Record: Katatonia 'Dead End Kings' (2012)

I've been a massive Katatonia fan for just under a day now, and it's mostly down to this (their most recent) record. I saw them live last week opening for Opeth and liked them (especially Nille, because holy **** I want a grey Warwick LX 5 just like his), but was too caught up in being psyched about seeing Mendez & Åkerfeldt et al live for the first time to really get into these guys. Until I got past Watershed  and The Raven That Refused To Sing in my stack of to-listen discs and tossed this one on my work playlist this morning. Ten hours and three-point-five full listens later... I love it. I love it so much I don't even know what to do. It's like everything that's bad for me in one gloriously, self-indulgently, bleakly-bespattered-with-carrion-birds package delivered by deliciously gloomy Swedish deliverymen with, collectively, at least a mile of hair over their faces. It's like going on a diet of only things that are unhealthy but also unspeakably delicious. It's like - fuck, just go listen to it already. You know you want to, and anyway I can't concentrate on writing this review anymore because I need to go and listen to Dead Letters again.

Film: 'Cat People' (1982)

This is one of those things that you start watching because it's on Netflix and you're too sleep deprived to realize it's a terrible idea. I mean, apart from Nastassja Kinski being really pretty, this film has absolutely nothing to recommend it. It doesn't even have a good soundtrack, despite Bowie singing the theme song.  I'm a pretty big fan of Malcolm McDowell and his impressive talent for being able to make a movie scary just by looking at the camera, but even he couldn't do anything much with this part. I honestly couldn't tell you why I watched the entire thing. In retrospect I would have been better off sitting through The Hunger again...  I'd hoped to enjoy the plentiful footage of great wild cats in the New Orleans Zoo, the film's main setting, but their horrible cement enclosures inspired much more in the way off horror than anything else about this so-called horror film did. I'd also hoped for the sort of colourful campiness so common in sort-of-horror films made throughout the decade, but what I ended up getting was an upsettingly prurient male power fantasy. Ugh.

Recommendation: don't waste your time on this shameful example of WTF Cinema (unless you really, really want to see Ms. Kinski get naked for no reason and kill a little bunny rabbit with her teeth, which is nowhere near as sexy as it sounds); hunt down a copy of the original and much classier Cat People film, made in 1942 and starring the inimitable Simone Simon.

The 1982 trailer

The 1942 trailer:

Film: 'The Song Remains The Same' (1976)

I'd like to propose that this film be renamed 'The Jimmy Page Show.' Because seriously? Jimmy Page, you guys! Dragon pants and all.

There's really nothing like seeing a band live to make one appreciate them, and, if live isn't a possibility, film is a fair substitute. Despite the cheesy '70s special effects and the peculiar 'fantasy sequences,' this fair substitute did a mighty fine job of convincing me that Zeppelin does indeed rule.

Book: Mary Doria Russell 'Doc' (2011)

This is a beautiful book. I've been a Russell fan since her extraordinary novel The Sparrow (and a Doc Holliday fan since Tombstone), and I am awed by the graceful manner of her writing about one of the great legends of the Old West. Perhaps the most striking feature of this story is that it is not a western. Yes, it holds cowboys, gunfights, gamblers, swinging saloon doors,  horses, hookers, and dust and death in Dodge within its pages - all the proper elements of all the best western tales - and yet the author maintains a certain level of class in her literary perspective, refusing to glorify or glamourise events that are traditionally written up as the most thrilling of adventures. Her sympathetic though far from saintly portrayal of the life and times of John Henry Holliday, D.D.S., feels very little like a grand heroic adventure tale and very much like a sad story about a sick man, far from home and surrounded by strangers who barely even speak the same language he does. Somehow she manages to make that story feel poignant rather than maudlin,  imparting a startling atmosphere of realism to a story about someone who is usually relegated to the larger-than-life pantheon of gritty  hardboiled American Heroes.