I'm a big fan of Bryn Jones/Muslimgauze, and his politics aren't really as dependly deplorable as you suggest — he was a strong supporter of European anti-Soviet dissidents, and first came to Palestinian politics through opposition to Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. I've found no indication, either, that he was a…

I really liked Anna Meredith's 'Jet Black Raider' from a few years ago - 'Unicron' was an especially delightful song with a real late 70s Krautrock feel (at least to me).

This is a great idea for a feature! I don't watch a lot of movies or TV, but I do listen to a lot of music, for both leisure and professional reasons. So, this past week, and this weekend, my plans for listening have included and include:

Felte is a really great label - Ritual Howls, ERAAS, and White Hex all put out some solid records through them. They definitely have a specific sound and aesthetic, but that's hardly a complaint from me.

There were still thousands and thousands of Armenian, Greek, and Jewish citizens in Istanbul in 1955 - enough that they were targeted and attacked by rioters armed and led by the Turkish secret police as part of the dispute between Turkey and Greece over Cyprus. There is still a large population of Armenians in…

And just to kill all the idols: Orwell was all too happy to provide MI5 with a list of fellow writers, friends, and colleagues he suspected were communists - including several who he thought must be communists because they were homosexuals. Which really made me reconsider his status as a 'leftist' hero, anti-Stalinist…

Those movies are really fascinating in hindsight, and the fear of the Japanese 'economic miracle' was everywhere - the evil Japanese boss in Back to the Future 2, Blade Runner and most obviously House of the Rising Sun. It also inspired a bunch of batshit literature and policy books, including my favourite: life-time…

The conversation between Smaug and Bilbo worked well because it was a nearly straight adaption of the same pages of the book - capturing Smaug's majesty and Bilbo's cunning very well. The subsequent fight scene (invented whole cloth for the movie) between the dwarves and Smaug was the moment I checked out. Cartoonish…

Marvel Comics used to own the (comic) rights to the Monolith from 2001. Not sure if they still do, but Jack Kirby did the comic adaption. And so, like Dracula and Godzilla, the Monolith is a canon part of the Marvel Universe. Which is another layer of confusion on top of the Celestials, Kree and everyone else who…

Ignoring all the terrible fantasy and sci-fi novels I bought as a teenager because the cover looked 'cool,' my best 'bought for the cover art alone' purchase was definitely Godspeed You Black Emperor's Yanqui U.X.O. at the local record store. I had just turned 18 and was becoming politically aware (in the shouty…

I guess you'll have to go back to the 18th century for all the lovingly detailed descriptions of bodily functions in Tristram Shandy, Jonathan Swift and Daniel Dafoe (in the later it's people dying of plague, but that's a kind of function…)

Still digging through Pierre Broue's The German Revolution, 1917-1923. I read about two chapters a month. It's an interesting book about one of the most important revolutions (that failed) in history, but damn is it long. And honestly: I have a decent amount of patience for reading about the (historical) minutiae of…

All good movies indeed (and strangely almost all films my dad made me watch with him before I thought 'old' movies were interesting). A good companion to The Enormous Room is anarchist-turned-Bolshevik-turned-exile Victor Serge's The Birth of Our Power, a lightly fictionalised and very well written account of his…

I've been on a several years spree of watching old prison drama movies from the 30s. The Big House, 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and some of the more forgettable ones (Men of San Quentin, Prison Train, Invisible Stripes.. Of course, I study the time period academically, so my…

I'm most familiar with Darius Jones, Quantic, Kamasi Washington and BadBadNotGood - the latter just colloborated with Ghostface Killah on an album. There's probably a lot more that I'm missing, of course. Hope that is a start!

There's a genuine jazz revival going on right now - that was a welcome surprise.

Wholeheartedly agreed. I work at a not for profit community radio station, and we get about three hundred new releases a month (a small fraction of the actual output, of course). Although there is always a fair number that are generic, uninspired or mediocre, I'm hard pressed every week to shortlist the best…

Some of his concepts are about half way down the page here: https://waynebarlowe.wordpr… You can kind of see how EA got to the Lucifer and Charon in the game - the weirdness is just watered down, and honestly, they are not the best Barlowe designs, even compared to his other Inferno work. Unfortunately, I can't find…

Rick and Morty is must see for my girlfriend and me. We just watched Macross Plus on Blu-Ray - a OAV I watch at least twice a year but it was here first time. I THINK she liked it. It's certainly nice in Blu-Ray!

Great book selections. I guess I should get around to checking out Brook' volume from that series - I liked his work on the Ming state well enough when I read it years ago, and honestly the scholarship on Ming China and the early Yuan is bewilderingly vast, even just in English, that a good introduction would be…