Simian Substitute Site for February 2025: The Monkey

The MonkeyMONTH END PROCESSING FOR JANUARY 2025

Movies: Kung hei fat choi. There's a point in the life of every Hong Kong cinema fanboy when you learn about the existence of Chinese New Year films: the star-studded, intellectually light movies that are made specifically for Chinese audiences to see over the weekend of the lunar celebration. These days, digital distribution means that the whole world can see them at the same time, which is why we were able to spend last Thursday watching Detective Chinatown 1900 along with a sizeable proportion of the planet. It's part of an ongoing franchise in which two Chinese cops (played by Baoqiang Wang and Liu Haoran) visit a foreign location and investigate a crime that took place in the Chinatown district. So after movies set in Bangkok, New York and Tokyo, the fourth film goes to... San Francisco, 125 years in the past. The Chinatown there is currently under construction, with Chow Yun-fat being as excellent as ever as its boss: but the murder of a politician's daughter, apparently at the hands of a Chinese man, threatens to destroy everything he's built. (John Cusack is equally excellent as the politician, and happily avoids that stiffness you frequently get when English-speaking actors are working for non-English speaking directors.) The tone is all over the shop, swinging from corpse mutilation to jokes about eating poo: and somewhat predictably, it goes all Rah Rah Rah China Is Great in the closing minutes. But it's fine as a holiday entertainment, even if it isn't your holiday.

Music: It's time to analyse the results of the competition associated with You're Lucky I Don't Charge: Pick Of The Year 2024, and yes of course Dave's won it again. If it's any consolation to you, he found it a bit tricky this year, because he struggled to get iTunes to work properly, leading me to suspect I might be the only person in the world who still buys MP3s from them occasionally. Anyway, you'll recall that the competition question was 'how much would it cost you in total to buy all the individual tracks on You’re Lucky I Don’t Charge on iTunes?' There are 18 tracks in total on the CD, and most of them retail at 99p: however, three of them - the ones by Pete & Bas, Norman Pain and Anna Erhard - actually retail for 79p, for reasons I don't fully understand but may have something to do with them being on very small labels. That makes the total (15 x 0.99) + (3 x 0.79), or £17.22. Bargain! But because Dave couldn't do the calculation for real, he took a stab in the dark and assumed the price of £20.24 on the cover graphic was really the answer. And he still came closer than anyone else, so a CD of YLIDC will be on its way to him in the post shortly. Congratulations, yet again.

Music again: With that out of the way, we can get back into the regular grind of Spank's Audio Lair playlists, although only one of the ten songs here was released in 2025. So expect tracks from The Osmonds, 65daysofstatic, Doechii, Tiny Leaves, Sorry, Eiko Ishibashi, Timothee Chalamet, Laura Marling, Nils Frahm and James Acaster, with those links there providing backup YouTube versions for anyone who doesn't Spotify. We'll do this one without any sort of supporting context, only noting that it's probably one of the least coherent collections of music I've ever curated, and that the James Acaster track makes more sense in the video version than the audio version.


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The N Word

The sculpture The Blue Chair by Sabine Geraudie: there's a quite beautiful visual joke that you'll only get if you see it in person, and I won't spoil it here.You don’t realise how big a problem it is until you spend a week in Nice. You’re looking around at things, and they’re… pleasant. They’re delightful. They’re lovely. And you desperately scrabble for every other possible synonym so you can avoid the obvious joke. As The Belated Birthday Girl said to me towards the end of our holiday, “I have to keep stopping myself from using the N word. [pause] No! Not that!

So, can we get through a whole writeup of our week away last June without using the city’s name as an adjective? Let’s give it a go.

(I should acknowledge at this point that seven months have elapsed between our Nice visit and this writeup, and there are a few updates required. The biggest one being that BrewDog Nice has just been closed down, along with their other French bar in Paris. Also, assume that pretty much every temporary art exhibition discussed here has finished by now. Other than that, this should all still be relevant.)

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Spankify Wrapped 2024: {insert name of disco-locating app here}

...young enough to WANT! (a nice hot milky drink before bedtime)
Am I a dancer?
Let's get it clear,
my father was a dancer
and his dad before him
So... am I a dancer?
Yeah now you see
that it finally percolated
through the old DNA

- Young Boy, NOËP

The fourth and final part of Spankify Wrapped 2024: and unlike the previous three chapters built around the stats collected by the apps Spotify, Untappd and Letterboxd, this one was inspired by a book. That book was Living For The Weekend: 2024 Diary, published just over a year ago by The Belated Birthday Girl. (Copies still available to buy.)

Towards the back of the diary, The BBG set her usual project for the year. To quote from her introduction: "The new project for 2024 may be a little ambitious, but let’s give it a try. This year the plan is to go to at least 12 club / DJ nights in the year. Although there are plenty of clubs to choose from, finding at least 12 that suit us is maybe where the ambition comes in."

The phrase "that suit us" is key, and part of what made this project the farthest outside my comfort zone of all the ones she's set. But we achieved it, and I'm here to tell you all about how we did it.

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Spankify Wrapped 2024: Letterboxd

So that's about one film for every six beers I drank in 2024.Quite honestly, you could take the fifth paragraph of Spankify Wrapped 2024: Untappd, do a quick search and replace on a couple of key words, and they’d fit in just fine here. Because it’s a very similar story. Late last year, I started seeing people sharing summaries of their year on Letterboxd, the app where you can log, rate and review all the films you’ve seen. And I thought, “that looks fun, maybe I could try that in 2024.” So I did.

Just like Untappd, it meant that I spent a whole year turning one of my favourite pastimes into an administrative exercise. And just like Untappd, the numbers it gave me at the end of that year made me feel appalled with myself. “What do you mean, I only saw ninety-one films this year?”

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