THE NEVERENDING STORY AS AN UNLIKELY ANTIDOTE TO CAPITALIST REALISM

G'MORK: Foolish boy. Don't you know anything about Fantasia? It's the world of human fantasy. Every part, every creature of it, is a piece of the dreams and hopes of mankind. Therefore, it has no boundaries.
ATREYU: But why is Fantasia dying, then?
G'MORK: Because people have begun to lose their hopes and forget their dreams. So the nothing grows stronger.
ATREYU: What is the nothing?
G'MORK: It's the emptiness that's left. It's like a despair, destroying this world. And I have been trying to help it.
ATREYU: But why?
G'MORK: Because people who have no hopes are easy to control. And whoever has control has the Power.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING RIGHT NOW?

WHAT AM I DOING RIGHT NOW?

WHAT AM I DOING RIGHT?

WHAT AM I DOING?

WHAT AM I?

WHAT?

WH?

W

A RELIEF, I SUPPOSE

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ME: Which celebrity would you say I'm most like?
LOUISE: Well, I only know Robbie Williams. You're not like Robbie Williams, as far as I can tell.

2009: LISZT

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TOONS

Yo La Tengo – 'I’m On My Way'

Jay Z – 'Empire State of Mind'

Camera Obscura – 'French Navy'

Bill Calahan – 'Jim Cain'

Royksopp and Robyn – 'Girl With the Robot'

Passion Pit - 'Sleepyhead'

Dizzee Rascal - 'Holiday'

Mos Def – 'Auditorium'

Phoenix - 'Lisztomania'

Built to Spill – 'Life’s a Dream'

BUMS

Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest

Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca

Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavillion 
jj – jj no.2

Mos Def – The Ecstatic

Dan Deacon – Bromst

Flaming Lips – Embryonic 
Yo La Tengo - Popular Songs 
Raekwon - Cuban Linx Pt II 
Times New Viking - Born Again Revisited

FANTASTIC HOPE INDEED

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... cultural decadal summary from Mark Fisher/K-Punk in this week's New Statesman (best, most succinct I've seen yet).

Fave bits:

No longer dressed in staid grey, the new cultural conservatism that enjoys full-spectrum dominance blitzes us with hypnotic hype - the whole neurotic assault and battery of multi-media marketing and interactivity that seems designed to ensure that nothing will ever happen again.

...
But if bohemia can rouse itself from defeat and depression, the cultural terrain seems open for contest in a way that it has not been for a long time. Perhaps soon we will be able to look back on the Noughties with a shudder and think: how did things ever get that bad?

Fisher's book is a bargain ...

F-DUBZ SMACKS IT FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE

Excerpt from forthcoming The Pale King, entitled 'All That'.

See also this excellent potted bio article of DFW at the New Yorker.

THE XX

Have finally gotten round to listening to (and enjoying) these guys.

I knew we were always only a step away from a Chris Isaak revival!

Not really sure what potentialities it suggests for future UK alt-rock though, and there's the inevitable staginess of the vocals.

But better a vaguely cheesy American vocal intonation than a spuriously demotic one. One of the worst things about Libertines, Kate Nash, Maccabees et al is that the colloquial British accent is now an unfortunate (not to mention deeply corny) shibbolleth for a sort of twee, hedonistic, metropolitan, drama-school privilege.

ALEX FUCKING PETRIDIS

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... is up there with Conor McNicholas, Jo Whiley et al on my Middlebrow Wanker of the Decade list.

This review of the decade's pop was appropriately Whiggish and banal, a facetious non-argument which passingly acknowledges the limitations of mainstream pop culture, while wrapping the whole thing in blandly un-rigorous yuletide optimism.

SEBASTIEN TELLIER'S 'LA RITOURNELLE'

The Euro-eccentric's noughties masterpiece receives fittingly hyperbolic praise over at The Grain.

Top 10 Tunes of the Decade fast approaching.

VERSE FOR MIDNIGHT, NEW YEAR'S EVE 2009

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In sum, this decade offered up a flat
and fierce rebuttal to the notion that
pop music’s every bit as ‘high’ as books:
The Killers, Razorlight, Snow Patrol, Muse, The Kooks.