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

http://www.amazon.ca/Glitter-Doom-Live-Tom-Waits/dp/B002QJX33O/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1261782927&sr=8-1

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.

I’d rather die than give you control

Nine Inch Nails: Pretty Hate Machine

Five years later, Trent Reznor would plunge steel meathooks into the great industrial beast and drag its agonized hulk into the present, with a sound of barbed wire, chain links, and corroded machinery, a skull full of disease and blood spatter.

It’s rough out there, high water everywhere

Bob Dylan: Love and Theft

Sometimes an album gathers an historical relation that does not fit it. On the morning of September 11th, 2001, I got up at seven-thirty and walked to school, for the first day of my first full week in university.

Somewhere impossible light still shines

Ryan Adams & the Cardinals: Cardinology

The random, frequently garbage youthful eclecticism (or less charitably, casting about for direction) that marked (and often marred) Ryan Adams’ older albums has by this point pretty much entirely departed.