happy halloween

Many tricks and treats to you all.

best present ever™

Love & Rockets, Eightball, Amphigorey 1 and 2, Stray Toasters, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and a beautiful sketch book, from my own personal Patron of the Arts. So rad.

most traumatising evening ever

Re-reading The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things then watching Threads.

All in all, a fun-time party evening.

listen to the silence, let it ring on

So after months and months of waiting, finally Control is in cinemas, and I had myself a ticket for the special screening and Q&A with director Anton Corbijn at the Curzon Soho (yay!)

I'm sure the film doesn't need much of an introduction as I've rambled on about it before on here, but as imdb has it, it's "A profile of Ian Curtis (Riley), the enigmatic singer of Joy Division whose personal, professional, and romantic troubles led him to commit suicide at the age of 23." Except it was more than that.

The film was just beautiful. There are some images that are just stuck in my head - the scene where they're recording 'Isolation' in particular, and when Debbie Curtis comes home to find Ian's body (not that the audience is ever shown, as we linger on the outside of their terrace house once Debbie has gone in), and is crying and sobbing for help in the street, I actually got goosebumps. Or perhaps that was just when they cranked up the air conditioning.

The acting was spot-on, Sam Riley and Samantha Morton were amazing. I loved the film and want to see it again.

However. The guy next to me laughed too loudly at totally inappropriate and not-funny moments (to the extent that I started to wonder if he maybe knew the actor/s involved and had some weird private joke going on), which really bugged me (so I'm a cinema purist, so sue me).

And then there was the Q&A. This seemed like a golden opportunity: see the film I've been dying to see and get to hear the director talk about it after. Now maybe I'm a little more aware of how questions are asked now I've conducted a few interviews, but the guy hosting would make a lengthy statement about some aspect of the film and then basically just leave room for Corbijn to give some kind of yes-or-no answer - so it's to his credit that the director managed to reel things out some. Then there was the audience. People were all trying to be way too "Hey look at me, I know technical shit about film, I'm so clever; were you trying to demystify the legend of Joy Division??" (to which Corbijn replied "Errr no?"). It's just disappointing that he was there for us to grill and no one came up with any truly interesting or original questions (myself obviously included, but I didn't stick my hand up and ask an inane one just for the sake of doing so. Perhaps I should have).

But the film was still great. And I'm not even going to mention The Killers' cover of 'Shadowplay'. Oy vey.

yay for my friends!

It's always nice to read sweet things influential websites have to say about your friends. Pitchfork had the following to say about the lovely boys of Ivy League and the video for their song London Bridges, featuring a bunch of our friends in NY and made by the one and only cryingboy:

Video: This Is Ivy League: "London Bridges"

When Brian Howe reviewed "London Bridges" almost exactly a year ago, he commented that Ivy League were "working the same seam of homely beauty and prematurely autumnal sentimentality" as the Whitest Boy Alive and Peter Bjorn & John. That description still holds, but in the interim, a lot has changed: Ivy League have added a This Is to their name (a previous group by the same name threatened Ivy Litigation), signed to Twentyseven Records (new album scheduled for March 2008), and finally made a video for "London Bridges". Directed by artist Dan Estabrook, the clip creates and sustains a soft-focus weirdness, borrowing all the elements you'd expect from a postmillennial Chad & Jeremy-- blazers, bicycles, merry-go-rounds, a park in autumn-- while adding a few new flourishes-- women in animal costumes, gently evocative use of color and pattern. Alex Suarez and Ryan Blackinton croon their crisp harmonies, finishing each other's sentences and riffs, nearly symmetrical as they perform atop their pedestals for the animal woman.