Sun, 12 May: Weekly Review 10

List Challenges delivered another newsletter to my email. It featured the usual lists of best movies, books, etc, and there was also yet another in a series of bucket lists. I like reading these just to see what is on other people’s bucket lists, and also because they often tell us something about that person. The latest one was 100 Bucket List Worthy Accomplishments. The list creator, HungryInTheHat, seemed to be a bit of a fan of Capitalism, and maybe into authority, and not the most environmentally-conscious person. One item was ‘Meet a Billionaire’ with a picture of Bill Gates. Another was ‘Go on a police ride-along’. Another was ‘Cut down a tree with a chainsaw’ (wtf?). But then there was ‘See the Redwoods’ with a picture of said Redwood trees, maybe from Muir Woods, which I’ve visited. Beautiful. More: ‘Ride in a monster truck’ (redneck?). And the clincher: ‘Tour a mint’ (money, money money). It got me thinking I haven’t really done a proper bucket list, so that’s what I did. Check it out here under Favourite Things.

I finished digitising my Carl Wilson solo album. The songs are sounding better every time. The song the Grammy is real catchy. I like the girly backing singers’ fade out of ‘We thought you wanted to be a star/Who the hell do you think you are?’ So, once I digitised it, I burned a cd and added it to the LP package, then converted the files to mp3, normalised them and put them in my digital music collection. Then I grabbed my favourites – The Grammy and Hurry Love – and put them in the digital jukebox (I use a program called Media Monkey). It’s never a simple process, but it’s a satisfying one.

Since I was digitising albums, I decided to do one I hadn’t done yet. It was my cd of Peculiar Hole in the Sky, an amazing collection of ‘Pop Psych From Down Under’ on the BigBeat label. It’s part of a series of four albums of 60s garage rock from Australia. The title track is performed by The Valentines (featuring a young Bon Scott), and written by Vanda and Young of The Easybeats, and it’s great psych and freakbeat. Not at all like their signature crappy bubblegum sound (Knick Knack Paddywack, anyone?). So many gems, so many weird bands (1863 Establishment, Hugo, hmmm?). I love it. It’s the sound of Love meet the Dukes of Stratosphere. I’ve got three of the four albums, and I’m hoping one day to get that fourth one.

I then chilled out with a very relaxing read in my rocking chair of the manga Shuna’s Journey, by Hayao Miyazaki. This was one of the items I bought on my recent shopping spree in Melbourne and it was very satisfying. Just a short one volume book, the translator, Alex Dudok De Wit, calls it more of an emonogatari, or illustrated story, than a manga. Shuna, a young prince from a poor village, rides an animal that’s a cross between an elk and a horse, on a journey to the west to find the Golden Grain that will save his people. Along the way he encounters astonishing things, plus a young girl called Thea and her little sister, who he rescues from slavery. Fans of Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli film Princess Mononoke will recognise Shuna and his trusty steed, called a Yakul, as an early version of the characters from that film. But he published the story in 1983, and this is the first English translation. In the excellent Translators Notes at the end, De Wit detects the work of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea stories as a possible influence on Miyazaki’s story. He had apparently wanted to adapt them, but was refused permission at the time. When permission was granted later, his son, Goro, directed A Tale of Earthsea, somewhat unsuccessfully. I loved this story, especially for its powerful symbolism and mythology, and the artwork was beautiful. I will read it many times.

I continued doing that Reader’s Development worksheet today while at work. One recommendation was to check out a site called Book Riot, which ‘describes itself as a pop culture haven for reading. On the site you’ll find book recommendations, reading life tips, book news, and general literary chatter.’ Upon checking it out the first thing I encountered was a very loud ad for ‘how to avoid ads’, plus some pop-ups. Not a great welcome. But the site does look interesting, including some interesting articles. One I couldn’t help but read was 1980s Sci-Fi Books That Aged Badly (And 4 Still Worth Reading) by Katie Moench. Nominees were L Ron Hubbard‘s Battlefield Earth, Walter Koenig‘s Buck Alice and the Actor Robot (yes, Chekhov from Star Trek), Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle‘s Footfall, and Robert Heinlein‘s The Number of the Beast. The main charge seems to be sexism and Scientology, but it’s also probably just bad writing. Of the four, I have only read the Heinlein novel, and boy is that a stinker! It was so bad that I was inspired to rewrite it for him, in hopes of making it better (a very relative term here). This is a thing I do sometimes, ‘rebuild’ pop culture artifacts. Don’t know if that one could ever be saved, but I tried. The 4 worth reading in the article were Ursula Le Guin‘s Always Coming Home, William Gibson‘s Neuromancer, Octavia Butler’s Dawn, and Samuel Delany‘s Stars In My Pockets Like Grains of Sand. I’ve read the first two and they are good, especially the first one. Moench’s opening essay about 80s scifi is worth reading. I must browse Book Riot some more.

Moving over, briefly, to the Nineties, I listened to the album Penny Century by Australian group The Clouds to and from work today. This is in preparation for their upcoming Retroactive concert at the Corner Hotel in Richmond, which I’m attending. I was a big Clouds fan back in the Nineties. If you haven’t heard of them, think of the Pixies with two female lead singers (or maybe Kim and Kelly Deal). Maybe the Breeders are more to the point. Noisy powerpop, with lyrics about serial killers, mythology, witchcraft, alchemy, vampires, surrealism, and sex, lots of sex. I think they’ll be flogging some vinyl copies of their albums, but I already have PC on vinyl. That was their first full length album, and what a good album it was. I saw them at the Corner on a similar retro tour about 12 years ago. Whenever they tour, I will be there. Please check them out on Spotify and listen to their very first song, Cloudfactory. It will convert you!

While on my van run today I continued with the Clouds playlist in prep for tomorrow’s concert. This time it was the Octopus mini album, then second full album, Thunderhead. So many great songs on those albums. Say It was a the big ‘hit’ from Octopus. About witchy doings, I remember Jodi dedicating it at a show at the Prince of Wales, St Kilda, to Elizabeth Montgomery (from Bewitched), who had just died. Ghost of Love Returned, from Thunderhead, is the definition of majestic, and dynamic. Starts off languid and all ‘when you’re without love/the sun don’t shine’, then Raff’s drums come in like thunder from the Gods as if to bring down the rain, which comes in the form of shimmering guitars. I love how it has not one but two false endings. When played live, it always revealed the newbies, who would clap at the first false ending (and sometimes the second). Last track, Rocket, ends with something like seven minutes of thunderstorm sounds, before the coda from Ghost returns one more time. They’re not called the Clouds for nothing. I’d forgotten how the song Domino features Jodi’s voice transposed down about a whole tone to make her sound like a man. This used to annoy me, so I made a remix where I transposed it back up to her normal range. I may put it on my song rebuilds page in future. Thunderhead was supposed to be the album to make them megastars, but they were so willfully experimental and perverse, as in what they did with Domino, that too many people were challenged by it. Even the big catchy single, Bower of Bliss, was covered in a fuzz vocal – and that’s before we get to them lyrics (‘such a beautiful thing is to fornicate…you can drink my piss’, yowsah!). What chance did it have? Anyway, that’s my theory. Of course, all of this is why they were so great.

Had a listen to some of the Favourites compilation by the Clouds in preparation for tonight’s concert. It’s an interesting compilation, including an extra disc called Pretty Greens featuring unreleased tracks. There are also some b-sides included, like Midwinter and their cover of Witchita Lineman, which are nice but not essential. And there is one glaring omission, in my opinion. Why on Earth isn’t Never Say Forever on there? I could add a few more, but this is always the way with compilation albums, isn’t it? I guess they were covering their bets with that title: this is their favourites, not yours or mine. I won’t say much here about the concert, since I’ll leave that for a full blog piece. I went, I had a good time, that’s it.

I saw in a newsagents today a copy of Uncut‘s 500 Greatest Albums of The 1980s magazine. Kate Bush was featured on the cover, which (spoiler alert) clued me in to what was probably album number one. Upon flicking through it, sure enough, her Hounds of Love was at number one. A damn good choice, I must say. Magazines thrive on these GOAT lists, and they’re interesting and sometimes enlightening, but ultimately they’re not to be taken too seriously. This one was already flawed in my eyes due to the lack of Australian albums (they start to show up later with AC/DC‘s Back In Black at 58). But it did get me thinking of what I’d put on my greatest 80s albums list. Here’s what might go in my top 10, in no particular order:

• Kate Bush – Hounds of Love
• Prefab Sprout – Steve McQueen
• The Go Betweens – 16 Lover’s Lane
• The Triffids – Born Sandy Devotional
• The Smiths – The Queen Is Dead
• REM – Life’s Rich Pageant
• Lloyd Cole & the Commotions – Rattlesnakes
• XTC – Skylarking
• The Pixies – Doolittle

I didn’t buy the mag…

A friend gave me and my brother a box of blurays he wanted to get rid of. Since it’s not in my nature to say no to such a request, we accepted them. It was fun rummaging through them for the goodies. They were largely of the action hero variety, with lots of Schwarzeneggers, Bruce Willis’s, Tom Cruises, you get the picture. I picked out some choice or interesting finds I want to watch in future, including: Looper, Predators, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2, Godzilla 2, The Lion King (live action version), The League of Gentlemen, The Gauntlet, all the Alien movies up to Covenant, Dead Pool 2, Master and Commander, We Were Soldiers, Gamer, Doom, F8 The Fate of the Furious, Atomic Blonde, Repo Men, Captain America Civil Wars, Eraser and Babylon A.D. Many of the others I’d already seen or owned, and some of these I’ve seen too, but god knows when I’ll find the time to watch them!

There were a couple of nice Twitter/X tweets I retweeted to my feed today. One was from ALIA, the Australian Library and Information Association, our peak body, which put out a protest about that stupid Cumberland City Council in NSW banning books about same sex parenting. It’s titled Protect the Freedom To Read. I think Cumberland City Council are the ones who should be banned. I mean, how behind the times are they? Just yesterday I was helping one of my library’s patrons, who mentioned she was getting books for her wife. And this was in sleepy old Croydon, Victoria – not the most progressive town. The other thing I retweeted, because it was so cute, was a thread of Photoshop Requests by Phillipong3. They were very silly and very punny and/or ridiculously literal and I couldn’t resist them. Check them out, but I’ll just mention one. First photo is of a young guy in a baseball cap. His request is ‘Can you make me more young?’ The second photo, or graphic, is of a squiggly sperm with the same baseball cap on! You have been warned.

I finished watching the Nijigasaki School Idol anime. I’d have to say I think it’s the weakest of the four School Idol shows I’ve seen. The music was beautiful, and much of the animation was terrific, but the story, what there was of it, and the characters, were under-developed. The main problem for me was how the School Idol club members decided to focus on solo idol activities, instead of going for group performances. A theme from this was ‘you are my friend and my rival’, which was an interesting change, but there was very little serious rivalry. Each of the first nine episodes highlighted one of the members, giving the story a fragmentary feel. One of the members, Rina, is so shy she often resorts to putting a smiley face-type board over her face, even when she performs. It begins to make sense, and can even be endearing (I liked the little power plug tail she wears), towards the end of the show, but it just looks weird and off-putting when seen in the title dance sequences. The finale has the girls putting on a festival around the buildings of Odaiba (the giant Gundam was spotted several times!), and because each member performs solo, the logistics of what they’re doing get a bit confusing. I mean, it was Idol, I liked it, it was super-kawaii and all that, but I’ve seen better.

Tickets for the Aespa concert went on sale today. I tried to get one, but the seating for those that were still available wasn’t good. I think I’ll wait until the concert gets closer and buy a resale ticket via Tixel. The MV teaser for new song Supernova just dropped and it looks pretty spectacular. I’ve got the new album, Armageddon, on order, and can’t wait to check it out.

I watched the first episode of Twice‘s new Time To Twice show, and it was, as usual, a lot of fun for us Onces. There’s a new title song and sequence, and the theme is Death Note, from the well-known manga and anime. The members are in this giant library with walls covered in books, and they’re tasked with finding their own death note book and some pens. A blue pen can erase a death, a black pen can cause a death. Of the game play so far, I can’t believe how mean Jihyo was, hiding some of the other member’s books. Nayeon got in on the act too, and both got some reverse-Karma for it. Damn, those members are super competitive! I like how this concept puts them all on a more level playing field. The previous TTT, set in a Squid Game park, with its daring climbing challenges, disadvantaged the scaredy-cats. Yes, I’m looking at you Momo and Nayeon! In this initial ep, my girl Mina won out supreme. She found her pens then sashayed up to a shelf, so calm, and found her death note book. Then she retreated to the ‘Death Zone’ to write her name in the book, in blue pen, thus giving herself a life. Her finals words to the camera were, ‘I will not die’. Yes, please don’t ever, my Minari! Blah, blah, blah, I’ll stop now….

I returned the Dusty Sings Soul album I borrowed back to the library today. Despite all those tracks, there was only one that I didn’t have – a nice song called Won’t Be Long, from 1965. I burned a copy and added it to my collection. I’m gonna call it a win! It’s not all that well known, but Dusty was gay. It must have been hard having all those expectations for her to be straight back in the sixties and seventies. And she definitely had her demons. There should have been so many more albums than there were. Guess I’m just grateful for what we got.

As usual, returning one item, and borrowing another – the hazards of working in a library! This time it was a dvd called Trumbo, about the blacklisted Hollywood writer Dalton Trumbo, starring the impeccable Bryan Cranston. It should be good. He wrote scripts for some interesting films: Papillon, Spartacus, Johnny Got His Gun, and an early favourite of mine, the eerie Five Came Back.

I watched Trumbo, the film I borrowed from my library the other day. Dalton Trumbo was a Hollywood screenwriter and member of the Communist Party, and the film was about his trials when he was blacklisted by the industry in the forties and fifties. Bryan Cranston, from Breaking Bad, played him, and the film was directed by Jay Roach, who directed the Austin Powers films (and is the husband of Susanna Hoffs). I must say I thought everything about this was great: the acting, the direction, the script (by John McNamara), the editing, the story, and the story’s pacing. McNamara’s script has been much criticized, but I thought it was sharp and funny. I think a lot of people just wanted to make a crack about the ‘irony’ of a film about a screenwriter where the script is the weakest thing about it. Once Trumbo is blacklisted, he is forced to write his scripts under pseudonyms. A couple of these get made into films that win Academy Awards for their scripts (Roman Holiday and The Brave Ones). But Trumbo cannot claim them. It’s only later, with the help of others (including actor Kirk Douglas) willing to stand up for him that his name is cleared and the blacklist, and those who support it, is defeated. It’s very interesting and appropriate that the two films he writes that bring him back to favour, Spartacus and Exodus, are accounts of slavery and liberation. But the film doesn’t hit us over the head with that connection. It seems right that Trumbo’s story has a certain amount of didacticism about it, as that was often how he wrote – and probably why he was blacklisted in the first place. It’s about making films with a conscience, with some heart, to say something important and meaningful. And I’m here for it.

I read more of the novel Timescape on the train to and from the gig. I’m over half-way now. There are lots of details I don’t remember from the first time I read it. Some chapters seem to veer off from the story, they feature domestic details about the character’s lives with hardly any mention of either the ongoing crisis in 1998, or the efforts to communicate with the past in 1962. There’s an interesting detail in a restaurant dinner scene in the 1960s storyline where main character Gordon’s girlfriend, Penny, mentions Philip Dick’s excellent novel The Man in the High Castle. It’s a pointed, and very meta, reference to the idea of split timelines that features in that novel. It got me thinking that the author, Gregory Benford, is inserting subtle hints that the characters’ timeline in the future is changing. Benford’s characters wrestle with the possibility of paradoxes and ways of overcoming them, and his solutions to them are intriguing – if not always completely comprehensible. It’s a good book. I’m looking forward to reading the new sequel.