Pack

Dungeon delver's pack
Stuffed with supples, then emptied
To make room for gold

Fire of Love by The Gun Club

OK, this was an interesting one. The opening title track was fairly standard post-punk, but then the second track added some slide guitars and turned out to be a cover of a Robert Johnson blues number, given considerable energy. The rest of the album continued to surprise, mixing blues, roots and punk, putting me in mind of the energy of stripped down Western Swing but with lyrics about sex, heroin and shooting people.

There is one very inadvisable use of the N word, but front man and writer Jeffrey Pierce was mixed race so we can probably let that one slide, as well as waiving the usual caveats about white people playing the blues. There was enough here to keep me listening and also wanting to explore some more of their albums - Patricia Morrison was part of the band later on, as a bass player pre Sisters of Mercy.

Cowpunk-tastic!

It : Chapter Two

Picking up the story 27 years on from the previous film, we now see the members of the Losers Club as adults, each with apparently successful lives on the surface, except for Mike who stayed behind in Derry as a humble librarian. However, it quickly becomes clear that the memories of It are not buried far beneath the surface and they will have to do battle once more.

Picking up on my thoughts about the first chapter, this is one of Stephen Kings more complex novels, and genuinely scary to read. However, the film adaptation suffers from being over literal in the use of CGI and putting the monsters in full view diminishes their effect. One scene in particular struck me as an example of this - one character is revisiting her childhood home, now inhabited by an apparently sweet little old lady. As she digs into the past we catch disturbing glances of the old lady in the background, moving in ways that are just … wrong.

However, the building tension of the scene is shattered by the hilarious appearance from a darkened kitchen of what can only be described as a ten foot tall zombie gollum creature with pendulous breasts lurching around the apartment, smashing up the furniture. Similarly, the final encounter with the It creature feels like a video game boss battle where you have to run around a central arena looking for a hiding place.

The final act also goes on much too long. There is a running joke about the character of Ben, a successful author, being unable to write a good ending, and Stephen King himself makes a cameo appearance as a junk shop owner to acknowledge the point.

Overall, it was OK, but I think that I have got to stop expecting adaptations of King’s works to be anything other than workmanlike.

 

Cricket

A day on the green
A picnic and the gentle sounds
Of village cricket

Homework by Daft Punk

They’re not daft and they’re definitely not punks, so what are they? Beneath the robot masks and costumes they certainly have an ear for a killer dance beat, working on these tracks separately in home studios before assembling them into an album. Some of the beats sound a little generic, but they get the job done and the end result was hugely influential on the European dance scene.

The only problem that I have with this is that it doesn’t really work as an album, in the way that their final release Random Access Memories does. Each of these tracks stands alone as something that you’d dance to at a sweaty rave, high on life (or on certain other substances, to taste). Like all the best dance music, they open with classic bass drum / snare patterns, building and layering sounds on top, and throwing in the occasional cheeky sample and glitchy beat drop for lolz.

Robot-tastic!

Crisis on Infinite Earths

Back in the day, comic books were straightforward things. Superman or Batman would fight crime, tie up the bad guys and finish the story in twenty or so colourful pages. However, it wasn’t long before the writers realised that these characters lived in the same universe and so they could boost sales by having characters show up in each others comics as crossover stories. They would also reboot characters from time to time, to reset the numbering and retell the origin stories for a new generation of readers as well as moving the time period forward so they wouldn’t have to explain why the characters had been around since the 1940s with getting any older.

By the sixties and seventies things got even more complicated with multiple versions of characters running around, explained away by convenient parallel universes that could be visited by the super speedster Flash running fast enough to jump between them. Thus the original Golden age characters could co-exist on one Earth, with the newer versions on another, as well as multiple other alternate realities (including one where the Nazis won the war). To say it was a convoluted mess is something of an understatement.

In 1985 writer Marv Wolfman pitched the idea of collapsing the multiverse into a single Earth to give a fresh start, as well as writing the ultimate crossover featuring just about every version of every DC character, even if just for a single panel background cameo.

The high concept is that a character called the Monitor has been watching the multiverse from the beginning of time in anticipation of the moment where he needs to summon a band of heroes (and villains) to counter the ultimate threat of his opposite number - the Anti-Monitor from an anti-matter universe.

Needless to say say there are plenty of fights and twists as the multiverse collapses, with many characters meeting their doom including the iconic cover picture of the death of Supergirl although presumably she got better in time for the recently released film. This is an essential series for comics nerds with great artwork by George Perez showing hundreds of different characters ranging from cavemen to cowboys, and super beings of every variety.

Leaves, Hot Tea

Arthur wants hot tea
The nutrimatic machine
Gave him dried leaves, boiled