Santa Claus Is A Black Man

If you're still recovering from this week's announcement about Hermione from Harry Potter, then I'm afraid I have some more bad news for you.

However, for those of you who aren't arseholes, The Belated Birthday Girl and I would like to wish you all the compliments of the festive season. Oh, to hell with it, it's Christmas - happy holidays to the arseholes too.

(And special thanks to Carole, who introduced me to this song via the album A John Waters Christmas.)

Living For The Weekend: A 2016 Diary By The BBG

One of these years, The Belated Birthday Girl and I will get our respective acts together to such a degree that we can publish her Living For The Weekend diary in good time for people to be able to order it and receive it before Christmas Day.

As you've probably realised by now, 2015 is not going to be that year.

MOSTLY FILM: Boring Conversation Anyway

So, that movie that everyone's talking about is coming out today. (Useful tip: the real film nerds among you should probably try to see it here.) Every media outlet is riding the Star Wars bandwagon like it's some sort of randy bantha, and Mostly Film isn't going to pass up the chance to do likewise.

Yesterday, a bunch of us - Indy Datta, Mr Moth and yours truly - collaborated on a piece looking back at various aspects of Star Wars history, entitled Boring Conversation Anyway. (My own contribution looks at the Star Wars Holiday Special, and if you don't know what that is, consider yourself blessed.) And hopefully Moth should be back there tomorrow with a hot-from-the-multiplex review of The Force Awakens, because obviously they don't invite oiks like us to press screenings of things like that.

Do you fancy seeing The Force Awakens this weekend, but need a crash course in all the films that came before it? Then this associated Red Button Bonus Content should be helpful.

Fat Child In A Pushchair*: Pick Of The Year 2015

I'm not gonna lie to you: even I think this year's Pick Of The Year compilation has an awkward title. Nevertheless, the first time I heard the song it comes from (at Everything Everything's Oval Space gig back in April), I suspected it was always going to be the one: an otherwise lovely track centered around the single most ridiculous line to appear in a song released in 2015. Which is a major achievement, considering that New Order also released songs this year.

Awkward or not, we're committed now. The CDs have been burned, and the track listing is being announced simultaneously both here and on Mostly Film, as part of their roundup of the best bits of 2015. We've got sixteen tracks, over 79 minutes of music, a surprisingly unequal amount of video, and the chance for you to win your own copy of the compilation in our usual competition (closing date 31/1/2016). Get ready, because here we go for the 34th time...

 

Simian Substitute Site For December 2015: Cheeky Monkeys

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR NOVEMBER 2015

Art: We all know the thinking behind the Pop Art movement, and the big names behind it. Or at least, we think we do - most of what's endured from that explosion in the sixties is the work of a small number of American and British artists, while the impact it had on the rest of the world has generally been overlooked. The current exhibition at Tate Modern, The World Goes Pop (running to January 24th), attempts to redress the balance. Over ten rooms of thematically linked work, we get to see that artists from many countries were playing with the same ideas of appropriation of pop culture that Warhol and Lichtenstein were. If anything, they took it one stage further, treating American Pop as another source of images to pilfer - Warhol's soup cans are ironically referenced in a couple of the pictures shown here. There's plenty of pure eye candy on display (which presumably explains this promotional video), but there's also a sweet playfulness in a lot of the work selected - from the collective optimism of Nicola L's Red Coat, to the Situationist prankery of Öyvind Fahlström's Mao-Hope March. If nothing else, this show brings home just how many women were working in Pop Art, a fact which tends to get overlooked in the art history books.

Music: The Spank's Audio Lair playlists seem to be settling down into a bi-monthly pattern, and you can find the latest one below. (Tracks 6 and 10 may require a little explanation, but apart from that you should be fine.) But I'd like to focus here on another band I encountered for the first time this month, supporting The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing at their terrific Camden Underworld gig. Conceptually, The Blood Tub Orchestra make for a rather neat match: The Men perform new rock songs about Victorian England, while The Orchestra revive little-known old music hall ditties in a modern style. So far they've only released one EP, We've Glad You've Got A Gun, which is okay but only scratches the surface of what they can do in a full live set (which is why I haven't included a track from it below). One of the songs they did on the night, Ain't It Grand To Be Bloomin' Well Dead, is such a delightfully dark piece of work that I was convinced they'd written it themselves: but no, a quick bit of research confirms that it dates back to 1932. The approach appears to be to keep the lyrics as faithful as possible, but commit as much violence as they can to the musical arrangements, using a fluid lineup including guitars, keyboards and two separate drummers. According to their Facebook page, The Orchestra are currently in the process of recording a few more of their songs, and I for one can't wait to hear them.

Telly: Well, sort of telly, anyway. Do I need a new category for streamed shows, now that the likes of Netflix are responsible for more and more original programming? They've just made available W/ Bob & David, a sequel of sorts to Mr Show, Bob Odenkirk and David Cross' late nineties sketch show. I only really know Mr Show by reputation, and from a couple of sketches I've caught in the past on YouTube, which seem to suggest that Odenkirk and Cross like a) stretching gags way past the point where they stop being funny till they start being funny again, and b) constructing sketches so complex you need to draw a diagram to completely understand them. The new show carries over some of those experiments in form - notably the Pythonesque links from sketch to sketch in a single episode - but seems less intent on breaking new ground: it's just some old mates getting together after fifteen years to try some stuff out and see if people laugh. There are some dull spots, as is usually the case with sketch shows, but there are some extraordinary highs that come when you least expect them. For those of you without Netflix, you'll be pleased to hear that a couple of sketches from the new show have made it online, so I'm going to link to this one, which isn't one of their best but has the benefit of potentially not being as offensive to Americans as this one. (Or as potentially offensive as another one which I've decided not to link to, but if you check the 'related videos' column over to the right of those YouTube pages you should be able to spot it.)