Dead Man’s Bones (Eponymous)

‘Dead Man’s Bones’ is a high concept, slightly but charmingly pretentious alt-rock opus of the kind favoured by The Flaming Lips, and  a (presumably deliberate) homage to the understated weirdness of The Langley Schools Music Project,  an inadvertent quasi-outsider classic recorded in the Seventies as a music class endeavour.  The Langley project featured children’s innocently warped interpretations of songs they probably barely even understood, such as ‘God Only Knows’, ‘Space Oddity’ and ‘Mandy’; ‘Dead Man’s Bones’ exploits this phenomenon self-consciously and in a much more musically accomplished and credible way, since it also involves adult musicians. To some extent it will always be a cheap shortcut to creepiness when you deliberately encourage children to sing inappropriate or non sequitur things (“We won’t destroy you!” they assure us, merrily. Slightly off-key, a bit too loud: “Like a lamb to the slaughter, I’m buried in water…”) But so what if it’s cheap? Here it works beautifully, and it really does feature the Silverlake Conservatory of Music Children’s Choir as fully integrated contributors to the sound of almost every song; this includes intelligent and effective use of their mistakes, their  excitable chatter and the general messiness and wavering focus of children. It just wouldn’t be the same without them.

OK, I got halfway through this write up without mentioning that Dead Man’s Bones defies precedent and stereotype by virtue of it being a successful, vanity-free and wholly unshameful musical project by two actors, one of whom is the recently but fully accredited Indie Dreamboat Ryan Gosling, who has in recent years been firing on all cylinders in small but perfectly formed films like Half Nelson and Lars & the Real Girl. Both of these films are well worth seeing, incidentally, although probably not in the same sitting. Watching both in quick succession would probably induce some form of emotional whiplash; the former is a sombre adaptation of a stage play about a functioning addict who teaches at an inner-city school and forms an intense relationship with an ambitious student, the latter film is an odd but jolly story about a painfully shy Christian’s love for a silicone sex doll in a tiny town that somewhat resembles a high fructose version of Twin Peaks. I suspect he’s potentially as musically versatile as he is as an actor, but it’s still hard to imagine Gosling’s unusual, warbling voice finding a better showcase than the school-play-in-a-bad-dream trappings of this record.

Frieze Art Fair

(October 2009 at Regent’s Park, London)

Although one of my job descriptions is “artist”, I’d actually managed to avoid visiting London’s annual showcase for the major [sic] commercial art galleries.  They call it an art fair, I’m more comfortable calling it a bourgeois crapfest. Many ironies are evident, but the most ironic irony of all is that most of the galleries who reliably fork out to be present at these things don’t seem to even know- or won’t admit- that capitalism is actually all about selling things. Frieze represents capitalism at its most baroque, with all the flourishes and frills and mannerisms of a commodity culture but devoid of any actual commodities or any significant commerce taking place because there’s nothing worth buying and everybody involved is still coyly cloaking themselves in the conceit that it isn’t about money at all. The whole affair is totally weird and irrational, like cargo cultists making fake airports in the jungle, or radios and fridges from bits of old wood, all in the hope of somehow provoking the manna of capitalism to fall from the sky. All they really understand is that they’ve seen it happen to other people and that they want to partake of that kind of plenitude. In fact they feel entitled to it.

I know that art and artists are almost beside the point for most of the to-the-manor-born elite who’ve got their fingers in the skanky old mechanically-recovered meat pie that is the international art industry, but I do want to talk about the art on show. It’s no surprise that for the most part it falls into distinct categories which can also be regularly seen in contemporary art galleries throughout the world. You could turn this into a game the next time you visit such a place. I must say that I enjoyed Frieze Art Fair immensely once I started looking at it as an overblown and three dimensional art world version of Top Trumps.

At Frieze, or other major art events and biennales, you will see:

[a] Broken up furniture, bits of dirty old wood, piles of twigs, or some combination of the aforementioned. Usually stacked against the wall or slung casually in a corner…. BUT IT’S IN A WHITE GALLERY SPACE. This is only mindblowing if you’re from the 19th century and/or if you still haven’t got to grips with the implications of Marcel Duchamp’s urinal which was about ninety years ago. A shrewd buyer could probably go around Regent’s Park and scrounge up enough furniture legs and lumber to make a coffee table and a few dining chairs, but I find it hard to believe this stuff is commercial, popular, or could sustain any artist’s career. Ergo, it’s hard to imagine why commercial galleries or major institutions have such a persistent interest in it. A clear subcategory was also apparent: patronising “recontextualisations” of china ornaments or other working class ephemera. You know, like you might see in a prole’s “front room”.

[b] Multiple (and in many cases utterly blatant) copies of work by well-known artists, the kind of thing that any respectable art teacher would castigate as plagiarism and lazy thinking. How many paintings of vertical stripes does one planet need? Why is the adolescent sloganeering of unimaginative artists still almost exclusively executed either in badly painted placards or wall-mounted neon tubes? In a few cases, closer inspection reveals that these works were in fact made by the brand name artists you first guessed at… except that they’re scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel stuff that wouldn’t be exposed in public by an artist who had any integrity whatsoever, done by artists who I doubt even need the money.

[c] Wrongly scaled photography. The natural size and format of photography is in no way comparable to that of a huge, academic painting from the nineteenth century, but it seems to be where everyone’s aiming by default. Apparently this nearly two hundred year old art form still isn’t entirely legitimate or Fine Art in some peoples’ eyes, there’s still an inferiority complex and they think that photography needs to be presented like a big old oil painting. Occasionally photography benefits from being on a large scale. A great example of this is Andreas Gursky’s work, which usually consists of incredibly detailed and busy human environments. In his case, the large format not only works visually but is indeed necessary to proper appreciation of the work. To most of the other artists and galleries at Frieze: your image does not need to be two meters tall and mounted on the latest super-expensive substrate. Who knows, maybe one of the main criteria for art buyers really is sheer surface area, otherwise they don’t think they’re getting value for money; it’s the only explanation I can think of for many of these photography works being so enormous, because neither the subject matter nor the quality of the work warrants such elephantine prints.

[d] Just plain bad paintings. More or less objectively bad, bad as in shoddy technique, bad as in poor observation, bad as in tired subject matter. There were a bunch that actually looked like vandalised portraits of characters from Spongebob Squarepants, and there was a striking female nude apparently painted by somebody who only had half an hour to spare and was entirely ignorant of what a naked human being’s body actually looks like. Not being able to do hands is a common problem, and understandable if you’re fifteen and doing art at GCSE level. If you’re selling in a professional gallery and doing  naturalistic figurative work, you should probably learn to convincingly paint a person. You’ll sell more paintings that way, incidentally. Also  present, a large quantity of girly, kawaii and decora fluff from Japanese and Korean galleries and artists. It’s getting a bit tiresome now, and it’s so shallow that it’s barely there at all. But these Asian offerings at least show some indications of knowing their own market and being saleable, albeit to someone with horrifically bad taste and more money than sense. Which, to be honest, probably describes most art buyers in the world.

[e] Galleries showing very little of anything at all. Most of them foreign, from diverse parts of the world but all united in the sense that their stands provoked exactly the same question from me: “You paid vast sums of money to Frieze and you came all the way from {Bulgaria/Portugal/China/etc} and this is what you decided to show?” This being in most cases a situationist banner or two, a miniscule and really bad abstract painting, an old film projector, a tiny and intellectually opaque conceptual installation, or something of that ilk. This, of course, brings us full circle to my cargo cult analogy; these galleries can only be at Frieze in the knowledge that most of the people they normally deal with will not have been present in London, so the galleries can say they have the imprimatur of Frieze and they’re in that Frieze world, like truant schoolkids turning up for morning registration at a posh private school and then bunking off for the rest of the day to do coke behind the refectory. When they leave, of course, the posh private school is all anybody sees on the CV.

I had fun at Frieze, but it was mainly because the unrelenting barrage of bad art pushed me into a kind of hysterical trance where I was able to find this aspect of the art world hilarious and absurd rather than merely depressing and ugly, as I normally do.

So, does anyone else want to do a massive Salon des Refusés (or Salon des Ignorés) next year?

Mythologies

(12^th March—25^th April 2009 at Haunch of Venison, London)

Haunch of Venison’s giant group exhibition at the Burlington Gardens building previously occupied by the Museum of Mankind claims to respond to the history of the place and its former display of cultural paraphernalia, but fails to deliver almost from the moment you walk through the doors. An obvious problem is that the majority of the work on show bears little apparent relevance to the stated themes, nor does it jibe with the equally strident appeals to the building’s history. This strategy can hardly do anything but backfire. Instead of the promised Wunderkammer we’re subjected to a cavalcade of irrelevance, art that only a curator could love. There’s very little to stir either the intellect or the emotions, most of the work doesn’t connect with anything or anybody (let alone with mythology or ethnology), and apart from a predictably glib and vulgar Damian Hirst effort most of it probably lacks any monetary value to the artists or to anybody else. What we’re left with is a large-scale demonstration of artists and curators blithely sidestepping the primary, secondary and tertiary reasons for contemporary art to exist. This tendency in big gallery art is analogous to the human appendix: mostly harmless, occasionally swollen, but in either case a person can go on with their lives perfectly well without it.

The only work that stands up at all is by artists who either by general inclination or by accident find themselves in relatively close compliance with the exhibition’s avowed intent. There’s some perverse curatorial self-sabotage at work, though, since these are the works that seem to get short shrift in terms of textual interpretation. Christian Boltanski’s self-explanatory and superficial Theatre of Shadows is lumbered with a gigantic paragraph of art-speak justification while many genuinely striking, thought-provoking or enigmatic works get no comment at all. Mat Collishaw’s portraits of crushed moths are in this latter category: huge, garish and beautifully macabre photos reminiscent of crime scene photos rather than just dead insects, a harrowing case for the Insecticide Squad. Polly Morgan’s works using skins capture the touchingly pathetic quality one often sees in genuine collections of stuffed animals, fitting both theme and location like a tanned skin over a taxidermy form. Her tiny birds are enshrined in an antique bookcase of vastly disproportionate scale, and are particularly unfussy and lovely. Hyungkoo Lee’s nearby skeletal versions of Sylvester the cat and Tweety Pie are meticulously researched and fabricated, turning the cartoon characters into a humorous memento mori. Several elegant video works by Bill Viola offer rare evidence of any work in this exhibition connecting with real human beings as subjects or as audience; visitors who’ve rightly skipped one piece of dreary arch-conceptual fluff after another linger with Viola for five minutes, ten, a quarter of an hour. This forms a vivid contrast to the mere flickers of passing interest aroused elsewhere in the building.

It might be that Collishaw, Lee, Morgan (and the remaining minority of artists who actually get the point in any sense whatsoever) are just effortlessly passing the Art test and need no explanation, unlike works such as Jannis Kounellis’ wilfully opaque and  horrendously dated quasi-Beuys installation of coats and shoes which supposedly “conveys multiple messages and meanings.” The long accompanying text stops short of providing clues as to what these might be for those of us who thought this was the 21^st century and not the Sixties.

This exhibition needed to be at least as uncanny and resonant as the antique ethnological museums to which it constantly refers. Instead, it simply reminds us that we’d have seen more affecting and relevant art if we’d gone instead to the British Museum where this building’s former contents are now housed.

Grizzly Bear, Future of the Left, Peaches

Grizzly Bear: ‘Veckatimest’

I’ve been resolutely unimpressed by the hype around Grizzly Bear over the last few years, but to me ‘Veckatimest‘ finally delivers what critics have been saying about the band and wasn’t really there before. Previously the only other thing of theirs that I’ve liked was their inter-album, gender/genre-bending cover of ‘He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)‘. Ed Droste’s incredibly sweet and pure voice often makes the lyrics almost irrelevant in a way that recalls a more self-effacing, less florid version of Jeff Buckley’s vocal aerobatics. But the subtle, evocative words are worth listening to and pondering, the production is great, the band plays and sings like a group completely in sync (or in love) with each other. ‘Two Weeks‘ has been one of my favourite songs for several months now, and I’m still not bored of it.

Future of the Left: ‘Travels With Myself and Another’/'Curses’

I picked up both of these recently on the strength of a random hearing of the stomping, bellowing brilliance of ‘Arming Eritrea‘ and ‘The Hope That House Built‘ from the most recent of the two albums, ‘Travels…’ In addition to an invigorating punkiness and brevity, FOTL also have a great ear for striking phrases, sloganeering and word play, with lyrics such as the playfully bitter chant of “Colin is a pussy… A very pretty pussy cat”, the phlegmatic “We imagine God as just a mental illness/Appearing towards the end of our days”, or the plain ridiculous “Woody was a wizard/And Jenny was an elf/And when they got together they only ate sausage on a stick”.

I’m tempted to quote a lot more, because the words are so eccentrically inspired and often laugh out loud funny when barked out in the band’s usual vitriolic manner. Many of the songs seem to be about disagreements or disappointments with real and often specifically named people; whether or not they actually exist doesn’t matter much, because we are nonetheless included in conversations and observations that assume we are part of the peer group in question. Such effortless and generous entrance to an artist’s (sometimes ugly) mental landscape is a rare gift.

Peaches: ‘I Feel Cream’

I think a lot of the confusion and dislike of Peaches in certain quarters arises from a basic misunderstanding. Peaches doesn’t even really exist, and she isn’t trying to be a conventional musician. Peaches is most productively conceived of as Merrill Nisker’s ongoing performance art project on the subject of sex, a project that takes the unusual form of a nymphomaniac, omnisexual pop singer character. That she’s to some extent infiltrated the conventional music industry infrastructure of radio play, promotion and international distribution is as much a testament to her poker face and the power of her high concept as it is to her merits as a musician. An artist in any medium is lucky to be capable of dwelling productively on one subject for any length of time. She obviously has an immense, monomaniacal and eternal store of creativity if she can release multiple albums in which every single song is about sex, while rarely repeating herself when it comes to vulgarity, sexual scenarios or words for sex acts and genitals.

It’s this latter dubious achievement that keeps her work so exuberantly and hilariously perverted. Perhaps there’s something wrong with me, but her albums have always made me fall about laughing. There probably is something wrong with me, in fact, because I think exactly the same thing about supposedly shocking films like Cronenberg’s ‘Crash‘ and ‘The Exorcist‘. I find the latter film completely ridiculous and in the immortal words of Beetlejuice, “it keeps getting funnier every single time I see it.”

But anyway, on ‘Mommy Complex‘, for example, I likewise find it impossible not to grin as she weaves an alarmingly detailed polymorphous fantasy around the sexual possibilities of maternity (“Are you a pregnant man? I say good luck, combo C-section/tummy tuck”). She then suggests some other things she could do “while you’re under the gas”. Not just a string of smutty bon mots, ‘Mommy Complex‘ would also be a killer on the dancefloor of an appropriately grimy club. Therein in lies the genius (or “the teaches”, sic) of Peaches.

‘Let the Right One In’, ‘The Assassination of Jesse James…’ and ‘Moon’

This month, two films based on little-known novels, both incredibly stylish works that ultimately eschew romanticism in favour of confrontation with harsh reality. Plus, a film you need to get out to your local cinema to see.

Director Tomas Alfredson, Writer John Ajvide Lindqvist: Let the Right One In

It’s the early Eighties and a neglected, lonely, bullied twelve-year-old in a dreary Stockholm suburb has only his violent revenge fantasies and his scrapbook of murder clippings to keep him company. Then his apparent soulmate Eli moves in next door. She’s the same age as Oskar (“more or less”) but doesn’t attend school. She only emerges at night and her creepy guardian goes on odd errands in the small hours. Eli is a vampire assiduously divested of any hint of glamour or chic, a blood junkie whose moral parameters expand in direct proportion to how far away she is from her last (or next) fix. In one long and interesting scene she even squirms at the use of the the V word and pedantically clarifies that she “lives on blood”.

But the title also coyly and correctly intimates that uncanny precoccupations are equalled by a wonderfully written and acted romance, one of the best depictions I’ve seen of adult feelings stirring in children, sometimes awkwardly and in ways that adult society conveniently forgets. Oskar and Eli’s relationship is certainly both touchingly naïve and profoundly perverse. We mostly see from their perspective, thematically and visually; adults are inscrutable but intriguing peripheral presences and the camera tends to settle at an adolescent eye level. Like del Toro’s equally bleak and beautiful ‘Pan’s Labyrinth‘, this film in anchored by an uncannily wise performance by a child actress. Otherwise the two films are only alike in being haunting, sui generis masterpieces that will fortunately prove difficult to imitate or neuter. For the very nerdy or the long-term horror fan (is there a difference?) we also get the long-absent demonstration of what happens when a vampire breaks the rule of entering without invitation…

Andrew Dominik: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Dominik is the director of the hyperactive ‘Chopper‘, which also examined “civilised” society’s morbid, ambivalent infatuation with the murderers and deviants in its midst, and is memorable for an astounding performance by Eric Bana before his unfortunate transformation into an emaciated, emasculated Hollywood leading man. Here Dominik adopts a diametrically opposed, glacial pace to tackle a similar true story of a boy’s obsession with the infamous robber who often killed people because of a misplaced word from them, or because of the mood he was in. Nonetheless James was and to some extent still is lionised as an American hero. Ford, as the title says, inveigled his way into James’ entourage, only to shoot him in his respectable parlour in front of the wife and children who didn’t even know that he was America’s most famous outlaw. Ford basked briefly in the celebrity and money that his betrayal earned before coming to his own sad and premature end.

Elegant cinematography evokes the aesthetics of early photographs without being twee or a sepia-toned pastiche, and provides a bleak depiction of America’s late period of colonisation. Families or small groups of young men driven by passing opportunity eke out meagre subsistence on windswept plains and muddy hillsides, while bandits like the James Gang roam the spaces between with virtual impunity. Although being captured and killed by the nascent police force was an occupational hazard, in truth the downfall of these antisocial malcontents could usually be blamed more on their own failings than the competence of the authorities. The film fully embraces and amplifies this idea, lending it an almost Shakespearian air of unavoidable tragedy. Casey Affleck compellingly portrays Ford as a lurking, smirking mooncalf who from the start and at the best of times has sinister, Mark Chapman-esque undertones, and Dominick makes effective use of Brad Pitt’s extremely limited range by facilitating an extended run in the familiar groove of him playing himself, Brad Pitt, as a volatile but intermittently charming nutcase*.

For repeat viewings I suggest a mammoth double feature of this and ‘There Will Be Blood‘. Long before you get to “I drink your milkshake” I think you’ll be nicely purged of any desire you may have for great riches or drama in your life. This is one of the eternal and essential functions of great art. Also, you can play a drinking game to celebrate every time Brad Pitt/Daniel Day-Lewis grimaces oddly or insouciantly makes an ominous remark. Or you can have a lengthy debate about who sports the best hat and moustache. Whatever, I’ll leave the details in your hands.

*See also ‘Fight Club’, ‘Twelve Monkeys’, ‘Kalifornia’. etc.

Director Duncan Jones, writer Nathan Parker: Moon

A British-made film that isn’t a stupid gangster flick and doesn’t involve crinolines and top hats is a rare thing indeed; it’s more precious still when that film is a brilliant, original and heartfelt one that at the same time harks back to the cerebral, philosophical sci-fi of the Sixties and Seventies. Unfortunately it seems to be getting a fairly limited theatrical release, at least on my manor. But you should get yourself out to any venue that is showing it to support the film and its makers. It’s hard to talk about a deliberately ambiguous puzzle of a film like this without ruining that crucial first viewing, so I’ll restrict myself to saying that Sam Rockwell (also in ‘The Assassination of Jesse James…’) is a one-man acting class and plays a whole range of characters in the course of the film, from a handsome astronaut to a complete physical and mental wreck.

The other crucial component is Kevin Spacey’s HAL 9000-esque voice, which emanates from a clunky, filthy robot whose only facial expressions are a series of smiley faces and other emoticons: a well observed example of the bizarrely inhuman and counterintuitive interfaces that high-tech devices in the real world are usually lumbered with. Like Douglas Rain in 2001, in the end Spacey gives a strangely moving performance that goes way beyond a simple voiceover. It’s also refreshing that Jones knows how to tell a complex story coherently with no cheats and no cheap tricks, and can keep a feature film to a sensible running time. In an ideal world this would be a lesson to any director and/or producer who thinks that their latest spew of adolescent, gratuitously violent, misogynistic, oversexualised and foul-mouthed drivel needs to assault us for two and a half hours plus, as is now the norm.

Michael Zielenziger, ‘Shutting Out The Sun’

As far as I know this is one of the few books available in English about the million-plus young men in Japan who have gone beyond otaku to permanently become hikikomori (“withdrawn and retired”), facilitated by compliant or ashamed parents and living mostly or entirely in their bedrooms while refusing all contact with society. It’s therefore a great shame and a wasted opportunity that at least half of the book resembles those occasions when you’re trying to have a reasonable discussion but one person just uses it as an excuse to reel off a list of grievances they’ve been brooding on. If only the Japanese could be more capitalist and more laissez-faire, Zielenziger tells us at considerable length, if only Japan was more tormented with Judeo-Christian shame and less concerned with collective harmony, less invested in their own culture and more American… everything would be OK. He also compares Japan unfavourably to China on several occasions, mainly because of China’s helter-skelter plunge to the most base, amoral depths of capitalism; it seems he approves of this and considers it preferable to a reasonably secure job or a person taking up their father’s business. I’ve spent a lot of time in both countries, and China’s social problems and pathologies are in an entirely different league than Japan’s or any other reasonably developed and stable country. Zielenziger accurately puts his finger on some of Japan’s very real flaws- xenophobia especially- but the only place I’ve been to that matches China for racism, turpitude, greed, social dysfunction and spiritual vacuity is the USA. QED, I suppose.

On the positive side, Zielenziger has a palpable, constructive and admirably level-headed compassion for the individual hikikomori he meets. He succeeds in conveying the silent despair of genuinely sympathetic and valuable people who’ve been buried alive by failed, loveless families, by social factors beyond any individual’s control and by their own inherent sensitivity and intelligence. It would have been nice to hear much more from them in their own words, from the parents who are the unavoidable other half of the hikikomori equation, and from the motley experts, amateurs and activists who work with them. This would have reduced the repetitive tiresomeness of Zielenziger’s free market hectoring. More or less the entirety of chapters 11-15 is blatant journalistic padding to stretch quite thin and tangential material about how great capitalism is in Korea. But in the land of the hikikomori, the man who can pop out to the shops is king. Until something more substantial and politically neutral comes along, ‘Shutting Out The Sun‘ serves its purpose as an accessible English-language glimpse into the shuttered rooms of an ever-growing Japanese subculture.

‘Shutting Out The Sun’ at Amazon.

Chris Morris, George Orwell, Jonathan Swift

At the moment I think we’re all in need of some intelligent and calm perspective, and we’re certainly not going to get much of that from the profitable scaremongering of the news media and advertising industry. They’re not books, but Chris Morris’ current affairs satires Brass Eye and The Day Today were prescient ten years ago and seem almost restrained now with their manufactured moral panics and the smug, vapid nonsense vomited up on cue by Collately Sisters at the financial desk. The strange thing about the best satire is that many of the specific references and inspirations fall away over time, but the skeleton still has equal or greater power because all satire is basically attacking the same, eternal thing; the folly of humanity. It’s both amazing and depressing that you can read the ancient Roman Juvenal’s bitter Satires on venal politicians or fame-hungry celebrities parading around in see-through togas and it still all makes perfect sense two thousand years on. Britain’s expenses-fiddling, public prude/private porn hound, surveillance-crazed Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, or Britney Spears’ latest “accidental” paparazzi upskirt shot are nothing new and they’ll occur again.

Talking of the Home Secretary and the current British government, they seem to be using 1984 as an aspirational script rather than as a depressing cautionary tale. Check out the recent ad campaign urging us to rat on our neighbours if they have the temerity to look foreign or do anything out of the ordinary; it doesn’t take much to imagine these posters pasted on the walls around Winston Smith’s neighbourhood. Orwell’s other work of timeless genius is Animal Farm. Again, this arose from his very specific disillusionment with the Communist movement and the Stalinist turn taken by the Soviet Union, but the “all are equal, though some are more equal than others” tautology at the heart of the book can be clearly seen in the contemporary world around us.

The grandaddy of all satires in English is of course Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (make sure you get the unexpurgated, scatological adult version). It’s one of my favourite books and influenced two works of my own: LPT BNB GDD LGN JPN and Nowhere Plains. Nobody knows very much now about the Tory/Whig conflicts, Hanoverian dynastic issues or personal grievances that inspired the book, and I doubt that many people care or need to know. What we’re left with instead is a caustic and at times hilariously crude and misanthropic attack on the stupid and ignorant. Half the world’s current bloody conflicts make no more sense than the egregious idiocy of Swift’s Lilliputian Big Endians and Little Endians, warring over the proper end of a boiled egg to crack first, further divided into mutually opposed sects of high heel wearers and flat shoe fanatics. Swift clearly expresses his disdain for such small-minded people by having Gulliver piss all over the royal palace of the miniature hate mongers. If you’re feeling the urge to do something similar right now, I recommend spending some time with these highly intelligent and righteously angry authors. As Juvenal wrote, for somebody with their eyes and ears open “it’s hard not to write satires.”

Writers Won-Chan Hong & Shin-ho Lee/Director Hong-jin Na, ‘Chugyeogja’ ['The Chaser']

I’ve said many times before that you need to get a long way from Hollywood if you want thrillers that thrill and horror that’s horrifying; here’s another great example of original storytelling and genre commitment from South Korea. The chaser of the title is a pimp who grudgingly, painfully recovers vestiges of his own morality and decency in the process of tracking down several prostitutes he’s sent out to clients, only for the women to vanish. Kim Yun-Seok’s well calibrated slide from callous, belligerent bully to hysterical lone crusader is all the more remarkable given that feature films are usually shot non-chronologically; his face and body seem to have physically altered by the end of the film, almost to the point where it could be two actors in the same role.

As one might expect, there are some harrowing scenes of abduction and violence in this film, but I think that’s as it should be if such scenes are going appear at all. Puritan America clearly disagrees, deeming images of people being riddled with bullets or dissected on autopsy tables suitable for twelve year olds, but squirming at the idea of two men kissing or virtually any other form of healthy, consensual human relationship. The Hollywood remake that’s regretably imminent will probably turn this into another misogynist torture porn travesty for popcorn-munching adolescents, which is the polar opposite of where the Korean filmmakers’ intentions and interests lie.

Writer Nakamura Masa/Director Miike Takashi, ‘Sukiyaki Western Django’

Miike’s most stylish and enjoyable film yet is a gleeful mashup of classic literature about 12^th century Japanese inter-clan warfare and the spaghetti westerns of Sergios Corbucci and Leone, with splashes of Miike’s own totally ridiculous black humour. Shakespeare, Hokusai and Kurosawa’s samurai films also get thrown into the anachronistic mix. The Japanese cast perform in English with varying degrees of success, but even this limitation is used knowingly and to great effect; it’s a witty call back to the blatant postproduction dubs and ludicrous lip-syncs of their Italian predecessors. Even some of Miike’s best films have production values that could at best be described as flat and documentarian, at worst amateurish and slapdash, but SDW’s cinematography, colouring and production design are interesting by any filmmaker’s standards. The costumes are among the best I’ve seen in any recent film; an inventive fusion of authentically filthy 19^th century frontier Americana, squeaky clean Yoyogi Park cosplayer, and street urchin refugee from some kind of disgraced idoru boy band, all of it worn with a parodically macho swagger familiar from Miike’s numerous yakuza films. Even a prologue featuring a mercifully brief attack of fanboy Quentin Tarantino’s alleged “acting” can’t sink this film.

Bat for Lashes, The Decemberists, Röyksopp

I still think Bat For Lashes is one of the most cringeworthy aliases of recent years (part of a whole wave of otherwise unrelated crimes against the English language such as Does It Offend You, Yeah? and Glasvegas), but Two Suns shows a real development from the already solid debut ‘Fur and Gold’; more musings on the heartache of life, like musical arrangements of a very intense first year drama student’s doodles on her folder, but with a more detailed and much more muscular overall sound than before. There’s also a distinct tinge of the 80s soundtrack aesthetic that cropped up everywhere in 2008, from Australians Cut Copy and the epical Midnight Juggernauts, through French electro pop like Justice and Yelle, to Neon Neon’s cheesy, intelligent and excellent concept album Stainless Style about John DeLorean.

Usually I’ve got a very high tolerance for The Decemberists’ little urchin faces and antiquarian affectations, but I think The Hazards of Love is an offering that only the most hardcore fans will embrace. Despite trying really hard, I’m finding it difficult to enjoy as much as I’d like to. It apparently arose from an aborted musical, and probably should have stayed aborted instead of haunting the general public like a character from one of the band’s own songs. A real disappointment after the equally ambitious but much more artistically successful and inspiring predecessor The Crane Wife.

Röyksopp’s third album Junior comes and goes pleasantly, without exciting or offending. If it was a person it would be a strapping but clean, unthreatening and polite Norwegian boy, which is how the duo themselves are depicted on the cover. The first single Happy Up Here proves my point by sampling 70s funk lunatics Parliament and Scandinavianising them into the sonic equivalent of an Ikea beanbag. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because I like funk and beanbags. Wait for the inevitable slew of remixes if you’re after something with more bite.