Jim Thompson Connections, Fantastic Planet, and the Winter Grind
THE LIST: The Mark of Cain, The Bear, Note-taking and a band called Failure
The List is a fortnightly round-up of the music, movies, books, and oddities I’m into right now. There’s no structure or hierarchy.
🔪 THE KILLER IS WITHIN
The Mark Of Cain’s The Killer Is Within EP turns 30 this year, and frontman John Scott has penned a retrospective on the record over on the band's website. Turns out "Hindsight" is influenced by Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, which is another intersecting data point in the Iain Ryan noir matrix.
I listened to a lot of TMOC at uni (in Gatton), and this was the record I reached for most of the time. The version of "Battlesick" on there is especially great.
If you're completely new to The Mark of Cain, here's how I described them in a review I wrote back in 2012:
Office workers in trouble make this sort of music. Australia has a history of it. We’ve always been really good at making super masculine butt-rock in this country, and the fringe of all that responds to the centre à la Australian noise-rock. It’s a response to the archetype mainly, not the sound. So Angus and Barnesy and every other dickhead at the pub begat a bunch of other weirder men who somehow rock but don’t fit that yobbo mold. Think the geeky Ricaine, the stoned over Midget, the overarching weirdness of My Disco, Dead and Budd, the drone-evil of The Grey Daturas and Whitehorse, the very real blood pouring out of Tom Lyngcoln’s head. It’s never pretty, and The Mark of Cain are the godparents of all this. They were there first. Clean-shaven engineers in denim shorts and Rollers, singing about battle and isolation and suburbia as if they were the same thing. Righteous, depressing, strange, from then to now. They’re from that era where Joy Division were totally serious, total outsider, no-girlfriend, no-future, death-march music.
🗒️ OBSIDIAN DAILY NOTES
I'm not a productivity nut (in recovery), but note-taking is a big part of what I do with fiction and in my day job as a researcher. In the past, I've used Notion for everything, but recently I've been experimenting with Obsidian for note-taking.
I just wanted something a little looser than Notion, where I'm often tempted to pretty up my work. What I love about Obsidian in particular is one specific feature (which I assume it's borrowed from Roam Research): the daily note.
This is where the app presents you each morning with a dated entry, ready to go, as soon as you open up. You can add tasks, reminders, and templates to these entries, and for whatever reason, this relatively benign practice is keeping the show on the road this winter.
🎥 FAILURE: EVERY TIME YOU LOSE YOUR MIND
Look, I'll keep this brief. The documentary is a dud, but it's about one of the most musically adventurous rock bands of the 1990s.
This is the message I sent my cousin this morning:
If you don't know what I'm on about, listen to this with headphones on:
🍽️ THE BEAR: SEASON 4
I'm mildly ashamed to admit this, but I really love The Bear. It's painfully earnest — an entire show centred around the deep-and-meaningful conversation — but I remain charmed by it, four seasons in.
To me, it's a TV show about how ambition is not pure. No one who truly wants to achieve something is travelling without baggage. And yet, when our culture celebrates success — which it does often — we overlook the ignoble parts of it. We tend to view success as the story of personal sacrifice, overcoming adversity, and cunning.
But it's also about lost people grabbing onto anything that makes their lives worth living, then obsessing about it in ways that can be self-destructive and cruel.
So what did I think of Season 4?
It was great. Four stars. Long character arcs get resolved. Things happened. There's an episode that ends with "Pull the Cup" by Shellac!
I submitted.
🧟 GALLAGHER ISLAND (Short Story)
Read it here.
At the end of the world, in the dying days, Ellie knelt in the garden with a joint draped out the corner of her mouth. She took off a glove and wiped her face. ‘Hey Mac, you reckon the Gallagher brothers are dead?’
— IAIN
THE END IS HERE 👇
