G’day teem.
I got up, fresh as a daisy, ready to start on this at the extremely well-thought-out and early time of 9.30, and then procrastinated for an hour with my general hygiene. My neck is shaved, my face is moisturized, my beard is oiled and my hair is middle parted (to middling results I’m afraid).
Last night I drank Moscato and watched Jake Ghylanhal overact in the very bad Velvet Buzzsaw. Which honestly, was the only thing I really signed up for with that, so I kinda got what I paid for.
Look at this guy! Look at him go! He sure is acting right there.
In that scene, he’s yelling at Rene Russo that people keep dying cause of art. It’s not great. Though there are some very cool art-related CGI effects involved! Watch em below so you don’t have to spend two hours getting to them like I did. (jump to 2.39 for the best one)
Daily Album:
COSMONAUT- Pickle Darling
Pickle Darling is another 95bfm discovery. The final track off their album Everything Is Flammable was being played pretty much non-stop for a hot second over there and for very, very good reason.
This is, without trying to sound too dismissive, extremely high-quality bedroom pop. I know that sounds like a diss but it’s not, I promise. This album has all the incredible energy of jamming out by yourself, for yourself late at night in your bedroom. Full of plinky banjo strings and odd sci-fi keys, twisting and turning digitized vocals, this is an album that feels designed to get lost in. It’s a swimming pool that allows the listener to lie on their back and drift, pondering the stars.
The above video for the opening track Achieve Lift! is a perfect example of Pickle Darling’s (Ōtautahi based multi-instrumentalist Lukas Mayo) humble and wholesome idiosyncrasies. An astronaut (old high school mate Vena-Rose Lennane! G’day Vena!) builds a treehouse-style spaceship and blasts off, before eventually crashing on a planet to find Mayo twanging on a banjo. The stars and planets of this particular space are crude doodles. Inside her ship, Vena’s instruments are rotoscoped to give their movements a colourful pop.
The world that Mayo creates with this album is in one way, interstellar, but in another, firmly planetary. Mayo sings about the world just a few feet from their bedroom rather than the majesty of the stars. On Boundless My Heart they earnestly sing about pushing through the anxieties that pulsate at the back of their mind while verbalizing day-to-day problems. They left their sandwich out last night. They need to buy a new vacuum cleaner. On Everything Is Flammable, my personal favorite track, they ignore a horrifying outside world that makes them terrified to even get out of bed, wishing on simple stars, dreaming about blankets that’ll reach their feet and the strength to make healthier meals.
This juxtaposition of fear and joy makes the whole album sing. It’s a true delight from beginning to end. It’s the only album this year that had me laying down in bed just staring at the ceiling, listening to it over and over again. The whole thing is only about a half-hour, so you know, it’s easier to do than a few other albums but still. A body of work that’s able to whisk me away like that I think is worth that sentiment and your time.
It might be my favourite album of the year so far.
Daily Art:
LE BAUME D’ACIER (THE BALM OF STEEL)- Louis Boilly. 1823
This piece hangs amongst a few other pieces I have hanging above my bed. It’s not the crown jewel of my lil art collection, that honour belongs to the enormous piece of concept art from How To Train Your Dragon 2- specifically that one scene where Hiccup and his mum are watching all the dragons dance around that one stalactite. You know the one.
But this piece holds a very special place in my heart.
Part of French artists Louis Boilly’s series of 96 works “Les Grimaces” the sheer chaos imagined in this painting speaks to me on such a primal level that I can’t quite explain. Looking at this thing, I can feel the frustration of each man, the dentist, and the dentee, as clear as day. I can hear the scrambling to get out of his seat, the other instruments getting thrown to the ground and the weird noises escaping from the back of the dentee’s throat.
I bought this in Amsterdam on day 2 of a two and a half week Contiki I did back in 2019. It lived at the bottom of my suitcase, long forgotten. Oh, happy day, the joy I felt when I found these two kooky dudes again. She’s a beaut of a painting and I love her to bits.
Daily Song:
I HATE SEAGULLS- Kate Nash
This is a hot take I know. But, for my money, and I’m willing to put a lot of cash on the table here, this is the most beautiful love song ever written.
Yeah, yeah I know that Pitbull’s International Love exists. I know. But there’s something particularly soul-rending about the very deliberate and simple style of storytelling at play here.
Here, you have a singer whose life is filled with small, mundane problems. The little things that get us down, that make the day-to-day so unbearable sometimes. Nits. Seagulls. Grazing your knee. All these small things add to something big. A feeling of isolation from the world around you. From the rude, ignorant bastards of the world who look down on you and won’t even give you the time of day. Leaving you alone with yourself and all the mistakes that you’ve made. All accompanied with the same simple, repetitive notes on an acoustic, sung in the same monotone melody.
But…
Then she introduces a friend. The guitar strings change up, deeper, and much more relaxed. The piano keys come in, like the wings of a bird, soaring overhead, perfectly complimentary. And then the strings come in. These slow, humble, delightful lil bits in the background that help stir all these pieces together. The singer isn’t monotone anymore, she’s all over the place. She’s quiet but there’s a joy to her voice now, as she tries all kinds of different singing styles, dancing through melody and swimming in the notes. All of the negatives are forgotten as her life is taken over by cream teas and ghost stories and days at the beach. The way the song progresses it’s as if you’re watching these two people from the very first day they meet, to the first date, to days and days of inseparability, to being separated, to returning and being closer than ever until the singer can barely contain the words “I’m in love with you”.
This song takes such a simple and magnified approach to a relationship that blossoms and blooms along with the music. You can’t help but feel like you’re seeing all the pillars that hold this incredibly rich and meaningful love even though you’re given very little details. It feels a privilege to hear the singer tell her partner how much they mean to her, despite her not being able to put it all precisely into words The beauty, for me, doesn’t come from long, detailed similies about your eyes being like the ocean or whatever the fuck. It’s the little stuff. It’s the knowing of your partner. It’s the sentiment of-
“I can't find the words to make it sound unique but,
Honestly, you make me strong!”
Daily Movie:
BASKET CASE- Dir. Frank Henenlotter
Basket Case is a fucked up little film about cinema’s most fucked up little guy. A true schlock fest of the best kind, best watched when you’re either extremely hammered or extremely sober, surrounded by a hundred people who are just as hammered/sober as you.
It follows Duane, a cutie patootie with one of the largest haircuts ever put to film, who comes to New York City for the first time with nothing but a basket. Holing up in a grubby hotel, he and the fucked up little mutant puppet Belial, who lives in the basket, go on a revenge-murder spree. But things get complicated when Duane falls in love and Belial wants to stick to the mission. Ruh-roh!
Made for $35,000 in 1982 by first-time filmmaker Frank Henenlotter who shot the whole thing on 16mm, the whole thing is a wonderfully bad, sleazy, seedy, grimy little b-picture with bad effects and worse acting. Every single character feels like the main character in their own right, stealing as much screen time as they possibly can before fucking off into oblivion. I saw this flick at The Hollywood Avondale a few weeks back on film and I gotta tell you, no film I have ever seen has ever communicated the sheer grossness of New York City in the ’70s and 80’s better than this one. The very screen looked filthy.
And Belial, oh my god Belial, quite possibly one of the greatest movie monsters of all time. The dude looks like an actually well-designed movie monster puppet that melted in a microwave. This fucked up little ball of flesh is horrifying to look at, just so, so disgusting in every way, which makes it so fun to watch him (very obviously with a guys hand up his butt) leap onto his victims and rip them to shreds in a few horrifyingly gory scenes. This is another film that I bought the DVD of the second I got home. And to my surprise, there’s three of them! All going for like 20 bucks in one DVD?? A fucking bargain baby. I love this flick.
Daily Panel:
DC PRIDE #1- “You’re the reason I came out.”
Last June was a particularly historic pride month for comics, as both DC & Marvel both dropped their first-ever Gay Pride specials- supersized anthology issues dedicated to highlighting the company’s respective queer characters, all written and drawn by some of their more prolific queer creators.
We’ve come a long way since 1992 when Marvel had the Canadian Mutant Northstar scream “I am gay” at the top of his lungs in the middle of a fight.
DC’s book included favourite story out the whole bunch “He’s The Light Of My Life!” written by Sam Johns and drawn, coloured, and lettered by Klaus Johnson, Dave McCaig, and Tom Napolitano respectfully.
It’s a simple story, following the first Green Lantern, Alan Scott, and his adult son Todd James Rice aka Obsidion. Alan, having been a superhero since the 40’s (don’t ask how he’s only like 50, comic continuity is confusing as hell) only very recently came out of the closet to his kids and is now taking the chance to have lunch with Todd and his boyfriend Damon, meeting Damon for the first time. Despite their estrangement, Alan takes the opportunity to tell Todd about his first love, a train conductor who he could only be with while they on the rails. How he died in the same crash that led to his superpowers. How alone he felt afterward. How he had no one to mourn with. And how isolated he felt from everyone else in the community considering how illegal simply existing as a gay man still was at the time.
Now, Todd and Alan haven’t always had the best relationship, Obsidion’s backstory getting retconned into being more and more troubled and existing a villain for a number of years, his father Alan his arch-enemy. Since Todd’s redemption, they’ve never quite seen eye to eye. Which makes the following moment of connection pack more punch than any super book released all year. This quiet moment of confession where Alan, having spent the whole story using very shy and understated language to describe his queerness, who’s spent a large period of his life pushing his son away- admitting that it was Todd’s coming out and all the joy and growth that came with it, that inspired Alan to do the same.
It’s beautiful and touching and refreshing to see, especially in the superhero genre- a genre dominated for too many years by hypermasculine straight male fantasy. To be able to fill in the margins of these two characters, which have existed since the 40’s and 80’s, makes their story so much engaging and these two characters so much richer.
For a pair of guys who can shoot green power bolts and control shadows, it’s remarkably human.
Daily Pic Off My Phone:
Here’s a pic that I saved to my phone at one point that brought me joy.
Today we have a Youtube ad for a minute and a half video by the channel King Mufasa, implying that Mufasa, the fictional lion from the movie The Lion King did not die like that film suggested but instead has been off somewhere in secret, getting absolutely yolked and playing videogames.
Daily FREE SPACE:
LATER ALLIGATOR- SmallBu Animation Studio & Pillow Fight
I have been following Lindsey and Alex Small-Butera, the Californian married animation duo since about 2012 with their animated web series Baman Piderman (more on those chuckleheads another day). Having worked in the medium for about a decade and a half now, these two are always cranking out some of the most gorge, smooth, and snappy traditional animation that I’ve seen in an online space. Also not online! They won an Emmy for their work on Adventure Time dammit! They make good cartoons!
This is all preamble to introduce their videogame Later Alligator, a collaboration with indie developers Pillow Fight. A fun, rompy, first-person click-and-point adventure game about your quest to figure out and stop the sweet alligator Pat from getting whacked by his large alligator family in Alligator New York City (that’s the name of the city).
While mostly made up of exploration and mini-games, this sweet short gem is top to bottom charm baby. Every single frame in this god damn thing is hand-animated! The visuals pop with such stylistic and unique flair it makes me sick with joy! The music slaps! The characters and dialogue are funny! Some of it is a bit millennial for some folk’s taste but I don’t care! Everyone’s an alligator! One of them is a big boy that’s scared of ghosts! It’s wonderful!
You can buy it on Steam or Switch and crank it out in an afternoon. I’m all out of flowery language, just watch the trailer dammit, it’s friggen good.
Nintendo Eshop- www.nintendo.com/games/detail/later-alligator-switch/
Steam- store.steampowered.com/app/966320/Later_Alligator/
Daily Good Vibe:
I dug an old keyboard out of my brother’s closet and downloaded an app and am trying to learn! I know middle C and the chords up to G that come after it! The app made me play shitty pop music but I think it’s working! I understand what a treble clef is! It’s to mark G cause it looks like a G (i’m sure it has other uses but for now this is the thing I’m focusing on cause it feels like an achievement). No timing yet but we’re working on it. We all gotta keep working on something.
xxx
-Mattie Bee