Caught in the Carousel

Mild Disappointments, 2008
I have had a culturally underwhelming year. I paid ninety-five pounds to see Tom Waits and left with a shrug of indifference. I coughed up a similar sum to see Leonard Cohen at Edinburgh Castle who was elegant, word-perfect and funny as fuck. But why does he employ that band of L.A. charlatans to undermine his beautiful musings with their tinny trash? I imagined him with Tom's musicians and felt bitter at the lost opportunity. I rushed out to buy Roots Manuva's Slime and Reason and quickly resigned myself to the thought that "Awfully Deep" was so brilliant as to be unassailable. "It's Me, Oh Lord" is wonderfully dark, but the album as a whole exists in a strange twilight of wracking depression set against a sort of morbid chirpiness. As a substitute I have been enjoying GZA's Pro Tools. OK, it could have been made in 1998, but is that so bad? I was dragged to see Blondie and to my surprise thoroughly enjoyed their spirited pop cool. Clem Burke and Debbie Harry seemed locked in a duel for the audience's attention but for me, Chris Stein was the star of the show. I saw my cousin, Momus in a little club in Glasgow the night before Tom Waits and he was everything the old barker was not. Humble, dangerous and hilarious. I must mention Brighton's The Famous Poet Derek Meins. Half John Cooper Clarke, half deranged Scottish preacher, he writes love songs to the bottle and raises a glass to the maddening lurches of the heart. We share a manager so my predilection for his work may reveal signs of bias. I enjoyed Cat Power's Jukebox although it was relentlessly monochrome and I couldn't help but like Oasis's Dig Out Your Soul. They have become a very reliable album band in their middle-years, like Led Zeppelin who, let's face it, were rubbish but in a really enjoyable way. I found myself making soup to Liam Gallagher's "I'm Outta Time" and feeling, how should I say it—comforted. In straitened times our taste for exotics declines and we hanker after the simplicity of mashed potato. Films left me unmoved. Steve McQueen's Hunger was an interesting study of the human body and functioned much better as visual art than narrative cinema. Someone told me The Dark Knight was great but the day I pay to see cartoons featuring fantasy figures in PVC suits is the day my mind has finally turned to toothpaste. I sulked at home with a Bunuel boxed set and series one of the supremely brilliant Mad Men. The Kodak "Carousel" scene had me in tears. Such coldness... The most affecting cultural input I ingested all year was A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh. Weirder than weird, moving, surprising and ultimately highly disturbing it tops my list hands down.

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