Albums

1. Hot Chip – One Life Stand

2.Mount Kimbie – Crooks and Lovers

3. Arcade Fire – The Suburbs

4. Brian Eno – Small Craft on a Milk Sea

5. Four Tet – There is Love in You

The Hot Chip album is easily their most cohesive effort to date and takes the winner’s medal for being chock full of stuff that is catchy, clever and, occasionally, wildly romantic. In case you hadn’t realised, these things, in the right combination, almost always make for great pop music and Hot Chip have lined everything up quite majestically. The Mount Kimbie record got me really quite excited for its dislocated bumpy beats (I’ll avoid the word dubstep) – Fat Roland does a better job than I ever could of explaining why it’s great here. Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs is a similarly coherent album that contains, as usual, a couple of outstanding songs (Sprawl II is vigorously excellent) as well as a lot of very good ones. Eno not only because it’s Eno but also because it’s good and Four Tet for being nicely, and surprisingly, housey.

Books

1. Jonathan Franzen – Freedom

2. Dave Eggers – Zeitoun

I didn’t read that many books that were released this year, hence only a top two. Freedom is outstanding and you can see how it took Franzen about 400 years to write it. I can’t remember reading a novel where each sentence is so carefully thought out and each page is so densely packed with brilliant prose. Zeitoun is incredibly moving and is easily as engrossing a work of narrative non-fiction as Capote’s In Cold Blood. I’m just starting Paul Auster’s Sunset Park, which might get better but at the moment I can’t imagine it will top these two.

Films

1. Inception

2. Monsters

3. The Social Network

4. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

5. Rec 2

I know it’s a bit low-brow and predictable to select a massive blockbuster as my favourite film of the year but Inception is an exquisite movie, executed brilliantly, that manages to retain a completely satisfying narrative logic and is hugely entertaining for the entirety of its 142 minutes. The conclusion, in particular, is beautifully economical while managing to be emotionally and intellectually rich. Monsters, an ultra-low budget (£500k) semi-improvised road movie – with aliens – really surprised me and is a genuinely remarkable filmmaking achievement. The Social Network is Aaron Sorkin at the absolute peak of his powers, managing to create an engrossing drama from what, on the surface, looks like the most meagre of real-life material. Bad Lieutenant, narratively a fairly bog standard, hard-boiled police caper, benefits hugely from rampant Herzogian hysterics, while Rec 2 was inventively shot and constructed, elegantly concise… and full of demonic zombies.

Television

1. Mad Men (Season Four)

2. Wounded

3. The Trip

4. Welcome to Lagos

Mad Men continues to be extremely enthralling for all the reasons it always has been. The writing is as sharp as ever, the characters continue to evolve in interesting ways and there’s still that ever-present, darkly tense undercurrent, which makes the outcome of each episode pretty much impossible to predict. Wounded was a stunning one-off documentary about the rehabilitation of soldiers who had lost limbs in combat and is as moving a TV programme as I can ever remember. The Trip started a bit shakily but evolved into something rather deep, poetic and manly, as well as looking stunning. The three-part Welcome To Lagos was a true feat of documentary access that opened your eyes to a hidden world.

I’ve probably missed something obvious. Feel free to comment below.

Film

I thought Wall-E was surprisingly deep for a kids film and was also technically flawless. But There Will Be Blood blew me away.

1. There Will Be Blood

2. Wall-E

3. Jar City

3. The Dark Knight

5. No Country For Old Men

TV

Absolutely no contest for the top slot, while Top Gear remains the most entertaining programme on television even when watching a repeat for the seventh time on Dave.

1. The Wire*

2. Top Gear

3. Wallander

4. The Apprentice

5. House of Saddam

*NB I’ve only watched a couple of episodes from Season 5 so far so if you’re leaving a comment, please NO SPOILERS!

Music

I don’t think it was a vintage year but perhaps I’m just turning into an old fart. Hercules and Love Affair was the only album that genuinely excited me but the rest of these are all pretty good.

1. Hercules and Love Affair – Hercules and Love Affair

2. Hot Chip – Made in the Dark

3. Duffy – Rockferry

4. Beck – Modern Guilt

5. Fujiya & Miyagi – Lightbulbs

Miscellaneous

1. The discovery of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö and their Martin Beck books

2. The use of the word “ASBO” as a noun. eg “Dave, you asbo!”

3. Pro-Evolution Soccer on Wii

4. Peanut Butter & Co’s “Crunch Time” peanut butter

5. The Barclaycard advert where the guy slides down a massive water chute

I recently discovered the joys of Scandanavian crime fiction, which is a generally magnificent and undiscovered literary genre. The Wallander mysteries are great but for my money not quite as enjoyable as the Erlendur series by Arnaldur Indridason, which are set in Iceland and are just that bit darker and more miserable. The recent film adaptation of Indridason’s Tainted Blood, aka Jar City, is outstanding.

It will be interesting to see if Branagh can take Wallander into the mainstream proper, although it’s always slightly annoying when something cultish becomes popular – the Mail on Sunday has already billed Wallander (the series) as “the new Morse”, which is just depressing.

I suspect Branagh will be good in the part as he is said to have a passion for the books. However, I’ve realised that considering he is “one of our great actors” I’ve actually seen virtually nothing with him in. In fact, all I can think of is Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and that nifty drama from a few years back about Ernest Shackleton.

Internet rumour suggests the first of three 90-minute Wallander dramas will be on BBC1 on 23 November.

Jar City trailer:

According to the paper’s report from the US BookExpo trade fair, Amazon CEO Jeffrey Bezos devoted his keynote address to talking up the item. Funny that. Is the Kindle really “on everyone’s lips” or is it simply on the lips of Jeffrey Bezos?

The Kindle (I keep having the inexplicable and possibly borderline dyslexic urge to type “Kimble” but I’ll try to resist) was launched last year and, as far as can be ascertained, nobody likes it and hardly anyone has bought it. Actual sales figures are not reported (although estimates of 50,000 unit sales are floating around), so we have no idea if Amazon has shifted hundreds, thousands or millions, only that sales are, in some fashion or other, going up. Oh, and that you can only get one in the USA.

Publishers are apparently adding thousands of titles to their e-book roster. More fool them. The Kindle is totally pointless. It costs $359 (£178), which is more than a hundred dollars more than an iPod. But whereas you might actually want to carry around many hundreds of albums to dip into depending on your mood, who the hell wants to do that with books?

You can, of course, use the Kindle to read blogs, online newspapers and Wikipedia. Or you could use your mobile phone or laptop for the exact same purpose. D’oh!

Talk about trying to reinvent the wheel. A book is light, looks nice, feels good and, except for the occasional longer trip, it’s not especially likely that you are going to want to haul more than one around at a time. And a book doesn’t run out of batteries. So, really, why?

The only real reason you might want one is if it looked nice and had a cool interface like an iPod Photo. Unfortunately, however, the Kindle resembles a cross between Major Morgan and a pimped HP 12C Finance Calculator. And not in a good way.

Amazon still has no plans to introduce the Kindle in the UK and the price has recently been dropped by $40 in the US. Which perhaps tells you everything you need to know about the so-called e-book revolution.

Are you in America? Are you entirely and definitely not on the payroll of Amazon or its agents? Do you own a Kindle? Can you tell me what’s so fucking good about it? Then why not leave a comment?

Despite my transparent attempts to build traffic by baiting Andrew Gilligan (which did, at least, result in a link from Roy Greenslade last month), this blog is about as widely read as the New Testament is in southern Afghanistan.

Nonetheless, I shall plough on by drawing your attention to a forthcoming book by Gordon Burn (not the bloke off the Krypton Factor and North West Tonight – that’s Gordon Burns). It’s called Born Yesterday: the News as a Novel and, according to the blurb on Amazon, is “an utterly unique novel about the way news is made, and how the media creates and manipulates the stories we see before us”.

Mark Lawson, no less, has already got Slightly Excited about it, using the premise of Burn’s book to write a piece in the Guardian about how the news has become

a kind of super-fiction, in which one unlikely and inexplicable yarn after another – The Portugal Child, the Perugia Murder, The Deadly Teddy Bear, The Secret Donor, The Panamanian Canoeist – play out across newspaper pages.

According to Lawson, the “new technology of self-expression” (ie Facebook – or MyFace, as my mum called it on Christmas Day) has aided this process by providing a helpful backstory for the protagonists, which reporters are able to feed off.

The other key factor, which isn’t really touched upon by Lawson, is the 24-hour rolling news channels and their incessant need to fill space with wretched conjecture punctuated by moments of “breaking” news. This style of news delivery lends itself to the “dense, messy” soap opera stories highlighted by Lawson, where the twists and turns of the “plot” can be played out day by day on live TV. (The finest example is the “Canoe Man” story from December 2007, which, ten years ago, would have been picked up by one of the Sunday tabloids and would have gone absolutely no further.)

Today, driven by intense competition, the newspapers are mimicking the news channels’ approach. The Daily Express‘s coverage of the Madeleine McCann case could conceivably never end and, like Sky News/News 24, is composed almost entirely of guesswork and repeated facts.

Anyway, the book might be interesting, it might not. Burn seems to have a decent track record in non-fiction crime books, although Lawson is convinced he is “a notable cultural observer”. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

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There could hardly have been a bigger sensation if Russell Crowe, Rod Stewart or Sven-Goran Eriksson had come out of the closet.

They’ve definitely hit the nail on the head. I’m not sure I can think of any “less gay” people than this trio. Perhaps Michael Caine. Or Sean Connery.

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