mixtape (march 2009)

The thicket that exploded
Black Dice “Street Dude”
Little Girls “Venom”
Richard Hell “Blank Generation”
Deerhunter “Nothing Ever Happened”
Crystal Stilts “Prismatic Room”
Crocodiles “I Wanna Kill”
Handsome Furs “All We Want, Baby, Is Everything”
Public Image Ltd “Annalisa”
David Bowie “I’m Waiting For The Man”
Dum Dum Girls “Brite Futures”
The Mayfair Set “Already Warm”
Vivian Girls “Surfin’ Away”
The Yardbirds “Stroll On”
The Black Lips “Drugs”

Deeper into movies: Just around the same time when many dudes around me are making peace with the fact that Liverpool FC won’t be taking the English title this season (some having made that contention earlier of course), I caught the latest Terence Davies film Time and the City (2009), the British filmmaker’s Proustian documentary about his hometown Liverpool. Davies is the greatest living British filmmaker, in my opinion, and the soot-flecked portrayal of working class consciousness that characterized his two greatest movies (1988’s Distant Voices, Still Lives and 1992’s The Long Day Closes) is evident in the barbed, revealing commentary (Davies did the voiceovers himself) accompanying the reels of vintage archival photos and celluloid footages used in Time and the City, along with some of the most hauntingly evocative use of music you’ll find in the cinemas these days (never mind that this is one filmmaker who hates the Beatles). Most potent is the weight of memory’s darkest and most fiercely perseverant contraptions that seems to be wired into every frame of Time and the City, Davies’ artistry clearly having a much more powerful effect than any of the chance-generated ambiguities of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (which I happen to quite enjoy as well). And well if David Fincher had made a more punk-ass version of Benjamin Button, then this latest mixtape might well serve as the soundtrack.