A new year! A new year with new cheer!
Except there’s nothing new about it, really, is there? Check out the media: Non-white people being murdered in their vehicles and on the streets, mass shootings, recession rumblings, a devastating ongoing war, an unavoidable 1.5-degree temperature rise, and a cultural landscape that’s falling apart at the seams. We learn nothing and we change nothing and yet we expect things to become better when a number increases by one. We’re so…enervating.
But let’s be more Hans Rösling about things. It ain’t all bad. For example: there’s a formation on Mars that looks like a grizzly bear. What more do you want? He’s our new god now. We shall all pray to Ursus arctos horribilis, or, as I like to call him, Bearyl Streep. I trust he will be a merciful bear god.
I haven’t written a new chart post since November, which is primarily because I was busy delivering the sequel to Reality Testing to my publisher. “That’s done and dusted,” he screamed, clapping his hands together to rid them of imaginary grit. Kind of backed myself into a hole with this series though, haven’t I? On the one hand, it’s all set in the #Sundownuniverse. Nice and neat, just as I like it. On the other hand, each book is a standalone story. Try making the average Amazon user realise this in the augenblick they give your title while browsing the science fiction Library of Alexandria. Just try it.
Other news: Yesterday I started writing a new novel. As daunting as ever, but 1,000 words is better than zero, I suppose. Let’s see what happens with it.
Album of the month: Surprise releases from bands who haven’t recorded anything for 15 years aside, January is always something of a void when it comes to fresh music. Either that or we’re too busy scouring the karaoke and ABBA residue from our minds to properly engage with the latest red-hot microtonal classical drone EP. Speaking of legends dropping new albums from nowhere, this month is all about 12 by Ryuichi Sakamoto. The composer was diagnosed with cancer for the second time in 2021 - this time stage four - and by all Internet accounts he’s pretty fragile. If this is to be his last release, it’s a desperately sad one. Whispered piano, sparse phrases, cold winter landscapes. It’s like he has already seen across to the other side and is showing us what awaits. It’s the transition stage from life to death and the terrifying realisation that - as prolific and creative and clean-eating and hardworking as you have endeavoured to be all your life - your time is now over, and all you can do is take a bow and fade out.
Book of the month: As I’ve only read one full book in January, this honour goes to I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, which I didn’t really enjoy because there’s only so much I can take of a man angrily drinking glasses of whiskey while pushing over vampires. If we’re including books that have taken me months to read, then Understanding a Photograph by John Berger wears the crown. Crackerjack, it was, even the self-indulgent parts where he just reproduces letter exchanges with his mates about how happiness is a series of moments surrounded - and called into creation - by a perpetual state of unhappiness. Full of quotes to put as the epigraph of an overreaching novel.
Movie of the month: Intimidation from 1960, directed by Koreyoshi Kurahara. Criterion sums it up neatly by calling it a “pocket-size noir”. It manages to do a lot in its 65-minute runtime, not least make me sympathise a little with a sweating bank manager who has to rob his own institution to pay off a comically inept blackmailer. It’s not ground-breaking, but there are several beautiful shots in it - as well as a stunning desk clock that I’ve so far failed to find online.
Last: RIP Tom Verlaine and Jeff Beck. Two unique players in the same month. C’est très triste.
Jolly sing-a-long songs:
1 Death and Vanilla - Nothing is Real
2 Bicep, Clara La San - Water
3 Nia Archives - Baianá
4 Floating Points - Problems
5 Tommy Genesis, Charlie XCX - 100 Bad
6 Damu the Fudgemunk - Blizzard
7 Forss - In Paradisum
