Now playing

1. 'Strange Froot' – Tokimonsta featuring Ambré (2019)
2. 'Solace' (radio edit) – Ma?k (2019) 
3. 'Bird' – Kelly Lee Owens (2017)
4. 'Future Ruins' – Swervedriver (2019)
5. 'Vitamin' – Kraftwerk (2013)

Have spacesuit, will travel

At this stage of the game Marvel movies should be a pillow of feathers but Captain Marvel lands with a thud. Brie Larson has Roger Moore's charm and Captain America's job: the character is a soldier and a trouper and not a complainer. She also has one of the stronger stories of the recent movies, as it should be, being from a screenplay by (deep breath) Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck and Geneva Robertson-Dworet from a story by Nicole Perlman, Meg LeFauve, Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck and Geneva Robertson-Dworet. Boden and Fleck's direction however suffers from multiple perspectives: everything feels negotiated, nothing feels easy. The actors' eyes line up but their performances are from different planets. Like the digital botox on Samuel L Jackson and Clark Gregg, the workers' fingerprints are on everything. Massaging, smoothing, until there's nothing left.

All the vampires walkin' through the valley

Writer Jenny Odell for her book How to Do Nothing has coined the term 'attention economy' which she describes as the:

buying and selling of attention. But I think I'm probably using it in two different ways. One is really literal: the design of a social media app to keep you on it. ... [And then there’s] the culture that design enables: the really, insanely short news cycle, or this general feeling something might have happened in the five minutes you were gone. The feeling that if you don't express yourself online every single day, you cease to exist.

Full interview by Clay Skipper (yes, really) at GQ.com.

Scott Walker in 2008:

I'm not a recluse ... I’m definitely not that. I have friends and I go to dinner. I like people, but sometimes I can't wait to get away and be on my own again. I am solitary, though. I need to be for my work. That’s the deal.

Full interview with Sean O'Hagan at The Guardian.

The Walker Brothers' 'The Electrician' is here, among other places. And here's 'Nite Flights', both 1978.

Now playing (Sunday)

1. 'Now U Got Me Hooked' – Nicolas Jaar nee A.A.L. (2018)
2. 'I Got You Man!' – The Sweet Vandals (2007)
3. 'Kinda Break' – Flow Dynamics (2007)
4. 'Hold Me' (T4T Embrace Mix) – Eris Drew (2018)
5. 'Cirrus' – Bonobo (2013)

Now playing

1. 'You Are In My System'– The System (1982)
2. 'I Feel For You' – Chaka Khan (1984)
3. 'Welcome To the Pleasuredome' – Frankie Goes to Hollywood (1984)
4. 'Love On A Real Train' – Tangerine Dream (1984)
5. 'Telescope' – Pino Donaggio (1984)

Now playing

1. 'Do it, Try It' – M83 (Junk, 2016)
2. 'Time After Time' – Hiroshi Yoshimura (Soundscape 1: Surround, 1986)
3. 'Crossing' – Midori Takada (Through the Looking Glass, 1983)

Bad choices

Body Heat (1981), 92 In The Shade (1975), 52 Pick-Up (1986).

Now playing

1. 'Nice Mover' – Gina X Performance (1978)
2. 'Johnny and Mary' – Bryan Ferry and Todd Terje (2014)
3. 'April 5th' – Talk Talk (1986)
4. 'Macadame' – Hotel (2017)
5. 'Sylvia Says' (A-Trak Remix) – Charlotte Gainsbourg (2018)

Space

Zabriskie Point (1970), Vanishing Point (1971), The Empire Strikes Back (1980).

We live on the edge of a body of water

Yellow Magic Orchestra co-founder Haruomi Hosono is being written about again in Western mainstream media because of his soundtrack for Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Palme d'Or winner Shoplifters but in other better parts of the world his influence is as constant as that of Ralf and Florian. In a 1980 interview with an astonished Rolling Stone Hosono said of YMO's use of technology: "If we put it in a very Oriental way, it’s none of these, not positive and not negative". The pioneering electronica musician does not however call himself as a pioneer:

"I've never tried to be a pioneer, I just did what I wanted to do. But for these 40 or 50 years, as I've started doing all these different types of music, the world gradually caught up with what I was doing and I slowly built up a fan base. But all this time I've just being doing what I wanted to do. I haven't had to answer to anyone or tried to be a pioneer or anything like that, just play my own music."

Hosono's 1978 album Pacific is a mish-mash of Dennis Wilson, surf bands, Hawaiian music and ambient shoegaze not a million miles away from where Khruangbin are now. Medicine Compilation - From The Quiet Lodge ‎(1993) sits nicely alongside Chicane.

Hosono has a new/old album out soon.

The sound is deep in the dark

Harald Sohlberg, Fisherman’s Cottage (1906); Beate Bartel, photograph by Wolfgang Burat, (1981); Battlezone, Atari (1980)

Goodbye computer

Hell froze: I'm writing and editing on an iPad. No external keyboard, MS Word, backing up to the cloud. It's better than good. I can type without keys and delete a line with a finger swipe. Key sounds are on. Accuracy is close to that of a mechanical keyboard. Apple's iOS 12 has a personality but it's solid, like Mac OS 9. The available screen area in landscape mode is about the same as my old Macintosh Plus. And Word 365 for iOS is Word minus the crap – like getting back Word 5.1a. I might even start liking it. I write mostly in 1Writer but Apple's Pages on touch screen is a revelation: reliable, clicky-feeling, substantial. On a desktop the material design interface feels overly user-friendly but on the Picard-sized device – I bought the iPad 6, Wi-Fi, 128 gb – Pages rocks.

The experience is not unlike using a typewriter again. The format forces me to concentrate on the few lines that are on screen at any time. With only one app running there are no distractions. I do use the split screen feature with Notes. I back up and cut and paste from earlier drafts on iCloud and Dropbox. The workflow requires me to remember where I've put things but that's okay. (Digital work has taught me the habit of keeping fewer folders with more files in each.) I considered getting an external keypad but then the iPad would become a second laptop and I don't need a second laptop, I just need a digital notepad so I don't have to write text twice. There are no any social media apps on it and Facetime has never been enabled. All that's on my phone. My iPad's just for writing. Who woulda thunk? Goodbye computer.

All our yesterdays

The Trek mirror universe is a mire of options. Critics say Star Trek Discovery doesn't know where it's going but Next Generation took five seasons to settle and Enterprise never took off. It's a voyage.

Discovery's Short Treks are the series unburdened by expectations – tone poems circling an established mythology. In other words, they're the Ronald D Moore reboot of Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009), alternately sassy, sentimental and funny. They hew to the rule that science fiction is pretty much like now except for one small difference, whereas Millennial Trek runs around trying to be everything to everyone. The narrow focus of the Short Treks is better sci-fi. More, please. Less.

Dime Detective

#HerIndoors

Emily Browning plays the narrative device in Legend not because Frances Shea's role in the story of the Krays adds new perspective so much as Goodfellas is the only gangster movie distributors have ever seen. Tom Hardy plays Reggie and Ron stiffly when they are in the same shot and thrillingly when they are not; the mid-movie dust-up between Tom and Tom is compelling because director-writer Brian Helgeland has made the twins different people rather than the Kemp brothers playing the same bloke. The characterisation lifts Legend above Soho-innit predecessors like Scandal (Shadows track / Morris Oxford / disappointing cameo) if not the period clutter (that's a real cup of tea that is). Knox Harrington looks old. Dr Who looks grounded.

(A barman once told me how the Kray brothers visited his parents' pub in London: 'They stole an ashtray and said, "We'll be back."')

In crowd

Recently played

1. 'Delius' – Kate Bush (Never For Ever, 1980)
2. 'Happiness Missouri' – El Vy (Return to the Moon, 2015)
3. 'Los Angeles' – The Bird and the Bee (Recreational Love, 2015)
4. 'I Feel Love' (12" version) – Donna Summer (1977)
5. 'Desperados Under The Eaves' – Warren Zevon (Warren Zevon, 1976)

Lust for life

The cliffhanger in Paterson is a gift of Japanese stationery; in the last moments of screen time we are truly rooting for Adam Driver to begin writing in it. Woe betide the artist on whom Hollywood fixes, I think Robert Hughes once said; movies about authors more so, their plots confined to writer's block and the anti-car-chase narrative of getting published. High and low – Sunset Boulevard, Betty Blue, Henry and June, The Shining, The Ghost Writer, Barton Fink – the big papery thing tied up with string is rarely more than a MacGuffin. (Special mention: the scene in Wonder Boys in which Grady Tripp rolls a new page into the typewriter, types a three-digit page number, checks the work in progress, sighs, types a fourth.)

In Paterson the story is the actual making of the work, how this image gives rise to that word and so on. The sensitive blend of poems by William Carlos Williams, Ron Padgett and director Jim Jarmusch avoids biopic artifice – no Fred Ward bashing out what you know isn't Tropic of Cancer.

Paterson is born and raised in Paterson, a rhyming origin which has destined him to become a poet. The ongoing appearance of different sets of twins in the movie signals his perception of patterns and his inspiration. The director, like Paterson's girlfriend Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), paints with a trowel: the actors deliver every line like it's a eulogy. But in our age of over-decorated epics and sentimental Uber-dramas the brusqueness is refreshing. Frederick Elmes' camera finds richness and colour. Barry Shabaka Henley reminds us he can play anything. Masatoshi Nagase who brings said notebook starred in Jarmusch's Mystery Train. He is a visitor from a larger world. The director remains happily at home.

Recently played

1. 'Red Lights' – The Jack Moves (Free Money, 2018)
2. 'Street Trash' – Tobacco (Fucked Up Friends, 2008)
3. 'It is Time to Leave When Everyone is Dancing' – Tangerine Dream, (Quantum Gate, 2018)
4. 'Honey' – Robyn (Honey, 2018)
5. 'Don’t Wanna' – Washed Out (2018)

Recently played

1. 'Dreams' – Mark Tierney (2018)
2. 'Excuses' – Mount Saint (2015)
3. 'MT1 tr29r2' – Aphex Twin (2018)
4. 'Tick Tock' – Japanese Television (2018)
5. 'Out Here Under the Falling Rain' – Baby Dayliner (2018)