It’s a list.
That’s what this is.
1.
‘THE STRIP’ CONTINUES (News)
The audiobook of The Strip is available now. Narrated by Henry Dixon and clocking in at 8 and a half hours, please give it a listen if audiobooks are your thing.
If you want to find out more about the book, there are a few bits and pieces online now:
This interview with James Ellroy’s biographer Steven Powell.
This video interview with Victoria Carthew.
ABC Radio National spoke to me too.
Sue Turnbull wrote the book up for the Sydney Morning Herald.
2.
LIMBO (2023, FILM)
It took me a minute to catch up with Ivan Sen’s latest film, Limbo. Truly an ‘outback noir’ the film was shot in Coober Pedy, in stark black and white. A lot of the action takes place during the day, with the glare and the treeless plains filling the screen with white space, almost inverting the noir trope of endless dark. A great cast, too. Simon Baker has never been better.
3.
HARD TO REACH BY JESU (EP)
Justin Broadrick’s (Godflesh, Napalm Death) one-man heavy shoegaze project Jesu is one of my favourite bands. He’s been extra-busy of late, reissuing albums, releasing new ones, remixing and remastering. The latest reissue EP features tracks from a 2008 split release with Japan’s Envy, a particularly productive era for Broadrick. During that time, you’d buy Jesu records and have no idea what you were getting: compressed, reverb drenched nu-metal or smeared, grimy electronica. This falls in the latter camp.
4.
LANA ON INSTA
The caption reads, felt cute 🥰
5.
CURRENTLY READING
I’m currently re-reading L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy. Regular readers might remember that I re-read it this time last year. This time I’m back in there, preparing for an appearance on Matt Sini’s Getting Lit podcast. It’s a great show and Matt’s a wild interviewer.
6.
‘WHY I WRITE’ BY GREIL MARCUS (ESSAY)
God of all music critics, Griel Marcus in the Yale Review:
I’ve always believed that the divisions between high art and low art, between high culture, which really ought to be called sanctified culture, and what’s sometimes called popular culture, but ought to be called everyday culture—the culture of anyone’s everyday life, the music that we listen to, the movies that we see, the museum objects we pass by or are fixed by, the advertisements that infuriate us and that sometimes we find so moving—are false. Nearly everyÂthing I’ve written is based on that conviction, and on the learned belief that there are depths and satisfactions, shocks and revelaÂtions, in blues, rock ’n’ roll, detective stories, movies, and television as rich and profound as those that can be found anywhere else.
7.
NEW AMPLIFIER (SHAMEFUL CONSUMERISM)
I used to own a 300-watt amplifier with a 4 ohm four-speaker quad box. It was loud as fuck and looked like a nightmare. Now I’m a guy who owns a white digital amplifier that doubles as a bluetooth speaker. Disgusting. Middle age is rough.
8.
THE WORLD IS ENDING AND WE'RE ENDING WITH IT (Short Story)
This is a bit of last week’s story:
As such, the time away from the touring didn’t do anyone any good. We all had our problems, our debt collectors and unwanted friends. Our choices were: the practice room, the cafe down the street, or whatever place we had to crash, most of which were sharehouses no normal person would live in. And the fucking rain. It never stopped. You couldn’t even go stand outside in the yard.
That’s all.
— IAIN
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PPPS: Buy my new book THE STRIP, it’s available everywhere (including Amazon):