Month: December 2023

So that was the old year

One of the greatest pieces of growing up I’ve achieved was finally recognising that I don’t HAVE to “do something” just because it’s the 31st of December. I always used to feel the need to mark the occasion, mostly because I was younger and “doing something” for NYE seemed important for some reason… to which end I actually went into the city for the fireworks a couple of times, 1994 and ’97 if I recall rightly—a sign of how much younger I obviously was if I found that tolerable enough to do twice, I obviously had far more patience then—but eventually the sense of having to do something grew wearying. And going anywhere also involved the potential difficulty of getting back home again.

Eventually I kind of snapped one year when the taxi I booked to take me to the club I was looking forward to going to never showed up, and thereafter I resolved that I wasn’t leaving the house again on NYE unless I had a really fantastic place to go and someone to take me there and back. I have stuck to that since then (friends are running a club in Newtown I’m sure I’d have a nice time at, but I can’t be arsed enough). So my NYE has been writing this gibberish, watching Dinner for One for the umpteenth time on SBS, having one of those Coles microwave curries for dinner… a life of excitement, hey.

Anyway. I made it through a whole calendar year without any medical procedures being done to me other than a normal blood test. Haven’t actually been operated on as such since 2021, but last year (there’s still a few hours left in which I can call 2022 “last year”) I had an invasive-ish heart exam that meant spending several hours at POWH. Mind you, lying back and watching the ceiling move when you’re on fentanyl was surprisingly entertaining. Otherwise, I spent four years in a row (2018 to ’21) going to and from POWH to get my left leg cut open for blood clots. It’s been nice having a whole year off from that, though I suppose I should actually go and get scanned again to make sure it’s still OK and not going to kill me… But yeah, I suppose the highlight of 2023 really was not doing something rather than something I did. Perhaps in 2024 we can change that…

Why don’t we end the year as I started it? The first proper post I made after the introductory one was We Rate Dogs’ Dogs of 2022 video, and I think the 2023 version seems like a good note on which to end things for 2023. Good boys and girls all.

The state of the blog

So, back to that Simon Reynolds article I mentioned in passing the other day…

The blogging circuit I joined was only one corner of an ever-growing blogosphere. Even within music, my blog’s primary focus, there was a whole other – and larger – network of MP3 blogs. Still, my particular neighbourhood was bustling all through the 2000s. Out of its fractious ferment emerged cult figures such as K-punk, aka Mark Fisher, one of the most widely read and revered leftwing thinkers of our time, and the prolific cultural critic and author Owen Hatherley. Then there were those like me, who fit a different archetype: already a professional writer but someone who relished the freedom of style and tone offered by blogging.
Today, there are still plenty of active music blogs I enjoy reading. But what’s changed – what’s gone – is inter-blog communication. The argumentative back and forth, the pass-the-baton discussions that rippled across the scene, the spats and the feuds – these are things of the past. If community persists, it’s on the level of any individual blog’s comment box. I prize the unusual perspectives and weird erudition of my regular commenters, while wondering why so few of them operate their own blogs.

I found this the most interesting point he raises in the article. That conversation that used to keep the blogosphere going 20 years ago—and yes it is a bit disconcerting to realise it was that long ago, and I was part of that scene myself with the legendary in its own lunchtime Hot Buttered Death—doesn’t seem to be there now in whatever remains of that blogosphere (I think Youtube is where that sort of community has moved). I, of course, don’t do anything to encourage conversation here cos my own comments section is resolutely shut and no one seems willing to spend time on an email… I don’t exactly do anything to advertise this place’s existence so I was never overwhelmed with commenters anyway, I think I’ve had precisely one real commenter and some trolls, some of which were using the same IP and I think I know who that was (HI JAMES if you’re still reading and it was indeed you). I mean, they were never going to get posted anyway cos I had all comments set to be moderated first, but why waste my time if that was all I was getting anyway? May as well just disable the fucking things and be done with it.

Anyway, Reynolds also says he’s not actually bothered by this anyway, and would still be blogging even if no one were reading. This is much like myself, in that I’m doing this while hardly anyone is reading… I mean, look at my recent visitor stats:

I’m not exactly a hub of activity for other people, am I? Which is fine, it doesn’t really bother me, cos this is for my own interest and my own record more than anything. But am I writing about the things I want to write about? Reynolds again:

…one of the great things about blogging, for a professional journalist, is that you can write about topics that aren’t topical. You are unshackled from schedules. An old record or TV programme you’ve stumbled on, or simply remembered, is fair game.

And this is the thing: I find myself having written a lot of stuff here that is immediately topical, political stuff, Oolong’s increasing derangement, whatever the fuck’s happening in Ukraine, vanishing subs, kings getting crowned, nuclear material going missing, etc… and to be sure some of this is kind of important (or at least sufficiently amusing or irritating) stuff worth discussing… but it’s not really what I envisaged this blog being. As of now there’s 594 posts on here and nearly 140 of those are tagged “politics”. That’s nearly a quarter of all the posts on here. To be honest, I’m not 100% sure what I wanted this blog to be—I think I envisaged something more arts-based a la John Coulthart’s blog—but I don’t think it was a repository of political discourse.

And, to be even more honest, the fact that it’s not quite turned out as I’d thought it would is largely down to me. It’s because I’m hardly reading anything, hardly watching anything, and definitely not creating anything. I’m not exactly going many places and photographing things, and in any case all I have is my phone camera which leaves an awful lot to be desired. I don’t even know if it’s worth investing in a proper new camera or not. So I’m a bit hamstrung on the visual front, and even more so on the literary front. All quiet on the musical front, too. (Or maybe this is my creative outlet?)

This is a general slump I’m in, and I know I’ve let myself get into it, and at least some of why that is. I’m in a Youtube rut, I’m watching a stupid amount of that instead of the stupid number of films and TV shows I’ve accrued (though my burnout on film and TV had been going on for years before YT became such a centre of gravity for me), to say nothing of the ludicrous number of books I’ve acquired. I don’t do new year’s resolutions, but this is something I have to make myself rectify in 2024. I’ve already observed elsewhere how I’m trying to cut back on the political content, though that’s going to be hard in 2024 what with a certain election coming up in November and what will no doubt be the endless bullshit surrounding that for months beforehand… still, the effort has to be made.

And it’s not that I’m not happy with the blog in general, I’m actually quite pleased with it and I’m having fun with it. But I am undeniably in a kind of rut and I have to do something to pull myself out of it. I need to start reading more and watching more. And to start writing more of the stuff I intended to write more of.

Actually it was about ethics in games journalism

Amazing. This is the sort of thing that should be enough to end Nikki Haley’s political career, but this is America going into 2024 that we’re dealing with here and recent polls have apparently had her second only to Drumpf in some states, so she’ll probably be just fine. Guardian notes that she apparently did agree it was about slavery in a radio interview the next day, but the lesson we should take from the war is all the other “yay capitalism” bullshit she mentioned… Guardian also notes at the end that when South Carolina—the state of which Haley used to be governor—seceded from the union in 1860, it specifically invoked slavery and other states’ hostility towards slavery as its reason for doing so. You’d think she would’ve known that. Probably she does, and she still went all “but muh freedumbs”…

Yes. That was all she needed to say about slavery. Instead, she really answered that bloke’s question. Fool.

Fear

Simon Reynolds had an interesting piece in the Graun the other day about why he still blogs years after blogging passed its peak. There’s a number of interesting points it raises, and I might come back to discuss those, but I want to look in particular at a blog post he highlights in the article called “Wiki-Fear“:

I call it Wiki-Fear. You know what I’m talking about. That twinge of apprehension just before clicking open a Wikipedia entry. It could be a song, an album, an artist. Something new to me – or something I’ve known for years without ever knowing much about. The trepidation comes from experience: there’s a pretty good chance you’ll learn something that’ll spoil your enjoyment. […]
Thing is, as much as you might strive to separate singer and song, follow the adage “trust the art, not the artist,” you can’t unknow these things once you’ve learned them. I sometimes forget the details (my brain these days being sieve-like when it comes to input sticking) but a tinge of uneasiness clings on. And it’s easy to refresh that knowledge – it’s just a click away.
Despite all this, it’s still irresistible to go searching on the Internet, when you’ve just listened to (or watched or read) something new and exciting, or when you’ve rediscovered an old favorite about which you never knew much simply because there was nowhere to go to find out. And often the things you find out end up enriching your enjoyment. Or they are just interesting tidbits that sit harmlessly alongside the enjoyment. But always there’s the possibility that you’ll discover something nasty.

This, alas, was timely cos that very thing happened for me a couple of days ago with the passing of Richard Franklin, beloved of Doctor Who fans as Captain Mike Yates during Jon Pertwee’s tenure… Yates was interesting cos he was one of the reasonably rare secondary characters on the show to have a proper character arc, in that he gets hypnotised to kill the Doctor in “The Green Death” and the trauma from that leads him to become part of Operation Golden Age in “Invasion of the Dinosaurs”, leading to him quitting UNIT but redeeming himself in “Planet of the Spiders”. Popular character, popular actor, and Franklin’s passing on Christmas Day aged 87 obviously made a lot of people sad; it drove me to look him up on Wiki to see what else he’d done, and I found his career encompassed quite a number of things, theatre (acting and criticism), writing, various TV roles, Big Finish audios, a Star Wars film… and politics. As part of UKIP.

In fairness to him, his political career does seem to have started with the Liberal Democrats in the early 90s, a time when I gather the LibDems were still respectable before Nick Clegg took them into their incomprehensible coalition with the Tories, but he evidently shifted right soon enough; a few years later he was standing as part of the Referendum Party, a Eurosceptic mob that helped pave the way for UKIP, for whom he stood as a candidate in 2001. After that he formed his own party, the Silent Majority Party, and, well, “Silent Majority” is a phrase that should always set a cloister bell ringing about the person using it.

So yeah, RIP Richard Franklin, but Reynolds is right, unfortunately: you can’t unknow these things, and that tinge of uneasiness is going to linger now…

“The Church on Ruby Road”

OK, so I knew about the goblin song:

This actually got released as a sort of teaser for the Xmas episode a few weeks ago. Eyebrows were raised about it, mostly because of the lyrics about eating babies. Somehow, though, I never got around to actually hearing it myself, and I’m actually kind of glad about that cos hearing it in the special for the first time with the accompanying visuals made it… something else. I knew about the song. Someone I was still not prepared for the full musical number, especially when the Doctor and new companion Ruby join in. And when the lyrics about eating babies accompany images of a newborn baby about to be devoured by the goblin king… JESUS FUCK. The goblins could actually be one of the most conceptually horrible monsters on the show since the Wirrn.

So yes, good stuff, perhaps more “New Who” than New Who has been before. Ncuti Gatwa OWNS the lead role immediately. I said in my last review how he broke the usual mould of the Doctor being at least somewhat malfunctional after regeneration, how he was pretty much immediately on top of things, and he’s even more so here. Authoritative straight away. Him and Millie Gibson are going to be a very solid team. Given that we apparently won’t be seeing his first full season proper until May or something, though, I’ve got plenty of time to watch Sex Education so I can catch up on his TV career so far…

A Christmas Carol (1977)

I thought it was time I finally watched a film, or something approximating thereto, cos otherwise my Letterboxd record for 2023 would’ve just been the Doctor Who specials… so I picked something suitable for the season, the evidently not terribly well-known BBC TV version from 1977 which I have as part of a DVD box set of assorted other BBC Dickens adaptations from the 80s and 90s. It’s very… mid-70s BBC, for want of a better description, weighing in under an hour and shot on video entirely in studio, which gives it a very particular visual and aural character (a fair bit of it uses candle lighting, which looks kind of delightful even on video). One of its technical tricks is the use of line illustrations combined with  CSO, which makes for an interesting way of opening things up a bit albeit one that doesn’t entirely work; it’s kind of an experimental technique in an otherwise quite straight production, so it felt a bit out of place (and the limitations of CSO mean it’s particularly rough in the credits sequence).

It’s not bad as such but it’s also kind of dry, though it does conjure up a certain sort of Victorian gothic atmosphere, and Michael Hordern is very fine in the lead role (this was his third go round with his story, having been Marley’s ghost in the previous two). And, being under an hour long, I’ve seen some criticism that it wasn’t long enough, but to be honest I don’t think I would’ve wanted this to be any longer than it is.