I saw a film the other night. It was about a Eastern European journalist attempting to assimilate into the alien cultural landscape of the United States, a touching, pathos-laden piece with hints of Werner Herzog’s Stroszek. Oh OK, it was the new Borat film (goodbye, underground credentials) but whatever because I actually laughed til I had a bit of a cry. It’s just this expression on this one guy’s face - he’s standing next to a naked Sasha Baron-Cohen in a crowded lift, with a look I can only describe as 100% disgruntlement. Beat that, cinema.

Anyway, essentially, the film rolls along on a contrived plotline (Baron Cohen plays a Kazak TV presenter who travels to America to learn some First World lessons to improve his miserable, exceptionally racist homeland) but it’s the real-life segments that make it - absurd violations of all decent and proper human behaviour that simultaneously make you cackle like a drain and slightly queasy with nerves that at any moment this whole thing could spill over into horrible violence. Borat falls over multiple times in an antiques shop, breaking rack after rack of expensive plates. Borat announces, over microphone, to a busy Deep South rodeo “We fully support your War Of Terror! May George Bush drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq!” Borat hands an etiquette coach his own faeces, in a plastic bag. And so on.

The fascinating factor is the blurring of the line between script and reality - is the guy who reads Borat the telegram announcing the death of his wife in on the joke? (”High five!”) Does Pamela Anderson, who Borat - spoiler alert! - attemps to kidnap and make his wife, via a “marriage” sack over the head, know exactly what’s going on? I don’t know. Maybe it’s not important.

Posted by Louis Pattison on Friday, September 29th, 2006
(3 Comments)

behold the majesty of my latest musical obsession - the Southern University Human Jukebox - a marching band who transform hip-hop staples into vast, beyond bombastic walls of brass… check their Rap Mix (2004) for a delirious ‘Knuck If You Buck / Headbussa’ collage - i love the way the whole thing appears to break down into total camera-shaking chaos before - well, you’ll see…

other performances wd include ‘You Don’t Wanna Go To War’ and a brilliant pastiche of the EA Sports intro with lots of in-band close-ups and choreography…

Posted by kicking_k on Monday, September 25th, 2006
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I’m doing the singles column next issue and I need your help. What I want to review are the little tiny releases, the limited 7′’ labours of love that don’t have a PR office behind them, the strange and the noisy and the noisy and the strange. The lonely and the rum. You know the sort of stuff.

I’ll go shopping at the weekend and find some of my own, but in the meantime if anyone out there is putting out such a single, or knows someone who’s doing so, you’re most welcome to send me a copy at the Plan B office. It doesn’t have to be vinyl, it can be a CD or download or even a lovely old cassette.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Thursday, September 21st, 2006
(4 Comments)

yes, we have an unabashed pop band on the cover. no, this does not betoken a change in direction (wait till you see who’s possibly, probably fronting November…)

Posted by kicking_k on Thursday, September 21st, 2006
(14 Comments)

i’ve been watching a lot of j-pop videos and it started me thinking about the state of pop here… i don’t follow the charts at all closely, but check stuff out via the internetz etc and certainly don’t hate on decent product (though my tastes err more toward american R&B). i can usually be relied upon to defend good mainstream music - and also its hypersexualization and bling but…

…but j-pop - and by that i’m mostly thinking of Ayumi Hamasaki (Ayu) & Hikaru Utada (Hikki) - operate on a very different wavelength… Hikki has recently contributed a song and my favourite video of the year (‘Passion’) to the Kingdom Hearts game - wearing a cremasterish pseudo-biological gown and dancing with a cast of eerily-veiled drummers and dancers - and Ayu’s video history is littered with incredible identity shifts - from the batgirl princess of ‘ourselves’ to the preening ghost of ‘alterna’, the fun fur sex poodle (and part-time military dictator) of ‘ladies night’ to the extremely goosebumpy me & my doppelganger of ‘rainbow’… (Ayu’s vids are also more likely to recall the recent resurgence in Japanese horror films with some pretty unsettling moments). a la…

i saw a new Hikki video tonight - ’sakura drops’ and it’s about as far out as i’ve seen - aestheticised psychedelia with plants and animals morphing into one another in unbelievably saturated colours…and it all seems so much more, well, imaginative than promos i’m seeing here - where videos often seem materialist wish fulfilment more than anything else (scene one: x arrives at hot party, scene two: y in hot car, scene three: z in bedroom with hot girls/boys…) everything seems geared toward stressing the brand identity, as it were, or trying to sell the life of a star to its audience. very aspirational.

there are j-pop videos that do this - i love Namie Amuro, but she has been guilty, especially recently (although the austere old school japanese cliches of ‘ningyo’ more than make it up)… but the examples above go so far out their way to be deeply, defiantly, magically unreal…

i do wonder if a culture so visually focused on anime isn’t a big part of this - whereas only still (relatively) expensive films can afford genuinely incredible FX, anime is always limited only by the ideas of its creators… video games, too. hmm.

Posted by kicking_k on Monday, September 18th, 2006
(No Comments)

ok, so this is one of those first posts people put up on blogs before getting distracted by mobile phone downloads, or glittering cursors, or spending entire afternoons correcting the format of the tags on their iPod, or i dunno, teaching an aibo to hump legs or something equally post-fun.

oh, i know what they always say - they always say: “is this working?” or “test.” and then “test test.” and then nothing, nothing for days, months and years - all these dead blogs shed by live people ’cause it briefly felt like something they shd do, and it wd save on emails, or they really needed somewhere (public) to vent, but they never got time, and lost their password, and anyway, they sit in front of their MySpace page and click refresh to see if they’ve got any comments from the top eight they kind of like, or scour eBay for vintage dresses, or - perhaps even - scan randomized hack musing like this.

test.

test test.

Posted by kicking_k on Friday, September 15th, 2006
(No Comments)

To accompany the Osaka feature in Plan B’s September issue, a sort of You Tube vidiography touching on a lot of the acts who’ve played a role in the evolution of Osaka noise from past to present. God bless YouTube. Viewer discretion advised.

Hanatarash, featuring EYE from The Boredoms (1983)

Hijokaidan (not work-friendly)

Incapacitants, live in Fukushima

Masonna, live at The Boredoms’ own venue Bears in Osaka (1992)

Masonna, live in Osaka (2)

Maruosa, live in Zaragoza

Doddodo, live in Zaragoza

Links

Renda Records (Maruosa’s label, releasing Gulpepsh, Doddodo, aaaaa, etc)
Addadat (UK home of Doddodo and Ove-Naxx)
Gulpepsh’s site (CD-Rs, ace T-shirts)
Midi-Sai (key Osaka festival)
John Harte (Osaka’s premier photographer, author of Zero City and Misona Days, and one-half of Pig & Machine)

Posted by Louis Pattison on Thursday, September 14th, 2006
(No Comments)

So today, Miss AMP’s cat, Katrina Payne, went to the great cattery in the sky, aged 18 human years. Since Amp moved into a non-cat flat, earlier this year, Joe, Emma and I were Katrina’s main carers and warm laps, and we miss her very much.

It’s funny how we all miss her so. I have shared a house with Katrina the cat since early 2004 (having met her a few years previous to that), but Joe and Emma only met her recently. She wasn’t a cute kitten. Most of the time she was a mad old smelly noisy murderous bundle of black and white fur and scary claws. But she had an enormous capacity for affection and no sense of decorum whatsoever, and that made her cute and awesome right up until her most geriatric phase.

I think Katrina was born in Kent, but mostly lived in London. She was a pioneer of the Shoreditch Twat movement, living in fashionable Brick Lane in the late 90s, where she scandalised dinner parties by running around the live-work space with half-dead rats clamped between her jaws. She moved to Hackney a few years later, and lived with a cat called Foot Foot. They had lots of fights, but eventually got along. She spent her last few years living with me and Miss AMP, and then with her official favourite man Joe, with whom she formed a weird and instant bond. She also became special friends with Emma, who gave her lots of soft food and hugs towards the end.

Katrina especially loved boys, and people with allergies to her (in that order). Boys with allergies were even better - those who dared to come round to visit would find Katrina canoodling with them before they’d even had chance to sneeze. She appeared numerous times on the Flickr group entitled Indie Rock Boys With Cats, and could often be found sitting upon the chests of unsuspecting gentleman callers, stretching one paw out in a lascivious manner and yowling seductively into their faces.
When not trying to steal our male friends, she liked to catch rats, rip their heads off, and leave the heads at the bottom of the stairs as a present, with the bodies a few feet away. Like most cats, she also liked listening to Kraftwerk, putting her head into pint glasses and milk jugs, and nesting in piles of A4 paper. Unlike many cats, she enjoyed the sound of the violin, and also slide guitar, harmonium and musical saw.

She had gorgeous white paws and a white tip on her tail and a really fluffy belly. Coming back from work today and hearing neither her claws clumping down the stairs nor her querulous little ‘feed me!’ voice made me feel empty and sad.

Here is a photo of her and Miss AMP, her proud owner and best human friend.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Saturday, September 2nd, 2006
(5 Comments)