I just remembered that I wasn't all that impressed by Watchmen when it first came out - and it came out right when I was the ideal target consumer for the COMICS AIN'T JUST FER KIDS NO MORE! thing. And I've never felt the urge to ever reread it, unlike Swamp Thing and Miracleman. It seemed too clunky and ponderous reading it in its monthly installments and the ending was too obvious and one-dimensional to anyone who had read, say, Theodore Sturgeon's "Occam's Scalpel" (1971), a faked-alien-invasion-unites-the-world story with a twist. I have more (ha ha) to say when I have a free minute or a free hand...

Dan Thibodeau's Alternative Map of Alternative Austin - 1987. When everyone and their armadillo was still pretty stoned, I guess.

Via bagrec, Johann Hari interviews Martin Amis for tomorrow's Independent. It all ends in tears, sort of:

As I stumble out into the Primrose Hill drizzle, I feel like I have been watching a boxing match in Amis’ brain. He waves goodbye and shuts the door. I stand at the gate, wondering if the Steyn-hugging round-‘em-up impulses – speaking with his father’s sneering voice – will deliver a knock-out blow to the other Martin: the nuclear-disarming multiracialist who remembers his Muslim girlfriends with a sweet smile. I hope not. If the fantasies prevail, one of our best novelists will disappear, raving, into the long Eurabian night.

The Steyn-approving Amis is a sad thing to behold, for me at least. Amis was the first novelist I bought in hardback, and went on buying his books from Money through to The War Against Cliche and Experience. He was the writer I judged new English writers by - how they failed to be him or how they fought so desperately to be different to him. His books captured the mad fascination with the impasto of modern life, the vertiginous wonder of the downward spiral. I remember when I lived in London that the sight of people reading London Fields on trains made me feel that I was living in some hallucinogenic meta-fiction. I would quote his words without realizing.

But now... It's not that he doesn't get it but that he makes such an elaborate, convoluted public balls-up of not getting it. I think Hari nails it when he says that Amis never really believed in anything until recently, that his early work was so dense and enticing because they were nothing but layer upon layer of fascinating surface with no stodgy message at heart, like those Russian nesting dolls. He was, like Nabokov, all style. It feels now like some once bright star has imploded and is now a barely luminous giant blob barely casting any light at all.

I have trouble coming up with guilty musical pleasures as I always end up thinking that what I've considered my suppressed, shameful, unutterable indulgence is really rather good and transcends the trappings of its time and I start feeling smug about my wide-ranging and undogmatic tastes.

But this... this, I think, is pure, squirm-inducing guilt, every pixel and bit dripping with feverishly overexcited, hysterical 80s wrongness. The drum sound alone is enough to make me want to surrender to the authorities.



Now where's the video for "Stop Using Sex As A Weapon"?

My theme song over at WFMU's Beware of the Blog.

If your boss ever tells you to stop blogging about Target and Chuck-E-Cheese and get on with some work, get on to Hugh Hewitt. He'll mobilize the forces to ensure you go on getting (reportedly) $92K pa for six 250 word columns a week.

Currently loving Berntholer's Merry Lines in the Sky. Early 80s Belgian band, released two singles then fell apart leaving an hour of demos that only saw the light of day in 2004. Perfectly epitomizes that strand of post-punk that rejected everything to do with rock for a breezy sort of near minimalism, spacious, leisurely, entirely European....

Guess I should be too amazed to find the spinetinglingly gorgeous "My Suitor" on YouTube....

Is it really 25 years? Nothing defines that time more succinctly and bittersweetly for me than the Associates on Top of the Pops.

18 Carat Love Affair




Club Country



And is it ten years since Billy MacKenzie died? After 1982's Sulk, his work didn't do it for me but it devastated me when I heard he had committed suicide back in 1997 (and I only recently got around to listening to the Beyond the Sun album he was working on at the time). The following had me glad to have a cubicle where nobody could see a couple of not very manly tears fall....

Beyond the Sun

Dig out four year old CD of miscellaneous MP3 files.

Play at random and bore people with the results:

01. The Bonzo Dog Band - Jazz, Delicious Hot, Disgusting Cold
02. The Adverts -New Church
03. Spizzenergi - Soldier, Soldier
04. Judy Nylon - Information Rain
05. Raincoats - Adventures Close To Home
06. Sparks - This Town Ain't Big Enough For The Both Of Us
07. Toktok Vs Soffy O. - Missy Queen's Gonna Die
08. Maximum Joy - Let It Take You There
09. ...And The Native Hipsters - There goes Concorde Again
10. Fad Gadget - Lady Shave
11. The Pop Group - She Is Beyond Good And Evil
12. Soft Cell - Entertain Me
13. The Gun Club - Sex Beat
14. Vitalic - Pony (Pt 1)
15. Boards of Canada - Melissa Juice
16. Television Personalities - Part Time Punks

Meanwhile, delving back through the aeons as one does on a boring Friday afternoon, this is how we all dressed in the mid-80s in Leeds.



Not really. But this is (or was) Vicious Pink, who I thought only ever made one record, "My Private Tokyo," as Vicious Pink Phenomena in 1982 and only really existed as Soft Cell's backing vocalists. But they persisted and even had an album released, although only in Canada. And still have one or two fans, it seems. You can hear some of their mid-80s stuff, possibly remixed, here. Very "of its time" you might say. Josie, the one on the left, was the subject of at least one of the Sisters of Mercy's more anguished songs, although probably before she started to dress like this. And Brian, the one on the right (who is still playing tunes with eyecatching ladies), gave one of the Sisters of Mercy a good thrashing round the back on the Warehouse club in Leeds one night w.r.t. Josie, although he probably wasn't dressed like that either. Ah, sweet memories!