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Just jotting down some things I've been looking at and listening to lately:
MUSIC. Swayzak's newest, Dirty Dancing, is, I'm sorry to say as a fan, the pits. Awful cover--what were they thinking?; too many tracks with guest vocalists; too many self-conscious attempts to capitalize on the '80s revival. The only track I really like is the last one, "Ping Pong." Adrien Capozzi aka Adrien75 has a new one on Worm Interface under a new alias, 757. The CD title is also 757. Really interesting musician. Fans of To Rococo Rot, Richard D. James, Kit Watkins/Coco Roussel, Alan Gowen/Hugh Hopper take note! (Listen to the track "Two Cats" here; also good is "Dusseldorf," which is like Kraftwerk's "Neon Lights" set to a raga beat.) Two old-school tracks from Clay's Pounding System show on WFMU caught my ear (check out the stream for 9/25/02 on his archive): Eazy E's "Nobody Move" and Coldcut's "That Greedy Beat." The late 80s/early 90s were truly a golden age.
ANIME. Two '80s classics set in WWII have recently come out on DVD: Barefoot Gen and Grave of the Fireflies. The former depicts the bombing of Hiroshima from the perspective of a boy who survived, and has much nightmarish imagery. The latter may be the saddest movie ever made. It's the story of a kid trying to keep himself and his 5-year sister alive after their parents die in the war. Despite his determination and resourcefulness--living on dried frogs and stolen vegetables in an abandoned air raid shelter, after their cold-blooded aunt makes it clear they're not welcome--over the course of 2 hours we gradually watch them starve to death. Both films are beautifully drawn and animated, and are routinely shown to elementary school kids in Japan. Maybe if we did that here people might not be so ready to jump on the war train.
BOOKS. I'm re-reading a lot of stuff at the moment. Laughing my way through VS Naipaul's Mystic Masseur, which I made a note to reread after seeing Ismail Merchant's pretty good film adaptation. Like Woody Allen, Naipaul's earlier, funnier material is his best. I'm also revisiting some science fiction I hadn't looked at in a while, such as Frederick Pohl's intense absolute power fantasy Demon in the Skull (1965-1984), A. A. Attanasio's completely overlooked In Other Worlds (1985), and William Gibson's very amusing Virtual Light, which no one knew in '93 would be the first of a trilogy. "Rydell drove past an In-and-Out Burger place and [Chevette] remembered how this boy she knew called Franklin, up in Oregon, had taken a pellet-gun over to an In-and-Out and shot out the B and the R, so it just said IN-AND-OUT URGE." Now that's funny!