Seems like me feeling shitty and the wide wicked world of politics have come to dominate this blog recently so time to get back to a long neglected facet, art. So here's your three:

dark renaissance

I'm out of weed at the mo, which is always super shitty, but despite the temporary absence of my long time green lady friend I'm feeling surprisingly chipper. Could this be to do with the parcel I found awaiting me upon my return home from work today?

The greatest band in the world, creators of the soundtrack to my life, the almighty Electric Wizard, have recently rereleased much of their back catalogue. The few tracks I've needed to complete my almost exhaustive collection have long since eluded me, existing only on super rare vinyl or even homemade demo cassette tapes.

Thankfully however these ultra rare tracks have finally been released as bonus tracks on these latest CDs. They've also released the CD I'm listening to now, Pre Electric Wizard, basically the demos of the three bands (Lord of Putrefication then They Grief Eternal and then Eternal,) that gradually developed into Doom Chapter, who later changed their name to Electric Wizard.

What this amounts to is the equivalent of a couple of new Electric Wizard albums and I am absolutely made up! It doesn't really matter that almost no-one out there has a clue what I'm talking about here, the point is that art, the right art for you, can make life worth living.

Huge doom riffs and even a Black Sabbath cover, fan fucking tastic!

renaissance

Saw an absolutely amazing piece of cinema recently called Renaissance. Now I've written before about Aldous Huxley and his background: his father's side were scientists, including Charles Darwin I believe, while his mother's side were successful artists of their time. The combination of so called opposites created, I fell, an absolutely amazing bloke with a unique view on the world.

Learning this has since given me a great enthusiasm for the combination of seemingly opposing things. Renaissance is an example of such a combination and it works so, SO well. A Hollywood plot with fast cars, guns and cheese; yet set in Paris with lots of moody, film noir smoking in the dark and beautiful, wistful landscapes and oh yeah, it's animated.

Now before the word cartoon looms into your mind let me assure you have never seen animation like this. No lines, no colours, NOTHING but black shapes and white shapes interwoven. As clumsy as this sounds the characters produced are the most realistic animated people I've EVER seen.

Better even than the bodies in Ghost in the Shell, my anime expert friend agreed with me when I said that I suspected the weird animation style somehow leaves gaps in the detail just the right size for your brain to fill in, lending it it's weird air of being so obviously abstract while simultaneously utterly convincing.

He also took the words out of my mouth when we left the cinema and he turned to me and said, "that was more Sin City than Sin City." Putting it much better than I could have, he'd put his finger right on it.

The best way to describe this amazing style, (just go and see it for gods sake!) is to compare it to the artwork in Frank Miller's Sin City graphic novels, also favourites of mine. Although I thought the film adaptation of Sin City was ok it's a shame it was made simply because now no-one's going to fund another version using this technique.

Now as it happens I quite enjoyed the plot of Renaissance, having as it did more depth than you might imagine at first. even if I hadn't however, i would have happily just sat there and looked at it for two hours, (and no, I wasn't stoned at the time ;) )

I left the cinema with that wonderful feeling that the previous couple of hours spent in the dark had actually added something to my mind and left a subtle change in me. Go see it, it kicks ass, and if you're still in this mindset, which i just don't get, that animation is just for kids and Japanese people maybe it's about time you joined the 21st century.

dark

One of my favourite, and most repeatedly watched, films of all time is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It is another example of a beautiful combination creating something which is so much more than the sum of its parts. This time however it's a combination of my favourite things:

One of my all time favourite writers, (HST RIP) and that's a very short list, believe me; one of my all time favourite directors, Terry Gilliam is an actual genius and creator of magical things; and one of my favourite actors, Johnny Depp is terrifyingly convincing as the Doc having lived with him for a while to learn the role, (lucky bastard!)

A glance at the list of books I've read this year then might give you a clue as to why I was so excited about A Scanner Darkly. Not only another of my all time favourite writers, (PKD RIP) but one of my all time favourite books.

Throw in another of my all time favourite directors, Richard Linklater's Slacker stunned me as a kid and his more recent Waking Life was an absolute delight. Some more great actors, (great in their own particular niche anyway,) and I was expecting something very special.

I guess I have to say from the start that, unlike Fear & Loathing, A Scanner Darkly was not a perfect translation of book into film. To be fair to Linklater though the I believe the following three things to be true:

it was yet another beautiful, unique Richard Linklater cinema experience in its own right,

it couldn't have been done any better,

PKD books just cannot be translated into films,

What I love about PKD, all time master of the headfuck, are the seemingly endless scope of his ideas. While this film was a pleasure to watch I highly recommend reading the book first as the whole thing is much more powerful in print.

An undercover narc investigating his own cover persona while taking a drug that splits the brain is something that only PKD could come up with. Throughout the novel a sens eof fraying sanity builds and builds creating at once a chilling social commentary and a very personal portrait of isolation and the path to madness.

The plot twists back and forth, inducing in the reader the same confusion, fear and loosening of the grip on reality as the narrator describes. I actually reeled as i read the last paragraph, it's the only word for it, he quite literally blew my mind.

Now in order to be true to this truly great work of literature, the film would have to be so long and so dark and so hard to follow that it would be unwatchable.

What Linklater has created instead is a visually stunning film that is at once delightfully funny, while still communicating that horrendous tension and sense of despair. The journey is lighter and shorter, and nowhere near as confusingly twisted, but it's great none the less.

Linklater has employed a similar, (the same?) technique here as with Waking Life wherein the film was recorded normally but then the individual frames were painted over to produce a completely arresting hybrid of animation and live action.

Read the book, watch the film, listen to music, go to an art gallery, guys, seriously, go get some art, I really believe it's what we're here for.