My Top 5 Gigs of 2009

Why Top 5? Why not a Top 10? As a lapsed Discordian I was going to knock out a rather elaborate, mind-bending explanation based on the 'Law of Fives' (which, according to Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! Trilogy, claims that everything in the universe can be connected to the number five if you try hard enough), but that looked too much like hard work.

Instead, I'll just tell you the truth: I opted for a Top 5 because I didn't go to very many gigs in 2008.

Five of 'em, though, were fucking awesome...



5. Bearsuit, Latitude Festival 2008 - Pete Ashton introduced them to me in 2007 when I saw them play at Birmingham's Sunflower Lounge, and their Latitude set was great fun. They're tremendously silly, ridiculously catchy and highly recommended. Jupiter Force, indeed.

4. Foo Fighters, Wembley Stadium, 7th June 2008 - I mentioned it in passing here, here and here but never got around to writing a proper review. Oh, well. I've never been what you might call a Foo Fighters fan; I have, however, always been an unrepentant Led Zeppelin fan. Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones surprise guest appearance on stage - and their storming rendition with Grohl & Co of Zep classics Rock and Roll and Ramble On - made this a gig to remember.

The Foo Fighters were quite superb, too.

3. Buzzcocks, Latitude Festival 2008 Sweaty, sticky, stomping fun in a marquee at 2am isn't everyone's idea of a good time. It's my idea of a good time and I wrote about it here.

2. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Birmingham Carling Academy, 5th May 2008;
Grinderman, Latitude Festival 2008 I'm cheating a bit, here - I suppose this should be two separate entries - but this is my list so my rules rule. I wrote about the former here and the latter there.


1. Tom Waits, Le Grand Rex Paris, 24th July 2008 - No shit, Sherlock. A bit of a foregone conclusion, this. A Tom Waits gig will always, by definition, be the the gig of the year. That's just the way it is.

I attempted a reconstruction of the gig here.

Top 10 Films of 2008 to follow.

Top Ten Commandments

It's embarrassing to admit this, but we're into the third week of January and I still haven't cobbled together one of those obligatory end-of-the-year lists for 2008. I can't begin to explain how bad this makes me feel.

These lists have become such a staple of the blogosphere that each and every one of us feels obliged to complete one each and every year. You know the sort of thing: My Top 10 Albums of 2008, My Top 10 Films of 2008, My Top 10 Bloody Top 10s of 2008... each one a highly subjective attempt to reduce the year's cultural and artistic highlights into an ascending or descending sequence of chart positions. It is a dull, arduous and thankless task that we're forced to do on an annual basis. To put it another way, it's the blogging equivalent of completing a tax return.

According to some sources, the first year-end Top 10 blog post appeared as far back as 1995, when blogging pioneer Zeppo Connery posted his groundbreaking Top 10 of Dodgy Flash Animation Shorts on a CompuServe bulletin board. This was remarkable for a number of reasons, not least of all because his list was actually compiled prior to the launch of Macromedia Flash and the subsequent wave of late-90s dodgy Flash animation shorts.

Of course, year-end Top 10 lists were in existence long before the advent of blogs and even the Internet. Newspapers and magazines have used them for many decades as a means of filling column inches while staffers spend Christmas with their families. Even the music industry has been known to utilise a similar methodology, regularly using 'Top 10s' to track the sales of records over a given period.

According to some sources, however, this tradition of compiling year-end Top 10 list dates back to ancient times. Recent discoveries about the the Mayan Civilisation of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica suggest that their people were decatheistic, that is, while a veritable plethora of Gods and Goddesses were available for worship, only ten of them were ever taken seriously at any one time. This 'Top 10' was updated annually, but since the Mayan year was considerably longer than the Gregorian year the process was a lot less bothersome.

This phenomena also seems to have a precedent in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The recent discovery of an apocryphal biblical text suggests that the Ten Commandments, previously believed to be delivered on stone tablets on Mount Sinai, were actually updated on an annual basis:

"And the Lord said unto Moses: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife and neither shall thou covet thy neighbour's house, thy neighbour's ox or thy neighbour's chart position. And thou shalt not kill shalt be a new entry at number 9, whilst thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour shalt still be a non-mover at number 8."

Of course, to the modern-day blogger, none of this offers any reassurance. Any failure to reduce the year's artistic and cultural highlights to a sequence of highly subjective chart entries can result in dire consequences. If you don't knock out a Top 10 Albums, Top 10 Films or even a bloody Top 10 Top 10s of 2008 you can lose your licence, be exiled from the blogosphere or even find yourself stripped of your hard-earned Technorati points.

I'd better get my finger out, then.

BBPM?

From The Hollywood Reporter:

TORONTO -- "Jeopardy!" host Alex Trebek is set to moonlight on the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. as host of the reality competition series "Canada's Next Prime Minister."

Canadian-born Trebek, who got his start at the pubcaster, will share the stage March 18 with three former prime ministers as they field pitches from four would-be politicos before choosing a winner.

Last month, the CBC got into hot water after admitting to breaking contestant recruitment rules and contacting political organizations to invite former young political candidates to compete on the series.

The CBC has sold "Canada's Next Prime Minister" as a format to the BBC.

Italics mine, as is the jaw on the carpet.

The Inauguration

I have a confession to make.

It's not an easy thing to admit to. In these rheumy-eyed, cynical times it can be considered dreadfully unfashionable, politically naïve and more than a tad suspicious. In certain circles it is regarded as an early indicator of the onset of water on the brain. However, at the risk of losing my friends, my credibility and even my credit rating I have to come clean:

While listening to President Barack Obama's inaugural address today I found myself experiencing an overpowering sense of optimism.

There. That wasn't so difficult to say.

George is Wrathful

How bizarre.

The Seinfeld season 8 DVD boxset came through the post this morning. I'm a big fan of Seinfeld, and used to avidly watch it on BBC2 during the 90s, but I never saw much of the last two seasons due in no small part to erratic BBC scheduling. This evening Clare and I watched the first disc worth of episodes including season 8 opener - The Foundation - which I'd never seen before.

By way of a set-up, the fiancée of self-proclaimed 'Lord of the Idiots' George Costanza died at the end of season 7 in a rather tasteless manner. She'd accidentally poisoned herself after licking the toxic gum on a batch of cheap envelopes that were to be used for their wedding invites. Needless to say, George bought the envelopes.

Season 8 opens with her funeral, and - in light of this week's sad news about Ricardo Montalbán - I was rather suprised to find that the fist episode contained numerous references to his finest hour, Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Golf Stream

Lils has joined an after-school golf club at her infant school where she and her five year old pals will soon be learning the arcane arts of pitching, putting and wearing a Pringle v-neck. She's tremendously excited about it.

Lils was talking to Clare and me about this, and I said, quite innocently: "Wow, Lils - at the age of five you're learning to do something that I've spent thirty-eight years trying to avoid."

"What's that?" said Lils. "Work?"

The line was delivered with precision comic timing. I was never that good.

Ricardo Montalbán, 1920-2009

Oh God, not again.

Only a day after I wrote a post about the late Patrick McGoohan, I now find myself writing about another cherished actor who has sadly passed away. Like most unrepentant fanboys, I'll always remember Ricardo Montalbán for his portrayal of my favourite screen villain, Khan Noonien Singh. However disillusioned I might have become with the franchise over time, Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan remains one of my favourite guilty pleasure movies, and that is due in no small part to Montalbán's incendiary performance.


Montalbán played Khan on two occasions, in the 1982 movie and in the 'Space Seed' episode of the original Star Trek series (which, ironically enough, I watched over Christmas for the first time in years as Clare had bought me a Season 1 DVD boxset). In non-Star Trek circles he was probably best known for playing the white-suited Mr Roarke in the 70s series Fantasy Island.


Like McGoohan, he had a long life and career - his first film role was in 1943 and his last was in 2006s CG animated flick, The Ant Bully. However, despite the fact he was multi-talented, had an amazing screen presence and exuded ridiculous amounts of natural charisma, as a young man he never got the leading roles he seemed almost genetically predisposed to play. Of course, this was the 1940s and 50s, and back then racial equality wasn't exactly high on Hollywood's agenda.





At the time, Montalbán was one of only a handful of Hispanic actors working in Tinsel Town, and on those rare occasions when a movie featured a Latin American protagonist, a North American A-lister would normally get the role. As much as I love the film, Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958) is a good example of this: we can only wonder how different the film would have been if the Mexican cop protagonist was played by a Latino actor like Montalbán instead of Charlton Heston.





To say that Montalbán delivered the greatest performance ever to grace a Star Trek movie may sound like I'm damning him with faint praise. Far from it. Any actor who could convincingly portray a genetically advanced, physically intimidating superman at the age of 61 (without, I might add, any prosthetic enhancements), was a talent to be reckoned with. The New Yorker's legendary film critic Pauline Kael - who never suffered fools gladly and could hardly have been described as a convention-going Trekkie - had this to say about Montalbán's Wrath of Khan performance:

"Montalban is unquestionably a star in 'The Wrath of Khan' (and his grand manner seems to send a little electric charge through Shatner). As a graying superman who, when foiled, cries out to Kirk, 'From Hell's heart, I stab at thee!,' Montalban may be the most romantic smoothie of sci-fi villains. Khan's penchant for quoting Melville and Milton (which goes back to 'Space Seed') doesn't hurt. And that great chest of Montalban's is reassuring. He looks like an Inca priest. He's still champing at the bit, eager to act: he plays his villainy to the hilt, smiling grimly as he does the dirty. Montalban's performance doesn't show a trace of 'Fantasy Island.' It's all panache; if he isn't wearing feathers in his hair you see them there anyway. You know how you always want to laugh at the flourishes that puncuate the end of the flamenco dance and the dancers won't let you? Montalban does."

Ricardo Montalbán - 25th November, 1920 – 14th January, 2009.

God, I hate it when my blog turns into a bloody obituary column.