We went to The Lighthouse on Sunday, Glasgow’s design and architecture museum. I love The Lighthouse, the way it’s hidden away in the back streets of the city centre, the way the staff always want to know where you’re going, the millions of escalators, the shop filled with expensive wonders and designer geek stuff and the restaurant right at the top where you get lovely crumbly shortbread free with your coffee.

Anyway, we took our dad (yes, I realise my dad visits a lot – there’s one reason for this and you spell it I-K-E-A) since he’s an architect and we wanted to see the Contemporary Japanese Posters. The posters were pretty cool but, really, once you’ve seen the one for Ueno Zoo, the rest don’t look so great:

We didn’t brave the hundreds of stairs to the top of the Mackintosh tower this visit (exhausting but worth it for the best view of Glasgow outside our bathroom) but we saw some newspaper photographs of the year and sat in the mobile cinema (which was pretty dull, sadly) and then spotted a fantastic little exhibition of self-assessment forms called Everything in Moderation. The idea is you take one home and keep track for a week of your eating, drinking, excercising and leisure habits and then tally it all up at the end to see what you learn and then take it back in to display with the others. I’ve got mine stuck up at home to fill in each evening but I doubt I’ll remember to bring it back in. Which is a shame as I enjoyed looking at the ones there. I’m also ashamed at quite how amusing I found the one that someone had filled in as Darth Vader but it was done with such detailed care and seriousness that I couldn’t help it.

Also good (good meaning fantastically tremendous) was Spirited Away which I have been looking forward to for EVER but I’m glad I waited to see it in the cinema with an audience who were totally into it. Sadly the dubbed Disney version but actually really well done unlike the crappy Princess Mononoke one. Anyway, it’s a total Alice in Wonderland tale of Chihiro who wanders into an abandoned amusement park (what were you thinking?!) and inevitably ends up trapped in the spirit world with her parents turned into pigs and has to get a job in a bath house to free them and get back home. Not the most exciting of plotlines but it’s all really a context to bring in the wonderful characters. The spirits range from creepy to ugly to cute to hilarious with my favourites being the sad-masked No Face and the return of the soot sprites from Totoro as coal carrying slave spiders but really there’s not a single character that didn’t have me enthralled, one way or the other. I can’t wait to see it again. GO SEE.

his popularity baffles me. somehow he is mister credibility, despite making films so corny it hurts to watch them. obviously they’re not corny in the traditional sense, but in every one of his films there’s one big fucked up scene where someone steals a dead baby or gets aids or some such crap, and it’s always filmed like it’s trying to say “ooooooh, can you bear to watch this? this is the most fucked up film you’ve ever seen and isn’t it horrible and aren’t i clever?”. no you’re not clever, you’re an idiot.

i really don’t like kevin smith either. another director who seems to be very popular amongst people my age. i swear i could write better scripts than he could, they’re fucking atrocious. the actors bearly have enough time to fit all the words of a sentence in before jay pops up and says “nooch” and all the guys in the audience fall around laughing and high fiving each other. sometimes i think maybe clerks isn’t so bad, it certainly seems like the exception, but it’s still nothing special. mallrats and chasing amy are both so bad however, i can barely bring myself to think about them in a detailed way, nevermind watch them.

there you are, two directors who don’t deserve a fraction of the attention they get. been meaning to say that for some time. in other news, we saw smog last week who was really very very good indeed. after having only ever seen him across a horribly noisy and crowded room at atp last year, it was great to see him in a virtually empty bar. support came from azita of bride of no no/scissor girls fame. she was a little odd, and her voice got on my nerves a little, but she went down quite well. jazzy piano and singing and weird faces. we also went to see cat power but left after 3 songs cos it was so packed and we couldn’t see or hear anything. apparently after we left she was so drunk she was rolling around on the floor wailing, before awkwardly finishing off the proceedings with some sloppy drumming. that’s entertainment. sadly we missed soilent green last night cos it was expensive and probably not very clean. however! coming up we have 25 suaves and spiritualized. yes!

Last night I went to see a film called Rien a Faire. It was worth watching if you had nothing to do.

Why go home after work anyway?

First i went to see Show Me Love, Lukas Moodyson’s first film (Fucking Amal to us sophisticated European / pottymouthed types). I’d heard good things about it but I wasn’t prepared for exactly how life-perfect and damned sweet the thing is. It might be set in Sweden and the two characters falling in love might both be female but apart from that it felt like me and every person i know / knew. It’s joined my list of films I wish I’d seen as a teenager. It’s on again on sunday and i might well be back at the cca for the double bill of this and Together / Tilsamanns. I defy anyone to see it and not go “awwwwwwwwww”.

After that there was the gig by Glasgow’s premiere pianopunk outfit Lapsus Linguae over at Stereo. They were definitely On Form tonight. No technical hitches or heckles, just room enough to marvel at the – what ? The Lapsus-ness of it. I haven’t heard a band like them and they are damn good. Go See Them if you haven’t already, though this was the end of their tour I think. News!: they have arranged an album release for the spring, even if the songs haven’t been written yet. Support band Sea Change are also worth a listen. More conventional song-style (obviously) but with a violin / shoegazey sound.

While I was there I got a flyer for a new Glasgow club, DeathKill4000. At the Woodside Social Club every Thursday from the 26th. I like the playlist’s silly-but-sensible-to-me mix: Aphex Twin, Alec Empire, Big Black, Bobby Conn, Chicks on Speed, Dead Kennedys, DJ Assault / Shadow, Horrorist, Iron Maiden, The Locust, Megadeth, Motley Crue, Peaches, Public Enemy, Slayer, Spinal Tap, 10Benson, Trans Am and Turbonegro. Multiplies playing live. Plenty variety in type of tune but no let up in quality it sounds like. Well worth yr £2 from 10-2 on Thursday the 26th June I’d suggest. I may even be there myself, competing for the “best dancer” bottle of vodka.

since the zine’s on holiday somewhere in eastern europe right now, i thought i’d take a second to talk about some films. we saw the matrix reloaded which had a rediculously complicated plotline, so complicated in fact that i gave up trying to understand what was happening within the first half hour. like everyone else keeps saying, you need to watch the first one again before going to see this. there was a lot of crap, some horrible cheese from everyone involved, and some shameful ibiza uncovered-esque ‘club’ scene with nipples and things. still, it was worth it for the fight scene with all the agent smiths, that were right good.

we also overestimated the charms of eugene levy and saw bringing down the house which was fucking terrible, one of the most unpleasant hour-and-a-halfs i have ever spent in a cinema. old school was marginally better, with low brow crap galore. what a week!

haven’t been listening to much music, but when i have been it’s been the same old crap. i’m looking forward to the new sightings lp which is out on riot season in a couple of weeks. there’s also a bride of no no song from a mixtape i’ve been listening to which has been going round in my head for days, it’s good stuff.

i’m also currently shitting myself hourly in anticipation of my BIG SCARY VISA INTERVIEW in london next week. if anyone has any tips on how to appear to be a decent upstanding member of society, please let me know.

Icy German electro-pop, especially Ellen Allien‘s new album Berlinette and Lali Puna‘s album from a bit back that I’ve only just managed to find, Scary World Theory.

My New Groin-Height Speakers, especially listening to Venetian Snares through them.

Secretary, with some reservations I can’t be bothered detailing here. “Less twisted than most romantic comedies because it’s the man who ends up losing his independence” (discuss).

IRE: SUNNYVALE NOISE SUB-ELEMENT: They were distinctly fantastic, kids. Despite some, uh, interesting monitor issues, they really delivered the noisy/motorik/techno goods in spades. Not being able to hear yourself onstage has never sounded so good. It would appear that they’ve come on yet further leaps and bounds since AUDIOSCOPE02, and their newer aggressive stance distinctly suits them. The audience didn’t know what to think. Hurrah!

RE: SOUVARIS: *cringe*. Fucking “rock stars”…

In other news, The Daily Telegraph this Thursday covering Vincent Gallo‘s vow that he’d never work with a professional actress not called Chloe Sevigny again was fantastic – the best laugh I’ve had at my parents’ breakfast table in a fair wee while. Apparently he’s made a public apology for his new film Brown Bunny, and said that he never meant to make it so long, dull and self-indulgent. I was appalled – what happened to the asshole stance of old? Anyway, here’s hoping it wins something at Cannes…

Everyone knows the Oscars suck (especially this year), but on the 15th April they were the cause of one good thing happening to Region 1 DVDs. Miraculously enough, diskant’s favourite anime director HAYAO MIYAZAKI won this year’s “Best Animated Feature” category, with Spirited Away. This has spurred the usually evil Buena Vista Entertainment into capitalising on Miyazaki’s new-found fame (?) and releasing ‘special editions’ of three of his films – all of which have previously been a bugger to track down: Kiki’s Delivery Service, Castle In The Sky, and Spirited Away itself. Even better, despite having high-gloss English soundtracks with such amazing actors as Minnie Driver and Dawson out of Dawson’s Creek doing the dubbing, they’ve all got the original Japanese language versions too; unlike the shitty R1 version of Miyazaki’s best film My Neighbour Totoro (apparently this too will be rereleased by Buena Vista as a special edition in cooperation with Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli, once they’ve wrenched the rights to it away from those nasty cash hounds at Fox Entertainment. I’m not sure when though).

Also, I’d previously never rated Roger Avary much as a scriptwriter or director, but Rules Of Attraction is pretty much everything the adaptation of a Bret Easton Ellis novel I had hoped Mary Hannon’s disappointingly limp farce American Psycho would be.

The other day, Fate sent me to see the BEST FILM EVER. Originally intending to go see The Rules of Attraction, tickets sold out at the precise second we got to the ticket desk. Snap decision and we instead went to see THE CORE. Anyone who has seen the trailer will no doubt have been similarly amazed and hysterical as we were at the film concept. In a nutshell – the core of the earth has stopped spinning, END OF WORLD! DOOM! etc. but it’s okay ‘cos we can send some brave young people into the centre of the earth to fix it with NUCLEAR WEAPONS – undoubtably best plot ever. It’s hard now for me to fully explain the marvellousness of this film in that it is even better than the trailer would have you believe. The plotline is stupendously idiotic and unscientific but that doesn’t daunt any of them for a second. Before the film even gets going properly it has a space shuttle landing in central Los Angeles, something that in any other film would have been the major event. But not for The Core, oh no. It then introduces a complete set of disaster movie cliche heroes and villians [plucky young girl, careworn old mentor, supercilious evil scientist, rugged hero, foreign expert with wife and kids, ‘crazy’ inventor] and sends them into the centre of the earth in a specially developed rollercoaster made of concrete to save the world. Hurray. They then go through a series of disaster movie cliches, people start dying in fantastic ways, everything goes horribly wrong, they come up wth a Plan B, defy the People In Charge with the help of a GEEK HACKER and some whales and save the day. Double hurray! There are too many best bits to even think about mentioning and without giving away every single minute of the film. Definite highlight is that they do manage to do the ‘ship broken, must go outside and fix it’ cliche despite being in the centre of the earth and they stand about wearing ‘pressure suits’ that look like they’re made of rubber and plastic. In the centre of the earth! The only way they could have bettered this scene would have been to have a giant lava monster jump out and eat someone. Seriously, GO SEE THE CORE.

Here’s some good film news.

And here’s some very bad film news. If you can’t be arsed reading the article, what it boils down to is this: Less money / support of arthouse cinemas in the areas where that support is needed most. If there’s a place in the country where those cinemas can survive without BFI funding it’s London, where there’s enough people to provide an audience for just about anything. Whereas if you live anywhere else but still want to see something different, you’re on your own. Let them watch cack.