Mixtapery: Like What? (2011)

In preparation for my end of year review posts I have discovered that my previous means of uploading my mixtapes/playlists have become a little outmoded. Three years of not sharing digitally will have that effect I suppose. So this first mixtape post is both an experiment and a preview of what's to come if all goes well.

I have a penchant for making mixtapes for my friends that dates back to actual cassette tapes, I'm sure my evolution to cd's and mp3 playlists is similar to a lot of people so I'm not making a massive hipster deal out of this fact. In general I made 3 or 4 a year at my peak and finished with an end of year "best of" for Christmas presents. Like What? was the most recent instalment of this practice, finished back in December 2011 and actually represents the last time I could be bothered to put something together. I was so lazy I didn't even make a real piece of artwork for it. Instead I provide you with this:

Looking at what I have started to put together for the 2012 edition and comparing it to this one, the similarities stand out as quite an indictment of how lazy in finding new music I have become in the past 12 months.

So what new things have I tried with this digital experiment? I have uploaded a complete zip folder of all 16 tracks if you feel like getting your hands on 95mb of music. I signed up to f**eb**k with a fake account so I could access Spotify and created a playlist too. It should be embedded below if things have gone smoothly and underneath is a link to the playlist within Spotify if you prefer. I have noticed however that one track is not available through Spotify, blame the label/band for being shortsighted.

I'd love some feedback on the modes of sharing as well as the mixtape itself, suggestions for other methods of sharing that might work for future mixtapes and of course feel free to share your own mixtapes with me, plus anything else that comes to mind too.

Full tracklisting:
1. Burying Davy by The Decemberists
2. Home Is A Fire by Death Cab For Cutie
3. Septemberism by Man Overboard
4. Santiago by The Kabeedies
5. Our Perfect Disease by The Wombats
6. Violence by Pegasus Bridge
7. Freud Links The Teeth And The Heart by Tellison
8. Songs About Your Girlfriend by Los Campesinos!
9. Simple Math by Manchester Orchestra
10. I'm Not Made Of Eyes by General Fiasco
11. Do You Want Me (Dead?) by All Time Low
12. It Doesn't Feel A Thing Like Falling by Taking Back Sunday
13. 200x by Johnny Foreigner
14. Since You've Been Gone (My Heart Swells) by Elephants
15. Let's Kill Tonight by Panic! At The Disco
16. I Can Show You by Tim & Jean




Like What? (2011) at Spotify

Book Review: Piercing by Ryu Murakami (1994)

Piercing by Ryū Murakami

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Blurb: In Piercing, Murakami, in his own unique style, explores themes of child abuse and what happens to the voiceless among us, weaving a disturbing, spare tale of two people who find each other and then are forced into hurting each other deeply because of the haunting specter of their own abuse as children. Piercing is set in Tokyo and follows Kawashima Masayuki trying to come to terms with his overwhelming desire to stab his infant child with an Ice Pick. He resolves to divert the impulse into an unsuspecting prostitute. However as he begins to execute his meticulous crime everything, including his past, begins to unravel.

Thoughts: This was a seriously dark read. I'm not sure if you can really call Piercing an enjoyable read in the traditional sense but as with my previous Ryu Murakami experience this trip in to the world of two damaged little fuckers was incredibly satisfying.

"Ten nights ago. He was in the bathtub with the baby, having just finished washing her. He handed her over to Yoko, who was waiting with a fluffy bath towel, and then he leaned back in the tub, leaving the pebbled-glass shower door partially open. Yoko was murmuring to the baby as she dried her, and he was aware of himself smiling at them. And then, with no prelude or warning, a thought came percolating up into his brain and he felt the muscles of his cheeks twitch and freeze.

'I wouldn’t ever stab that baby with an ice pick, would I?' "

The content is at times quite disturbing in it's descriptions of physical torture but possibly even more disturbing is the empathy and compassion you find yourself feeling for these two people who are clearly not entirely sane. Whilst this literary descent in to a nightmare world has the potential to be gore-filled the prose is actually restrained, using it's language sparingly to convey maximum effect and grim imagery. This is horror but not as we ordinarily consider it.

The writing of The Other Murakami is something wonderful to immerse yourself in and so very impressive for that very reason. Any moment I had to stop reading I found myself constantly thinking about the characters and the situation they were in, almost desperate to go back to it and find out what would happen.

“In heated rooms, he often felt the outlines of his body, the border between him and the external world, grow disturbingly fuzzy.”

It's a nerve shredding, adrenaline rush of a novel that leaves you turning the page in eager anticipation and whilst I cannot recommend this for everyone because of the hard to swallow content I feel it is something that deserves to be read by anyone not easily offended.

World cinema fans will know what it is like to experience the dark imagination of Ryu Murakami already; he is the author of Audition, the novel that Takashi Miike adapted for his shocking and disturbing movie of the same name, and whilst Piercing is not at that same level it still packs a real punch on multiple levels. I would highly recommend this to anyone looking to explore their literary boundaries and suggest following it up with the even more impressive In The Miso Soup.

Further Viewing Suggestions:
Audition
American Psycho
Lost Highway

Additional Reading:
In The Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami
Out by Natsuo Kirino
Requiem For A Dream by Hubert Selby Jr.

View all my book reviews

Birthday Double Feature Movie Review: Looper (2012) & Lawless (2012)

As mentioned yesterday, it was my 30th birthday and for an extra special treat we went to see two of the movies from 2012 that I actually wanted to see as a double feature. Hopes were high and by now some of you have already been made aware of my disappointment, but for those who aren't here's my brief reviews.

Looper by Rian Johnson
3.5 out of 5 stars

Blurb: In the futuristic action thriller Looper, time travel will be invented - but it will be illegal and only available on the black market. When the mob wants to get rid of someone, they will send their target 30 years into the past, where a "looper" - a hired gun, like Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) - is waiting to mop up. Joe is getting rich and life is good... until the day the mob decides to "close the loop," sending back Joe's future self (Bruce Willis) for assassination.

Thoughts: Unnecessary is the word that comes to mind the most when thinking about this film. So much of it feels stupid and lazy and that's without even considering the pathetic and generic tropey Emily Blunt.

But then when you consider this is probably Bruce Willis's best performance in at least ten years, JGL superb playing Bruce Willis (despite how creepy he looks), a scene with two of the finest young actors in Hollywood opposite each other (watching JGL and Paul Dano face off was easily my highlight,) Jeff Daniels who just gets better with age (if he doesn't win an Oscar before he retires it will be a crying shame and for a lack of decent scripts) AND a kid who makes Jodelle Ferland look normal, things kind of even out.

Emily Blunt needs to stop appearing in films. I desperately wanted somebody to shoot her in the face in one of the action scenes but SPOILER ALERT it doesn't happen. END SPOILER ALERT There are so many talented young actresses out there I'm sure so it is beyond me as to why this talentless woman still gets roles. It didn't help that her entire storyline seemed completely UNNECESSARY.

My man Simon had this to say: "Could have been two really good and different films. Instead it was a Frankenstein's monster that they forgot to fix legs on before animating," which seems quite perfect to me. That Total Film put their name to the "this decades The Matrix" quote says a lot about the kind of hyperbole expected of film magazines at the moment and I suggest everyone takes a deep breath before writing such untruthful nonsense in future.



I'm not saying this is a bad movie, it's just not as good as it thinks it is and the (surely) paid for reviews led us to believe. Rian Johnson has some great ideas, the sci-fi noir thriller angle he starts with would have been enough to make this a very good movie on its own for example and his imagining of a near future filled with near poverty and renewable energy sources retro fitted to current petrol burning cars was quite perfect but it loses its way in trying to be more complex than needed.



Lawless by John Hillcoat
3 out of 5 stars

Blurb: The mostly true story of the infamous Bondurant Brothers: bootlegging siblings who made a run for the American Dream in Prohibition-era Virginia. In this epic gangster tale, inspired by true-life tales of author Matt Bondurant’s family in his novel "The Wettest County In The World", the loyalty of three brothers is put to the test against the backdrop of the nation’s most notorious crime wave.



Thoughts: With the team of Cave and Hillcoat it is inevitable that comparisons are made to The Proposition, their earlier Australian "western" which featured fantastic performances and beautiful direction, this is clearly detrimental to your enjoyment as Lawless fails to live up to their previous high standard despite some great performances.

Nick Cave writes by the numbers stories, sure he embellishes a little and adds a little poetry but in this case it's still predictable and filled with cliche. I think that despite it being his adaptation he shouldn't take all of the blame for the plot failures, the historical fiction novel it is adapted from was written by somebody who used his own family history and placed it in the patented prohibition gangster plot generator to give us many obvious plot points and a quite possibly unrealistically heroic portrait of the Bondurant Brothers.



John Hillcoat directs just fine and dandy, he makes his movies look beautiful with the help of his more than capable DoP but still when push comes to shove the film loses appeal because it's all so predictable from the opening scene.

Gary Oldman could have used a couple of minutes/hours more screen time and Tom Hardy was his usual high quality but the acting highlight naturally came from Guy "Shotgun Ed" Pearce. It's Pearce vs McConnaughey for actor of the year and I think Bongos will win for Killer Joe alone but Pearce really does push him close thanks to his performance as the effeminate yet psychotic US Marshall (or whatever he is) Charlie Rakes.

I've already been told I have issues from crazed Looper fans but feel free to jump on the bandwagon criticising me for my own personal opinions and tastes on movies in the comments below.