Musical hairsplitting makes your life easier..

Thanks to the genius of music writers, I can now identify the two musical trends I love and loathe by easy labels. Kindercore is a label name but feels like it should be the name of the twee 'movement'. Owl City fits the definition but it also includes Belle and Sebastian and weirdly the Smiths, which I like. I can assume that's a bit of absurd bombardment of influences to forerunners, since for me at least, the whole point of the Smiths is the palatable lack of sincerity. Unfortunately for the label, which has a quite a few acts that I don't mind I'll never be able to identify them with anything else but this shit:



On the positive side is stuff like new young pony club, alphabeat, etc. Now collected under the name 'Wonky Pop'. Terrible name, but at least I can use it as a search term. Even if I've never heard of the band, it's become a reliable way of identifying what I like. Most of the DJ's doing the remixes are people left standing after 'electroclash' failed to become the next rock 'n roll. I couldn't think of a better recommendation.



If you want to make a sweet song, at least make it fast and danceable.

I can't stop watching the Venture Bros.

This little scene just about encapsulates what I love about this show. The total failure of almost all of it's characters at almost everything. The violence, obscure Nerdy references and dead baby comedy would be enough to keep me entertained, but there's very little replay value in it. I just can't get enough of the failure, though, it's just incredibly endearing. I found out recently that the show has a rabid fanbase, and that doesn't surprise me. Everything about it is pitched to the kind of people who care passionately about something weird and it just fills the void perfectly. It's pretty much the same gimmick X-men used, finding the right one-size-fits-all metaphor for a whole generation of people. This show is perfect for the disillusioned nerd of today. Combining Nostalgia and existential dread with snarky pop-culture humour, it catches the flavour of the times better than anything else at the moment.

The second golden age...

Further rustling through my comics collection turned up the gems I became more interested in in the home stretch towards college, when beer money eclipsed comics for a few years. Vertigo was a weird mix of more adult-oriented material. When Alan Moore and Frank Miller revolutionised comics in 1986, Marvel did nothing, but DC decided to recruit some more Brits from 2000AD and it's competitors. The British comics scene took much more advantage of the total lack of interest from serious critics to move towards more underground and weirder stuff. Not being taken seriously meant doing whatever you felt like. Consequently the comics were tackling big issues, lacked meaningful censorship and attracted better writers. Vertigo imported these guys wholesale and set up the comics version of HBO, a well-funded mainstream home for non-mainstream material with a high emphasis on quality over quantity. Around '97 or '98 I was bored with the x-men and decided on a whim to subscribe to the four hottest vertigo/dc titles of the moment. I followed Hellblazer, Preacher, Hitman and The Invisibles. Consequently I got sucked into a mind-expanding world of shocking violence and evil occult shit. I specifically picked up the Invisibles because of a wizard magazine list of the weirdest things in the comic. If I hadn't done that I never would have gotten out of the x-ghetto, and would probably have lost all interest in comics forever.

Cheap effects

I inadvertently flicked through the space battle at the beginning of Star Wars episode 3 recently and instantly reconnected with my boredom the first time I saw it. J.G. Ballard, apocalyptic fiction writer extraordinaire, famously wrote an essay pointing out why Star Wars' visual aesthetic was so convincing and philosophically interesting. It was a future filled with technology that was dirty and malfunctioning, i.e. the often overlooked downside to advancement. Most sci-fi tries to make the most of the future, all cars are new, everything is shiny, etc. Just ask yourself from 1990 what they thought 2010 would be like. Whereas the old Star Wars had handmade cardboard and plastic models, covered in grit, scratches and fingerprints, this one cgi's the shit out of that space battle, leaving us with a day-glo plastic version of a battle with graphics that you'll be able to make with an iphone app in a year or so.

celebrity news is becoming too mundane.

It was always banal, but the recent crop of celebrity news stories is just terrible. That 24-hour news cycle is wreaking havoc on the bland little dramas playing out on the airbrushed canvases that are supposedly real lives. How are we supposed to get excited about the same old stuff when you hear bout it every five minutes? Every time the cheryl cole song comes on the radio there's a joke about her failing marriage. I've heard so many jokes, it feels like I'm divorcing here. It's almost like they've caught on. Only reality stars surprised by the burgeoning popularity of their show are still caught out. There's a whole industry of publicists and other random media jockeys defusing, editing and just crushing the life out of every scandal before it even breaks. A friend of mine gets press-releases about impending 'spontaneous' flash mobs regularly. I never really bought all that stuff about the media being controlled, but then I've never been this bored by the low-rent shenanigans on T.V. Cheating, divorce, Micheal Jackson's death still mysterious? I'm beginning to think these people don't matter at all.