Hope You Had A Merry Christmas, and Wishing You A Happy New Year

I probably won't be updating this blog anymore. I'm still trying to figure out what to do with my writing. I'm gonna spend some time looking after myself before I devote some serious time to writing. Christmas was good though (and I hope it was for you too), Santy was very generous. So here's hoping for a great New Year's party I'll be too drunk to remember and a year much better than the one I've just had.  

Charlie

The Kooks - Listen

In 20 years the only people who will be listening to The Kooks are the people who are currently listening to The Kooks. Only they will now be mums and dads and forcing The Kooks onto their kids using their car stereos. I would never have heard of Erasure if my dad didn't play them every time I get in his car; and even if I'm not very grateful, I still get a slight jig on hearing the opening bars of A Little Respect. And using my crystal ball, I've managed to deduce a similar, not unjustified fate for The Kooks.

I imagine the reason me and many similarly aged people are still listening now that we're on album four is just a matter of loyalty, of wanting to have as much music to call our own as we can get. Which is my way of saying The Kooks have frequently been good, never great; the albums serviceable - the first two maybe even a little more than that - but never brought up in snobbish conversations about great albums. The Kooks were a bi-product of the music that sprouted up in the mid-naughties - a sort of post-BritPop or indie Madchester with less of the disco and more of the feelings - not the creators of it.

Listen is worrying because it makes me think The Kooks have started to make their albums the way I listen to them; focusing on a few great tracks and not putting much brain function towards the rest. Listen is less of a coherent set than a salvage job. It does (like all their previous albums) highlight a new Kooks sound: funkier and with a lively beat where there was once a lot of empty space. The album's general sound reminded me of the last Foster the People album, or at least someone trying to imitate it; The Kooks' usual focus on a tuneful rhythm guitar has been replaced by something flashier. It's a wider sound for a band used to conjuring up images of the same seaside-fish-and-chips Britain that The Kinks once conjured up. On opener Around Town there's a backing choir to go with the dancey guitar work and heavy-handed lyrics like, "You can choose the life of a bohemian/Or you can choose the material world". It's a strange fit but a fit nonetheless.

The best track is See Me Now which is written as an open letter to frontman Luke Pritchard's now deceased father. It's one of those rare songs that come from such a genuine place that you get floored by the sentiment in every line, and is justification for the album alone. It reminds me a lot of when The Rolling Stones would fit in a gloomy ballad somewhere near the end of a sex-and-bravado rock'n'roll album - it sticks out in a good way. The rest of the album: not so much. The tracks all have the band's new groove and sentiment. Pritchard sings "But all I need is somewhere to lay/Somewhere to lay my hat up/I need someone to love in the middle of the day" and it would be impossible to deny this is a band that can make real, rip-out-your-heart-and-hand-it-over beauty. But most of the tracks sound like early demos, recorded to highlight the new Kooks sound instead of making good songs with it.

A Goodbye to HTMLGiant

When you're really engrossed in something it can be hard to tell if everyone else is engrossed or if it's just you. Something about the forest for the trees. Because, what does the rest of the world matter when you've got this tiny, personal thing that covers your whole vision? And yes, I'm aware that's a pretty deep way to open what is more or less just a send off to an online blog; but I'm aware that despite the outpouring of what one might call a deeply appreciative, weird sort of love from all the scattered different alcoves of the web for HTMLGiant over the last few weeks, you, dear reader, may not even know what an HTMLGiant is.

If you never, in the early hours of some lonely morning, stumbled (clicked) your way to this particular dark side of the web, then at its simplest: HTMLGiant was a blog that ran from September 2008 until sometime last week, written under the guise of being an "alt-lit" blog, a "movement" (if that's what you'd call it) just starting up at the time, although really just a blog where a handful of contributors wrote book reviews, alt-lit and not, trash talked each other, posted funny images and pointless status updates when they were too bummed-out to write something proper, and had a place with a fairly big audience to write out all the usually thought-up-then-forgotten manic ideas that flooded up their craniums, where they might have otherwise just become background dressing on personal blogs no-one would ever read. And for that they deserve some thanks. 

I wouldn't know where to point someone wanting to "get into" the site. The archive's been there for reading for the three or so years I've followed the site but I simply chose to read the posts that came up on my blogger feed and nothing else. Which opens up the trail of thought about how a place like HTMLGiant will be remembered. Your grandad probably read an article in an obscure magazine in his twenties that he thought was the greatest thing he ever read, and it's very probable that that article is on some online archive now, preserved by some small-name publisher. Many times reading HTMLGiant I wondered if it was the greatest thing I'd ever read. Maybe it wasn't, who cares? Memories make everything look shiny and clear, surely the only really great writing to matter to you is the writing that you're thinking is really great right now? The archives will be shut off at some point, and then only the people who were there will have been there. Sad, since HTMLGiant is as good and as worth treading through as any 'movement" or grouped-together cast of writers that I've ever heard of.

Jimmy Chen was my favorite writer there - look through his archives if you're new. I once saw his writing described (in the comments of one of his posts) as every stoned conversation you ever had in college somehow connected together. He eventually got tagged around the site with the word "misogyny", a reputation the whole site straddled with, probably why the recent news of arrests of many high profile alt-lit figures over sexual charges, Tao Lin being the "big one" of alt-lit and covered on the site frequently, was what pushed the site over the edge and what made those running the site decide it was time to pack up.

I don't really feel I need to say more. Others have said multitudes more. Good wishes to all contributors. I hope the archives are up for a long time more. It was a weird little corner of the web that felt like it was doing something so original and doing it with the sort of confidence that made you feel like all the writers' different brands of crazy were so good they'd be the mainstream one day, once everyone caught on, a sign that it was a good enough place that it made you so engrossed you forgot, or maybe just stopped pretending it even fucking mattered, that it wasn't cool and you were the only one in your real life who had even heard of a place called HTMLGiant, but surely that was all part of the fun.

The Double (2014)

Either because he's most well-known for a role in a sitcom or because he makes regular appearances on panel shows like The Big Fat Quiz of the Year, I find myself - and I doubt I'm alone in this - expecting less of Richard Ayoade's movies, maybe just stemming from a prejudice belief that the skill sets of funny panel show guest and quality movie director (an endless wormhole of a phrase I see no point in getting into now) couldn't possibly be found inside the same body. Yet The Double is enough to convert me. I haven't read any Russian literature (I know, shame on me) so don't know how The Double translates as an adaptation of Dostoyevsky: its coming 168 years after the book's publication so any crazed fans might not want to expect a one-to-one, page-to-screen adaptation.

Instead, I kept forgetting I wasn't watching a Kafka adaptation. I'm well aware no-one seems able to (or maybe just don't like to) agree on what Kafkaesque means, although The Double makes the grade. Simon James, introduced with some clumsy, Buster Keaton-type comedy to show what a cowardly underdog he is, spends his time alone is his room, staring out of a telescope Rear Window-style into the apartments opposite him, usually at Hannah, a girl he thinks too out-of-his-league to do anything more than mumble a few sentences to everyday. It's always night time, and apart from the few locations Simon goes to, the rest of the world need not exist. It's a work orientated world, and he has an office job (it's adapted from a modernist book - what else?) so mundane we never even find out what it is exactly he does. It's not only Kafkaesque in the constantly rattling away machinery of the setting, but in the mind of a character who sees the whole world as violently trying to dismiss his personal melodramas.

The 'inciting incident' that gives Simon's life a jolt is the introduction of James Simon, a man who looks exactly like Simon (not that even Simon's co-workers notice) only... different. He's suave and cool, and to paraphrase Fight Club: he's free in all the ways Simon isn't. And at first it seems like a win-win: he beats up the tough-guy at the bar picking on Simon, he shows Simon how to pull the ladies - our little man starts to loosen up. Then it all starts to go wrong: James starts dating - and cheating on - Hannah, taking credit for Simon's work, even using Simon's apartment. Simon feels trapped again, only now even the life he used to have has been taken over by a smoother-talking version of himself.

You don't have to have met your Doppelgänger to relate to what's happening to Simon. I imagine if everyone was a bit more philosophical - and read a lot more self-help books - then New Year's resolutions would be a litter of people vowing to stop comparing themselves to others. It's an epidemic. The thing everyone falls back on is their differences to the people doing better than them - they had rich parents, they went to university, they weren't born with eight toes - yet Simon can't use any of those excuses because there's a man who looks exactly like him, who seems to only have what he has, doing a lot better than him. A face walking around like a living symbol that he should have done a lot more with his life. And real people feel this pain all the time: there's enough blog posts from single people entering middle age trying to make it clear how not bothered they are that all their friends are getting married and having kids while they're still jerking it twice a day to movie scenes they first watched when they were a teenager.

There's a lot to praise. Ayoade gets the pitch just right: you can't really comment on a director - beyond the formalities of if they're good at staging a scene and etc - from just one movie, and Submarine pointed to Ayoade going for a British, more heartfelt version of Wes Anderson style conventional quirkiness. The Double makes the case for the man as much more ambitious: both in adapting a classic and in creating a whole setting and atmosphere to try and create what the original author was getting at. Jesse Eisenberg - among a cast who are all great - playing both Simon and James, should be praised: most would probably play the difference between the doubles as something subtle, like the difference in personality that could have happened because of one slight change in childhood, like getting rejected by a girl when he was young instead of having her kiss him, which would spiral into him being a confident ladies man in later life - yet Eisenberg comes on strong with the performance. The contrast between the doubles is huge. At first this seems overdone yet by the end of the movie it makes perfect sense, and drives home the point of how common it is to look at other people and imagine how easy it would be to become just like them, before having to the face the reality of it.

The ending is a disappointment, mainly just because for a film that raises questions that I'm betting most viewers will have asked themselves, the film only answers the problems of Simon James. Which is a pretty self-centered criticism to make - which I guess also works as a compliment to the film on how easy it is to relate to Simon's struggle. The ending's so abrupt I hardly remember anything about it; but The Double is one of those films that works up so much good will - one of those films you want to like (and for the most part I did) - that a lousy ending is forgiven.

Catfish and the Bottlemen (and the Current State of Things)

If you were ever a punk rocker or hippie chick or even just a cardigan-wearing grunge fiend (guilty) then you'll know the whole idea of a "musical movement" or scene or whatever you want to call it is actually just made up. A marketing term. The description of Grunge is really just a description of Nirvana; the movement that sprung up around it just an easy way to market imaginably hard sell acts like Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam (and many others) despite some gaping wide differences, on the basis that all were young, angry and from Seattle. Punk isn't really a good way to describe The Clash, but it made sense to in that they had the rebellious, DIY message of the other music coming out at the time.

A few years ago, hearing rumblings of a new scene emerging, a music mag, say Rolling Stone, would have sent their reporter to whichever city this sound was coming from (most likely a small, never-heard-of-before city that would now be remembered forever more) to make sense of things. Said reporter would listen to the scene's music, try and find some similarities to label the scene's artists (a few greats - many clingers on) together, and at least try some of the scene's drugs.

But we're in the future right now, apparently, and musical movements aren't really working like they used to. We're all interconnected now, so my Sociology teacher keeps telling me, meaning some kids in a rural town in France couldn't land onto some new sound without some old guys in Alaska joining in and putting their own spin on things. Rolling Stone have no physical place to send their reporter; labels are becoming more broad (and even more pointless) and who listens to what music even harder to spot; not even any officially associated drugs anymore.

Lets call the current, modern-equivalent of a movement 'moody, guitar-lite, indie disco pop' (you need to leave some work for the marketing team). The 1975. The xx. HAIM. Vampire Weekend. London Grammar. Bombay Bicycle Club. Tokyo Police Club. (I'll leave it up to you to label the big players and the cling-ons). A movement in the sense of many overlapping sounds - you like one and they all come recommended. Lots of overlapping fan bases of mainly young people.

Catfish and the Bottlemen are like a confirmation that there is a movement out there right now - they have a sound that wouldn't have existed without lots of other bands digging the same well. The best compliment I could give them is they're competent. Wavy, longing vocals; optimistic, jumpy guitar hooks; a production of wide open, lonely space in what is the album of some twenty-somethings who spend most of their time at parties and who think mostly about different variations of relationship - and non-relationship - problems (the lyrics say so). It's like they're running through a checklist - the band do all of these things well, so much that my ears had the tendency of simply switching off for most tracks on their debut The Balcony. It's not talent Catfish lack, it's passion.

There are moments of emotion that slice through The Balcony. Ryan Van McCann's screaming in the choruses of Pacifier: 'But, you just don't know how it feels to/Lose something you never had and never will/But, babe you know I've tried and failed'; The sudden explosions from silence to blaring guitars in Homesick. I don't want to get all mushy but emotions are still something that you have or don't have regardless of the scene you find yourself in. I've heard so many people call Catfish and the Bottlemen the next big thing, and they surely sound like what's hot right now, but that's their biggest problem. Talented guys, but an album that sounds so familiar it fits around the earlobes as firmly as the lost glove you just embarrassingly realized has been on your hand the whole time.

18

It was on my birthday night, we were walking home from the pub and my dad was telling me about his different birthdays. 18 was great because he was at that rave. 30 was shit because he wasn't in his twenties anymore. 40 was great because, as he'd told me earlier in the night, everyone (all the old gang) had shown up at the bar him and me had just left, and had all agreed it was just like 'the good ol' days' (said unironically). I never know whether I should believe people who say they feel different on their birthdays - he said he felt different when he woke up on his 18th birthday - I certainly didn't feel any different that morning. Don't even know what it is I was supposed to be feeling: added maturity? greater intelligence? the horrible throes of responsibility?

I didn't feel older but I did (do) feel old. I have a feeling when I finish school I'll feel younger again - the beginning of something else and not the end of something like I'm at now. It's why so many people seem to drop out near the end of education. It got me thinking about a section from the newest Tao Lin book, Taipei, where Lin describes how the years of school, the actual segregated blocks of 'year 3' and 'year 4', create a sort of easily quantifiable set of stages back to birth. Like levels in a video game (probably the reason kids like this); easily being able to say I was there, now here, and there next (something I imagine adults would like too). And then, as Lin puts it, you're left to drift off into an endless stream of year after year, no clear way to trace how you got there. It's probably why people cherish their 'milestone years' so much: being able to have sex at 16 (I'm from the UK so obviously so are these); 18 and you can drink (yah!); and then 21 and from what I can tell you celebrate and call yourself an adult (a real one; not the one I currently am, apparently) for no other reason than that your milestone years are over.

It's a pretty gloomy way to look at things but celebrating being young makes me think about being old. I remember reading that Pete Townsend wrote My Generation during a train journey on his 20th birthday. It makes sense actually, there's such a fear in that song, clearly Townsend's fear that soon he was going to be too old to rebel and make a statement and even be a part of the generation that was making all the noise. He was 20 and picturing himself as a zombified white-collar old man. And who even cares that he still sings that on stage as an old man who plays nothing but old hits, because when he wrote it it made sense to yell out 'I hope I die before I get old'. Me too; maybe I don't hate the thought of being old, just the thought of being an old person.

I guess talking about turning 18 is really talking about drinking. Some of my friends have been talking online with their American Exchange students that they're going to be visiting later this month; some of the Exchanges said they'd never tried a drop of alcohol. Basically our version of blasphemy. My friend works as a barman at a gentleman's club and me and some friends have made it a weekly thing going out drinking there (we have our own spot in the corner and a friend of mine joked we now count as 'regulars'). I've hardly used my new 'freedom'. I guess the most ironic thing about being able to drink whenever you want is that those who haven't drank because they aren't 18 are probably the least likely to once they are (or, conversely, anyone who was going to 'go off the rails' as people I know call it, would have already done so). The freedom of being 18 is so easy to see as romantic when you're a little kid but not quite as magical when put into the context of your 18 year old life.

My actual experience of being drunk is an immense topsy-turvy-ness; not just of my body (which looks like a rag-doll being thrashed from side to side by invisible forces) but of my thoughts too (which my mouth then transmits out to the whole world). I actually see this as a virtue to being drunk; especially when I spend so much time sober second-guessing what I'm going to let out of my mouth. I wish I could get 'lost in the moment'. I imagine some can do this without alcohol - those annoying people who claim they're getting 'high on life' must be lost in something just to be spurting such crap. But people who get lost in being drunk: spouting gibberish to the people carrying them home (who, unlike the person being carried, will actually remember this the next day), they're the lucky ones. I once read an article on the show Girls - it was about a sex scene where Adam Driver's character gets completely lost in the sexual fantasy he's acting out, while Lena Dunham's character, the plaything of this (somewhat twisted) fantasy, and also a writer, can't let herself forget what's really happening. If Dunham's like that in real life then she's probably like me: the sort of person who even remembers everything from the night where you ended up passing out at the end. It's a blessing and a curse.

I was actually a little worried about turning 18. I felt like a Friday night in when I was 18 - and had no real excuse for being stuck in the house - would feel like a much bigger disappointment than a Friday night in the house at 17. Although who I would be disappointing I'm not even sure anymore. I like the thought of being 18, even more of being 19 (although maybe that's just the start of a pattern) but like I'm saying: growing up and feeling older are very different.

Damon Albarn - Everyday Robots

I have this theory that most artists who get gushed about like they're something real special earn such gushing because they've made so much good stuff that to even call yourself a "fan" of theirs is too broad a term. It's obviously easier for people to praise something that's too large for them to even see in its entirety. Damon Albarn already qualified for such praise because of his double combo punch of Blur and The Guerrillas, and now making his name from his solo work, Albarn's become such a broad entity that he can't even be described as this type of artist or that. Which is also a way of saying that not being a fan of his previous bands (I wouldn't describe myself as one) shouldn't put you off giving Everyday Robots a spin.

The fact that Albarn's turned out to be a crank shouldn't be that surprising (doesn't everyone?), although the only reason his cynicism doesn't ruin the whole album is that he seems to know how old the whole fear-the-future thing is. The lyrics are all Kubrickian-style future warnings, only for the future we're all living in right now. It would be enough to say that Albarn's ran out of ideas and is just complaining for the sake of complaining if his misery over all of us internet obsessed, technology-for-happiness, TV whore robots wasn't so consistent - just look at some of the lyrics (all from different songs):

We are everyday robots on our phones/In the process of getting home

Hoping to find the key/To this play of communications/Between you and me 

When I'm lonely, I press play

When the photographs you're taking now are taken down again/When the heavy clouds that hide the sun are gone

It all sounds a bit depressing in theory, although just look at that last example: comparing the pictures on your Facebook to clouds stopping you from seeing the sun. There's a romance to the whole album. It's like an acceptance that technology's already corrupted us all and it's here to stay so the best someone like Albarn could do now is salvage some playful tunes from the rubble. Radiohead might have made a similar album in the late 90s if they'd cared more about the music than the message - sadly they didn't (still don't - even more so now); Albarn does.

The music here is slow; backing tracks built on slushy, mellow beats. The sort of tracks you can't quickly dash on to see if you like them or not because they offer no immediate satisfaction - the arrangements are slowly building beats which only really work when looked at as part of a three, four minute long track. Seven minute track You and Me brings to mind The Stone Roses, who were great at building funky, endlessly repeating rhythms that worked (where most artists struggle the most) in longer tracks. The best track is Mr Tempo, so out of place optimistic it sounds like a digitized Bob Marley reborn on the internet, it even has the sort of simplistic, just-happy-to-be-alive type rhyme at its center that Marley would have given us: "Mr. Tempo is on his way up the hill/With only this song to tell you how he feels/But to get there he will need a helping hand/It's where he is now but it wasn't what he planned". It's a sign that Albarn's too big in scope for any of us to see him whole, and third career around he's still the best at whatever it is exactly he's doing.