Art & Criticism

On new music

Published on May 21, 2020Leave a comment

What do we mean when we talk about listening to new music? I’m currently listening to the album the song below was taken off, ABC’s 1987 comeback attempt, Alphabet City. I do have the vinyl of that, but this is the first time I’ve listened to it in decades. Arguable this is new music to me, but is it?

Probably not, eh? But I have never listened to ABC’s sophomore album, Beauty Stab. When I play it today, does that mean I’m listening to new music, or is there more to it? The idea after all is that you stop listening to new music after a certain age (thirty, thirtyfive, in any case an age I passed a while ago). You no longer have the mental flexibility to appreciate new things, and are forever doomed to wallow in the nostalgia of the music of your youth. A horrible fate.

But what does count as listening to new music? Ont he one hand Beauty Stab is new music for me. On the other hand it’s more of the same music from a band I already know I like. Not very adventurous. But what if you discover an overlooked artist or group in the same genre of pop music? Is that new music? Or does that still fall under nostalgic wallowing? Surely discovering an entire new (sub)genre of music does count, right?

Alcest is a French band/project driven by metal prodigy Neige, which with its first EP created a new genre: blackgaze. A hideous mutant recombination of black metal and shoegaze and I’d be surprised if you can find two more unlikely musical genres to merge. Nevertheless it’s ultimately still heavy metal, a music genre I’m well familiar with. Alcest sounds a lot different from the Iron Maiden and Anthrax I grew up with, but ultimately it’s still metal. And to be honest, it is rare for me to start listening to any kind of music that is completely alien to me. Getting into Japanese pop and rock music by way of anime was the last major discovery for me, but even that is not that alien.

Ironically, the newest sort of music I may have listened to recently is actually the oldest piece of music we know how to play, a hymn to Nikkal, the goddes of orchards and fertility from Ugarit, an ancient port city in what is now Syria. Almost 3500 years old, it’s oldest discovered song with surviving musical notation. It’s older than anything we know, a product from an almost alien world, yet put a synth under it or use the right sort of guitar and it could just as well be a modern noise or gothic song.

That Lilo & Stich discourse: racism wrapped up in ‘woke’ language

Published on April 30, 2020Leave a comment

Somebody having a real normal one about Lilo & Stitch:

Apparantly Lilo is a brat and an abuser for being angry and upset her parents have died

Now while this may read like tumblresque pseudowokeness, it turns out the writer is a rightwing creep who wants to keep children in cages. But it gets worse. In a follow-up post their friend describes how the movie isn’t Hawaiian enough because it doesn’t engage with the anti-white racism supposedly rife in Hawaii:

The absolute worst example of this was using Myrtle as a bully figure. The 1970’s were the peak of the Kill Haole Day tradition in Hawaiian schools, something you won’t find in any textbook, but any true Hawaiian knows about. You’ll also find a lot of non-natives that claim “Kill Haole Day” is fake, or an urban legend. My Mom had the broken arms and black eyes to prove it. She was a 2-time State Championship paddler for the Outrigger Canoe Club, and a Punahou school athletic scholar (yes, the same Punahou that President Obama attended). Definitely not your cliché tourist caricature. A ginger haole girl like Myrtle would have been getting her teeth kicked in on the regular, so to see her picking on a local girl is about as ridiculous as a mouse taking down a cat. Funny gag for the general public, insultingly deaf for any local, especially kama’aina.

All of which is nonsense of course. These certified brain geniuses are so smart they completely miss that Lilo & Stitch is set in the present, not the seventies, then go off how it’s not an accurate portrayal of 70s Hawaii because of lies their mum told them about being bullied for being white. Note that the tumblr post actually uses a slur for native Hawaiian people as well, just in case you thought this criticism wasn’t rooted in racism.

As we all know, rightwingers are forever taking left language and twist it to dress up racism, sexism or transphobia in appropriate language, but this is the first time I’ve seen it used so unconsciously. These are Tumblr children, using Tumblr’s language and doing so unironically. It’s just that they use that language to describe rightwing bogey men.

So in the original tweet Lilo is called a bully, abusive and the moral of “family means nobody gets left behind” is twisted to mean abusers should be forgiven. But while that sounds vaguely woke, their real concern is about ‘responsibility’, pretty much always a rightwing shibboleth. Lilo, a six year old child who has lost her parents not long before the story starts, is held entirely responsible for acting out, with no regard to her circumstances. No empathy whatsover, no acknowledgment of what had happened to her, just cold condemnation dressed up as social justice.

Needless to say her opinions got a bit of a backlash and she ultimately deleted her tweets about it, though still blocks everyone that mentions them to her. Typical.

The Death of Stalin

Published on February 28, 2020Leave a comment

It took this clip on Reddit to prod me to go watch The Death of Stalin today. It only needed eleven seconds to convey the mood of the movie rather better than the awful official trailer above, which simultaneously tries to make it all more serious than it should be and leans too hard into nudging you in the side for the humourous bits. But this is Armando Iannucci bringing the same energy of the thick of It and In the Loop; eleven seconds of Zhukov dramatically taking of his coat works so much better.

Zhukov, with Khrushchev and rather nauseatingly, Beria, is the hero of the movie after all and gets that heroic entrance. They’re the ones who act, who get things done while the rest of the cast bumble around. These are all as venal and crooked and steeped in blood as the rest of them, but Iannucci still likes them the way he liked Malcolm Tucker. They’re fun, they get to do things and they get to curse.

This is just a romp of course, a mockery. Russia was right to ban it. It tramples right on the neo-Soviet myth making of Putin and his cretins, while it makes that whole gulag business look a jolly jape too. The victims are nameless, shot of screen; the executioners get to tell jokes. The villains at the heart of it all are humanised, the same way the asshole politicians of Iannucci’s early works were. And because it is a romp, don’t take its historical inaccuracies so seriously.

Is there anything more to it than just a spectacle piece for a group of good actors to get their teeth in? Not really.

Rocketship X-M — Sci-Fi Sundaze

Published on February 23, 2020Leave a comment

Trigger for when the fictional moon landing from the 1950 Rocketship X-M is less sexist than the actual moon landing programme a decade later.

Yes, that’s right. Unlike the real moon programme, he crew of the Rocketship X-M includes a female scientist next to the ex-air force pilots. Granted, she’s partially there for the romance subplot but it still struck me. She’s treated as one of the crew, just as professional as the others in a way that some much later, ‘better’ movies couldn’t do.

Rocketship X-M was made as a cheap cash-in on a more prestigious film on the same subject that also came out in 1950: Destination Moon. This was when you could still film a movie in eighteen days to take advantage that another project had been delayed by a month. It’s one of those movies I’ve read about a long time before I saw it today, back in the day when if your local videostore didn’t have it, you could only read about it in science fiction encyclopedias from the library. I thought I knew what to expect, just some shlocky, badly acted movie only relevant because it was arguably the first movie of the 1950ties sci-fi boom.

It was better than that though. There’s an earnestness to it that’s unexpected in a b-movie. There are no monsters, no things men wasn’t meant to know, but a desire to get the science right. It actually starts with a long infodump disguised as a press conference explaining how the ship will get to the Moon from the Earth and it sort of get things right? They actually use a multistage rocket and talk about using the Earth’s orbital spin to give them enough velocity to get to the Moon in 48 hours. A pity then that once the journey is underway, they run into a meteor storm and hear them whoosing past them with the deep rumbling sound you’d expect from a bunch of rocks travelling in a vacuum. There’s a fair bit of bad or outdated science like that in this movie, but it doesn’t really matter. At least it is trying to get it, if not right, at least plausible.

We can’t have a space movie without something going wrong on the movie so the ship promptly develops engine troubles, which they manage to fix, but unfortunately once it starts to accelerate the crew gets knocked unconscious and they managed to miss the Moon and end up on …. Mars. Not exactly plausible, but bear with it. This is of course a pre-Viking Mars, still twentysix years in this movie’s future, so it has an almost breathable atmosphere where you don’t need a real space suit. And of course it has an ancient, now vanished civilisation, but no Barsoom style planetary adventures here.

No, the reason there is no more ancient Martian civilisation is because it destroyed itself in a nuclear war. Even seventy years later, the scene in which the characters realise that is gripping, even with the obvious matte painting backgrounds and red filter landscape. It gets a bit more hokey once they run into the degraded into barbarity survivors and most of the crew dies at their hands. Those that survive reach the ship and make the trip back to Earth, only to crash at the very end. The movie ends with the main scientist behind the project being asked how he feels now Rocketshipp X-M proved a failure. His answer is that it isn’t and that they’re already working on the X-M 2.

Rocketship X-M then, is more of a science fiction than a sci-fi movie, perhaps the first to take the idea of space travel seriously as more than just a way to get the heroes to the scene of the action. And it only existed because George Pal was a bit behind on his movie…

Subtle and not so subtle horniness — Friday Funnies

Published on February 21, 2020Leave a comment

Sometimes you can tell from a throwaway panel like this what really gets the mangaka out of bed each day:

Neko no Otera no Chion-san: two girls in working trousers on their knees in a shed seen from the rear only their butts in shot

It is clear from the shot (and the many similar shots throughout this series) that Ojiro Makoto likes her butts. Some extra time and care has been taken to render those buttocks. Of course the same is true for roughly 100 percent of cartoonists and their particular fetishes, but what I like about this is how mundane Ojiro makes it. This is the third panel of the first page of the twelfth chapter of Neko no Otera no Chion-san, a manga about a teenage boy who moves to live with his distant, slightly older cousin and grandma. While he’s the protagonist, he’s not in the scene. Instead the page opens with a shot of cardboard boxes filled with crap, left over cleaning material and the like before the second panel shows a crowded garden shed, more a storage unit than anything else, with two girls dressed in typical work clothing talking about cleaning it. The final panel then, the one above, is a logical progression, rather than a staged cheesecake shot. There’s no posing, the clothing conceals as much as it highlights and Chion and Hiruma are pretty rather than beautiful. An everyday sort of horniness.

Azur Lane Slow Ahead: a 4-koma gag strip interrupted by a cheesecake drawing

Compare and contrast with a typical chapter from Hori no Su’s Azur Lane 4-koma: Slow ahead, a gag strip where every page has a bit of cheesecake on it like this. Unlike in Chion-san, the fan service is strong in this one, your eyes immediately drawn to that intrusive panel of Cygnet posing. It’s not bad, but it interrupts the flow of the comic. Cygnet both poses and is dressed for fan service, thighs and breasts on prominent display. For what it is, basically an advert for the Azur Lane game, very much a waifu collector game, it’s not bad, but it lacks the subtlety of Chion-san. And for me, that makes the latter all the more stronger. Because ultimately Neko no Otera no Chion-san is about a teenage boy moving in with his attractive, not that much older cousin, that sort of everyday horniness fits the mood of the series far more than an intrusive shot like the above would, even if it’s nominally “sexier”.