Tuesday 29 December 2015

Just because...

My favourite films watched in 2015

1. Frank

2. Ex-Machina

3. Birdman

4. It Follows

5. Lucy

6. Nightcrawler

7. The Martian

8. Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck

9. Miss America

10 The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2


Favourite novel read in 2015
The Physiognomy by Jeffrey Ford

Some of my favourite short stories I read this year (I include links where the stories are available to read online):

Little Men With Knives by L.S.Johnson  (Crossed Genres)

Queen of Lakes by L.S.Johnson (published in Fae, World Weaver Press)

The Husband Stitch by Carmen Maria Muchado (Year's Best Weird Fiction Vol.2)

The Air We Breathe Is Stormy, Stormy by Rich Larsen (Year's Best Weird Fiction Vol.2)

There Used to be Places by Louis Rakovich (Dark Lane Anthology Vol.2)

The Redfield Girls by Laird Barron (The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All)

The Stone by Rebecca Llloyd (Mercy)

Northwest Passage by Barbara Rodin (Northwest Passages)

Getting There & Away by Austin Bunn (The Brink)

Hungerford Bridge by Elizabeth Hand (Errantry)

Sing by Karin Tidbeck (Tor.com)

The Wilds by Julia Elliott




Music

Silence Yourself by Savages
Too often these days rock or indie rock or however you want to describe this kind of music is so careerist and sanitised that it makes me want to vomit.  What happened to the days when this kind of music was made by the marginalised, the outsider, the weirdo?  These days it feels like it's been co-opted by upper-middle class kids enjoying a gap year as indie-rock stars, and the music they make leaves me cold. I'll take a Kurt Cobain, a Morrissey, a Siouxsie Sioux, a Robert Smith, or a Johnny Rotten, over your Chris Martins of this world any day of the week.

Savages' music feels like a return to the days when music was intelligent and angry.  I initially dismissed this album as some kind of weird hybrid of Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees but the more I listened the more it drew me in.  My favourite tracks: She Will, I Am Here, and Shut Up.

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