually pretty shit.
6. ROLLING STONES - SHAKE YOUR HIPS - The guitars on this sound like they were done a four-track. Bloody smart-arse limeys.
7. HOWLIN' WOLF - HOLD YOUR MONEY - You can't go wrong with Howlin' Wolf. Sounds like it was recorded in a really small and really packed juke-joint with Negros high on speed. You see, this stuff, it just swings.
8. KIM SALMON - YOU GOTTA LET ME DO MY THING - Salmon wishing he was doing soundtracks for John Holmes films, of course, there's a flute in there.
   
9. THE GUN CLUB - GOODBYE JOHNNY - this sounds tinny and shit. It influenced a tinny and shit Aussie band of the same name as the track. Pack of fucken junkie alcoholics. Now there's a band called the Drones who sound even MORE similar, just not as tinny.
10. THE MAGIC MARKERS - WE ARE THE MAGIC MARKERS - the youth of the SOnic Youth who have emerged as part of Thurston Morre on-going no-wave social-project. At least they're better than SOnic YOuth. Lots of angry young art-fuckers saying 'fucken' and over-distorted lo-fi blare, they remind me of Black Flag for some reason. It's alright.
    

THE RETURN OF THE 5 BEST NON-ARGENTO/BAVA GIALLI!

Women drivers - DEATH LAID AN EGG

NUMERO TRES : EQUALIZIO: DEATH LAID AN EGG and THE FIFTH CHORD

Run to the Vatican coz its back...!

My next two 'Best non-Argento/Bava' gialli, while don't really figure so much in the story/plot or boobs/blades and blood department, definitely do so in terms of there succinct visual style and to a large extent weirdness. The first is DEATH LAID AN EGG. Yep its premise is very fucken STRANGE to begin with, coz literally, it’s about eggs and death. There's this guy called Marco, played by IL GRANDE SILENSIO' Jean-Louis Tringitgnant. who owns a hi-tech poultry farm and is married to Gina Lollabrigida and has a hot sorta blonde secretary that he wants to fuck, and you sorta know the rest. But if sexual infidelities and murder are the basic templates, it’s the mind-fucked visual cut-up style that raises this film above the sum of its parts. Giulo Questi, who directed the great and very violent-and-off-its-head Spag-Western DJANGO KILL, IF YOU LIVE..SHOOT! tries his hand at the giallo genre (as did nearly every other director from Italy in the late 60s early 70s) and does a pretty diffracted, but no less interesting job. For one the premise involving a high-tech Poultry Farm is pretty weird, especially when you have some loopy subplot involving mutated chickens. But then you have this completely LSD flash-backed visual style with erratic jump shots and a completely acid-fried title sequence that makes everything feel a bit nisht. And the soundtrack. Well think of all that weird musique concrete stuff from the 60s that all theses sonic mathematicians were doing in European Universities, and yr pretty much there, in fact this whole film feels kinda musique concrete for that matter.. The visual colour scheme uses lots of yellow, keeping with the genre and maybe due to the fact that there's chicken and eggs and whatever in there somewhere. In many ways this film comes off like one of those late-60s acid-fucked Godard movies like WEEKEND or 2 or 3 THING I KNOW ABOUT HER but using the giallo framework, there's also lots of weird architecture and sexual violence like some sort J.G BALLARD novel, and Gina Lollabrigida shows some booty just to keep things nice and orderly.

Spinning out with the FIFTH CORD

Italo-cult legend Franco Nero stars in the FIFTH CORD as a shicker journo who becomes a suspect in a murder, done by some guy chopping off fingers of a glove that he leaves next to his victims (turns out he’s an Australian from Sydney). The film borrows heaps from BAVA's gialli like BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, and for most of it, is a bit of a snore-fest, but like EGG the film is redeemed by its visuals. In this case, the film was shot by uber-Italian-legend-cinematographer VITORIO STORARRO. Now I have a friend who is some-sort of cinematographer and he like many other people of this talent, swear by the work of STORARO. Some of his work includes film like APOCALYPSE NOW, ISHTAR, THE LAST EMPEROR, THE CONFORMIST, the mod-giallo THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE and *ahem* THE LAST TANGO IN PARIS. THE FIFTH CORD was one of Storarro's early efforts, and what an effort. In fact I think this is one of the first films I've ever seen where the cinematography is more interesting than the film itself. Storraro's sugar-shit-sharp lensing gives the film a cold-clinical look, and his usage of muted colours gives the film a relentless atmosphere, despite the fact that not much is really going on. In many ways this film works like an Antionioni-giallo (innaresting as Ant-o refers to LA'AVENTURA as a giallo in reverse!) with it's nice usage of space and architecture to create a cold environment and atmosphere of emotional dislocation. The Blue Underground DVD has been remastered off High-Def or something, so everything looks super-duper clear. The film is nowhere near as kinky or shocking as the liner notes say, but yeah, the cinematography is STUNNING, and probably the best seen on any gialli this side of an Argento one. But that’s the whole point of this list, ‘aint it?

Looks like the cover artwork of some band from THE WIRE magazine

CREWS'in for a BRUISIN'

AN AMERICAN FAMILY - Harry Crews

With the miniscule fanfare of a GOLDBLOG post, Harry Crews recently released his last novella AN AMERICAN FAMILY via the small 'Blood and Guts' press, and distributed via Vagabond Books. Sure the Internet is shit, but hey, I would NEVER have known a new Crews book was out, let alone be able to buy it without the global 24-7 mail-order-catalogue that is the InterNerd (and if yr not an Americanski, buy it direct from Vagabond press, you'll get it cheaper and quicker than Amazon)..I can admit that like every other shmendrick my age, I 'heard' about Crews via that neo-riot-grrl 'project' that featured Lydia Lunch, Kim Gordon and some female wrestler(really?) called Sadie Mae. I heard the record once, found it to be nasty unlistenable dreck, but really enjoyed the liner notes by Byron Coley. I soon ordered an import copy of the only book I could get at that time A FEAST OF SNAKES, and was subsequently disturbed in the same way I was when I first heard a Jandek record (Telegraph Melts). Maybe I started in the wrong place, but I was convinced that this literature AND music was custom designed by and for seriously fucked up nihilist heroin addict art-punk motherfuckers. Yes. I started in the wrong place. Needless to say a FEAST OF SNAKES is a totally mind-fuckingly GREAT novel - truly the last great 'Southern Gothic' novel. At the time I'd just read AMERICAN PSYCHO, and FEAST not only kicked its ass, but probably punched it another asshole. It's nasty and violent and horrible, but you'll never forget it. But Harry Crews is more than some lame-ass transgressive motherfucker for the sake it, like so many 'hip' shitty one-trick-pony writers that really deserve Iranian Fatwas on them - Chuck Palahniuk, Irvine Welsh after 'Ecstasy', Poopy z Brite etc.. - are. Crews is a fantastic satirist, a moralist, a great yarn spinner, writer of 'dialogue' and really, really original. He's also horribly under-appreciated, and I still find it criminal that the God-awful Chuck Palahnishnook is one of the biggest selling 'counter culture' writers in America, and Crews can't even sell a limited run of 2000 books or something. ANYWAY, Crews latest is a novella that you'll probably read in under an hour. AN AMERICAN FAMILY has one of his typical consumed-by-self-loathing and loserdom characters stuck in a rut, and finding a way out via some comic, over-the-top scenario. The main character here is a bloke called Major Melton (yes Crews ALWAYS has fantastically evocative character names) who discovers his baby has a birthmark on it's dick(!!) and starts to lose the plot from there, meeting some hilarious characters along the way, including a Korean called Bac Bong Suc. Yep Crews is at it with his redneck-with-the-heart-of-Gold shtick once again. People are motivated by primal (generally sexual) urges, the guys are dogs the women are bitches - in fact all of America is pretty much a giant dog-pound. Yep, Crews is a bit of a neo-Con, yep, he's a total Greenie, yep he's a big Anarchist, and most importantly, he's a died-in-the-wool humanist. It's all in here and the book’s only 100-odd pages long. Don't believe the liner notes that claims it's Crews 'most savage and disturbing book yet’, far from it, but it is very FUNNY, and sweet. And don't worry; Crew's innate ability to make the simple incredibly profound is still intact. It 'aint a classic, but it delivers, like one of those 7inch punk-singles from back in the day.

Now it's interesting to note how the 'Harry Crews factor' has permeated the bobular-gulcha over the years. In music circles, besides his popularity with the Nu-York-Shitty junkie-art set, some of his fans have included more commercial college-rock types like Bob Mould and Maria McKee, and he appears in some documentary that features all these nu-cunt, I mean no-Depression nu-Country types like the Handsome Family. Obviously Crews has a reasonable 'indie' or 'college hipster' type following, and it's interesting to note his forays in the flim world. He had a cameo in Sean Penn's under-rated THE INDIAN RUNNER (blew my mind when I saw it in the early 90s since I was on a massive Harry Crews bender, and had no idea he'd be in the film!) and apparently wrote something with Michael Cimino, and also wrote bits of a Sean Cunningham (Last House on the Left, Friday the 13th) shlocker the NEW KIDS, which I still haven't bothered to see. I was recently lucky to see THE HAWK IS DYING, which I was terrified would be another Sundunce shitty American indie-film, and while it went down that way, turned out to be actually not such a bad film, and totally TRUE to Harry Crews work, especially in regard to his less comic and gnarled work (ie ALL WE NEED OF HELL)..I thought we'd be lucky to get a reprint of THE HAWK IS DYING, but so far no-dice, and the film has died an inglorious (and I reckon unfair) indie-film death. If there's one failing of the film, it's probably casting Paul Giamatti as the main guy, sure he tries his butt off, but he doesn't quite cut it as a Southern bum - I guess that's all part of the cruel-capitalist machinations of getting a 'small' film by a 'not so hip these days' writer like Crews off the ground - you need a fucken 'name' actor to get an 'audience' of fuckwits that wouldn't know better unless they were at an REM or Sicker Ross gig or something.

Anyway I couldn't finish this post without posting my Crewophile 'trophies', because really Crews novels are so rare that literally become them. I only have on hardcover, funny that, the book I just yakked about. My first was FEAST OF SNAKES, the one with the white cover, then I got THE KNOCKOUT ARTIST, one of those Simon&Shuster editions with the funky art-pulp yellow (giallo!) covers. Also in this series are editions of THE GOSPEL SINGER and ALL WE NEED OF HELL. My personal fave is SCAR LOVER. MULCHING OF AMERICA is a cracker; I reckon it was one of the best literary indictments of Capitalism in Amerikka written in the 90s, no-one else did so I must be a born idiot. The CLASSIC CREWS trilogy is all good, as is FLORIDA FRENZY. BODY is fucken dynamite, CELEBRATION was so-so. My rarest is the English run of KARATE IS A THING OF THE SPIRIT that has some Twiggy look-a-like doing a terrible karate pose on the cover. I've also got GETTING NAKED WITH HARRY CREWS and PERSPECTIVES on HARRY CREWS. To round it out I even mail-orderd that documentary HARRY CREWS: GUILTY AS CHARGED, I'm still trying to find a fucken NTSC video so I can convert the fucker to DVD for posterity! Shit I'm so sad I even photocopied all of BLOOD and GRITS from the library at the University I work at!!

1985 on Ice

MIAMI VICE - then.................... and now (if only it stuck to the sell-line more..)

MIAMI VICE (2006) - written and directed by Michael Mann

For some people the 80s was a cultural nightmare worse than Mao's 'Cultural Revolution: MTV, gated drums sounds, Neon, synthesisers, heroin addicts in Germany, 50s and 60s kitsch etc..etc... When it cames to TV shows in the 80s, the interesting thing is that TV shows were starting to become more and more like movies - Hill Street Blues, A-Team, Knight Rider etc.. - until now many TV shows are in fact better than the movies. One line of thought is that cinema is pretty much dead, TV is where it's at. At the top of this heap for Tv shows trying to be films , for me anyway was Miami Vice. It was my favourite TV show of the 80s, and watching it now, well, *cough,cough*, I guess I was only a teenager. But, still, when it worked, it was pretty hardcore for a TV show, and when it was shit, well just more 80s dreck then, eh? Part of the appeal was that at the time Brian DePalma's 'Scarface' was one of my favourite movies of that period, and well 'Miami Vice' was pretty much 'Scarface' every week.

FOOTNOTE: I was one of 4 people who actually liked Mann's follow up - the massive flop 'Crime Story' HEAPS better than 'Vice'

Anyway, Michael Mann, the man who directed and produced most of the series has finally made the TV-show-that-was-trying-to-be-a-movie into a movie. Over the years Mann has gone from being a pompous-stylistic bore - I remember seeing 'the Keep' at the legendary Valhalla Cinema in Richmond, one of those cienmas that had couches for people to smoke pot down the back, and thinking, what a slow, drawn out crock of shit - to some sort of 'master' that knows how to stage a suagr-shit-sharp modern gunbattle. And nu-MIAMI VICE has some nice gun-battles. In fact the gun battles in this film seem to be inspired by some of the footage from skirmishes in the Middle-east, and the HD-digital photgraphy makes them even more real and cracking. When it comes to violence as poetry or an 'artform' in the fillum-world I rank Mann up there with Kubrick and Peckinpah, some of the violent scenes in this nu-MIAMI VICE are that good. If you don't like any of that stuff, then don't see the film.

The first 40-minutes of nu-MIAMI VICE just fly. It's bravura film-making - guns, gadgets, girls, guts, drugs, spicks, butts, chinks, -Nazi white-trash, yids, bids, and skids. That's just content. Mann uses his mix of HD-digital and film, fast cutting, mad-modern landscapes, arhcitecture and fractured, mini-bite story telling to set everything up. It's relentless, it's confusing, but it cranks. And then...well, Mann being the trendy (hip?) type of 80s-yuppy-guy that he is, decides to try his hand at a Bong Car-Why move and the film falls into a duller than Miami canal-water conflicted luff story. Trust me it was BORING - but then I thought, 'this is just like how every 4th episode of VICE would be' - you'd have Crockett have one of his 'living on the edge of the night' sensitive-new-age-bozo story-arcs. I guess the film is ultimately arse-fucked by the Holly (Charra) Wood paradigm for mainstream idioten story telling - define yr main character, follow his 'journey', love interest, other action - etc.. In this case Crockett is fair and sqaure the main story and the rest are just cyphers. Mind you, Mann does his usual 'subversion' of the paradigm, as he did with the TV show (which I won't say coz you already know). Anyway, once the middle shit is over, action ensues with a great cracking Iraq-Lebannon video feed shoot-out. Farrell is pretty good, though ultimately a slobby bum(he almost seems to turn into Russell Crowe as the film goes on..), as Crockett, he lacks the Southern edge that Don Johnson brought to the original. Foxx is not-much as Tubbs, but who knows he might be moved to the front in the sequel if it emerges. Gina and Trudy are replaced by some butch hispanic J-Lo and a black chick with a great ass. Zito and Zwyteck are made into bigger shleppers than the originally were. And Castill has been replaced by Fat Albert. But don't worry, the Columbian drug-lords are as fantastic and deadly as they always were.

The film is B-grade dreck, pure and simple. It looks fucken GREAT on the big screen like it's supposed to, and credit must be given to Mann for sticking to his dull, downbeat style, than making the film into a camp ejaculation of rubbish like every other worthless TV adaptation.

One thing is certain, Michael Mann surely knows how to make every film he's ever made seem like it was made in 1985.

Lets art-fuck, shall we?

Found this innaresting link about Pommies pondering about modern stuff for a change, but really, I like the pictures!

Being there with Jandek

jandek : glasgow Monday- THE CELL

The worlds greatest ex-rock crit, Richard Meltzer accurately nailed Bob Dylan's shtick to a large extent, when, in his tome 'The Aesthetics of Rock' said something along the lines that 'Dylan frees us from meaning' rather than the other way around (which is the case for 95% of innerlectyul fuckheads, myself included). But there's something incredibly powerful, profound and perhaps transcendental about art that delivers us from meaning. In fact, maybe that’s the thing that makes music 'spiritual' - and in today's milieu, that is a very dirty word (though Terry Riley, in a recent tour in Australia was effortlessly waxing lyrical about the role of rock n roll and popular music being a way for young people to express their spirituality). You could say that it all goes back to that undefinable term "the shit's got SOUL", or if you are the modernist, non-believer - it's got FEEL. Either way if the music's got it, you'll get it somehow. Mr Sterling R Smith aka Jandek aka the Representative from Corwood Industries recently released I think it's his 48th record GLASGOW MONDAY : THE CELL. The disc is another whopping 2-CD set, immaculately recorded from one of his recent UK live shows, and is another bona-fide masterpiece from the man, as far as I'm concerned. A live 'concept' album no-less, in the great tradition of live concept albums, like FRAMPTON COMES ALIVE, TOMMY LIVE @ ROYAL ALBERT HALL , THE WALL live at Krakow or some other place of megalithic grande-gestureness. So Jandek, in his infinite jest gives us his own version of 'The Wall' in THE CELL.

Immediate thoughts: A jail. A holding cell. A good title for a Swans/Michael Gira party-tune, but THE CELL could also mean, a battery, one of those solar things or most importantly, the smallest known living organism. Jandek once again frees us from meaning with the simplest of terms. But let's not get too carried away with his royal Perplexed one here.. The album cover features another jaw-droppingly great example of minimalist art photography with a shot of an ancient looking, possibly Celtic in origin, stone-dwelling that gives some sort of visual representation of Jandek's 'Cell'. The thing that baffles me the most about this album cover is what appears to be a stone table in front of the rock-house:

..I mean, what the fuck is that thing? Is it another of Mr.Jandek's Photoshop tricks?

Anyway I listened to this album straight through this afternoon while cleaning the garden of my own 'Cell':

It was a really pleasant sunny day here in Melbourne-town, a nice break from the crisp but dry (and finger-and-toes-freezing) winter we've had so far and Jandek's hot new album went down a treat and ended just as I filled the green bucket with the last chunk of rotting, possum-eaten lemon that fell of the tree in my back yard.

ANYWAY, I'm gonna attack this album on two fronts, namely the MUSIC and the LYRICS.

THE MUSIC: Jandek on piano. Richard Youngs and Alexander Neilson as the main pick-up band doing Cello-ed Bass and ambient-pavement saw percussion (and I mean really ambient, so you don't think yr listening to Throbbing Gristle or Neubaten or Pussy Galore). Jandek plays a very luverley piano here. I mean the playing here is so staid and quaint you could play it to an old fart who listens to classic-FM and they'd probably like it. It's quite astonishing to hear this type of 'civilised' playing from a bloke who has sonically raped, tormented and psychotically-epsisoded hundreds, if not thousands of left-field brain-splattered listeners over the decades. I mean this record is of the cheese-and-wine and Government-grant 'produced' standard (FOR WHAT THAT'S EVER FERCUCKTEN WORTH)..Yep, it's mature listening for snobby adults. It's a fuckhead's aesthetic-circle-jerk-spunk-bubble-feltch. I could go on... But don't despair. Coz sonically this is another great avant-rock-piano album in the tradition of John Cale and John Cage and Michael Nyman - this record is the antithesis of the 3-Ben's Axis of Evil (Ben Lee, Ben Queller and Ben Fold Five, a sonic threat as truly diabolical as anything Iran/Korea/Syria, Al-Qaeda and Johnny Farnham and the Family First Party could muster). The album still has that rootsy, gnarled and beautiful edge that only Jandek can muster. In fact, on initial listening it sounds like chamber music taken from a Merchant Ivory Production about British noblemen and maidens. The piano aint new to Jandek - his sayonara to the millennium - the fantastic THE BEGINING album featured the magnum-opus that was 'The Beginning' 14 and-a-bit-minutes of Jandek passionately (nuttily, whats the diff?) noodling with his mother's grand-piano the piece being equal parts frustrated catharsis, infantile tinkering and introspective plinking. In GLASGOW MONDAY: THE CELL, Jandek sticks to the introspective plinking, and obviously has some pretty reasonable chops to display. But the real kicker that makes this record something beyond dull wine-and-cheese MOR-plonk is the fact that this record is a 'one riddim rekkid', just like all those old reggae records and the recent 'See Me Yah'/BASIC CHANNEL production. Yep. Jandek plays pretty much the same tune 10 times with slight and subtle variations on each while Youngs and Neilson chip in with their classy tutored-embellishments. Youngs seems to be playing a bowed-electric bass that drones, and slowly and deeply changes keys at specific moments. Neilson uses lots of feed backed-industrial sound washes, jingly bells and ever so slight rattles of wood or something of a similar timber. As a whole the thing has that elegiac feel that isn't dissimilar to rock-works like the recent Reed-Cale 'SONGS FOR DRELLA' or even Lou Reed's MAGIC & LOSS, or imagine a whole record that sounds like that spooky-otherworldly piano on Sonic Youth's 'Providence'. Also the piano sounds similar to the sort of thing you'd hear on some soundtrack to a serious-melancholy arty film. Right now I can only think of bits of EYES WIDE SHUT but there's prolly many others that might be familiar.

LYRICS: Jandek actually sings/talks quite nicely here. In fact he sounds remarkably like Robbie Robertson in parts. The main turn of phrase for THE CELL is: 'What do I have?’ In fact every 'Chapter' starts with the statement 'What do I have?’ which if you care to think about it, isn't that far off from the repeated verse-statement structure that many religious hymns use, and is also used in many of the great poems of the times. In many ways the lyrical content of THE CELL finds Mr.Jandek going from the material to the cosmic to the intergalactic. The whole thing feels like mediation on life/existence/death and his imminent passing from this 'material' world - hence 'What do I have?' coming off like the ultimate challenge to the physical/material paradigm. The stanzas vary from Part One where he talks about the Body/Mind connection, to part two where he talks about modern-life-banality: 'What do I have/Some ability to pay the bills/Well lets get them done!’ Each 'Chapter' gets more and more esoteric in the subject matter and phrases, but no less poetic. In fact as it goes on, it reminds me in FEEL to Goddard’s 'Eulogie De L'Amour' movie, who knows, maybe Godard will get Jandek to score one of his flicks, (or maybe they'll both leave this mortal-coil together in some sort of cosmic-existential-fractal boom?) But his lyrics here are rich with evocation: 'A ship without a crew', 'some bastion I guard', ‘Phoenixed (?) out of here', 'when it's all gone and black, the guardians step aside'.etc..etc..

If there's one film THE CELL reminds me of, it's Hal Ashby's BEING THERE. Maybe it's Jandek's cryptic, meaningful-but- meaningless phrases, the seemingly naive approach he has to making music, and the way at times that it all becomes so effortlessly transcendent. Jandek is like the character Chancey in that film, in that with his 'simple' manner he was able to see through all the complexities and manoeuvres and cruelty in life and see them for the bullshit that they are. Another quote from that film that might equally apply to Jandek is that 'life is a state of mind'. In BEING THERE, Chancy leaves his 'Cell' to embark on some sort of quasi-religious/symbolic journey, not much different to the story Jandek imparts in GLASGOW MONDAY: THE CELL.

Make no bones about it, this album aches, with age.

Peter Sellers in a Jandekian state of mind.