If you keep people guessing, don't be upset when they guess wrong...
Christmas this year has been a wash. with the exception of an hour of sobbing for Dr. Who on the 25th I've spent days either in bed, on the couch under a duvet, sneezing my brain out, choking on phlegm and feeling wretched. This was written a while ago, but I've only just got it together to post, and with the year officially dying tomorrow Phoenix style I thought now was the appropriate time to post. And my football team just got bounced from the NFL playoffs because the officials screwed up. Ok, with a glad heart and healthy(ish) lungs I present what I strive every year to deliver:
Event of the Year 2013
2013 felt very much like a George Kaplan of years when it came to major events. Lots of minor ones, but nothing (either positive or negative) that made everyone look up and go “WOW/WTF”.
Case in point with the birth of another British royal, the chances of them ascending to the throne in my lifetime utterly unlikely unless someone abdicates, typhoon Haiyan blitzing the Philippines, Edward Snowden blowing the whistle on the NSA, Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s drug admissions and the hoo-ha about 1200 dead Syrians that may or may not have been poisoned by sarin.
Egypt was so eager for the good old days of 2011 they had another coup, this time the Islamists getting kicked out by the army. Sri Lanka tried to prove to the world that it hasn’t slaughtered thousands during its ongoing suppressing of the Tamil Tigers by hosting the Commonwealth summit and the world held its collective breath as a meteor crashed to earth detonating somewhere over London.
Sorry! Somewhere over Chelyabinsk in Russia. As one broadcaster mistakenly reported. It’s easy to get those two places confused, they look remarkably similar…
Obama tried to get Obamacare off the ground. Which he did, sort of. Everyone in the UK continues to get reamed by the BIG SIX when it comes to energy consumption. Matt Smith announced he was hanging up his sonic screwdriver. The Boston Marathon made global news for all the wrong reasons. My annual fee for my professional nursing licence shot up from £76 to £100 with no obvious benefit. Mylie Cyrus made her daddy very proud at the VMA. And whiles the rest of Europe was drowning in floods and rainstorms England had a pretty decent summer for six weeks this year. Nice and hot, went to work in shorts at 7am, rare I know.
I think 2013 suffers from desensitising and a difference of perspective. Unlike 2011 (Arab Spring) and 2012 (UK Olympics) the bar is now so high in the “WOW/WTF” stakes that anything less than awesome/tragic just isn’t considered massive news. Next year is a World Cup & Winter Olympics year. Whether those two events bring about anything big, although the both have already made headlines, the former with the amount of fatalities occurring as they try to get the stadia ready on time and the latter for the host country’s opinion that all LGBT people are evil, no one can say. Maybe something concrete will happen in Syria, maybe we’ll be still at war in Afghanistan, or maybe the world will end. I hope it doesn’t, cos as “last years of humankind” go, 2013 was a bit of a damp squib.
Sporting Event 2013
Superbowl 47.
And for reasons other than football.
Pitting the favoured 49ers against the bully-boy Ravens, the 47th game would be special. Returning the game to New Orleans, a city that hadn’t hosted the thing since ’02 and had endured a gutful of tragedy in the meantime, it didn’t go according to plan from the offset.
With the 49ers favoured by 4 the world watched as the Ravens took a 21-6 halftime lead, extended to 28-6 with the opening kickoff of the second half returned all the way for a touchdown. This had happened shortly after Beyonce had shaken her thang! Telling everyone you had to “put a ring on it” in front of a hundred million people watching worldwide.
And then BOOM: massive power failure lasting almost 30 minutes. And when the lights do come back on the Raven momentum is exhausted and the 49ers roar back. In the end the Ravens win, just, but later many players would say that the powercut was orchestrated by the suits that run the league. Fearful of the favourite being blown out and desperate not to lose the audience and the sponsors with it they yanked a plug out to level the field.
Of course the league denies this, but I for one wouldn’t put it past them; and more than that it indicates a level of distrust, brewing to outright hatred of the men who run the NFL from the players who play. A new labour agreement was signed less than three years ago but it wouldn’t surprise me if the two sides clash again fairly soon. Massive fines for petty offenses, questionable safety rulings, lip-service explanations on safety in general all leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. The suits say the players aren’t forced to play. But they are the best players in the game, if they quit the product quality would nosedive, which given what a cash cow the NFL is to America, is it something they can really afford to throw away?
Honourable Mention: Chicago beating Boston in the NHL Stanley Cup finals. Thankfully denying Beantown another championship while they still hark on about how disrespected they are as a city.
Film of the Year 2013
Now You See Me
Yep, a crime caper about 4 infamous magicians takes the top spot. Why? Because it has very few serious flaws and grades out higher across the board than everything else I saw this year. Nothing is amazing but everything is good or very good. The script, the score, the action scenes, the pace, the length (a bladder friendly 140 minutes) and the reveal at the end, well the last one stumped me but then I still think magic is real so hey ho!
Given the genre its longevity may be questionable; and if you do read it backwards then you do wonder how the mastermind was able to pull all the strings from such an obvious position, but to me it was smart without being patronising, the bad guys were genuinely bad (banks, insurance companies that refused to pay out) and it was shot in New York very close to the Chinatown markets where I stayed back in ’12. So yeah, film of the year. I hope there won’t be a sequel.
HM: World War Z. Primarily for not being the utter clusterf**k everyone was hoping for. Heck, it’s the reason why I went to see it.
Loosely (I cannot stress that word enough) adapted from the excellent Max Brooks novel it features Brad Pitt as the retired home-dad who just happens to be the only person the UN can call on when a global outbreak of zombies starts. It has a stupid 12A rating which made any gore traditional with the genre forcefully omitted by camera angles or cutaways. I’m waiting for the 15 version. Pitt’s performance is meh. It includes none of the great bits from the book. But it has broken even (an impressive performance) at the box office and they are thinking of a sequel. Not sure why mind you. With everyone immune to the zombies where can the story go?
HM: Hunger Games 2 (aka Catching Fire). Massive improvement on the first one due to much better direction. Jennifer Lawrence, fresh off her Oscar win brings more feeling to Katniss and the inclusion of rounded, damaged characters Finnick and Johanna is a real plus.
Film First Seen in 2013
Django Unchained
Tarantino does slavery. Following Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino does the Holocaust) we see Quentin’s take on the southern states of the US during the mid to late 1800’s. Filled with typical crisp post-modern dialogue and enough historical errors to fill a phone-book we follow Christophe Waltz in another Oscar winning role as a bounty hunter who takes a black slave under his wing to find his bounty only to team up with the man, played rather well by Jamie Foxx, and help him find his enslaved wife and free her from a tyrannical plantation owner.
Not exactly Inception here I admit but Waltz’s performance is worth a viewing on its own. And a hilarious scene when a racist posse face a dilemma whether to wear hoods or not on a forthcoming raid brings tears to my eyes every time I see it. Hard to digest in places because of the subject matter, the constant use of the N-word, the chains, physical cruelty and sheer utter meanness but Tarantino does show us the absurdity of racism, both during the explanation of author Alexander Dumas and when a Tennessee plantation owner is having problems explaining the difference between a slave and a free man. In the end it all goes to hell in typical Tarantino style, the blood spattering every flat service in a twenty foot radius. But he doesn’t lose control of it, and unlike Basterds, where Brad Pitt doesn’t really do much here the three leads of Foxx, Waltz and a fantastically evil Leonardo DeCaprio as the plantation owner really keep the dialogue tight.
Not his best work, it still doesn’t equal Pulp Fiction, but still worthy and some of the funniest violence since Butch ran over Marcellus Wallace at a crosswalk.
Album of the Year 2013
Graffiti on the Train by The Stereophonics.
Really an award by default as I didn’t stump up top-dollar prices for up to date albums this year; the only other album I waited to buy was TATE’s long awaited third offering Such Hot Blood. Which while being blessed with the fabulous song ‘Bride & Groom’ was patchy overall.
Not so the Welsh lads who put together an album I’m still playing from soup to nuts a good 2 months after buying it. The title track brings the band full circle back to the messy business of young lovers and one being run over by a train (echoes of ‘Local Boy…’ the song that made their name all those years ago), but ‘Indian Summer’ has some fantastic lyrical contrasts, the riffs chainsaw in ‘Catacomb’ and the bittersweetness of ‘Nobody’s Perfect’ top everything off quite nicely and lighten the load at the appropriate moment.
HM: Such Hot Blood by The Airborne Toxic Event. Third album not as catchy as the first two. Maybe suffering from overproduction and too much interest from people more interested in shifting units than crafting longstanding gems. It feels almost too polished. Good for radio, which was never the band’s strength which in turn worked in its favour with its fanbase.
Album First Heard in 2013
Fight Like a Girl by Emilie Autumn.
I got introduced to Autumn by boychik, one of the guys in work and while her most recent album (2012) isn’t her most ambitious work (she hails from a classical background) it is definitely the most polished. Drawing from Dresden Doll influence, bloody cabaret, Victoriana, Steampunk, the London Torture Garden and her own first-hand experiences of institutionalisation (she was committed for a time a few years prior following a breakdown) FLAG is both tragic, liberating and self-parodying. Favourites of mine include the fortitude building ‘One Foot in Front of the Other’, the vaudevillian ‘Girls! Girls! Girls!’ and the empathic ‘Goodnight Sweet Ladies’. Very much a sad-clown of an album, you hear her laughter behind the lyrics but you know those chuckles have come at a cost you’ll never know as a listener, and the tears that accompany them have more depth than she intentionally plans to share.
HM: Wrecking Ball by Bruce Springsteen. Bought on New Year’s Eve last year it missed the cut for Album of the Year. Bruce’s first full album without Clarence his saxophone player, who died last year and it shows. But it’s still vintage Boss. Screaming about the greed of the rich, the Wall Street traders, the resilience of the American Dream (‘We Take Care of Our Own’) and the mortality of us all (‘Land of Hope and Dreams’) the latter is especially poignant as it features the only sax sound in the album, and as the last song on the LP you suddenly find yourself aware of its omission as the chords belt out. The title track rings especially true for Giants fans, as well as an in-joke against the diabolical Mylie Cyrus song of the same name.
HM: Battle Born by The Killers. Their fifth album and deeper than most but lacking the cream of Day & Age. Lyrically superior in many places but thematically and chord wise nothing new to write home about.
Song of the Year 2013
Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke
The song of the summer in the UK; played on the Bristol radio stations for over a month before some bright spark actually listened to the lyrics and almost had a coronary. Now the entire second verse is omitted, although I can’t really blame them, singing “..I got something big enough to tear your ass in two!” is never going to get you laid in a club at 2am. Though it might, maybe I’m going to the wrong clubs
Oddly the third verse, dedicated to Thicke’s personal admission of his insanely high marijuana usage is uncut. I guess the censors rank sexual assault above drug usage. As well they should!
The cherry on the top of this horribly catchy but equally horribly misogynistic song was the VMA performance with Thicke and the latex clad (or partially clad) Mylie Cyrus. It introduced twerking to the English lexicon and broke apart Cyrus’ engagement of four years to actor Liam Hemsworth, but apparently the organisers felt it suitable to air, even though many of the great and the good flocked to Twitter soon after to voice their righteous indignation and disapproval. I suspect we just saw the VMA equivalent of Janet Jackon’s boob, only time will tell if America recovers.
HM: Bride & Groom by The Airborne Toxic Event. Best song on the album by miles. A short three minute affair about a broken relationship it has some wonderful lyrics (“.. like a beating of the drum in a parade of the insane”) and would have won the award hands down any other year.
TV Show of the Year 2013
Ray Donovan
Billed as the Californian version of the The Sopranos, this original drama starred the delectable Liev Schreiber in the title role as a man who “fixes” things for powerful people running the wheels of the Hollywood machine. Schreiber’s surly laconic charm would be enough solo but combined with Katherine Moennig’s typecast as the frank lesbian assistant and Steven Bauer as ex-Mossad muscle the trio are riveting to watch on their own, regardless as what’s going on around them. And there’s a lot. Cameos from James Woods and Jon Voight, the latter as Schreiber’s estranged father who just got released from prison after being framed by Ray make almost every scene watchable. And Paula Malcomson as his Southy wife, desperate to leave her Boston vowels behind her but none of the attitude proves that it’s not just the guys who can deliver cutting lines and violence when needed.
Naturally the body-count is insane, but not overly gratuitous. The only exception was the fate of a paedophilic priest and it was obvious that the creators knew they had a pass concerning that death. A second season is incoming in the new year.
HM: The Following. Loses by a whisker. Kevin Bacon stops doing EE ads long enough to take the lead in this VERY bloody original series. James Purefoy is a serial killer caught by Bacon years before but when copycat crimes start appearing the local FBI tap Bacon for help. From then onwards keeping Purefoy in prison is like trying to give a cat a bath. And the copycats turn out to be an army of serial killers, and trying to distinguish friend from foe ratchets the tension every episode.
Book of the Year 2013
The Twelve by Justin Cronin
Was there ever any doubt? The second book of the trilogy, the first book (The Passage) narrowly missed the award last year but this time there would be no such mistake. Following on where the first book ended it continued its split timeline narrative, jumping between modern day 2014 before shooting into the future and following the fate of the remaining colony survivors as they try and make sense of the world they virtually stumbled across after living in isolation their entire lives. Peter, Michael, Lish, Hollis, Sara, Greer and the seemingly immortal Amy are still trying to hunt the remaining 12 vampires that destroyed the world, but when Sara gets snatched at the end of the first book we get a healthy dose of how people try to recreate the broken Pre-Viral world and the cruelty they inflict in the process. Drawing comparisons to the camps of WW2, as well as a more recent nod to the jihadists of fundamental Islam and their own motivations I was scared to read this book at times because it wasn’t clear if everyone was going to get out alive. But they do. Mostly. The tension unbearable in the final chapters as the seconds tick down and Amy’s plan both succeeds and fails simultaneously, along with Lish’s heartbreaking ordeals and the unhappiness that they all feel as they go their separate ways once more. It’s upsetting that there is only one book left, entitled The City of Mirrors it’s due out next year.
HM: Perdition by Ann Aguirre. Keeping in the same universe as her Grimspace novels Aguirre takes the story over a hundred years into the future where one of her characters, the clone Jael, is shipped to a prison ship on the grounds that no one knows what to do with someone that lethal who can’t die. Working with three different first-person perspectives Perdition is an interesting first book of a single-location universe. The usual prison conditions only worse and with perpetual fighting between the 6 rulers of the place Jael’s the ace that can tip the balance. A good thing? Probably not.
Gone But Not Forgotten 2013
Nadezhda (Nadia) Popova (1921 - 2013)
In a year unfortunately stuffed for choice my first one would always be my definite. Nadia Popova was one of the last remaining Night Witches, the women of the 588th Soviet bombing corps who had the misfortunate to fly in the rickety WW1 biplanes harassment bombing the Germans during the GPW.
The only main player in the war to let women see front line combat the USSR realised what it needed was more bodies to help when it got invaded and having 100,000,000 women at its disposal went all-in in order to survive. Sniping, driving tanks, working on submarines, intelligence women proved they could do just a good job as the men when push came to shove.
Inspired by Marina Raskova, the Russian equivalent of Amelia Earnhardt, she joined a gliding school just before the war began and then got sent to combat training. Being women in a men’s world they got lumbered with virtually nothing in terms of equipment, but they turned such privations to their advantage, shutting off their noisy engines during bombing runs and gliding silently in to drop their payload. The whoosh of paper and wood and the chaos they caused made the Germans below call them “Nachthexen" or Night Witches.
After the war and the tumultuous political coups that followed the Witches were forgotten, their heroics painted over as the USSR, like other nations regressed and returned women to the home and flying schools. But recently in ’07 Popova was heralded by the Russian president for her actions during the war, so many remember what she and the women of the 588th did. I live in hope for the movie someday.
HM: James Gandolfini. The man who made Tony Soprano such an interesting character passed away from heart failure at the age of 51 in June.
HM: Nelson Mandela. Liberal, racial and political icon Mandela died earlier this month aged 95.
HM: Paul Walker. Life imitated cinema when the star of a series of movies about street racing was involved in a fatal car crash on his way to a charity event about road safety.
HM: Margaret Thatcher. Finally dying back in April; she put Ding Dong: The Witch is Dead back in the UK singles chart.
My Own Personal Tale of the Year 2013
Meeting up with friends I haven’t seen in three years.
This might seem anticlimactic I know, but like the George Kaplan nod it’s definitely been that sort of year. The friends in question I hadn’t seen since 2010, we all figured out it was sometime after April of that year. Since then two little ones have appeared on the horizon, making it three at the time, that total climbing to four following a successful delivery in October. It had been three years, and I was so nervous because three years can feel like a lifetime to some people.
And the second the three of us were together it was like the clock had rewound to ’06, and we were all smoking and chatting and sitting on the floor of a mutual friend’s apartment in Brixton. We went for brunch alongside the Thames, and we talked about life, and I tried to contribute as best I could. Being the odd one out when it came to children put me at a disadvantage in terms of experience but I didn’t feel, nor was I made to feel uncomfortable by the fact.
Staying at my friend’s for the night I got to meet her eldest, the only boy of the four, a very mobile 18 month old. Very nervous to begin with we took to each other like a house on fire, to the happy surprise of both my friends and myself. I have been at peace for a while concerning my chances of being a parent, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like children and I hope to be in the lives of all four of my friend’s children for many years to come. We also shared silly sayings, reminisced about conquests and achievements, showed off new tattoos, and told stories about work horrors that all nurses do when they get together (sex, poo and death; in no particular order). The following day we promised to get together in 2014 and hopefully we will do in July. I can’t wait, they’re my friends; the tug of distance works both a drawback and an incentive to continue to make the effort.
HM: Seeing my boys (The Pittsburgh Steelers NFL team) play in person. Any other year this would be #1 by a landslide. Seeing them play in Wembley, the atmosphere of British NFL is unique in the sense that fans flock together regardless of their allegiances. All 32 teams are represented there; faces are painted, and given the Steelers were playing many Americans flew in for the weekend from Pennsylvania. The Vikings were the home team and the stadium was decked in purple, the horns blasting whenever they scored or got first downs. In the end Pittsburgh lost when a last minute rally died but I didn’t really care. Just to experience the atmosphere, to talk to so many fans, even women from America who were decked out in black and gold and fiercely proud of their team was worth the price of a ticket alone. I won’t forget that day for a long time.
HM: Seeing New York in less than an awesome light. The city that never sleeps looked exhausted. Not the best holiday in the world there but an experience nevertheless.
HM: Tearing ligaments in my spine from T12 to L7. A month off work followed and my back is still weak to this day. I have a lot of exercises to do and have been lectured to stop acting like Atlas in work and thinking I can lift anything regardless of the weight.
HM: Reading The Invisibles: Apocalipstick. Fanny’s backstory continues to inspire. “Illuminated woman am I, says”.
So what happens now?
Well, in a few days it’ll be 2014. Ten years ago I had started my nurse training and would soon wind up hating every minute of it stuck in a post-Christmas fug working 12 hour shifts on an elderly male respiratory ward for three weeks. The only change came after that three weeks when I got shifted to the female side, and boy that was even funner. Now that hospital no longer exists. Torn down most likely, or turned into posh Zone 1 apartments priced at a zillion pounds a square foot.
And this year the hospital I currently work in will be discontinued. Making way for a new amalgamated Super Hospital for the region it will combine both NHS hospitals in the region to form one big one. Fewer beds, fewer theatres, less space, but more patients. I do not worry about such things. I can’t. If I did I wouldn’t be able to function. What happens will happen, I will either survive it or I won’t. The good news is I’ll still live on the doorstep of the new place, my apartment, should I ever want to sell/rent it would be at ground zero for anyone wanting a home who lived there, it is an opportunity should I ever decide to relocate.
In the meantime I will continue to plug Gray Horses. And work on its sequel.
One of the resolutions I have is to play more PS3 games that aren’t Madden. I’ve got my sights on the new 2013 Tomb Raider. Praised for being more empathic, the first in the franchise designed by a woman it loses the Pamela Anderson cleavage to tap its inner Katniss Everdeen. I for one can’t wait.
A holiday this year is unlikely; I’m not sure really where I want to go, and whether I can get the time off without selling my soul in work. Saving money works too, and it’s hassle free with the current saving situation I’m involved in.
I will turn 35. An age I never thought I’d reach back when I was a teenager. Heck, what teenager does think they’d been that old? You’re tempted to take the year off (so to speak) but that would be foolish. I’ll never have a year like it, I think it might be time to try new things, strangers and outsiders be damned. Who knows, maybe I’ll even surprise myself?
I hope the world doesn’t end next year, like I said, 2013 wasn’t the best 12 months in the history of man and it would be nice to go out with a bang. It would be nicer to not go out at all. These days are gravy to me, but that doesn’t mean I should let the current just let it carry me where it will. Be proactive Devi, you get more bang that way. And as Mickey Goldstein once said: “Go after him kid, go after him…”
Event of the Year 2013
2013 felt very much like a George Kaplan of years when it came to major events. Lots of minor ones, but nothing (either positive or negative) that made everyone look up and go “WOW/WTF”.
Case in point with the birth of another British royal, the chances of them ascending to the throne in my lifetime utterly unlikely unless someone abdicates, typhoon Haiyan blitzing the Philippines, Edward Snowden blowing the whistle on the NSA, Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s drug admissions and the hoo-ha about 1200 dead Syrians that may or may not have been poisoned by sarin.
Egypt was so eager for the good old days of 2011 they had another coup, this time the Islamists getting kicked out by the army. Sri Lanka tried to prove to the world that it hasn’t slaughtered thousands during its ongoing suppressing of the Tamil Tigers by hosting the Commonwealth summit and the world held its collective breath as a meteor crashed to earth detonating somewhere over London.
Sorry! Somewhere over Chelyabinsk in Russia. As one broadcaster mistakenly reported. It’s easy to get those two places confused, they look remarkably similar…
Obama tried to get Obamacare off the ground. Which he did, sort of. Everyone in the UK continues to get reamed by the BIG SIX when it comes to energy consumption. Matt Smith announced he was hanging up his sonic screwdriver. The Boston Marathon made global news for all the wrong reasons. My annual fee for my professional nursing licence shot up from £76 to £100 with no obvious benefit. Mylie Cyrus made her daddy very proud at the VMA. And whiles the rest of Europe was drowning in floods and rainstorms England had a pretty decent summer for six weeks this year. Nice and hot, went to work in shorts at 7am, rare I know.
I think 2013 suffers from desensitising and a difference of perspective. Unlike 2011 (Arab Spring) and 2012 (UK Olympics) the bar is now so high in the “WOW/WTF” stakes that anything less than awesome/tragic just isn’t considered massive news. Next year is a World Cup & Winter Olympics year. Whether those two events bring about anything big, although the both have already made headlines, the former with the amount of fatalities occurring as they try to get the stadia ready on time and the latter for the host country’s opinion that all LGBT people are evil, no one can say. Maybe something concrete will happen in Syria, maybe we’ll be still at war in Afghanistan, or maybe the world will end. I hope it doesn’t, cos as “last years of humankind” go, 2013 was a bit of a damp squib.
Sporting Event 2013
Superbowl 47.
And for reasons other than football.
Pitting the favoured 49ers against the bully-boy Ravens, the 47th game would be special. Returning the game to New Orleans, a city that hadn’t hosted the thing since ’02 and had endured a gutful of tragedy in the meantime, it didn’t go according to plan from the offset.
With the 49ers favoured by 4 the world watched as the Ravens took a 21-6 halftime lead, extended to 28-6 with the opening kickoff of the second half returned all the way for a touchdown. This had happened shortly after Beyonce had shaken her thang! Telling everyone you had to “put a ring on it” in front of a hundred million people watching worldwide.
And then BOOM: massive power failure lasting almost 30 minutes. And when the lights do come back on the Raven momentum is exhausted and the 49ers roar back. In the end the Ravens win, just, but later many players would say that the powercut was orchestrated by the suits that run the league. Fearful of the favourite being blown out and desperate not to lose the audience and the sponsors with it they yanked a plug out to level the field.
Of course the league denies this, but I for one wouldn’t put it past them; and more than that it indicates a level of distrust, brewing to outright hatred of the men who run the NFL from the players who play. A new labour agreement was signed less than three years ago but it wouldn’t surprise me if the two sides clash again fairly soon. Massive fines for petty offenses, questionable safety rulings, lip-service explanations on safety in general all leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. The suits say the players aren’t forced to play. But they are the best players in the game, if they quit the product quality would nosedive, which given what a cash cow the NFL is to America, is it something they can really afford to throw away?
Honourable Mention: Chicago beating Boston in the NHL Stanley Cup finals. Thankfully denying Beantown another championship while they still hark on about how disrespected they are as a city.
Film of the Year 2013
Now You See Me
Yep, a crime caper about 4 infamous magicians takes the top spot. Why? Because it has very few serious flaws and grades out higher across the board than everything else I saw this year. Nothing is amazing but everything is good or very good. The script, the score, the action scenes, the pace, the length (a bladder friendly 140 minutes) and the reveal at the end, well the last one stumped me but then I still think magic is real so hey ho!
Given the genre its longevity may be questionable; and if you do read it backwards then you do wonder how the mastermind was able to pull all the strings from such an obvious position, but to me it was smart without being patronising, the bad guys were genuinely bad (banks, insurance companies that refused to pay out) and it was shot in New York very close to the Chinatown markets where I stayed back in ’12. So yeah, film of the year. I hope there won’t be a sequel.
HM: World War Z. Primarily for not being the utter clusterf**k everyone was hoping for. Heck, it’s the reason why I went to see it.
Loosely (I cannot stress that word enough) adapted from the excellent Max Brooks novel it features Brad Pitt as the retired home-dad who just happens to be the only person the UN can call on when a global outbreak of zombies starts. It has a stupid 12A rating which made any gore traditional with the genre forcefully omitted by camera angles or cutaways. I’m waiting for the 15 version. Pitt’s performance is meh. It includes none of the great bits from the book. But it has broken even (an impressive performance) at the box office and they are thinking of a sequel. Not sure why mind you. With everyone immune to the zombies where can the story go?
HM: Hunger Games 2 (aka Catching Fire). Massive improvement on the first one due to much better direction. Jennifer Lawrence, fresh off her Oscar win brings more feeling to Katniss and the inclusion of rounded, damaged characters Finnick and Johanna is a real plus.
Film First Seen in 2013
Django Unchained
Tarantino does slavery. Following Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino does the Holocaust) we see Quentin’s take on the southern states of the US during the mid to late 1800’s. Filled with typical crisp post-modern dialogue and enough historical errors to fill a phone-book we follow Christophe Waltz in another Oscar winning role as a bounty hunter who takes a black slave under his wing to find his bounty only to team up with the man, played rather well by Jamie Foxx, and help him find his enslaved wife and free her from a tyrannical plantation owner.
Not exactly Inception here I admit but Waltz’s performance is worth a viewing on its own. And a hilarious scene when a racist posse face a dilemma whether to wear hoods or not on a forthcoming raid brings tears to my eyes every time I see it. Hard to digest in places because of the subject matter, the constant use of the N-word, the chains, physical cruelty and sheer utter meanness but Tarantino does show us the absurdity of racism, both during the explanation of author Alexander Dumas and when a Tennessee plantation owner is having problems explaining the difference between a slave and a free man. In the end it all goes to hell in typical Tarantino style, the blood spattering every flat service in a twenty foot radius. But he doesn’t lose control of it, and unlike Basterds, where Brad Pitt doesn’t really do much here the three leads of Foxx, Waltz and a fantastically evil Leonardo DeCaprio as the plantation owner really keep the dialogue tight.
Not his best work, it still doesn’t equal Pulp Fiction, but still worthy and some of the funniest violence since Butch ran over Marcellus Wallace at a crosswalk.
Album of the Year 2013
Graffiti on the Train by The Stereophonics.
Really an award by default as I didn’t stump up top-dollar prices for up to date albums this year; the only other album I waited to buy was TATE’s long awaited third offering Such Hot Blood. Which while being blessed with the fabulous song ‘Bride & Groom’ was patchy overall.
Not so the Welsh lads who put together an album I’m still playing from soup to nuts a good 2 months after buying it. The title track brings the band full circle back to the messy business of young lovers and one being run over by a train (echoes of ‘Local Boy…’ the song that made their name all those years ago), but ‘Indian Summer’ has some fantastic lyrical contrasts, the riffs chainsaw in ‘Catacomb’ and the bittersweetness of ‘Nobody’s Perfect’ top everything off quite nicely and lighten the load at the appropriate moment.
HM: Such Hot Blood by The Airborne Toxic Event. Third album not as catchy as the first two. Maybe suffering from overproduction and too much interest from people more interested in shifting units than crafting longstanding gems. It feels almost too polished. Good for radio, which was never the band’s strength which in turn worked in its favour with its fanbase.
Album First Heard in 2013
Fight Like a Girl by Emilie Autumn.
I got introduced to Autumn by boychik, one of the guys in work and while her most recent album (2012) isn’t her most ambitious work (she hails from a classical background) it is definitely the most polished. Drawing from Dresden Doll influence, bloody cabaret, Victoriana, Steampunk, the London Torture Garden and her own first-hand experiences of institutionalisation (she was committed for a time a few years prior following a breakdown) FLAG is both tragic, liberating and self-parodying. Favourites of mine include the fortitude building ‘One Foot in Front of the Other’, the vaudevillian ‘Girls! Girls! Girls!’ and the empathic ‘Goodnight Sweet Ladies’. Very much a sad-clown of an album, you hear her laughter behind the lyrics but you know those chuckles have come at a cost you’ll never know as a listener, and the tears that accompany them have more depth than she intentionally plans to share.
HM: Wrecking Ball by Bruce Springsteen. Bought on New Year’s Eve last year it missed the cut for Album of the Year. Bruce’s first full album without Clarence his saxophone player, who died last year and it shows. But it’s still vintage Boss. Screaming about the greed of the rich, the Wall Street traders, the resilience of the American Dream (‘We Take Care of Our Own’) and the mortality of us all (‘Land of Hope and Dreams’) the latter is especially poignant as it features the only sax sound in the album, and as the last song on the LP you suddenly find yourself aware of its omission as the chords belt out. The title track rings especially true for Giants fans, as well as an in-joke against the diabolical Mylie Cyrus song of the same name.
HM: Battle Born by The Killers. Their fifth album and deeper than most but lacking the cream of Day & Age. Lyrically superior in many places but thematically and chord wise nothing new to write home about.
Song of the Year 2013
Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke
The song of the summer in the UK; played on the Bristol radio stations for over a month before some bright spark actually listened to the lyrics and almost had a coronary. Now the entire second verse is omitted, although I can’t really blame them, singing “..I got something big enough to tear your ass in two!” is never going to get you laid in a club at 2am. Though it might, maybe I’m going to the wrong clubs
Oddly the third verse, dedicated to Thicke’s personal admission of his insanely high marijuana usage is uncut. I guess the censors rank sexual assault above drug usage. As well they should!
The cherry on the top of this horribly catchy but equally horribly misogynistic song was the VMA performance with Thicke and the latex clad (or partially clad) Mylie Cyrus. It introduced twerking to the English lexicon and broke apart Cyrus’ engagement of four years to actor Liam Hemsworth, but apparently the organisers felt it suitable to air, even though many of the great and the good flocked to Twitter soon after to voice their righteous indignation and disapproval. I suspect we just saw the VMA equivalent of Janet Jackon’s boob, only time will tell if America recovers.
HM: Bride & Groom by The Airborne Toxic Event. Best song on the album by miles. A short three minute affair about a broken relationship it has some wonderful lyrics (“.. like a beating of the drum in a parade of the insane”) and would have won the award hands down any other year.
TV Show of the Year 2013
Ray Donovan
Billed as the Californian version of the The Sopranos, this original drama starred the delectable Liev Schreiber in the title role as a man who “fixes” things for powerful people running the wheels of the Hollywood machine. Schreiber’s surly laconic charm would be enough solo but combined with Katherine Moennig’s typecast as the frank lesbian assistant and Steven Bauer as ex-Mossad muscle the trio are riveting to watch on their own, regardless as what’s going on around them. And there’s a lot. Cameos from James Woods and Jon Voight, the latter as Schreiber’s estranged father who just got released from prison after being framed by Ray make almost every scene watchable. And Paula Malcomson as his Southy wife, desperate to leave her Boston vowels behind her but none of the attitude proves that it’s not just the guys who can deliver cutting lines and violence when needed.
Naturally the body-count is insane, but not overly gratuitous. The only exception was the fate of a paedophilic priest and it was obvious that the creators knew they had a pass concerning that death. A second season is incoming in the new year.
HM: The Following. Loses by a whisker. Kevin Bacon stops doing EE ads long enough to take the lead in this VERY bloody original series. James Purefoy is a serial killer caught by Bacon years before but when copycat crimes start appearing the local FBI tap Bacon for help. From then onwards keeping Purefoy in prison is like trying to give a cat a bath. And the copycats turn out to be an army of serial killers, and trying to distinguish friend from foe ratchets the tension every episode.
Book of the Year 2013
The Twelve by Justin Cronin
Was there ever any doubt? The second book of the trilogy, the first book (The Passage) narrowly missed the award last year but this time there would be no such mistake. Following on where the first book ended it continued its split timeline narrative, jumping between modern day 2014 before shooting into the future and following the fate of the remaining colony survivors as they try and make sense of the world they virtually stumbled across after living in isolation their entire lives. Peter, Michael, Lish, Hollis, Sara, Greer and the seemingly immortal Amy are still trying to hunt the remaining 12 vampires that destroyed the world, but when Sara gets snatched at the end of the first book we get a healthy dose of how people try to recreate the broken Pre-Viral world and the cruelty they inflict in the process. Drawing comparisons to the camps of WW2, as well as a more recent nod to the jihadists of fundamental Islam and their own motivations I was scared to read this book at times because it wasn’t clear if everyone was going to get out alive. But they do. Mostly. The tension unbearable in the final chapters as the seconds tick down and Amy’s plan both succeeds and fails simultaneously, along with Lish’s heartbreaking ordeals and the unhappiness that they all feel as they go their separate ways once more. It’s upsetting that there is only one book left, entitled The City of Mirrors it’s due out next year.
HM: Perdition by Ann Aguirre. Keeping in the same universe as her Grimspace novels Aguirre takes the story over a hundred years into the future where one of her characters, the clone Jael, is shipped to a prison ship on the grounds that no one knows what to do with someone that lethal who can’t die. Working with three different first-person perspectives Perdition is an interesting first book of a single-location universe. The usual prison conditions only worse and with perpetual fighting between the 6 rulers of the place Jael’s the ace that can tip the balance. A good thing? Probably not.
Gone But Not Forgotten 2013
Nadezhda (Nadia) Popova (1921 - 2013)
In a year unfortunately stuffed for choice my first one would always be my definite. Nadia Popova was one of the last remaining Night Witches, the women of the 588th Soviet bombing corps who had the misfortunate to fly in the rickety WW1 biplanes harassment bombing the Germans during the GPW.
The only main player in the war to let women see front line combat the USSR realised what it needed was more bodies to help when it got invaded and having 100,000,000 women at its disposal went all-in in order to survive. Sniping, driving tanks, working on submarines, intelligence women proved they could do just a good job as the men when push came to shove.
Inspired by Marina Raskova, the Russian equivalent of Amelia Earnhardt, she joined a gliding school just before the war began and then got sent to combat training. Being women in a men’s world they got lumbered with virtually nothing in terms of equipment, but they turned such privations to their advantage, shutting off their noisy engines during bombing runs and gliding silently in to drop their payload. The whoosh of paper and wood and the chaos they caused made the Germans below call them “Nachthexen" or Night Witches.
After the war and the tumultuous political coups that followed the Witches were forgotten, their heroics painted over as the USSR, like other nations regressed and returned women to the home and flying schools. But recently in ’07 Popova was heralded by the Russian president for her actions during the war, so many remember what she and the women of the 588th did. I live in hope for the movie someday.
HM: James Gandolfini. The man who made Tony Soprano such an interesting character passed away from heart failure at the age of 51 in June.
HM: Nelson Mandela. Liberal, racial and political icon Mandela died earlier this month aged 95.
HM: Paul Walker. Life imitated cinema when the star of a series of movies about street racing was involved in a fatal car crash on his way to a charity event about road safety.
HM: Margaret Thatcher. Finally dying back in April; she put Ding Dong: The Witch is Dead back in the UK singles chart.
My Own Personal Tale of the Year 2013
Meeting up with friends I haven’t seen in three years.
This might seem anticlimactic I know, but like the George Kaplan nod it’s definitely been that sort of year. The friends in question I hadn’t seen since 2010, we all figured out it was sometime after April of that year. Since then two little ones have appeared on the horizon, making it three at the time, that total climbing to four following a successful delivery in October. It had been three years, and I was so nervous because three years can feel like a lifetime to some people.
And the second the three of us were together it was like the clock had rewound to ’06, and we were all smoking and chatting and sitting on the floor of a mutual friend’s apartment in Brixton. We went for brunch alongside the Thames, and we talked about life, and I tried to contribute as best I could. Being the odd one out when it came to children put me at a disadvantage in terms of experience but I didn’t feel, nor was I made to feel uncomfortable by the fact.
Staying at my friend’s for the night I got to meet her eldest, the only boy of the four, a very mobile 18 month old. Very nervous to begin with we took to each other like a house on fire, to the happy surprise of both my friends and myself. I have been at peace for a while concerning my chances of being a parent, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like children and I hope to be in the lives of all four of my friend’s children for many years to come. We also shared silly sayings, reminisced about conquests and achievements, showed off new tattoos, and told stories about work horrors that all nurses do when they get together (sex, poo and death; in no particular order). The following day we promised to get together in 2014 and hopefully we will do in July. I can’t wait, they’re my friends; the tug of distance works both a drawback and an incentive to continue to make the effort.
HM: Seeing my boys (The Pittsburgh Steelers NFL team) play in person. Any other year this would be #1 by a landslide. Seeing them play in Wembley, the atmosphere of British NFL is unique in the sense that fans flock together regardless of their allegiances. All 32 teams are represented there; faces are painted, and given the Steelers were playing many Americans flew in for the weekend from Pennsylvania. The Vikings were the home team and the stadium was decked in purple, the horns blasting whenever they scored or got first downs. In the end Pittsburgh lost when a last minute rally died but I didn’t really care. Just to experience the atmosphere, to talk to so many fans, even women from America who were decked out in black and gold and fiercely proud of their team was worth the price of a ticket alone. I won’t forget that day for a long time.
HM: Seeing New York in less than an awesome light. The city that never sleeps looked exhausted. Not the best holiday in the world there but an experience nevertheless.
HM: Tearing ligaments in my spine from T12 to L7. A month off work followed and my back is still weak to this day. I have a lot of exercises to do and have been lectured to stop acting like Atlas in work and thinking I can lift anything regardless of the weight.
HM: Reading The Invisibles: Apocalipstick. Fanny’s backstory continues to inspire. “Illuminated woman am I, says”.
So what happens now?
Well, in a few days it’ll be 2014. Ten years ago I had started my nurse training and would soon wind up hating every minute of it stuck in a post-Christmas fug working 12 hour shifts on an elderly male respiratory ward for three weeks. The only change came after that three weeks when I got shifted to the female side, and boy that was even funner. Now that hospital no longer exists. Torn down most likely, or turned into posh Zone 1 apartments priced at a zillion pounds a square foot.
And this year the hospital I currently work in will be discontinued. Making way for a new amalgamated Super Hospital for the region it will combine both NHS hospitals in the region to form one big one. Fewer beds, fewer theatres, less space, but more patients. I do not worry about such things. I can’t. If I did I wouldn’t be able to function. What happens will happen, I will either survive it or I won’t. The good news is I’ll still live on the doorstep of the new place, my apartment, should I ever want to sell/rent it would be at ground zero for anyone wanting a home who lived there, it is an opportunity should I ever decide to relocate.
In the meantime I will continue to plug Gray Horses. And work on its sequel.
One of the resolutions I have is to play more PS3 games that aren’t Madden. I’ve got my sights on the new 2013 Tomb Raider. Praised for being more empathic, the first in the franchise designed by a woman it loses the Pamela Anderson cleavage to tap its inner Katniss Everdeen. I for one can’t wait.
A holiday this year is unlikely; I’m not sure really where I want to go, and whether I can get the time off without selling my soul in work. Saving money works too, and it’s hassle free with the current saving situation I’m involved in.
I will turn 35. An age I never thought I’d reach back when I was a teenager. Heck, what teenager does think they’d been that old? You’re tempted to take the year off (so to speak) but that would be foolish. I’ll never have a year like it, I think it might be time to try new things, strangers and outsiders be damned. Who knows, maybe I’ll even surprise myself?
I hope the world doesn’t end next year, like I said, 2013 wasn’t the best 12 months in the history of man and it would be nice to go out with a bang. It would be nicer to not go out at all. These days are gravy to me, but that doesn’t mean I should let the current just let it carry me where it will. Be proactive Devi, you get more bang that way. And as Mickey Goldstein once said: “Go after him kid, go after him…”