My top 25 of 2010

2010 was a hell of a year for music, folks, this top 25 only scratches the surface really. Click on my track picks for a download.

Dying together is even more personal than living together

Alfred Hitchcock is a very important figure in cinematic history. He was The Master, a person whose films were so rigorously constructed that he grew bored of making them, that he felt the need to complicate his films to challenge himself. This led to the shrinking space of Lifeboat

…but for the accident of birth, you might be as they are

The inevitable discussion when Tod Browning’s Freaks comes up is that you could not make this film today for reasons of political correctness, but the truth is it was not all that acceptable then either

We deal in lead, friend.

On the commentary track to Magnificent Seven, director John Sturges is quoted as saying, ‘I thought we were making movies, not history.’ You wouldn’t know it from his pictures, though

THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST of 09

1. Tom Waits: Glitter and Doom

Glitter And Doom: Live

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Tom Waits has always been awesome, but he has also grown into his awesomeness more and more as time has passed. He was practically a standard-issue crooner when he debuted, but then whiskey and cigarettes very rapidly turned his voice to that bourbon rasp we all know and love, and it only got raspier over the years. His anarchic, weird humour and his sense of beauty and tragedy in the everyday became more honed and his songwriting grew weirder and more original. So it should be no surprise, really, that an album of him performing many of his great songs live trumps anything else to come out in 2009. The arrangements are generally quite different from the original studio versions and the icing on the cake is the fantastic second disc entitled ‘Tom Tales’ which is half an hour of him telling jokes and stories to the audience plus a beautiful take of “Picture in a Frame” at the end.
Song pick: “Dirt in the Ground” – This song originally from his classic Bone Machine album was never so weighty and powerful.

This road goes all around the world

I have a fascination with gay cinema – from the earliest transgressive hints in Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box) to the fevered imagination of Kenneth Anger to the overheated, closeted homoeroticism of the likes of Top Gun, it’s a pocket universe of cinema that is unique and almost perpetually metaphorical. Perhaps it intrigues me so much because of that.

Silent Cinema: Buster Keaton in The General

The General

There is a moment in Sunset Boulevard where Buster Keaton makes a cameo, playing bridge in Gloria Swanson’s house with a table of washed-up silent film stars.

Why no melancholy?

Sleeping Beauty

Sleeping Beauty is quite possibly my favourite Disney animated feature. However, what makes me love the film is a subtext that may not be at all intended. The main thrust of this is that Maleficent is the most intriguing, complex, and powerful villain to ever grace an animated film, and none of the ostensible heroes of the film are anywhere near as interesting. Anyway, I’ll get on with it and elaborate as I go.

coming on to it I wasn’t sure what I was looking at

2 Foot Flame: 2 Foot Flame

The musicians involved in 2 Foot Flame come from art backgrounds and this is very much an art project.

solely in my chest is my heart a drum of water

School of Seven Bells: Alpinisms

Having listened to Secret Machines’ 2008 self-titled album made it clear that Benjamin Curtis had absconded from the band with all their atmosphere and mathematical complexity.