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Chart / January

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NEWSFLASH: I’m back.

It’s been a while since I did one of these….September, in fact. The reasons are myriad: I relocated to Athens, Pacific State needed a promotin’ (number #1 for cyberpunk in the USA last week!), and I have a few projects keeping me busy. Two days ago I wrote the last line of a neo-Western thriller I’ve been working on for a year. Perfect timing, because from mid-February I’ll be in residence at JOYA: AiR, a not-for-profit, carbon-positive arts residency supporting artistic projects “at the intersection between creativity and the environment”. My residency will last for three weeks, during which I hope to sketch out the structure for a new masculinity and climate-focused novel and write the first chapter.

Book of the month: Hyperion by Dan Simmons. I’d been aware of this book for many years, but I’d never actually paid it much attention beyond the gnarly cover art. For some reason, I’d assumed it was written in the 1960s. WRONG. It’s a mashup of Conrad, Gibson and Homer. And it’s fantastic. Not since the Three-Body Problem have I read science fiction so rich, with 10+ fully fleshed characters all with their own incredibly well-constructed stories. The world-building is flawless, the language varied and the dissection of religion compelling.

Film of the month:

In November Criterion put up a selection of ‘end of the world’ films, with some of the usual suspects including Mad Max, Threads and Escape From New York. I’m still working my way through the titles I’ve never heard of. Two I did watch were Dead End Drive-In and Night Of The Comet. Both distinctly B-movie, both rough around the edges, both with dodgy pacing, paper-thin characters and editing choices (Night has a pivotal scene where most of the world is turned into red dust by a comet passing overhead…all we see of this catastrophe is one woman closing her eyes and uttering a bored ‘oh’). The saving grace: the sets, costume design and cinematography (particular for Drive-In). Wow. Neon-soaked cities, orange horizons, bloodied skies. It more than makes up for dialogue like “Yeaaaah my name’s Crabsy, because people thought I had crabs, But I don’t”. That’s the protagonist saying it. Our hero. The guy we want to believe in.

Buena Vista Music Club:

1 The Beaches - Blame Brett

2 Phoebe Bridgers - Scott Street

3 sign crushes motorist - theres this girl

4 Pinegrove - Need 2

5 flyingfish - wonder if u care

6 Soap&Skin - Me and the Devil

Chart / February

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Classic February doing its Irish goodbye and prompting me to frantically write a roundup six hours before the month is over.

Here’s what I want to talk about: I travelled outside Europe for the first time in more than four years, which necessitated my flying on a long-haul aircraft. Now, quite aside from the indirect environmental damage I’ve wrought on our wonderful planet (another topic for another day), I’m concerned by the fact that the entertainment rigs on these planes now only seem to show Netflix-friendly movies from the past four or five years. If you’re into superhero movies, Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds or the Fast & Furious franchise, then you’re all set. But dear Christ, when is this dumbing down of mainstream art going to stop for the rest of Western society? I’m beginning to think there’s an insidious plot afoot to delete all movies prior to the year 2000 from our collective memories - perhaps so they can be remade without incurring the inevitable backlash. I remember (oh good, I’m that guy) sitting on a plane to Australia a decade ago and being pleasantly surprised that I could watch stuff like Double Indemnity, The Wild Bunch, The Poseidon Adventure and Full Metal Jacket. Now your choices are Black Adam, Jurassic World: Dominion and Bullet Train. I know that in the grand scheme of things, this gripe may come across as entitled (oh no, you could kill time watching big budget movies while jetting off on holiday, the humanity), but I mean only to point out that this diet of empty-calorie cinema seems like one of those steps en route to us becoming the mindless blob people from Wall-E.

In related news: Old man yells at cloud.

Book of the month: Berlin Game by Len Deighton. A spy novel that is sexist, old-fashioned, glacially paced and obsessed with quotidian details like picking kids up from school after work….and I loved it. This is a book that would never be published if it was written today, and that makes it all the easier to enjoy. Of course, it isn’t without its highlights: Deighton’s encyclopaedic knowledge of 1980s Berlin is guaranteed to excite a long-term fawning resident of the city such as myself, while his prose is unvarnished without being workmanlike. Metal fact: Deighton also wrote the novel that served as the inspiration for Mötörhead’s Bomber. Awesome.

Album of the month: Heavy Heavy by Young Fathers. Those three chaps definitely know what they’re doing when it comes to single-handedly evolving abstract hip hop. They’re the Massive Attack of their day.

Movie of the month: Steven Soderbergh’s Kimi, almost exclusively because it stars Zoe Kravitz, who has the magical power of being able to turn a lame script and soporific direction into a watchable thriller. Seriously, if she wasn’t in it, Kimi would be nothing more than a bad, too-long episode of Black Mirror. But no one can repel charisma of that magnitude. You know who else had that power? Mickey Rourke in the 1980s (with the exception of Year of the Dragon - even he couldn’t save that piece of trash).

Feel-good February:

1 Betty Davis - Muskwarp Mountain

2 Kedr Livanskiy - Night

3 yunè pinku - DC Rot

4 Logic1000 - What You Like

5 Elkka - Music To Heal To

6 Pretty Girl - Arc

7 Bonobo - Heartbreak (Kerry Chandler Mix)

Chart / January

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A new year! A new year with new cheer!

Except there’s nothing new about it, really, is there? Check out the media: Non-white people being murdered in their vehicles and on the streets, mass shootings, recession rumblings, a devastating ongoing war, an unavoidable 1.5-degree temperature rise, and a cultural landscape that’s falling apart at the seams. We learn nothing and we change nothing and yet we expect things to become better when a number increases by one. We’re so…enervating.

But let’s be more Hans Rösling about things. It ain’t all bad. For example: there’s a formation on Mars that looks like a grizzly bear. What more do you want? He’s our new god now. We shall all pray to Ursus arctos horribilis, or, as I like to call him, Bearyl Streep. I trust he will be a merciful bear god.

I haven’t written a new chart post since November, which is primarily because I was busy delivering the sequel to Reality Testing to my publisher. “That’s done and dusted,” he screamed, clapping his hands together to rid them of imaginary grit. Kind of backed myself into a hole with this series though, haven’t I? On the one hand, it’s all set in the #Sundownuniverse. Nice and neat, just as I like it. On the other hand, each book is a standalone story. Try making the average Amazon user realise this in the augenblick they give your title while browsing the science fiction Library of Alexandria. Just try it.

Other news: Yesterday I started writing a new novel. As daunting as ever, but 1,000 words is better than zero, I suppose. Let’s see what happens with it.

Album of the month: Surprise releases from bands who haven’t recorded anything for 15 years aside, January is always something of a void when it comes to fresh music. Either that or we’re too busy scouring the karaoke and ABBA residue from our minds to properly engage with the latest red-hot microtonal classical drone EP. Speaking of legends dropping new albums from nowhere, this month is all about 12 by Ryuichi Sakamoto. The composer was diagnosed with cancer for the second time in 2021 - this time stage four - and by all Internet accounts he’s pretty fragile. If this is to be his last release, it’s a desperately sad one. Whispered piano, sparse phrases, cold winter landscapes. It’s like he has already seen across to the other side and is showing us what awaits. It’s the transition stage from life to death and the terrifying realisation that - as prolific and creative and clean-eating and hardworking as you have endeavoured to be all your life - your time is now over, and all you can do is take a bow and fade out.

Book of the month: As I’ve only read one full book in January, this honour goes to I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, which I didn’t really enjoy because there’s only so much I can take of a man angrily drinking glasses of whiskey while pushing over vampires. If we’re including books that have taken me months to read, then Understanding a Photograph by John Berger wears the crown. Crackerjack, it was, even the self-indulgent parts where he just reproduces letter exchanges with his mates about how happiness is a series of moments surrounded - and called into creation - by a perpetual state of unhappiness. Full of quotes to put as the epigraph of an overreaching novel.

Movie of the month: Intimidation from 1960, directed by Koreyoshi Kurahara. Criterion sums it up neatly by calling it a “pocket-size noir”. It manages to do a lot in its 65-minute runtime, not least make me sympathise a little with a sweating bank manager who has to rob his own institution to pay off a comically inept blackmailer. It’s not ground-breaking, but there are several beautiful shots in it - as well as a stunning desk clock that I’ve so far failed to find online.

Last: RIP Tom Verlaine and Jeff Beck. Two unique players in the same month. C’est très triste.

Jolly sing-a-long songs:

1 Death and Vanilla - Nothing is Real

2 Bicep, Clara La San - Water

3 Nia Archives - Baianá

4 Floating Points - Problems

5 Tommy Genesis, Charlie XCX - 100 Bad

6 Damu the Fudgemunk - Blizzard

7 Forss - In Paradisum

Chart / September

The best thing about working on a TV series as a writer: Bouncing ideas off other people and receiving instant feedback.

The worst thing about working on a TV series as a writer: Having ideas bounced off you and being expected to provide instant feedback.

As my career as a non-sci-fi writer is going nowhere fast (for some reason I thought the market for boxing/refugee crisis/Berlin party town novels was blowing up. It isn’t), I have thrown my lot in with a plucky bunch of people looking to bring the next Breaking Bad to the small screen. It means I likely won’t be doing other kinds of writing for the next few months, at least. I have to say that feels liberating.

I’M FREE.

Book of the month: The Space Merchants by Cyril M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl. Oh, what a shot in the arm this was for me. Critically acclaimed cyberpunk from the forward-looking days of 1953. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty. Well, maybe not that, but a read that was actually enjoyable without needing to be grandiose or impart a Big Message or require me to have a qualification in horticulture in order to endure the flowery prose. There is - get this - a chapter of the book devoted to a protoplasmic, sentient mass of meat and tissue called Chicken Little that is regularly cut up into steaks to feed the downtrodden population of a neo-Victorian workhouse. This is all I want from a book.

Film of the month: Persona by Ingmar Bergman. Rumour has it the great director was unstable, but you’d never guess it from this descent into the depths of insanity, abortion, motherhood, homosexuality, sex and method acting. There are several shots in this film that cannot be topped, such as the moment when Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson lean toward the camera in profile, with Bibi’s face being overlaid by Liv’s in a kind of vampiric sexual synthesis that is more effortlessly, organically aesthetic than anything I’ve seen before.

Album of the month: For this already-too-cold month I will say Circuits by Moiré. Eight slices of tech house, nonsensically titled, metallic and tundra-like and futuristic. It’s what I’d expect to be listening to if I was ever transported to another planet with giant cities made of glass, where humans are made to fight android replicas for sport.

Music with which to stave off nuclear thoughts:

1 Joy Division - Autosuggestion

2 David Bowie - Subterraneans

3 Ryuichi Sakamoto - The End of Asia

4 Iron Curtain - Tarantula Scream

5 The Future Sound of London - Cascade

6 Aphex Twin - Milk Man