Spatula Forum

Westward, Ho! Watching 'The West Wing,' Season 1

2012-01-25T20:12:00.002+13:00

In a US election year, it’s appropriate to feel a bit nostalgic for my homeland, messed up as it kinda seems to be these days. As the plastic Romney and the arrogant gargoyle Gingrich tear each other to shreds in the Republican primaries, I kind of pine for a simpler time. A “West Wing” time.

As a big presidential history buff, I watched “The West Wing” a lot when it first started on TV in 1999, and quite liked it. Yet for some reason I drifted away from paying attention to the show in the Bush years, perhaps too depressed by the real man in the White House to watch stories about the fake one. But since I finished my “Buffy/Angel” TV travels, I was looking around for something else to dig into on my TV-on-DVD time. “The West Wing” was a good candidate to gradually revisit, season by season. It was an Emmy-winning machine back in the day, but how does it stack up now?

And watching Season 1 in 2012 instead of 1999 is quite interesting. It’s a dynamic, beautifully-produced series, given punch by creator Aaron Sorkin’s now-trademark constant babble of ideas and pithy dialogue. It’s hopelessly idealistic yet not quite starry-eyed enough to just be seen as a liberal wish list. The show hasn't dated badly, other than not really referencing the Internet age, and many of the issues - gays in the military, abortion, the Middle East - remain key today. Its fictional President Josiah Bartlet (a never-better Martin Sheen), an intellectual, well-meaning liberal who has problems connecting with Middle America, is a startling doppelganger for our own President Obama. Bartlet is a heck of a lot more like Obama than he is Bush or Clinton. The parallels came often for me, right down to Bartlet being a bit of an egghead who likes to show off his knowledge, or a “transformative” sort of President who languishes in the polls.

“The West Wing” is quintessential comfort television, breezy somehow even at its most emotional, and Season 1 is all about meeting the cast of characters in the Bartlet administration and their 25-hour-a-day lives. When it gets super-political, the show doesn’t always work, and definitely leans to the left. The show is most successful in how it portrays the always-on West Wing, with its constant bustle and characters who devote their entire life to their job.

Sheen’s Bartlet is a wonderful creation, by turns cranky and messianic, forgetful and omnipotent, yet always strangely reassuring. Sorkin and crew don’t make President Bartlet flawless, and in fact he often comes off downright arrogant as in “A Proportional Response,” when grief makes the president genocidal. Sheen gives a fantastic performance, which rightly dominates the room, and it’s hard to imagine that the character of the President wasn’t originally intended to be quite so central in the series.

There are quite a few clunky bits in season 1, and it takes a while to find its tone – Sam Seaborn’s awkward relationship with a prostitute, or consultant Mandy (Moira Kelly), who is such a screechingly annoying character that it’s a pleasure to see her gradually written out into oblivion. While the interracial relationship between Barlet’s daughter Zoey and his black aide Charlie provides lots of plot fodder, it never seems convincing (when does anyone in this White House have time to date anyway?).

But although the show can get dark, it’s also often very, very funny. Allison Janney’s lovely CJ Cregg and Bradley Whitford’s wise-ass Josh Lyman deliver most of the humour. In its first season, “The West Wing” reflects America, but it’s a far more charming and engaging entertainment than the constant partisan battles in real-life Washington are these days.

Concert Review: Beirut, January 16

2012-01-18T19:32:00.001+13:00

A band with rousing accordion riffs, a thundering horn section and the occasional lusty tuba solo isn't the sort of act you'd think might sell out one of Auckland's top hip concert venues. But Beirut's sound defies the expected for modern pop music. Zachary Condon, the 27-year-old face behind Beirut, looks about 16 and yet channels that old-world gypsy vibe with a timeless, epic sound that sounds unearthed from sometime in the last century.

Beirut came to New Zealand for a series of great shows this week. The six-piece act are kind of world music magpies, drawing on gypsy dance, Mexican parades, French ennui and more to create a swirling sound anchored by Condon's soulful, world-weary voice and a cascading series of horns. At the Powerstation Monday night, they managed to be both epic and intimate. (Here's a few reviews by my work cohorts at the Herald and Volume magazine far superior to my own scratchings.)

I wonder if for much of the crowd Beirut affected them like they do me -- in the iPhone/Twitter age it somehow evokes an older time, a sense of legacy which often seems lacking in our live-updates-all-the-time world. Condon's lyrics often touch on the foggy border between now and then, a constant pining for an imagined ideal past. Beirut walks a fine line - their appropriation of the past and old-fashioned instruments, and Condon's youth, might make them appear too overtly hipster precious in their approach. But there's an underlying sincerity in their mournful odes and ballads.

When "Postcards From Italy" surged up -- a song I listened to a lot during the depressing days of last fall -- I felt a kind of cathartic joy, at sad sounding music that also is full of nostalgic love. Live, Beirut transformed many of their slower songs into jaunty waltzes -- the wistful "Santa Fe," the tender "Goshen." But they also unleashed the joy that music can bring - a grand voice, an accordion gurgling, a ukulele twang, or the kick of a line of horns blaring (Beirut makes the best consistent use of horns in pop music by any band since Earth, Wind and Fire). When all three horn players blasted their trumpets, horns and tubas at the same time, it's ecstatic. The rollicking folk-pop show closer, "Gulag Orkestar," was a dizzy blast, complete with tuba solo - how many rock concerts have had a tuba solo be a crowd-pleasing wrap-up?

The "Postcards from Italy" video:

Nik’s Unheralded Albums #8: Milla, ‘The Divine Comedy’

2012-01-12T10:18:00.000+13:00

There’s no reason this album should be any good, really. It’s by a former supermodel-turned-zombie-movie-actress. While Milla Jovovich has carved out a lucrative career in movies like the “Resident Evil” series and “The Fifth Element,” her 1994 debut album – and only one to date – would seem the kind of vanity project that has little to recommend it. Actors who think they’re singers clutter the used CD sections of the world – Bruce Willis and Eddie Murphy, I’m looking at you.

But here’s a surprise. Milla’s “The Divine Comedy” is actually quite good, a heavily atmospheric sampling of folksy world music pop that carries a distinct, pleasant voice. Milla pays homage to her Ukrainian homeland with an album full of mandolin, dulcimer, and cascading synthesizers. There’s an aura of blissful lovesick reverie and girlish confusion throughout many of the songs (not surprisingly, as she was only 18 when the album came out). Numbers like “Gentleman Who Fell” or “You Did It All Before” don’t sound like a lot of the other mainstream music that was coming out in 1994, and that’s what’s kept “The Divine Comedy” sounding pretty fresh years later.

There’s a gentle pastoral, broken-hearted feeling to the album, but Milla’s emotive voice and constantly surprising and rich instrumental choices keep the album ducking cliché. You can hear a heavy Kate Bush influence in her work, and the sounds of artists like Beth Orton and Tori Amos peeking around the edges.

I’ll admit I was drawn to “The Divine Comedy” by the fanciful nude portrait of Milla on the cover, but this album offers more than celeb-spotting. While I don’t imagine it sold very well, it had a decent critical response and it’s a bit surprising that in the 18 years since Milla never put out another proper album. But while this is an obscure record, it’s got a devoted fanbase -- and the mere fact I’m still listing to it fondly in 2012 is a sign “The Divine Comedy” had a happy ending.

The ‘Gentleman Who Fell’ video:

Happy 65th birthday, David Bowie!

2012-01-08T09:10:00.003+13:00

...One thing that happens as you get older is your idols get older, too. It's hard to believe David Bowie is of retirement age today - even though he's been semi-retired since 2004 or so. I've written about Bowie many a time before on this blog. It's fair to say I'm a mega-fan, of pretty much everything from "Space Oddity" on up to "Bring Me The Disco King." Heck, I even have a soft spot for the Tin Machine era.

His "retirement" after his last studio album, 2003's "Reality," was a surprise - no melodramatic goodbye announcement or anything, but a slow fade away. While Bowie's given us enough entertainment for several lifetimes, the selfish fan in me still hopes he might come out for one last hurrah sometime - 65 isn't quite ready for the nursing home just yet.

One of my bigger musical regrets is not seeing Bowie when he performed in Portland, Oregon in 2004 on what would turn out to be his last major tour. I foolishly thought I'd get another chance to see him, and little Peter was less than 2 months old and cash was thin on the ground. But man, now I'm thinking I might've missed my one chance to see Bowie live. I've seen most of the other musicians on my "concert bucket list" but Bowie has eluded me.

If you held a gun to my head and asked me to choose between my top three musicians of all time - Bowie, Dylan and Elvis Costello - I figure I'd have to go with Bowie, whose sheer theatrical inventiveness pushes him slightly over Misters Dylan and Costello for me. Happy 65th birthday, Mr. David Jones, wherever you are - and thanks for all the memories.

Don't let me know when you're opening the door
Close me in the dark, let me disappear
Soon there'll be nothing left of me
Nothing left to release
- "Bring Me The Disco King," the last lyrics on the last album David Bowie has released to date.

Movie Review: The Adventures of Tintin

2012-01-04T09:08:00.005+13:00

I know we Americans apparently aren't supposed to be huge fans of Tintin, but I grew up on the intrepid quiff-haired reporter and his globetrotting adventures.

I used to devour the Tintin books from the local library until they started to fall apart. "The Broken Ear," "Tintin in America," "Destination Moon" and many more - the great Herge's art is pristine, detailed and expressive, while the cast of characters surrounding Tintin are some of the great eccentrics of comics.

But I went to "The Adventures of Tintin," the big-budget Hollywood epic, with a bit of concern. I appreciate Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson devoting so much care to bringing Tintin to the screen, and their fancy new CGI motion capture technology achieves a pretty remarkable look -- something that pays homage to Herge's crisp cartooning that isn't quite a cartoon. Jamie Bell and Andy Serkis voice Tintin and the rummy loudmouth Captain Haddock in an adventure that ties together several of Herge's stories into one narrative. Serkis, the king of motion capture, steals the show as the blustering Haddock, while Nick Frost and Simon Pegg are the amusing twin detectives Thomson and Thompson.

There's an awful lot I liked about "The Adventures of Tintin", and my nearly 8-year-old movie companion loved it. They are highly reverent to the basic characters -- Tintin still has his plus-fours and oddly ageless look and isn't carting around an iPhone or anything. The delightful "boy's own adventure" tone of Herge's work is intact, with Tintin merrily circling the globe on a detective quest that involves hidden treasures and ancient rivalries. Frequently, the animation is stunning -- particularly a show-stopping battle between pirate ships that's one of the best I've ever seen in the movies, and could probably have only been done in animation.

But there's things about "Tintin" that leave me vaguely unsatisfied.

The look, while technically an utter marvel, sometimes threw me out of the picture. Not so much Tintin and Haddock, who are just perfect quasi-realistic creations, but more the background characters or the too-rubbery Thompson and Thomson. The "dead-eye" look many CGI characters have is mostly gone here, but the background characters have this weird deformed off-putting look, which kept distracting me. Yeah, they're in Herge's style, but still.

I'm not one of those pedants who gets too worked up over movies differing from the source materials that much, but in "Tintin," the parts I liked the least tend to be the bits Spielberg, Jackson and the rest have bolted on to Herge's elegant stories. There's a little too much Spielberg in Tintin, too much over-the-top, utterly implausible action that just kind of glazes your eyes over. Almost every bit Spielberg has added on - I'm thinking the ludicrous "crane fight" for example - adds nothing to the story.

I always liked Herge's fine detail and the way his action scenes seemed real - punches really hurt, characters really bruise. Sure, there's big goofy action sequences in the comics, but here Tintin too often becomes yet another movie Superman. There's some business with a larcenous falcon or some huge motorized cranes that just goes on forever and doesn't really seem "Tintin" to me. What I liked the best are the bits of Tintin that really do stick close to the book - the meticulous treasure hunt, the wonderful Haddock/Tintin bond, the intrepid, brave Snowy. "Tintin" is a good movie, but it falls a bit short of great - perhaps the likely sequel (the movie hasn't done huge in America but is a big money-maker in Europe) will be a bit more Herge and a bit less Hollywood.

The Angel-a-Thon: Season 5, the grand finale

2011-12-30T17:53:00.005+13:00

OK, it was actually a few months ago now I finished my noble goal of watching all of Joss Whedon’s “Angel” and “Buffy” series, a whopping total of 254 episodes of vampire-stabbin’ good television. I wrapped it up with the final episode of the fifth season of “Angel,” “Not Fade Away.”

After the stumble that was the confused Season 4, the final season shakes up everything and goes in several new directions. At the end of the fourth season, Angel and his friends were put in charge of their longtime enemies, evil law firm Wolfram and Hart. The entire season is basically a meaty moral dilemma for Angel and co. – if you join the bad guys, work for the bad guys, doesn’t that make you a bad guy yourself? Angel, Wesley, Fred and the rest are determined to try and turn Wolfram and Hart into a force for good, but easier said than done.

For me, much of the enjoyment of Season 5 comes from totally changing the status quo. No more dank hotel and “vampire detective,” hello heavily funded mysterious corporation and deals with the devil. Some longtime “Angel” fans squawked about this season, but it’s a natural progression for Angel’s ever-shifting moral compass. It’s also a pleasure to see Buffy’s Spike, played by snarky James Marsters, join the cast. His cocky cockney schtick may be getting a wee bit tired after so long, but it adds a nice jolt of energy to the cast.

The pathos of Season 5 echo the show’s best year, Season 3 – there’s a ton of tragedy here, from the fate of poor Fred and Wesley to Gunn’s metamorphosis from street tough to silver-tongued lawyer. A real appeal for “Angel” is how everyone constantly changes, and you honestly feel that characters can die at any time – and often do. The show did get its legs cut out from under it a bit with the open-ended finale cliffhanger (which has been followed up in an OK fashion in comic books). Yet “Not Fade Away” ends in a spectacular, damn-the-torpedoes fashion, with the final battle to top all the final battles to date and some shocking turns.

Best episode: Several to choose from, including “Not Fade Away” and Cordelia’s bittersweet swan song on “You’re Welcome” – but for sheer quirkiness and a welcome blast of humour on a dark season, you can’t go wrong with “Smile Time,” the one where Angel is transformed into a deranged vampire Muppet. Awesome.

Year in Review: My Favourite Comics of 2011

2011-12-21T20:38:00.009+13:00

Favourite Ongoing Series: Amazing Spider-Man continues to be reliably solid under writer Dan Slott. His massive “Spider-Island” tale this year was both ridiculously goofy and a lot of fun, as the entire population of Manhattan mutates into “Spider-People.” Slott knows the balance of humour and action is important in Spider-Man. While not every issue is a home run, the comic is the best it’s been in years, welcome news for this longtime Spider-fan. Runners-up: Batman Inc. by Grant Morrison; Criminal/Incognito by Ed Brubaker.

Finally got sick of: Brian Bendis' Avengers books. There was a freshness and novelty to The Avengers when Bendis took over and added characters like Wolverine and Luke Cage to the mix. But I’ve gotten really sick of his dialogue tics, his spinning out one issue worth of story into six, and his overuse of the ridiculous villain Norman Osborn (who should’ve stayed dead back in the 1970s, dammit). Enough already.

Best gamble that paid off: The "New 52" by DC Comics. As monthly comics face dwindling sales, there’s going to be more drastic action in the future. DC relaunching every comic was the first shot fired. Not every book was a winner but there's been enough to enjoy here and some particularly fun offbeat series -- the "horror hero" books like Animal Man, Swamp Thing and Frankenstein are my favorites.

Best overlooked book: Red Hulk by Jeff Parker & company. The Red Hulk is one of those awful-sounding comics concepts like the son of Wolverine that shouldn’t work, but under talented writer Parker, his book has become a real gem. The Red Hulk is the “green" Hulk’s former foe General Thunderbolt Ross, who has, as you do, become the thing he most hated. What I like about the Red Hulk is the character behind him - a frustrated, 60-something military man who now has to be a superhero. It's not revolutionary Hulk comics, but there's something unique in Parker's spin on the character and Red Hulk has become an inventive, exciting ride each month.

Disappointing: Some of my favourite alternative comics creators delivered heavily hyped, but unsatisfying new work this year – Chester Brown’s bizarrely cold and clinical memoir of patronizing prostitutes, “Paying For It,” which suffered from a very dry, emotionally distant art style. And then there’s Frank Miller’s “Holy Terror,” which has very quickly assumed almost legendary flop status. Rushed art, juvenile writing, and a paranoid world viewpoint that seems torn directly from the furthest fringes of the far right.

Biggest bomb: Fear Itself. Yet another overhyped, overpriced "event comic." Each time I get disappointed by a "Siege" or "Secret Invasion" I say I'll stay away, but the muddled, overblown calculated chaos of Fear Itself finally convoked me to stop buying the hype.

Best new series: I love Daredevil, but the grim, rain-soaked loner facing constant tragedy bit got very old. So it’s a delight to see Mark Waid deliver a more happy-go-lucky take on the Man without Fear, which doesn’t abandon the past but embraces a more optimistic view. And artists Marco Martin and Paolo Rivera have, for the first time in Daredevil’s nearly 50-year-history, come up with some amazing and inventive ways to illustrate a blind superhero’s perspective of the world. Runner-up – a bold new take on Animal Man at DC Comics, with a creepy, Clive Barker-meets-David Lynch sensibility and some truly disturbing art. Not sure it’s got enough steam for the long haul yet, though.

Best writing about comics: The good folks at TwoMorrows Publishing continue to put out some great reading. Back Issue magazine is the only mag about comics I get anymore (now that the Comics Journal is once every year or two). And their books are even better -- I just got The Quality Companion which is a retro-fan's delight of information about the comics from this Golden Age publisher – from Plastic Man to forgotten oddballs like The Jester, Bozo the Robot and The Whistler. Great stuff!

Best reprint series: We truly do live in a golden age of great comics reprints, when even my old 1980s guilty pleasure West Coast Avengers gets deluxe hardcover treatment, but I was especially pleased this year to see Fantagraphics kick off a massive reprinting of Carl Barks’ delightful Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comics, easily some of the best kid-friendly comics ever created. Reading the first volume, “Lost in the Andes,” with the boy was a great experience, and knowing there’s a flood of future volumes to come is great. Beautifully designed, full of content and at a reasonable price.

Best Comic Book Movie: I've got high hopes for The Adventures of Tintin, coming in a week or so, but until then the most enjoyable comics-based movie this year was Thor - with X-Men: First Class and Captain America not far behind. Green Lantern and Cowboys Vs. Aliens, we won't speak of.

Year in Review: My favorite music of 2011

2011-12-13T22:26:00.004+13:00

It's that time of year, so here my picks for my favorite music of 2011, in alphabetical order:

Beirut, “The Rip Tide”
Sometimes sad is good, and Beirut does wonderful sad. Imagine Morrissey if he'd loved world music and brass bands. Zach Condon is only 25, but his music sounds like it's been around forever, steeped in old-world charm. Beirut's third disc, "The Rip Tide" is all sweeping melancholy and Condon's mournful voice, but it's the kind of sad that feels good to listen to. The jaunty "Santa Fe" is perhaps my favorite song of this year, while the title track is beautiful, broken-hearted and grand. If you like Arcade Fire or the National, you need to listen to this one.

Ben Folds, “The Best Imitation of Myself: A Retrospective”
OK, technically it’s a box set, but it’s got new stuff, too. And what a treasure trove for fans of Folds and his wry, witty piano pop – three discs of hits, rarities and live versions. Folds’ tunes straddle the line between Elton John and They Might Be Giants, with a song able to break your heart and crack you up in the same verse. The Ben Folds Five were one of the great underrated acts of the 1990s and Folds’ solo career has been pretty winning. This set offers a whole new chance to appreciate the hooks and harmonies, and discover rare gems.

Fabulous/Arabia, “Unlimited Buffet”
New Zealanders Lawrence Arabia and Mike Fabulous have collaborated to create a dreamlike and gorgeous piece of Kiwi pop. Arabia's last album "Chant Darling" is one of the best Kiwi records of the last few years -- in that same creative, vibrant zone bands like Phoenix Foundation and Liam Finn are operating in -- and this record is nearly as good. High harmonies, floating hooks, a bit of winking irony and an undercurrent of funk swim together in an album that is perfect for listening to on a New Zealand summer's day, watching the waves roll in at the beach.

Kanye West & Jay-Z, “Watch The Throne”
It’s a gaudy and cocky monument to consumerism, with barely an ounce of subtlety – but still, the two titans of hip-hop deliver a caffeinated, hook-filled romp of an album. While less epic in its reach than Kanye's last album, it's still a pretty dazzling mix of ego and invention, with some of the best uses of samples in a long time. Most “event” albums -- like Lady Gaga’s latest -- fall short, but this one manages to deliver.

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, “Soul Time!”
Unabashedly retro soul-funk, which may not be particularly groundbreaking but sure lights up a room. I've been on a big classic soul kick lately -- Otis, Aretha, Stax -- and Jones is one of the few folks today who carry on that tradition in a way that doesn't just seem like a tribute act. Top-notch musicianship and utter sincerity abound in songs like "Genuine" and "What If We All Stopped Paying Taxes?" I'd take the well-seasoned, passionate voice of Sharon Jones over the staggeringly dull Adele any day of the week, myself.

Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks, "Mirror Traffic"
Ah, Malkmus. Don't ever change. On the heels of the great Pavement reunion tour comes another slab of Malkmus' quirky, goofy rock, this time produced by Beck. Full of jammy guitar riffs, wacky lyrical asides and hooks that burrow into your brain, "Mirror Traffic" is good partly because it seems so damned effortless for the band. Only Malkmus could deliver the chorus to "Senator" with a straight face: "I know what the senator wants / what the senator wants / is a blow job." Awesome!

My Morning Jacket, “Circuital”
Some fans hated MMJ's last album, the experimental "Evil Urges," but I kinda dug it. The myth-drenched Southern rock combo return with an album that sums up all their parts. "Circuital" combines the spooky, reverb-filled feel of MMJ's first few albums with the free-wheeling charm of their later work -- got to love a song called "Holdin' on to Black Metal," which is defiantly tongue in check. But then album opener "Victory Dance" is a slow-building thunderbolt of a song, knocking you flat with its building power.

Unknown Mortal Orchestra, “Unknown Mortal Orchestra”
Out of the ashes of New Zealand’s punk-pop band The Mint Chinks comes this groovy psychedelic funk rock outfit, now based in Oregon. There’s a kind of alien, trippy loose-limbedness to this record, which blends solid grooves to space-cadet melodies. A bit like MGMT or Of Montreal, it’s a band giving a hipster take on well-worn genres with true adoration. It’s seasoned with a strange dash of melancholy that only makes the beats dig deeper.

Tom Waits, “Bad As Me”
After nearly 40 years of doing this, isn’t Tom Waits’ schtick old by now? But “Bad As Me” is as fresh and strange as anything else in the master’s cellar, and like many other critics have said, it plays almost as a “lost greatest hits” album. Waits saunters through every style in his book – the mournful ballad, the warped road song, the tub-thumping rant. I remember Waits being a bit of a cult figure when I stumbled across him in the late 1980s. But icon status, and even admission to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, hasn’t dimmed his distinctive weirdness one bit.

Wilco, “The Whole Love”
After two lovely but mellow albums, there’s a welcome return of tension and experimentation to Wilco’s latest. There’s less of the anguish that marked the band’s classic “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” but there’s a resurgent curiosity and sense of play. The band’s secret MVP is astounding guitarist Nels Cline, whose textural clangs, chords and riffs give frontman Jeff Tweedy’s lyrics added space and mystery.

Bubbling under: Florence + The Machine, “Ceremonials”; PJ Harvey, “Let England Shake”; Bon Iver, “Bon Iver”

Songs of the year
Beirut, "Santa Fe"
The Drab Doo Riffs, “Juggernaut”
Bon Iver, "Perth"
Liam Finn, "Cold Feet"
My Morning Jacket, "Outta My System"
Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks, "Senator"
Urge Overkill, “Thought Balloon”
Florence + The Machine, “Never Let Me Go”
Tom Waits, “Hell Broke Luce”
Unknown Mortal Orchestra, “How Can You Luv Me?”

Show of the year
I've been a total slacker on the concert scene the second half of this year, because I'm an old man in my 40s, after all. But I did see some excellent stuff earlier this year, including the sprawling traveling review of George Clinton & P. Funk - the big man may be past his prime but he was backed up by a great all-star cast. A '90s fave of mine, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, were also garage-rock fun, but the real highlight for me was seeing the post-punk combo Gang Of Four tear it up, and energetic front man Jon King ripping the Powerstation apart like it was 1979 all over again.

Superheroes I Love #10: Deathlok

2011-12-08T20:15:00.011+13:00

Every red-blooded boy loves cyborgs. Half-man, half-robot, what’s not to love? The Marvel Comics character Deathlok is a bit on the obscure side, but debuting in 1974, he’s the grandfather of Robocop, Arnold’s Terminator and many more equally mean machine-men.

Who: Deathlok “the demolisher,” a.k.a. Col. Luther Manning, an American soldier who suffers horrible injuries but is reanimated and turned into the experimental Deathlok cyborg wandering through a ruined future world.

Why I dig: I didn’t often pick up “Captain America” as a kid but the cover of #286, featuring Deathlok taking aim at the Captain, is pretty darned sweet. Drawn beautifully by Mike Zeck, it really makes Deathlok look half-zombie, half machine, and you can practically feel the gritty rot. It was about 1983, my first exposure to Deathlok, but it took me years to get around to finding his obscure 1970s original appearances.

The original series of Deathlok stories that ran in Marvel’s Astonishing Tales comics in the 1970s was a kitschy romp, created by artist Rich Buckler, and with that marvellous “make it up as we go along” feeling so many 1970s Marvel comics had which make them such immersive, if goofy, fun. Deathlok wanders through an apocalyptic America (in the far future of 1990!!) hunting the maniacal Ryker. There’s not a lot of plot to these stories but Buckler and Doug Moench give it a tactile atmosphere. Many of the sci-fi tropes we now consider a bit cliché originated in these pages. I wouldn’t ever call Deathlok great art – the series flounders about in search of a real hook other than the mangled Deathlok’s identity crisis, and unfortunately it ends just as it's really getting good – but it’s still a lot of fun.

Read this: The “Deathlok Masterworks” hardcover is a bit on the pricey side, but it collects pretty much every decent Deathlok story there’s ever been, including that Captain America multi-parter that attempts to sort out his tangled history. Unfortunately, like an awful lot of characters, Deathlok’s been killed, reborn, resurrected, rebooted and redone so many times since the 1980s that I don’t even know who he is these days. But that’s all right. Give me the shiny Deathlok Masterworks and a sunny afternoon and I’m good as gold.

40.

2011-12-06T09:51:00.003+13:00

…So long time, no post. As the last entry probably indicated, it’s been a rather rough year for us. We’re dealing with everything that’s happened and getting on with our lives, but admittedly, it’s a long haul for everyone, losing two parents from the family in less than 2 months. It's a cliche, but sometimes cliches are true: Everything has changed.

Somewhere in there, I turned 40. We buried my wife’s father on a Monday, and by that weekend, we were off to Sydney, Australia, for a long-planned holiday arranged well before all the funerals and such we’ve deal with this year.

I turned 40 and we spent the day in the sunshine at Manly Beach, on gold sand and warm water, and we went out for dinner at a fine little Italian restaurant where I ordered a proper steak for the first time in eons. Sydney is one of my favourite places, and it didn’t disappoint this time. All in all, it was a good way to get a year older – I thought I’d like to make the 40th something to remember, and it was.

And now 2011 is nearly over – I’m usually a fairly positive fella, but it’s been a year with a lot more bad in it than good. Good riddance to it, and hoping for a better 2012.

Sir Peter Siddell, 1935-2011

2011-10-27T14:32:00.005+13:00

My father-in-law Sir Peter Siddell died peacefully Monday, nearly three years after being diagnosed with an incurable brain tumor, and nearly two months to the day since his beloved wife Sylvia passed away.

To say 2011 has been a tough year for our family would be an understatement. To lose two parents, two grandparents, in less than 8 weeks is the kind of thing I hope nobody has to go through. The deaths were not surprises -- in many ways, we've been preparing for them for several years now. The year has been filled with slow declines, fading away and too many vigils, hospital visits and emergencies to count. There hasn't been a lot of time for blogging, or whatever passes for ordinary life.

Now all that's over. But it really is going to take us a terribly long time to get "over" losing Peter and Sylvia. I'm apparently going to be speaking at Sir Peter's funeral in Auckland Monday, and one of the things I will mention is how unceasingly welcome he was to this strange American joining his family, dragging his daughter around the USA and eventually bringing her home again.

Sir Peter was one of New Zealand's most famous painters, and it's a great comfort that he lived long enough to see his work recognized -- a wonderful coffee-table book of his art came out this year. And the family has a http://www.siddellart.com/ of his distinctive, uniquely Kiwi work.

Passed almost unnoticed this week was that it's been exactly five years since we moved back to New Zealand. We didn't know then what we'd be dealing with, or that our son would have such a short time with his New Zealand grandparents. But I'm still glad we've been here for it, that we were able to be a part of their lives and that my wife and her sister were so supportive in their final days.

We don't always know what kind of family we'll get when we marry someone. I was extraordinarily lucky and honored to be part of this one as long as I was.

More on Sir Peter's passing from local media:

* New Zealand Herald

* TVNZ

* Auckland Art Gallery

* Artists NZ

* Beattie's Book Blog

* Siddell Art

Steve Jobs and the world he left us

2011-10-06T15:57:00.002+13:00

Like a lot of people, I heard the news about Steve Jobs dying via my Apple computer – in my case, my iPhone.

There’s been quite the reaction to the death of Steve Jobs, at 56, too young, and many of these comments talk about how much he “changed the world.” Despite my distaste for hyperbole, I’d have to agree. He’s one of the few business leaders you can say that about. Steve Jobs didn’t single-handedly create the home computer, the iPod or the iMac or the iPad, but he was a driving force in getting his vision across to talented others, and even more than Bill Gates, he was the face of the ongoing technological revolution. And unlike Bill Gates, Steve Jobs managed to be bloody cool.

An article I quite liked today noted how Apple “stood in the intersection of utility and desire.” That to me really sums up the instinctive appeal to the Apple line, which more than any other computer system has taken us into the future. We may not have rocket jetpacks and laser guns, but I have a computer the size of a sheet of paper and I can do video live conferencing with my parents on the other side of the world at a moment’s notice.

Apples were the first computers I liked, and the only computers I’ve ever really owned. A friend of mine in junior high had some of the first Apple IIs in the mid-1980s, which dazzled me with their ease and intuitive use, even with the poky black-and-white games. I was too danged poor in the 1990s to own anything but hand-me-down PCs but when I finally achieved fiscal stability, one of those beautiful blueberry 1998 iMacs had to be mine. Since then it’s been MacBooks, iPhones, iPods galore – and just last week, I bought an iPad 2. I’ve used PCs when I’ve had to, but I have never felt as at home, as comfortable on them as I have on my Macs.

I don’t know much about Steve Jobs the human being, who apparently could be a bit arrogant, but I do know that whatever his flaws, he drove a creative, engaging business sense that made Apple what it is today. His management style drove the innovation that kept Apple rising from the dead, again and again. Oh, and during that brief period Jobs was “fired” from Apple? He went and helped create Pixar, the home of some of the biggest computer animated movies of all time.

Sure, Apple’s business practices aren’t perfect, and the “hip” factor might put some off. But there’s a reason every other tech company scrambled to come up with their own mp3 players, their own tablets and their own smartphones that aped Apple as much as possible. It’s because somehow, Steve Jobs knew what people want. He’s gone, but he left behind a world that’s very much shaped in his image.

DC Comics and the "new 52" gamble

2011-10-05T07:51:00.013+13:00

I do worry about comic books. I’ve been buying them regularly since, oh god, 1982 or so, but the monthly floppy periodical business model may be something that, like a lot of good ol’ non-digital pastimes, is fading away.

So DC Comics shook things up quite a bit by deciding to cancel their entire nearly 80-year-old line of books (some up to #900 or so), and starting all over from scratch. I can’t get too fussed about that, really – there have been more “reboots” than I can count of comics universes in my 30 years of collecting and I’m sure there will be more.

I see this move, though – 52 new first issues of 52 series, all over the course of a month – as a real “hail Mary” pass for the future of comic books as a monthly concern. So far, fortunately, it seems to have at least for now been a financial success – because frankly, if it were a huge flop, it would be bad for the entire comics industry by proxy. While DC is far from the only comics company, they're one of the two biggest. I wouldn’t be half surprised if Marvel followed with some sweeping move of their own sometime soon.

I haven’t picked up a ton of the new DC 52 comics but I have generally liked the ones I tried. DC have put together a nice mix of mainstream heroes like Green Lantern and The Flash with more offbeat books like "Frankenstein" and "All Star Western."

The new “Justice League,” much touted as the flagship of the line, was a mixed bag – I’m over the “let’s take 6 issues to put the team together” decompression school of storytelling, and Jim Lee’s art has always been a bit overrated to me. But it wasn’t TERRIBLE – merely routine. Grant Morrison's new "Action Comics #1" is a far better relaunch -- a new vision of Superman that draws heavily on the nearly forgotten gangster-punching strongman of the early 1930s, but modernised with a twist.

I quite enjoyed the quirk-hero adventures of “Animal Man” (an old favourite of mine) and “Frankenstein and the Agents of S.H.A.D.E.” Also good fun were the medieval adventure “Demon Knights” and, surprisingly, the relaunch of conspiracy-heroes comic “Stormwatch” which combines a variety of franchises and DC’s venerable Martian Manhunter together and might actually make the characters Apollo and the Midnighter interesting for the first time in a few years. “Justice League Dark” was pretty cool, too, a kind of Vertigo-meets-mainstream caper with some excellent art.

More importantly, this whole "new 52" business has given comics a jolt of excitement that all the endless "big event" miniseries have failed to do. While there's a fair amount of junk among the new 52, I have to admit I've now suddenly got more DC Comics than Marvel on my monthly pull list for the first time in a long while.

In what is probably a testament to the problems comics sales are facing, I ended up downloading a couple of my very first comics on our new iPad too. It’s interesting to note that it was cheaper to download than buy them here and now that DC and Marvel are both doing day of release digital, it’s hard not to imagine that market taking off.

I was pretty impressed, actually, at how gorgeous “Superman #1” and “Justice League Dark #1” looked on the iPad – stunning colours, very user-friendly interface, and closer to “reading” a “real” comic than any other such digital endeavour I’ve seen. I'm still a sucker for the tangible object, though. I don’t think I’ll download often, but I have to say Comixology and the publishers have made reading a comic on an iPad a pretty satisfying experience.

Will DC’s “new 52” gamble pay off in the long run? I honestly don’t know. When you look at the figures a comic sells nowadays – if it breaks 100,000 copies it’s a huge hit, whereas 20 years ago some comics sold in the millions – it’s a tough fight ahead. However, whatever happens next I don’t ever think we’ll see the end of comics as a medium of expression – yeah, they may go entirely digital like so much else has, but the comic book is a sturdy, endlessly vast and variable way to tell a story, from “Love and Rockets” to “Archie.”

The comic book has its fingerprints all over pop culture these days. It ain’t going anywhere soon, no matter how it changes.

That's me in the corner: Farewell, R.E.M.

2011-09-23T09:51:00.005+12:00

R.E.M. have called it quits, which saddens me -- not as much as it might once have, perhaps, but it's still worth taking a moment to remember how great they were at their zenith.

I know there's a lot of wags out there who expressed surprise they were still together, that the general consensus is that they peaked with 1992's "Automatic For The People" and it's been a slow downhill slope ever since, but I don't care what anyone else thinks -- they remain one of the finest bands of the last 30 years, and their influence can be felt on countless acts.

It's hard to be a band that makes it to that blockbuster level of a U2 or a Pearl Jam or Rolling Stones. Inevitably, you fall off the peak a bit. Name a band that sustains a 20+ year career of constant critical and commercial success, and it'd have to be a pretty small list. R.E.M. was a fluke as a mainstream success -- they were more comfortable in the shadows, in the cult icon category with people like their idol Patti Smith.

Like most things, I was a bit of a late bloomer to R.E.M. -- I didn't discover them until 1989's "Green," and it was appropriate that I discovered them in my first year living in Mississippi. In the early days, they were definitely a Southern band, steeped in kudzu, gothic mystique and fog. Someone in my college dorm was giving away some of his CDs and I snagged "Green." I remember playing one track over and over again that seemed directly written for me, freshly moved from the West Coast to the deep South -- "I Remember California," of course.

There was a big hoo-rah in the rock world around 1992 or so over who was better -- U2 or R.E.M. It's never been a contest for me. While U2 are grandiose, epic and often a bit overblown, R.E.M. were a cult band who briefly became mainstream through the sheer power and craft of their songwriting. Even now, 20 years on, I listen to the chiming mandolin chords of "Losing My Religion" and it still sounds fresh and peculiar on the thousandth listen, the urgency and murky universality of Stipe's anguished lyrics ringing true.

I love their entire career, which carved an arc from hushed Southern poets to stadium-filling anthems to the more hushed, emotionally open balladry that dominated their later work. Michael Stipe's gift as a lyricist, especially in the early days, was combining elliptical lyrics with heartfelt sincerity -- a song like "Fall On Me," "What's The Frequency Kenneth" or "Driver 8" could've been about anything, whatever you wanted it to be. Some of their more populist songs like "Everybody Hurts" or "Shiny Happy People" might've felt like sell-outs to the fans of the mumbling Stipe era, but even they had a dash of that R.E.M. mystique to them. R.E.M. never sounded like anybody but themselves to me.

I'd stick with them through thick and thin -- while they haven't released a truly great album since 1996's underrated, experimental "New Adventures in Hi-Fi," I usually found at least a few songs to like on their later work. I loved the hit singles like "Losing My Religion" but also the rare numbers like the soundtrack number "Fretless" or "Out Of Time's" sadcore masterpiece, "Country Feedback." 2001's "Reveal" I find particularly strong, with a gorgeous wanderlust on songs like "All The Way To Reno" and "Imitation of Life." They could disappoint toward the end -- 2003's "Around The Sun" was a dull bore -- but honestly, I don't feel like R.E.M. ever embarrassed themselves. Perhaps they chose to retire a bit later than they should have in order to get the proper amount of appreciation -- but I think in the end R.E.M. will be remembered as one of the giants of the "alternative rock" era.

The Angel-a-Thon: Season 4

2011-09-13T19:59:00.001+12:00

It’s hard to top a peak. The third series of “Angel” was such a taut, exciting ride that season four had a lot to live up to. And while it’s rarely rotten, Angel’s penultimate series falls a bit short.

There’s great momentum at the start of this season, as the cliffhangers of Series 3 are wrapped up and the apocalyptic Beast comes to town, raining fire on the streets and blocking out the sun. There’s a real sense of danger and drama in these early episodes – the Beast is by far the most inhuman villain the series has had, and it really seems nothing can stop him. The various psychodramas continue as Angel bonds and brawls with his bad-boy, instantly teenaged son Connor, Wesley works his way back from his dark exile into redemption (it’s amazing what a bad-ass Alexis Denisof has become as Wesley, especially when you view his first few appearances way back in “Buffy”’s third season), while Fred and Gunn wind down their increasingly annoying relationship.

But then it all kind of turns to custard. The writers apparently feel they have to keep one-upping the threat level, and so the Beast turns out to be a pawn of a now-evil Cordelia, who turns out to be yet ANOTHER pawn of the smiling goddess Jasmine. Really, the Beast could’ve been a solid enough protagonist to fuel the entire season, and the ridiculously labyrinthine plot by Jasmine is insulting to viewers (apparently pretty much everything that ever happened since episode one has been a part of the plan). But the worst misstep is how the writers abuse poor Cordelia, who’d shown the most fascinating growth as a character over the first 3 years, moving from selfish diva to selfless heroine. Her “ascension” at the end of the third season was tearjerking and yet very right.

But it’s all dumped on this year, as Cordy’s forced into an icky affair with Connor, gotten pregnant, turns evil, then is clumsily just written out of the series entirely. It’s a real shame that poor Charisma Carpenter goes out on such an awkward note (although fortunately, she has a better swan song in Season 5). Jasmine, played by “Firefly” star Gina Torres, is a character with potential – an ancient god who is bringing enforced world peace – but she never quite comes across right.

There’s still a lot to like in series 4 – we get the return of Angel’s evil alter ego Angelus, who’s sinister fun, and a guest appearance by Faith (Eliza Dushku) always provides a lot of energy. There's lots of great moments, but the meandering of the overall season storyline and the egregious waste of Cordelia do spoil it all a bit.

Best episode: In a season filled with dark twists and turns, it’s the lighthearted change of pace episode “Spin The Bottle” that provides some much-needed levity, and a chance for the cast to show how much the characters have grown. While the “everyone gets amnesia” plot is beyond cliché, it’s played out in a very fun fashion as we witness the return of bitchy high-school Cordelia, foppish Wesley and medieval young Angel and everyone bounces off each other in a nice locked-room mystery. It's a good showcase for the actors and just nice to get a break from the never-ending apocalypses. Runner-up: “Home,” the energetic season finale, which delivers a much-needed change of setting and mission for Season 5 and gives the entire mauldin, overlong Connor storyline a fitting, bittersweet sendoff.

Rugby World Cup madness comes to town

2011-09-11T10:41:00.002+12:00

In New Zealand, there's only one event right now -- the massive Rugby World Cup. If you're in America, you might not know much about this, but if you're anywhere else in the world, it's one of the biggest sporting events in the known universe.

We in the media have been preparing for this for months, and my colleagues in print and online at the NZ Herald have done an amazing job. It's a massive undertaking, and I have to admit knowing it's just the start of a 6-week, dozens of game tournament kind of makes you quake a bit. It'd be lovely if this was just for two weeks or something, but going on till the end of October? Egad!

In-between working on the website and the paper Friday, I'd duck out and check out the scenes outside the building. It was like every college football game I'd ever seen rolled into one roiling mass of people -- flags of many nations, screaming drunken boys, nervous tourists, honking horns -- it was fun but also rather insane. Nobody in power seemed to be prepared at all for the massive crowds. Clearly NZ has gone a bit rugby-mad.

Unfortunately, the big opening celebration Friday night was a bit of a debacle on several fronts -- after months of hyping Auckland's public transport system it failed badly, with stuck trains, cancelled ferries, even elementary measures like failing to close the city's major downtown streets until hours of traffic chaos had ensued. Downtown Auckland was pretty madhouse Friday night -- estimates of anywhere from 120,000 to 200,000 people poured into downtown, which in a country of 4 million people is a HUGE gathering.

Yet there were pretty awesome moments -- the opening ceremony was amazing, the All Blacks won the first game against Tonga, the sheer energy was invigorating, and the gigantic fireworks ceremony -- apparently Auckland's biggest ever -- was stunning. A bunch of us climbed up on the roof of the Herald building for some stunning views of fireworks erupting from the Sky Tower and buildings around us.

It's hard to compare an event like this to something you'd see in the United States -- the US has never been a big player in the soccer, cricket or rugby international tournaments, so perhaps something like the Olympics is the only comparison. I've never been a huge sports guy, but you have to get swept up in it all. It is cool to see how tourists from the 20 nations have swarmed into town -- a peculiar mix of countries from rugby standards like England, Australia and South Africa to a dashing of proud Pacific Island nations like Tonga, Samoa and Fiji and then a few "what the heck" countries like Romania and Namibia.

While there's a certain sense of craziness and inconvenience to it all it's also kind of a cool thing to witness. You either ride with something like this or you waste energy getting annoyed at it. Right now for rugby-heads New Zealand is the centre of the universe. And for the next six weeks, it'll continue to be.

Sylvia Siddell, 1941-2011

2011-08-26T17:58:00.005+12:00

"Max Taming The Furies," Sylvia Siddell, circa 1999

...My mother-in-law, and a wife, mother, grandmother, artist. She will be missed.

Movie Review: Captain America: The First Avenger

2011-08-10T19:38:00.009+12:00

It may have taken me a week or two, but I’ve finally seen “Captain America: The First Avenger,” the red, white and blue wrap-up to our summer of comic book movies galore.

I have to admit I wasn’t quite as excited to see Cap as I’ve been other superheroes on screen – I’ve just never been a gigantic fan of the character, who walks a thin line between inspiring and hokey. Most of my comics experience with Captain America has been as a supporting character in “The Avengers,” although writer Ed Brubaker has been doing some great stuff with him in recent years I’ve been catching up on. But “Captain America” the movie, while not groundbreaking, is a solid, fun time at the movies, a rip-roaring and mildly retro war action picture that is more Indiana Jones in tone than “The Dark Knight.”

What I liked:
Chris Evans has now played two Marvel heroes in recent years – first the Fantastic Four's Human Torch - but Captain America is a tricky role. He's idealistic and inspirational, which can make for a dull character. But Evans does a solid job presenting the man behind the icon, particularly in the marvellous early scenes with a pretty seamless special effect that makes him a 90-lb weakling as young Steve Rogers.

“Captain America” is quite tied into the whole overall Marvel movies mix, but it’s not done QUITE as intrusively as it was in “Iron Man 2” or “Thor.” There’s nifty little nods to the original Human Torch and Iron Man’s dad Howard Stark is a major character, and the ending is a natural lead-in to next year’s “The Avengers.” I love seeing old war comics heroes The Howling Commandos appear (seriously, did anyone ever imagine “Dum-Dum” Dugan would appear in a major Hollywood movie?).

Hayley Atwell makes a marvellous Peggy Carter, who’s both feminine and tough and has a naturalistic, unforced relationship develop with Rogers. Tommy Lee Jones is there pretty much for comic relief as the wisecracking old soldier commander, while Stanley Tucci provides a nice emotional heart in a few scenes as the doctor who gives Rogers his powers.

Director Joe Johnston did the beloved 1990s cult comic adaptation “The Rocketeer,” which “Captain America” almost feels like a sequel to. There's a great production design of 1940s New York that straddles realism and fantasy, and some fine visuals like the Red Skull’s flying wing of destruction and his proto-Stormtrooper armoured henchmen.

What I didn’t like:
Chris Evans, the flip side: once he gets pumped up into Captain America, oddly, I found Evans a little less interesting - the first half of the movie is captivating as we see how Rogers becomes Captain America, but once he does, it gets a bit routine. Probably my one big beef with Evans is that his Captain America lacks a certain authority, that leader of men feeling that the character needs. Even as the movie winds down, he seems a bit too green. I know it's the young Captain America here, but there's still a need for a bit more gravitas.

Hugo Weaving looks all grim and cool as the Red Skull, Captain America's evil doppleganger, but the character just feels a bit thin to me. Actually, I’ve had that problem with the comics Skull too, who’s just so darned evil and nihilistic that it’s hard to really feel any kinship with him. There's nothing that pushes him to a unique level like Heath Ledger's Joker or Terence Stamp's General Zod.

Overall, it hasn’t been a bad summer (or winter down here) for comics fans. I quite enjoyed both “Thor” and “X-Men: First Class,” and while “Green Lantern” was a financial and critical miss, it wasn’t the worst comics movie ever made and really suffers more because the bar has been raised so high the last five years or so.

Nik's Unheralded Albums #7: Joey Ramone, "Don't Worry About Me"

2011-08-04T10:26:00.005+12:00

Death changes how you listen to an artist. You can't help it. Try putting on Amy Winehouse's "Rehab" this week and not thinking about her lonesome end. It's pretty much impossible. Of course, eventually the shock of death fades a bit and it's just another song by the Doors. There's a ton of famed posthumous albums, from Nirvana's "MTV Unplugged" to Roy Orbison's "Mystery Girl" to George Harrison's "Brainwashed."

Some after-death albums are better than others, some are obvious record-company attempts to catch in on leftover bits and bobs (hello, Tupac Shakur!). Occasionally, you get one that's a defining final statement by an artist who knows the end is near. Warren Zevon's "The Wind," the latter albums of Johnny Cash, and one of my favorites, Joey Ramone's "Don't Worry About Me."

Is it morbid? Hipster nostalgia? Probably a bit of all of the above. But 10 years after his death, I still find myself listening to and enjoying a Ramones fan curiosity -- the only solo album by lead singer Joey Ramone, released a year after his death from cancer in 2001.

"Don't Worry About Me" doesn't break the Ramones mold. Short, sharp and punchy, it's got that distinctive Ramones sound but shot through with a slightly more introspective air, and underneath the punk/pop you realize this is a loose concept album about Joey's life, and his battle with lymphoma.

"Don't Worry About Me" is a 34-minute catharsis for Joey, recording the album from his sickbed. Look at the song titles -- "Stop Thinking About It," "Like a Drug I Never Did Before," the marvelous "I Got Knocked Down (But I'll Get Up)". "I Got Knocked Down" is a song for anyone dealing with the horror of their body or a loved one's body failing -- "Sitting in a hospital bed / I want my life," Joey sings. There's nothing too deep or metaphorical about this -- it's Joey's very real frustration, delivered with the same blunt passion the Ramones would bring to lines like "Now I wanna sniff some glue." But "Don't Worry About Me" isn't a downer of an album. With typically goofy Ramones songs like "Mr. Punchy" or a cover of the Stooges' "1969," it's a defiant, resilient album. He doesn't ask you to feel sorry for him -- hell, the final song is the title track, "Don't Worry About Me."

Off-center covers of Louis Armstrong's "What A Wonderful World" are cliche by now, but man, I still love Joey's take on it, which opens the album with an ecstatic blast, a punch in the face of death and fate. Knowing the singer is gone now, too young, lends it an extra poignancy -- is that manipulative, I suppose? But something being manipulative doesn't mean it isn't also based on truth. As last blasts raging at the darkness go, "Don't Worry About Me" is one of my favorites. Play it at my funeral.

The Angel-A-Thon: Season 3

2011-07-15T10:39:00.005+12:00

In “Angel” Season 3, the vampire-detective show manages to get even darker, if that’s possible. You could measure the torment and angst on screen in some of these episodes by the gallon. Yet at the same time, this is the season “Angel” really gels and the characters form a real “family” of outcasts and freaks – which makes it all the more painful when bad things keep happening to them.

This season Angel Investigations continue to grow – the nervous Fred joins the team, while Gunn and the demon Lorne both also become full-time cast members. Fred’s a strange addition at first, and I felt Amy Acker overplays the whole “naïve country girl with an accent” schtick. But she becomes an enjoyable cast member, although I couldn't ever buy into the idea that her and Gunn would have a relationship – they never make a plausible couple. I also really loved the changes Wesley went through this year, completing the transformation from tweedy geek in his early “Buffy” appearances into a grim, haunted and authoritative figure. (Alexis Denisof proves himself a pretty solid actor this season.)

But the big ongoing story this season is the tale of Darla, Angel’s evil ex, and her pregnancy and the surprise child she delivers. It’s a great tragic soap opera storyline, complete with a resurrected ancient foe of Angel’s, Holtz. Holtz, wonderfully played by Keith Szarabajka, was a vampire hunter 200 years ago whose entire family was slaughtered by the evil Angelus. Brought back to life to continue his hunt for Angel, Holtz is a fascinating character – seething with righteous rage over Angel’s past deeds. The whole Darla/Holtz plot comes to a great conclusion as Angel’s son is born – then through one of those magic/timey-wimey things, ends up a few episodes later as a scowling Pete from “Mad Men.” The grown Connor and his fractious relationship with his father give “Angel” another surge of energy as the third season comes to a close.

This season is the best yet, as it tangles fatherhood, guilt, love, and vengeance into one boiling mass of emotions and twists. I’d have to say this year is when the spinoff becomes as good as the parent show “Buffy” was at its peak. It’s a tribute to the skill of the actors and writers that the show doesn’t drown in its own bleak plotlines. Just enough humour and action are used to break up the gloomy bits.

Best episode: There’s several great ones this year, but I have to go with “Sleep Tight,” about as tense an episode “Angel” has produced, with Angel’s baby son becoming a football passed between a variety of players. Wesley’s betrayal of the team is startling, but what’s even more gripping is how horribly his behaviour damages the bond between the friends of Angel Investigations – the easy camaraderie between the gang is broken, and the fallout from this episode lingers through the rest of this season and into Season 4. The shocking finale of this episode, where Angel loses Connor and Holtz, seemingly forever, is a gut-blow to the viewer. (Runner-up status to the season finale "Tomorrow" which has a great cliff-hanger ending -- one character sinking into the sea, one ascending to higher realms.)

Movies I Have Never Seen Part 5: 'Easy Rider'

2011-07-12T11:15:00.006+12:00

Grab your helmet and here we go again with another long-delayed installment of famed movies I've finally gotten around to seeing or the first time....

Why it’s famous: “We blew it, man.” If you were making a time capsule of 1960s counterculture, “Easy Rider” would have to be at the top of the pile. The tale of two hippie pals aimlessly motorcycling across America, it’s a landmark movie – a slap in the face of complacent middle America culture, it opens with the leads snorting cocaine at a drug deal. Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper are ‘Captain America’ and Billy, antiheroes living the footloose dream. Along the way they pick up a drunken lawyer (Jack Nicholson in his breakthrough role) and dive deep into the heart of Americana.

What I thought: This is another one of those movies that you can kind of feel like you have seen even if you haven't -- it seeped into the popular consciousness long ago, and actually sitting down and watching "Easy Rider" for the first time in 2011 is -- well, kind of a trip, as the characters might say. It's darker than you might imagine. “Easy Rider” caught the zeitgeist in 1969 as hippie freedom clashes with rural America, and director, the late Dennis Hopper, wonderfully catches that sense of possibility and nightmare lurking on the wide open road.

Even the wall-to-wall rock soundtrack was pretty groundbreaking -- Martin Scorsese and Wes Anderson and Cameron Crowe owe Hopper a lot of their style. Using Steppenwolf's "Born To Be Wild" is a huge cliche by now, but when it revs up over the opening credits, you still feel a visceral kick as audiences must have done back in '69.

Yet while "Easy Rider" is full of great imagery (nothing says "freedom" quite like two bikes roaring down a desert highway), as a movie it sputters a bit. Fonda and Hopper have a great time -- developing the personalities they'd basically explore for the rest of their careers, Fonda laconic and mellow yet authoritative, Hopper manic and frenzied. Yet the first half-hour or so of "Easy Rider" is often slow and unfocused, with some really irritating "flashy" scene cutting editing.

But then Jack Nicholson bounds into the movie about halfway through and hugely lifts the game – it’s a star-making turn in every sense of the word. Drawling in a Louisiana accent, and less over-the-top than he'd become as an actor, his George Benson is the voice of the audience in this film, both gently mocking the hippie travelers and yet longing to trip out with them. But for Jack's character it all ends horribly badly. It's a short performance - just 25 minutes or so - but Nicholson etches himself firmly in your mind and has most of the movie's best lines: "They'll talk to ya and talk to ya and talk to ya about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it's gonna scare 'em."

And that to me is what surprises most about "Easy Rider" -- while I had often imagined it to be some free-love paean to the sixties, it's really a movie that shows how that image was never true. I was struck by the scenes at a remote hippie commune where the people are trying to live off the land and failing -- one long pan shows the faces of these dreamers at dinner, dazed, confused and strung-out looking, beaten down by the impossibility of trying to "get back to nature". It's hardly a positive advertisement for the lifestyle. Few people really seem to be enjoying their so-called "freedom." The visceral hatred that "townies" show to the traveling bikers is startling, savage, and yet very believable coming at the end of a turbulent decade. "Easy Rider" may show us a lot of freedom, but in the end it shows us the price it usually demands.

Worth Seeing: Yes, as long as you know going in you’re going to get a time capsule of 1969 Americana. The themes of “Easy Rider” are still relevant today once you get past the groovy dated bits, man, and while I wish I could say 40 years on America has become a far more tolerant country, there’s still work to be done.

Grade: B+

Nik's Unheralded Albums #6: Julian Lennon, "Mr. Jordan."

2011-07-02T10:02:00.004+12:00

I do feel bad for the children of rock stars. Never mind all the lunacy involved around growing up being Keith Richards Jr or whomever, but then there’s the impossible expectations that come if you decide to follow in their footsteps. The music world is littered with Frank Sinatra Juniors, Jakob Dylans and so forth.

One kind-of-success was John Lennon’s oldest son Julian Lennon. He had a few minor hits back in the mid-1980s, then sank from sight. His first two albums were what I'd call perfectly pleasant pop -- with their biggest attraction Julian's startling similarity to his late father's voice. But only so much can be done with nostalgia, so Julian Lennon never quite rose above one-hit wonder status with his single "Too Late For Goodbyes."

Yet Lennon Jr. continued plugging away, and surprised with his third album, 1989's "Mr. Jordan," a more sonically adventurous little gem – the kind of pop that’s often called “Beatles-esque” which here at least can be traced partly to genetics. I’d say it’s the highlight of Julian’s brief recording career, with a self-assurance that his earlier work lacked. The mellow singer-songwriter vibe has been replaced by a grittier, more experimental sound that really works well.

The very first track of "Mr. Jordan" announces that we're moving on from John Lennon to David Bowie as an influence, with Julian boasting a deeper, sturdier singing voice than before, more willing to expand his range. "Now You're In Heaven" pulses with a strong beat and crunchy guitar riffs, sounding like a lost single from Bowie's "Lodger." "Open Your Eyes" bounces along on a very '80s Human League keyboard line, mashed together with a dash of "Tomorrow Never Knows" swirl. "Angillette" is a sweeping ballad that does echo "Mind Games"-era Lennon, but is tinted with Julian's own distinctive ache. With "Get Up," Lennon reaches further back into rock history with a loose-limbed rockabilly pastiche. Everything-and-the-kitchen sink album closer "I Want You To Know" is a psychedelic romp that piles on the soundscapes (at one point Lennon sounds like he's singing while marching underwater). "Mr. Jordan" is a magpie of an album, with Julian trying on a variety of musical hats, some of which fit better than others. His willingness to experiment is bracing and he sounds far more free than he did in his earlier work. But after a couple more albums, that was it for Julian's music endeavors.

Lennon seems to have given up the music biz, and I can’t say I blame him – it rarely turns out well for pop kids. But over his brief heyday he delivered some material that moved well out of his father's shadow. (The music of his half-brother Sean, whose own hipster-ish solo records got a bit of hype in the 1990s, has aged far less well to me.) While Julian Lennon can't ever hope to entirely get past that formidable father figure, "Mr. Jordan" shows he had a voice of his own.

"Now You're In Heaven" video:

Movie Review: Green Lantern

2011-06-21T12:58:00.008+12:00

Apparently, "Green Lantern" is the worst thing in the history of ever if you read the message boards. But it isn't actually. It's another fairly routine comic book movie, with a handful of flaws and missteps, but I still found it decent entertainment. Its big problem is it comes amongst a tsunami of comic movies and offers too much of the "same old thing," which "Thor" and "X-Men: First Class" managed to avoid. At this point, I think we comics geeks kind of expect more.

Green Lantern is a step or two down from the Batman and Superman level for DC Comics, but he's been a pretty successful character for going on 70 years now, through a variety of incarnations. The Green Lantern Corps -- a cosmic police force - has spun off into all kinds of configurations, but the best known Green Lantern is Hal Jordan, former test pilot who becomes Earth's first Lantern Corpsman.

"Green Lantern" the movie introduces Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) and his world and goes for a kind of "Star Wars" meets "Iron Man" tone. The faraway world of Oa and the diverse alien corps are wonderfully realized in a million hues of green. Where "Lantern" stumbles is the same place other comic movies like "Iron Man 2" did -- trying to cram in too much. Between the Corps members, Sinestro, villains Parallax and Hector Hammond and Hal Jordan's personal life, there's enough for a couple movies. The film develops a choppy rhythm, rushing to its climax where suddenly novice ring-bearer Jordan becomes an expert warrior.

But still -- I liked Reynolds' breezy, yet insecure Hal Jordan. Jordan is one of those comics characters I've never really warmed to - a generic square-jawed hero who later developed deep problems and even became a mass murderer (as you do). The movie takes the shorthand method of characterizing Jordan (using a heaping helping of traits from another comic Green Lantern, Kyle Rayner). Mark Strong also commands the screen as stern alien leader Sinestro, whose name is a dead giveaway for how the character ends up in the comics. Peter Sarsgaard also makes the most of a rather confusingly written character as the nerdy, betrayed Hector Hammond.

I didn't really think much of co-producer and overrated comics writer Geoff Johns trying to awkwardly cram in many of his own creations like Parallax, a nebulous floating fear demon, or yellow power rings and the like. I'm not a fan of the red, yellow, pink and whatever Lanterns he's created in the comics. The blue Guardians of the Universe are also one of those comic-book concepts that just look a bit goofy on screen.

Unlike "Thor" -- where I thought the balance between the fantastical Asgard and the mundane New Mexico actually worked -- "Green Lantern" comes to life best in the outer space sequences. I wanted more of Oa, more of the eye-catching alien Corps, and less of Hal Jordan mooning about over the bland Blake Lively. There's too much that's familiar in "Green Lantern" -- hero discovers powers, hero tested, hero triumphs. For comic movies to succeed when there's so many of them these days they need to set themselves apart, like "Thor" and its Nordic gods or "The Dark Knight" and its epic morality plays.

But y'know, I took Peter, 7, with me to it which is perhaps the best way to see a movie like this, with a boy whose eyes open wide at every sight we grown-ups would call cliche. I mean, Peter even gets a kick out of the much-maligned "Fantastic Four" movies (which "Green Lantern" still surpassed in my humble eye). I know "Green Lantern" isn't a great movie, but I had a great time watching it with Peter. So in that respect, it works pretty well for some ages.

100 Years of The Daily Mississippian

2011-06-19T13:38:00.001+12:00

An old boss of mine turned 100 years old this past weekend -- The Daily Mississippian, my college newspaper and the first place I earned my journalism "stripes," so to speak. Being on the other side of the world and all I couldn't exactly make the centennial events (but hopefully a drink or two was had on City Grocery's balcony on my behalf). But more than 15 years after I finished college, I've still got many a fond memory of the old DM, my training ground for a career that's been changing and shifting ever since. Since 1911, the DM has been the voice of debate and news at the University of Mississippi.

It's stunning to look back at my DM term - roughly 1992-1995 or so - and see how much has changed. The "Internet" was barely a notion then, the idea of computer layout of our pages was a shocking novelty (just a year or so before I came along, the paper was still using an ancient pre-desktop publishing system of pagination). The job I have today -- production editor for a major metropolitan newspaper website -- simply didn't exist then.

The DM was a terrific place to hang out in college, in the basement of Farley Hall and just across the hall from the hip campus radio station. Putting out a five-day-a-week newspaper felt like being in a club, where a variety of raconteurs, oddballs and iconoclasts were shoved together out of their shared love of the journalism dream. I held a variety of semi-official "titles" there -- opinion page editor, features writer, assistant entertainment editor or something like that, columnist, cartoonist -- and while I didn't live down there 24-7 in the basement like a lot of the staff, I felt the first tinglings of the familiar newsroom buzz that is still an intoxicant to any newshound. We alumni still fondly speak of "The Ice Storm of 1994" which closed down the campus and we scrambled to create an 8-page "EXTRA" edition to cover.

An awful lot of the newspaper's controversy revolved around Ole Miss' evolving place in the post-integration world -- this was a campus which was integrated by the government forcibly in 1962, just 30 years before I arrived, and the wounds were raw -- bullet marks still speckled the administration building columns. When I was there one of the editors was the great Jesse Holland, only the second African-American editor of the paper. I still remember the day some local redneck rang up and got Jesse on the phone and then angrily said, "I wanna speak to the WHITE editor!" Sorry, Mr. Cracker, the times have a-changed and Jesse's since gone on to be the Associated Press's US Supreme Court correspondent. Folks who haven't lived in Mississippi still give it a lot of scorn today, but I tell you, I was there to watch the world ever-so-gradually changing. I'd love to know how that redneck's mind was blown by President Obama.

I learned an awful lot at the DM -- I interviewed California's ex-governor (and once again governor today) Jerry Brown, I met Henry Kissinger, hung out with local writer-made-big John Grisham, and wrote vaguely pretentious newspaper columns about my first loves and the music I was listening to -- the kind of columns every 22-year-old writes and thinks nobody else has ever done.

But the biggest charge I ever got at the DM was doing my very own daily newspaper strip for a year or so -- "Jip," a kind of goofy pastiche of Martin Wagner's "Hepcats" with "Bloom County," "Peanuts" and "Doonesbury" that was like flying by the seat of my pants every day as I sat at the drawing board trying to come up with gags and one-liners and characters that seemed at least slightly real to me. It was a real stretch of the creative muscles and an utter blast to do.

These days I work in a "digitally active newsroom" where I do things like live-blog the Royal Wedding, a sentence which would've been half-incomprehensible in 1994. Unlike many of my old pals from the DM, I'm still hanging on in the journalism industry despite its many seismic changes and cutbacks -- and I'm always grateful to the ol' DM for helping get it all started for me. Happy birthday.

Movie Review: X-Men: First Class

2011-06-08T09:24:00.006+12:00

I still remember how amazing it seemed 11 years ago that they were actually making an "X-Men" movie from one of my favorite childhood comics -- and here we are with the fifth now out, "X-Men: First Class."

I won't call it a "reboot," because man am I sick of that phrase, but as a prequel, "First Class" is genuinely exciting stuff, filling in the gaps in the relationship between Professor X and Magneto and providing the required amount of summer-movie explosions and such. It's easily the best of the "X-Men" movies after "X2," I think, although I don't view "X-Men: The Last Stand" and "Wolverine" with quite as much visceral scorn as the rest of the Internet seems to.

The Malcolm X/Martin Luther King kind of dynamic between Xavier and Magneto over mutant rights has been fodder for many of the best "X-Men" stories over the decades, and "First Class" follows the relationship from its start -- including young Magneto's tortured youth in a Nazi concentration camp. There was the solid decision to make this a period piece set in the 1960s, in a world where mutants hold the balance of power in the Cold War and the real-life Cuban Missile Crisis is cleverly folded into the plot.

What I liked:
I have really dug Michael Fassbender in movies like "Inglourious Basterds" and "Centurion," and he owns the screen as a young Magneto. I'd actually say he's better than Sir Ian McKellen was in a lot of ways, tapping into the character's rage and wounded dignity. James McAvoy is less flashy as young Professor X, and plays it a bit goofy with his lounge lizard "groovy" slang sometimes, but ably convinces of Xavier's essential heart and compassion. You believe this man will grow up to be Patrick Stewart.

Jennifer Lawrence brings some needed depth as young Mystique, a shapeshifter trying to fit in. It's a shame her character was nowhere near as well written in the first few "X-Men" movies, and doesn't really mesh well with the more thoughtful woman shown here. The other younger mutants on screen here get less time to develop their characters and some of them are rather weak actors, but Nicholas Hoult as Beast is a stand-out (although I'm afraid I didn't find the CGI/makeup used for his "transformation" later in the film very effective).

The Hellfire Club of the comics, a kind of mutant Masons, were always one of my favorites, and it's good to see them on screen albeit in a somewhat different form. I love Kevin Bacon playing a scenery-chewing Sebastian Shaw. While he isn't exactly the same burly dandy the comics have featured he does a good job of providing sinister menace. January Jones as Emma Frost looks fantastic, but as seen on "Mad Men" the icy Jones seems to have exactly one facial expression about 90% of the time.

What I didn't like:
The movie is fitful in its desire to keep to the 1960s setting. While there's marvelous James Bond/Austin Powers type touches, like Sebastian Shaw's evil submarine and Emma Frost's go-go wardrobes, other times the movie seems to be set in the modern day. Director Matthew Vaughn ("Kick-Ass") has a lot of style, but it feels like he was holding back a bit (kicky split-screen montage sequences are one of his better gimmicks).

It's a real grab-bag of mutants assembled here for any long-time reader of the "X-Men" comics. You've got Beast and Professor X from the "real" comic book first class, then Havok and Banshee from a slightly later era, and then mutants so darned new in the comics I'd barely heard of them, like Darwin and Azazel. Still, unless you're some kind of rampant continuity nut, the team assembled here works for the story -- and if you're a rabid continuity nut you're going to be really annoyed anyway by how the fate of Charles Xavier in this film doesn't seem to match up at all with appearances he made in "X3" and "Wolverine." So it goes.

After the mixed reception "Wolverine" got I kind of hope "First Class" keeps the X-fires burning. There's a lot of good stories yet to be told, and "First Class" reminds us of the potential the first few "X-Men" movies showed, back when we didn't have 6-7 comic books opening a year.

Peter Sellers Saturdays #5: "The Magic Christian" (1969)

2011-06-04T11:48:00.005+12:00

The story: Eccentric gazillionaire Guy Grand (Sellers) has apparently gone off his rocker. He adopts a homeless hippie (Ringo Starr) and embarks on a series of increasingly surreal practical jokes aimed to show the lengths people will go to for money -- humiliating themselves in various ways to get a handful of Guy's vast fortune.

Who's Sellers: Guy Grand. With his floppy hair, tweedy mustache, sad eyes and false good humor, Sellers does what he can with a horribly weak script to give the character life and motivation. I kind of saw Sellers playing him as a man who's done everything, who's been a debauched scoundrel, and who's now just going for sheer crazy kicks. Basically, though, he's a shit-stirrer, doing things like buying a vastly expensive painting to destroy it in front of a snooty art dealer, or filling a vat with urine, feces and money and seeing who'll dive in for the cash.

So how is it: How much more 1969 could this movie be? None more 1969. This is one of those Sellers movies that has a pretty bad reputation on a lot of fronts, but y'know, once I got into its anarchistic spirit, I kinda dug it. There's next to no character development and the plot just kind of lurches from skit to skit -- who is Guy Grand and why has he gone off his rocker? Why does "Junior" just blindly follow along with him? But there's a verve and lunacy to it all that makes it fun to watch, which a lot of other similarly "madcap" '60s flicks never quite managed. Ringo is, well, being Ringo basically, but his deadpan I'll-go-along-with-anything cheer plays well off Sellers. Great soundtrack, too, with Badfinger and Thunderclap Newman galore. It takes a while to really take off, but by the time Christopher Lee pops up on a cruise ship in a Dracula suit, you kind of just go with the flow.

While it's a sloppy, freewheeling and highly blatant piece of hippie kitsch satire, there's a bit of fun if you're in the right mood to be had in watching Sellers & Starr so eagerly puncture the hypocrisies of the uptight squares of 1969 London. With tighter direction and more emphasis on actual characterization it could've been a protest era classic, but as it is it's nowhere near as bad or lazy as some of Sellers' other misfires from this era. The biggest problem is that, like a lot of 1960s idealism, it offers a lot of attacks on a system but little in the way of solutions. Some other reviews point to this film as a forgotten link between the "Goon Show" comedy era of Sellers' early career to the world of Monty Python in the 1970s. (Pythons Graham Chapman and an amusing, already-officious young John Cleese appear in cameos here too to extend the connection. There's a ton of other cameos including Raquel Welch, Roman Polanski and Yul Brynner. Reportedly John Lennon even pops up but I didn't see him.) It's a failure as a "message movie," but "The Magic Christian" is still entertaining.

Grade: B+

Quote: "I just wanted to see if you had your price … most of us do." - Guy Grand

Happy 70th birthday, Bob Dylan - and 10 of my favorites

2011-05-24T08:43:00.008+12:00

The beautiful thing about Bob Dylan for me is that you never quite get to the bottom of him. After a casual Dylan fandom for years, I dove whole-heartedly into the world of Dylan obsessiveness about five years ago. I haven't quite come up for air yet. Today, the man turns 70.

So in honor of Mr. Dylan's 70th, here's a list. Of the hundreds of Dylan's songs that are out there, my favorites are constantly changing. Here's what my 10 top Bob Dylan songs are today. Tomorrow, they could be entirely different. That's kind of the beauty of Bob; everybody's Dylan is a different one. Happy birthday, Mr Zimmerman!

Blowin' in the Wind: This was probably my first exposure to Bob Dylan; I remember singing it in class in third or fourth grade during music lessons. It stuck in your head, instantly. I think I'd assumed it was some 100-year-old standard, not knowing it was written less than 10 years before I was born. Some of Dylan's songs kind of seem like they always existed, excavated from the earth at just the right time.

Not Dark Yet: Is this 1997 song from "Time Out Of Mind" the most depressing one Dylan ever wrote? Perhaps, but there's something so beautiful about this mournful ode to the end of love and the end of one person's world, it's like a particularly stunning tombstone. Hushed and elegaic, this song is proof rock stars can grow old with superb dignity.

Maggie's Farm (live at the Newport Folk Festival, July 1965): It seems hard to imagine these days that Dylan going "electric" stirred up so much fuss once. But listen to this raw molten blast of sound from the Newport Folk Festival where Dylan blew a crowd of Peter, Paul and Mary fans to bits. I love the song, but I love this particular performance of it found on the "No Direction Home" soundtrack even more -- it's a giant middle finger by Dylan, who sings the lines "I AIN'T gonna work on Maggie's farm no more" like his life depended on it. Maybe it did.

Tombstone Blues: Off all Dylan's madcap surrealistic lyrics, this is the one I've always loved the most -- from "Highway 61 Revisited," a rollicking, quite funny tour of whimsy and tragedy. I couldn't begin to tell you what it's actually about, but the way young Bob reels off lines like "The geometry of innocent flesh on the bone / Causes Galileo's math book to get thrown" is just vastly entertaining, like a drunken carny rattling off his spiel to anyone who'll listen.

Subterranean Homesick Blues: Did Bob Dylan invent rap? Honestly, if you listen to this classic, you have to at least give him a few nods in that general direction. Free-wheeling and hip, it's a mash-up of Beat poetry and talking blues that pretty much invented a handful of genres of music. And let's not forget that classic film clip of Dylan flipping cue cards to the tune from "Don't Look Back" -- a giant step towards MTV and the video revolution, too.

Lay Lady Lay: One of Dylan's cheesiest songs, perhaps, from the "Nashville Skyline" era where his voice suddenly took on a surprisingly silky crooner's tone. And "Nashville Skyline" is a rather slight album compared to the masterworks that came before it, but I love it all the same - a simple homage to hearth and home, gorgeously produced and one of his biggest hits. Sure, it ain't political or surreal, but it's just a mighty pretty song, and Dylan's written plenty of those for the ages, too.

Idiot Wind: From love to heartbreak -- from "Blood On The Tracks," this is a blistering trip into the eye of the storm of a relationship crumbling to bits. There's a breathtakingly honest anger and plain meanness to this song, which is almost like reading someone's secret diary. It's so intimate it's uncomfortable, as Dylan spits out lines like "One day you'll be in the ditch / flies buzzing around your eyes." But it's a powerhouse because it feels so true.

You Ain't Goin' Nowhere: I have a specific memory attached to this song, of a favorite restaurant/hangout back in Oxford, Mississippi, and the night it closed its doors. A ton of local musicians, including members of the band Wilco, sung the night away to bid the cafe farewell, and a shining highlight was a merry singalong of this Dylan tune. It's hardly one of the deepest of Dylan's catalogue, but it's a song that seems to celebrate being alive, getting out of scrapes and surviving to sing the night away.

Hurricane: For my money, the best Dylan "protest song," although there have been many great ones. An older Dylan takes the raw talent of his youthful songs and adds the indignant outrage that comes with age and experience as he takes on the case of convicted murderer, boxer Rubin Carter. Did "Hurricane" Carter do it? Even if you think he did, by the time the 8 roaringly angry minutes of this song go by you might well have changed your mind. That's what a truly great protest song can do.

I'm Not There: From the legendary "Basement Tapes," most of which have never seen official release, this haunting number was released on the soundtrack of the Dylan homage movie of the same name a few years back. It's Dylan at his spookiest Weird America best, hushed and sounding like he's singing from a million miles and years away.

Nik's Unheralded Albums #5: "The Lost Boys" Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

2011-05-15T18:14:00.005+12:00

When a soundtrack is at its peak, it evokes a movie but also kind of surpasses it -- you listen to the crashing cadences of Strauss for "2001: A Space Odyssey" or the jangly retro hits of the "Rushmore" soundtrack, and you find yourself reliving your favorite bits of the movie, but you also kind of create an idealized version of it in your head. It turns out "Top Gun" is actually a kind of terrible movie if you watch it today without the affections of nostalgia, but man, whenever I hear Kenny Loggins sing "Danger Zone," I'm 15 again and feel a spontaneous quiver of excitement, as a movie that's way better than the actual "Top Gun" ever was unspools in my brain.

Which brings me to "The Lost Boys," the 1987 teen vampire movie that chews up "Twilight" and spits it out in gory little pieces. An early work by "Batman & Robin" auteur Joel Schumacher, it's all smoke machines, hair-spray fashion and pouty angst, but it's still actually a heck of a lot of fun. And the soundtrack is a tasty slab of vintage '80s bombast and cheese, one I have a rather unaccountable affection for. Unlike a lot of the big '80s movie soundtracks it doesn't boast wall-to-wall hits like "Footloose" or "Dirty Dancing" did, and your biggest stars are INXS and Echo and the Bunnymen. (If they'd paid better, you'd have thought they could've gotten Depeche Mode and Sisters of Mercy to sing on this thing.)

But "The Lost Boys" soundtrack in its sunglasses-at-night sweep perfectly captures the glossy feel of the movie, which was Goth without the gloom, sexy without being nasty about it. Jason Patric, an evil pre-Jack Bauer Kiefer Sutherland and Jami Gertz brood a lot and the two Coreys provide comic relief. Bill from "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" plays a vampire. It features one of the great cinematic closing lines. But it's glossy trash, of course.

Lou Gramm's screeching anthem "Lost in the Shadows" pops up several times in the movie -- I particularly like the breathy urgency he puts in as he sings against the beat. Gerald McCann's theme song "Cry Little Sister" is melodramatic and gaspy Harlequin romance Goth. The marvelous cover of The Doors' tune "People are Strange" by Echo and the Bunnymen nicely captures the movie's tone of parody mixed with menace. Another cover tune I've always liked here is Roger Daltrey's take on Elton John's "Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me." (A song tailor-made for vampire flicks.)

Bodybuilder/sax man Thomas Capello's bizarre scene singing "I Still Believe" is so insanely homoerotic and over-the-top in the flick that it spawned a "Saturday Night Live" parody decades after the movie. (Seriously, why didn't someone tell the guy to put a shirt on at least during the filming of this scene?) But while you can't watch that scene without giggling, the actual song itself isn't terrible, in a Huey Lewis if he were a bodybuilder kind of way.

But sometimes a big slab of cheesy music from your youth is what you need. I haul out the Journey's "Greatest Hits" disc sometimes and still feel my blood start pumping when Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger" theme music from "Rocky III" rings out. "The Lost Boys" soundtrack sold less copies than "Top Gun" and "Flashdance" did but in some way I'd call it the perfect '80s movie soundtrack -- very little irony, lots of bombast, and hooks that may leave you feeling a bit of guilty pleasure but still won't quite stop echoing around your brain.

Superheroes I love #9: The West Coast Avengers

2011-05-12T09:22:00.001+12:00

This time out, rather than one particular hero, let's look at a whole team of them that I always had a thing for.

Who: The West Coast Avengers were the '80s "spin-off" Avengers comic, based in California and led by one of my favorite Avengers, loudmouthed but goodhearted archer Hawkeye. The team also included at its start Hawk's wife Mockingbird, Iron Man, Wonder Man and Tigra, all set up in a former Hollywood star's mansion and fighting crime on the West Coast -- which seemed quite a novelty at a time when 99% of comic book superheroes seem to live in Manhattan. Being a Californian myself, the WCA, as they were known, felt like "my" team.

Why I dig: The West Coast Avengers were the underdogs of the Avengers franchise, lacking the big heroes (except for Iron Man, but his involvement seemed half-hearted) but scrappy and amiable. They'd battle bizarrely goofy villains like Master Pandemonium, whose limbs popped off at will; Razorfist, a guy whose fists were both replaced by large knives (which would seem to make daily life outside superhero battles rather unpleasant), or Cactus, who was, yes, a sentient walking cactus. Not exactly Dr. Doom.

The book had two key runs -- a colourful, high-action era written by Steve Englehart and drawn mostly by Al Milgrom, and a more modern, grim 'n' gritty take by John Byrne for a dozen issues or so. I also really love the original miniseries written by Roger Stern which introduces the team and is probably the best single story the book ever had; a team of novice and insecure Avengers move to California and end up fighting one of the world's strongest villains.

The ongoing book had its bumpy road, and charms often mired in kitsch -- Wonder Man's almost uniformly horrible costumes, Tigra's bimbo supreme troubles, Hawkeye's hearty temper tantrums, the one-note approach to much of the characteristation. (The West Coast Avengers were generally a whiny lot.) Englehart is going for a very silver age tone, which makes the book look almost childish sometimes. The arguable highlight of Englehart's run is the twisting 7-part "Lost in Time" saga, which splits up the entire team over time and ends up juggling several different story threads at once in a fun tour of Marvel Comics history. The team expanded to include other interesting members or quasi-members like Thing, Firebird and Moon Knight.

John Byrne came along after the book had been puttering along for a few years and promised to do his patented "reimagining" and revitalize it. Now, I loved Byrne's work on the book at the time -- his art, bold and dynamic, was a huge improvement -- but read today, it's got problems. He relied on shock over sensible plotting -- the entire "Vision Quest" arc which systematically destroyed the long-running happy Vision and Scarlet Witch marriage, for instance, has left both once-beloved characters pretty much screwed up to this day. There's a lot of changes over his short run, and it's still exciting stuff to read, but Byrne failed to really follow through with any of it, with many subplots just trailing off. The shortened nature of his run over an editorial dispute on the book leaves it lacking. Yet a lot of the changes still echo more than 20 years later -- turning Scarlet Witch into a raving nutter, for instance, or the goofy fun Great Lakes Avengers.

I didn't really follow the WCA after Byrne left -- the few issues I've read after that were almost uniformly terrible. The book ended with #102 in 1994 and was replaced by the "This is why 1990s comics sucked" poster child book Force Works. But for a little while, West Coast Avengers was a fun superhero team book, not one that changed the world by any means, but its easygoing camaraderie and sense of fun make it memorable. And how can you not love a B-level superhero team who inspire an entire groovy rap album?

Movie review: Thor

2011-05-06T00:01:00.007+12:00

It's strange for a 30-year comic book geek to admit, but I never really much cared for Thor. When I was in my younger avid collecting days there were only a few characters whose books I never bought, and one of 'em was Thor. The long hair, the bare arms, the high-faluting fancy talk? It all seemed too lame to me.

But yet Thor is a compelling character, which took me a while to realize -- a god who walks among men, caught between two worlds, and now that I'm less of a nerdy fanboy I've found some very good Thor comics such as the legendary ones by Walt Simonson and the sturdy originals by Lee and Kirby. The highly entertaining new movie "Thor" reminds me a lot of "Iron Man" -- it takes a B-grade hero who's been in far more mediocre comics than truly great ones over his 50-year history and distills it down to its essence.

"Thor" combines culture clash with smashing action and adventure and feels like something rather new among the current glut of comic movies. It's not a story of some humble nerdy type who learns to become a hero. It's got equal elements of Lord of the Rings-style fantasy and superhero action. It's a tale of a god who learns humility, wrapped up in lots of family drama dynamics and good old frost giant-smashing. It's got a good solid sense of humor and whimsy which you kind of need when dealing with Norse gods throwing giant hammers about, yet it knows when to pile on the serious as well.

What I liked:
I wasn't sure about casting relative unknown Chris Hemsworth as Thor, but he pretty much knocks it out of the park in a starmaking performance -- rather than having the character speak the typical mangled Elizabethan style that the comic did for years, he adopts a more general formal tone. The scenes where Thor is stranded, powerless, in a small New Mexico town are great culture clash fun.

A relentlessly scenery-chewing Anthony Hopkins makes for a logical Odin, while Tom Hiddleston does a very good turn as slippery Loki, although the script fails him sometimes with muddled motivations and character turns. Natalie Portman brings nice charm to Thor's earthly love interest Jane Foster, while director Kenneth Branagh ably balances big-action moments with smaller character beats that make this feel a bit less disposable than it might have.

And it's a pleasure to see a superhero movie that really embraces the cosmic scale -- one failing of, say, "Iron Man 2," is climactic battles that kind of disappoint. Here, we see giant armies of frost giants, a Thor/Loki throwdown that's quite epic, and the extraordinary Jack Kirby creation the Destroyer brought to vivid life.

What I didn't like:
Well as usual, the "3D" edition of the movie is a gimmick and not worth paying extra for -- I'm actively avoiding 3D versions of most movies when I find them, as the 3D films tend to be projected too dark, rarely utilize the format well and generally just a big hype.

The one thing about "Thor" that sticks with me is the general look of Asgard and the Asgardians -- I'm not quite sold on it, yet I'm not quite sure how I would've done it. They're all very shiny-armored and colourful, but I wonder if it would seem more "real" if Asgard looked a bit more lived in rather than like a lot of plastic models. Yet it is a god's realm, and who really knows how that's meant to look? As I've said before, it's a fine line between making Asgard look cool and having it look like a bad rock video. It's also a shame to see Rene Russo relatively wasted as Thor's mother, but so it goes.

Despite all the very solid acting talent and one of my favorite creators Joss Whedon at the helm of next year's giant "Avengers" movie, I'm still rather uncertain about it. Frankly the weakest parts of "Iron Man 2" and "Thor" are those where they try to awkwardly shove in a "shared universe" and twee cameos. (Although seeing ace archer and "Avengers" co-star Hawkeye, briefly, in "Thor" is pretty sweet, actually. Guess I'm still a comics geek after all.)

All the news that's fit to tweet

2011-05-04T12:53:00.003+12:00

I've worked in journalism for 15+ years now, but rarely have I enjoyed the kind of immediacy I do with my new online job, where all it takes to disseminate your story to the world is a click of the button. This week has been a non-stop onslaught of breaking news -- the royal wedding, some Osama character you might've heard about, and an extraordinarily rare fatal tornado right here in Auckland yesterday.

For both the big global news stories of the last week I've been tasked with running a kind of NZ-centric Storify feed on the website of "vox populi," filtering Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and more into a giant mass o' opinion that runs concurrently with the more hard-news stories. This sort of aggregation is a kind of reporting that would've been hard to imagine 10 years ago -- there's a massive, ever-sprawling pool now of rants and raves and viewpoints online, and it never ever stops. As I "live tweeted" the royal wedding I found it fascinating -- the flow of information is so fast on the Twitter/Facebook feeds that you literally have to just grab and run -- and it was also kind of dizzying, too. After 6 hours straight of reading the world's Tweets on Wills and Kate your brain does kind of turn into mush.

And then the world's most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, met his logical end Monday and it was a whole other set of tweets and comments to gather up. This story was very different from the royal wedding and tended to arouse all kind of firm views. As a fence-straddler, I found myself kind of turned off both by the bloodthirsty patriotism and the sanctimonious moralizing from both extremes.

I agree, people who live in America have no idea how utterly awful the mobs shouting "USA! USA!" looks from overseas, but I also think that at this point in its history, America desperately needed a "win." It seems like dozens of my US Facebook friends are unemployed now, there's a cynicism in US society that never quite goes away, and this long-desired news gave the country something to celebrate, as tacky as some of the cheering may have seemed from afar.

Both stories were strange to watch as an American living in New Zealand -- one dealt with the British monarchy and the possible future king of New Zealand, while one offered a very US-centric kind of catharsis that I don't imagine as many New Zealanders might have felt.

The Twitter/Facebook beast is something wholly new in journalism -- a never-ceasing flow of quotes without having to pick up a notebook. During President Obama's speech on Monday 4,000 tweets came per second. This quoteflow is the sort of thing that has newspapers and journalists questioning their relevance -- although I fall on the side of good journalism still being firmly necessary, as a way to filter through the impossibly dense voice of humanity online these days. By night's end I had 15,000+ hits on the Osama Storify feed -- a kind of instant gratification journalists rarely get.

Once upon a time the question used to be, how do I get the information? It's then moved on to how fast can I get the information? But maybe as the world continues to change every millisecond, the new question might be, where does the information stop?

The Angel-A-Thon: Season 2

2011-04-29T12:46:00.006+12:00

Here we go again, as I slowly continue my bloody plunge through all seven seasons of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" and now into the five seasons of the spin-off "Angel."

As we enter season 2, Los Angeles' vampire detective Angel and his allies in the fight against darkness battle evil on a variety of fronts -- most notably the resurrected Darla, Angel's former lover and his vampire "maker," a plot line that drives throughout the season.

Season 2, I thought, was a lot more consistent and enjoyable than the sometimes stumbling first season was. We feel that Angel Investigations has become more of a family, and that makes the ups and downs the "team" has this year feel more effective.

It's also good to see the characters grow and change -- Cordelia becomes far more responsible than the conceited teen she was on "Buffy," while Wesley shows new inner strength as he becomes the leader of Angel investigations. A couple of newcomers join the cast too -- former anti-vampire gang leader Gunn and the delightful Andy Hallett as Lorne the Host, who tends to steal pretty much every scene he's in.

I also really enjoy Julia Benz' nasty, scheming take on Darla, a far cry from her sweet and charming wife on "Dexter." Angel's tug of war with Darla continues throughout most of the season, although some of the episodes get a bit repetitive with the whole cat-and-mouse game.

While there's a lot of darkness in this series of "Angel" it's leavened by some goofy humour as well. The season finale series of episodes set in Lorne's home dimension of Pylea are an often-silly treat, kind of "Angel" goes "Army of Darkness.".

Best episode: There's a lot to pick from this season, but "Reunion" takes the Darla/Angel/Wolfram and Hart triangle to a new height, climaxing with the stunning scene where Angel basically lets Darla and fellow vamp Drusilla kill off most of the law firm. It's a good showcase for Angel's dark side (which is talked about a lot, but sometimes doesn't seem very convincing), and takes the story in genuinely surprising new directions.

Concert review: George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, Auckland, April 23

2011-04-24T17:09:00.002+12:00

What is P-Funk? It's a style of music, a state of mind, a sprawlingly ridiculous cosmology all shepherded by the fried brain of one George Clinton, who brought his outrageous Parliament Funkadelic gang to Auckland for a show last night at the Powerstation that was a non-stop three-hour celebration of funk, rock and the joy of letting your freak flag fly a bit.

Clinton's tangled musical legacy includes the bands Funkadelic (more rock than funk alone), Parliament (who are a free-wheeling party band) and a whole slew of spin-offs and side projects like funk star Bootsy Collins. I've been a fan of Parliament for a while -- a band guaranteed to cheer you up no matter how low you feel -- while I've only recently delved into Funkadelic's catalogue, an eclectic, beautiful and gritty mishmash of genres and sounds. I wasn't going to miss a chance to see Clinton's mad revue on a rare trip down under.

Admittedly seeing the P-Funk show is more of a nostalgia act today than I'm sure the P-Funk circus was at its peak -- Clinton is nearly 70 now and served more as the "grand conductor" and a genial stage presence rather than really funking out himself; his croaky voice these days sounded a lot more like Captain Beefheart. But the ever-shifting band itself -- by my count nearly 20 people, some old P-Funk hands, some new -- kept a tight hand, with the invaluable rhythm section keeping songs going no matter how far afield they went. Near-naked ladies and men danced and sang, joints were freely passed about, and pretty much everyone on stage took a turn singing a song. A three-hour-plus show bounced and rambled all over the place without a single real break, sometimes the groove only moments from falling apart entirely. The band masterfully tugged and pulled to keep the audience's energy up till well after midnight.

The P-Funk "hits" came out -- "Atomic Dog," "Cosmic Slop," "Bop Gun," "One Nation Under A Groove," a delightful "Give Up The Funk," and blended in with other more obscure Clinton tunes. It's the kind of show where Clinton's granddaughter came on stage in the middle of the jam "Flashlight" to deliver an impromptu risque rap, and it all kind of works.

The best moments were sheer transcendence -- A sprawling 15-minute or so take on "Maggot Brain" really got me. The song in a sense is just one massively anguished guitar solo but Michael Hampton's loving take on it was great. "Maggot Brain" is the kind of song that you either ride along with or find indulgent, but for the space my head was in Saturday night, I found it gorgeous and glittering. Last night's show nicely showed how Clinton's sound can spin from hard-rock crunch to dance-floor anthems at the drop of a hat.

At its best P-Funk is a music of ecstasy, a celebration of being alive for however long we've got. Clinton is one of the few musicians who can be said to have honestly created a genre all his own. Part hard rock, part R&B sway, part pantomime buffoonery and part magic, it's a sound that's well worth seeing live at least once to get the full experience. Now I just need a couple more naps to recover.

Summer 2011 Movie Preview Excite-O-Meter

2011-04-22T19:32:00.007+12:00

It's nearly summer in US movie theatres (or winter in my part of the world), and all the blockbusters are lining up one after another. This is the comic-bookiest movie season we've seen in a while. Typically every year there's one or two big comic book flicks but this summer seems particularly high on the spandex and sequels. Here's a handful of this summer's biggest movies and how excited I am to see them on a scale of 1 (might watch 10 minutes on the telly one night) to 10 (I'm already waiting in line).

Thor
I always liked the concept of Thor far more than I did the comic books unless they were by Walt Simonson or Jack Kirby. And this first of this year's flood of comic book movies is the first one that feels fresh to me, rather than yet another sequel or standard origin story. You have Norse gods walking the earth, Anthony Hopkins in the role he was born to play as Odin, a spunky Natalie Portman, and director Kenneth Branagh, whose "Henry V" dazzled me with its Thor-like mix of pomp and grit 20 (!!) years ago. I'm not entirely sure the leading man Chris Hemsworth is up to the job here, but I'm quite intrigued by what I've seen so far. Hopefully it doesn't all end up looking like a bad Queen video, but I'd say this and "X-Men: First Class" are most interesting of all the summer's comic booky movies to me.
Excite-O-Meter: 9

Captain America: The First Avenger
And yet ANOTHER first-time superhero. It's unpatriotic, but I've never really been a huge Captain America fan, although Ed Brubaker has been doing some great comics the last few years with the character. So I'm not as psyched about this as I was about the first Batman or Spider-Man movie, say. But Chris Evans is very solid casting, and what footage I've seen is intriguing. Setting it during World War II could work, or it could come off as a bit hokey. I'll probably see it in theatres like I have most comic book movies since 2000, but I want to feel a bit more energy first.
Excite-O-Meter: 6.5

X-Men: First Class
Speaking of which, The X-Men franchise may be running low on steam, but I'm intrigued by this one. I like the decision to set it in the 1960s, giving it a kind of cool retro-Mod design, and both James McAvoy (as young Professor X) and Michael Fassbender (as Magneto) are excellent casting. I'm not too sure what the actual story is about, but "Kick-Ass" director Matthew Vaughn is at the helm, so I'll go see.
Excite-O-Meter: 8

Rise of the Planet of the Apes
I love the old '70s movie series, barechested Charlton Heston and all, and this is an intriguing kind-of-not-really remake of the fourth film in the series, "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes," taking on how the apes came to rule the world. An interesting trailer is out which is a bit clunky (I like how someone described it as looking like a zombie movie but with apes), yet it's a far more intriguing plot than Tim Burton's frankly awful remake of the original. But are CGI apes really an improvement over awesome rubber masks?
Excite-O-Meter: 6

Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, Part 82
Y'know, I know I've seen all the Harry Potter movies, but honestly, I barely remember much of them past about part 4. They're all perfectly adequate adaptations, but somehow, they've never really risen to the realm of fine art for me ("Prisoner of Azkaban" is the one I remember the fondest). So I might see this eventually, but I have to admit there's no substitute for them old-media books for me really.
Excite-O-Meter: 4

Green Lantern
Another "second-tier" superhero makes it to Hollywood. This could go either way, really. I like the concept of Green Lantern, and I like Ryan Reynolds, who's been appealing in a variety of movies. The latest footage is pretty cool, going for a kind of "Star Wars" meets "Cops" vibe with some striking design work -- although Green Lantern's costume looks a little too heavy on the CGI for my liking. It'd be nice for a DC hero other than Superman or Batman to succeed on screen, but really I feel this could either soar as lighthearted "Iron Man"-like fun, or be a big miscalculated "Spirit"-scale flop.
Excite-O-Meter: 7

Transformers 3: Dark Side of the Moon
It was kinda cool to see the big robots come to life in 2007, but it was a Michael Bay film, so there wasn't much to it. Never saw #2, and no interest really in seeing #3 either. I miss the clean if clunky designs they had for the robots on the old TV cartoons myself.
Excite-O-Meter: 2

Cowboys and Aliens
Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig in a movie that's about exactly what it sounds like. Steampunk mashups of this sort can be like "Wild Wild West," but it'd be nice if this was actually good. "Iron Man" director Jon Favreau is doing this, so there's hope, but gosh, it feels like the last time Harrison Ford really tried in a movie was back in 1997's "Air Force One," so I dunno....
Excite-O-Meter: 5

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
The first one was good fun, the second one went right up its own laboured and overcomplex mythology and lost all sense of fun, and I didn't even see the third one. I might check this out one day as it promises to be more self-contained, but really, Johnny Depp is kind of slumming it doing this for a fourth time.
Excite-O-Meter: 4

Cars 2
The boy will drag me to it, and I quite liked the first one even if I couldn't really swallow the idea of an entire ecosystem apparently built around anthropomorphic cars. Seriously, where are all the people? Did Lightning McQueen and his mates kill them all?
Excite-O-Meter: 6

The Smurfs
Ohgodno.
Excite-O-Meter: 0

It's Record Store Day 2011!

2011-04-16T16:13:00.006+12:00

I zipped on down to Auckland's mighty Real Groovy Records for a couple hours today for Record Store Day 2011, celebrated worldwide as a way to help draw attention to the sadly struggling independent record store industry.

It's been a grim year for these kinds of places -- both the other two Real Groovy stores in New Zealand have announced closures (one thanks to the Christchurch earthquake), and I'll do anything I can to keep RG Auckland going strong by grabbing up some more music for the ever-escalating collection. (But honestly, I really needed those Dead Milkmen and Oingo Boingo discs. And that rare Rykodisc Big Star Live album I've been hunting for forever? Score!)

In the last 6 months I've been happy/sad, because I've grabbed dozens of CDs and books from huge clearance sales at Auckland stores -- the Borders chain for instance pretty much got rid of all their CDs so I picked up stacks of bargains back around Christmas. It's awesome for bargain hunting, but kind of grim in the big picture -- these sales offloading stock are because half these places are in receivership or bankruptcy, after all. I don't even know how many of the great book and music stores, corporate and independents alike, will be around in another five years.

Ever since I've been a little kid, one of my favorite pastimes in the world has been shelf browsing. Ask my parents -- when I was 7, my idea of a treat was being taken to the library. And to this day, I get a nice sense of peace and happiness simply browsing the shelves of bookstores and record stores, hunting around for whatever I might happen to find. It's like a treasure hunt, and while sure, I can download that book or record now I might be looking for, I'm just a stickler for the tangible sensation. There's a certain way an old book smells, for instance, which sounds kind of freaky fetishistic to say. I've got a million fond memories of browsing in book and record shops from New York City to San Francisco to Sydney. Real Groovy is one of the greats and a lot of fun to spend time at.

Anyway, Record Store Day is an awesome thing. Take a chance wherever you are today to remember the thrill of browsing the stacks, of finding that rare gem, of supporting these endangered places. I'm all for the digital world, but man, I'll never stop being a fan of musty old second-hand books and previously owned albums.

If the devil is six, then God is seven

2011-04-08T00:01:00.004+12:00

So apparently I've been doing this blog thing for SEVEN YEARS as of today. Which is like nearly one-sixth of my LIFE. Good god. That's a lot of bloggery. Blogging is such a relatively recent phenomenon that there's no real determination of its life span yet. Do blogs live forever? There's probably not a blog out there much more than 10 years old at this point. Am I at the end of its life or the midpoint? If a blog falls in the forest does anyone hear?

I dunno. Like most people who've been doing this for more than a year or two I've had a love-hate relationship with the blog, sometimes, even going so far as to take a long hiatus last year. But I'll keep on keeping on at least until we develop the technology to beam my ramblings directly INTO YOUR MIND. Sure we've got Facebook and Twitter to play with as well, but can I go on about old Peter Sellers movies, concert reviews and mix tapes for 1000 words at a time on there?

Also, I've recently changed the url or address of this site to my own goshdarned name, so it's now nikdirga.com -- although the old address works just as well. I mainly wanted to scoop up my own domain so the thousands of speculators out there eyeing it don't steal it first. You also may need to update RSS feeds/bookmarks accordingly!

And as always, thanks to those of you who keep reading my occasional scribbles. Thanks!

My 5 favorite authors 50 and under

2011-04-03T08:39:00.006+12:00

In the last few years, several of my personal pantheon of favorite authors have died -- notably John Updike and Kurt Vonnegut, both of whom I'd followed religiously since college. Their time had come, they were in their 70s, yet it's still sad to see such lions leave us. But who will be the future Updikes and Norman Mailers in the iPad generation? Here's my 5 favorite current authors age 50 and under -- an age which might seem old to some, but frankly, I'm getting there, and most great writers don't really start cranking until well into their 30s at least. Keeping it to those under 50 leaves out a few of my most liked authors like Paul Auster, Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Haruki Murakami or Jonathan Franzen (just over the cut at age 51).

David Eggers, 41
Eggers made his mark with the alternately funny and tragic inventive memoir of his youth "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," which went on to found the entire snarky, groundbreaking "McSweeney's" school of writing. But Eggers has gone on from just a kind of hipster icon to show amazing versatility, with the wry road-trip comedy novel "You Shall Know our Velocity!" and particularly the stunningly powerful journalism-based memoirs "Zeitoun" and "What is the What" which take the lives of real people -- a Muslim Hurricane Katrina victim abused by his own government, a survivor of Sudan's genocide -- and turn them into a story as powerful as any fiction. His work only gets better with each book.

David Mitchell, 42
Mitchell is a writer without borders whose sprawling books can take place just about anywhere. His first three novels, "Ghostwritten," "Number9dream" and "Cloud Atlas," are deftly created experimental interlocking narratives, using a variety of voices and techniques to tell his stories. "Cloud Atlas," for instance, cycles between a 19th century sailing ship to a post-apocalyptic Hawaii, World War II Belgium, a noir California, contemporary England, and a futuristic Korea. Yet Mitchell has proved more than just a trickster with "Black Swan Green," a relatively straightforward tale of a lonely British kid growing up in the 1980s that had an amazingly distinct and honest voice. His latest, waiting to be read on my bedside table, is "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet," which swerves again into a historical epic of 18th-century Japan.

Michael Chabon, 47
Chabon crafts gorgeous, dazzlingly smart prose -- the effortless quality of his work probably reminds me more of John Updike than anyone else -- but unlike Updike's narrow suburban focus, Chabon is a pop-culture influenced magpie, who can tackle academic mid-life crisis drama ("Wonder Boys"), a comic-book influenced epic ("The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay"), a florid pulp fiction homage ("Gentlemen of the Road") or a Jewish detective novel set in an alternate history ("The Yiddish Policeman's Union"). Chabon combines inventive plots with that fluid, elegant voice to make him consistently rewarding reading. He also writes some great nonfiction essays ("Manhood for Amateurs").

Jonathan Lethem, 47
Lethem is in some ways Chabon's doppleganger -- they both blend "literary" writing with "junk" culture influences like comic books and '70s soul records. But Lethem is a bit cooler in voice, more abstract than Chabon, with work that dips frequently into surrealism and sci-fi. His earlier books were science fiction with an uneasy twist, like "As She Climbed Across The Table," about a woman who falls in love with her own existential physics experiment. Reality always seems frail in Lethem's fiction -- his breakthrough, "Motherless Brooklyn," is a detective novel starring a Tourette's syndrome-afflicted gumshoe, and a book where language is subjective. Lethem's masterpiece to date is "Fortress of Solitude," a buddy-comedy tale of sorts of a lonely white kid and a streetwise black kid growing up in a vividly realized 1970s New York. Oh, and there's a magic flying ring involved.

Jasper Fforde, 50
I actually don't read a ton of hardcore science fiction/fantasy, but one author I'll let take me wherever he wants to is Fforde, whose "literary detective" Thursday Next series is one of the most madly inventive, witty worlds I've ever visited, a topsy-turvy universe where fictional creations are real and a complex hierarchy of rules delineate the crossover between realms. For a book lover, Fforde's books are full of easter eggs and clever in-jokes, but they also work well as a creative, twistily plotted adventure series. Fforde has also created fictional realms based on "realistic" fairy tales ("The Big Over Easy") and a world where society is determined by what colours you can see ("Shades of Grey"). Fforde's fiction is deeply allusive fantasy with a word-nerd bent, kind of like Lewis Carroll if he had an Internet connection.

Peter Sellers Saturdays #4: "The Millionairess" (1960)

2011-03-26T08:15:00.005+13:00

The story: Based loosely on a play by George Bernard Shaw, "The Millionairess" is the tale of a spoiled young heiress, Epifania (Sophia Loren), who is unlucky in love. She meets the quiet, altruistic Indian doctor Kabir (Sellers) and decides this good-hearted man is for her, but she has to follow conditions in her father's will that her future husband be able to make vast sums of money. Hijinks ensue.

Who's Sellers: In what would be a dry run for his Indian character in "The Party" a few years later, Sellers is Kabir, a humanitarian doctor who doesn't care about money and who finds Epifania's ostentatious wealth offputting. Playing the straight man, Sellers is a bright spot in a rather plodding movie, as he makes Kabir genuinely kind and sincere, yet a bit too idealistic to be believed. But the comedy in the movie is left to a rather shrill Loren, and his character is shoehorned into a totally unconvincing romance that never comes off. Notably, in "real life" Sellers became obsessed with the gorgeous Loren, ruining his first marriage over her. It's a shame that obsessive chemistry never really shows on screen.

So how is it: A rather big misfire, one of those self-conscious movies where abrasive is confused with quirky. While Loren is fun to look at and utterly gorgeous, her character is a hugely unappealing spoiled brat, and Sellers is so damped down as the upright doctor that he barely registers sometimes. There's few things more disheartening than a romantic comedy where two actors with very little chemistry acting in highly melodramatic ways are shoved down an audience's throats, and that's what "The Millionairess" is. There's some moments that are amusing -- Epifania heads into a dingy sweatshop and manages to turn it into a hugely successful business in about ten minutes, and there's an enormously risque scene for 1960 where Loren strips down to her undergarments -- but the overall sluggish pace and a hit-you-over-the-head message that "money isn't everything" make this one a bit of an ordeal to sit through today. Not Sellers' best by a long shot.

Grade: C-

Quote:
Epifania Parerga: "You don't understand, I'm killing myself."
Dr. Ahmed el Kabir: "Well, it is our common destiny, good day."

In which I discover they still make videogames

2011-03-21T16:32:00.008+13:00

It's kind of embarrassing to admit but my game of choice on my fancy new hi-tech iPhone 4 hasn't been some flashy God of War type digital extravaganza, but instead a rather charmingly poky 20-year-old Sega videogame, Sonic The Hedgehog. I stumbled across an app download that exactly duplicates the 1991 version of Sonic, spent my $2 and was hooked, drawn in again into the land of spinning rodents and magical gold coins where I whiled away much of a summer away from college playing. Perhaps age 19 is the perfect time to spend a summer playing videogames.

I've got to admit the videogame revolution of the past two decades has mostly passed me by, and my joystick skills pretty much ended with Sega Genesis and Nintendo games in college. We don't own a PlayStation or a Wii or a Kinext or whatever they're called; I've thought about it, but I get kind of addicted to these things and I *know* 7-year-old Peter gets hooked on 'em, and it wasn't until the last couple of years I really had the spending money to buy big videogame setups anyway. The iPhone is giving me a chance to check some of the newer games out (go Angry Birds!) but, well, I tend to find stuff like Mortal Combat IV kind of... boring. I've just never been a huge fan of the shoot 'n' kill lots of things school of games.

Now, my true videogame addiction days peaked around 1983 or so with the beloved Atari 2600, which was in every '80s child's home. These games were hopelessly clunky by today's standards -- a square red dot is a knight with a sword? But your imagination filled in the technical limitations marvelously, turning "Yar's Revenge" into a sweeping galactic struggle or the hopelessly primitive castles and dragons of "Adventure" into a derring-do epic. My brother and my friends would crouch around the Atari for hours playing stuff like "Raiders of the Lost Ark," as it bleep-blooped away.

Maybe that whole recapturing childhood thing is why I'm enjoying going all retro with Sonic The Hedgehog, as the little Sega critter, while more advanced than the Atari 2600, is still pretty crude compared to some of the other slick modern games I've seen. But he's familiar, and while it may not quite have 3-D reality, the goofy little world of Sonic is still pretty exciting by my undemanding videogame standards.

A change is gonna come

2011-03-08T18:14:00.004+13:00

... So I haven't been blogging as much as I once did, because, well, blogging is on the wane, says The New York Times, so it must be true. After some initial trepidation, I have to admit I've been spending a bit of time on trendy Twitter, while Facebook is also one of my frequent haunts. But as I approach the end of year 7 (!!!) of blogging here, I don't imagine i'll entirely give it up in the near future. Twitter is specious, fluffy and highly short attention span -- but it's also a valuable news and networking tool, as I particularly noticed during the Christchurch earthquake down here last month. Yet I do like to ramble on for longer than 140 characters as well, so my aging Spatula Forum still has its place, even if I only get on here four or five times a month now. I don't see any need to give up one platform in favour of another. Part of the digital world these days is sorting out all the noise and figuring out what tools work best for you.

The landscape changes very, very fast online these days. What was hip a year ago can become forgotten overnight (hey, remember MySpace or LiveJournal?). I picked up my first iPhone the other day, and it is a fantastic, utterly addictive tool -- just 10 years ago it would've seemed something out of science fiction that I could download, say, the works of Shakespeare in an app for free and have it in my pocket. I'm a creaky old gent of nearly 40, and it's hard to imagine what tech will be considered everyday when little Peter is my age. My iPhone 4 will likely seem a charming antique (unless of course our ape overlords have taken over by then).

As a sign of the times I'm starting a new job next month too -- diving wholeheartedly into the digital journalism realm which is where an awful lot of my industry is going. I'll be working for NZ's biggest newspaper web site and am quite excited about the bold new realms I'll be exploring. There's still a lot that "dead tree" newspapers still have to offer, but any journalist or media company that is ducking its head in the sand over this Internet "fad" is going to be facing extinction. On to the brave new world!

Peter Sellers Saturdays #3: Two Way Stretch (1960)

2011-03-05T09:18:00.004+13:00

The story: "Two Way Stretch" is set in a small British prison, where life is pretty comfortable for inmate Dodger Lane (Sellers) and his cellmates. They've worked the system so cozily that they even get daily deliveries of groceries. They're near the end of their sentences, and an old criminal chum hatches a cunning plot to have Dodger and pals break out of jail for one night, make a heist, and then sneak back into jail so they can have a perfect alibi.

Who's Sellers? Dodger Lane, a small-time Cockney criminal with big dreams and oily charm, whose shameless toadying and ability to work the angles have given him a smooth time of jail.

So how is it: As one of Sellers' earlier flicks, in "Two Way Stretch" he takes a bit of a back seat to a cast of colourful British supporting actors. There's no disguises or wacky slapstick to the extent you'd see in his later films, but "Two Way Stretch" is also a showcase for how well Sellers could fit into one character. Dodger Lane is an unrepentant criminal to the bone, a lazy, self-satisfied thief who's always looking for an easy fix, and Sellers, in his "heavy" stage, sinks right into the character. The scenes of how Lane and his jail cellmates have set up a cozy little nest, complete with tea services, are quite funny, and there are some great supporting turns. But "Stretch" is also a rather thin premise for a film; although it's quite short, it feels a bit padded.

Sellers nearly has the film stolen out from under him by the late Lionel Jeffries as the constantly shouting Chief Crout, the hard-as-nails warder who takes over the undisciplined prison. Jeffries is a riot, all barely-contained rage, nearly choking on his lines. He's a prototype of R. Lee Ermey in "Full Metal Jacket," an authority figure driven mad by the slackness of his charges. Some of the other actors don't do quite as well but Bernard Cribbins is also sly fun as the aged criminal disguised as a kindly visiting priest. All in all, though, it's a fun and breezy British crime caper.

Grade: B-

Quote: "Silence when you're talking to me!" -- Chief Crout

Superheroes I Love #8: Mr Monster

2011-03-02T13:21:00.000+13:00

Back in the glorious 1980s of my youth, the comic book world seemed to be exploding with creativity. The independent companies were in full bloom, and the mainstream was hip-deep in the innovations of Moore, Byrne, Miller, Simonson and many others. There was a lot more diversity than we see today in the shrunken field, with Marvel and DC doing battle with dozens of smaller publishers like First, Comico, Renegade Press and more. One of my favorite outfits of the time was Eclipse Comics, who put out Miracleman, DNA Agents, Scout, and one of my most beloved rather underrated heroes, Michael T. Gilbert's Mr. Monster. Evil beware!

Who: Doc Stearns is Mr. Monster, the latest in a long line of monster killers. Picture Buffy the Vampire Slayer crossed with Hellboy with a dash of the Punisher. Gilbert actually took the character from an obscure Canadian comic appearance or two in the 1940s, but he really made Mr. Monster his own, creating a detailed history and defining the blustery, monster-hating character. After a dozen or two of his own comics, Mr. Monster settled into a role as a "host" to many of Eclipse's reprints of weird comics from the 1940s and '50s, including what I fondly remember as my very first "3-D" comic.

Why I dig: Gilbert's work is full of wit and charm, combining a kind of EC Comics campy gore and wit with some highly inventive layout and expressive Eisner-influenced art. Props also go to the essential lettering of Ken Bruzenak, which is like a secondary character in some of the stories. Gilbert's stories are highly tongue-in-cheek, with Mr. Monster and his spunky Girl Friday getting into all sorts of scrapes. A key to the stories is no matter how goofy they get, Mr. Monster remains an utterly serious hero, nearly fanatical in his pursuit of creatures of the night. There's not a lot of gray areas in the work, but a lot of clench-jawed charm.

Sadly, Gilbert's monster-hunter has rarely been seen since the 1980s. There's been a few anthology series, but nothing sustained after the "Mr. Monster: Origins" miniseries that took a more serious spin on the Mr. Monster legend. Gilbert has gone on to do a lot of other comics work at Disney and DC but I wish he'd return to Mr. Monster -- there's a lot of great potential in this character yet.

Read this: Sadly it's a bit of a hunt through back-issue bins to find much of the 30-year-old Mr. Monster comics. The 10-issue Eclipse series remains his highlight, although "Origins," which is considerably darker, is also quite solid. The best starting point though is this paperback which collects #1-5 of Doc Stearns' own series, including what I might have to pick as the single best Mr. Monster tale, "The Strange Story of Hemo Boy," featuring a little boy whose head is a bottle of blood (!!). It has a more sympathetic viewpoint than some of Mr. Monster's stories and combines pathos, wit and invention into a little, blood-soaked gem.

Concert review: Gang Of Four, Auckland, February 24

2011-02-25T13:54:00.006+13:00

OK, so this week was pretty much a disaster I'd like to forget. The terrible earthquake, more dismaying family sickness news, lots of quake-related stress at work of course, and to top it all off my car got broken into in our own driveway last night; $300 worth of damage for the sake of about $2 in change.

About the only thing that saves this week from a total write-off is a cathartic, phenomenal show last night by post-punk pioneers Gang Of Four at the Powerstation. Ninety minutes, two encores of high-octane, lacerating guitar and bass and a frontman who seemed to be channeling David Byrne and Iggy Pop's illegitimate child. Some nights, you need to be in a row full of people jumping up and down and singing "To hell with poverty / we'll get drunk on cheap wine."

Gang Of Four, to my mind, are an unfairly overlooked pivotal late '70s act who combined punk and funk to make political rock you can't help but dance to. Bands from Red Hot Chili Peppers to Franz Ferdinand and LCD Soundsystem owe them big. Their debut, 1979's "Entertainment!," is one of the signature postpunk albums, all coiled angst, bass that twangs away like a gong, shrieking, staccato guitar and chant/sung lyrics. Frontman Jon King and guitarist Andy Gill are the two founding members who lead the group today, and it's their drive that feeds the push-pull of grinding rock with highly political subjects -- "At Home He's A Tourist," "Natural's Not In It," and "I Love A Man In Uniform," one of the most sneeringly witty anti-war songs ever written. This is the band Rage Against The Machine always tried to be (and failed to quite live up to, but that's just my opinion).

Gang Of Four's songs are often accused of being chilly, with gloomy lyrics like "this heaven / gives me migraine" or the awesomely snide "Love'll get you like a case of anthrax / And that's something I don't want to catch." But live, King threw sweat, gymnastics (a headstand!) and microphone-stand twirling energy into the Gang's songs, adding a whole new dimension to their work. King was fantastic, swirling, shaking and gyrating like a man 20 years younger. At one point he sat out for a song played by Gill and I worried he was having a mild heart attack downstage. Meanwhile, Andy Gill had approximately one facial expression for the whole show but let all his emotions out with his scorching guitar work, which places its focus on bursts of tone rather than showy solos.

For a group that's got a rather serious reputation, I was pleased at just how much joyful fun Gang Of Four are live. Bass man Thomas McNeice, looking like a Lenny Kravitz impersonator with his swaying dreadlocks, was terrific at playing all the classic songs, sending out resonating bursts of corded sound that stabbed right through the audience. Gang Of Four played most of Entertainment! plus a selection of their other tunes and some from their really solid comeback new album Content. We had the seething blast-furnace fury of "Anthrax", "To Hell With Poverty" became a raucous mosh pit singalong, and "I Love A Man In Uniform" was an encore delight, while "Damaged Goods" closed out the set. Good show, mates.

Here's Gang Of Four on David Letterman recently performing their new single "You'll Never Pay For The Farm." Jon King in full effect!

And a recent take on "To Hell With Poverty":

Earthquake. Again.

2011-02-22T17:13:00.008+13:00

Today's awful earthquake appears to make the dramatic earthquake of last September look like a mild tremor. It's only been four hours since the quake struck here as I write this, but already the scenes are horrific -- entire buildings down, unknown fatalities. We basically got off lucky in September, with not a single death. But that quake was at 4am, and this one struck in the middle of the lunch hour, and was far shallower.

Grim times, and terrible to see Christchurch suffer so much. One of our sister newspapers down there had their roof fall in on them. We visited Cathedral Square, shown here today, back in 2009 -- and to see that massive icon cathedral tumbling like a set of children's blocks is humbling and frightening in equal measure.

It'll be some time before we know just how bad this was today. All my thoughts, and all New Zealand's thoughts, go to the people of Southland today.

'The Art of Peter Siddell' takes flight

2011-02-19T00:01:00.001+13:00

So Thursday night finally marked the official launch of my father-in-law Sir Peter Siddell's massive coffee table art book of his life's work, The Art of Peter Siddell.

It is no exaggeration on my part to say my father-in-law is one of New Zealand's most respected living painters. I chose a good family to marry into, as both of Avril's parents and her sister and brother-in-law are all acclaimed artists. I remember when I first met my wife's father more than a decade ago now and I was telling him I thought a big book of his paintings would be wonderful to see sometime. It's been very good of the kind folks at Random House to work so diligently to bring this project to fruition. It's a highly handsome tome -- hey, it's even got paintings of my wife and son in it (and a photo of some disreputable blogger/journalist American expatriate in the introduction as part of a family portrait). The book's been getting some very kind notices and press (special kudos to Beattie's Book Blog which has given it multiple plugs).

Thursday night was special, because nearly 100 people came out to the invitation-only event for Sir Peter at Parson's bookshop, longtime family and friends.

It's no hyperbole to say it's been a rather rough couple of years for our family down here. I've written, sparingly and out of respect for the family's privacy, of Sir Peter's battle with a brain tumour he was diagnosed with in 2008. He is still with us, perhaps slower than once before, but doing far better than anyone would've predicted more than two years ago when we got the diagnosis. But my wife's mum, Sylvia Siddell, has also had an extraordinarily hard time of it lately with her own cancer diagnoses, including multiple painful surgeries. She was actually in hospital just this week for a spell and got out just in time to be able to attend the book launch. Even Sir Peter's sister, my wife's aunt, has been ailing and in hospital (at one point this week my wife's mum and aunt were in the same hospital ward opposite each other). At times like these when you start to feel like a plague of locusts might be around the bend, the support of so many friends and supporters of Peter's art is a mighty thing.

Seek out the book if you get a chance -- it's an impressive testament to one artist's imagination, vision and peerless skill over nearly 50 years of work. And I'm not just saying that because he's my father-in-law.

Man, I just cannot believe this boy is 7 years old today.

2011-02-18T00:01:00.001+13:00

Seriously, how does this happen so fast?

Peter Sellers Saturdays #2: The Party (1968)

2011-02-12T00:01:00.001+13:00

Here's the only time Peter Sellers collaborated with director Blake Edwards outside of the "Pink Panther" series. Like those films, Sellers plays a clumsy foreigner with a goofy accent, but 1968's "The Party" has a distinctly different tone than the Inspector Clouseau capers.

The story: A bumbling Indian actor is fired after botching a big Hollywood film, but ends up accidentally invited to a glamourous party at his producer's house. Hijinks ensue.

Who's Sellers? Hrundi V. Bakshi, a kind-hearted but highly accident-prone Indian actor in Hollywood. Now, Sellers playing an Indian is the biggest problem in watching "The Party" today. You couldn't really get away with a white actor slapping a bunch of makeup on and playing a minority in 2011; even 40 years ago it was probably a bit tacky. So there is that uncomfortable squirm element to watch "The Party" today, as Sellers comes close to racial caricature. But yet, despite the "brownface" factor, I found Hrindi a sympathetic character -- Sellers, whose impersonation of an Indian is pretty remarkable, tries not to make him a total stereotype. Part of the fun of "The Party" is watching this shy, courtly, repressed outsider find his bliss.

So how is it: Amusing as it is, "The Party" takes a little while to truly get going -- but director Blake Edwards clearly means the stilted, dry early party scenes to contrast with the unfettered anarchy that spills out in the final act. A dull mogul's gathering turns into a freaky happening. There's a lot of funny gags here (the drunken waiter manages to upstage Sellers in several scenes), yet "The Party" is really lacking in plot or character development. Sellers makes Hrindi likeable, but we know next to nothing about him other than that he's a bad actor from India. His "love interest," a French singer, is even less developed. It's a series of skits strung together with a loose structure. The plot swerves hard when a previously unmentioned daughter of the film producer and a gang of the cleanest-cut hippies you've ever seen storm the house in the final scenes.

Yet what I really liked about "The Party" is how successfully in its early scenes it captures the feeling of being the only outsider at a party, of being the aimless guy shuffling about trying to find a conversation to get into. This stillness is where Sellers really excels, that outsider sensation compounded by Hrindi's foreignness. And as an example of that distinctly '60s film genre -- uptight squares get their hippie-fried comeuppance -- it's a fun if slightly awkward time capsule today.

Grade: B+

Quote: "Birdie num num?" (Of course!)

Mix Tapes I have Known: 'More Damn Music,' 1997

2011-02-04T09:42:00.004+13:00

...So where were we? Last time around in my excavation into my box of mix tapes of ye olden pre-iPod days, I looked at a tape from 1992. The thing about mix tapes is -- usually -- you made them fervently trying to impress some gal/guy you were all emo about. Usually, of course this didn't work and the tape ended up a monument to your own insanely overwrought passion of the moment. This tape from 1997 didn't end in tears, though - two years later I ended up marrying the recipient. Mix-tape score!

The tape: More Damn Music from your California Hippie Dude

Year created: 1997

Who it was for: My future wife Avril, all the way over in New Zealand. Around this time, fall 1997 or so, I'd gone and abruptly moved away from Mississippi back to my native California, got a job at a tiny newspaper in the San Joaquin Valley, was living in a concrete bunker of a back-alley apartment with psychopath rednecks in the front unit, and in just a few months time Avril would get a green card and come from New Zealand to live with me. So a rather transitional time, in other words... I think this tape, one of many we exchanged back and forth across the Pacific Ocean, was a kind of long-distance reassurance and valentine if you will, in hopes that after many years living far, far apart we two might finally get to try out a proper relationship...

Track listing:

SIDE A
1. #1 Crush (Garbage)
2. Normal Like You (Everclear)
3. Amy [Amphetamine] (Everclear)
4. I Will Buy You A New Life (Everclear)
5. Boogie Chillin' (R.L. Burnside)
6. Heaven Beside You (Alice in Chains)
7. I Do Not Want This (Nine Inch Nails)
8. Sappy (Nirvana)
9. Mystifies Me (Son Volt)
10. I Turn Around (Elvis Costello)
11. Bloody '98 (Blue Mountain)
12. The Passion of Lovers (Bauhaus)
13. Sheet Kickers (Guided By Voices)
14. License to Confuse (Sebadoh)
15. Life Worth Living (Uncle Tupelo)
16. Talk Show Host (Radiohead)

SIDE B
1. Fire Maple Song (Everclear)
2. Glycerine (Bush)
3. Devil's Haircut (Beck)
4. My Son Cool (Guided by Voices)
5. Motor Away (Guided by Voices)
6. My Valuable Hunting Knife (Guided by Voices)
7. Positive Bleeding (Urge Overkill)
8. What Goes On (Velvet Underground)
9. Try (Michael Penn)
10. Chottie See (Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan)
11. Who You Are (Pearl Jam)
12. Find The River (R.E.M.)
13. Something's Out There (Freedy Johnston)
14. Feel So Different (Sinéad O'Connor)
15. Short on Posters (Guided By Voices)

What this says about my musical tastes at the time: It was the waning days of grunge, and I was mightily into Everclear and Guided By Voices judging from the four Everclear and five (!) GBV songs I included. The music of your late college years is pretty much the music you will always love, and very little here embarrasses me overly 14 years on.* Neither Everclear nor Guided by Voices have ever really equalled their mid-1990s peak, though.

What was I thinking? *OK, well, except for the Bush song -- the bargain-rate version of Nirvana, they were pretty lame even when they were cool for about 10 nanoseconds. If you couldn't find Nirvana, couldn't find Stone Temple Pilots, you got these guys.

This song could totally be taken the wrong way:
"He'll keep you in a jar / And you'll think you're happy" - Nirvana.

Aw, that's sweet: "Why must it always be the less I see of you, the more I care?" - Elvis Costello

Clever left-field choices: There are some more obscure acts here -- I always have loved alt-rock also-rans Urge Overkill, who I think were very underrated, and Michael Penn continues to be one of the most unfairly ignored singer/songwriters out there.

Totally obvious choice: Well, like I said, it was the age of grunge. I might as well have made the tape case out of flannel, this is such a totally 1997 sort of production.

Peter Sellers Saturdays: "The Mouse That Roared" (1959)

2011-01-29T20:05:00.002+13:00

I love Peter Sellers -- when I was a kid, one of my favorite movie series was the mad anarchy of the "Pink Panther" films. I've always been vaguely fascinated by Sellers, his remarkable chameleon acting skills, his chaotic personal life and his sadly early death at 54. Sellers made a gigantic body of work in a short life, appearing in more than 60 movies, many of them apparently kinda awful. I've been trying to catch up with many of the ones I've never seen or haven't seen in years. So let's start with "The Mouse That Roared," a cold-war comedy that's a bit like a dress rehearsal for the superior "Dr. Strangelove" a few years later.

The story: Tiny European nation Grand Fenwick is facing bankruptcy. Fenwick's prime minister hatches a sneaky plot for Fenwick to "invade" America and lose, thus opening itself up to millions in financial aid (think Iraq or Afghanistan today). But thanks to a fumbling army leader and a top-secret doomsday device nothing goes quite to plan, and Grand Fenwick ends up becoming the most powerful nation in the world.

Who's Sellers?: Sellers plays three characters here: the nation's dotty head of state, Grand Duchess Gloriana XII; the sinister Prime Minister Count Rupert Mountjoy, and bumbling army leader Tully Bascombe. Awkward-but-courageous Tully, a kind of Woody Allen-lite, gets the most screen time, although I think my favorite Sellers here is the sneering Count, all mustache and cunning plans. Following in the footsteps of his idol Alec Guinness, Sellers makes each of the Fenwickians distinct characters, never making his multiple roles seem just like a gimmick like, say, Eddie Murphy does.

So how is it? "Mouse" is kind of a Mad magazine version of Cold War satire, with many similarities in plot to "Strangelove". The movie is hugely implausible (so everyone in New York City is hiding in bomb shelters and basements over some air raid drill when Fenwick invades?), but there's an amiable charm to it. It's never a very pointed satire, nowhere near as mad and inspired as "Strangelove," but the idea that a handful of bumblers from a flyspeck nation could somehow hold the balance of world power is still amusing. But the story has a lot of missed potential, settling instead for cliches. Bombshell Jean Seberg is horribly mismatched as a love interest for Sellers, although she's great to look at. It's also funny to see William Hartnell, aka The First Doctor Who, as Tully's stern aide. At 80 minutes "Mouse" doesn't wear out its welcome, and although it's a rather dated piece of satire now, there's enough gentle humour in it to make it bearable. And Sellers' capacity for playing multiple characters never stops being amazing.

Rating: B-

Quote: "There isn't a more profitable undertaking for any country than to declare war on the United States and to be defeated."

Adios, Wizard: The slow fade of the comics magazine

2011-01-25T16:29:00.003+13:00

I love comic books and have since age 11 or so, but if there's anything I love almost as much as reading comics it's reading about comics. The comic-focused magazine is a admittedly bit of a niche market, and this week we saw the death of what was once the field's heavy hitter, Wizard magazine.

Wizard was bloody huge in the 1990s, a comics magazine that took advantage of that whole speculator boom to become about as big as any comics mag ever did. They were glossy and enthusiastic but often juvenile, pandered shamelessly to what was hot and rarely engaged in any serious criticism, but if you read comics for a while there it was pretty much impossible not to give them a read, even if you shook your fist at how idiotic the mag could be. I often felt vaguely unclean reading Wizard. But then amidst the dross you'd occasionally find some sterling pieces; I still remember my old small-press bud Troy Hickman getting a nice shout in there. Wizard lost ground to the Internet as a source for breaking news and their over-reliance on price guides and comics as investment doomed them -- the last time I picked up a Wizard a few years ago I was stunned how small it was. It was a mercy killing.

Fortunately, the excellent TwoMorrows publications are still turning out their magazines Back Issue and Alter Ego which focus more narrowly on comics' rich history -- I absolutely love Back Issue, which sticks entirely to comics of the 1970s and 1980s with exhaustive articles on things like Daredevil's relationship with Black Widow or the Japanese Spider-Man TV show. It's basically in spirit a fanzine done up nice and fancy but Back Issue is such a rewarding read every month or two that it pretty much fills my comics 'zine needs. TwoMorrows is smart, too, how their publications basically avoid breaking news, focusing on lengthy homages and analysis of days gone by.

There have been a lot of comics mags over the years. One of my all-time favorites was the old Amazing Heroes which during the 1980s was like a more mature, thoughtful Wizard, combining solid journalism with great historical pieces, mixing coverage of both superheroes and then-"alternative" comics skillfully. I picked up a ton of these on eBay about 10 years back and was sorry to have to leave many of them behind when we moved to New Zealand. You can still read an Amazing Heroes about American Flagg and Secret Wars II from 1985 and enjoy it if you're a big enough comics geek. I also loved the old weekly newspaper Comics Buyer's Guide, which I subscribed to for years. It started in 1971 and it's still going as a monthly magazine, albeit probably struggling -- but I admit I haven't really read it in a while either, as the last time I looked it seems geared at an older version of the Wizard fan, and is a bit of a shadow of its old self.

And then there's the Comics Journal, which I've always had a complex relationship with. At its peak it's the most vital, insightful mag ever done about comics. Fantagraphics is a priceless company in the comics industry, both for its championing of artists like the Hernandez brothers, Daniel Clowes and Peter Bagge and for its fantastic reprinting of classic comics and comics strips. But the Journal often was a bit schizophrenic for me, often hugely entertaining but sometimes a bit too sneering and mean-spirited for me. I love both Spider-Man and Clowes, and a fan like me sometimes felt excluded by their tone. The unreadably pretentious essays by Kenneth Smith sum up what turned me off about the Journal; space-wasters geared at showing how intellectual the mag could be. I usually cherry-picked the Journal, picking up issues only with subjects that particularly interested me, and they did depth like nobody else could. A big Comics Journal interview remains the definitive statement of any comics creator's work. Sadly the 'print' Comics Journal has more or less died too, down to semiannual publication -- it's been a year and a half since #300 came out, but Fantagraphics promises a gigantic 600-page #301 is coming soon. I'll definitely pick that up just to see what they come up with, as I do love a good comics magazine read.

It's a shame, though, that the glory days of the comic-book magazine seem to be over. I doubt any publication will come along to equal Wizard's mainstream success, even though I won't particularly miss the magazine myself.

Nik's Unheralded Albums #4: Freedy Johnston, Can You Fly

2011-01-24T18:55:00.000+13:00

Freedy Johnston, "Can You Fly" (1992)

The world has a surplus of singer/songwriters, sensitive guys with guitars penning odes to their lost loves and such. Kansas-raised Freedy Johnston got a bit lost in the cracks, but his albums hold some great stories, told with a keen eye and a voice that is by turns agonized and hopeful. His breakthrough album on a career that never quite went mainstream was 1992's "Can You Fly," a record packed with finely honed character studies, tales of valiant losers and romantic mavericks.

"Can You Fly," his second album proper, was financed by Johnston selling off his grandfather's old land in Kansas, as he notes in the rollicking album opener, "Trying To Tell you I Don't Know" -- "Well I sold the dirt, to feed the band." It's the kind of album that's known to a certain breed to rock critic and a small devoted fan base, but really should have been a stone-cold classic. The far more vapid, high-school journal-style lyrics of Alanis Morissette sold gazillions around the same time. Isn't that ironic.

Johnston's vocals quiver, seem barely held back -- the hummable melodies of the songs given great tension by his voice's commitment. Like a songwriting Raymond Carver, Johnston paints character landscapes with a fine eye. Take the elegant, broken-hearted "Mortician's Daughter," where with a few quick strokes Johnston etches an entire world: "I used to love the mortician's daughter / we drew our hearts on the dusty coffin lids. ... We rolled in the warm grass by the boneyard fence / her skin so white, the first leaves falling."

I recall listening over and over to "The Lucky One," a singalong tale of a beaten-down gambler's plucky optimism -- "I know I'll be the lucky one," he sings, and it's a call for anyone who ever gambled away on a dream -- whether it was a good one or a disastrous one. Some of the songs grow for me with each listen, like the little masterpiece "Responsible," where a father sees his daughter off to the big city, or the mysterious and evocative title track.

It's a distinctly American record -- not in any jingoistic fashion, but in the way Johnston pushes between dogged open-road big dreaming and tiny, brittle setbacks. The wide-open skies and roads of Kansas color "Can You Fly," where ghosts of the past flutter about without ceasing.

Johnston went on to produce some other fantastic work -- his next album, 1994's "This Perfect World," is just about as good as this one, while 1997's tightly wound "Never Home" only suffers in comparison to its predecessors. After that, though, Johnston's muse seemed to fade -- 1999's rather lethargic "Blue Days, Black Nights" drowned in its own dark tone and I have to admit I kind of lost track after that.

Just recently Johnston released his first album of new material in eight years, "Rain On The City." I haven't gotten around to picking it up yet, because I guess it's a case of worrying you can't recapture that same old magic. Still, "Can You Fly" and "This Perfect World" are good enough a testament that Freedy Johnston will always rank high on my songwriters hall of fame.

Under the sea, darling it's better down where it's wetter

2011-01-15T09:50:00.001+13:00

One thing I never take for granted about New Zealand, after more than four years of living here, is how accessible the sea is. Most Americans have to make a bit of a trek to get to a beach -- and unless you live in a really temperate place like Florida chances are much of the year it's not a swimmable sea.

But Auckland, as I've written about before, has a million kinds of beaches all within a short drive from home. One that I haven't been to we finally visited yesterday, Goat Island Marine Reserve. It's a beautiful spot about 90 minutes north of town where like few other beaches in New Zealand, fish don't worry about being caught and their populations have exploded into life.

And the fish -- huge fish all so tame they'll swim right by you unafraid of being eaten. Blue maomao, gorgeous striped red moki, bulge-eyed cod, little bewhiskered goatfish feeding on the bottom of the sea, and giant snapper. The beach is studded with rock formations that make deep canyons when the tide comes in, and as you float on the sea looking down you feel like you're observing entire hidden cities. I only wish I'd had an underwater camera to capture the sights, but here's a few online pics of fish I spotted.

I realized that I've never really properly snorkeled before. I've worn one but never in a place where the water is clear as glass and so many tame fish come up within inches of you -- one gigantic snapper who seemed to be the size of my torso scared the hell out of us all. Water magnifies, of course, so each of these great mouthed fish seemed like a dinosaur, hugely confident in their environment.

The snorkel takes away one of the big hard parts of swimming, the whole having to breathe thing. With a snorkel I could float, like a spaceman, above the undersea world. It's very peaceful and calming, visiting this other world in the ocean like that.

And so I float.

Concert Review: Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Auckland, January 7

2011-01-08T10:43:00.002+13:00

I like my job just fine, but sometimes the hours are a bit unsociable. This last week I had a bunch of 5am starts, which leaves you a wee bit befuddled by the end of it all. So what better way to wind up a week than with some dirty shirt, sweaty rock 'n' roll and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion? On an extraordinarily hot, sweaty Auckland Friday night, a couple hundred of us crammed into the Kings Arms to perspire away the work week blues.

The Blues Explosion have been kicking about for around 20 years now, with a high-octane, borderline kitschy blend of garage rock blues-punk, with frontman Jon Spencer channeling a kind of mad cross between Elvis Presley and Iggy Pop. You can trace a direct influence from the Blues Explosion to the White Stripes, The Strokes, Black Keys and many other popular garage-noise bands, although the Blues Explosion have never quite become household names. But they are awesome fun -- I first heard their classic album "Now I Got Worry" back in the mid-90s living near Memphis, and if I ever just want to bliss out with hard-driving rock 'n' roll, I go with the Blues Explosion.

Last night's show was cathartic fun from the word go, as Spencer took the stage in leather pants and at least to me looking curiously like a weathered version of Morrissey. With guitarman Judah Bauer and pounding drummer Russell Simins the trio blasted through 90 minutes or so of all their shoulda-bit hits like "Bellbottoms," "Wail," "Chicken Dog," "Greyhound" and more. Spencer kept hollering out his mantra, "Blues Explosion!" and on this sticky night, no song seemed more appropriate than "Sweat" -- "That's the sweat of the Blues Explosion," he sang, as rivers of the stuff flew off his mop of black hair. Yeah, by the end of the encore we were all pretty ripe and in need of deodorant -- but it was one of those great music moments as little shaved-head guys built like fire hydrants bounced around with high-heel wearing petite bar chicks and one extraordinarily smelly guy who looked like a missing Fabulous Furry Freak Brother.

There ain't nothing particularly deep about it, but boy was it fun. When Jon Spencer put down the guitar to engage in a feedback-lacked theremin solo, I knew I was in something approaching rock 'n' roll paradise and all thoughts of work and normal daily life fled my head. If you can rock a theremin you've got it going on. Long live the blues explosion.

The future's so bright, I've got to wear shades

2011-01-01T15:38:00.002+13:00

How's this for making us '80s kids feel old -- 2011 is only four years away from the hoverboarding world of 2015 "Back To The Future II" predicted for us way back in 1989. Ye gods. No hoverboards but tons of iPods and iPads and iThings. (Further Future Shock amusement: 11 predictions BTTF2 got right, and 11 predictions BTTF2 got wrong.)

I turn 40 this year, too, which is a really weird thing to see on the horizon -- on 11/11/11, no less. My wee boy is nearly 7 and about to enter Year 3 at school. I sort of feel like my entire 30s whooshed by in a blur of babies, newspapers and moves. I moved from California to Oregon to New Zealand, had a high-energy kid, and I guess that accounts for that blurry feeling as we enter 2011. Where did the 2000s go?

The world young Peter is growing up in may not have hoverboards and flying cars (yet) but it is very different. P will never know a pre-digital world without the internet, texting, Facebooks, iPods and the like -- he will assume knowledge is all out there instantly, without having to dig around in libraries, just a click or two away (the other day he asked about what eels eat, then said "I guess we can just look it up on the internet").

As Arcade Fire sang in last year's song, "We Used To Wait":
"I used to write,
I used to write letters I used to sign my name
I used to sleep at night
Before the flashing lights settled deep in my brain"

It's a world where you're never out of touch if you don't want to be, where you don't sit around waiting for weeks for a letter from an old friend you've been wanting to hear from. Just send a Facebook message.

... Not that I'm gonna turn into one of those cranky old geezers complaining about the way things ain't the way they once was. The world of 2011 brings us many wonderful things that make it possible for the world to seem bigger and yet closer than ever before. But it's interesting, now that we're actually IN the future of 2011, how different from what we once imagined and yet how futuristic it actually is when you think about it.

Year In Review: My Top Music of 2010

2010-12-27T15:06:00.000+13:00

So, 2010 was a pretty good year for me and music I dug -- old hands like Neil Young and Paul Weller put out stellar work, while young turks like Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti and Arcade Fire also delivered grand new sounds. Here's my 10 favorite albums of 2010 in alphabetical order:

Arcade Fire, The Suburbs
Three records and not a duff move yet by this Canadian assembly. There's a beautiful melancholy over this latest set, a kind of ode to vanishing childhood, with one anthem after another. My favorite: "We Used To Wait," which makes the pre-digital era of the 1980s seem as faint and far away as Victorian England.

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, Before Today
I have a mixed record with getting into indie-rock Pitchfork-certified cool bands -- I love Grizzly Bear, didn't really get what the fuss about Animal Collective is about, but this band -- wow, what a curious, haunting record, like early Guided By Voices mixed with Prince and an '80s horror-movie soundtrack. Vague and strange, with keyboards washing in and out, hooky choruses diving in out of nowhere and quirky strange collages of sound. It's a ramshackle gem.

Roky Erickson, True Love Will Cast Out All Evil
A burned-out '60s psychedelic legend surfaces after years of problems to record a battered, beautiful record with the band Okkervil River. While it lacks the wacked-out frenzy of his old 13th Floor Elevators classics, there's a world-weary wisdom and gentle optimism to this fine comeback.

Grinderman, Grinderman II
Nick Cave's dirty ol' rock' n' roll band releases its second disc and it's even more raw than their first, with Cave's sinister power harnessed to raunchy garage rock. Way more unhinged than the Bad Seeds, it's loud and mean and fun.

LCD Soundsystem, This Is Happening
Darker and spacier than James Murphy's first two discs, but still filled with marvelous half-snarky, half sincere tunes exploring the frontiers of dance-punk. Also notable this year was Murphy's soulful music for the "Greenberg" soundtrack which points in interesting new directions.

The New Pornographers, Together
Indie-rock's finest all-star collective produces yet another album of power-pop goodness, highlighted by Neko Case's wail and A.C. Newman's bittersweet romanticism. Consistently one of the best bands going.

Phoenix Foundation, Buffalo
This New Zealand group swerve from the terrific hooky pop of their last album into a halfway instrumental record that meanders and sways through deeply textured songs that end up in surprising places. Subtle and gorgeous and something distinctively Kiwi about it all.

Paul Weller, Wake Up The Nation
I finally saw the man live this year backing this well-received album, which distills his nearly 40 years of music with The Jam, Style Council and solo into one diverse whole. Hard-charging dad-punk, blissful balladry, psychedelic strangeness -- it's all here in this sweeping statement.

Weezer, Hurley
There seems to be a love-hate relationship with these guys on the internet but I loved the poppy simplicity of their 8th record, which made fine listening as I zipped along the epic highways of California this autumn. Full of energy and optimism and playfulness, which may infuriate some snooty fans who want Rivers Cuomo to record nothing but "Pinkerton Part II" for the rest of his career, but I enjoy a band that doesn't take itself that seriously and still deliver fun summer pop tunes. Give me this over Katy Perry any day.

Neil Young, Le Noise
Young's so prolific even into his mid-60s that this one snuck by many, but it's a real treat, produced by music legend Daniel Lanois and featuring nothing by Young and his feedback-drenched guitar creating a really fascinating brooding sound that hovers between Crazy Horse crunch and "Harvest" pastoral melancholy. One to crank up right around midnight, and bathe in the glow.

Runners-up: The National, High Violet; Joanna Newsom, Have One On Me; Wolf Parade, Expo 86; Eels, End Times and Tomorrow Morning; Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World soundtrack.

Worst record I bought: Peter Gabriel, Scratch My Back.
As a giant fan, this one makes me sad. The man goes a decade or so between albums for this? A limp collection of tired covers, done with a bland orchestral backing. While Gabriel's voice is still gruff and terrific, there's a dour, labored feel to this entire enterprise, with even the world music textures that colour his best work lacking. Joyless.

Best old music I discovered: The dB's awesome first two albums from 1981-82, "Stands for Decibels" and "Repercussion" together on one disc, which I stumbled across at Real Groovy. I've always wanted to check these guys out as you often hear about them as the missing link between Big Star and R.E.M., and they don't disappoint at all. Top-notch power pop with wit and stylistic experimentation galore.

Worst music news: Other than the continual closing and shuttering of old-fashioned record shops in the MP3 age, I'd have to say the worst news of the year was the death of Alex Chilton.

Best concert: Some good stuff this year like legendary Paul Weller, fantastic and sexy Florence + The Machine and an intimate audience with The New Pornographers, but I have to admit, being in the crowd for the reunited Pavement's first show in 10 years in humble lil' New Zealand was pretty dang cool, and Steve Malkmus and the gang were in full quirk-rock frenzy.

Merry Christmas and all that jazz

2010-12-22T18:09:00.003+13:00

We return from a brief camping getaway to Coromandel Peninsula and on into the Christmas rush! More posting including my Top 10 albums of 2010 before the year's out!

The Angel-A-Thon: Season 1, And So It Begins

2010-12-15T21:23:00.003+13:00

So a while back, over the course of a couple years, the wife and I whipped through all seven seasons, 144 episodes of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" , which I regularly blogged about in progress reports. How on earth to follow all that vampire-staking action up? With the spin-off showcase "Angel," which ran from 1999-2004 featuring everyone's favorite antihero vampire-with-a-soul.

I was actually rather hesitant to dive into the whole five seasons of "Angel," because spin-off shows rarely reach the heights of their parent. And for about the first half of this series, "Angel" kind of felt like a show trying to figure out what it wants to be. After having left Sunnydale and a broken-hearted Buffy, Angel heads to Los Angeles and sets up shop as a kind of supernatural private detective -- basically, he's vampire Batman. Whiny "Buffy" castmate Cordelia comes aboard as his secretary/damsel in distress, and a mysterious wisecracking guy named Doyle joins the show as they amble about various supernatural adventures.

While entertaining, the early episodes kind of fall into a rut and too often the show doesn't really seem sure where it's going. The gothic rock'n'roll video slash-cut editing style sometimes gets annoying, too. I also have one pet peeve -- wayyyyy too much of Angel strutting about in broad daylight, which spoils the whole vampire mystique thing. I don't care if he's not in direct sunlight, if he's in a brightly lit office, it just ain't... vampirey.

Soon, though, dreary Doyle is killed off (a good move, as the whole dark brooding guy with a secret role was already filled by Angel) and ex-Watcher Wesley (a very solid Alexis Denisof) joins the team. The show needed a "Giles" sort of character, the know-it-all geek with courage, and Wesley and Cordelia provide much-needed comic relief to the show's generally dark demon doings. I also enjoyed the cynical policewoman character Kate, although she starts to move into the background after a couple of appearances. By the end of season one and a few really entertaining episodes featuring the demonic law firm Wolfram and Hart, "Angel" seems a much more focused show than it started off as.

Best episode: Is it a bit of a cheat that my favorite episodes of this series featured guest appearances by "Buffy" characters? Well, either way, episode 8, "I Will Remember You," is a great piece of romantic melodrama when Angel is "cured" of his vampirism, Buffy shows up for a little romantic tango, and in the end Angel has to make a rather tragic decision. The Buffy/Angel thing has been run into the ground, but this episode still packs a nice sting. Honorable mention: the two-parter featuring another "Buffy" character, Eliza Dushku's rogue slayer Faith.

Year In Review: My Top 10 Movies of 2010

2010-12-12T10:44:00.003+13:00

...No, I refuse to believe it's mid-December already and the year 2011 looms out on the horizon like some Kubrickian monolith. It's time for the usual year-end review wrap-ups to begin littering the blogosphere. So in the first of an intermittent series wrapping up the year that almost was, here's my Favourite Movies I Saw In 2010. As usual, several of the big Oscar hopeful movies haven't opened down under yet like "The King's Speech," "127 Hours" and "True Grit," so I'm keeping this strictly to what I've seen -- and a couple of movies from the tail end of 2009 sneak in as well.

In alphabetical order --
Black Dynamite
Man, this movie is a hoot. In and out of theatres in about 15 minutes last year, it's a spoof of classic '70s blaxploitation movies that is one of the funniest comedies in years. It's the kind of thing Quentin Tarantino tried to do with his 'Grindhouse' movies. The movie parody genre has been pretty much kicked to death by the hugely unfunny "Scary Movie" type flicks, but "Black Dynamite" harks back to the original "Airplane!" with how lovingly it parodies '70s cheese and Michael Jai White's great turn as the unstoppable Dynamite. And any movie that ends with a kung fu battle with Richard Nixon must be on a Top 10 list.

Boy
This New Zealand charmer became the top grossing movie EVER here this year, and writer/director Taika Waititi proved he's a talent to reckon with. His first feature "Eagle V. Shark" was a goofy romantic lark. Here, he digs in to make a surpassingly kind-hearted comedy/drama set in 1984 about a teen boy's life in an isolated East Coast Maori community when his shiftless, braggart father returns home. This ain't like the hushed and mythic "Whale Rider," though -- Waiti's fanciful script, witty asides and even Michael Jackson tributes make it feel uniquely New Zealand, yet accessible to anyone. If you like the "Flight of the Conchords" sort of deadpan humour seek this out.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox
Another one from late 2009 that opened in New Zealand in 2010, and I'd take Wes Anderson's take on Roald Dahl's kiddie classic over 100 "Shrek" movies. I'm a fanboy deluxe for pretty much every movie Anderson's ever done, but this was something special because both the 6-year-old and I could get into it. I love the charmingly low-fi animation, the production design filled with all of Anderson's trademark flourishes, and a pitch-perfect George Clooney as the voice of Mr. Fox. I've watched this at least 3 times so far and love it every time. I wish all movies aimed at children could be more like this one.

The Hurt Locker
The "best" movie of 2009? I dunno, I never place too much seriousness on that Best Picture Oscar, but this is miles better than the all-flash, little substance "Avatar," with a topical Iraq war story that incorporates more knuckle-whiteningly tense scenes than I thought I could handle. I've been a fan of director Kathryn Bigelow's eye for ripping action scenes ever since "Point Break." It may stumble a bit in scenes not on the battlefield, but the ones set in the heat of war are scorching.

Inception
There's a kind of gun-metal coldness to Christopher Nolan's style as a director -- movies like "The Dark Knight" and "Memento" are pretty much utterly humorless, shadowy views of the world, polished like gemstones. This one is almost a remake of "The Matrix" with more brooding and less sci-fi, and an excellent cast (highlighted by one of my favorite young actors, Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Several fantastic set-pieces make this a summer blockbuster that sticks with you. Does the story make a lot of actual sense on a second viewing? Not entirely sure yet, but it sure sucks you in while you watch it.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World
This one didn't do great at the box office, because for some reason it was perceived as a "hipster movie." Maybe it's Michael Cera, whose itchy dork characters seem to annoy some people. But Edgar Wright's high-octane adaptation of the graphic novel series may be one of the most faithful comic adaptations ever - like the "Sin City" movie with a video game gloss. It's tremendous entertainment, incorporating video-game effects, snappy wit and cartoony violence into a mish-mash of gleeful fun.

A Serious Man
Here's the Coen brothers in full-on "weird" mode, as in more "Barton Fink" than "Raising Arizona." But what a strange, captivatingly weird one this is -- a kind of tangled meditation on fate, faith and the cruel whims of the universe, all cycling around one Larry Gopnik's tragic, slow downfall in 1960s Minnesota. Gopnik (a superb Michael Stuhlbarg) is a college professor who over the course of the movie battles infidelity, spoiled children, crazy neighbours and student blackmail. It's the Coen brothers at their best -- comic in as black a fashion as possible, but also quizzical, with plenty to chew on afterwards.

The Social Network
Here we have a movie about a bunch of over-privileged geeks sitting around at their computers. So why it is so bloody fascinating? David Fincher brings the same ultra-intense feeling of dread he brought to his "Zodiac" to this tale of social hustling and nerds avenged. Aaron Sorkin's crackling script and some truly good performances by actors playing quite unlikable people make this one zip by, and I think it sums up the zeitgeist of life in 2010 as well as anything else could.

Teenage Paparazzo
I wrote about this one back at the NZ International Film Festival, and still think back fondly on this funny, insightful look at the relationship between the famed and the fans. "Entourage" star Adrian Grenier has made a nicely low-key documentary about a teenage celebrity shooter that twists and turns in amusing ways.

Toy Story 3
This is pretty much a no-brainer, but if this movie consisted of nothing more than its final 15 bittersweet minutes, it would still be a classic for the ages. As it is it brings together Pixar's usual top-notch quality storytelling with an ode to vanishing childhood that will make all but the most soulless of cretins sniffle a bit at the end. Happy trails, Woody.

Wednesday shuffle: Sing the song don't be long / Thrill me to the marrow

2010-12-08T20:04:00.002+13:00

A man's got to get his workout on. Treadmill shuffle, go!

1. Up The Dosage 2:40 Paul Weller
2. Hollow Cheek 0:32 Guided By Voices
3. Run For Your Life 2:19 The Beatles*
4. American Gangster Time 3:47 Elvis Costello & The Imposters
5. All Night Stand 2:05 The Thoughts
6. Suite: Judy Blue Eyes 7:25 Crosby, Stills & Nash**
7. You Came Through 2:48 PJ Harvey
8. That Is All 3:51 George Harrison
9. Good Morning 5:01 The Dandy Warhols***

* And of course, it was 30 years ago today, John. Hard to believe he's been dead for a good 3/4 of my lifetime. RIP.
** I wouldn't imagine a rather goofy hippy-harmony song like this would be good on the treadmill but to my embarrassment I found myself getting quite into it -- who knew CSN could be workout music?
*** They may be swept up in a kind of hipster backlash in a lot of parts but I still dig these guys, and this slow-burning, bombastic stoner-rock churn of a tune is a fantastic cooldown song.

Superheroes I Love # 7: Hercules

2010-12-04T08:45:00.002+13:00

Yes, that Hercules. The icon of Greek mythology has made the leap to comic books several times in various incarnations -- why not use the legendary strongman as a superhero, after all? The most lasting portrayal of Hercules in comics has been Marvel Comics' version of him, who first appeared in Journey Into Mystery in 1965 as a sparring partner for the Mighty Thor. Hercules as proper superhero has had a long life in the Marvel universe, joined the mighty Avengers and fought Wolverine and all that kinda jazz. He's been an arrogant yet chivalrous force for good.

Who: The son of Zeus and a mortal woman, the demigod Hercules is a fearless warrior renown for his strength and courage. In the Marvel Comics, Hercules is part of the modern world of superheroes and villains. It's always a bit interesting when a centuries-old mythological figure is shoehorned into modern stories, but Hercules fits better than most.

Why I dig: Herc has always been the down-to-earth, impulsive braggart counterpoint to Thor's stuffy restraint. Thor always struck me as thick and impenetrable in the comics too much of the time (unless done by Walt Simonson or Jack Kirby). Too much thee-ing and thou-ing. Hercules is the god you'd sit down and have a tankard of mead with. The best portrayals of Hercules combine his chummy bravado with heroism, while in lesser ones writers err too much toward making Hercules an addled man-child. Hercules has had an excellent revival as the star of "The Incredible Hercules" comic, teamed up with a teenage boy genius and having various adventures, loves and epics. Writers Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente have provided some interesting spins on Hercules' character -- notably focusing on the fact that this demigod has lived a very long time and is no stumbling buffoon, while he still has a sense of humour about himself.

Read this: The classic 1982 "Hercules: Prince of Power" series by Bob Layton were sci-fi action mixed with godly feats, and funny to boot. They're set deep in the future when Hercules -- banished yet again from Olympus by his angry dad Zeus -- is roaming the stars. Then pick up any of the recent "Incredible Hercules" paperbacks by Marvel which nicely weave in a variety of world mythologies and other Marvel hero storylines into a complex, witty and wild ongoing epic.

Five-sentence Friday

2010-11-26T09:42:00.000+13:00

1. This is super-duper cool, and it's great to see my father-in-law Sir Peter Siddell's art career anthologised in one huge hefty package, coming in early 2011 -- I've seen the proofs and the book looks fantastic!

2. Keith Richards' autobiography "Life" makes for entertaining reading, although a bit too rambling, it's got a remarkable story to tell and he holds little back; great insights into his relationship with Mick Jagger to be found here though.

3. Some band called U2 is playing just down from the road to us this week on their 360 tour, and I'm just not quite huge enough a U2 fan to spring for tickets -- but it turns out we didn't need to, as the concert, also including opening act Jay-Z, was quite loud and audible from our house 3km away, so we pulled out lawn chairs and blankets and sat on our front lawn last night for a live U2 show, without even having to leave our driveway!

4. The Pike River mining tragedy has obviously dominated New Zealand news for the past week, and while we all feared the worst, we hoped for the best; a distinct sting to the situation was added by the fresh memory of the recent Chilean miner rescue miracle, but unfortunately the NZ mine was a completely different type of mine and situation and such a happy outcome seemed unlikely from the start. My sympathies and good thoughts remain with the families of the Pike River 29.

Concert Review: The New Pornographers, Auckland, November 20

2010-11-21T11:02:00.009+13:00

I was an avid fan of pornography last night. The New Pornographers, that is, the Canadian indie-pop collective who played an excellent show at the Kings Arms in Auckland last night.

That band name is a bit of a joke -- there's not much immoral about this band, who for five albums have been exploring the pleasures of hook-filled, harmony-laden energetic pop. The main players are leader Carl "AC" Newman, Neko Case, Dan Bejar and Kathryn Calder, all of whom have had considerable success on their own. If you put Squeeze, Big Star, Cheap Trick, ELO and The Beatles in a blender you might get something like this all-star alt-rock grouping.

It was a hot, humid Auckland spring night, with sweat dripping off everyone. The Kings Arms is a right tiny, intimate place so I was less than 10 feet away from Case the entire time. The show had a freewheeling, relaxed vibe. Between the heat and probable jetlag by the seven-member band it took a few songs for the momentum to really get going and the sound was muddy for a few tunes. (The bass player actually missed getting onstage for the first song, which the band only noticed at the end of the song!) There were a couple of false starts, but there was an energetic good cheer despite the hitches. Throughout the night Newman and Case bantered snarkily with the audience. But like a steamroller, the band kept locking into these fantastic harmonic grooves where the combination of voices and their wall of sound approach blew the crowd away.

The set featured a heaping helping of songs from their most successful album, 2005's near-masterpiece "Twin Cinema". Newman led the show and did a great job crunching on guitar chords and trading off lead vocals with Case. It was a real pleasure for me to finally see siren Case, who's built the most successful solo career of the group. Her voice is justly famed and to hear her wailing out just a few feet away was awesome.

The Pornographers ramped through many of their best tunes such as "Use It," "The Bleeding Heart Show" and "Challengers." I've always liked how Newman's songwriting combines pop accessibility with twisting, strange lyrics, and as a live show the songs hit sweet spot after sweet spot. Nothing quite like the harmonies Newman, Case and Calder could conjure together. (And I'd think it's quite hard to reproduce live a note-perfect whistling chorus like they did in "The Crash Years" from their latest album "Together.") Sadly missing from this tour was glam-pop singer Bejar, who crafts some of the band's most addictive songs, but Newman did an excellent job filling in on Bejar's sneery vocals on songs like a crowd-pleasing encore of "Jackie Dressed in Cobras."

Here's one of my favorite of their tunes, "The Bleeding Heart Show."

"Alone: Bad. Friend: Good." The genius of Boris Karloff

2010-11-15T17:21:00.002+13:00

It's a little late for Halloween, but I've been in a monster movie frame of mind. The classic monster movies, that is, which to me have always been the Universal Pictures horror of the 1930s to 1950s -- Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolf Man, et cetera. I loved 'em as a kid in the 1980s and lately have been on a jag watching some of these classic black and white flicks for the first time in 25 years or so. What's amazing is how well many of them still hold up, particularly those starring the man who I'd say was the king of monster movies -- the original and best Frankenstein's Monster, Boris Karloff.

Bela Lugosi's immortal Dracula seems to get more ink today, and Lon Chaney Jr's tragic self-loathing Wolf Man was also great, but Boris Karloff created a monster who defines horror. Try not to imagine Frankenstein's Monster as the cliched star of everything from breakfast cereals to video games to really bad Hugh Jackman movies. Instead picture the Monster as he first appeared in 1931, looming from the darkened screens. An abomination against life, a morality tale about man's desire to play god, a creature cursed for the way he looks.

The very first scene when we see the Monster in "Frankenstein" is remarkable. The Monster simply walks into a dark and gloomy room, almost unnoticed for a fraction of a second -- then the camera abruptly quick-cuts inward, two beats, to an extreme, silent close-up of Karloff's heavy-lidded, haunting eyes. It's still chilling 80 years after it was filmed. Karloff's portrayal is a marvel of economic emotion, terror and innocence all bundled together. The physicality Karloff brought to the Monster defines it; the locked-kneed, lurching walk, flailing hand movements, the monosyllabic grunts and groans.

The famous "monster meets the blind hermit" sequence in "Bride of Frankenstein" is a bit hard to watch without bias today because Mel Brooks' "Young Frankenstein" did such a glorious job of sending it up, but try to picture it as it seemed in 1933. It's an amazing little character arc, as the Monster learns and grows an astounding amount in just a short time, from guttural grunts to emotion-packed short sentences. Treated with brief kindness, we see his potential, which makes what happens next that much more stinging.

The naked emotional need of the blind man and the Monster is startling. But what we're seeing here is a real attempt at human connection between two utter outcasts, a connection that is of course shattered by the outside world's cruelty. "Alone: bad. Friend: good." That line could have sounded awful done wrong, but Karloff puts just the right spin of hope and sadness on it. The genius of Karloff is in full flight in this scene, as he's alternately savage, needy and rocked with childlike glee. He helped form the whole "monster you feel kind of sorry for" motif we've seen everywhere from "King Kong" to "Twilight."

Karloff's skill is more notable when you compare his portrayal to that of other actors who've played the Monster -- in the many sequels to the 1931 movie we saw actors like Glenn Strange and Lon Chaney Jr. take on the role, but they lacked that almost-sweet innocence Karloff brought. What was a character of real tragic depth became the more familiar lumbering monster we now know, still cool, but not quite as shocking and strange as the half-human Monster Karloff created in the first three films. And Frankenstein's Monster on film since has never quite managed the power of the Karloff years.

Nik's Unheralded Albums #3: Colin Hay Band, "Wayfaring Sons."

2010-11-08T08:29:00.003+13:00

Colin Hay Band, "Wayfaring Sons." (1990)

It's hard being perceived as a one-hit wonder. You put out an album, it does a zillion in sales, but you can never quite get that popular mojo back. Witness Men At Work, the Aussie "Down Under" combo who were huge with "Business As Usual" in 1982, but kind of gradually faded away within a couple years. But for those who were fans, lead singer Colin Hay has actually done some pretty interesting work since then. He did two more Men At Work albums, mild hit "Cargo" and the darker and quite underrated flop, now out-of-print "Two Hearts." Then the band broke up and he went solo.

I've enoyed Hay's solo career intermittently -- he's written some beautiful, laid-back tunes, although many of his albums seem to contain an awful lot of filler in between the gentle gems. (Lately he's taken to doing "unplugged" version of many of his old Men At Work songs which are pretty to listen to but lack much in the way of novelty.) The sitcom "Scrubs" used several of his tunes to give him a sort of comeback. But one disc I've always had a soft spot for is a fairly obscure one, 1990's "Wayfaring Sons" by the Colin Hay Band.

I first heard this one in the waning days of my Men At Work fandom, and it always sparked in me a powerful feeling of wanderlust. Loosely it's a concept album about traveling the world, voyaging the seven seas, with several songs about leaving home and coming back again. It relies heavily on Celtic and folk sounds, giving it an almost Chieftains feel in spots. The instrumentation is lush and varied, not quite as monotonous as the more acoustic style Hay uses these days, and his husky voice is in fine form throughout.

"Wayfaring Sons" is definitely Hay's strongest collection of songs, with barely a duff move in the bunch. Lyrics of harsh oceans and stormy weather dot the tunes. The title song kicks off with a down-home violin, a bustling night out -- "I duck into this public house / and get shattered by the din" -- and the singer upping stakes and sailing across the sea.

Hay's songwriting here has always felt very evocative to me, sketching in a few telling details with the lyrics and the very full, pub band meets world music feeling. "Into My Life" is a charming little love tune that captures a relationship in all its passion and frustration -- "We drink until we get too tired / Even though you try to dance for me / I still can't light up your fire." "Dream On (In The Night)" or "Not So Lonely" are fairly conventional torch songs but it's the purring warmth of Hay's voice that makes them soar and little touches like the chanting Gaelic backing chorus on "Not So Lonely." A marvelous jangly mandolin and soaring chorus on the anthemic album closer "Ya (Rest In Peace)" bring us back to where we started, back to the bustling public house that we heard in the opening tune.

It may not quite be a hidden masterpiece, but "Wayfaring Sons" is my favorite of Hay's solo discography by a long shot, and kind of nearly makes for a "lost" Men At Work record. Hay may be a 'one-hit wonder' to much of the public at large, but I've enjoyed many of his songs over the years. It's one I like to spin on occasion and think of foreign seas.

Concert review: Paul Weller, Auckland, October 29

2010-10-30T09:34:00.003+13:00

There's a reason Paul Weller was dubbed 'The Modfather' of British pop. From his early days with the short sharp punk attacks of The Jam to leading the way for "Britpop" in the early 1990s to his modern soulful experimentation, Weller has been at the vanguard of British music, combining his idols The Who and the Kinks with his own fierce music and bittersweet passions.

He's never been huge in the US, but Weller's albums consistently top the charts in England; the whole country and its thick, living history and class culture are his muse. For my money, Weller's as vital as he's ever been -- this year's album "Wake Up The Nation" is a barnstormer, one of the best of 2010.

He made it to Auckland this weekend in a series of three sold-out shows at the Powerstation, his first appearance in New Zealand ever. From the moment he took the stage, clad in black and chatty in his thick accent, Weller did a fine job surveying his 40-year-career, mixing the old Jam and Style Council classics with his superb more recent work. (This guy apparently thinks Weller should have played nothing but Jam tracks, but I disagree -- the man's got a rich and diverse catalog, why not explore it?)

I actually really discovered Weller with his solo albums, particularly 1993's rich, soulful "Wild Wood," and only came to the Jam belatedly some time later. As he's aged Weller has weathered and seasoned like a fine old oak, into a peerless singer/songwriter who evokes a timeless mood tinged with that old punk anger. The best comparison I can make is to another old angry young punk, Elvis Costello, who's lasted far longer than anyone might have guessed by constantly changing his approach.

Weller showed off all his sides during the show -- highlights included a storming, psychedelic jam through "Pieces of Dreams" from his latest album, or the sweeping, eclectic "Trees," which crams together several different songs into one powerful mix. The "Stanley Road" classic torch song "You Do Something To Me" got a loving take, while "Echoes Round The Sun" (written with Noel Gallagher) was a feedback-laced gem. The old Jam classics could be counted upon to get the crowd raving, such as a bouncy bass-driven "Start!" (smashed together with the brand new "Fast Car/Slow Traffic" in a sterling medley) and a massive fist-pumping singalong take on "Eton Rifles," or The Style Council's poppy "Shout To The Top."

Over nearly two hours and two encores, Weller swerved from piano-led balladry to crunchy guitar anthems without missing a beat. It's good to see The Modfather is still full of plenty of steam and I can't wait to see what he does next.

Mix Tapes I Have Known: YO YO MA, 1992

2010-10-28T19:15:00.005+13:00

Ah, the mix tape. The lovely artifact of the 1980s and 1990s where you painstakingly, pre-digital, grafted together a dozen or two of your favorite songs into some kind of deeply deep emotional statement that was, most typically, aimed at showing the subject of said tape how awesome you were.

Now that we slackers of that generation have grown up these have become the object of fetishistic nostalgia galore , and why not? They're snapshots of the person you were at the time you made it. Often, I tried to make copies of the mix tapes I made for people because they made awesome car listening, so now I can scavenge out our one remaining cassette player and listen to them on occasion. Here's the first of a trawl through my aging, decomposing Mix Tapes.

The tape: "YO YO MA"

Year created: 1992

Who it was for: "Yo Yo Ma" (I think I just liked the oddball sound of that cellist's name as a tape title) was made for one of my California friends, either John or Sun; unfortunately 18 years on I'm not entirely sure who for but I think this one was for John. Many of my tapes were sent from my college home in Mississippi to my old high school chums out West, cries from the heart of Dixie aimed at showing off what I thought were my impressive tastes; these were vaguely homesick missives, from a stranger in the South to the place he came from. Good god, I'm just as pretentious now as I was then.

Track listing:

SIDE A
1. Hello, I Love You (The Cure)
2. Little Earthquakes (Tori Amos)
3. The Fly (U2)
4. Progress (Midnight Oil)
5. A Campfire Song (10,000 Maniacs)
6. Anchorage (Michelle Shocked)
7. We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful (Morrissey)
8. Only You (Yaz)
9. Getting Better (The Beatles)
10. The Boxer (Simon & Garfunkel)
11. So. Central Rain (REM)

SIDE B
1. Strange Angels (Laurie Anderson)
2. She Goes On (Crowded House)
3. We Are The Champions (Queen)
4. Mayor of Simpleton (XTC)
5. I Can't Dance (Genesis)
6. Dome (The Church)
7. Tomorrow (Morrissey)
8. My Finest Hour (The Sundays)
9. Always On My Mind (The Pet Shop Boys)
10. In Your Eyes (Peter Gabriel)
11. Songbird of Love (The Hurlettes)

What this says about my musical tastes at the time: This is a pretty middle-of-the-road selection of early 1990s alternative rock standards -- The Church, Tori Amos, The Cure, etc. At the age of 22 or so, I was fairly proto-emo at the time, hence the TWO Morrissey songs included here. I did have what I like to think were some cool choices even back in '92 -- Laurie Anderson, XTC (who remain one of my favorites today) -- mixed in with the requisite U2 and REM stuff.

Totally obvious choice: Like 99% of mankind, I used Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" on a mix tape. In fact I used it on several of them. It is an awesome song and deserves its mixtape stardom, though. Most disturbing is that this song of everlasting love and devotion is on a tape that I made for a dude.

Clever left-field choices: The Sundays were a short-lived and delicate girl-alt-pop band back in the day, and "My Finest Hour" is a lovely little number. "The Hurlettes" were a made-up band from a snippet of an old high-school play I put on the end of the tape, so you can't get much more obscure than that.

What was I thinking?: Now, I'll stick up for Genesis any day, even Phil Collins-era Genesis, but why on earth I chose the goofy try-hard novelty number "I Can't Dance" from one of their worst albums is beyond me. And I also like Queen, but the insanely overused "We Are The Champions" wouldn't be in my top 20 Queen songs at all.

Hasn't dated so well: The mawkish earnestness of 10,000 Maniacs, whom I only occasionally listen to today; ditto Tori Amos, who put out an utterly superb debut album with "Little Earthquakes" and has faced diminishing returns ever since then.

Into the TARDIS with two Doctor Whos

2010-10-25T08:41:00.002+13:00

I've been to several big old American comic-book conventions like the ChicagoCon, so really, compared to them, New Zealand's Armageddon Expo is rather small. But it's still a decent size and a lot of fun to while away a day at -- a couple of hundred booths of stuff for sale and show, celebrity guests, tons of bizarre costumes to gawk at and the usual kind of overcrowded, sweaty, adrenaline-filled rush of stimuli you get at conventions.

But the big draw for me this time was the chance to see TWO former Doctor Whos appear -- the "seventh Doctor," Sylvester McCoy, and the little-known "eighth Doctor," who only appeared in one 1996 TV movie, Paul McGann. Both appeared for photos etc as well as in panels. I always find these kind of panels quite fascinating, a bit of a peek behind the curtain at what an actor's life is really like. They have to put up with a lot of inane fans, but I appreciate it when an actor takes the time to talk to the crowd. McCoy played the seasoned old showman/raconteur, rambling off into oddball and amusing stories about shoving ferrets down his pants in his circus days (I kid you not). He's had a long and varied career (and is apparently going to play a role in "The Hobbit" movies if they even actually get made) and was quite comfortable playing to the crowd.

McGann was a bit more wistful and down-to-earth (and I think jet-lagged). I've just watched the 1990s "Doctor Who" movie he was in, and while it was a mixed bag story-wise, I really liked McGann's portrayal of the Doctor, half Victorian dandy, half imperious alien. It's a shame he didn't get to play the Doctor more (although he has done a ton of audio-only adventures.) McGann isn't a household name but he's been in some good stuff, notably as the "I" in the Brit cult classic movie "Withnail And I," and he also waxed rhapsodic about his appearance in, er, lower-brow flicks such as "Lesbian Vampire Killers." He seemed like a good bloke, basically, and both he and McCoy had a lot of fun geek tidbits into "Dr. Who" history which I found fascinating, as a relatively novice Who-vian who really only got into the show starting with the new 2005 series. (McGann mentioned that during the casting for the 1990s "Doctor Who" would-be revival, one actor's name came up repeatedly for the part of the Doctor -- Monty Python's Eric Idle. While I do love the Python, I suspect that would've been a bizarre misstep indeed.)

It's a change of Hobbit

2010-10-21T09:30:00.003+13:00

Is The Hobbit leaving New Zealand? Sure sounds like it. I honestly don't know enough details about these labour woes to weigh in too much on whether the actors union is in the right or wrong here, but I do think it's a bloody debacle if the Hobbit movies end up being filmed elsewhere than New Zealand as a result of them.

The Lord of the Rings movies were a huge boost for New Zealand and its image overseas, and that kind of image and impression is simply priceless. The idea that Devonshire or Australia might be hired up to substitute for New Zealand in the next films is mind-boggling, especially since Kiwi Sir Peter Jackson will be back as director. This production has been hugely troubled (witness the loss of originally signed director Guillermo Del Toro, who would've been a great fit).

I sure hope that a resolution to this situation might be found, as it's just a horrible look for New Zealand to lose The Hobbit. The movies are good for the country's economy, image and the national sense of pride, and labour complaints shouldn't derail them. Frankly, I'm wondering if these movies will ever really get made. My precious!

Superheroes I Love #6: Vanth Dreadstar

2010-10-13T11:48:00.004+13:00

One of the nifty bits of geek-related loot I picked up in California was reassembling my set of Jim Starlin's Dreadstar comic series from back in the 1980s. Like a lot of things, I used to own these comics, got rid of them for some reason and then years later experienced deep remorse. Starlin's "Dreadstar" run from #1-40 is vintage high-octane space opera, with a lot of the deeper themes about mortality and power that Starlin has explored in his other work like "Warlock" and "Captain Marvel."

It's the story of Vanth Dreadstar, who's caught between two evil warring empires and attempts to take them down with the aid of his friends. It's a bit of a riff on "Star Wars" and other such sagas but done with a visceral spin -- people die bloody deaths, and the evil here is a lot more sinister than Darth Vader. The murderous Lord High Papal, the series' main villain, is a genocidal religious maniac without pity.

Who: Vanth Dreadstar, the last survivor of the Milky Way galaxy who ends up fighting in a war between two empires.

What: Dreadstar is not strictly a "superhero" in the traditional sense of the word (even though he dons a rather garish spandex outfit at one point), but more of a soldier, a rebel who finds himself in a series of never-ending wars. A mystical sword of power and other abilities lead him into conflict with those who would oppress billions. Reprints include the early "Metamorphosis Odyssey" storyline and the first 12 issues of "Dreadstar" in trade paperback if you can find 'em.

Why I dig: Dreadstar is a kind of King Arthur figure, one surrounded by unimaginable pain and tragedy (at one point, Dreadstar helps to wipe out the entire Milky Way Galaxy; in another, an entire city is nuked by the Lord Papal just to get at him). Starlin surrounds this figure with a good mix of supporting characters (the blind telepath Willow, the cat-man Oedi, the disfigured sorcerer Syzygy). He makes you believe this scrappy band of rebels could take down a massive power. Dreadstar is racked with guilt over his deeds yet also a kind of righteous anger that you rarely see in "good guys" (there's a sequence in #10 where he basically tortures a villain to death; no matter how much the dude had it coming you still sort of cringe at the intensity). Now, in the 1990s, this kind of bloody anti-hero would be commonplace, but in 1982, Dreadstar's darkness was startling.

Starlin's run on the series wound down with an extremely dark coda set post-revolution, where Dreadstar awakens from a coma to find a world where all his struggles seem to have been for nothing. It's a very grim way to go and hard reading, as old characters die, corruption is everywhere and Dreadstar himself even contemplates suicide. But it's also a clear, stinging statement by Starlin that war is never neatly wrapped up (which seems very relevant today in the "War on Terror" era).

As a series, "Dreadstar" isn't perfect, in retrospect -- the first 15 or 20 issues are the best, and Starlin way overdoes the recaps each issue, which are very jarring reading it all in a sitting. The final revolution seems to come a bit too quickly and neatly to be believed (the same could easily be said of "Return of the Jedi," too). Ignore the later issues of the series written by Peter David, which while amusing space-action fun, really lack the emotional power and weight of Starlin's work and rely too much on goofy humour to succeed.

But Starlin's original "Dreadstar" work, nearly 30 years old now, still is terrific reading and as flawed, blood-stained and arrogant as he is, Vanth Dreadstar remains a compelling character.

I left my heart in San Francisco

2010-10-11T18:27:00.001+13:00

...Yeah man, I'm back down under, after several groovy weeks in California. It was my second trip back for a visit since we emigrated in 2006, and it is always a bit strange trying to cram so much into two or three weeks. Not to mention rather exhausting being the single-dad with the 6-year-old boy while Mom stays in New Zealand. There's the meet-ups with old friends, wedged into everyone's busy schedules, where you get an hour or two to play speed catch-up of the last four (or even 20) years of your lives. There's trying to show your son all around the area you grew up in, trying to ensure quality time with the grandparents and the uncle, and trying to get some American-style shopping in there. Somewhere you also attempt to "relax" on this "vacation" some.

Highlights of this year's journey --
• The places that are etched in my mind from childhood and onwards, all wonderful to see again -- the high, dry foothills of the Sierra Nevada where I grew up; the sweeping lonely casino-filled vistas of Reno and Western Nevada, both tacky and epic western at the same time. The sweeping blue expanse of Lake Tahoe, where I spent much of the late 1990s, the grand granite-lined canyons of the Yuba River, the finest place in the world to while away a hot summer's day. And of course sweet San Francisco, which still has the same kinetic effect on me it did the first time I saw it back in the 1970s -- Coit Tower, North Beach, Chinatown, the giant Sutro Tower (the "monster tower" of my childhood), the candy-box spectacle of the houses stippled up and down the hills, the sweeping Golden Gate Bridge, foreboding Alcatraz hunched in the harbour -- I do love that place.

• The climate really knocked me for a loop, though. I'd forgotten that late September is peak allergy/pollen season and that, combined with the staggering dryness of the climate after being so used to humid New Zealand, left my sinuses feeling like a barometer the entire time. It's a shame I love an area yet hate the atmosphere.

• One thing that struck me is how battered and cynical the American "mood" seemed. A liberal like me thinks it's the hangover from 8 years of colossal failure by Bush and the impossible expectations laid on his successor. Far as I can figure the Tea Party folks are against nearly everything being done these days but I have yet to really figure out what they'd do about it or why they didn't speak out during the wild government expansion of the Bush years. It's nearly Election Day in the US and while I hope people aren't dense enough to give the party that screwed everything up for 8 years ANOTHER chance at the House or Senate, my feelings are that the American people just love being fooled by big promises and vague platitudes, from either side of the aisle. The failure of the two-party system -- if we don't like the guy in the White House, we'll just vote against EVERYTHING he proposes -- is manifest. While NZ politics are far from perfect, the minor parties here have a much stronger chance of actually getting their views shown and making a difference through coalition governments. In general politics here seem a bit less shrill, less polarized. I really am starting to fear the American system is terminally broken, no matter who's President.

• The recession that hadn't quite happened last time I visited in summer 2008 was in clear evidence -- vacant shops from Sacramento to Reno, several friends who've lost jobs/money in the past two years. The newspapers I once read have all shrunk into near-nothingness -- thanks to narrower "web widths" (reducing print costs) and staff cutbacks. I remember when the San Francisco Bay Guardian, say, was a thick monster of a free weekly tabloid you could kill a cat with, whereas the one I picked up last week was a wee thin thing. I know my industry is changing and it has to change, but it is a shame to see the newspaper so withered in size and influence.

• As always the sheer SCALE of everything in America dazzles after a few years away in a small, small country. Mega-malls the size of small New Zealand towns, spreading silently over the countryside that once contained nothing but fields; more big box stores than you ever imagined existed; giant cars everywhere. Theme restaurants that serve more food on a plate than one man can decently eat; a "large" cup of coffee that is at least twice the size of one you'd find down under. All of this exists in some form or another in NZ, of course, but just "less" of it.

* On the flip side of course is how cheap anything and everything seems in America compared to NZ -- as usual I stuffed my suitcases to the brim with things like books, CDs, toys, over-the-counter medicines and blue jeans, all far more costly down here. Found several wonderful things to jam in the bags such as the "Nuggets II" CD box set, a great "Art of Brian Bolland" coffee-table book I didn't even know existed, lots of awesome Beat literature at the wonderful City Lights Books in SF, and much, much more. It's a good thing we only get back to the US every couple of years as my wallet and bookshelves really couldn't handle more often.

God save the queen - maybe.

2010-09-14T11:51:00.004+12:00

My head of state in New Zealand is Queen Elizabeth II. We're still part of the Commonwealth, still a fragment of the once-huge British Empire. While we have our own Prime Minster and all that, in theory, the Queen is our big boss, even if the power is more ceremonial than not.

In recent weeks the debate on New Zealand's future has flared up again, with the leader of the opposition party saying it's time to start making plans for a republic. "We need to start the conversation now," said Labour leader Phil Goff. Prime Minister John Key seems to be content with vagueness, having said before a New Zealand republic is "inevitable" but not actually doing much more than that. Bills introduced to actually move the debate don't get far; the most recent one failed on its first reading in Parliament.

The sentiment generally seems to be that when Queen Elizabeth II dies or steps down, NZ (and probably Australia) will move to sever their last ties to the monarchy. The notion of poor King Charles III doesn't seem to instill a lot of confidence in people. (We might still have Queen Elizabeth for another 20 years though - while she's 84, her mum lasted to 101.)

However, you could argue that without the ties to the motherland New Zealand suddenly becomes a mighty small country at the bottom of the world. Australia already has a lot over us economically. Would losing the monarchy actually benefit us in any tangible way on the world stage? Do we need it to stay afloat? Yet culturally, we're hardly "Southern Britain" anymore. NZ is a vibrant, multicultural nation - a little bit Pacifica, a little bit Maori, a little bit Australian, a little bit Asian. Britain really is an awful long ways away. We're our own identity now.

I've got nothing against old Queenie, and I find the novelty of it all kind of interesting to observe coming from the American system of government. If pressed, I'd have to admit the whole notion of a hereditary leader, as limited as her actual power might be, kind of flies in the face of my good ol' "anybody can be President" American idealism.

But I'd bet firm money a change is going to happen, in the next decade if not sooner. I certainly see no harm in the notion of planning for it, but there seems to be a political timidity to engage on this -- for fear of offending the last hardcore monarchists. But it's foolish to wait until Queen Elizabeth II kicks the bucket to even start thinking about the future. While there's a kind of quaint charm to the idea of the monarchy, in reality New Zealand stopped being just an outpost of empire some time ago. It's only a formality that we still have a Queen.

(Speaking of outposts of Empire, I'm off to the United States for a long-overdue holiday and will be on blog hiatus until mid-October sometime. Cheers mates!)

Nik's unheralded albums #2: Elvis Costello, "Mighty Like A Rose"

2010-09-08T15:39:00.002+12:00

Elvis Costello, "Mighty Like A Rose" (1991)

The thing some people like and some people don't like about Elvis Costello is that he's a dabbler. The one-time punk's angriest young literary man has gone on to forge a career of astounding diversity, doing everything from country music to fuzzy garage rock to laidback balladry to even, god forbid, an opera. I personally love Costello's never-idle mind, even if all of his career spins don't quite pan out (the opera, no thank you). Costello is always recognizably himself, even when trying on different genres. One of Costello's albums that is often overlooked when his career is considered is 1991's "Mighty Like A Rose," which is an album of violent, almost dizzying eclecticism.

"Mighty Like A Rose" was the first time I fell hard for Costello, and perhaps that's why I hold it so dear. It's full of verbose wit and rage like the best of his work, while musically it careens about like a drunken sailor, with blasting guitars, horns, calliope, flutes, even maracas. "If you really want to hear an angry record," Costello writes in the liner notes, "then this one is for you." He had an untamed long-haired, bearded look around the time of this album which makes him look like some kind of demented prophet coming from the other side. The lyrics reflect this new look -- the first lines on the album are "The sun struggles up another beautiful day / and I felt glad in my own suspicious way." So the tone is set, as "Rose" swings between malice and mourning. There's a kind of lurching energy to "Rose" that reminds me a bit of Tom Waits.

"The Other Side of Summer" is a Beach Boys song wrung through a dark wringer, sneering instead of crooning. Men and women recur throughout "Rose" playing cruel games with each other. In "Harpies Bizarre" the girl is crushed by the worldly stranger. In "After the Fall" she has her revenge. Two songs co-written with Paul McCartney feature here; in their "Playboy to a Man" it's romance as jaunty battle of the sexes; Costello yelps, "now you're standing there in your underwear / now you know just how it feels for her."

If "Rose" were just meanness it wouldn't have much appeal, but what I also like are the moments of tenderness like the brittle "Sweet Pear" or "So Like Candy," and the razor sharp wit of songs like the over-the-top rant "How To Be Dumb" or "Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over)," which is about exactly what it sounds like.

What I'd have to call one of my top 5 Elvis Costello songs of all closes out the record on a note of resounding grace -- "Couldn't Call It Unexpected No. 4" which reels about like a carnival from an alternate universe, a catalogue of surrealistic imagery. There's a fine sleight of hand here as Costello sings of "shadows of regret" and broken hearts, then reveals himself as a character in the song -- "well I'm the lucky goon / who composed this tune / from birds arranged on the high wire." He ends with what he later called a kind of "agnostic prayer," a beautiful moment when all the anger and frustration of the album ends with a glimpse of hope -- "Please don't let me fear anything I cannot explain / I can't believe, I'll never believe in anything again."

And it burns, burns, burns, like a ring of fire...

2010-09-05T08:07:00.000+12:00

So we had a magnitude 7.1 earthquake down here yesterday morning, the most damaging in New Zealand in about 80 years from the looks of it. It didn't hit anywhere near us in Auckland, but about 500 miles south in Christchurch on the South Island, NZ's second biggest city. I visited there for the first time a year or so ago and it's a really beautiful city with great buildings, and am sad to see how torn up it's been -- though thankfully, no loss of life reported so far.

Because I'm lucky, I was actually awake at 4.35 am Saturday when the quake hit -- I work at danged early hours on Saturday mornings. Didn't feel it in Auckland, although by (perhaps) freakish concidence, at almost the exact same time the giant glass front door of my workplace shattered into a million pieces. We were having a ferocious gale-force windstorm up here at the time so I can't say it was the earthquake that caused it, but then again, who knows if it wasn't a factor?

It is a vivid reminder that we here live right on the Pacific Ring of Fire, which isn't just a Johnny Cash song but the most active geothermal zone on earth. NZ straddles a continental shelf and the entire country is dotted with volcanoes, thermal vents and more. Our home of Auckland has literally dozens of theoretically extinct volcanos (used as Maori ancient pa, fortresses). In our harbour is a giant looming volcano island, Rangitoto, which erupted out of the ocean not 700 years ago, which is a mere eyeblink in geological time. It's hard to imagine the sheer chaos a giant volcano in the nation's biggest harbour would cause if it popped up today.

Peter, 6, was a bit freaked out by all the earthquake coverage on the TV last night and can't say I blame him. Growing up in California earthquakes were a constant fear too. My thoughts go out to all those down south affected by this billion-dollar disaster, and it's a stern and worrying reminder that when it comes right down to it, the human race are mere visitors on a playing field of immense natural forces far more powerful than we are.

• In other quake coverage, Arthur talks about disasters and social networking (I too got a flurry of anxious Facebook messages yesterday).

• To help: Salvation Army NZ

On the end of every fork: Naked Lunch

2010-09-01T15:22:00.003+12:00

Some books you try several times to read before you crack their code. I remember picking up a paperback of William S. Burroughs' "Naked Lunch" years ago and being unable to get past the first 30 pages or so. It had a sleazy, baffling and intimate tone but I couldn't make head or tail of it. More recently, bolstered by a diet of Bukowski and having read a quite interesting biography of Burroughs, I thought I'd try it again. This time the book opened itself up to me. I'm still not quite sure if I "liked" it in the traditional sense of reading a book, but I can't quite stop thinking about it.

The key to "Naked Lunch" is realising that it isn't a traditional narrative, that there is no end or beginning really, and that it's basically the drug-stewed mind of Burroughs spinning forth in a frequently vile, hallucogenic rant loosely tied together by a few recurring themes. It's hard to put aside all the narrative preconceptions you bring to reading, but once you slide into "Lunch's" strange and slithery rhythms you kind of get what's being attempted here, closer to a prose poem than a novel. It's the sex and drugs that puts a lot of people off "Lunch," and it's without a doubt not for the timid -- I consider myself fairly unshockable but several passages in "Lunch" push one to the limit. It is a book without an ounce of comfort in it. You later learn many of the most shocking passages, the mass orgies/massacres and such, are meant to be a metaphor for capital punishment. Not sure how well it works at that, but as a general "look how terrible man can be to man" sort of screed, it does the job.

"The sailor's face dissolved. His mouth undulated forward on a long tube and sucked in the black fuzz, vibrating in supersonic peristalsis disappeared in a silent, pink explosion."

Ostensibly it's "about," if anything, the drug subculture in Burroughs' imaginary "Interzone" -- based on the expatriate Tangiers community Burroughs lived in during the depths of his drug addiction in the 1940s and 50s. Characters appear and disappear; chapters were apparently randomly assembled from the huge pile of manuscript Burroughs had written. There are moments of blackest humour that pass in between the visions like bone-dry chuckles. All but a few sentences of the novel may just be a vivid halluciation.

What sticks with you is Burroughs' foul, snakelike, ellipsis-filled, wandering prose -- like a David Lynch movie, it's more about setting a mood than a straight plot A to plot B movement. It assaults you, bombards you with grotesqueries. It's like listening to Captain Beefheart - if I'm in the right mood, it works, but it's not everyday cuisine. In between the slime and sleaze there are glittering shards of prose beauty, men with eyes like insects and gibbering protoplasmic spasms. Is it a 'comfortable' reading experience? Absolutely not, but somehow between the viscera and abominations it stirs you, leaves you different than you were before.

Nik's unheralded albums #1: David Bowie, "Earthling."

2010-08-27T16:42:00.004+12:00

There's albums that are loved by someone, but don't quite become "classics" to the mainstream. Everyone knows "Highway 61 Revisited" when they think of Bob Dylan, but who sticks up for, say, "Infidels"? Here's an occasional series that looks at lesser-regarded albums that I really dig.

David Bowie, "Earthling" (1997)*

1997's album "Earthling" comes at an interesting time for David Bowie; I call it his "midlife crisis" album, as it came out the same year he turned 50. Heavily influenced by drum 'n' bass dance music, "jungle" techno and industrial rock, it follows the same path started in 1995's "Outside," a Goth cyber-murder concept album that really began Bowie's modern critical revival after Tin Machine and various subpar '80s and '90s efforts. "Earthling" is less heralded by fans and critics, but it's one of my top 5 Bowie albums.

A lot of that is due to the time I discovered it; most great records evoke something in our lives, have some personal relationship to us beyond mere melody. For me, "Earthling" came along when I'd just moved rather haphazardly across the country, from post-college Mississippi to my old homeland of California. I moved without a real plan or job, and after a few months of bumming about and relying on the kindness of old friends, ended up working at a tiny little paper south of Sacramento, a kind of nowheresville with endless valley landscapes. Didn't know where I'd go next, wondering if I'd screwed up by leaving all my old pals in the South, etc.

So "Earthling" was the soundtrack for much of fall '97 and early '98, as I kind of drifted in a job that was OK in a town where everybody my age seemed to have three kids and work at Kmart. (Obviously, life got better, my future wife Avril emigrated to the U.S. and we moved up to Lake Tahoe in summer '98.) "Earthling" is a really anxious, fretful Bowie album, one that kind of assaults you with rippling beats and distorted guitars. It's the loudest of all his albums, and it definitely feels a bit like a 50-year-old trying to sound cool. Yet it works for me to this day.

The lead track, "Little Wonder," is all skittering blips and screeching guitars, Bowie chattering away like a man on the edge of a breakdown. Lyrics in general aren't the focus of this album, which shows a lot of influence from William Burroughs' "cut-up" writing method. Several tracks, like "Looking for Satellites" or "Law (Earthling on Fire)," are abstractions set to thumping, circling dance music, meant to create mood more than anything. A song like "Seven Years in Tibet," with a compulsive sway, roaring chorus and snippets of Mandarin, is as experimental in its way as any song on "Low." One of my personal favorites on "Earthling" is "Dead Man Walking," a rave-up defiant rebuttal to aging, colored with Bowie's trademark nostalgia and wistfulness, but with a beat you can dance to. Another sterling track is "I'm Afraid Of Americans," which could nearly be a novelty song if it weren't for the very real angst Bowie brings to the tune, wailing lines like "I'm afraid of Americans / I'm afraid of the world / I'm afraid I can't help it." You believe him. Yet my most replayed song on "Earthling" is probably "The Last Thing You Should Do," all raging at the darkness and jittery fear. It's claustrophobic but cathartic at the same time, and the kind of song many techno bands are striving for and miss much of the time. I listened to it a lot in the fall of 1997, wondering who I was and who I'd be a year from then.

Like I said, fear runs through the tunes of "Earthling," fear of death, losing power, potency and the world. "Earthling" is very different from most of Bowie's catalog, with the exception of its predecessor "Outside." His next album, "hours..." heralded a move toward a gentler, more introspective phase. Despite appropriating the sound of bands like Chemical Brothers and Nine Inch Nails, Bowie still managed to be unmistakably himself. "Earthling" is one of his strongest albums in a lifetime full of peaks.

*This a repost and a bit of a reworking of a post from way back in 2005; I've got a few other albums in this vein that I plan to look at in coming weeks.

Superheroes I Love #5: The Great Machine, Mayor Mitchell Hundred

2010-08-23T08:38:00.002+12:00

The final issue of Bryan K. Vaughan and Tony Harris's DC/Wildstorm series "Ex Machina" came out this past week. Issue #50 wrapped up the tale of Mitchell Hundred, the would-be superhero who became the mayor of New York City, and like the entire series, it was a thoughtful, edgy, often surprising dive into the world of politics, heroism and culture. Like Vaughan's other big series "Y, The Last Man," this was an epic tale, but grounded in superb characterization of Mayor Hundred and a vast supporting cast.

Who: The Great Machine, the world's only superhero -- who becomes the mayor of New York City after helping save thousands on Sept. 11, 2001.

What: Mitchell Hundred discovered a piece of alien technology that gave him the ability to communicate with machines and became the short-lived superhero The Great Machine, who managed to avert the destruction of one of the Twin Towers on 9/11. He uses his fame to become the Mayor of New York City, but his strange past and the mysteries of his powers keep coming back to haunt him...

Why I dig: "Ex Machina" was not really a book about superheroes. Instead, it was a book about politicians, who aren't always that heroic, and Vaughan created a kind of "West Wing" meets "X-Files" vibe to this always interesting series. All sorts of topical events from the last six years are woven into the twisting, time-hopping narrative - terrorism, abortion, art vs. smut, crime, gay marriage.

The comic could sometimes verge on being too talky, and its hot-topic issues may make it seem dated in years to come, but I rather liked the naive liberal idealism Hundred has -- and what happens to him throughout the series. Vaughan has a knack for dialogue and complex, realistic characters who don't hew to just one point of view. Harris' fluid, photorealistic art is an integral part of the series (in a rarity these days, Harris drew every issue of the main series). I loved his work on "Starman" a while back but he's taken it to the next level here.

"Ex Machina" is a series that rewards re-reading, which many comics don't these days. Indeed, the final issue is so devastating and poignant that it inspired me to go back and start reading the entire series again from scratch. I was fascinated to see how #50 wraps up so nicely with #1 from over six years ago. It's one of the most interesting statements on superheroes we've seen this decade, and hopefully will only grow in reputation over time.

The truth is out there

2010-08-21T17:56:00.002+12:00

This is the kind of thing that just depresses me about my home land to no end.

Whether or not you agree with his politics, it really, honestly has been proven without a doubt that Barack Obama is not a Muslim. That he was not actually born in Indonesia or Guatemala or wherever. He may be a liberal tax-and-spender, but he's no foreign invasion leader. Yet the lies persist.

I just don't get it. Is believing in whatever the vast right wing conspiracy of the day is just shorthand for "I don't like the guy's politics"? Much as I despise the administration of George W. Bush, I never bought into the conspiracy that he somehow planned/knew about 9/11. Yet people just love their conspiracy theories. As if a secret Muslim infiltrator could actually get elected President in Fox News America?

It's frankly embarrassing sometimes at my work, where I'm surrounded by Kiwis, Australians, Brits and South Africans, and having to defend the US when a story like this comes across the wire. It feeds into all the sad stereotypes people have about my country. (Of course, every country has its idiots, demagogues and ranters, a fact I like to point out when anyone gets too high on the 'bash America' bandwagon. New Zealand politicians tend to be less brash and omnipresent than Americans, but it's got its share of well, wankers.)

A great reason for why the Obama myths persist in mainstream society lies in the fact that media are scared to death of stating an outright fact when it comes to politics, for fear of offending some demographic. Too many stories on this sort of thing mushmouth their way around the point, using vague language rather than just calling a lie a lie, an untruth an untruth. Journalists today have been taught that being factual isn't being "balanced."

I dunno. Is it just easier to believe whatever you're told that fits into your personal worldview? But as the always thoughtful Arthur puts it, propaganda works. Say something enough and people will start to believe it. It's a shame that the 24-hour news cycle, always logged on Internet world of knowledge and freedom seems to have in many ways actually made this kind of climate worse. The truth is out there... somewhere, I guess, maybe.

Movie review: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World

2010-08-16T07:28:00.004+12:00

Sitting there watching this week's comic-book movie adaptation "Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World" with a big goofy grin on my face much of the time, one thought kept running through my head -- how on earth did this movie get made? It's a gleeful, wacky romp, the demon spawn of 1960s Adam West "Batman" crossed with Donkey Kong spliced with a raving Looney Tunes energy all its own.

It's hardly "The Dark Knight," in the madcap way it slices and dices genres and constantly winks at its own artificiality. And it isn't looking like a big hit movie at the box office, whatever that means, but creatively, it's a high-adrenaline blast from "Shaun of the Dead"/"Spaced"/"Hot Fuzz" mastermind Edgar Wright.

If you're not up on it, it's all about a rather clueless, casually cruel but well-meaning doofus named Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) who grows up to become a man. Pilgrim's a jobless, aimless 22-year-old bass player in a struggling band who falls in love with the mysterious Ramona Flowers – but finds out he has to defeat her 7 evil exes before winning her heart.

I loved the casting -- Michael Cera's wide-eyed nerd routine may have worn thin for some, but I think he really ventured into a new place here. He got that the Scott Pilgrim of the comics is hopelessly self-centered and not that bright, and he's surprisingly convincing as a flyweight action here during the many fight scenes. (Any movie that features a climactic battle pitting Michael Cera vs. Jason "Rushmore" Schwartzman = awesome.) I also really liked Mary Elizabeth Winstead's Ramona -- she resembles a young Kate Winslet, and does well in a really tricky, deadpan role. Kieran Culkin nearly steals the movie as Pilgrim's gay roomate Wallace and in smaller roles "evil exes" Brandon Routh and Chris Evans are awesome. The aforementioned Schwartzman, who I always like, makes a great oily evil Gideon.

Wright's approach to the material is somewhere over the point of being over the top -- he throws in video game references like villains exploding into piles of coins or extra lives popping on screen at opportune moments. And of course, the whole way a romantic comedy is spliced into some sort of mutant superhero film where scrawny Scott Pilgrim can be thrown through buildings and survive unmaimed. It gets rather surreal at times (Vegan Police?!?) but never breaks the rules of its own weird universe.

The movie features a bit less heart, a lot more whiz-bang motion than the longer 1200-page or so comic series by Bryan O'Malley, but Wright does a great job distilling the six novels into one two-hour movie. Sound effects appear on screen a la the old "Batman" TV show; captions appear to give us scene transitions. It's another thrilling example of how in this golden age of comics-spawned movies, not everything is "X-Men Origins: Wolverine." We can still see ones that really push the creative limits like this or "American Splendor." See it now before it vanishes from theatres, or check it out on DVD soon.

Here's a story, of a lovely lady...

2010-08-09T15:20:00.005+12:00

In truth, I spent far, far too much of my childhood watching reruns of "The Brady Bunch."

I saw every one of the 117 episodes of "The Brady Bunch" in afternoon reruns as a kid, some of them many times over. The shows were only a few years old at this point, and in constant rotation on TV. Greg Brady's dubious fashion choices, Marcia's hotness and Mike Brady's stern but loving paternal tone were all hardwired into my brain, paisley patterns on a growing mind.

The other weekend, I discovered a cheap DVD clearance sale where I could buy the full season sets of "The Brady Bunch" for just $9 each. I went a little bit mad, visions of polyester '70s childhood recaptured in my head. And I imagined indoctrinating young Peter -- not named after the middle Brady boy, honest -- into "Brady" fandom. (He loves "The Simpsons," and I do too, but frankly sometimes we think he could use a little more wholesome family sitcom role-modeling than Homer and Bart.)

I still think, 40 years (egad) after it premiered, "The Brady Bunch" stands up in my mind as the archetypal cuddly sitcom. I don't profess it to be an objectively "good" show. But it has a warmth and sincerity despite the hackneyed sitcom plotlines (Bradys go camping! Bradys clean attic! Bradys go Hawaii!). The kids always seemed more real than the wisecracking automatons on sitcoms such as "Differ'nt Strokes," and Mike and Carol Brady portrayed a truly loving couple -- a blended marriage --- that modeled the kind of behavior most of us would like parents to be. The only truly false note is wacky Alice the housekeeper, who now seems vaguely creepy with her constant passive-aggressive wisecracks about her love life.

I was always rather fond of the Brady home layout. Was a fictional television sitcom location ever better delineated? The Brady bunch house has inspired a host of fetishists (including blueprints for it). The house felt lived-in, kitschy to the max, of course. What was the deal with the hideous clown painting on the boys' bedroom wall, or the astroturf lawn, or the strangely mod and cavernous haunt that was Mike's den? Was there really only one bathroom?

While it wasn't part of the hard-hitting, "relevant" wave of '70s TV shows that included "M*A*S*H" and "All In The Family," the Bradys were a gentle step beyond one-dimensional "Leave It To Beaver" and "My Three Sons" type families. Sure, Greg getting caught smoking was about as harsh as it got, but I don't know, "The Brady Bunch" never felt quite as fake as plastic as so many sitcoms to me. Or perhaps it was so ridiculously plastic that I embraced it anyway. Or maybe it's just because I grew up on Brady afternoons, a half-hour of gently moralistic hijinks several days a week, and anything you grew up looks good with enough hindsight.

Whatever the answer, re-watching these episodes in recent weeks has been a jolly good time. And my Peter? He loves 'em too. Groovy.