End of the year lists

Since it's the season for it, I'll put my own list out there. Shorter and to the point though. I saw almost none of the must see films, certainly listened to no must-listen albums, or played any of the video games I ought to have played this year, but I watched a lot of TV, bad and good, and there are programs that tell me what I've missed.
A short list of things I enjoyed too much this year, though they might be far older:

-Venture Bros.
-The Mabinoginion
-Mad Men
-30 Rock
-All Star Superman
-That Mitchell and Webb Look
-Plants vs. Zombies
-The Walking Dead
-Community
-Lady Gaga
-Nouvelle Vague
-2666, by Roberto Bolano
-Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
-Listening to terrible pop music while driving
-Writing more and reading less
-Procrastinating

Favorite Issues nr. 1: Animal Man #5

This is probably my favourite single issue ever. I don't even own it, except as a trade paperback. It's some of Grant Morrison's first work in the U.S., a revival of an incredibly lame 1960's character. This was the first issue after the originally planned 4 issue miniseries proved successful. It's a bizzare retelling of the Prometheus myth with Wile E. Coyote as a protagonist, hoping to end the abstract violence cartoons inflict on each other and being cursed with real world suffering as a penance, and as his antagonist a gay trucker creating an elaborate deathtrap to catch him after his life spirals out of control. The titular hero only shows up at the end but is unable to read the scripture he's handed as the trucker, dying because of his own elaborate trap, kills the coyote at a crossroads, where he dies metaphorically. Animal man learns nothing and cartoon violence continues. This issue is weird, smart, funny and exciting and pretty much a statement of purpose for the rest of the series. Animals kill each other, human beings kill animals, the hero doesn't understand it, nor does he learn anything, the world is cruel and unjust because whoever runs it cares more about entertaining the audience than the happiness of those who have to live there.

Gas-guzzling death traps

The thing that annoys me about SUVs isn't that they guzzle gas or are unsafe, per se, but the conflation of causes that made it the most popular car model of the last 20 years. They just didn't deserve to be. American car companies were out of ideas, so they lobbied for what was essentially a truck, i.e. something to haul freight with and built a salon on top of it, to be legally recognised as a passenger vehicle. The public, compliant as ever thought that it was safe and roomy. But just because you're high up doesn't mean you win. It handles worse than an average American car, which already feels like toboganing down a hill on a sack of wet cement, mostly because it wasn't designed to go faster than 90 kilometers an hour or so. An overpowered engine that wastes an absurd amount of fuel to move considerably less weight than it could. It is also not an off-road vehicle, regardless of what the brand says, if you go off-road you might need suspension or a good differential, a manual gearbox. It's a horrible useless machine that just doesn't do any of the things people thought it could do. There is no reason to lament the downfall of the American car industry, they haven't done anything useful since the sixties, this is it's tomb.

Wardrobe eats children

I skipped the chronicles of Narnia first time around. There was a BBC dramatisation I could've seen when I was twelve, but for some reason it just didn't appeal to me. I felt no compunction whatsoever to see the Disney flick of a couple of years ago. Thank god for Christmas, I finally got to see it and was thoroughly annoyed. I don't know what it is about British Child Actors, but they raise my hackles. I always used to laugh at the stereotypical British villains in American films, but I get the point now. There's something deeply sinister about the accent, if not used in historical context, funny or ironic. I had an honest to god nightmare after seeing this film, about British Children wanting 'ever so much' to play with me. And this is all before taking the fact that that Lion is supposed to be Jesus into account.

Christmas song 2

A creepy song made worse by time..

Christmas song 1

Just play this, and you'll be done for the day...

E-commerce is exhausting

I don't have a funny clip for this, because it's not funny. I've been trying to sell some old things on the internet and I've never met so many idiots in such a short span of time. No one seems to know how anything works, or how much it would cost to ship something. I thought I might make some money, but the amount of time I'm having to spend isn't worth it. Leading out from my Nerd hoard, There are some valuable comics in that load that are objectively shit. I've resolved to set apart the money earned from selling those and buying trade paperbacks. But the horror of what that might entail. What if they want me to ship something to the U.S.? Ugh...

My Nerd Hoard

Over the holidays I was able to find some wonderful relics of my misspent teenage years. A couple thousand euros worth of comics, a good 90% of which I wouldn't read today if forced at gun point. I had much less cool 90's Vertigo titles than I suspected, just Preacher, Hitman (not Vertigo, but close), The Invisibles and Transmetropolitan, some Shade the Changing man, Sandman etc, but a small metric ton of x-men from the late 70's to the late 90's, even an x-men 17 from 1963 I bought in London 10 years ago. I'm glad I was never a serious speculator, crap foil embossed image titles from '90 to '95 are in short supply. I do have the first few issues of Whilce Portacio's Stone, signed by him, but apparently so does everybody else. I could shift some of the most valuable crap and buy TPB's of things I'd actually want to read. That would be the best Christmas present I could think of.

Food, glorious food

I just spent the afternoon Christmas shopping at a restaurant supply company. Navigating a large cart through stacks of 5 kilo bags of cooking chocolate to peer at the 10 by 10 feet lobster tanks, having to ask if they maybe had a turkey in the back that would fit in the oven, taking note of the fact that they were out of 2 kilo blocks of foie gras, If we would like a 6 kilo tub?
I finally found boiled duck preserved in goose fat, for the spring. Christmas really should be an orgy of excess, in every single way. There is a real reason to fatten up this winter. Come January grasshopper corpses will litter the streets, only industrious little ants will live. Merry Christmas!

Policecops

If only they were really like this, but they're not. I spent years actively hating the police, but they probably do serve a purpose. According to a friend who worked in a womens' shelter, they're the main reason most domestic disputes don't end in bloody murder, which is something to be grateful for. I've never been particularly helped by their presence, nor have many of the people I know. There's the rule of law aspect of having a police force that I must have benefited from somehow, but mostly there have been fines, po-faced lectures, shrugs at inquiries into if they'll find my stolen property, or if they'll look for those guys that started the fight. And these are the positive encounters. I've also been fined unjustly, detained for no reason, pushed around, threatened with violence, and once pulled over because they thought I might have been speeding if they weren't there. In Rio they arrested me for a bribe, when I didn't have any drugs, they offered to arrest a dealer and get me some.
It's a problem of consistency, mostly. I just don't know what to expect. I'd much rather they either always fined you, always gave you a lecture, or well anything really, as long as they always do it. It's just the reasonability, the discussions only work if both parties are of sound mind, and even if I sometimes am and can discuss things calmly, I can't be sure of that, and neither can they.

Heaven knows I'm miserable now.

This is the first thing I play whenever I'm depressed, and it always cheers me up. I know I'm not exactly unique in this regard, and I hate most Smiths/Morissey fans on the Internet at least. For that matter, what I know about Morissey, I wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire... unless he promised to get back together with Johnny Marr, that is. I think it's exactly that quality of self-serious, but clever goth poetry set to relatively happy, complex music that Makes snap out of any funk. At no point can you take your own problems seriously when you listen to someone describing the teenage woes of artistic souls this sarcastically. I love it so much, I can't even articulate it as well as someone whose music I unreservedly hate:

Never mind the guesthosts

It's a crying shame Simon Amstel left as the regular host for 'Never mind the buzzcocks'. I liked him better than Mark Lamar even, and he perfectly encapsulated the show's stated goal of puncturing pop star egos. There is nothing funnier than seeing ridiculous, manufactured pop acts being confronted by the level of hostility and sarcasm he brought to the game. Noel Fielding is about as good a replacement for Bill Bailey as possible (though Simon has him pegged in the video) and Phil Jupitus is exactly the same, dependable and solid, but not spectacular. The only one of the guesthosts that was as menacing and hard was Frankie Boyle of all people. He'd do an okay job, but seeing as he stopped at mock the week because the amount of jokes being censored, I doubt he'd do it. I hope the BBC doesn't go for a permanent guest, It hasn't done 'Have I got news for you' any good, there has to be a good presenter and good regulars /team captains. They ensure the pace and a consistent level of quality. For every Boris Johnson as host, there's a ton of forgettable turns for comedians who are funnier in their own stuff or politicians who shouldn't be there. The panel show is a rare animal, really only thriving in Britain, and I think it has a lot more to do with regulars and host than guests, however funny.

Jupiler is apparently the extreme sports beer

I like Jupiler less now. I get the distinct impression that this campaign is the end result of an orgy of high fives after a 'let's work things out' rockclimbing session with executives from Jupiler and the add agency. Glistening sweat, subtle homo-erotic tension, one of the Jupiler guys, out of shape, slips, the rope tightens, saved by the ad agency. While eating sandwiches at the top, the agreement is made. This is why you have to see this. Thanks, male bonding.

Devourer of worlds

It's fashionable among classic moviebuffs to lament that this is Orson Welles' final role. Oh, how the mighty have fallen, etc. That's ridiculous. It may just be an 80's cartoon/toy commercial, but it's the best of it's kind ever made. The movie's plot is market-driven (Like the Bay films..), but in a devastating way for children. In the opening scenes, all the transformers you bought in previous seasons are killed, to make way for new models, and 20-30 new ones are introduced. The animation is of a higher standard than average, there's a lot of ringers in the cast, Leonard Nimoy and Huge star (in the 80's) Judd Nelson. But I think it's a fitting swansong for Orson Welles that he played the logical extrapolation of the 'robots that can transform into anything' paradigm. The new films add all sorts of testicles to devastator and whatnot. But he fails in topping that. There is no topping it, really. This is the citizen kane of robot cartoons, because it has Orson Welles in it.

Asperger's video roundup

There's nothing more satisfying after doing nothing much than watching how someone else better spent their time. I can't believe these videos haven't topped a million views each. Up until they're about 25, most men tend to believe that if their family and friends were brutally murdered and they dedicated 5 years of their life to studying martial arts to take revenge, they would become a Kung Fu Hero. This, however, is what usually happens in reality. Instead of single-mindedly pursuing physical fitness for revenge, you usually end up obsessively doing something that doesn't really matter, which is actually cooler. Think about it, those crazy dedicated (fictional) people tend to be whining emo idiots when they're not kicking ass. Sure you could beat anyone up, but you'd still be a douche.

Gaga for Giger

This is a weirder video than usual for Lady Gaga. That whole bathhaus of Gaga thing is a dead give away that something is up. The whole decor, the storyline, Gaga patched up and sold to an affluent businessman with a gold chinstrap(bidding with wii nunchucks, I think). In some kind of resort with lots of steam. Everything is so Swiss. There is an insistence on her spine as well. I think it's an elaborate tribute to H.R. Giger. The spines, the costumes in the beginning: latex bodysuits? This may just be how my mind works, but the fact that you can see her forehead for the first time is the real Giger connection in my mind. Check out this pic of the original alien head.



There are human eyes underneath that plate, just as I always suspected with Gaga.