you know exactly what I mean

WATCHING:

old favourites

bureaucratic nightmares

WANTING:

saturday night dancing (holla, Jingle Jangle)

a Janelle Monae Sydney sideshow, please please please

he has very good hair

"Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. devour old films, new films, music, books, painting, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: 'it's not where you take things from - it's where you take things to'."

 - Jim Jarmusch

you mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling

I’ll concede to the critics that there’s no character development to speak of, and it sure doesn’t pass the Bechdel test, but there’s still a lot to like about Inception. Chiefly: this guy, in a suit.

Oh Joseph Gordon-Levitt, it’s nice to know my early teen crushing out was entirely justified! (no really, I used to watch 3rd Rock From The Sun for him) Underage hustler, highschool gumshoe, co-conspirator in mindfuckery, not to mention metaphor laden stoner Jesus, is there anything he can’t do? JGL grew up dangerously cute and unfairly talented. Let’s just concentrate on the incredible singing and dancing and not mention (500) Days of (B)ummer - apart from this little wonder:

in between the sheets

things go better with Mayer Hawthorne

in this town they love a drunk

Forget New York, Vegas is the town that perfected self-mythologising. It has everything: mafia beginnings, impeccable showbiz connections, obscene amounts of money being gambled on architecture and business schemes - not to mention on the official tables of its commerce. Showgirls, strippers, neon, 24 hour diners, 24 hour everything. Young Elvis romancing Ann-Margret, Elvis again in his Rhinestone years. Fitzgerald was wrong about American lives having no second acts - he was just born too early to bear witness to the post-war edifice that rose out of the Nevada badlands.
Vegas created a whole new visual language, a uniquely American mid-century vernacular with its skyline of glittering lights and advertising. Tom Wolfe celebrated its pioneering signage and dubbed it the "super-hyper-version", the epitome of a whole new style of life in America. Hunter S Thompson founded his personal legend there, emerging from the desert in his apple red convertible in search of the Great American Dream (attorney in tow). It is the city of pop culture conflations, grand illusions, Free Enterprise. You can't argue Vegas went commercial, that was always the point.

I know it's tawdry and glitzy and despite all the money flowing in and out it is cheap, and not at all the place I think of when I hear Gram Parsons lamenting his losses at its uncaring hands. I know gambling is not as glamorous as endless Bond films would have me believe (he got to have his own Vegas adventure in Diamonds Are Forever, trysting with the fabulously named Tiffany Case and indulging in other favoured vices: car chases and besting various alluringly dangerous girls) I don't really want to be married by an Elvis impersonator. But I do wish I could have seen Las Vegas in its early days of self-creation, when the Ratpack and their shady associates owned its fledgling dreams and the novelty of all those neon lights hadn't quite worn off.

some people really know how to have a good time

out past midnight

My internet connection is running on the kindness of strangers these days and is therefore kind of unreliable, as a result I've tended to come to news late. Alex Chilton (a man rightly immortalised by The Replacements) and Andy Hummel both died this year and it breaks my tiny heart. I heard about Alex's death pretty much immediately, because he was one of those legendary guys you can guarantee 9 out of 10 Pitchfork writers would have been fighting over for the right to pen his eulogy. Paul Westerberg wrote a fitting one.

Founding member Chris Bell died in 1978, having quit the band after their first record, so part of the Big Star idea has been long gone. But I only found out about Andy by accident, a week or two ago. And I while know that all good things come to an end, and that even teenage favourites aren't (particularly aren't) immune to mortality, the whole thing feels so damn final. Even for something that to all intents and purposes ended years ago, before I was led astray into the disreputable world of rock & roll, before I knew that Memphis produced more than Elvis and well before I had fallen in love with the opening chords to September Gurls.

Listen to this song and tell me it doesn't crush your heart a little that three quarters of Big Star are dead.