Future daze

2006-08-19T12:55:00.000+01:00

The End of Blogging

OK folks, the time has come to wind up operations and focus my written energies elsewhere. I always looked at the Daze as a casual-selective record of artistic items consumed & processed during my stay in Ireland, and now that I’ve left that Land of Errors, I mean to give the Slow Review all the prose-reviewing oomph it deserves. Don’t get me wrong, blogs are a great way of spreading cant and opinions, but in terms of serious writing and prose-smarts, well, the concept of blogging is more of a taint than a marketing boon. Neither am I the kind to adopt marketing postures in effort to get my name across, but by golly, it’d be nice to write for a vehicle that could one day pay out. Opinions are so lonely… they crave the comforting folds and regularity of editorial column-space and printed ink. Above all, in the end, down with the brass tacks, opinions wanna get paid…

So then, below is nearly three years’ worth of reviewing content. I’ve enjoyed the Balzacs and the DFWs and Lisa Burkes and Elvii the best. I’ve also enjoyed the sloppy overlong paragraphs and the minimal typeface {font-family:Verdana;font-size:10;} and white space. I regret not having written more like Sterne. I tip my hat to the few commentating friends who bothered.

I’ll endeavour to keep the blog live on blogspot, but in the meantime direct your attentive energies to www.SlowReview.com.

rino

2006-08-10T06:04:00.000+01:00

Neko Case, Black Listed & Fox Confessor Brings the Flood

Sometimes I get a thing for a singer purely because of her voice. A long time ago I had a special feeling for The Clouds’ Trish/Tricia Young, who I thought just kinkyplum as backing vocalist and occasional lead singer. Something in the character of her voice had me hallucinatin’ lazy eyes and husky cool and low-slung basses and groove smarts and flannel. Neko Case kicks up the same boyish reaction of Oh I Like You, Will She Like Me? Her timbre is rich and throaty, extremely strong in the high range and confidently ringing in any key. She’s so much more than the generic alt.country tag can hedge and fence her in. The independence and woman’s smarts of country, the poetic naturalness of confident songwriting, a sexy intelligence and sharp, redheaded good looks. Canadian blood. Hard-working tourbus (actually, a tourvan called the Beaver) attitude and self-made woman pith. But above all, that clear-open voice ringing out with full reverb. Sometimes country-sounding (vis early Maria McKee) and sometimes mixed with a radio-friendly 50s bandstand/pop sound and sometimes just cool and smokey, in love with old record players and dusty guitars and smart girls in skirts or overalls and childhood popsicles. It’s a rich timbre to my ears at least. My thanks to the lads at 3hive for pointing me her way. Here’s to clear and bold voices.

2006-06-22T12:45:00.000+01:00

Farid Ayaz Qawwal & Brothers, live at Liberty Hall, Dublin

In many ways, Qawalli music has it all: committed and intense vocals, call and response chorus and verses, syncopated rhythms, and great group dynamics. On top of the devotional Sufi content and strong testamental power, it still retains the music-for-converting-people aspect of the Persian marketplace. Songs of poets, prophets and Islam, sung with suasion and passionate spirituality, sung with physical-performative rhetoric and virtuosity. Eight mustachioed musicians in the party; an amazingly dynamic song structure and ordering and dynamic control, hands reaching out like conduits. Fine voices with great sustain. The spinal tingle of the first group note and devotion to Allah. A group can say so much more than a single singer… spirituality begins in numbers.

Musically, it’s where Arabic vigour and lilt meets Indian precision and rhythm. It’s so much more passionate and lively than your average white Christian band testifying to ambiguity in a church; it’s people-to-people spirit, just as at home on streets as concert halls. Even if the evening didn’t quite match the expected pyrotechnics of the great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, there were moments I was lifted inside.

2006-06-15T10:24:00.000+01:00

Bush is 'inspired'

Of all the weird, hokey and downright idiotic things to say after a visit to Baghdad (and his grinning glee to get the words out right), President Bush says he was inspired to visit the capital of a free and democratic Iraq, and impressed with what he saw. Inspired by what? Daily carnage and sectarian violence? Downright chaos and bloodshed? Beheadings? What inspiration! To be inspired by that... means there is something dire and wrong not only with his perception and message-politics (and the yawning reality-chasm), but that in all likelihood Bush seriously likes all that killing and violence.

OK now, there's an election coming up and all that implies for Republican America, but imagine by analogy if Putin went on a little junket to Chechnya and says he came back 'inspired'. Inspired by his executed vision of controlled democracy. The Russian people of course would have the sanity not to believe the propaganda, not a word of it. How long can the politics of denial persist, or is this the shark-jumping turnaround the media, the voting public of America and the rest of the world need?

2006-05-30T23:29:00.000+01:00

Circle of Complicity – Dublin property prices

I’ve been a-thinking about this a lot, and it’s a representative analogy of the unique bubble of the Celtic Tiger. It’s also a riddle and a conundrum that explains why property prices in Dublin have been skyrocketing for the last ten years; pricing almost everyone out of the market – everyone except the desperate and the fabulously wealthy. Here’s the problem in a nutshell.

When the Irish government of the early 90s lowered interest rates and introduced incentives for companies (esp in the Finance and IT sectors) in the hope of boosting a long-stagnant economy, they also created ways of defraying tax back as economic stimulus. A company could minimise its bill by investing back in property development. Result: property speculation became big business; new building developments went up everywhere and cranes began to dominate the Dublin town aesthetic. Hotels, residential housing developments, major refurbishments, huge commercial estates. Which meant extra jobs and a greater need for housing, so the demand helped supply and tax incentives along.

With many property developers benefiting from tax breaks and high demand, property prices went through the roof. Everyone who owned a house or two in Dublin suddenly became semi-millionaires. This is why the Celtic Tiger was perceived as a success. Everyone refinanced and got brand new BMWs, investment properties, summer houses in Spain. Quality of life was perceived to have improved but nothing was really fed back into infrastructure, kinda like the Republican idea that tax cuts for the rich will benefit everyone. The hospitals are still shite. Inequality is second only to America.

An interjection at this point would point out that a) the Irish taxation system is about 40 years behind the rest of Europe and b) the government was happy to be getting so much more revenue from its range of new stealth (or hidden) taxes as well as all the extra income tax and stamp duties. Not that this meant revenue went back into infrastructure, not by a long shot. And not that this streamlined or modernised the taxation system; for instance, it was only until recently that you could get away with not declaring income from overseas accounts. In fact, the government doesn’t care at all that many people get away with dodgy declarations (you declare what you want, in essence, if you don’t pay PAYE) because the system is obtuse and expensive accountants are very willing to overestimate your projected income in the hope of securing a loan, or point you to ways of defraying your bill…).

In the first years of the boom, real estate agents and speculators made huge sums of money and consequently lent the industry an air of cutthroat greed which trickled down to the bottom, with desperate renters trying to outbid one another for subdivided crapshacks (and landlords taking the highest bids). New money made a lot of landlords very arrogant. But, people selling property could make even more because most sales-deals are not of the Western, above-board kind but a dodgy three-part system of closed auctions where bidders are played off against eachother via a ludicrous, nominal guide price. A house sold at auction can go up to four, five times higher than the guide price, especially if already near the million mark. The agents can treat buyers like pawns, hanging on for the competitive bidders, and of course they make huge commissions when trumped-up prices go higher. Even when the closed auction seems to be over and done, there’s still an opportunity for a higher bidder to come in and outbid the final offer. To wit: it’s all deliciously corrupt and greedy if you know how to fake a few bids with your real estate chums. The industry regulator, of course, thinks there’s nothing wrong with the current system, writing it off as merely the economics of a booming economy. Speaking of write-offs, one of the tax incentives makes it more worthwhile for a company to leave a property empty than to lower the rental price and get tenants in. Go figure. Keep them prices high.

So, tax incentives and speculation spiked the prices, and real estate agents benefit from a very dodgy system (as do their notaries and solicitors). Add in the banks willing and eager to lend everyone huge sums at low rates, and then price hikes are no biggie. If it continues at this rate, they say, then imagine what it’s worth in 35 years when you’ve finished paying your mortgage! (Do a quick calculation: if you pay a third to two thirds of your mortgage in added interest, and the average price of a house in Ireland is around €350,000, and there are several hundred thousand in the same boat, then you can see why Ireland is perceived as a wealthy economy: the finance sector is laughing all the way to, or rather, inside its own bank).

Now, in an average year the government pulls in well over a BILLION euro in stamp duties (hey, like a stealth tax), so of course the government benefits from all the speculation too. None of that money goes into regulating the industry properly or fairly. Government has cosy relations with developers (see tax breaks: those hands don’t wash themselves) and government favours dodgy or corrupt developers (one roads/construction company favours exploiting Turkish labour at half the minimum wage. No harsh penalties or regulation there. Of course they can outbid all the other companies for government tenders, they don’t even pay their workers properly, the workers are dependent on the company for work visas). Many property developers are either corrupt in not paying fair taxes and fees, or completely circumventing regulators and auditors (think dodgy changes in name) and others are adept at exploiting government contracts (like the hilariously useless LUAS) by dodgy workmanship, dodgy and slovenly planning and by coming in over three times the alloted budget (thankyou taxpayer!). Which, for a government tender, you’d think would have the entire nation up in arms. But no, the two LUAS lines don’t even connect, or integrate well with other public transport, or even travel in meaningful directions. But says the government: everyone’s lifestyle is good, property prices are healthy and high, there couldn’t possibly be anything wrong! Well, unless of course you’re a first time buyer looking at €400,000 for a two bedroom flat not too close to the city, which is probably poorly constructed or leaky or showing signs of early structural damage. Thank the builders, contractors, tax laws and governmental incompetence for that one.

When everyone gets a kickback – owners, developers, agents, the government – there simply IS NO PROBLEM. The classic Irish head-in-the-sand. The beauty of which is that there’s really no fine line between mild corruption and general incompetence, from the government on down. Which is worrying.

But, it has created a bubble of artificially exaggerated and unreal property prices – the banks are only happy to lend acres of money – but it cannot last and the entire circle of complicity will fall apart when the banks start to ratchet up interest rates by whole points, by necessity. If I remember rightly, several EU reports have indicated this is becoming glaringly necessary and long overdue if the economy is to stay viable. Most people paying off a second or investment property will be forced to dump it, there’ll be an oversupply of property all over the shop, and prices will be forced down by simple economics. There’s already a feeling of oversupply in commercial lets. Many middle-income folks won’t be able to keep up repayments and go into hock, and the bank will cash in again. And the contractors will be fat enough by then to move their money and projects to new EU countries looking to repeat the magic Celtic formula.

In sum then: dodgy government » dodgy tax laws + dodgy real estate agents » cheap loans = unreal property values » imminent collapse of the value bubble. And everyone does of course suspect that it’s unsustainable, but whatchoo gonna do?

2006-05-21T20:15:00.000+01:00

Prince, Diamonds and Pearls

I can say, without equivocation or pimply hyperbole or excessive superlative, that Diamonds and Pearls is the greatest pop song of all time. No question. It’s got it all: funky tight rhythms, catchy melodies, affecting and natural choruses, light but definitive hooks and the surest pop touch (the kind of pop mastery that Prince would barely shrug his shoulders at). Chintzy synth lines, call and response vocals and harmonies, soul-pop vibes and trademark guitar licks, and supremely tight / varied changes (indeed, about four times the amount of changes you’d expect in a basic hit, including a major key change and turnaround). And it never seems to waver for a second, every part interlocks and leads to the next, every drum fill / lick sits right, it’s perfectly crafted and flowing. Super slick and layered production values with ferocious bottom and typically deep snare attack. I remember an interview with Michael B saying they nailed it in a single take in Japan or someplace; which, considering how long it’s taken me to ge the whole bass part down, is testament to superior musicianship. Listen to the subtle bass-behind-the beats between Sonny T and Michael B from 1:20 (‘Which one of us is right…’) to about 1:40 – supremely funky and deep in the pocket. The pompous key change to D# at 2:06 leads to tight funk at 2:24, repeating the opening bass riff. Sonny’s work is amazingly tight and nuanced at every point; it’s not until you play along that his pacing and emphasis come out clearest. Compared to the rather straight-ahead Cream, D&P has all the intricacy of a Swiss timepiece. Pure pop with deep pocket grooves and vocals stacked on top. Catchy as all hell. Pure Prince.

2006-05-07T11:19:00.000+01:00

Reimer | Setzer, Together

Reviewer’s confession: I brought this disc purely on the basis of its ad slogan: "Only voice and bass guitar - does this work?" The link came from a TalkBass forums byte, the CD came from CDBaby and the CD was in my hands within a week (bless you internet). The slogan appealed to me because I’m trying to work out something similar myself, something basic and folk-y using only basic bass for melody, rhythm and chordal movement, and a call and response vocal on top. Reimer|Setzer approach it more from a Eurojazz angle: Sabine Reimer is schooled in standard phrase and projection, bending up to a note, relying on timbre for expression (alas, I can’t think of a direct parallel). Markus Setzer plays 7 and 6 string bass instruments (yes, pretty exotic stuff) like a jazz guitarist does counterpoint and chords. Which bugs me a bit because when you’ve got six strings and above, you’re playing guitar, not bass per se. You might as well be playing jazz chords all the time: at least Setzer steps out occasionally with a slap routine to reinforce the bass angle. It reminded me of a time seeing a six-bassist doing jazz cuts (could be Soup Plus in Sydney); I was disappointed he only played chords. Sure it sounded deeper and warmer, but some of that minimal magic of the bass was lost. Bass is about simple lines and foundation. Which makes me think that cutting it back from the jazz-chords angle (and Setzer definitely plays in the vein of the modern virtuoso) and keeping it limited and grounded: most bass remember is just dum-de-dum-dum. If your bass tone and vocal interlocking is tight, related and rhythmically melodic (that is, implying rhythmic counterpoint), you should have enough foundation (my other thinking lies with the expressive supremity of the timbales: two drums and percussion, so much funky freedom). But back to Reimer|Setzer. The music is thoroughly proficient; the range and vocal/song choice a little limited (some covers might’ve anchored this better, a broader lyrical range and attack) and almost same-y in the end, which is regretable 'cos it’s a very interesting duo-experiment. I might’ve opted for a different range of bass tones, but then again I play a Warwick 4. But in the end it does work, it’s a tasteful exercise in jazz motions.

2006-04-28T13:12:00.000+01:00

Absurd Homerism of the Day

Okely, after a brief but hospitable sojourn in Bordeaux (St Laurent d'Arce) with more quality wine and cheese than is safe to mention without wilting, I chanced, upon my return, on an absurd little televisual nugget in a Simpsons repeat. I could've focused more on quality content here of late, but with all my other energies going into the Slow Review, y'all have to be patient and make do with such little nuggets now and then. Of course, it doesn't make half as much sense unless your hear Castellaneta's intonation and singing attack, and of course's Homer's mildly absurd dance interpretation, and it's all over in a matter of seconds and could arguably be derided as a minor or lo-humour-value gag, of which there are quite a few, on occasion, in the later series, though without reservations I can pledge my own continued and singing allegiance to the show as a non-issue, taken for granted, signed and authenticated as cast-iron-clad solid gold opinion and conviction, the show is simply the greatest of our generation. No ifs nore buts about it. Anyhoo, here it is.

Homer's Safety Dance

You can dance,
You can dance,
Everybody look at your pants.

2006-04-02T21:52:00.000+01:00

Shane Carruth, Primer

Just quickly then, a lucky batch of selections from the well-below-par, not so local video store we joined recently (where it always smells, the service is shite, the movie you want is never available but everything's for sale). Primer is an amazing first film. A beacon of hope for lo-budget DIY filmmaking which is nonetheless challenging, professionally constructed cinema. Basically a team of young garage inventors make a time-shifting device and lose themselves in the paradoxes and cause-effect permutations the shifting incurs. Issues of trust and ego stretch over manifold dualities and little mind-warps; the confusion and miscomprehension of the characters feeding onto the audience. Carruth's commentary track is worth the price of rental alone, not so much to explain the diffuse obscurantism of the plot but to lay bare the simple efficiencies of shooting a movie with one camera, editing on a home computer, writing your own music, ensuring minimal dubs with good sound recording, the hundred minutiae of self-driven, self-funded and self-organised filmmaking etc. I learnt a lot. Also of note was the dense jargon of four tech-wonks talking over one another: capturing the spirit of post-uni research and innovation with an air of naivety and realism. Guys in shirts and cheap ties who don't really know what they're getting into (cutting up the microwave, do you really need that catalytic converter?), not quite perceiving the nature and implication of what they create, that is, philosophically unprepared for the moral imperatives or responsibilities active outside regular time and limitation.

2006-04-02T21:50:00.000+01:00

Brad McGann, In My Father's Den

Pacing is the major subset of plot that drives the cinema experience. Now if you can rearrange and massage the plot in service of pace with plenty of flashes backward and forward, there's a good chance your film stands outside predictable plot patterns and expectation. At times a fine mix of Janet Frame novel and a film like The Boys (not in terms of suspense, but in terms of scene/pace-driven narrative), this is one of the better dramas available to rent recently. The peculiarly NZ mix of small-town isolation and mountain-ringed enclosure drive this prodigal son returned / old wounds narrative. Yet not for a single second is the film predictable or familiar in its movements. Maurice Gee wrote the source novel; the film retains sufficient novelistic breadth of perspective. The dialogue lacks clarity at times (I missed whole chunks due to the rapid flurry-mumble of NZ accents) but it's extremely handsomely shot. And that pacing is superb: part mystery and analysis, generously clued yet always unexpected — balancing character with audience-minded development. The strength of misinterpetation and incomplete knowledge, long-standing enmity and ideas of worldliness. As well as a grizzly metal party teabagging scene. It feels like I'm writing a review entirely using review-cliches, so I will end there. Four stars.

By the way, Ads, on a completely unrelated note, did you like that Roots track Water?

2006-03-30T20:48:00.000+01:00

The (ultimate) Guns 'n Roses Use Your Illusion mix?

Something about my love of Slash's sweet/fine solo tone made me do a personal compilation of that over-ripe, overextended, hyped over-everything double-single album by the Gunners. I still think it's music for bullies; there's a lot of tripe on the album; and it was cunning marketing to not release a proper double album but two overloaded single albums (bigger bucks for models and filmclips); and the sound takes me back to the very early 90s, when Nirvana and all that was just around the corner (though the Pixies had already happened); and that if you stole a car in Brisbane in 1990 then there was a good chance the Gunner's first tape would be in it, and when black t-shirts and tats and mullets were not yet exercises in visual comedy; and that when two guitarists play Gibsons through Marshalls they always sound the same; and Axl's schtick is very, very tiring after two point two hours and that after playing with Elton John at the MTV video awards it just wouldn't be the same; but nonetheless, here's my personal Gunners/Illusion mix (loosely faithful in order); it's heavy on the long songs of course, and all them sweet sweet Slash tones that make practicing hard rockers weep and weak with envy.

Coma | Double Talkin' Jive | The Garden | November Rain | Civil War | 14 years | Yesterdays | Breakdown | Locomotive | Estranged | Don't Cry (Alt. Lyrics).

73 minutes: that is, not cramming it all the way to 80. Have yourself a really super album.

2006-03-27T13:10:00.000+01:00

Gus van Sant, Last Days

Even by arthouse standards of disengagement and snobbish distance, this film is a milestone in heavy-going, artless emptiness. I can't think of anything as mind-numbingly arch and failed and overextended except for maybe Brown Bunny, which has much in common here. A completely impenetrable lead character; a state of complete narrative sloth and breakdown; a hopeless cast (with the exception of Michael Pitt's accurately hunched shoulder blades); and a blandly perspectival play on repetition which begs 2x and then 4x fast viewing. If this film didn't have the clear Kobain-suicide context it'd quite possibly be the worst tripe ever filmed; that said, the context is far from sufficient to extricate this mess into coherent meaning and feeling. The same scenes and set-ups, the same unmoving shots, the repetitive putting on of clothes, the lamely sycophantic hangers-on, and even a totally-beside-the-point homoerotic scene which (even by van Sant standards) is in incredibly poor taste (as though he couldn't help himself, as though there was no other way to suggest depth and complexity and deliberate disadherence to Kobain-reality). The only nice touch, the only welcome relief from the glaring monotony was a guest spot by Kim Gordon as a record executive. Again, why not cast her as Kim Gordon, musician? Also, Asia Argento has some lovely tats, Gus, why couldn't you focus on them? I mean, your Kurt was so reductive and clearly damaged and incoherently aloof (sans explanation, source, drugs) you could just as well have spent all that film on Argento and her wobbly, g-stringed arse.

2006-03-18T18:50:00.000Z

Georgian Architecture

I don't often write about architecture, but Dublin has such a rich preserve of Georgian-style buildings, indeed they so define the city's aspect and ambience, that after two and a half years it'd be slightly unfair not to have reported on them. By Georgian architecture I mean the 18th Century English design of (terraced) townhouses of flat and regular frontage with Palladian/fanlighted doorways, sometimes running for the entire lengths of streets; with a below-street basement storey (fenced off), a stepped access to the door (brightly coloured, sometimes flanked by columns) leading to a generous but compact entry-level, a series of high-ceilinged rooms on the first floor with larger windows, and usually two floors of decreasing height above that. As mentioned elsewhere, the general impression is of regular conservatism: the British design is thoroughly practical in terms of strong, easy construction and resistance to spreading fire (no balconies or extruding windows, and thick walls). But the external minimalism is betrayed by an inner opulence which can de staggeringly acute: fine plasterwork, chandeliers, elaborate marble fireplaces and of course huge paintings or panelling – in rooms whose height and sheer dimension profess a nobility we no longer cherish. These were, after all, the ordinary townhouses of the normal middle class as well as the excessively monied. The contrast between inner/outer is the crux of this typically British design (just don't remind Dublin too often… that what so solidly defines the city (after its people) is or was thoroughly British). The added Irish contrast to which is that the vast majority of Georgian buildings have now been taken over by businesses and commercial lets, eager to get historical frontage whilst gutting the noble interiors and squeezing in sublevels and subletters and cruel lighting. Which, residentially, was nothing new either over Dublin's last 150 years of poverty and crowding; now it's slightly odd to think these houses enjoyed their best years as residential homes. There has been a lot of senseless destruction and wilful decay, and some of the acts of preservation seem limited to the street-face or lip-service to the spirit of design, but there are cases of amazing restoration (see the James Joyce Centre on North Great George's Street).

The web is rather poor on reading materials on the experience of living in these buildings, and frankly I can't afford the rent to even begin conceiving a work on the subject, but I have to admit that after two years of mild bafflement and occasional slow drives down streets of sheer British planning, or sneaked peeks at normal lives under noble ceilings (and alas, so few interiors seen and experienced), I have warmed and melted to the aesthetic purity and elegance of the design, especially as part of a consistent, uninterrupted street of townhouses. With silver grey cast-iron streetlights, stone pavements flanking a broad street, and of course the cold black chill of Dublin winter casting an abstract stillness. There's an air of logical townplanning and coherence, the pleasing ideal of uniform exteriors and inner individualism, as well as the only-remaining vestiges of a sensibility appropriate to what JJ called the Second City of Empire. Because the Georgian buildings attest to the only Golden Age of Dublin (that is, by a retro-definition of sorts: a nation's Golden Age can be determined by its strongest architecture, cf Amsterdam, Venice, Vienna, Paris etc) which peaked in the 18th Century.

So, with all that in mind, I set off late on a weeknight to take some photos of Georgian buildings. Possibly with an eye to a future small-format coffee table book, stacked prominently for tourist's eyes ("Georgian by Night"). There are moments in winter especially where the crisp chill and the amber-yellow floodlights on some buildings seem wholly congruent for a Northern city, especially with a skinful of brew. There is a calmness, a wet blackness, and a reassurance that people can live like noblemen in these. That these buildings are carriers of a continuity with the past, in starkest contrast with thoughtless oblivion...

2006-03-11T10:34:00.000Z

Duke Ellington, Blues in Orbit

There's a tendency to think of the Blues as an easy genre for amateur guitarists and old black singers with lotsa heartbreak, an all-too-familiar vernacular riddled with cliches and guitar faces. But jazz did manage to do something amazing with the blues, with swing and the blues together. And it was The Duke who turned the blues into a sophisticated artform. A complex, composed and supremely flexible artform. First he made an ensemble of distinct voices, and then scored them with adventurous elaborations of the blues mood. There's not a single three-chord progression on this album; just superlative little pockets of blues in and around three minutes in length. Moody chords and warm solos. Hodges in fine, clear form. Nance, Carney, Strayhorn. All in compact/expansive jazz miniatures. Laid-back, lively and amazingly free with its genre, really putting the format out there, composing by tonal band colours, a supreme understanding and mastery and brevity. Not a cliche to be found.

2006-03-08T14:19:00.000Z

Jean-Luc Godard, Alphaville

What a very strange film. Largely plotless, obsessed with stairs and corridors, liberally plagiaristic with SF, dystopian and comicbook tropes, completely impersonal and yet strangely consistent and whole. Consider its lineage: Le Mépris (1963), Bande à part (1964), Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965), Pierrot le fou, (1965), Masculin, féminin: 15 faits précis (1966) – this is a director at the height of creativity and stylistic diversity. There is also quite simply no other film in this mode – bristling with cerebral shadows and future-paranoia and a weird, a-violent inertia. There's a hint of classical Modernism throughout – the sets, the orchestrated music, the old-school idea of the automaton and the machinic dictator with his ruthlessly logical programs. Another director working today would've made this with much more sinister music and references, with a greater sense of historical inevitability and politico-cultural reality. Would have made the timeless, ahistorical trap of the present (theme) something shorter and more blandly superficial, filled with useless products and a culture of irresponsibility. Question: how can you make a film about conscience in the era of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair? Answer: you go for the throat. Our idea of the future is the inevitability of the next invasion; we no longer have a vision or a capacity for big humane principles. I'm in a good mind to chase up Eluard's Capitale de la Douleur in preparation for the work on torture I'm dreaming up.

2006-02-15T19:02:00.000Z

David Foster Wallace, Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way

Expansive in scale yet involved in detail: pure DFW. The question and paralysis of PostModern fiction is dealt with like a turning point in the/his ouevre, with personal finality, to be done with it all, tired of internal argument and hungry to consolidate the forces of fiction that make it worth having at all. Whilst of course using all the touchstone techniques of meta- and pop-cultural -reference, authorial intrusions and uncloakings, stories within stories, academic buzzwords masquerading as literary fidelity. There is a real wrestling with the format (and what it means) at the same time there’s real trickery and messing with the reader. Dotted, as always, with real character-driven pathos and amazing group dialogues.

DFW keeps things contemporarily relevant: an adman with an apocalyptic idea-event to end all need for advertising; dysfunctional sons sans fathers and unlocked daughters and excesses of body-consciousness and of course sports analogies. A discourse melding PoMo theory with Advertising’s usurping arrow through fear & desire, as well as pop culture’s pure entertainment slash vapid cultivation of the solipsistic and drug-addled self. Yes, and still managing to pull enough narrative weight to keep it interesting.

If it weren’t for DFW’s acute humour (the Ronald clown going "Varoom!"), some of the Creative Writing classisms would certainly ache and fatigue by story’s end. In terms of raw analysis, the structure of Westward is wholly improbable and diffuse, yet nothing is wasted – unless, with for example the workshopped story near the end, it’s clearly marked as flowery and overdone. It’s remarkably in line with the other stories in Girl With Curious Hair. It’s the point where the no-hands-isms of Broom anticipate the toasted teens and pathos of the Jest – where the real state and issue of literature are perceived and nailed with prose precision. Where graduate writings programs are discarded, their petty themes and discussions jettisoned like so many watery clichés.

"You saying there’s no politics going on on that show?" [Hawaii Five-0] […]
"Pure entertainment." […]
"Especially in reruns, syndication, that you’ve seen before," Sternberg says, into it, feeling, feeling disembodied, other, flaccid. "Incredibly comforting. You just know how the universe is going to be for the next hour. Totally secure. Detached but connected. A womb with a view." [p317]

2006-02-14T09:21:00.000Z

Dick Cheney’s Pellets

A very quick post on media sanitation/dumbing down: after Dick 'Elmer' Cheney shot his hunting buddy in the face & chest whilst 'fixated' on bagging a quail, many reports claimed he was using a 'pellet gun'. Now, admittedly, the 28-gauge Perazzi he was using is a slightly lighter weapon, but it’s still a fucking SHOTGUN. Why not go all the way and say he was using a pop-gun and the 78-year-old lawyer-buddy merely got the cork in his eye. 'Accidentally sprayed?' — my eye. It's all part of the media's role in excusing reality with dishonest language.

TV is the place where phrases are redefined | like "recession" to "necessary downturn" | "crude oil" on a beach to "mousse" | "civilian death" to "collateral damages" | and being killed by your own army | is now called "friendly fire."

2006-02-06T11:18:00.000Z

Brad Mehldau Trio, live at Vicar Street

Something I had forgotten, until about halfway through the first set, is that Mehldau approaches improvisation not from a pure jazz tradition but from a hybrid that’s strongly informed by classical. It’s just then that I missed the element of swing and sophisticated blues that you get with the purists. Which is not to say the Trio is anything less than an improvisational force, in fact, it’s improvisation on a level of rhythmic acuity I haven’t seen in a long time. Precise chops, absolute sharp syncopation on the breaks, and free extension of fills. And always improvised on an ensemble-level, not just backing/solo, backing/solo. Everyone’s ‘on’ most of the time except at the start and return to chorus, but always damn tight. Sometimes with jazz virtuosos you get the feeling that solos can break into real subjectivity and complex meaning; with the Trio I got the feeling that the expressive range of solos didn’t quite matter as much as the tight group dynamics. There were some great solos, but I got kicks just listening to their precise timing. If swing’s not yer bag, then rhythm’s still key.

Actually, I have been meaning to write more about Brad, but haven’t balanced the time/resources equation very well. I gave the Tokyo solo concert a good listen (and from the next room it sounds clearly keyed by classical ears) and loved the Nick Drake tracks, and LaunchCast turned me onto Brad in the first place (especially with his Anything Goes album) without giving me the overall sense of Brad as musician and composer/interpreter. But I’ve lacked download/purchase resources to invest in more of his works, and really investigate his line. He sounds like an interesting and open chap in interviews too.

So then, Brad strikes an interesting balance between hard-core improv stuff with the band, that is, his original compositions; and cover-interpretations. You just can’t call them ‘covers’ in the sense of the Tijuana Brass Orchestra doing schmaltzy pop-orchestra facsimiles — Brad does Interpretations. The chorus melody and structure are vaguely there, but the music within the chords is opened up much more; at times, it seems the structure is being improvised alltogether. And extended, stretched and freely elevated rhythmically, until you’re left with a hybrid that is part meditation on form and part displacement (wider, ever wider) of boundaries. So, you have Black Hole Sun served up Brad style (which I’d now really like to see Necks style), She’s Leaving Home, Nick Drake’s Day is Done, and Knives Out, amongst newer compositions.

On the level of musicianship though, I’d kill to have 5% of the ability these guys have. To have such chops and work together so well… and for it not to be pure (restrictive) jazz whilst improvising on an ensemble level, is quite something. It’s jazz but-not-jazz; an interesting evolutionary branch on the tree of improvised music.

Admittedly, my attention flagged sometimes, but the reactive thoughts were just as interesting. The audience was mostly middle-aged but extremely well-behaved (no ringtones, no yack) and quirky like all jazz audiences (hair-wise). Brad is a humble and genuine player, posture perfect, attentive. Some of his crossed-hands techniques looked decidedly classical. His shirt was fly. The sound was pretty good for Vicar Street, probably because the volume was much lower. Drummer Jeff Ballard was rich on chops and variety and amazingly consistent/tight changes, but almost a little too frenetic for my taste. It still worked on the group level though. Larry Grenadier did some hot solos and the fastest walking lines since the 50s. I wish we had slightly better seats to appreciate his sound; the PA wasn’t perfect on that score. Larry really anchors the band.

And now I gotta check out Brad’s new album.

2006-01-31T13:01:00.000Z

Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle

The Idler has been a bit of a champion in my book lately: writers digressing at length and leisure on their favourite habit: pondering, ruminating, slacking off and creatively wasting time. And creating all the while, mind you. Time is the great commodity of our age, and genuine artists are those that know how to manage it well. Hodgkinson does a fine job of hacking into the working mindset instilled by the Industrial revolution and refined by the Protestant work ethic and of course the modern work culture that takes and takes and just owns all your time in the end (whilst chopping your rights). Another documentary on TV recently illuminated just how much longer we work now, both partners, in an effort to stay afloat. The downshot of all which is: Quality of life is diminishing in spades. Working people have little time to themselves, and the dominant message being communicated is that work is the answer for everything. Want the lifestyle, the products and a chance at big bucks on the corporate ladder? You gotta sacrifice everything, you gotta work. Want the image and digs propagated by the media? You gotta read the lifestyle sections, then work to pay for the products. Want a holiday? Go to our packed activity deals. Want the security of fitting in? Work is the answer. Need more cash… etc.

To which the idler, of course, says Fuck all that codswallop, I’m going back to bed*. The problem here is control over how you live your life, an ethical problem at heart, whose boundaries interact with your societal participation. If you want to control the time you give to others, you have to radically re-think your priorities re: work, lifestyle etc. And that is the brilliance of idling: it’s a deliberate choice to slack off and find ways of creative living that are fulfilling on a soul level. To find the personal groove that fits your skin. And, once found, to not be afraid of being greedy with that time, to indulge and cultivate the self. And thence to mould your life around it. Prioritisation, people. Like Slow Food, it’s a way of extending your experience of quality time. Time is good for you.

Hodgkinson is damn convincing when it comes to planting the seed that becomes the faultless logic of the idler (call him the Alain de Botton of Bludging? Creative bludging). The book is full of fruity and pithy-serious ideas like the Sabattical Year, the right time to sleep in to, the appreciation of beer and bacon, fishing and smoking. The context of work and go-go-getting he draws against is pretty depressing and hollow, so even the smallest piece of advice shine with obvious glee: want holidays more often? Move to a place where normal living is like an everyday holiday (Tom chose Devon). Never forget that an Idler is capable of serious industry and application (think Dr Johnson). Quit work (or the working mentality) and take time. Become a part time consultant, or start your own magazine (speaking of which, Mr Hodgkinson, if there’s any room for editorial expertise and serious writing chops, email me). The fruits of idling cannot be measured but we live in their vicinity all the time.

Until I get a site design together, it’ll be a small while before I get to apply this my way at the SlowReview.com.

* Comment at time of purchase: 'You need a book to tell YOU how to be idle?'

2006-01-21T18:16:00.000Z

WG Sebald, Austerlitz

The novel as travelogue of recollection and loss. Of the rootless migrant, adrift in denial yet governed by the dark impulses of deep memory. Of stories, pictures and observational lists told at a narrative degree removed (She said, Austerlitz explained, etc) and consequently perilously close to abstracted distance. A novel without much corporeality or bodily ties; a work of remembrance addressed to the vertiginous void of oblivion, fiendishly devoted to details and the conceptual slip of time and generations lost. And yet powerfully European in a geographic sense, informed wholly by the world lost after WWII. Actually, I'd hesitate to even call it a novel in the formal/dialogic sense of the word, with narrative contours and inexorable movement; it is almost pure travelogue set on the rails and stations of memory. Ahem. There is sufficient mastery in 't (especially on migrant mentality, unbelonging etc), for sure, but also a touch of aloofness in its fortresses and death camps and myriad vaulted objects. Leaves one hungry for the cerebral finesse of the full-blooded writer.

2005-11-20T21:51:00.000Z

Federico Fellini, 8½

Commencing with the nightmarish traffic shot of silent, hemmed-in despair, and ever after that open to dream, suggestion and imagination, this is the culmination of a kind of cinema we’ll never see again. The era of Cinecitta, of oligarchic producers and fabulous set pieces and swirling arrays of extras, littered with personal recollection, wish fulfilments and fear. And total dubbing. And wholly personal, boyish, poetically inventive direction. I love that his critic character, besides spouting an endless bilge of intellectual clichés (all of their time), states early on that his film is nothing more than a sequence of disconnected scenes; a film about filmmaking must employ self-criticism at some point, and when he talks about the failure of a scene with the dream-girl at the therapeutic springs, which we’ve just seen, well, it’s significant that it doesn’t deflate the narrative at all. And of course the critic hangs later on (how could he not see that coming).

The strong mover of the film is the sense of being carried along by large events one is complicit in creating, yet losing all willed responsibility for; the alienating fear of losing the thread, to get off the moving train and admit to not knowing. The endless circus of faces asking for their parts or opinion, always a circular chaos of distractions crossing the line of sight or sweeping up from the corners. The continual demands. The unspoken fear of failure, hungrily grasping at every (feminine) distraction. One of the great films about failure, fact. Fellini has a gift for controlling very large studio spaces, making them buzz and thrive with visual activity and eclectic peoples; contrasted of course with Guido’s unflappable calmness at the centre, the quiet heart of adriftness.

Along with childish masculinity, the distractions of feminine beauty, the injection of personal drama (the wife, the musical director, and of course the producer) and ceaseless directorial invention. In a film that is ever erupting into dream and fancy, or rather, which is more dream than real (hence honest about the illusions of cinema). The scenes in the steam baths, the profound nocturnality of the film contrasted with the washed out, over-exposed daylight scenes, the sheer improbable cohesiveness of it all… again, one has to resort to lists to distil the breadth of the scope, and avoid wanting to analyse everything (fear of women, Catholicism etc).

This is filmmaking on the genius side of Italian cinema: the Fellini method. Renown, production excess, cartoon humour, gorgeous dolls, a frenetic chaos externalised yet humanised by uncertainty and a search for clarity, or simple, useful and effective filmmaking; and still to be able to say Yes, this is my (mad) method but there’s more to it than that… there are lies, begged indulgences, cover-ups and denials, tawdry lovers, common gossip, domestic despairs, staged resolutions and uneven or badly-paced ambiguities in life, and producers bearing gifts… So much personal free reign will never be given in a studio environment again.

2005-11-17T21:22:00.000Z

Diverting attention, away, away

You gotta love the management of news-issues and debate-framing by the White House. Distract people from Katrina and the price of oil & petrol, distract them from Rove, Libby and DeLay and then divert them from all that Plame implies, then obfuscate on torture, Iraq, health care, and maybe heap a little blame on false WMDs with the Democrats, as though they're complicit in this illicit war, or unpatriotic in the very least... and in the meantime all the telling but smaller-scale stories of absolute significance get brushed aside like autumn foliage. Obfuscation and issue-management provide the best cover for spin. Take the Chalabi Tour. He got a bit of gladhanding press-coverage when he went to Washington recently, and the administration pundits all agreed he's a top bloke who gets stuff done; but he's also a convicted felon and highly suspicious fraudster whose information is always informed by personal politics; and yet, hard on the heels of his visit to Iran, not many analysts that I've seen are putting two and two together on the nature and possible narrative content (from Iraq to Iran to America) of his visit. Is he building a new case for war, or selling his Iran-line for whatever reason, or simply having lunch with his NeoCon pals..?

Anyway, I've gathered together some quotes through Google News, in what could be construed as quoting out of context, but I think the words say plenty already.

Washington Post
Ask about Chalabi among members of the administration, and off the record there is general agreement. "Very astute fellow," says one very high government official. "Extremely bright and competent," says a senior military man.

Chalabi says the administration knows "how little we influenced the decision."[to go to war over unreal WMD]

Myrtle Beach Online
"We are heroes in error," Chalabi proclaimed at a time when the post-invasion chaos had long since evolved into full-fledged, murderous insurgency. "As far as we're concerned, we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important."

Time (via Egypt)
DID YOU MAKE ANY SPECIFIC REQUESTS [to the Americans]? We put forward the idea that Iraq should buy American weapons. It will go a long way toward raising the morale of Iraqi troops and giving them something serious to work with. We discussed Syria and how we stop infiltration from Syria by getting the Syrian government to act responsibly.

WHY SHOULD IRAQIS TRUST YOU TO BE PRIME MINISTER WHEN YOU'VE BEEN CONVICTED OF FRAUD IN A JORDANIAN MILITARY COURT? Because they know that this is a false charge. And they also know the record of Jordan being the hub of corruption on the basis of Saddam's illicit dealings.

DO YOU THINK THE U.S. SHOULD SEND MORE TROOPS TO IRAQ, AS SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN PROPOSES? I think more troops in Iraq would make more casualties and would contribute very little to improving the security situation. I think the way to go forward is to arm the Iraqi army in a way that it can deal with the insurgency and the violence in a more professional way. The most important thing to do is revamp the intelligence collection. [That's beautiful, that is]

Petroleum World
According to senior associates of the Iraqi official, who have accompanied him to meetings with Bush administration officials, Mr. Chalabi has been threatening his friends in the Bush administration that if they do not support his candidacy to become the next prime minister of Iraq that there will be no way to contain Iran. He has told them in no uncertain terms that he is the only one who can make the Iranians behave.

"If Iran and Venezuela decided to team up and squeeze the United States, Uncle Sam might have to scream uncle," explained one of Chalabi’s friends.

Al Mendhar
What is more surprising is Al Chalabi's boasting of obtaining the approval of Tehran for occupying the position of Iraqi Prime Minister. After meeting with the Iranian leaders, Al Chalabi said in an interview with the New York Times newspaper that the Iranians promised him that they would not fail him or oppose him in case he attempted to become an Iraqi Prime Minister.

The New York Sun
"The Syrians are guilty," Mr. Chalabi said. "Foreign fighters are traveling through Syria to Iraq." He said Syria was providing both a "transit route" and a "safe haven" to the foreign fighters, and he said he hoped that would stop.

Mr. Chalabi also reflected on seeing Saddam Hussein after the Iraqi dictator's capture. He said he felt "sadness for the people of Iraq that this idiot ran their affairs for all this time." [This from Chalabi, mind you]

Now... I'm no wizz at spotting credible sources from the Middle East and MSMedia, but I thought it nice to do a bit of standard blog-mongering and stitch a narrative together, before the story becomes just another stale fact in the miserable war on conscience and truth.

2005-11-16T08:04:00.000Z

The Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus

Yes, it’s still OK to like reference books – they’ll never be Starbucks cool. They only make them expensive to keep them away from the rabble, the great unwashed etc; or, to recompense the intensive tertiary scholarship that goes into them. Seriously. None besides grammar nerds and pedants read them, or copy-editors coveting sub-editing jobs ("Got the latest Chicago Style Manual the other day. Essential reading") and maybe the odd head of English looking to round off a budget application. Of course anything that promotes crisp and "maximally considerate" writing is good in itself, such materials need not be defended. But in case it ain’t obvious already, I’ve a rather persistent weakness for reference books that in no way corresponds to being a grammar fiend expounding subordinate clauses or squinting at modifiers. I like correct usage, efficient punctuation and well-cast prose. I don’t find reference boring in any way; it’s just another of the manifold entry points to superior writing-insight. As well as being etymologically interesting, and precision-ennobling, and usage-clarifying. Am I alone? Thank God, I thought I was alone!

Naturally there was a significant by-reason (ugh) for buying this particular thesaurus and that was DFW’s contributing editorship. Dave and me we’re like this * when it comes to reference. OK so his brain has far greater memorial firepower than mine (I must say part of the appeal of reference-reading lies in my inability to store facts for long. To which counter-laughs I respond that a slacker memory might leave the creative membranes looser and more responsive for improvising), and his upbringing was laced with hard-core grammar instruction and jollies compared to my lazy second langage. In fact, this is all starting to sound like my coming clean on a dirty or at least nerdy little secret: a) I buy reference books (lemme talk about Johnson, and later I will) and b) I brought a book purely because DFW’s name graced the cover. And worse, I brought an American reference book.

I should’ve guess from the flap byline "For the writer in everyone" that this is a beginner’s book. Which is not to say the book (1087 pages) is pedantically simple; but that in flipping through it the dominant impression is of standard-usage words being drawn to their nearest synonymous neighbours for everyday-acceptable essay writing. The dataset lacks a certain thoroughness or completeness that would otherwise gloss archaic or exotic words of limited but fecund usage. It feels limited to American English rather than Wordly Rich English (again, the title: my fault). This is a thesaurus for the average American college student: the kind that sits all robust and futile on a bookcase with a kegger in full swing next door. Mixed with a whole lotta usage guidelines and helpers and pointers. A college-usage-thesaurus then.

There’s stacks of guides (The Right Word) and Word Banks (taxonomic lists) and Word Spectrums (a scale of near-synonyms towards an antonym; see what I mean about undergraduate simplicities…), and, for the original purchase incentive, Word Notes by famous contributing editors (including Zadie Smith). DFW is on home turf here, dressed in full didactic regalia. He cannot but betray his teaching style and dry comedic precisions; and neither can he hide his mainline to grammar buzz & thrills. The man is a word fiend, and of all the contributors comes across most authoritative on usage for writers, and on rare and exotic sources and variants and the despicably changing state of usage and context (further, always pointing out he’s writing in 2004). But as always he’s well worth quoting in full:

WORD NOTE dysphesia
This is a medical noun with some timely nonmendical applications. Educated writers already use aphasia to refer to a brain-centred inability to use language, which is close but not identical to the medical meaning. Dysphesia can be similarly extended from its technical def to mean really severe difficulties with forming coherent sentences. As anyone who’s listened to our current president knows, there are speakers whose lack of facility goes way beyond the range of clumsy or inarticulate. Our president’s public English, like that of his father’s before him, is dysphesiac.

Actually, George W gets another nod somewhere else too. Regretably, these occasional glosses and rhymes (!) are just momentary personalisations, snapshots of the language in action from ardent practitioners; but this is by no means a thesaurus written by its contributors. Which is not to say that piffle and guff don’t have a place in reference, I mean, the peculiar inflections of interpretation that so humanise Johnson’s Dictionary are what make it a great work of reference. In any such text there’s a goal of prescriptive clarity and precision which overrides any descriptive rendering or accounting of the (historical) language at hand: which is always a matter of not un-subjective intelligence and perspective (just like encyclopeadias, dictionaries provide wide-screen pictures of how we understand ourselves and the world. And now to Wittgenstein). If the contributors worked on the floor of this book instead of just phoning in some anecdotal briefs, then maybe we’d have a nicely saucy and fallible and eminently quotable work of reference. We wouldn’t say, Oh, that Yankee Oxford, we’d say DFW’s Dictionary. We would have a thorough and indicative description of the state of English Of Our Time, with full glosses and footnotes. Such books, of course (and this deflates my argument completely) already litter the eye-level reference shelves: The Story of English. The Story of Johnson. The Story of the OED. The Story of the Comma etc. But I’m damned sure DFW would make an hilarious and maniacially thorough dictionary and pre/descriptive usage guide.

In the longest gloss in the book (1.25 column lengths), DFW kinda breaks down from his original and detailed explication of hairy (barbigerous, cirrose, crinite, glabrous, hirsute, hispid, lanate, pilose, piligerous, piliated, pilimiction, ulotrichous and tomentose ["covered with dense little matted hairs – baby chimps, hobbits’ feet, and Robin Williams are all tomentose"]) and provides the following, rather epiphanic footnote:

N.B. If you’re thinking of using any of the more esoteric adjectives here, you’d be well advised to keep an OED close at hand. This is not simply a gratuitous plug of another Oxford U. Press product. The fact is that some of these hair-related terms aren’t in other dictionaries; plus, the terms are often specialized enough that you’re going to want not just an abstract definition but a couple sample sentences so that you can see how the words are actually used. Only the OED has both defs and in-context samples for just about every significant word in the language. Actually, why not screw appearances and just state the obvious: No really serious writer should be without an OED, whether it’s bought or stolen or hacked into the online version of or whatever you need to do. Nothing else comes close.

Refreshingly honest, I’d say. Maybe the King’s English is next.

2005-11-15T15:54:00.000Z

State of British music IV: Supergrass, Life on Other Planets and Road To Rouen

What do you do when you’re in a guitar band and you get sick of making riffs and choruses with three of four pop chords? Every band comes to an impasse of this kind, from Black Sabbath to U2. The options out are pretty simple: you either bring in interesting producers to fiddle and tweak your songsounds, or you write songs with strings and horns in mind, and begin to stretch the format somewhat. Supergrass did the latter. From the punchy high of Life to the brief but crafted vignettes of Rouen (which I’ve combined into a killer twofer), the Grass are making interesting pop again, beyond mere 'spot the precursor and have a lark'. The last of the former (the wonderful stoner cut Run) seems to segue perfectly into the first of the latter. The production is crisp and clever, the instrumentation fresh and broad (with some welcome piano work), the canvas has been stretched and opened, and there ain’t a single flaky moment. Yet it’s distinctively BritPop: easy melodies, clear choruses, good guitar fun; and the sense that George Martin could’ve been involved in the project. And it’s great value at 35 minutes — I agree with shorter albums: greater quality and concentration on fewer songs rather than endlessly sprawling CDs stretched with b-material. I love the sense of containment and sufficiency of such albums: it reminds me of soul records somehow. Have yourself a really super album.

2005-11-14T09:32:00.000Z

Martin Amis, Experience

Yes, again. This blog has now officially achieved circularity. What takes the average PostModernist a lifetime of reference and pose I've achieved in a year and a half. And I don't just mean Repetition. Which reminds of a nice little PoMo Manoeuvre involving laugh tracks and spare irony, which I'll have to relate at a later date. The thing I like, nay love about this book, besides the palpable enjoyment-factor of its prose and its contiguity to literature's furnace, is that it's a book about Family. Not just a dual biography, not just a stab at the fourth estate of Britain, but a meditation on the writing life seen through the lens of familial bond and narrative order. It's also one of the most pro-childbearing books in the genre. It is... a surprising book.

2005-11-09T12:58:00.000Z

I know that quality writing (quality reviewing especially) thrives on a contradictory meld of disinterested clarity and the catty, personalised wordplay of invective, where anger or outrage induce the fact — and on the other hand, balancing the sheer amount of review material at hand (I’m addicted to downloadahol) with the limited amount of motivated time to write and invoke non-clichéd shots at the target (the cliché being the shortest, straightest line to a critical truism, to be avoided absolutely but always lying in wait), and my often being at a loss to simply say something new about something new, all leave me in a state of mild indifference and wordlessness, no doubt typical of the jaded review mindset — washed up yet secretly hungry for that heartsinging work of inspiration — yet meeting everywhere its disappointment, the reactive ideas spent and thrustless like dull waves on a dun shore. That little voice calls out from within its rounded tower, in wiltingly pathetic tones: But what does all this music shit mean to me, I mean, personally?

2005-11-06T22:03:00.000Z

Over on the Long Blog (all essay, no review), some Notes on Christianity.

The question of Christianity's veracity (ie the True Faith) is nowhere near as interesting or relevant as Why this religion has worked so well for so long. Is it because the formula and tenets of Christianity lend themselves so well to politics? From the first Christian emperors to the popes and the Jesuits and the sectarian parties of today? Or because of its dogma, so flexibly interpreted across Christian sects, churches and sub-denominations? Or because monotheism makes for great religions of war & conquest? For its relative ability to meld power with changing times? And where is the individual in all this? — weak, a sheep, in need of (shep)herding.

Anyhoo, it's a bundle of notes I've extracted from the notebooks, so much of which would never see the light (of day) otherwise.

2005-11-04T14:30:00.000Z

State of British music V: Blur b-sides

I’ve taken to trawling through a few back catalogues, and by extension, the b-material and offcuts and stuff that never really progressed far from the rehearsal or aborted-conception stage. A U2 bootleg, for instance, from the early Achtung Baby sessions, was a revealingly embarrassing study in mild desperation: the band fumbling and trying to put coherent music together in the early stages, shouting cues at each other, missing notes and playing the same riffs way too long. In a way it’s almost emboldening to hear a megagroup sound so amateur and dysfunctional (and lost for ideas) before the big-ass production and mixing values kick in, before the songs were essentially found and embellished. They sound almost like anyone else dicking around with their instruments. It’s the complete antithesis of a finished record, and of course a band would be upset to leak this crap material, especially U2.

Anyhoo, the Blur. Never ones ashamed to put wholesale crap on the b-side, Blur have nonetheless got some stellar material in there as well. Although, maybe ‘stellar’ ain’t quite le mot juste when it comes to Britpop; OK, I was being hyperbolic. But, again, the b-material can be very revealing or function as great conextualiser for the a-stuff. Like Joyce says, errors are the portals of discovery. But is incompleteness an error? I remember a recent interview with Gorillaz-Albarn or maybe it was Mali-Damon talking about ProTooling his African recordings, and he said he’s good at generating ideas but not finishing them or rounding off the project. That’s what comes over clearest on my personal sampling of b-sides from Chemical World to Coffee & TV. It’s a great look at how Blur put songs together guitar-bass-drums-wise, and later, mix shit up. They’re not afraid to let stuff just run without proper fibre and mileage; they’re happy to let the search for melodic quality fritter away like so many uncomplaining drummers. They’ve left in the late-night or drunken no-brainers when anything on tape sounds adequate. Or just plain daffy. Even though the final finish and patina (or even the structure itself) is incomplete or patchy.

I’m a great believer in the aristocracy of talent, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like slumming with all the slush and average shit at the bottom of the heap. With Blur especially, you can tell they just record a heap of stuff for an album, twenty odd tracks or more, then make harsh executive decisions about what should go in or get the full focus. But they always put in the basic minimal effort with their b-sides, whether it’s backing vocals or noodling effects and tricks. There’s still enough value in the tracks the for a lesser band to be quite happy with. There’s a few dinky drinky waltzes, and it’s remarkable how unlike the Kinks a lot of these cuts sound (comment, discuss) and Graham Coxon is easily 60% of the band. Damon’s predeliction for Frenchification is fun but his accent is truly shite. Personal faves include French Song (off Tender), Supa Shoppa (off Parklife), Threadneedle Street (off To The End), Theme From An Imaginary Film (Parklife), Woodpigeon Song and All Your Life (off Beetlebum).

2005-11-03T12:26:00.000Z

State of British music VI: Robert Wyatt, Shleep

I'll let the mood generator at AllMusic handle this one:

Dreamy, Atmospheric, Laid-Back, Mellow, Gentle, Soothing, Whimsical, Trippy, Literate, Witty, Quirky, Nocturnal, Restrained.

Actually, I do have more to say. This is a fucking great album. Wise, crafted, nutty, alinear, obscure but fresh, gnomic but clean, superbly crafted and engineered, it’s a true listener experience. It’s joyous and affirmative and painterly.

There’s a way of gauging quality that I’ve been exercising of late, and that’s to listen for how into a song the singer is: Jackson is totally IN and experiencing and committed to Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough, Marvin totally owns Distant Lover (his heart breaking). It’s a measure of identification, involvement, which comes across most clearly in Soul and which feeling I don’t get from so many of the indifferent singers emoting histrionically in modern radio pop. No doubt because the entire production is owned by the companies that allow them to put their vague stamp on the songs but which is all marketed uniformly (think of how much production work and listening-hours goes into the average turd on the radio, the voice is just an accessory on top of it all; they’re expressions of corporate ownership, not feeling). Anyhoo, in the case of Wyatt, with his distinctively fragile yet lyrical voice, the music of Shleep is almost the complete opposite of corporate shill: it’s individuated, crafted art: it’s everything we want the arty, expressive and affective potential of modern music to be. Most of the music is generated by contributors but it feels entirely Wyatt’s product; I’d even be tempted to rate this higher, musically, than Dylan’s work, where the feeling of a clear delineation between backing and lead is always maintained. The contributors don’t just make a springboard or conditional atmosphere for Wyatt, they’re participants in the whole expression, the gestalt. As though the magic of Wyatt is to open himself up in this way, in pure collaboration. The success of which is measured by the distinctiveness of his voice or lyrics never once sounding out of place, conflicted or lost in the music.

Most of the structures on Shleep are deceptively simple: he doesn’t rely on familiar chord patterns (must research his writing technique more) but there’s enough backing vocals to locate this as popular music. Maybe that’s the Eno touch. Instrumentation is almost always motivated by colour rather than virtuosity. The sounds (the means) are always in harmony with the lyrical intent: which I guess is the precedent of painting in Wyatt’s work (and Eno’s, for that matter). A Sunday in Madrid is probably the superlative song of the album, laden with travelling urgency. The long chorus and shifting melodies of Maryan are also super. The simplicity is pleasing but beguiling: this is very clever and organically progressive/unpredictable music. And dreamy, wistful and all those other nocturnal review terms.

2005-10-31T13:34:00.000Z

The Rapture Index

First DeLay, Scooter, then Rove, Rumsfeld perhaps? All this talk about the beginning of the end for Bush (I mean Bush is secure in his enclosure, as always, with straw and bananas) is fine, but to the average American citizen whose entire world is television, it'll hardly matter. Unless, we put some good ol' Rapture spin on it. Really grab them evangelist voting-blocs by the balls and show them their elected criminals as servants of End of All Things, let alone the Continued Destruction of the environment, of Iraq, the nation’s poor etc. Will they want their Bush so badly then? Possibly. Will they wake up to criminality and hypocricy in the White House? Where are the number crunchers and paranoiac preachers of the afterworld, shunners of the body, counting the number of gaffs and significantly repeated words in Bush’s speeches to determine the Date of Departure? For I’ve got the feeling that the Rapture Index is nothing more than a form of social racism, empowering weak minds to judge others, to bludgeon them with self-righteous dogma. You are Holy, you’re with us, you ain’t. Hey, just like (NeoCon) Republicans. Just like… fascism.

The Simpsons recently did a Rapture episode which I must say was rather conservative, safely inconclusive and thoroughly uncritical. But, once something has been on the Simpsons, it isn’t entirely feasible as reality any more. And if the average US citizen can say Hey, that was on the Simpsons, then no amount of letterwriting or lobbying can undo the fact. Everything real will become another Onion headline.

So let’s talk like evangelists and talk about the 50 years of hardship Americans must now suffer, the Republican debts and illegitimate wars that’ll continue to decimate their youngest and poorest, and the obscene petro-profits their republican Fathers will laughingly walk away with.

2005-10-30T22:24:00.000Z

Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity

There are occasions when you meet the consummate novelist, the shamelessly perfect master of the form. You think Dang, why has it taken so long to meet, why didn't I follow up on positive leads or references earlier; and most importantly, you think Blast this perfectionist freak with his superior ability and insight. Damn his Austro-Germanic precision!

Zweig... is a master. Constructing a nearly classical novel on the inward model of a Proust by way of Nietzsche (that is, Nietzsche Lite, overtly namechecked as the greatest mind of his generation, and also as thesis-predecessor) with simple first person prose and overt precision, Zweig has the gift of realistic pacing and detailing life's happenstance meanings blended with clear moral slash didactic lines. But what I liked in particular (forgetting for the moment the explicit location in pre-war Habsburg times, their morality and language) is the neat, controlled power of his narrative causality. Situation A ineluctably leads to B and complication C and repeating defect D. You cannot anticipate his turns despite their regularity, you cannot but be drawn in. A classical theory of narrative movement and the novel could definitely source itself here. Pace, structure and thorough anticipation, each moment locking into the next. Ringo would laugh.

The thesis of pity's absorbing, corruptive dependencies is played through a coward's mind with oscillating force. The lead discovers his capacity for pity, discovering an inner life, self-analysis and his own cowardly, profound weakness and herd-conscience. Actually, it is more a study of cowardice than pity; only a coward such as Hofmiller would fall prey to the causality of pity understood in the pathetically condescending kind. Soldiers and empathy don't mix, methinks. And the histrionics may have dated for our modern, indifferent tastes; but the social difficulty of cripples in the early 20th is handled with surprising elan; the prose is everywhere perfect and crisp (and well translated), especially when drawing emotions or the subjective depth of errors. And as with Proust, Zweig is an important branch on the history of the novel as social investigation and framing device.

2005-10-27T08:22:00.000+01:00

The President's Neck is Missing! Rest your giant head. I am Lugash. Smells like hot dogs. Instead, it’s been painful and disturbing, like the movie Police Academy. Do I know what rhetorical means? Help me Jebus, help me! Homer no function beer well without. I have misplaced my pants. I'll mace you good! All this fresh air is making my hair move and I don't know how long I can complain. In jail we had to be in this dumb kabuki play about the 47 Ronin, and I wanted to be Oshi, but they made me Ori! The Strong must protect the Sweet. You couldn’t fool your mother on the foolingest day of your life if you had an electrified fooling machine. They're doing a documentary on Canadian Graffiti! (Cuts to a spraypainted sign saying 'Obey the Rules') I am aware of the work of Pablo Neruda. It's Fuhrerific. I'm no missionary! I don't even believe in Jebus! He's like a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a vest. Anyway, long story short - is a phrase whose origins are complicated and rambling. And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I've been to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and I can say without hyperbole that this is a million times worse than all of them put together. This just in: I'm pissed off! The results are in: for Sideshow Bob, one hundred percent; and for Joe Quimby, one percent. And we remind you there is a one percent margin of error. You're the sober ying to my incorrigible yang. Just give the great unwashed a pair of oversized breasts and a happy ending, and they'll 'oink' for more every time. Reading? His job description clearly specified an illiterate! Look Smithers, a bird has become petrified and lost its sense of direction. But Aquaman, you cannot marry a woman without gills! Now make like my pants and split! Stop! Those are prescription pants! Activate cloaking device! Engage candy bar! Dying tickles! I'm Idaho! Me fail English? That's unpossible! It does taste like Gramma! When I grow up, I want to be a principal, or a caterpillar! Can you open my milk, Mommy? Maria, my mighty heart is breaking. I'll be in the Humvee. "I'm a neurotic little nerd who likes to sleep with little girls." I would cry if my tear ducts weren't so muscular. Ice to see you! Let me get into character. (voice unchanged) Okay, I'm McBain. (applause) My teenage son returns from a fancy East Coast college, and I'm horrified to discover he's a nerd. McBain to base! Under attack by Commie-Nazis! You're no Mr. Teeny number 3 - He got me chicks! Must-save-buffoon!

By this to prove my loyalty to the Groening franchise.

2005-10-26T12:24:00.000+01:00

The MIC / The 'Tarantino Effect'

It's hardly a new idea, the industrial war machine, the economic correlation of war and industry; even in Godard’s films of the 60s there is frequent mention of the double relation, of money and commerce working along the same logic as military or authoritarian order. I give you the theory that Tarantino doesn't make films, he makes Soundtracks.

Wartime nations give free reign to an authoritarian, centralised economy under a panoply of rhetorical banners: nationalism, necessary defence, patriotism, unity etc, which aren't dissimilar from hard-core Republican thought (ie, serving industrial interests). We aren't just monkeys to Tarantino's hip revisionism, we are willing accomplices in his cultural force, because we're bereft of new art and the ability to recognise geneuinely far-reaching talent.

Critics of the war machine are branded Leftists, seditionists, unpatriotic freedom-haters or liberal dunces. Tarantino 'works' in our depraved entertainment industry because he's as safe as Best Of compilations or drive time track listings.

Defence is the last little command-economy and authoritarian rhetorical gambit governments can wield to bludgeon their people. His entire shtick is sidereal revival: I remember when Pulp Fiction came out, all of a sudden these nearly-forgotten artists were making comebacks on (inter)national television (Channel 9 especially): directly, live, or through experts in the field: there was Dick Dale on Hey Hey (spouting vague environmentalisms after roaring through Miserlou) and there was an 'expert' on Midday revamping Dusty Springfield.

Why does all power, even in the most token democracies, inevitably divert itself to a model of harsh authoritarianism with draconian laws and oppressive paranoia and restricted rights and censorship? All made indirect reference to PF's retro fun and revivalism without addressing the Great Cultural Wheel of Repetition that drives the industry. Why does such power always attract the biggest industrial and media players? Tarantino is in the enviable position of being a cultural director (in the non-cinematic sense) and he knows damn well ("you know?") he holds this power, just as the faceless powers behind him pat his back. Wasn't it Mussolini who said that fascism is assured when big business holds sway over governmental power? Which implies that ultimately QT is only as good as his songs, which as the Hip-Hop/sampling industry knows, is ultimately a reductive, unsustainable stance.

Machiavelli was lucid and correct, I believe, in charting the necessary movement and courses of power; but he also saw that it couldn’t be explained away or diffused by rational intelligence; he was, it seems, somewhat melancholic and fatalistic on the continued suasion of power’s movement for all time. Only the quick cuts of action films provide the necessary drugging-cover to divert attention away from profound repetition, formula, shallow shtick.

In the face of the Military Industrial Complex, I preach the Individual; from the gestation of my own conscience I perceive the spurious deception of my fellow man; I say cleanse your mind of cant and realise how we're being fucked over every day. Pop reference and allusion are ultimately redundant; they add nothing new to the culture of expression that runs through humanity.

We're all in this together. We've forgotten what expression means and can be.

2005-10-25T19:03:00.000+01:00

Family Guy, season 1

Building on and extending the prime-time cartoon arc created by The Simpsons, Family Guy pushes things along at a faster clip and with sharper humour. It’s great to not only see the early fruition of the show, and the characters especially, but in particular the amazing amount of characterisation inherent in the voicings themselves. Brian and Stewie, and Peter’s laugh are perfect inspirations, not cardboard cutouts. It’s almost as though Seth MacFarlane emerged a fully fledged TV writer with script and multiple voices in hand. The Simpsons, in contrast, were a lot slower to emerge as full patterns of predictable character. But then again FG rides in the groove opened by Groening & co: it has a chaotic, selfish father and a stable mother-figure, and the kids are rich side-arcs. It comes back to being about the Dad in the end, though FG has far more referentiality and flashbacks and parallel pisstakes of television. And a bigger hunger for absurdity and PC-baiting unaffected by a necessary return to regular reality or emotional centres. And to make an extension of The Simpsons contrast, the real differences in what/where/how are with Futurama, which is another choco bar altogether.

Any episode with Brian or Stewie in the lead is best; the cult episode (Chitty Chitty Death Bang), the Indian casino ep with hilarious moral-tv-time-outs (The Son Also Draws), the dog show with Brian and the one with Gumbel 2 Gumbel (Beach Justice!) (If I’m Dyin’, I’m Lyin’) (absolutely cracking police interview with nodding Bryant Gumbel and pen), the parade float based on a Who’s the Boss scene (and debate about who actually is/was the boss)… it’s all gold. Also the Hitler show, with Slater’s arse, great.

Stewie is my new comedic hero, the insultive Dr Zachary Smith of the show, by way of Rex Harrison. And Seth cut his chops over with Johnny Bravo, I see.
His sense of pacing and comedic timing is superbly abrupt or extended as the case may be. Peter’s darting eyes. Superb writing smarts for TV. Lessons for all. Three more seasons to go. Comedic bliss.

2005-10-24T12:29:00.000+01:00

Jean-Luc Godard, 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle

A movie that inspires lists, reaction, comment, not so much a cinematic experience (cinematic journalism, maybe). Not many people talk about the poetry of the film.
The ultimate film of a city, the ultimate filmic essay.
Industrial society, the limits of communication.
Vietnam/Morality/Fashion/Economic Paranoia
- What is language, Mummy?
The chaos of word, sound, image and signified all disassembled, blurred; the thinking head from the body; the city, a nation, from its people.
- Pax Americana: jumbo-sized brainwashing.
A place obsessed with other places, destinations.
The slow documentary pan of essay.
The spoken persistence of colours worn, observed.
Consumer overproduction.
Using characters somewhat restrictively as image-conduits of idea, observation; connected and loose from reality, yet always with sufficient poetry of expression and vision. And always from a subtly feminine, city perspective.
High density living.
Prostitution on every level of city life.
- They're American shoes.
- To trample Vietnamese with.
Magazines/catalogues vs Newspapers/radio.
Objects become more real than people.
The cold juxtaposition of construction and prostitution.
The philosophy of Being, difference, fraternity, married to the banal image of picking up tricks.
The rebirth of conscience - everything follows from this.
Mon semblable, mon frère.
The director, in direct communication with the character-visuals, represents conscience speaking thru cinema. Conscience essaying the world, tout le monde.
The painter/writer's rage for expression.

2005-10-24T12:26:00.000+01:00

My new comedic hero is Stewie Griffin:

Stewie (to one of the prostitutes at Cleveland's house): So, is there any tread left on the tires? Or at this point would it be like throwing a hot dog down a hallway?

Stewie: I was under the impression the name of the show was "Kids Say the Darndest Things," not "Old Black Comedians Never Shut the Hell Up."

Lois: What's going on down here?
Stewie: Oh, we're playing house.
Lois: That boy's all tied up.
Stewie: Roman Polanski's house

Stewie: By all means, turn me into a child star. Perhaps I can move to Californ-i-ay and wrangle me a three-way with the Olsen twins.

Link and laughs here.

2005-10-24T09:24:00.000+01:00

Jim Jarmusch, Broken Flowers

When his career is written up in the future, this film will be part of the trinity of late-bloom that mark Bill Murray (ok, one could argue more than three films constitute Bill’s resurgence, or argue which films outweigh minor from major in such a grouping (though Wes Anderson must feature), and one could also argue convincingly that it’s not Bill’s late style (all drab faces and demure dryness) that finally upped his appeal, or the roles becoming available, but that Bill’s style has always stayed the same and it’s the directors (and the market) who’ve come around to him again. He’s a great comedic actor who’s been given serious work again, who never strays far from serious humour (of the face particularly). I remember him as a tall force with great access to chaotic energy on a Letterman appearance; I remember the screwball nuts of his 80s roles. He’s still someone who has to leave America for a spell occasionally, which I believe humanises him. The difference now is that he’s older, but still bewildered and wired into manic potential under a thinning dome and a refined array of tics and moods. Now it’s got extra cachet and potentially an Oscar.

Now, match that with the White Mane of Independent Cinema. And what you get is another road movie. Whoulda thunkit? I was woried that Jarmusch would exploit that Late Murray Demeanor to the full, (Lost in Translation in America, but with more smoking) but in the end he’s quite calm and understated. Murray himself doesn’t even play it up. He spends most of the first 15 minutes of film sitting down looking at a TV. He seems lost or mired, surrounded by 80s furniture. He’s a testament of some form of (late) midlife crisis or ennui of maturity; a craggy old Don Juan (a persistent gag) who knows not himself but enjoys a comfortable affinity with (meeting) women. And before you know it he’s pushed (reluctantly) into a road trip to find a (potentially) (illegitimate) son by an (unsourced) previous fling. And what you get is not so much an essay into mid-life vacuity or the causality of lost opportunity (say, by strong character direction), but a sketch-book of American social life in differing degrees of surface, low-brow and small town. So the comedy is located in two places: Bill’s face and the mores of American society as he crosses and dines with them. It’s not a film about disconnectedness or unfulfilment or knowing what you want, or social distance and empty patterns of meaning, but simply nothing other than a road movie with a mild consistency of trope and persistence (and a peculiar fondness for women). Not stylised, not driven, and definitely difficult to locate in terms of inner subjectivity (for it has none). The great metaphor of the road (the journey, the quest) doesn’t even stick. There’s a lead that proves fruitless, a final tease of potential which turns into an admission of failure, and the credits roll!

OK, so there are great moments of facial comedy or daft Americana and reference, and I sniggered with genuine glee at times, but there could have been so, so much more to this film. I think ultimately it didn’t do justice to Bill’s unique status as American actor nor really stood up as a Jarmusch film. But then again the Academy always rewards conservative bets.

2005-10-21T09:06:00.000+01:00

10CC, Rubber Bullets

By the speed of internet download and review, I offer this quick riposte (thrust, parry, ho!). First listening reminded me of the naff and layered studio production of Beach Baby by First Class (1974):

What ever happened at the high school hop?
I guess you should remember soda pop.
Ever think about the girl next door
With beat up sneakers and a pony tail?

I love the intro to this track though, the thumping rhythm and that odd tappity rhythm (could be a bass played very high). The nice little key jumps, the double-fuzz guitar licks, the delicate middle eight with distant piano tricks... and the sheer odd, camp, cheeky, bluffing, throwaway fun lyrics:

Having a tear-gas of a time…
I love to hear those convicts squeal,
It's a shame these slugs ain't real
There's a rumor goin' round death row,
That a fuse is gonna blow
Hey padre
Padre you talk to your boys...
Trust in me -
God will come to set you free
We all got balls and brains
But some's got balls and chains

This is just weird, I mean, it kinda makes the BB's Student Demonstration Time look like a waltz in the park. Great production though.

2005-10-17T20:59:00.000+01:00

I’ve been contemplating some ancient family photos of late: a grandparent wedding photo of a rushed union due to pregnancy, the grandfather I never met in his defence force uniform on the eve of the German invasion, the other unknown relatives standing with unsmiling seriousness and poise and cigars, their general underweight pallor (except for the father of the bride whom they called the Kaiser Uncle, seated behind his stomach), and only the bride with her duo of tulips smiling happily. Most of the people in the photo have already departed, but I can claim some degree of kinship to all, some distant scrap of relation which only seems more meaningful for never having been actuated.

Also some photos of said grandfather in his school days: a teacher in a boater, a class of shabby kids, some sprawling symetrically on their sides at the bottom of the group, some in typical sailor outfits like the kids of Russian aristocracy. These are people that experienced the poverty of Holland in the 30s. And in the far left corner, as far as I can be certain in judging his features, said grandfather with no more than eight years behind him and an impossibly deliberate folding of the arms with attitudinal stare. Wilfulness.

Also an illustrated magazine from the occupation period, with ads for household products and pilot’s bars and coal heaters and photo stories of the victorious German armies quashing the communist forces on the Russian front (note the superimposed V on the final photo). Yes, a slightly detestable propaganda medium; but several pages in, a baby photo competition with none other than my father at six months looking calmly angelic and distinctly Aryan. I didn’t actually get to clear up whether he won the prize or whether my grandmother explicitly shunned it due to collaborative associations, or whether nothing ever came of it and was hushed up anyway, like so many other little things which seem trifling but go a long way to explain the mosaic of attitudes that shaped much of the familial structure and norms of my parents, and how they in turn transposed these in their parenting.

Anyhoo, another observation from my recent visit was the amount of (relatively young) people having kids, or trying to conceive, or lighting the buzz of expectancy in their soon-to-be-grand-parents. Lots of defacto couples and lots of second or third marriages gunning for that extra kid. (And, as an aside, a whole lot of houses and flats for sale in forced- or settlement-disposal circumstances). Mothers and fathers caught in the flush of parental celebration and fussy obsession (vis. my father’s snide comments to the effect that everyone has super-babies these days) and basically plugged in to the great circle of life, or whatever you want to call it. I know it’s a terrible cliché to say that everyone goes through the fixed stages of life more or less consistently, and that you can either be cognisant or blissfully unaware of being in that (vicious) cycle, yet still lead a life of supreme individuality or proud heritage or sheer reproductive thrill (vis. Anna Brangwen). It’s all a rather humdrum matter of choice, for sure, and yet I don’t mean to play the individualist card any stronger or more deliberately than others who feel it’s a normal part of life to spawn directly and often; but above all this, and possibly filtering through it, the active knowledge and awareness of past generations, in intimate detail and intimate distance (I wonder, what did his voice sound like? How much of that attitude came out in his speech?) should somehow correct or balance our understanding of the present. Not so much an inoculation as an information in the most literal, syllabic sense of the term. They all went through the same shit we do, I mean in the broader way of things, personal crises, difficult relationships, stubborness and guilt and jubilation and warm summer days. Those crisp black and white pictures with their posed solidity and faces seasoned with time’s expressiveness… Their attitude to having kids was more a matter of conjugal duty and churchy sanction (as well as sheer normality). But still those faces stare into the distant present that is my interpretation in turn, and it does feel heartening to see, so closely, the long line and cycles of my descent and extrapolate some projection forward, and of how little and how much can be left behind to speak to them. How time is like a bubble…

2005-10-05T16:16:00.000+01:00

Steve Mumford

I don't often do this kind of direct linkage from the blog, but I've found some very interesting artistic reactions to the Iraq Invasion and Continuing War over on N+1 mag.

Of course I’m ambivalent about the war, and feel that the arrogance of Bush and his team really screwed a lot up, making the going much worse than it had to have been. However, I believe that we have to see it through, since Iraq has really become the prime training ground for Al Qaida now. I’m not sure that Americans realize how Sunni fundamentalism defines the insurgency and how dangerous and profoundly racist it is.

Here's an interview and some interpretations and some more symposium pieces. Well worth it, methinks.

2005-09-25T19:37:00.000+01:00

Download music

Now that the Rummage box has been put to bed, I've had to relocate some old and dusty articles to fresher servers. The archive, you could say, must always stay online. But one of the bonuses is you can now download my MP3 files from one handy page. [A word of warning: these are early slash amateur attempts at home recording. That means no decent microphones or nice-sounding rooms were used, nor class mixing and structural perfection. I just did these with DI guitars, effects and a glass. More than anything, these brief snippets of rhythm-masters (by which I mean there's no vocal content or messages on top) are testament to patient and laborious overdubbing using a Zoom digital 8-tracker. No more, no less. The laptop studio is in progress but still an audio interface short and a U87 several paypackets away.] So then, until then, please go here:

www.iol.ie/~simoni/rino/

Backline guitar (mp3 - 2668k)
Five minute drone (mp3 - 8764k)
Little groove grab (mp3 - 2748k)
Not dub (mp3 - 952k)
Not prodigy (mp3 - 760k)
One hot minute (mp3 - 2056k)
Six guitars mp3 - 1994k)
Skabilly (mp3 - 3340k)
The old in-out (mp3 - 4482k)

2005-09-20T08:24:00.000+01:00

Blog Aesthetics

I know, what a silly header. To many people, just absurd. Blogging is writing’s karaoke; a poor analogue of the journal, where links are presented as important and/or current facts wrapped in half-baked commentary slash thought. And yet it’s a new media with a third estate all its own, leaning somewhere towards an op-ed state of personalised journalistic integrity and immediacy without the legal finality of publishing proper, and hence easily ignorable, unworthy. What’s aesthetics got to do with it.

Well, new technologies are usually not appreciated for their potential art or integrity. And in the weblog’s case, this all boils down to the art and integrity of the writer using the medium. So, from this POV, I mean to bring blogs back into the (potentially) literary fold, by focusing on the quality that goes into them. But in terms of potential aesthetics, in a medium so shiftless and gossipy, where does one begin to draw a system or code of criticism? And indeed, what’s the point when there’s already a complex and well-mapped history of literary criticism directly related to writing proper?

Well, I’ve just disclosed that I tend to like blogs that share many of the same qualities of good writing. And all that guff about literary theory is just that; I mean what’s the use of stucturalism, reader-oriented theories or deconstruction in an online environment? Theories based on the heritage of novels used as a primer for media in which novels are not written (yet), or hardly even considered in depth, and which is fiendishly anti-quality or -textual care… as you can see, it’s a spur for self-questioning, for mediated conscience of a kind.

But anyway, my point: and I regret that it is only a little one: what I like about good books and what I like about the fine punctuation of literary styles is a certain sensitivity and attentive care to detail; and hence I like blogs which not only differentiate particularities of thought, expression and idea with subtle scalpels of honed prose, but in particular those blogs which tend to approach the literary in quality by boosting the amplitude and imagistic resonance of details. I mean the kind of stuff that makes any writing memorable by casting it diagonally, obliquely into the mind’s memorial faculty. A clarity of images which makes one a trusted voice in terms of narrative, reader-care as well as the cerebral tingles of literary creation and participation. Which gives of a certain completeness as opposed to just so much more tiredly interpretative thought (or criticism, reviews, as the case may be).

Let that be my care and incentive from now on.

2005-09-19T12:41:00.000+01:00

Nice, France

A strangely mixed, ambivalent city. There’s plenty of evidence of former glory and middle class wealth, yet there’s a lot of decay and disrepair unbalanced by new development or maintenance. There’s hallmark Riviera stylings and massive, elegant beachfront hotels, yet no beach to speak of nor a central, main attraction to fully focus attention and orientation. Sprawling with traffic, incoherently allocated, yet typically French and solid on the map, gravitating to the sea, surrounded by hills and between the drawing power of Monaco and Cannes. I guess this is what it means to live on the Cote D’Azur, that long stretch of holiday development, mad scooters and suspicious wealth that only lives fully for two months a year.

The grand apartment buildings have palatial names and lofty ceilings, but the half-open shutters are rusting or falling apart. Some streets seem to be in long periods of maintenance-hibernation; one major shopping street was just gravel for petanq players. Brass plates for doctors everywhere: paediatricians, dentist-surgeons, kinesthesiologists. Beggars of all hue, some talented and singing an honest trade. Never a rush to clear out. No mad rush for the status of new cars. Teeming young couples or pregnant types; a healthily diverse gene pool. And a Mediterranean humidity that leaves you slightly glazed, giddy.

But, importantly, from the food angle up, Nice (and by extension France, the Continent) presents simple fare and perfect proportions; all home cooked and unpretentious. I didn’t get to try many of the specialités Nicoise, but I loved the service and the wine with everything, the cheese, the value. The mad varieties of ice cream, the dog with the balloon, the street labourer smoking a pipe, and the simple courtesies no matter how small or trite the purchase or meal.

2005-09-11T22:06:00.000+01:00

...Some interesting reviews, in easy-to-read paragraph format.

Shakti w. John McLaughlin, A Handful of Beauty

I’ve taken a real shine to John’s acoustic playing. Here he uses an acoustic with scalloped fingerboard and crossing drone strings to amazing effect. Rich bends up and down, amazing runs and fireworks matched by occasional slow exercises in sustain, like a sitar. Shakti area great band (violin, tabla, ghatam) and this is a harmonious (and rapid) meeting of musical worlds.

Blue Brazil

I love the way Brazilian music lends itself to compilation. Almost every comp I’ve got is a winner (Brazilica, the David Byrne selections etc) because I think strength of song quality is better appreciated in South America; the sheer amount of good songs is uniformly higher per recorded output. They have legitimate song contests with quality writers and a healthy respect for music as social force that’s lacking in our song/dance/Eurovision climate. I particularly love the Edu Lobo track Viola Fora de Moda. As with most current compilations, all have quality surprises.

Sufjan Stevens, Greetings from Michigan The Great Lake State

Quite simply one the best albums I’ve heard in a while. Balanced, complex, melodic and instrumentally interesting. Sufjan has a gift for chorus and coda, and here Oh God, Where Are You Now? (In Pickeral Lake? Pigeon? Marquette? Mackinaw?) (yes, dig the titles) is another supreme and gentle song of faith and hunger for heaven with a killer run-out line. Lots of songs about people and a state’s self-assessment slash identity (possibly masking its poverty, hard work and a love of nature). Worth every cent. I’ve also a suspicion that Sufjan, Wes Anderson and David Foster Wallace all inhabit the same universe.

Gilberto Gil, Acoustic

My man Gilberto is Brazil’s Minister for Culture. Recorded live in the studio, this is a great exposition of the songwriting panache and virtuoso musicality that seems to dominate Bossa music today. Happy souls, wise souls, true performers every one of them. This man has songwriting to spare. Also some great bass. More than just great middle-class snob’s dinner music.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Yanqui U.X.O.

What is the emotional sound of a cruel and barbaric war machine? In you, the listener? In a band?

Os Mutantes, Everything is Possible!

Weird, funny, funky Brazilian pop from the late 60s/early 70s with a hint of psychedelic. And tasty, impressionistic lyrics.

Orchestra Baobab, Specialist in All Styles

Proof (if ever that had to be any) of the direct African heritage of Cuban music. Left me slightly annoyed with myself 'cos this is the kinda music I wanna make. Guest spots from Youssou N’Dour and Ibrahim Ferrer.

Fela Kuti, Expensive Shit

Set up for a bust, Fela swallowed the joint. The cops waited for the evidence in his shit. A friendly, clean shit was presented by a fellow-inmate and Fela gets out and writes this amazing track about the steep turd. Big sass horns, the solid Afrobeat shuffle and a great bass presence. Call and response, wise-ass lyrics and a private community of wives for backing vocals. Probably his definitive track thus.

13th Floor Elevators, Easter Everywhere

Once you’ve heard that weird, chickeny gobbledygook, you never forget it (AllMusic assures me it’s electric jug). Prime early psychedelia from Texas — and everything the Byrds ain’t.

Mogwai, EP+6

So the Japanese offer some extra tracks; is that sufficient cause to re-release a perfect EP locally as something more akin to an album? Especially if one of the tracks (Stereodee) turns into a bold (as in not many other signed bands would get away with it) and relentless scream of guitar noise for its last ten minutes? I’ve never heard such a demanding sheet of noise. The familiar major-sounding chords of the last four (original tracks) are almost a relieving closure from the b-side tracks before them. One for the fans.

Cluster & Eno

Bean curd, bean thread, cellophane, chasoba, chow fun, dang myun, dumpling, e-fu, egg, farfel, glass, gooksu, harusame, hokkien, knodel, kreplach, lo mein, mei fun, mung bean, naeng myun, pirogi, quenelle, ramen, rice, sevian, shirataki, soba, somen, spaetzle, udon, wheat, won ton.

The Black Crowes, Amorica

Remember how good all that 70s guitar rock used to feel? Feel it again. It’s almost unnoticeable how limited Chris Robinson actually is as a singer, unless you’re a room away and get bugged by his whine-format.

Brian Eno, Nerve Net

This is Eno wih modern beats. That is, interesting collages that roll along nicely but also cry out for more cream, especially lyrical and vocal cream. Eno’s lyrics (when they are applied) are pretty throwaway here, surprise surprise. Some vaguely jazz progressions, mostly soundtracky-songs, some forgettabe stuff, but also some superb ambient works. One or two of the samples and riffs actually sound like modern hip hop samples. A great headphone or hi-fi listen, maybe a little bit keyboard-heavy, it's significant for being so unlike and dissimilar to Tiger Mountain.

Fripp & Eno, Evening Star

Tranquil. Unruffled. Expansive. Equable. Composed. Quiet. Assured.

Beck, Guero

What I like about Beck, particularly after a hashed-up revisit with Mutations, is that he can write great songs set to very defined and crafted musical settings. Here, there’s only one or two interesting songs, and though they’re all well-defined production pieces, it’s just not such an interesting album. It’s rather mill-running Beck, methinks. It sounds great, but it leaves you lingering for the precise punch of a hit, for the combination of sound and craft that define musical success.

Mogwai, Happy Songs for Happy People

Somehow, to my mind, irrespective of thought, mood or place, this stuff taps right into what it feels like to be alive (in cities, suburbs, or highways) and functioning (albeit aware, critical, questioning) and feeling (lonely, distant, obscure). Instrumental music completely of our time, just like Neu! was for the autobahn 70s. Sophisticated, progressive, sculpted and humane. These guys aren’t just making interesting soundtracks to imaginary films, they’re ready for films to meet and complete them.

Remember Shakti

Calm. Flute. Tabla. Warm nights. The measure of a culture’s (musical/social) complexity lies in its attitude to improvisation. Friends. Continuity. Recognitions. Dharma.

Dennis Wilson, Pacific Ocean Blue

Coke, flake, snow, toot, blow, nose candy, her, she, lady flake, liquid lady, speedball, crack, rock, Charlie, bump, slim.

Goldfrapp, Supernature

In my cynical heart of hearts I might concede that the only differential between Allison and that other electro-pop "singer" Kylie is that Ms Goldfrapp didn’t go through many rounds of Stock.Aitken.Waterman horseshit to get where she is today. Ms Goldfrapp could do it by singing talent alone. But on several occasions here she just sounds like another starlet vamping over DJ-craft; not like the sexy waif-voice of Tricky’s Pumpkin, or the perfect chamber-torch-pop and deliciously palpable sexuality of Felt Mountain and some of Black Cherry (I mean, to sing about a lab rat wired for orgasms — sublime). It just sounds like more of the same now; and though it does take a nearly interesting turn halfway through, I want more of the explicitly feminine sex and songcraft of her earlier designs. Allison, do you hear me? You know there’s better material to be had with your voice. I’m thinking a Bond-theme. I’m thinking a collaborative effort with cigar-smoking Frenchmen, something distinctly continental and slightly sus. I’m thinking tabloid scandal and cigarette superlatives.

Miles Davis, Nefertiti

The axel, camel spin, death spiral, flip, flying, free skate, ice dancing, lift, loop, Lutz, over-rotation, toe pick, quad, salchow, serpentine, sit spin, spin, spread-eagle, toe loop.

Miles Davis, ESP

What with Sorcerer and Nefertiti as a loose group of discs, ESP is certainly the superior. The band which felt cold and business like-before (in the sense of new recruits getting the hang of their new manager, trying to anticipate his expectations and adopting a deliberate informality to seem assured and confident, certain of eventual bonding (whilst said manager is already contemplating other recruits and new lines of business (his eyes calmly perceiving the effect of his reputation in action))) is here finally relaxing creatively and improvising warmly. Miles, consequently, is certainly in top form.

There’s more, but I’ve lost steam, oomph, vigour.

2005-09-07T12:34:00.000+01:00

Matthew Buzzell, Jimmy Scott - If You Only Knew

My man Jimmy, what a heartbreaker. One area where the world wide web is deficient is in footage of our man in action, so I got this as soon as Amazonianly possible. I knew most of the personal history already; I knew of Jimmy's need for family and emotional mainline to his lost mother; and I knew of his impeccably behind-the-beat phrasing and complete possession-immersion in the song with that sublime androgynous and clear voice; but I wasn’t prepared for the magnetism and intense focus of his performing style, to see him in action. So personal and yet so performative, so much singing from the deepest, private heart, with everyone hanging on his every note. Such rare genius, so rare and total soul, such faultless execution. Jimmy’s heartbreakingly simple lesson: it all comes from the soul. The broken, suffering, but moving-on soul. And a part of his beauty as a person comes, partly, from an intelligence born of that suffering. An articulate, moving, generous man.

Heaps of concert footage on the road in Japan, heaps of interviews with family and friends, heaps of music and archival photos and anecdotes; even an 'artistically' bespectacled art-fart biographer to pad out the historical detail. Simple, respectful documentary homage. An important chapter in the historical trajectory of vocal jazz.

2005-09-06T10:18:00.000+01:00

Partagas Churchill de Luxe

Truly, an obscene amount of tobacco. I’ve never smoked a Cuban this big before; it’s like smoking a cannon. But what an experience. Easier on the draw and subtly stronger than a Romeo y Julietas, it actually changes, in terms of smoking experience, in the course of the full 50 minutes it takes to consume. On the third puff especially, about a third of the way in, there’s like a forest fire of action at the tip. The operative word, though, is powerfully smooth. In a big way. Maybe not so strong on nicotine highs (unlike the headache-inducing hit of Flagship rollies), but a complete tobacco experience nonetheless, almost exhausting; I feel I’ve reduced my life expectancy by a week or so. Word up to Olav for bringing me this behemoth smoke, and word to the finer things and qualities in life.

2005-09-03T22:39:00.000+01:00

John Coltrane, Ballads

Something I’ve carried over from my Miles studies, no doubt, is the habit of measuring a jazzman by his facility and strength with ballads, standards, and slow tunes. It’s the basic premise of musical modesty: the master returning to the simplest, most familiar songs to display economy, soul, superior statement and technique; or rather, musical wisdom. The master at home in all formats as well as being a radical technician and explorer elsewhere.

So I was looking forward to this album lot. AMG hints at commercial/audience interests being a possible motive for this album, coming off the relative hard exploration and demanding work of Giant Steps, say, which ain’t quite Ascension yet. The record company gunned for an inoffensive crowd pleaser without sheets of sound or squawking horns. Coltrane rises to the challenge by not sounding chafed or restrained – there’s quite a few of his hallmark fills and contained runs on the tenor’s middle range. There’s no soprano here – though my personal mix includes the awesome simplicity and sweetness of Central Park West which one could call a ballad of sorts though I’d much rather call it melodic wisdom in its purest form – one of the humblest, most humanly sufficient tracks ever recorded.

The only gripe with this album I can muster — though the band is excellent and the recording, song choice and laid-back late-night mood are all impeccable, it’s that Coltrane as solo horn sounds a little lonely – I’d think he’d be better accompanied here by another horn, trombone, trumpet for a completer band sound, instead of having only the steady piano response of McCoy Tyner. Maybe it’s a subtle lack of sparring or dialogue, or occasional, repetitive hanging on a dependent note of the solo – I just thought a quintet might be more to the point. Maybe Dolphy, a Curtis Fuller or Freddie Hubbard. This probably goes against the sanctity of his ‘classic’ quartet, and that entails for Coltrane purists, which I am certainly not. But it’s a pleasant album nonetheless.

2005-08-31T14:11:00.000+01:00

Miles Davis, Bitches Brew

I believe that Bitches Brew is one of the most mysterious albums in jazz, period.

Alinear, spliced, swampy grooves played in modes or keys somewhere between uncomfortable and unfamiliar. Long sketches that completely collapse notions of verse/chorus in the standard jazz-solo sense. The insinuation of virtuosity but not the harmonic foundation to ground it. Multiple musicians weaving around each other in austere groove and rhythm. Echoes and congas, electric and acoustic instruments (one of my fave combinations), planned and unplanned spontaneity. Obscurity, occlusion and occasionally sharp clarities of melody. Loose cohesion. No major hooks or choruses, but searching stabs of notes (played for echo-decay) cutting through the noodling undergrowth and treacherous quicksands.

Preceded by Nefertiti, Miles in the Sky and In a Silent Way, and antedating Live-Evil and Jack Johnson, we can place the mindset of the album in terms of progression and scope (1969-70 was an amazing period for Miles). And we can look to anecdotal popularity slash impact of the album vis. jazz-rock-fusion and the related after-careers of the players involved. It’s not racially, temporally or ethnically typified; it can’t be offset or contextualised by other jazz works or composers of the time. It’s difficult to read subjectively. We can finger Teo Macero’s constructive mix-methodology, but it’s incredibly difficult to put a finger on the singular essence that defines or centralises the Brew. It is wilfully mysterious.

I don’t mean to imply that mystery is in and of itself a pure artistic criteria to be called upon when all others fail. It can be a mode of interpretation and respect, and it can gauge depth and resonance where literal approaches look for transparent hits.

The tension of the album veers between accessibility and space. It’s not an easy album to interface with; there’s no strong melodic intent or subjective line to adapt. The songs spread themselves over a large canvas without forming a definite formal structure or contour, yet it still feels organic and compositional. Which got me thinking that the kind of people who’d get off on this stuff are painters. It’s very much as though this is composition by other means, by colours or tones or shades and abstractions (or tape splicing as the case may be). With a variety of brushes and secret processes.

I think there may be an undercurrent reaction to free jazz here, filtered through the tonal (electric) approach of a Hendrix or other acid children. Free jazz would just not’ve been interesting to a trumpeter of Miles’ peculiar calibre; his sense of sound and colour had very little to do with literal hard chops and more with sound-setting and ambient feel. Reflected of course in his choice of musicians, with the compositional approach and direction, with the fact that Miles’ stamp is all over this Brew.

Sanctuary comes close to a normal jazz theme introduction, but again veers off into high slabs of single notes. And then it ends; no explicit theme clearly expressed, no definitive statement painted, but a very wide and singular space covered. There ain’t many big-picture risk-takers working in the studio like Miles any more. Baffling.

2005-08-30T21:44:00.000+01:00

Christopher Hitchens, Hostage to History — Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger

There is, to my mind, something fascinating and representative about the last half century of political history in Cyprus. Fascinating in the sense of political machinations operating naked and unreserved for all to see; and representative for the rest of us because it exemplifies quite succinctly the Ps and Qs of lite-imperial leverage as fomented by post-WW2 British decay and American ascendance – a formula of state/industrial interest and spin which results in cruel junta governments and massive loss of civilian life (whilst calling itself ‘friendly’ or ‘democratic’ or ‘freedom-loving’). There’s powers of patriotic nationalism and forceful intervention at work; of dirty geopolitical manoeuvres by large parties each working to a private and/or shifting imperial agenda irrespective of the Cypriot people’s needs or wishes. Amongst whom there was a relatively calm social/religious unity, now embittered and torn apart by these forces with the resultant loss of thousands of lives and a partitioning which sees no sign of abating.

It’s the particular failure of the US, the British, the Greeks and the Turks (in that order of influence) that Hitchens focuses on. He singles out Kissinger as the conniving, turncoated real-politician exploiting (or rather, indulging) first the junta Greek government which caused and directed the 1974 coup (and hence Turkey’s ‘protective’ invasion of the North), but he’s also clear in singling out the British handwashing that lay power at Kissinger’s shifting feet in the first place [which as an aside, could have made a forceful extrapolation of the Divide-n-Rule policy exercised by the Brits up into the 50s. This D&R kernel could be argued to have directly led to the four-way exploitation of the Cypriot situation that lead to the invasion. Add to which the background arms deals Nixon made with the Greek junta in exchange for campaign contributions, vis the anti-communist/Cold War power scheme envisaged for the Levant at the time, reflected in the still-active and immune military outposts on the island]. Rich… tapestries.

The chapter on the Greek junta period (‘Dragon’s Teeth’) is forceful and driven by Hitchensian conviction: in the sense that he expects trust for his collation and interpretation of the facts rather than providing well-sourced clarity or thoroughness in constructing the case. Which adds to my second gripe (irrelevant really in face of the book’s professed scope) in that Cyprus has always been conquered and ruled by outside forces, and that hence this frame is the best (if only) way to interpet the modern history as well, by examining purely the most recent batch of external powers in their plays for the island. Which is not to say that on the other hand, the native Cypriots were collusive engineers of their own doom (commonly implied in false reductios that the T.Cypriots and the Gr.Cypriots always fought or never got along), or were misled into accepting at face value the outsider’s promises and conditions; but for instance, it often glosses over how subtle and strangely counterproductive the politics of enosis really are/were from an internal point of view. The Hitch begins his account personably enough with the decisive hospitality, but I got the feeling he loses track of the ordinary people who were swept along by extreme politics and events of a nature intrinsically alien to them. A few humanising anecdotes could really have padded his journalism.With enosis especially (in the sense of the term used up to the 70s), I know there’s still a lot of smarting betrayal felt over the fact that Greece then (1974) did nothing to ‘aid’ the Gr.Cypriot rebuff of the Turkish invasion (the Turks, patient, waited for the right moment to act, aided by Kissinger’s sudden favour and the Greek junta’s collapse (cf. the hapless, destabilising coup on the island – related events); but it’s not often perceived how the Greek junta pretty much directly caused the whole invasion anyway, directing it from Athens with two Cypriot thugs at the helm (said thugs also playing significant roles in establishing the junta in the first place). Enosis then and therefore entailed a collusion with fascism – a fact lost on the Gr.Cypriots looking for such unification, or who now recall it fondly under the banner of EU ratification, washed of all past valence. The prelimenary steps leading to the Greek-sponsored coup of 1974 entailed EOKA-B’s ruthless elimination of non-enosis dissent from the island (which was then in a powersharing, independent phase with T.Cypriots, who got rightly antsy over the extremists. And I mean the worst kind of in-fighting and murder under the guise of national interests – Gr.Cypriots killing Gr.Cypriots). The Enosis rallying cry was before then also the cry against British occupation. How nationalism and independence ever got caught up with the idea of unification with Greece stems back to the language and culture of the majority of the population, but of course it did nothing for the idea of a unified and truly independent Cyprus, which to this day is still a strange and conflicted notion but which should, you’d think, be in the island’s best interest. The island never tasted independence long enough to form a steady sense of it: hence the continued internationalist perspective of the "Cyprus problem" and the continued draw of Hellenic unity. I was put in mind of this again recently by Churchill’s supreme role in the failed and devastating landings at Gallipoli, the necesity of which was only mildly tactically-relevant – imagine telling that to the bluebloods and royalists at the RSL: the greatest Briton sent you into slaughter on a mistaken but wilful whim. I’m just scratching, rather poorly too, at the manifold streams of politics that define the Cypriot struggles – it is a history incredibly dense and rife with disinformation and political slant slash sympathies and contradictions – said complexity the Hitch also glosses over for the sake of urgent declamatory power.

So then, Cyprus is ‘representative’ in the sense of nationalism breeding a peculiar blindness which provides cover for profound exploitations which directly contravene a nation’s (or a people’s) best interest. And thence to the bigger POV, or the shamelessly modern elements of the geopolitics involved: the casual meaninglessness of international treaties and sovereignty in the face of American influence and exploitation of divisive powers. Kindly manipulating foreign policy to suit its ‘friendly’ benefactors and selfish, presidential interests. The dismissive and direly cynical condescension of bigwigs over a little island. Kissinger, shuffling with unaccountable abandon [yes, I thought immediately of the current, switchable White House administration; but also of note is how damned infectious the Hitch’s crusade against the Kiss really is]. Mutual delusion and relative spin, betrayal, polite non-intervention whilst discreetly sanctioning ‘friendly’ interventions, shifting ideological and/or political goals… the basic punctuation of modern American foreign policy, methinks. And a broken, bewildered nation left to mop up the blood.

Hitchens provides some rather cursory additional prefaces which don’t really do much for the current situation re: the EU, except to note that Turkey’s desire for accession stretches way back. The entire book could do with a complete re-edit or re-think (there are several textual errors). I’m gonna add some additional comments when I actually finish the book. I just wanted to get the initial thoughts down. Cyprus is important. It is incredibly unfair to say this vis. the continuing problems, the past victims and the huge number of Cypriots who fled the island, but Cyprus is a test-case of how modern, Western foreign policy fails in the rawest terms, and reveals the cunning expediency of imperialism-lite. How the smaller a nation is, the stronger the efficacy of violence and manipulation is perceived by the greater powers. How the international community is revealed to be quite powerless on matters of nationhood and humanity. Cyprus can teach so much.

2005-08-23T21:13:00.000+01:00

The Great Political Excuse now has Commercial Applications

I got a 70s rock musical DVD — it doesn’t matter which one because frankly it’s embarrassing. The movie was pretty forgettable but my attention was snared by the short, unskippable little Copyright ad that preceded it. It’s of a devilish blacksmith (red-eyed and sweaty) forging a © in his smithy whilst the voice-over lays down the evils of copyright infringement. The text runs like this:

The Pirates are out to get you. Don’t let them brand you. Piracy funds organised crime; piracy will destroy our film and video industry. Piracy costs jobs and will destroy our music and publishing industry.

And then, in easy run-on, is this:

Piracy funds terrorism. Piracy will destroy our development and your future enjoyment. Copyright is a matter of fact.

Of course, as this is a dramatically didactic little piece, I can undestand they have to find effective and (un)hyperbolic means to convey a message. But did FACT (and yes, that is the name of the company) have to resort to such (possibly) spurious and inflammatory statements? I’ve had people peddling hot or burnt DVDs at my door, and they definitely didn’t look like the purveyors of desperate hate crimes. I’ve got a feeling that FACT is co-opting the political theme du jour to tap into a little good old fear themselves to get people to take copyright issues seriously. Or am I reading it wrong?

I decided to ring up the Irish chapter of the body. I got a nice but defensive lady on the phone who instantly assumed I was media. No, I said, I’m a concerned consumer. I asked if there was a factual basis for making such an associative claim with terrorism, or reasearch warranting it. At first she said that this is confidential business stuff and hence not discussable on the phone, but she elaborated to say that the company would obviously have a legitimate basis for making such a claim if it did.

I’ve checked out the FACT website and can’t find the word terrorism anywhere on it; so, pending further clarification on the issue (by calling the English office, by follow-up emails, letters to editors etc etc) I’m drawn to conclude that this dramatic but subtly inflammatory statement will not raise more than an eyebrow. Don’t get me wrong, I think Copyright is a serious issue that demands good thinking and a fair reflection of ownership, but I also give a damn about media standards and I don’t want to see important and or dangerous political approaches to rhetoric creep into private consumption. Especially if this cheapens legitimate terminology and debate, so that everyone can start throwing illegitimate terms around to make an impression. I think the link to organised crime is a fair one to make in general, but any objective relation with terrorism is probably closer to our petrol pumps than the nearly 1 in 3 illegitimate videos sold in Britain.

Unless, of course, there are objective and verifiable facts which FACT are withholding. I’m all ears. Because otherwise I’m forced to conclude that there’s a spurious link, at best, between terrorism and organised piracy; and that the claim is merely employed as a subtle suggestion which insults people’s intelligence and good faith, further blurring that once-proud distinction between newsy truth and entertainment technique.

2005-08-22T13:10:00.000+01:00

David Foster Wallace, Little expressionless animals

My mind reels. This neat little story has it all: a broad interplay of theme and time, the classic Foster-Wallatian tropes of media and multiple psychological crises, a media king-pin message of absolute surface and uncanny mystery, with deep trauma and precise-definition fanatics. By turns devastatingly funny and poignant, it’s more like a mini-novel condensed into short story form: the multiple streams are established, the oneiric parallels weave in and out (trauma/mediation, surface/autism, sexual definition / power roles / insecurity), all with a defined but finally absent, cataclysmic denouement. There is power in its brevity and breadth: a complete efficiency of narrative means. It gently deflates the mechanics of television to reveal the withered psychological husk of the viewing/entertainment mindset. It is consumingly immersive and it moves irrevocably. It suggests an ongoing, deepening time-scale as well as complete unpredictability. And ultimately, the multiple perspectives arouse genuine pathos. This is modern fictive precision personified.

2005-08-15T12:33:00.000+01:00

Funkadelic, Eulogy and Light

Our father / Which art on Wall Street / Honored be thy buck / Thy kingdom came / This be thy year / From sea to shining sea

Thou givest me false pride / Funked down by the riverside / From every head and ass, may dollars flow / Give us this pay / Our daily bread / Forgive us our goofs / As we rob from each other

He maketh me to sell dope to small children / For thou art evil / And we adore thee / Thy destruction and thy power / They comfort me / My Cadillac and my pinky ring / They restoreth me in thee / Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of poverty / I must feel their envy / For I am loaded, high and all those other goodies / That go along with the good god big buck

To your whores / And [what?] grows there / Ahead in time, the unexpected soul-searching beam of the strobe / But now, the stairway looms / And as I rise / The cries of kittens, gray, make way / For there, now near / Here now, gone, alone / I feel my wrist, it flicks the switch / No lights reveal the room or me / She sees, then panics, grabs a light / I scream silent comforts that are not heard / I panic, for I have not said a word / Hysteria hold the room in sway / I run, I back away, to hide / From what? / From fear? / The truth, the light? / Is truth the light?

2005-08-05T13:08:00.000+01:00

The Who Sell Out

A word about concept albums. The idea of "Concept" is usually applied too strongly – it’s a very general idea of song theme and continuity in albums and not some over-arching, megalithic artistic statement. Any medium, be it a novel, album or a series of works tend not only to a bigger picture or canvas, but almost inevitably to some kind of narrative cohesion or continuity. When conceived, these threads start out as a big picture idea (Floyd, Smile, Sgt Pepper) but they usually stop before halfway: the writers either lose interest or do whatever else they (or the drugs) feel like doing. Musically speaking, it’s a bit like Prog: so much music tends towards a bigger scale and reach; depending on the available musical talent, everything becomes a series of noodling solos and lyrics about fairies. Music becomes complex. Only rarely does a concept attain that magical, unified whole. I’m thinking Dark Side of the Moon. Sell Out is loosely conceptual but by no means superior to non-concept albums (as an aside, think of how great jazz albums aren’t concept-works, but often strongly thematic and unified).That said, the useless liner notes by Dave Marsh are soaked with gushing hyperbole and reckless drops of ‘classic’ and ‘concept’ and ‘masterpiece’ that really labour the case.

So then, the famous concept of Sell Out is a pirate London radio station with commercial segue-jingles and product placements, often played as gags ("Radio London reminds you: go to the church of your choice", "Drink Easy, Drink Easy, Pull Easy"). Burying great pop within a materialistic joke and thereby playing on the whole commercialism of pop; both critising and inoculating against what just a year or so later in the 60s became the concept of Selling Out. As well as bagging the benefits of these product placements (Rotosound strings, Premier drums). But there’s real smartness in using Odorono, for instance, as a song of pathetic broken-heartedness and disapointment: a peculiarly British kind of intrusive irony slipped in and slipped out before you know it. I think much has been written about Townsend’s songs of guilt and awareness (as opposed to self-consciousness) and here the songs are almost all fantastic. Sly wit and comic suggestion, songs about handjobs, the pangs and fragile dawns of love or tenderness emergent on a field acoustic, ("You take away the breath I was saving for sunrise"). Plenty of songs about suspicion, posed characters and the fine-conscience-detail of casual sex and affairs (the great Early Morning Cold Taxi, by Daltrey).

This being my first Who album, I gotta admit that I never really gelled well with the Who sound: the particular voices, the clattering drums, the aggressive rock bass and wheeling guitars. I liked Pete’s Rickenbacker stylings, but that might be because I like a good rhythm player. I love the idea of "Maximum R&B" but I don’t like the record-setting, ear-splitting volume they played at in the 70s. I laugh at Keith Moon’s dedicated drinks floor-tom (or was that Bonzo). And since the chaps at TalkBass regularly drop Entwistle’s name in their popular bassist polls, I thought it high time to pay a closer listen. (Though, it should also be mentioned that TalkBass draws a peculiar brand of bass player who likes exotic wood construction in 5, 6 or even 7-stringed basses over €2000 in value to no doubt play their meaningless bass solos to other nerds. And Entwistle always trails a poor fourth or fifth after Jaco, Marcus Miller, Victor Wooten etc). But there’s much great musicianship on Sell Out. There’s the odd tendency to resort to powerchord phrases here and there but on the whole the emphasis is on song and song content. That said, the Who sound like a bunch of disparates held together only by song: Moon endlessly clattering without rhyme or reason, Townsend in charge but definitely out of the spotlight (see his annoyed, hesitant lead outings), and Entwistle playing the lead role with up-front and clear punchiness (though without groove or syncopation: the worst criticism I can lay at his feet. I must admit to a bias of playing slighly behind the beat and in the pocket as opposed to merely 'on top'). But they're still a very strong band. Daltrey comes out well on this album too: I’m guessing he’s doing most of his own harmonies, because all the songs are quite full in that typically 60s sound-sense of deep reverb and lo-fi deepness. But Entwistle is definitely the lead player of the band.

Track by track then: Armenia City in the Sky is a very powerful opener with a swelling, blistering horn line and some backward guitars, with the bass and drums neatly isolated in the left channel for rhythm effect. Overtly aimed at the psychedlic crowd. Chords later stolen for The Boys Are Back in Town. Mary Anne With the Shaky hand is a sly little boy’s fantasy driven by acoustics and an interesting showcase of how well Moon functions as a percussionist rather than a traditional drummer. Odorono is said brokenhearted pathetic desire and shame piece. Tattoo is a fine come-of-age story with punishment overtones and Leslie’d guitar. I guess this is the most typical Who track: (imminent lost) youth and some fine backing choruses. Our Love Was is pure bitter guitar pop with nice bass counterpoint. I Can See for Miles sounds more like 70s Who with maximum chorus effect. Moon really rips on this one; full of tension. I Can’t Reach You starts like an average B-side vocal but turns into something better: it almost lags on occasion but for a neat descending little bridge. Townsend’s voice is almost too light here. Relax is more pure 60s UK pop. Silas Stingy is the miser’s anthem played for obviousness, but the 'moneybags' line is very clever. Funny to hear an original first in a WhoBoys mash (Brian could’ve done amazing things with the backing vocals). Sunrise is pure tenderness:

You take away the breath I was keeping for sunrise
You appear and the morning looks drab in my eyes
And then again I'll turn down love
Having seen you again
Once more you'll disappear
My morning put to shame

Sometimes I fear that this will go on my life through
Each day I spend in an echoed vision of you
And then again I'll turn down love
Remembering your smile
My every day is spent
Thinking of you all the while

— that peculiar blend of opening to love and spurned opportunity. Rael 1 is a strange kind of battle anthem about Red Chin (?) invasions and yellow flags and naval support. Five minute complex pop with some jabbed and reverbed powerchords at the end. Rael 2 some kind of lullaby. Glittering Girl is snappy Britpop with a big idea about mummy’s rules. Melancholia is straight-ahead despondent rock. Someone’s Coming features horns arranged by Entiwstle, very nicely done; with lyrics about sneaking out under parent’s noses for a bit of nookie. At this point of the disc I wanted to know what was original tracklisting and what bonus tracks — a blatant failure in the liner notes and packaging. Jaguar has heavy chord attack and thundering timps and almost American-sounding lyrics about cars and girls. Early Morning Cold Taxi I really like. Noel Gallagher would give his right eyebrow to be able to write something as Beatle-y and clever as this. That is, it ain’t all that clever, but it’s a natty rock lifestyle song. With a pumping bass-led ad for Coke at the end. Hall of the Mountain King is a great instrumental lark. More fun live, maybe. Girl’s Eyes by Moon ('hello') is pure Beatlism wrapped up in 1964 pop. The second Mary-Anne has more organ in the mix. Glow Girl is about rebirth and crashing planes and supposedly leads right into Tommy: 'It’s a girl, Mrs Walker.'

And that's it. A really full album, I gotta say. Lots of great pop moments. The ads grate after a while, but it might help to know that Daltrey ran up a case of pneumonia sitting in that Heinz bath.

2005-08-02T13:23:00.000+01:00

Rediscovering Old Bits

What I really like, is when you’re in a boring or stretched-out situation, and you’re listening to the radio and come across an older track that was a minor hit in the 70s or 80s — it’s on those perennial lists of safe, easy-listening favourites or oldies that live out their lives as filler between commercials, and everyone knows the song because it’s long been absorbed into the culture — and something catches your ear which has never struck you before. I had such a moment with two songs recently, first with Edie Brickell & The New Bohemians’ 1989 hit What I Am. Now, I remember watching this one on Video Hits on Saturday mornings with my wholemeal toast and socks. This was the time when a soft-rock slash folk artists could make it onto the radio. The song still sounds a bit light and undergraduate, which is fine. But of course I didn’t notice the really clever and long guitar solo because I wasn’t into guitars as much then. It sounds like the solo’s been processed through an envelope filter and a wah pedal. It’s very funky and canny without being too noodly. Very cool. Secondly, and this inspired a delving into his works again, is Bowie’s Young Americans. It’s a very committed vocal, and the song’s produced to the gills. It sounds like some pricey session men putting in a hard day’s work for a white soul-wannabe. But it’s the vocal that really kicks — slick and frenetic all at once, packed with a slap echo. It’s singing in the old sense of really putting in a performance on the mike. The production and performance are totally commensurate. From here I got back into Bowie’s hits again (regrettably, only the hits), but I’ve been boning up on the production of Heroes which is a story in itself. Hansa Ton studios, Eno effects on Fripp’s loud triple-tracked (and slightly out-of-tune) guitars, ace musos, a totally committed and large vocal recorded in the room using three gated microphones, that amazing sense of Berlin being just outside… and the song coming together with the vocal last. Inspired.

2005-07-19T16:13:00.000+01:00

Odd Nerdrum, my new artistic hero

Through Kitsch the talented one can save himself. It is a new discipline in which skill finds a superstructure. A superstructure serving the genius of ability.
Do not allow Art to retain its moral authority over ability.
Because Modernism has conquered art, Kitsch is the saviour of talent and devotion.

Rembrandt stuck in a timewarp... Have we progressed beyond the Flemish masters? Did the Renaissance really happen? I love Odd. He knows what's important.

2005-07-18T12:10:00.000+01:00

Neil Young, On the Beach

Self-administered therapy and consolation for damaged hearts. That subtle turning point of angered grief when self-destruction becomes obvious and resigned, that first point after which hurt becomes a stab of memory consigned to the past. I read that at this point Neil had given up the rambling anger of tequila (and Time Fades Away) for the mellow medication of honey slides. It doesn’t seem like an overt dope album, but there’s a definite mélange of hazy sadness and self-alienation and easy lyric associations. With the peculiar loneliness of songs addressed to one’s own alienation (and reading the signs of alienation all around), and taking swipes at whomever comes to mind without quite going the whole Dylan put-down. ‘I’m deep inside myself but I’ll come out somehow.’

This is also one of those albums which is so clearly an ‘album’ in the pure sense: coherent in mood and expression and driven by a diverse, unified musical poetry. There’s more emotion around the lyrics than in. I love that this (and also the two albums below) clock in at around 45 minutes — not a single song is wasted or overdrawn, and yet each song feels plenty long. Add to the braveness of a naked heart pushing its angered grief upwards and out, cuttings its grain on wax, and coming to an apotheosis at its end. This is greatness.

Also, besides the steel guitar and pared-down, rumbling instrumentation, I think the use of electric piano makes Beach a lot more attractive than the relatively MOR/session band Harvest. It’s just the right colour to Neil Young’s guitars. I’m always surprised to hear Neil use piano, there’s something unexpectedly appropriate about it for his voice and songs. The one track from Time Fades Away that I’ve heard is a hauntingly simple piano track whose mood slots right in with Beach. I want more.

2005-07-18T12:08:00.000+01:00

Eno, Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy)

Nutty, superior studio craft. Just the right balance of studio technique and (session) musical talent. It sounds like an album of happy and conspiring coincidences. At first the silly lyric associations and the Ringo-esque vocals distract from the amazing songcraft at work below them — I don’t mean lyrical songcraft — I mean purely musical craft, something you only appreciate when you hear cover versions hereof (Back in Judy’s Jungle for eg). Eno makes much of the irrelevance of lyrics, all lyrics, and yet he does take care with their fitting in and resonating. Ultimately, with songs like By This River (on B4&AftrSc) you know he’s taking their quality very seriously, so I’ve always taken his disparagements with a grain of liver salt. The music of the songs comes first, and the lyrics only further contextualise the cream, they’re never central. The emotion is always in the music, so it’s pointless to read for deeper meanings beyond the loosest associations.

It feels almost like pure experimentation, a grand exercise in collaborative creation based on simple but potent seeds. That is, the expensive folly of using the studio not only as an instrument but as a tool of composition. An amazing production, all up: a producer’s dream of making superior pop music. Sometimes sinister and bent, it’s still a fresh collage that could only have been made in the early 70s. And in its guerrilla freedom and flaunting of potential, it’s somewhat akin to the Godard of the 60s.

Left them in Japan! That's what we're paid for here! We are the 801!

2005-07-18T12:04:00.000+01:00

Eno, Another Day on Earth

What better way to contrast the last full lyrics album with the latest, after 30 years. I can’t think of a greater contrast in any musical artist’s career. This is spare, austere, informed by lightness and ambience. There’s no standard rock set-up, no hip/catchy choruses or deliberately nutty fun and expansion. The one continuity with Tiger is the difficult attitude to lyrics and lead vocals. I think a computer was used to generate some (insert EnoComment on how songlyrics are the only part of music that haven’t been improved or abetted by technology), and yet on others like Bone Bomb Eno takes great care to get an idea across. Like de Sade in a spin, he draws in his accountant and cleaning lady for vocal duties. And there’s a loose theme of global modernity, crossing from France to China and the twists and turns of identity/observation in between. With lots of space and time by suggestion. Of course. The modern world considered purely from an atmospheric point of view.

Melancholy and fragility layered over textured washes and simple beats. Vocoder treatments and astute, Edge-like crafted guitar backing (Leo Abraham). Eno enjoys singing these days, it seems, and he’s not afraid to stack a few harmonies in the background. It’s a slow burner, and the songs require many listens to find a familiar home, but there’s a lot of warmth once you dip into its gentleness. It seems to operate on a pleasingly subliminal level. There’s also a feeling that the music is still looking for its location and full context to come around. Not to mean that it sounds futuristic, just unique in a stripped and simple way, music from somewhere else. It sounds great cranked up on headphones. Like Beach, the last three songs are best.

But from another point of view this is all incredibly mild: decidedly cool and distanced with only just enough musical activity to reward the most devoted attention spans. It’s neither fun nor funny; just spare beats with uninspired vocals orbiting within sight of the recent Drawn from Life. It is that, and yet so much more. For instance, Eno has done something amazing: written a sympathetic song about suicide bombers (Bone Bomb). Inspired by the bomber’s bone-fragments lodging as shrapnel in the victims around him, Eno captures the desolation and bodily demarcation where politics and occupation stop. The details are of what sounds like Palestine (‘Buildings pushed over… young girls dreaming of beautiful deaths… everything stolen except my bones’); It sounds terribly clichéd to write about that last timeless moment, just like it’s clichéd to say the song is also very affecting. But it works. It approaches the issue from empathy rather than disparagement, it avoids descending to the universally denigrating T word. The timing/release is of course powerful; and I think it’s high time the subject got its full artistic due, it’s opening up away from the rhetorical ideology of Lifestyle (as in They hate our way of life, our Freedom etc).

2005-07-14T10:05:00.000+01:00

Conscience and relative value

I’m a great believer in the world community, and disparage any forces that undermine our global humanity in any way – be they corporate interests, unilateral invasions or terrorist acts. But I’ve got a bone to pick about the two minute’s silence the EU is observing today for the victims of the London bombings. I say: all respect to the victims and their families who have to deal with loss. The curse of terrorism is that it strikes ordinary people, not the privileged political elite that share the blame of causality. But spare a thought for the 50-odd people that die in Iraq every day; spare a thought for the people struggling to keep their lives together in a climate of violence, disorder and chaos. The daily victims in Iraq barely raise a blip on our conscience, nestled between headlines of distant indifference. The clear-cut implication of the media focus and bias is that Britons are worth more in terms of human cost than your average Iraqi. We participate in this privileging of Westerners and have become desensitised, dehumanised to have let this happen. But there is NO relative scale of human worth, we are all equal. It is NOT the case that 1 yankee = 2 britons = 4 spanecians = 20 africans = 50 iraqi. I will participate in two minutes’ silence when there’s a whole two days’ silence for the unaccounted and unnecessary dead of Iraq. Keep your conscious real and be mindful of the global, I say.

2005-07-13T13:00:00.000+01:00

Colm Tóibín, The Master

Bland episodic mechanics and coherence. Mere biographic extension; a lesser novel. Disappointing in terms of biographical power, mildly speculative/insinuating but shallow, unwhole; and in terms of novelistic aesthetics and order, merely a good read. There is some sympathetic material for writers chasing the buzz of literary conception. It’s good that it didn’t win the Booker, it is just. It’s reduced me to spluttering half-sentences. I guess with all my banging on about fictive extensions of biography I’d be expected to like this particular execution, but The Master doesn’t deepen the knowledge of James nor thicken the mystery of creation, especially not in terms of writing or characterisation. James comes across like a central blank: effete, austere, a mix of passive, dry will-lessness and ambiguous uncertainty. It strikes one as artless: James Lite for ladies of a certain age who’ll get a kick out of its restrained manners and oblique silences, readers for whom identity-ambiguity and artistic genius is a one-way street. It’s mostly a game of spot-the-novel-in-gestation with a dash of family drama and the peculiar Jamesian observation slash indifference to action. Important points aren’t given the weight and connectedness or completion they deserve in novels. The suspicion that much of James’ thought and speech was lifted/peppered somehow weakens the already watery, unremarkable prose. There’s no pointed power. Time, in other words, to get back to James Central.

But I’ll quote:

Observing the concealed self… skilled in the art of self-effacement. (p 226)

Both ladies, in the early months of 1892, sent one another short, brittle, witty messages. (p 246)

He had become like the eternal city itself: he was dented by history, he had responsibilities and layers of memory, he was watched and examined and in much demand (a sample of artlessness, p 274)

In the shadowy light of the apartment, he veered between displaying a vulnerability, an extraordinary, half-blank handsomeness and a strangely thoughtful introspection. (Colm’s favourite technique of compound word-lists, p 282)

Anderson was perhaps too young to know how memory and regret can mingle, how much sorrow can be held within, and how nothing seems to have any shape or meaning until it is well past and lost and, even then, how much, under the weight of pure determination, can be forgotten and left aside only to return in the night as piercing pain. (As Jamesian as it gets, staggering his commas to extend sentences, especially as the book wears on, though that entire section about Anderson is tediously drawn out, one might even say pointedly futile and crying out for editorial intervention of the sharpest kind, p287).

On another tack, I did get a reactive melancholic spark thinking how the idea and value of correspondence has changed so much since James’ time.

2005-07-11T11:50:00.000+01:00

Never lost in a sub-genre be

I was inspired by a discussion to find out exactly how many genres, sub-genres and lesser orders of Metal music there actually are. Now, I’m no musical taxonomist, and I’ve left out a lot of cross-genre classifications, but this is totally out of control:

Heavy Metal, Black Metal, Death Metal, Thrash Metal, Progressive Metal, Viking Metal, Speed Metal, Power Metal, Hair Metal, Glam Metal, Nu Metal, Doom Metal, Electronic Metal, Folk Metal, Gothic Metal, Traditional Metal, Orchestral/Symphonic Metal, War Metal, Electro Metal, Industrial Metal, Death 'n Roll, Dark Metal, Ethno Metal, Grindcore, Horror Metal, Mathmetal [intriguing!], Ambient Metal, Atmospheric Metal, Chaoscore, Cyber Metal, Dramatic Metal, Epic Metal, Experimental Metal, Fun Metal, Groove Metal, Indie Metal, Medieval Metal, Pop Metal, Skaldic Metal, Sludge Metal, Stoner Metal, US-Metal, Wave Metal and Western Metal.

Just for starters.

2005-07-07T08:08:00.000+01:00

Cyprus

Lefkosia, Pedoulas, Lapitos, Kyrenia, Pafos, Polis, Pomos.

Braving the 30 degree plus heat. The excesses of modern tourism contrasted with Byzantine monasteries, Roman mosaics and cool mountains. Witnessing first hand the ‘last partitioned capital’ and the deep-seated distrust of Turks for ever more, as well as the warmest hospitality from one Turkish-Cypriot family. Observation on the Turkish-supported occupation, with parallels in Palestine: you depoliticise an issue by privatising it. It’s much harder to remove arrogant foreign settlers with their fat British pounds and proprietary rights, who buy into the land thinking it’s legitimate development because the pre-invasion ownership issue was completely glossed over. Expect an old, angry family from the South at your door, deeds in hand. The issue is inadvertently forced onto the EU now with Turkey’s negotiation for accession, but there are also massive economic barriers between the two sides (the Turkish-Cypriot currency is inflated to the millions, vis. the stable, unfloated southern Pound), in addition to the general animosity. But then a lot of Turkish Cypriots were also displaced from the south. A unified Cyprus still seems a long way off.

Belgium’s bread-vending machines are paralleled with water vending machines in Cyprus. Mountain water! Histrionic Greek television. The blue band of the Mediterranean never too distant. Hungry cats milling around restaurants. Keo beers. Always trust the choice or presence of locals. Orthodox iconography. The layering of historical invaders. The fine line between graciousness and excessive hospitality. The fact of girls in bikinis and dark-skinned guys with sunglasses sitting nearby. The extreme demographic contrast of the hotel strip and the old town. The mild ignominy of selling useless, indifferent trinkets to bloated tourists (a vision of obese pink crabs scuttling to the water)(and no, I don't think I saw Aphrodite, but I did witness several Venus of Willendorf rising from the water). Motorbike sunburn. Haloumi and watermelon. Turkish cigars. And the potential for a simple life, lived well.

Aparichoritos means heartbreak.

Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer

I loved it so much I read it twice through, enamoured as I am of the mechanics of literature. First for the story, then for the wheels and aerodynamics. Of note is the way every narrative tangent-line is about writing/writers in some way: the fawning young over-imaginer, the starlet identity-thief, the validation of the spiritual father at the expense of the biological, the particularities of Jewish lit personalities in America (I was tempted to collate pieces of Bellow from the mosaic). And most importantly, the corrective realities behind the literary daydream (‘the religion of art’), especially for those who have to live with the artists. Which drama is pointedly crisp, contained and efficient.

I think I like Roth’s shorter novels best. This one has one of his least ambivalent endings.

I love the canny juxtaposition of Zuckerman’s love of light, airy ballet dancers with his earthy desire to pin them (and others) to the floor.

I love the confident association with literary predecessors and giants, with literary savvy (Zuckerman quotes boldly). The mix of youthful/brash imagination and solidifying confidence is just right. I keep thinking that Roth is precise in his wideness, which may sound a little non-sequiturial but I mean he can capture a wide gamut of narrative (character, anecdote/tangent, drama, pointed contrast and choice detail), at times with extreme, nearly conspiratorial brevity, especially as they relate to the becoming-writer or humour. Though there is an occasional tendency to lead/preach, everything rolls and slots in neatly, everything is sufficient. Which is the high water-mark of literature.

Quotable:

My guess was that it would take even the fiercest Hun the better part of a winter to cross the glacial waterfalls and wind-blasted woods of those mountain wilds before he was able to reach the open edge of Lonoff’s hayfields, rush the rear storm door of the house, crash through into the study, and, with spiked bludgeon wheeling high in the air above the little Olivetti, cry out in a roaring voice to the writer tapping out his twenty-seventh draft, “You much change your life!” And even he might lose heart and turn back to the bosom of his barbarian family should he approach those black Massachusetts hills on a night like this, with the coktail hour at hand and yet another snowstorm arriving from Ultima Thule. [I wonder how Rilke would apreciate such reduction to barbarism, p27]

[On Betsy] ...those elegant, charming tableaux she could achieve, even when engaged in something so aesthetically unpromising as, half asleep in the midle of the night, taking a lonely pee in my bathroom. [love that ‘unpromising’, p35]

Hope tried her luck with a self-effacing smile, but the wattage was awfully dim. [p41]

The charm [of Felix Abravanel] was like a moat so oceanic that you could not even see the great turreted and buttressed thing it had been dug to protect. You couldn’t even find the drawbridge... It was a head that the Japanese technicians, with their ingenuity for miniaturizing, might have designed, and then given over to the Jews to adorn with the rug-dealer’s thinning dark hair, the guarded appraising black eyes, and a tropical bird’s curving bill. A fully Semeticised little transistor on top, terrific clothes down below – and still the overall impression was of somebody’s stand-in. [p58-59, possible deliberate close skirting to racial stereotypes {he is projecting the 50s and mild naivety} to echo the young writer flirting with cliche]

"We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art." [James, p116]

...Insipid best-sellers from which real people learned about fake people who could not exist and would not matter if they did. [out of context but nice, Zappa would agree, p148]

Also, on PopMatters, my revamped article on the Stateless Passport.

Such a passport could represent a great advance in galvanising and normalising human rights, and counterbalance many of the inequalities experienced around the world (such as the idea of class-based inequality or second class citizenship, or the unethical exploitation of global labour forces that corporations and conspiratorial governments already enjoy). It would give freedom of movement to the people and eliminate the low status of refugees by recognising citizens of the world, which we all are. To be stateless in this sense may seem like an existential crisis or a global analogue for homelessness, but from another point of view it would translate into true neutrality and feeling at home everywhere.

2005-07-06T08:04:00.000+01:00

Bobby McFerrin, live/solo at the National Concert Hall, Dublin

The voice is the ultimate instrument.

2005-06-14T09:11:00.000+01:00

On the quick review:

What’s the deal with the retro-animation of Star War: Clone Wars? I mean, did they go to some ageing, near-bankrupt animation agency in Japan to knock together some Transformers-era hand animations over painted backgrounds? With the CGI arsenal available at the Lucas ranch, why revert back to the late 80s? It boggles and scrabbles the mind. And of course the dead dialogue and minimum plot/maximum action scenario and squinting, trembling faces make it all seem incredibly trite and mundane. It doesn’t matter how many post-it notes they fluttered on the fight choreography, this shit couldn’t draw a bored teenager away from his Wheatos or Playstation. Unless, of course, it’s meant to offset the cartoonish simplicity of the real show and its attendant universe, which it does in spades. I kept thinking this was a commercial tie-in with some cereal box action figurines; completely tossed-off in quality and marketed to the shortest attention spans, a cheap give-away.

When you find your formula, stick to it. Make only minor variations and occasionally hire new musicians. The thing about Ben Folds’ Songs for Silverman is that it repeats to a tee the band-sound he made with the BF Five: fuzzed bass, backing harmonies, banana-chords and a songwriting voice located somewhere between youth-power-piano-pop and suspiciously-SNAG maturity. The only real variation here is the flavour of the backing harmonies and the inclusion of steel guitar and or strings on some of the tracks. Ben is beginning to sound very 70s AOR/MOR in his 38th year, touching some Eagles/America-style backing here and there. Having said that, there’s about four songs on the album (Jesusland being the highpoint, a track not unlike Ween's Chocolate Town) that illustrate just how strong and dynamic the Folds Formula really is. And he is incredibly subtle and tight with his changes, throwing in an unexpected jazz chording or a horn-like backing chorus. Bitches Ain’t Shit would’ve made a welcome but slightly dissonant extra track on the album – he gives that song a whole extra tint and feeling that makes you empathise with the gangsta line about just coming out of six months county jail and finding you cousin balls deep in yo ho. And not just because Ben likes to swear in his songs.

And on a slightly embarrassingly nostalgic note, I had a quick look at U2: Rattle and Hum again, to see how it stands up now my fandays are long gone. The surprising thing was how well I remembered it. The thing that galls is the whole sincerity of it, especially the BonEgo thing rubbing up to big A(ss) American Music. I was watching primarily to tune into Adam’s live playing (great authentic Fenderbass sound), and there’s a few lucky breaks in the otherwise patchy editing/filming, but Joanou didn’t fail completely (but as documentary: totally zero). Have good cinematographers, will have film. If you’ve never heard of music, you might think these guys are pretty good live performers, and there’s a peculiar energy to the concerts which comes through very emotionally in Sunday Bloody Sunday (which makes a lot more sense if you live in Ireland). And there’s almost a feeling, that despite the whole Irish love of all things American, that they sense the inherent, profound contradiction at the heart of it all. A feeling that cast a certain look in their eyes in the music videos, a bemused obligingness (as opposed to wide-eyed excitement) that knows it’s all money-suckering and commercialisation, yet knowingly riding the wave. If you’re still out there, Jason Brayshaw, we can take up this discussion where we left off.

Also, gee I’m annoyed with myself cos Sly and Robbie are coming to town and I’m gonna be in Cyprus. The greatest rhythm section! My number two bass player! Me not there!

2005-06-13T08:12:00.000+01:00

At last on PM: my EuroTrash v. Brit Election column.

Achingly kitsch and bordering on absurd, the Eurovision festival gives new meaning to television endurance both in the sense of an event whose format has changed little since the '70s, and as an extraordinarily drawn-out viewing affair that inspires spontaneous invention of drinking games. Its tawdry hosts swap tepid gags from the autocue; it has song and dance routines more revealing than maniacal interpretations of '80s music and aerobics; it always has a bunch of guys banging drums in a pointlessly dramatic spectacle; there's more sweeping camera angles and fancy lighting than your average awards ceremony or Lionel Ritchie video.

Meanwhile, following the campaign of Blair's opponent, Michael Howard, would be another group of flunkies, seemingly spontaneously-appearing to protest his policies while bearing suspiciously on-message posters. They'd make their presence felt for the television cameras, then disperse and regroup wherever Howard went, as long as he was made to look consistently unpopular. All of these troublemakers were Labour operatives — some even parodied the vampiric demeanour of Howard by dressing up as grim reapers. But the net purpose of all their dishonest tactics was not to be a political disruption or provide a sarcastic side-show to the dull familiarity of electioneering, but rather to control the tele-visual environment (and perceived reality) of the whole election; as one of the commentators in the documentary said, the election became an exercise in "organised deception".

2005-06-09T12:13:00.000+01:00

Ben Folds, live at Vicar Street, Dublin

The problem with a venue with at least three bars is that everyone’s either getting up to get more pints are shuffling off to the can to unload them again. Which means that me, with my big legs and open aisle seat, gets trod on. Repeatedly. By the time a gaggle of girls (all wearing same clothing) had gone off to the bar/can for the second time in 30 minutes, I was getting pissed, as in annoyed. My thinking is: when I pay to see an artist I like, I give him/her my fullest attention. I wanna capture the whole performance. I expect other to pay similar attention, and if I was up onstage I’d demand nothing less (of course, magnetic performance a prerequisite). Actually, up on stage is the only place where the hell-is-others aspect of the audience doesn’t get to one. Problem is: most international acts either play Vicar Street or The Point or the RDS, the latter two just sound-dead halls, so I gotta put up with the shit and mild to poor acoustics and wear steelcaps. And get real pissed like everyone else. Because nothing is enjoyable unless you are pissed.

Anyhoo, the Benster. He’s built himself one of the best trios I’ve ever seen live. The original (massively delayed) gig had him billed solo with piano, but thankfully he brought a band. And obviously drilled them to tight perfection. And made sure they could sing harmonies. Jared Reynolds is a great bassist (and a Nashville session man) and he’s got one of the best bass distortion tones I’ve heard in a while (that’s some Big Muff) – much nicer and rounder than the original BF Five dude with the Gibson basses. Although he played mostly pick when he’s a fingers man – not sure if playing against a piano calls for that all the time: that hard pluck as opposed to the soft attack. I’m sure that a bit of tone fiddling could have provided a similar sound. Anyhoo, he’s the kind of bassplayer I aspire to: song-oriented, excellent backing, solid without any pretentious horseshit. Like Adam Clayton, who I’ve been rediscovering lately; it’s a bass style I enjoy immensely precisely because it is song foundation, groove and interplay with the drums. It’s a particular kind of bass personality, a particularly bass personality, easygoing and brotherly in a musical sense, listening yet lyrical.

An aspect of Ben’s songwriting that comes out strongly in the live/performance context: his great dynamics. Call it contour or song balance, but it came out even clearer in the trio format: every song has its own variety of pace. Never just verse/chorus/verse or soft/loud soft/loud, his voicings are always interesting in range and contour. A trio with guitar instead of piano as main harmonic driver would obviously sound far more limited. The solid two-hour set didn’t flag for a second (even the lame-ass music teacher standing on the piano and conducting the crowd singalong (with horn parts) had some musical value). The 4 solo songs were good; the cover of Dr Dre’s Bitches Ain’t Shit (media player link) was hilarious and gentle (‘that’s some real conversation for your ass’). The new songs didn’t sound as strong as the material off Rockin the Suburbs – 'Jesusland' being one exception. Certainly the audience responded strongest to the old songs (the familiar old ShithouseNewStuff theorem). Add to the fact songs about people and stories, and a piano style that is in turn rhythmic, melodic and vicious, and a good drummer who doesn’t need to play 24/7 to enjoy the groove (Lindsay Jamieson) and you’ve got an excellent pop performance. And of course he threw his stool at the piano (again). Great gig.

2005-06-01T23:13:00.000+01:00

Notes on Truth and Political Liars

I liked Andrew’s piece on truth and politics, considering how much lucid mileage he gets out of a political truism. The problem with the subject is to my eye largely nominal: truth as a concept (of facts, realities, things that are) simply has no place in politics, and never has. To my eye, politics is a form of relativism of power masquerading as perspective: politics as a power of representation married to interpretations without reference to absolute or distinct ideals of truthfulness. Truth is an idea too austere, too removed from the malleable, dirty little half-truths of politics. Truth is out. It is slightly obscene to talk about truth in politics because truth is and always has been at odds with power. The spectrum of politics is governed by Macchiavellianism on one side and genuine representative lobbying power on the other, with various shades of party in-fighting in between (mostly to do with leadership and jockeying for votes on bills). Truth is meaningless without interpretative spin and power. And further, politics is the garb and dress of seemingly necessary decisions whose sources are often totally at odds with public wellbeing or opinion. We had to go to war because... we had to lift embargoes and tariffs because... we had to free up media ownership because... And ultimately, well, because decisions had to be made and y’all need leadership, so it ain’t gonna be pretty. You, the people, after all, gave us the mandate to do so.

And lies, well, the politicians’ daily fair ain’t so much purely dishonest lying (in relation to truths, facts or special interest intepretations) as a discrete and banal form of dissembling, or disingenousness. The polite dressing up and presentation of half truths to disguise the source of the interpretation or interest, whether it’s industrial lobbying or the party line or any of a hundred forms of corruption. The off chance a politician is being genuinely honest and direct about a difficult decision is meaningless in the face of the sheer amount of perspectivising and spin the pull off every other time (unless, of course, they are the underdog in opposition). It makes politicians great untrusted relativisers and jargon-jockeys (just like lawyers, corporate directors etc. Ever noticed how many big politicians are or were lawyers?) and hence actors working in a fictive (because dishonestly representing facts etc) realm where the media, importantly, plays a strongly supportive role. Any ethics or statesman-like qualities or aristocratic mien a politician might have had up until the early 60s has been totally shafted by the new doctrine of image management and information control. These are the twin axes upon which the spun veracity and the hypocritical dissembling of politics runs today. Elections aren’t won on promises but strong images of leadership and controlled campaigning. Politicians play mercy to their hacks when they conveniently need a fall guy. Politicians now don’t explicitly “misinform” the public, they were misinformed themselves. (I know, how much more obvious a charade can there be? How can they continually mine the gullibility of the public? It’s all down to savvy media presentation. It’s a politico-media system, our system of governance and values) The only real danger to a politician is bad legal advice, which could lead to unexpected or irrational media representation and tainting. Even then Blair got away with a hokey legal case for war. Most wars are illegal anyway. The moral cases for war are allmost all constructed and deeply irrational shambles of thought and self-interested ideology (the word ‘poontang’ springs to mind).

Now more than ever, we live in fictive times. For the public this is largely a glossed-over issue since the media excels at covering its mediation; and what seems like an honest statement is more likely a deliberately conceived act, or a play at truthfulness. But it registers in the broad distrust and cynicism that’s out there, in the powerlessness most people feel even though there’s still great capacity for change and empowerment. (On a tangent, I can’t wait for the popular artist who’s going to mine the seething distrust of American politics and the war and represent the subjective force of the Second Superpower as an expression of artistic conscience.)

So in a way I’m amazed there’s still so much to be said for the case of politicians and truth. These are downright Nietzschean times. There’s so many other perspectives and precedents to draw here: Nixon (probably the most modern of politicians in terms of his naked greed, corruption and irrationality); Churchill downplaying the real carnage of war to prevent public outcry; the way the ‘fragile network’ idea of modern telecommunications, connectivity and globalism fosters not only greater threat from minority interests but actively encourages politicians to seek out greater secrecy and non-disclosure, and hence a broader package of themes and excuses to cover it (the War of Terror being a prime example). Or the fact that to a politician, an untruth does not equal an error (and the great lost idea of accountability, or statesmanship, or dialogue etc). Or the continuing fascination of Spin. Or the prevalence of the Bad Egg argument when the problem is really systemic (Rumsfeld and Abu Graib, Rumsfeld and Guantanamo).

The first thing I jotted down on a stickie when I read Andrew’s piece was this: in terms of honour and accountability, do lying or disingenuous politicians matter in a world that’s bent and crooked? The more perspectives I open up, the more I’m starting to unify and join the dots on them all (and I got a few coming), the more disgusted I am at the state of this world, and the passive participation in the broad dissembling and mediation which holds it all together.

2005-05-30T13:14:00.000+01:00

The Zoom MRS 802

I’ve just spent a weekend of intense noodling, overdubbing and mixing. The Zoom has many plusses: an amazing array of distortion/lead guitar sounds and effects, chorus and reverb settings (including one that mimics the Budokan’ acoustics; that’s one for my new album). It renders Marshall distortion very accurately, the 9002, the 900 series etc; but also Fender Twin and vintage blues and crunch sounds (I borrowed an Epiphone Les Paul for the occasion). Because everything’s recorded and treatable digitally, it doesn’t matter how crappy the room (or bathroom) may sound acoustically, the Zoom can mimic different kinds of microphones and boost the signal accordingly (and then with the reverb/echo options, you can get a pretty professional sound, depending on the mic used). That said, it can’t automatically tighten up a sloppy, flu-ridden vocal or fix a rubbery rhythm track (see conclusion). The effect algorithms are plentiful and on the whole reasonably productive, except they can’t be applied across the board to a recorded track (I wanted to distort stuff after the fact) — or maybe I just hadn’t figgered out how. The drum machine has hundreds of patterns made redundant by the lack of drum sound variety — it’s all the same heavy, late 80s rock sound which is so wrong for reggae or jazz, for instance. I didn’t have time to start programming the drums, it looks a bit too consuming and the (track) buttons aren’t really conducive to bustin’ out a rhythm pattern — but there’s heapsa editing and fiddling functions which lets you stretch, crop and drop fills accordingly, with the option of using other drum samples. Also, having eight tracks is plenty of room to record, and then there’s virtual takes on top of each of these, and a handy bounce function for wittlin’ it all down. The mastering leaves a neatly professional sound which can be burnt and played straight away.

Having said that, I gotta underline exactly how absorbing home recording can get. (Mind you, this was the first time I’ve ever done any recording like this: thirty years old and I’d never had my hands on so much as a four-tracker. Very strange.) It’s more involving and concentrated than internet pornography or Photoshopping. I lost track of the rest of the world for two days, and in that time gained a raised respect for the recording process, the work and time involved, and for studio hounds like Prince and Brian who pull this off naturally. And to the singers who can sing a line cleanly and evenly. It’s much easier to write music this way, with multiple tracks to back and play against, than to figger stuff out in the head in advance (I don’t have that kind of head). Respect also to those artists in particular who personally record all the instrumentation of a song this way (Prince again, and Lenny Kravitz in a token way though I’d rather exclude him, Toms, Matthew Sweet (further to which, these artists all give bass the right weight in the mix. Coincidence?)). Working a song from the rhythm up is no mean feat. Which is probably the strongest lesson I’ve taken away from the Zoom: you can’t do anything without a perfect rhythm master. Recording a rhythm section of drums and bass concurrently works around it, but you’ve gotta be damn precise: it’s infuriating putting rhythm or percussion on a track after the guitar, for instance.

I’ve been a fan of production sounds for years, but I’m listening to music in a new way now: from the production up, as it were, and not from the feel of the sound down, which is regrettable really, but like guitar playing, once you’ve got an idea of how it’s done you can’t but listen to a solo from the technical POV. Nothing well-produced is so worthless as to leave nothing of sonic value; I found myself listening to November Rain thinking… nice structure and contour, amazing guitar tone (Slash, I love you). Also, I love getting into the politics of the mix, the balance and priority and control over sonic depth; how you mix determines the mode and order of representation. But after spending in excess of four hours on a 2-minute little snippet of noise (and bashing out three of these in a day), and wailing for hours with the heavy-overdrive in my cans, I wanna get into the big league of audio production even more. It’s one area where creativity and ability marry soul to sound.

(By the way, here's a Zip file of the results.)

2005-05-26T09:01:00.000+01:00

Alexander Payne, Sideways

Initially I thought this film was a parable of middle age… the desperate last fling, the overdriven connoisseurship, the post-divorce depressive ennui, the flabby flesh of a jilted lover rubbing up against your car window (a Saab, of course). And then I thought, Parable, nay, this film is totally, consummately Middle Age. I’ve never seen a film focus and concentrate on the tropes and mores of the middle period so exhaustively. Honestly. And hilariously. Perfectly pitched and paced, almost every scene had an infusion of natural humour though the film wasn’t played for broad comedy. Giamatti is excellent and convinced, perfectly cast. Haden Church does the Jock with enormous, precise glee. Virginia Madsen shines since… what, Electric Dreams, Dune?

Payne directs for softness both in terms of drama and film stock. Though never lumpen; every shot has a quiet cinematography to it; I noticed that some of his pans end on nicely arranged or balanced pictures, Giamatti in left of frame, bowling alley or sky on the right, etc. All the scenes were neat vignettes, gently toned and tanned, perfectly scripted and character-conducive. Everything played in an environment of familiarity without kitsch or sentiment, and drifted down along its easygoing plot like a smudged tissue out to sea.

But in all, I hadn’t laughed so much since Kentucky Fried Panda: "It's Finger Ling-Ling Good!"

2005-05-24T12:53:00.000+01:00

The Beach Boys, the Warmth of the Sun

Pure warmth and harmony. Sunsets over glittering water. The first marijuana glows around the fire. An amazingly complete little piece of music though there's almost no definitive chorus in 't; I almost think of Brian's lead as a single long guitar line flowing for the whole 2:48. It's profoundly sad of course: the clue to the broken heart art of Pet Sounds, possibly the clue to so much of the broken beauty of Brian. The secret of his art is this: a fundamentally damaged person can still conceive and execute amazingly crafted and inexplicable works of beauty. I can see Brian pacing and directing the backing harmonies in a jiffy: they just come naturally because the feeling runs strong in him; I'm sure he didn't even have to think twice about his arrangement. It's a profoundly felt loss, and like all broken hearted, he doesn’t mind how many other hearts he breaks by expressing it.

2005-05-20T12:51:00.000+01:00

Metallica, St Anger

If you’re like me and your desk is not even two metres away from customer service people talking all the time (and getting up to discuss, clarify and air issues continually), then you appreciate having music and good headphones to block out the general verbal noise. Human noise is one of the most distracting forms there is. Especially since the editorial work I do favours reasonable quiet and calm precision — is it any wonder that I sometimes turn to heavy beats and guitars to drown out the yack and piffle. (And in a bracketed footnote, it’s also worth noting that being forced to listen and use music like this for seven hours makes me almost resentful of music. I cannot listen to much more at the end of the day when I’m at my prime, and that galls me. I’m obsessed with music at the best of times, but there’s limits to all tolerance.) Which leads me to Metallica, the ultimate gossip-drowners. After having a great laugh at the Monster movie (see below), I’ve come to think that St Anger ain’t half bad. It’s positives and negatives are clear-cut; it’s a here-it-is album with little gravy or trimmings. Monster riffing, power drumming, no solos. Really shitty lyrics though — I appreciate their spirit and angle but somehow the couch-clichés seem at odds with heavy, angry music. It’s a very angry little album (maybe not quite as aggressive as Vulgar Display of Power maybe, also heard again recently, which is just pale with rage) but then again Metal is all about anger or at least looking angry all the time. The lyric ‘I wanna hate it all away’ seems like a neat Metal manifesto. Anger: the patron saint of metal. Etc. But on the whole, compare say the lyrics and range of …And Justice for All and the closet-cleansing of St Anger becomes obvious, lumpen. Does Hetfield actually feel better now he’s got it all out? Somehow it’s an uncomfortable mesh, not really driven by real psychological affect or unabashed madness: I just don’t feel the import or emotional revelation (like on a Velvets record). But the music: dropped-D tunings, power riffs, clattering snare drums. Sometimes I thought I was listening to Helmet. At least Lars is on top of his game and every beat — at times it feels the band is centred by him alone — and his changes are integral to the impact of the album (Bad Brains: A band is only as good as their changes). Up a gear, heavy roll. Down a gear, different bass drum level, stop. Double-time. Back to the roll. He’s a great machine. Like …And Justice, this album might’ve benefited from a real (Robert Trujillo) bass presence — it’s a pity he came into the album several years after it was begun. Bob Rock should’ve stuck to the desk and left this a bass-less album, methinks (and I’ve got issues with him as producer too). Actually, I sometimes wonder whether bass is really necessary in so much metal… Bart assures me that some death-metal is heavily dependent of bass-groove, but obviously this has to be researched. If I was Bob I would’ve mixed me out just like they did Jason on Justice. And overdubbed more guitars — I mean, they’ve got six hundred guitars — I wanna hear them all! Still, St A sounds great cranked up after a beer or two. Great for hoovering, air guitar or headbanging. It still begs the question of where-to-from-here, and I think Prog might be the answer (again): longer, more complicated multi-sections, extended solos, fairy lyrics. A veritable suite of heaviness but spread over a bigger canvas. A structure for improv perhaps. Acid maybe? Anger is just so damn limited emotionally, and it’s high time the boys got their heads around a theme again (like, maybe the War on Terror and Iraq? The lies of the media, the idiots in control? The effect of torture on a people? The destruction of rights? Something with a pang of conscience for the boys in the tanks, shooting them up whilst banging their heads). See, I could be a Metallica lyricist. I’d like to see them get angry about those.

Like all Metallica albums, I feel fatigued by the end of it, and ready for something calmer like Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert. What a wonder of improvised contemplation and joyous groove that is. Such a pleasant vista of exploration and harmony.

2005-05-18T09:06:00.000+01:00

The Mother of All Smokescreens

I haven’t formulated a final or absolute impression of George Galloway yet, but I loved his opening remarks to the Senate Committee investigating the food for oil problems (which committee I’m starting to think of as an arm of the Republican’s Thou Shalt Not Think Or Speak movement). I watched the hearing live on Sky News, and though every media outlet banged on about its ‘blistering’ rhetoric and ‘braveheart’ pugnaciousness and socking the US senate with some good ol’ British soapboxing, I thought it more significant that such critical views of the Iraq invasion and the human cost at last found expression in the relatively mainstream media.

Senator, this is the mother of all smoke screens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq’s wealth.

I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try to bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war.

Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq’s wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Haliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq’s money, but the money of the American taxpayer.

I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question... without any contact with me whatsoever, and you call that justice.

I’m trying to find a transcript of his opener, but haven’t had much luck yet. See also Wiki, Guardian, audio, extra, and Times (quotes).

2005-05-09T13:59:00.000+01:00

Ruggero Deodato, Cannibal Holocaust

Horror? Exploitation? B-Grade? Can B-grade actually be truly horrific, especially when dubbed? I don’t think so. Especially when B-Horror plays like a B-Porno (check your genre definitions at the door). This was an 80s romp that probably had no small part in spawning Blair Witch (crew go into the woods, film gore, die; tape is retrieved. Horror!). Here, the slick towers and achievement of New York are deliberately cast against the supposed savagery of the jungle cannibals. A crew of right idiots make an amateur doco/slashfest in the Amazon. They get nekkid, they torch villages and rape ‘n kill. They film their antics, they fuck. They’re surrounded, slashed and eaten. And a nearly legitimate Professor of Anthropology goes back to the scene, salvages the film which the exploitation hacks in NY wanna beam to the jaded masses. 80s cynicism with deplorably B-rate gags and a lilting, dissonantly pretty soundtrack theme. It’s amazing how they got the tribes to agree to filming this little jaunt in the jungle: they look like they don’t mind getting into the pig’s livers or whatever they are. The guileless savagery of the doco team was probably the scariest of all, like, you think you’re so civilised with your technology and GI brainsmarts and depraved recklessness…? As though Deodato was going for the heaviest metaphor he could think of to contrast the relative calm of the tribe with the idiocy of the West (every second observation was about ‘strange sexual customs’). Ultimately the title is misleading, I mean in terms of sheer numbers, 5 or 6 people for lunch and dinner is hardly a human holocaust: it’s more of a Cannibal Incident, really. And despite the great transfer and usually good image quality, this romp might’ve benefited more from a Vietnam or Going-Up-River angle: obvious metaphoric contrasts work better against a climate of human despair or inner corruption. That is, psychology — B-Grade and psychological depth obviously don’t mix. Stick to Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes.

2005-05-05T21:26:00.000+01:00

Brief reviews only; I don’t have the oomph to do full essays for what I’ve already discussed elsewhere or by other means; or which might not warrant further exposition when succinctness will do. It might be an age slash intolerance thing, a loathing to repeat myself. It might be the allocation of time slash attention management regarding the major projects of one’s life vis. all the other little extras one engages in. Or the sheer number of things to dribble about.

Primus, Tales From the Punchbowl

I’ve been listening to a bit of prog of late, and somehow Primus slipped right into this mindset. Although the song scale is nowhere near symphonic proportions, and the emphasis is on groove and wackiness (the kind that likes weirdos, fishing, carnivals and carnies), I’m still a big fan of the Primal approach. Especially live. It’s something that could never come out of France, for instance. Col. Claypool is a twisted personality for sure, but his bass style is totally commensurate and never solely-soloing as Prog goes. It’s a tone I quite like, that big fretless bass, full and earthy and simple in a way that belies all the tap and slap, which ain’t Funk either but rolls frenetically. The secret of the band, in my humbles, is Larry LaLonde: a guitarist somewhere between a modern (alt.gen) Fripp tone and lead player and the ultimate team slash rhythm player. One of my favourite players. At times purely sonicaly minded, playing sheets of noise or trim backing. Dissonant and then hokey. Referential but always tasteful. A pure band guitarist, nothing that screams solos or pained guitar faces. He almost functions like the bass player in the band, which is why I like him so much. Anyway, the album. Definitely a progression in terms of studio and musical sound from Pork Soda; still a little patchy, but nicely varied in song contour. The longer pieces are best. Grooving unexpectedly, rhythmically intricate and tuned. Less about DMZ-related states of mind, yet so much more than a band you might only like at uni. Someone should have let these loonies do a set for MTV Unplugged while they were still together. Still, Oysterhead takes up where they left off. What’s Larry doing, I wonder?

Robert Wyatt, Rock Bottom
A man is lost and wandering in a mist-laden haze somewhere in Cornwall. Wild hair and wild eyes, he keeps brushing imaginary flies from his face. Raving or turned inside out, he commits the stories of his life to a portable tape recorder. He’s got the normal voice of someone in a teahouse reading a newspaper to a friend, missives of an estranged correspondent burying his broken heart with crazed abandon. Burying everything he knows in the past. The eerie impression of someone addressing himself from the outside in, estranged and wilful, remote and fractured. Lamenting someone he was by addressing another. Improvising with mild histrionics. He likes the hillside mists because it’s like walking through acres of water, enveloping the depths and the aether. He has an affinity for the glistening rocks and the open spaces of his head, or is it the freaky midget inside trying to get out. His eyes connote running and diving at the same time.

Great horns too (Kick Horns?). The album leaves you wondering, How the hell did they write and structure this weirdly inward escapade, musically speaking?

2005-05-05T10:43:00.000+01:00

We love you, Bill Hicks

Over on PopMatters, my imitation of Nigel Tuffnel and an imitation of Bill Hicks and maybe one day an imitation of his imitation of Elvis and Charley Hodge.

For those who might not be familiar with Bill, he did some pretty devastating comedy on the first Bush/Republican regime and Gulf War, as well as the war on drugs, the state of the music industry, television and evolution generally. Bill was a genius of anger who died prematurely of cancer; and if you've ever seen a video performance or heard his CDs, it's clear he was something rare amongst comedians: a total comedian — one whose every gesture and expression drips with biting humour and passionate, committed drive. His routines on abortion and Rush Limbaugh, for instance, recorded with the insane persuasion of the righteous and dying, are over-the-top thrashings of received opinion and perception. His concern was always for the truth on the one hand and the media-driven status quo of our abused reality on the other. Hence, he was never too popular in mainstream America, though he was a quintessentially American freethinker.

2005-05-02T09:22:00.000+01:00

Jean-Luc Godard, Éloge de l'amour

History. Hollywood and Americans (but which Americans? The ones without history who buy others' images, the ones between Mexico and Canada). Adulthood (which doesn't exist). Resistance and WWII. Cinema. Spielberg, Schindler. Balzac (but briefly). Simone Weil. The Matrix (dubbed into Breton, please!). The English. Nude scenes in films. Grandparents. The past, self and memory. What could be finer than a JLG romp through the modern world? It starts with B&W stock and ends in saturated video and imposed montage. It has texts, quotations, historical anecdotes, bookcovers; and hence is in itself eminently quotable. There can be no resistance without memory or universalism. Isn't it strange how history has been replaced by technology? But why politics by gospel? The Church is in step with time. The truth may turn out to be sad. Every thought should recall the debris of a smile.

Vaguely didactic, this film left me slightly worried about JLG's intensity as an artist of ideas. There's signs of the onset of scattered carelessness, of not being bothered with the unity or expressive power of ideas. And unity is what JLG's extraordinarily broad canvas has always been about. It's still hallmark JLG — no other director can get away with such a bold and direct transcription of ideas onto film. I was channelsurfing of an evening and came across spare B&W dialogues about artists and projects and literature. I thought, This could only be by a New Wave director. There's the standard multiplicity, or what I like to call the trialogue of his style: dissociated, cut-up or multileveled/multilingual dialogue layered onto diverse semantic images, sometimes doubled images or of varied media, mixed with natural sound, musical refrains, interjections. Text, sound, image — usually concordant, sometimes broadly dissonant and multivalent, sometimes silent. But always thinking, writing, philosophising. A poetry of three media; a tricolour meditation. And, as always, things, ideas and events shift subtly in meaning in the JLG cinema, in the space of thought, the crossed trialogue, the unreality of the mind — a train deliberately honking past an ambling reader is somehow neither intrusive nor uncontrolled; there's a sense of pre-ironic structuralism maybe (from studies in ethnology), of images stripped of semantics and signs, to toss jargon in a way unfair to a film decidedly a-theoretical. But when a character turns and says, When did the gaze collapse? and the dialogue becomes one about TV's precedence over life (I feel our gaze has become a program under control. Subsidised. The image, Sir, alone capable of denying nothingness, is also the gaze of nothingness on us. (I hope not, says another)), then you're in very close and delicate (as narrative) thoughtspace. Something close to mere ideas, or ideas only, stripped of coherent context. There's also a background insinuation of deeper melancholy or near futility; of the difficulty of making a difference through signs and words, of fatigue or exhaustion with the world and ideas; as though JLG no longer wills the poetry from the image or desires its latent mystery. Whether or not this functions as a critical element of the film re: modern media, I dunno. The worry lies in resultant projects that are mere thoughtfiles set to image and music.

The film seems to be stitched together with quotes. Let feelings bring about events, not the contrary. Be sure to exhaust what can be communicated by stillness and silence. (Bresson) What bothers me is not success or failure. It's the reams and reams written about it... Why bother saying or writing that Titanic is a global success? Talk about its contents. Talk about things. But don't talk around things. Let's talk on the basis of things... They're confusing life with existence, treating life like a whore which they can use to improve their existence. The extraordinary to improve the ordinary. One can enjoy existence, but not life...

All in all, I can't say this is satisfying cinema like Two or Three Things I know About Her or Masculin, féminin, and there's almost zero performance quality in this — just bland faces reading (not acting) mildly philosophical lines (these characters are not even objects, let alone subjects). Neither has it the shouted intensity and layered brainwork of Hélas Pour Moi. Eloge is not a plotless anti-story but something nearly a-storical that retains elements of metanarrative (disquisitions on tragedy etc). A lack of emotional integration or joyous inwardness, offset by tired, late-night images reaching for poetry and finding very little (the most suggestive scenes were the empty train sheds). And not as much sharp humour as could be: the Americans get the occasional barb, but they’re mild, easy stings. Not a consistently questioning essay nor an intensely located setting for ideas and disquisition, nor an acting out thereof, this is largely a struggle to define the late arrival and realisation of History in terms that are opposed to cinema and culture (the yanks with their contracts and fat thoughtless dollars, the exploitation of historical verité, the End of Cinema etc). Sporadic without rambling, unreal whilst actuating thought (the intrepid manufacture of ideas), I yearned for the guerrilla-intensity of hardcore JLG. He's still one of the primary artistic models, and I love his headspace, but...

2005-04-22T11:01:00.000+01:00

Not much blogging of late because I’m in the middle of several books on several levels of the house; and also, with the last three nights spent on PopMatters columnation, my mind is pretty much spent and incapable of delivering attention to anything wordier than Family Guy. Well, there was the Uncut interview with Robert Plant, which I understand cause a minor controversy for Benny and Björn from Abba; and there’s the debacle of Continuing Top 100 Album lists (courtesy of Channel 4, whose popular list got more pedestrian as it went along ) and of course there’s Lisa Burke on Sky News’ Weather channel, but that’s about as much media as I can tolerate for a while. Attention is the most precious resource in this world, and I’m starting to get fussy how my petrodollars are being spent in that department. I did write a (regular, to FDaze's style) blog entry for the blokes at 1115.org (blogger kudos!) but either I didn’t get the house style right or they’ve no time to check my slight and superficial analysis of the upcoming British elections. Either way I forgot to mention that Blair’s Gut and Manboobs have increased in relative volume and girth, and that he should be advised to wear a jacket or blazer at all times.

Don’t blame me, I voted for Sir Kodos

The lesser of two evils perhaps? With campaigning well underway for the May 5^th general election, it won’t be long before British politics will mirror the American style of bipartisan homogeneity and indifferent platforms.

we must move forward, not backward, upward not forward

British voters have the choice of re-electing a lying (on Iraq) and disingenuous Tony Blair for a third term of Labour, or the Conservative Michael Howard whose creepy smile and leery eyes seems to suggest more than his jingoistic policy of immigration control and swing-voter-baiting. So far, this is an election of sound bytes and manifesto slogans write large on billboards for the parochially stupid (‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ say the fear-tapping Conservatives to Labour’s ‘Forward, Not Back’ – as you can see, clear election-winners there). There’s very little unique or intelligent debate or dialogue going on – only the endless launch of manifestoes like fleets of paper promises. The slanging match hasn’t resorted to Swift Boat tactics yet, but there’s enough image- and issue-management and Left/Right turnpiking to keep Kodos twirling for ever. It’s an indifferent two party system! We will talk about pensions and policing immigration but we won’t talk about the war (and its causes) or greater EU involvement or cleaning up the National Health Service. If current polls are anything to go by, there’ll be a likely victory for Labour, and hence voter interest is low and resigned. To be honest, there is a third choice in the form of the Liberal Democrats whose promise of a genuinely intelligent if befuddled alternative seems marred by a penchant for greater policing, even if they do have alt.kudos in the form of an open letter from Brian Eno.

The real winners on the media front have been the cartoonists of The Guardian. Steve Bell’s brilliant parodic piss-takes and Martin Rowson’s sly pen have kept the duplicity of political guff and well-mannered hot English air suitably sane and true.

2005-04-13T12:57:00.000+01:00

The Michael Nyman Band in concert, Dublin

Firstly, I love the format of the band: horns (incl. French, flute and piccolo trumpet) and strings and piano and electric bass (alas, a Steinberger, I was expecting a Rickenbacker like on A Zed and Two Noughts). A good contour of instruments. Everyone was miked and supported through the PA, except for the piano, which was acoustic throughout. Now, the acoustics of the concert hall weren’t too bad, but maybe it was a deliberate choice to force the piano down in the mix, making it more a percussive rhythm presence. Nonetheless on the several solo pieces, Nyman’s subtlety and gentleness at the keys came through.

The sets consisted mostly of soundtrack materials (whence the pure solo stuff?): Draughtman’s Contract, Wonderland, The Piano, Prospero’s Books, Drowning by Numbers etc. The first set was rather repetitive in terms of tempo and range: I got the strongest impression that many in the audience were struggling with a strange kind of boredom. They still clapped like mad, though, and Nyman does the maestro’s bow very well in his tails. But considering how acute Nyman’s work is as film counterpoint and accompaniment, without the film and its full context, this music sounded a little bit adrift on its own signature jags and bumps. The second set was much more varied and alive. I had a nicely subversive little brainstorm about what it means to be a musician in the MN band: do hardcore classicists write them off because of the easy, straight-ahead scores and the absence of virtuoso solos? Does MN ever think, Eh, I’m the composer, I’m gonna throw in a g-minor and reverse the score, for the hell of it, occasionally? Because it seemed none of the scores varied much, if at all, from what we’ve received and come to know on soundtrack CDs.

With so little emphasis on personality and interpretation (what other would loosely call 'minimalism'), I guess the onus on the musicians is to make the ensemble work together and work well, to mind the whole sound from the intonation of every note. Which then begs the question, does an audience already slightly stunned tune into these subtleties of interplay and precision? I guess not, since they’re already battening down the mental hatches trying not to applaud at having recognised the first strain or two of The Piano. Or digging the head-shaking cello player.

I found myself in possession of minor difficulties engaging with the material and performance: which is odd because I normally love listening to soundtracks. Maybe if MN played the Man With A Movie Camera routine I might’ve been more attuned. Or ready to jump to ovation like everyone else. The ovationary Lady In The Red Hat made up for it a little ("I recognise that one!") but too late. It was enjoyable and all, but…

2005-04-10T23:15:00.000+01:00

The Warwick Fortress Rockbass

My life and interests seem most harmonious when balanced around the twin poles of music and writing. Recently I’ve only been following the musical side in a referential-hound manner by pursuing and absorbing the trails of as many different genre styles and artists as technologically accessible. This hasn’t been easy under a self-imposed non-acquisition policy which doesn’t lapse until August; meaning I’ve been dependent on internet radio, the gifts and loans of friends and live and DVD performances (by which means you can still cover an astounding musical turf). But this all changed with some recent dabbling in home recording and my purchase of new bass power. And I’m talking a seismic shift in bass power. First I got the Ashdown Electric Blue 180w combo which is seriously loud and ‘present’ to use an audio term. The only problem with this amp is that it disturbs the neighbours and causes near-immediate ear/headache in my nearest and dearest. I’ve never had so much wattage before and it’s a little addictive — I’ve already cast wilful glances at the 300w model which has the real input level meter as opposed to my LED one. Which begs the question what’s the point of bringing it home and not being able to crank it. But I do love the subtle sub-harmonics control and the bright and auto-EQ effect. It’s a seriously full sound and quite warm, which I didn’t expect from the people that used to make Trace Elliot amps. New power also needs new tools. I’ve been plucking away at a Harley Benton freebie which was given me; it functions adequately and the sound isn’t all that bad from a suspiciously light and hollow-sounding body; I’ve also had a feeling that the battery inside is a sham and the electronics passive, not active. When plugged into a Zoom unit it sounds pretty fair for a beginner’s bass, with a vaguely rock-ish sound contour. Which has been my problem for the 12 odd years I’ve been playing bass — wasting my time with cheap and tinny basses and always dreaming, ogling the real machines and envying their sound. Ditto for amps. But considering my dream bass clocks in at between €1200 and €2000, well, I’ve never had that much money to splash around. But the good people at Warwick have done what almost every major guitar manufacturer does and farmed out some of their manufacture to cheaper countries. Fenders come in all ethnological shades (and relative qualities) from Mexico to Indonesia. Warwick has outsourced their budget Rockbass range to China, where, as the sticker wants so badly to reinforce, they are still hand-made. Since the old Fortress model is no longer made, it’s a good thing the Rockbass came along and whetted my fetish. The only problem was finding one in Dublin. Four music stores gave me the shamefully red herring runaround by saying Warwicks were no longer distributed into Ireland. Not so. An email to the ‘Wick factory in Germany put me in contact with the UK distributor who gave me the number of a small store on the Bachelor’s Walk (on Liffe) who, a phone call later, confirmed they were the sole stockist for Ireland. I was beginning to think that Dublin music store attendants were a reasonable and generous bunch as far as letting you play Stairway-till-it-bleeds goes, but they were deliberately snubbing Instrument, said store. No bother. I took early leave of an afternoon and bussed it over. The store is tiny and the attendants middle-aged and indifferent — as in they always seem to be staring away, and by virtue of either too much gigging or the badly cramped acoustics of the store or said strain of indifference and humming along to a Dylan disc, were actually quite hard of hearing. I blame not the accent. Anyhoo, I went straight for the Fortress and asked to plug into an Ashdown. I got one of those attitudinal stares and the mockingly incredulous words ‘Ashdown? That’s Trace Elliot, man!’ before plugging me into a huge Ampeg (which brand I never did like, somehow; but anything in excess of 300w sounds good). The sound was right from the get-go. The bass felt good. The tonal range was great. Rich and warm and plenty of bottom warmth. Perfectly balanced at every height and position, and the weight was reassuringly solid (with no hollow knocks anywhere on the body). The rough standard issue strings had already left some marks on the second and third frets, no doubt the in-store present of some hard-slapping metalhead just in from buying something shit from Slipknot. The Corvette Rockbass model, by contrast, sounded light and wispy in comparison — a slapper’s toy. Instrument stocks mainly Warwick and ESP guitars — hence the Hetfield/Hammett wannabe crowd dropping in all the time (‘Snotters’ my metal pal Bart calls them). I haggled about €60 off the price because I could get it cheaper on order from Germany, but they threw in a cheap gig-bag and average-quality lead. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion someone’s been fiddling with the electronics because the pick-up volume pot order is reversed, but no matter. It’s the closest to owning a genuine Warwick and hence the Genuine Sound of Wood, so I was happy enough. Also, considering I’ve never actually handled one properly, I wasn’t sure what to expect. There was a second-hand Streamer on the wall but it was conveniently priced out of range. Methinks I like the precision/jazz pick-up arrangement better anyway; it’s what I’ve always had. The Rockbass is surprisingly easy to play. The temper of the strings and hence playability alters with heavy gauge flatwounds, which I hurried on as soon as possible (took me damn near two and a half hours to restring and adjust the intonation, and later, crank up the truss rod to compensate for the higher tension). But the again I’ve never had flatwounds before, so that’s another novelty to get used to. Nowhere near as bright they are, but as y’all know, I’m into the funk and groove and soul of bass presence and don’t give a hoot for slap-and-pop bass styles, so it’s all good. Jazz people and Carol Kaye use flatwounds, need I say. It’s still easy to play, and plugged into my Ashdown it definitely rattles windows and walls. Even at the mid-pot levels, the sound is good (crank up the active EMCs and feel the bottom). The higher notes sound fuller and more middle-y with the flatwounds too, which sound even better with the sub-harmonic effect. The range of tone is good and the neck quite fast, so I’m extremely happy to at last own a ‘real’ bass. Even with the fingers only it still delivers a bright, pick-like sound (easily damped for pure funk). It looks dead sexy and it’s a yellow golden curry colour. My first act of homage was to figger out the bass part to Diamonds and Pearls (by P and Sonny T — two more Warwick heroes). Next I went back to the oldies: The Meters and Sly Stone and Adam’s Roots of Hip Hop CD (most of which tracks I already knew). A little bit of Stewart Zender’s stuff, and of course my man Robbie Shakespeare (on the Marcus Garvey disc by Burning Spear). My second step to self improvement was buying a metronome — it’s my best teacher yet. There’ll be several more weeks slash months of woodshedding before I’m gonna start writing some stuff for a new and simple musical format I’m hoping to work out. I won’t reveal too much because it’s a pretty fragile concept, but the inspirational refrain I’ve got running round my head is: The rhythm must play call and response with the melody. Wait and see for that one. I’m so chuffed to finally own some good equipment, to get some decent sounds, to get back into the making of music as opposed to its passive/reactive consumption.

(BTW, here she is.)

2005-04-07T12:26:00.000+01:00

St Patrick's Day 2005

Well, it came and went. I hardly drank. But I did manage to channel the ghost of James Joyce for the PopMatters piece. His ghost tuned in from a pub in Skerries and looked on the parade at hand.

Streamers and bunting. Shaven children with tricolour faces. Ample perambulators stopstarting: mothers' talk and conference: names remembered and passed along. Remember me to him. A net of souls each pushing hungry babes in sunlight: same boat and ocean we inhabit. Orange white and bolder green, thinlegged urchins tearing through a crowd. Not so long from swaddling clothes, six of them conspire for a trinket: all eyes on the prize: all heeding mother's cries at Angelus. And yet what is to come is not so long before... Circle of life.

Are you more convinced of the aesthetic value of the spectacle?

Who this leaning lad with limp and quoting mockery? I've ten rounds on order to be dragged away for a pun and piffle. Some misquoted afterlife in Errorland.

(I must admit that quoting Joyce in his own manner seemed the best way of getting myself across. Though if you've ever been quoted direct to your face, you'd know it's very uncomfortable. Especially if you're a stickler for detail and know they've got it slightly wrong. Nonetheless his voice-within-a-ghost-within-a-statue temporarily imbued with sentient power forgave my slight lapses of precise memory and traces of un-Irish accent.)

What discrete succession of images do you meanwhile perceive? Do you still drink?

A mass, a swirl of massing people half happy and halfdrunken as they move to see then move against the tide. A pub claims them for its frothy depths and brine. A smoky bellows guards the door where money sinks in pints. Throw. It. Up. Drinkoffering. Live on beery smells they do. What's in a beer: a name like porter. Twopence a pint. Good for sick children's bones and old cod's pins. My breakfast of rashers and Guinness's. A genetic fact of diet entwined in ages. There's money to export the stuff: expert medicine to the world shipped in vats and clunking metal hulls. Whiskey beer and wine given their parade, is all I see: a crowd parade in parallel proven scientifically by intoxication. A fanfare for this shamrock isle of dreadful thirst. Not the drink that claims these souls, but souls by legal means and tender claim their drink. To each their accord: new money buys more beer.

2005-04-06T08:20:00.000+01:00

Metallica - Some Kind of Monster

It starts in almost exactly the same way as the Chili Pepper’s Funky Monks video — the band rent a recording space, they drive in to work every day, they indulge their outdoor hobbies. The discuss the album with the producer, themselves and the media. They overdub and discuss some more; but here there’s a big fuzzy mental space oozing brotherly tension and distaste — the space of therapy and its associated jargon of pain and emotional recognition. And here, the film becomes more and more like Let It Be. I mean, how could they not see that coming? This is almost formula! It’s like Eugene Landy sitting in on the Beatles recording sessions instead of Yoko. And worse still, the viewer slowly comes to realise the new material and the new album is shit: somewhere below average harder rock, something not unlike Echobrain. This being the first attempt at group song writing, it’s hard to shake off the feeling that these are just so many band-comp lyrics hurriedly bashed together 'cause they rhyme or express someone’s feelings at that time. Essentially, this is a film about burnt & frayed egoscapes rather than music and creativity. It feels like an incredibly drawn-out hangover. Metal never sounded so tired as these guys fishing for riffs and ideas. They can rock and party hardy, sure, but can they function in an effective team-dynamic? Can they contribute and listen? No, and the problem of course is the therapist. You must never trust a therapist in yellow knitwear, no matter how much he gets per month, especially one with such burred couch-platitudes and perennial presence. The film was constantly on the verge of a saccharine group hug. Thank god he kept his trap shut about the lyrics (the content of the lyrics isn’t important here, he’d say) — but to have James Hetfield singing about cap T Temptation? Really? I mean they’ll be taking a post-Farrakhan P.E. turn and singing about shaking booties before the manager can say radio-friendly broadcast. This is the new, softer Metallica; monsters of mood and sharing. James is a heel, and quite oblivious to the fact. Lars is the normal one, even when he scores around 20 million just by selling some artworks (all in a hard rock day). Lars chooses his words carefully. Lars Pére (the wizard who looks like he just spent 20 years in the wild) pops in to call some musical shots. Kirk makes himself the model considerate one; Kirk concerned about serving the song — and yet I hear there’s no solos on the album! That must be a tough break. At times I had to laugh hard at all the slightly left-field insincerities and the serious little disappointments of their days… the glazed looks on Kirk and Lars as they witness the mild waste of Echobrain… the new bass player getting a million advance (did I hear that right?)… the Megadeth guitarist coming out with his rejection issues… the fact that everything is Pro-Tooled… and the fact that they collectively own something like 5-600 guitars! Rock on. Like my pal Jason used to say: Give someone else a go. I guess the fun of the film, the drive and gist is the expectation and waiting for the end, the inevitable termination (by day 715 of the project I was getting concerned for my own life). And yet, ultimately, the arguments didn’t make for any better musical tension or resolution — the problem partly being that Metallica have done about as much as they can for Metal — the genre is moving on and sooner or later the boys will be stuck playing to their purist fans and splitting up over new (softer?) directions. Maybe that evil word Progressive will crop up in future media spots. Music for head banging doesn’t need to worry about future trends and ceremonial inaugurations and radio giveaways. It just bangs heads. Maybe these guys need to drink more tea or something. Or get a new producer.

2005-04-05T12:47:00.000+01:00

François Ozon, 5x2

A film in reverse episodes. A hint of Nordic (divorce) drama. A growingly unlikable man (reminiscent of an Erland Josephson performance); a man who has serious problems making love to and loving women. A strange space of filmic passivity. A rather bleak Greek opening and a growing-bleaker ending. An interesting ensemble of contrasts. A focus on Tedeschi as Marion when the real narrative problem is Gilles the John. A lack of emotional slash relational centre, possibly due to the otherwise fine episodic structure limiting a causal continuity. A still unpredictable film — that is, sufficiently engaging. A leap ahead of 8 Femmes, at least, yet only a mild departure from the Rampling films. And also, in my case, a badly projected film: I had to rush out during the forceful opening episode to alert the management of UGC Dublin that the projecting scale was wrong and constrained by the narrow ratio used for ads; they said they’d alert the projectionist but nothing came of it — which I’m not going to let them get away with again, the slackers.

2005-04-04T22:30:00.000+01:00

Agnès Jaoui, Comme une image / Look at me

When recording Zep II, the young Jimmy Page was experimenting with different recording methods; one technique he used on Whole Lotta Love was to mike the guitar amp from a distance rather than up close as is the norm. You’ve got to turn the amp up louder to get the same levels, but he also noticed you get a fatter, fuller sound. In like manner, though this will be somewhat discounted by the technical gaps in my memory, I wonder if criticism and reviews come out different if they’re written a week or more after the original viewing/experience. Certainly, the peaks and valleys of impressions should be more defined; whatever’s worth truly remembering should still be there and the rest just dribbled away. Which of course is detrimental to those inclined to loving fine detail. But something I’m starting to think more and more is that the detail is integral to mood and not always consciously absorbed/observed; and that mood is essential to how we remember the bigger bits and streams of culture. Which of course begs the question of a bad initial mood dampening the effect of a work which might (in other circumstances) transcend petty predispositions; or which demands that reviewers in all walks of write be even, balanced and emotionally calm and consistent people, which is an insulting waste of speculation when your competition’s an autocue hound like Richard Wilkins. Ultimately, the purpose and value of art is to engage. And in the best works, to generate an experience that stays with you. An historical trace of artistic stayers would be pretty similar to the accepted canon of greatness and talent. Just as there’s a lot to be said about critical passion and the heat of thought’s immediacy in getting a review down, there’s also significant value in considering works from a distance, both temporal and spatial and or contextual. So then. I mean to talk about Agnès Jaoui’s film. I saw it almost two weeks ago. Jaoui is a rare specimen of French female actor-directors: she isn’t as intense as Isabel Huppert but is more attractive, acting-wise. Hers is a clear talent immediately readable whilst retaining a distinct femininity; youthful, subtle in its cares, natural in its movements. It’s not a talent measured by intensity but thoughtful grace and naturalism in the moment. I’m writing it up, of course; and there’s something to be said for directors acting in their films, especially those that know and identify deeply with the character, especially as the focus around which others base their performance. (Jaoui has an amazing vocal talent; her role is customised to suit). But it’s a mature form of charming which I found wholly agreeable. At times bristling with crisp wit and well-edited comedy, the film is a great character vehicle. Not all the leads excel, but the arrogant father figure (Jean-Pierre Bacri) was played to a razor’s edge precision (husband and wife team alert: a reprisal of his role in Le Goût des Autres, also by and with Jaoui). The father whose reputation and fame cause others to dance with nimble adulation and sycophantry. The daughter desperate for the smallest scrap of recognition in the face of a rejection of the profoundest regularity. The house in the country where it all unfurls; relationships unwinding and reintegrating into other intrigues; the nagging undercurrents of failure and ambition’s insecurity (backdropped by sheer parental and unspoken jealousy). Emotionally even and balanced by pace, you almost completely lose the sense of a mediated, constructed experience. I want that more and more: to lose the sense of experiencing cinema, to immerse myself. And as always with French films, it’s mostly about writers — my theory being that the only place one really sees writers represented is on screen (them paper bios and interviews just don’t cut it in terms of representative art and power). Every second or third French film of late has involved or resolved a particular question of writers, or, more generally, auteurs. Which is why it’s high time to make a nicely bland doco-film about the real slog and visual ennui of the writing process. The little making-of doco on the DVD was also illuminating, one of the better ones yet. To see shots made and developed under the most natural, gentle and contributive atmosphere had me thinking of Eastwood. None of that poncy French faux-intellectual storm und drang, no mealy theoretic or abstrusions; just plain, simple drama. The work of precision built into every scene. The painting of grass to match the season. The in-car shot whose punctuation is crucial. The nearness of love and resentment. The small and intrusive rudenesses of the world (mobiles, taxi drivers). The shifts of mood and music (from Schubert to TuPac). The director as guide, conduit and fine-tuner. Proof that subtlety behind the screen (backed by natural talent) equates with subtlety and grace on screen.

2005-03-24T12:24:00.000Z

Belgian Beer

Out now on PopMatters, and only two weeks overdue, my continuing love affair with all the delicious and varied beers of Belgium. Choice quote:

I've experienced trouble keeping track of all these beers, and I haven't even begun to sample the specialist beers made by various small breweries around the country. Leffe comes in four varieties and Chimay in three colours (each deliciously different and successively stronger); there's a stable of 'kriek' lambics and diverse white beers that all blur into a lazy haze of malty hops and foam. I've a stack of scribbled coasters with notes, stars, and underlinings of various names but very few criticisms and memories; and there've been a few times already that I'll walk into a supermarket or bottle shop and recognise a label or two, like someone who looks vaguely familiar, like I might have had a deep and intimate discussion with the night before but now cannot match to a name. It's embarrassing for all concerned. The coaster might say 'hallelujah, I've found my brand' and I might have dragged all my friends to the bar to meet and greet it, but a week or so later I'm not so sure any more. Another beer has come between us.

2005-03-21T12:54:00.000Z

Wes Anderson, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Mr Anderson, I loved thee. Another film about middle-age failure and father-hungry sons, there’s probably a few too many relationships at work in this film. Which drag it down, diffuse the focus and leave the viewer slightly at sea. Sea films are dangerous, they swallow attention and careers. The detail was as always superb — Mr Anderson truly loves every fine touch — he aims for an absolute of set control and flavour which is admirable. The background of Italy was a nice touch. The ensemble was great. The best touches were the singing Brazilian, the electro-keyboard song and the outrageous gunfights. The interview scene with the killer whale in the background was tops. Cate Blanchett was luminous and consistent. Bill Murray was either not quite chaotic or essential enough to carry the drama. I love thee too, Bill, but something was missing. Between him and Owen and Anjelica and Willem there just wasn’t that access of depth and emotional reality (or need) that kept Tenenbaums rolling. Like the guy on IMDB says, there’s touches of Fellini comedy rubbing off from the Cinecitta studios. But Fellini, even at his nutty and dreamiest always has a foot firmly planted in humanity. At least this one is slightly more specific and detailed about mid-life wash-ups and mild desperation and resurgence. Take the scene with Werner, Klaus’ son. It could’ve been a real identifier, a child-moment of salvation, but it failed. Alas. Would it be inconsistent to ask for greater focus on human detail, the emotional fine print, as opposed to the set detail? I so much wanted to love this film that I felt a little jilted. Maybe a complementary set of them Adidas would’ve helped.

2005-03-13T18:23:00.000Z

Out now on the Long Blog, some Notes on Science Fiction. Excerpt:

I love SF for its speculative powers and bold acts of prophesy. It is an act of extended interpretation, a radicalisation of the New. But it also has its transparent problems on a structural level. Basically, the technologies of typical SF have (supposedly) undergone several generations of paradigm shift — within the limitations of what we currently conceive to be possible later. Regrettably, the technology has advanced but the narrative worlds haven’t. The narratives are always predictably 20th Century human. Why else is the clear-cut moral range of the Western so adapted to SF? On a very basic structural level that ignores for the moment the leaps of faith involved, and which ignores the trends and fashions of narrative culture, narrative has, when viewed in technological parallel, changed little over the last thousand years. Good guys on grand adventures fight against evil aliens or technologies; there’s friendships, loyal teams and skimpy heroines; missions spinning out of control that become desperate journeys home; mysterious objects/omens/phenomena that teach humanity crucial lessons about itself or the vastness of space; there’s power plays within hierarchies and rebel factions — and all with the clearest scenario establishment, suspense and resolution of within 1-2 hours or 190 pages (and I beg indulgence here — it is an error to confuse plot with narrative — narrative is the whole active field of story and effect, not just its obvious formal/genre elements). For us, these are a series of fixed and universal forms which change little except in shape and colour but which inform much of the novelisation, filming and televising of SF. An episode of Star Trek might deal very intelligently with an interesting and debilitating problem of interstellar physics, and the formal execution of the episode might reflect this; but it’s still an extension of the problem/teamwork/solution form worked out in 50 minutes. (Star Trek - The Next Generation embodies most perfectly what could be called the corporatisation of SF — a reliable, bankable and easily-consumed SF-product franchise. More on this later.) It’s easy for SF to dream up convenient stellar drives and beeping tricorders — it is much harder to conceive and execute a narrative experience that is truly futuristic or that hypothesises how future generations might expand and experience the structures of narrative beyond superficial trends. Because narrative too should also undergo paradigm shifts if it is to be truly futuristic.

2005-03-11T14:48:00.000Z

The Third Movement (Adagio molto e cantabile) of Beethoven's Symphony nr. 9 in d-moll

I don't generally go for Hegelian definitions of the Sublime (or was that Kant), but if I was pressured to analogise the cool, abstracted air of Sublimity and had sufficient leeway of criteria, I'd choose the box marked Musical Art and lock in this Adagio.

It's best to define the Sublime by what it is not: it is not utterly bereft of melody, harmony or counterpoint. It does not, ultimately, eschew rhythm. It is neither narcotic, necrotic nor sentimental. It's neither abstractly restful or becalmed to such a degree that all movement is negated; it doesn't transfix or beholden the mind to its beguiling extremities. The Sublime does seem to entail an air of rarefaction: of heights, unsullied skies and long horizons; of inner smallness drawn against the widest vista and emptied spontaneously into harmony with 't. It is high humanity drawn to near-abstraction without spiritual dogma; humanity without suffering or the mud of cloying hearts. (The Sublime is obviously incompatible with the African.) Neither Platonically ideal nor the Rilkean domain of angels, Beethoven's Adagio is absolutely humane, that beyond which it is humanly inadvisable to speculate, for there is nothing further besides the vacuum of space and/or the dread void that looks back into you. His Adagio is sublime because it's subjectively rendered as though born of felt experience, or by a seeming-experience on the fly of composition/performance. You can't tell if it's art or deepest experience.

The backing of winds and strings allow the lightest escapades of melody; the backing draws in, builds and returns and then launches into austere freedoms of lightness. All the while progressing the movement of experience and time, seemingly natural-formed. A metaphorical tap into pure spirit as universal experience. The score, the sublimely narrative movement, is like a delicate instrument designed for handling the lightest, most delicate filaments and textures, and yet also capable of drawing and channelling the heaviest support and foundation. It is lightness anchored in the depths, a strong body singing the life of the mind. That contains its own action and rest in a single movement; that is coolly sufficient; that is both air and experience.

Notable point: the release into flight of the French horn at 9:00 (on the 1977 von Karajan/Deutsche Grammophon recording)

2005-03-10T21:39:00.000Z

As you all know, the purpose of this blog is largely memorial: to keep basic track of the various works worth reviewing during my time in Europe; so that I can archive these impressions and also gauge the volume of stuff encountered for the sake of future recollection and memory-propping. And also to let others know what I've seen, read and consumed. Pretty basic stuff. But don't let it create the impression that I write or review everything I see and do. It just ain't so. Only the stuff worthy of longer review and associative analysis makes it onto the Daze. To review everything would be to incur a Borgesian maelstrom — equally mind-numbing, wasteful and detailed as that may be. To review everything I might only get a bite of, or witness the last five minutes or garnered through staggered impression of channel-surf'd malaise, these too would still not constitute sufficient warrant and booking in review form. Only the good shit. The rest, well, it's either trash, tired or merely worthy of sighs. Stuff I've seen in toto but which can be dealt with in one or two words. Like:

Sex is Comedy by Catherine Breillat (shit). The Circle, by Jafar Panahi (naturalistic). Coffee and Cigarettes, Jim Jarmusch (fagged out). The Captive, Chantal Akerman (insipid). Mirror, Andrei Tarkovsky (lacking). Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynne Truss (mild fun).

2005-03-08T14:45:00.000Z

Hugh Miles, Al-Jazeera

Fans of The Control Room will wanna read up on the renegade news channel and its unique charter through our diseased media times. Miles compiles a pretty thorough and broad essay on the channel; it’s probably as good an introduction as can be done at the moment. The problem of course is that the Iraq occupation is an ongoing concern; and hence so is the US smear of the station. The most entertaining value of the book is to lay bare how shameless, depraved and supremely American the NeoCon occupation and global war on terrr really is. The stunned mullet of Bush coming to grips (ever so slightly) with the hatred of the US and US foreign policy in the Middle East, and the laughable PR manoeuvres to try and correct this image with advertising guff and smokescreens and new media initiatives (cf the various cynical and corporate ad attempts at rivalling Al-Jazeera, bringing in the likes of Charlotte Beers and her corporate delusions). And the sheer, deepest hypocrisy at the heart of it all — in a nutshell, forcing the rhetorical concepts of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ onto other countries and yet castigating the one truly free and democratically-relevant channel out there. On top of all the blatant lies and the totally false evidence for war and WMD. When, if they really wanted to get their perspective across, the US could’ve efficiently used Al-Jazeera as a conduit — even Qadhafi learnt that lesson early on.

America doesn’t just come across badly (even a minor list of its errors and lies could’ve had that effect) but as one of the major and most guilty propagators of disinformation out there today. If Rumsfeld et al successfully cast their spin over the most heinous and bloody crimes in the war, then you know 99% of the (US) media simply aren’t doing their job. Which is the deepest shame in the book (contrasted with the braveness and integrity (hey, bias? Yes) of the A-Jazeera crew) — the narcolepsy and self-censorship affecting Western media today. Remember the major US networks falling over themselves to patriotically follow the White House brief by not broadcasting Bin-Laden because his messages could be coded? To accuse Al-Jazeera of enemy propagandising (when you’re the biggest propagandiser of all) is an amazing act of slander and misinformation; and now a quiet majority of Americans think of AJ as partial to Bin Laden (the counterpart of this argument is that Hicks line of partitioning information in such a way to keep (American) people stupid). The great news is that most Iraqis are smarter than that. Most Arabs are cynically aware of how governments use the media and so they had a good laugh at the American attempts at positive spin (though add up all the hundreds of millions wasted in the process… and you get an idea of war consultancy profits and sheer waste). The sad fact is that the major Arab concern in Palestine is still not being addressed in a meaningful way by the US. If only Bush could realise that to do so would instantaneously transform the image of the US in Iraq. Obviously, that is a heavy load to realise in one go and not a single NeoCon hawk would have the smarts to suggest it. With the result that the broad ‘Zionist Conspiracy’ argument will continue to be aired in the Middle East. (It bears noting that Al-Jazeera is often labelled an Israeli plot in the Mid-East — what Fisk called the perpetual Conspiracy mentality).

Al-Jazeera represents the single most important step forward in the Middle East today. An independent media outlet is a crucial prop for democracy in any form today. And considering this is the rhetorical goal of the US, their squashing, slandering and abusing Al-Jazeera (in the field as well as diplomatically) leads one to conclude that there are latent or unspoken goals driving their invasion and occupation besides the ones touted: freedom, democracy, regime change. Oil no doubt. [Though, in an aside, I’ve got more to say about the sheriff’s stance the US is adopting over Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon — the probable real motivating force just south of the border is keeping its cards close.] Al-Jazeera is a brave enterprise; and with the launch of the English version, it should become a major media voice on the global scale and hence no doubt even more castigated (with all the integrity and underdog kudos attached). At least, my hope is that if AJ does become the BBC of the Middle East, then it’ll start attracting the cream of journalists and analysts, those with enough integrity left to ask difficult questions and scalpel through the tissues of lies and spin. This could be the single strongest corrective measure in the modern media since the smokescreen began with Dubya’s election (and possibly much earlier). Maybe Fisk might join the crew. But then Fisk is probably a bit too reactive for the AJ ethic of ‘the opinion and the other opinion’. I was reading an interview with the Fisker a while back in which he pricks the bipartisan myth of journalism, of allowing right of response when you’re faced with the kinds of extreme and continuing atrocities such as occur in Palestine, in which case you need to call a spade a brutal, criminal and grossly inhumane, illegal occupation. A crime is a crime by any other name. Which reminds me of the article on Al-Jazeera recently, of a Japanese legal team which concluded that Bush and Blair could legally be tried as war criminals to the full extent of the law. Didn’t see that article anywhere else.

Nice quote:

For Arabs everywhere, everything America does in the Middle East is seen through the prism of Palestine. Washington is blamed for blocking attempts to find a ‘just and lasting peace’ between Israelis and Palestinians, for freezing the road map to peace and for supporting an extremist Israeli government that is in contravention of international law. When President Bush calls Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ‘a man of peace’, all the advertising expertise of Madison Avenue will not help win Arab hearts and minds. You cannot polish a turd. (p386)

Also of note is the battle over words like martyr, occupation, invasion, resistance, which Al-Jazeera used freely at one point. And the subtle shifting of power away from Saudi Arabia, especially now the US has bases in Qatar, Iraq etc.

2005-03-04T18:51:00.000Z

The Cannonball Adderley solo on Flamenco Sketches (Kind of Blue)

Despite all the banging on about modal jazz and the fact that Flamenco Sketches is very clearly modal, it is nonetheless one of the most perfect pieces of jazz ever recorded. It is purest improvisation. It is free soloing over an integrated and conducive backing where everything sounds 'together'. The furthest state removed from indulgent noodling and ego-exercises on a technical scale; this is emotional and affective music where the means and message merge to become art. It is gentle, contemplative and meditatively sparse yet reassuringly intimate; its emotional contour taking in warm comfort in one mode and the soul’s weathering of the storm in the next, before returning again to comfort in the late of the night. It is one of the great triumphs of the blues ballad form. It is the heart of music laid bare with grace and maturity.

And it’s Cannonball Adderley’s solo that I find particularly graceful. Coltrane takes the first solo, navigating comfortably over the three modes and introducing some of the measures Cannonball will develop. The biggest difference between the horn players is that Cannonball has this amazing faculty for lyrical rhythmic grace. His improvised phrasing is strongly suggestive of the human voice. He has a genius for that rhythmic degree between swing and funky. He bends notes up unexpectedly, he quips and pops little phrases; he sings languid one minute then uses plain bop-notes the next. And then he will sustain the most beautiful vibrato note. He is fabulously well-punctuated — one of the finest grammarians of rhythmic phrase and finesse in jazz. Coltrane seems more the straight-ahead, lateral line-man in comparison, his soul a different kind of energy. Cannonball is a sheer optimist, pacing his notes between the beats while staying perpetually fresh (I think he is the better complement to Miles’ spare musings — Miles also has an acute rhythmic sensibility not immediately apparent). He plants a bold note to clear the air of the last, he sews together heart, tact and intuitive melancholy in a broad sketch of runs and commas, and at 5:12 he performs an amazing, roof-opening octave run that is pure elegiac soul. It is no longer improvisation but pure emotion.

Why is it so humane-affective? Flamenco Sketches implies that at the pinnacle of pure music and art, you’re likely to find a deeply profound but optimistic sadness, a melancholy emotion of loss tenderly rendered but utterly expressive of soul. A truer kind of beauty.

2005-03-04T10:16:00.000Z

The Infinite Café

I’ve had a lot of recumbent time to study Vincent van Gogh’s A Sidewalk Café at Night — a painting about perspective and colour as luminosity (view). Vincent must’ve had a peculiar fondness for the geometrical rays of the vanishing point in his compositions, a lesson central in his learning to paint (which like everything, he learnt and executed quickly). The composition of the Café scene is near perfect and harmonious, with the vanishing point just left of centre. The rooflines, the awning, the drainage grooves on the cobbled street and even the aligned leaves on the tree all snap in line to that central point of infinity located somewhere near the golden gas light above the waiter’s head. The white tabletops float like saucers in formation away from the centre; and to deter them as subjects from the painting, the people of the café crowd in vaguest definition around this point. An inverted distancing effect: the people are indistinct and distant, the stars are bright and exaggeratedly close, like daisies printed onto the blue fabric of night. The man and woman on the street’s right travel in opposite directions, silent vessels in the night. The blue doorway pillar on the left buttresses the bright expanse of yellow awning and offsets the heavy buildings in darkness opposite. A large quarter of the street is devoted to the rough cobble street, hurriedly scored on an underlay of white and gray. The nearest subjects in the order of perception are the chairs — one of Vincent’s favourite objects — the first three all face the same direction — subtle cues for the rearrangement of mental furniture as experienced in the bedroom with chair painting. The length of the awning and the diminishing heights of the doorways all seem to indicate a stretching of perspective or an unreal scale (again, voiding the front of humans helps). But for all its adherence to perspective and the vanishing point, and the impression given of a funnel effect, this is an unusually flat and undimensional painting, because it instead wants to suggest depth by colour and colour contrast. There is no arranged layering of depth in Vincent’s work; it’s all about straight paint to canvas and not the manipulation of dimensionality. Since perspective is all about true perception of dimension, this painting would be a mess without its bold and direct colours. The colour in turn disguises the fact there’s no real luminosity at work on the canvas, no real sources of light. So in a snap Vincent regresses to a pre-Renaissance attack on painting, as though the culmination in Rembrandt never happened. A modern idolatry of colour perhaps. All the light comes from the yellow and orange of the awning, tempered with green contours and mixed-on-canvas white overlays. The source of light is barely defined as a source; the gaslight is neither background nor foreground and indifferently melded with a basic outline. It is yellow in a field of yellow, ambivalently close. If the gaslight had real luminosity (which I’m sure it did it reality) he would’ve had to create realer shadows and gradations and intensities of light — obviously time-consuming details. Every brushstroke is a registration of haste and urgency — it must’ve taken an hour or two to paint this scene. In part it’s dirty and amateurish. But it is still a bold transmogrification of reality — the only reality here is the paint, the colour. A reality where colour draws a hard wedge (like the awning) between the darkness it doesn’t care for, but without all that religious or allegorical interpretation of Light. You begin to suspect there’s a complementary mindset at work here, that Vincent doesn’t paint what’s Realistically there but what his heart wants to see and harmonise with order and colour.

2005-03-03T11:39:00.000Z

The cream of writer/director combo flicks are diverse and many, from Godard to Takeshi. But on the downside, the ones that fail often fail intensely. One thinks of George Lucas’ recent work. And it’s on this subterranean scrap heap that Vincent Gallo’s Brown Bunny belongs. It’s singular proof of what you can get away with as self-scored and self-obsessed director: lots of shots of yourself scoring with every chick, indulging your hobby (biking) and ultimately, getting blown by a reasonably well-known actress. What could be better? Do some brooding, look lost and intense and string together endless shots of American roads shot through a dirty windscreen, show off the peculiar powerlessness of your light voice, and voila, a Cannes nomination comes your way. Bunny is one of those rare films that gets a negative score for story without in any way approaching Beckett. A negative score for sense and involvement, this film is almost anti-engaging. The one nicely cinematic shot in the desert becomes a grossly meaningless non-statement (you can tell the double negatives are crowding in. Again, our criticism lacks a full discourse of negativity). I’m amazed (in a slightly perverse way) at how Gallo can dilute and de-flavorise his film of all usable meaning and effect, at how he can make himself especially so bland. And to get head from Chloë Sevigny seems to be the ultimate expression of directorial coercion slash getting away with it — I mean when Leonard Nimoy directed Star Trek III he didn’t unload his schlong for all to service, no matter how glazed Shatner’s eyes were ("Spock… Friend..!"). Now, everyone knows that Chloë swallows. For a film about being lost and broken-hearted (merely by association, not by acting, script, montage…) to end on a tawdry note of film-my-dick is amazingly conceited. I had to watch most of Bunny at 4x speed because of all the tedious road shots, and was seriously going to demand a refund from the Leuven video store if I could’ve been arsed filming myself in the process and mailing the tape to Gallo directly.

Also saw Terry Gilliam’s quixotic undoing (I know, the cheaper the pun…) in Lost in La Mancha. As far as cinematic disaster movies go (with what to compare it to, Hearts of Darkness?), it’s quite nutritious documentary fare though not quite the whole narrative meal. A keyhole view into who and what powers own and really control a film project; in this case the insurance underwriters. Gilliam is the dreamer whose under-budgeted film mutinies; there’s moments when he’s facing the darkness and the betrayal but he never quite snaps, his humour doesn’t decay for a second (seeing him watch the rushes reveal his comic intent). He’s not quite as uncompromisingly gung-ho as Coppola, digging himself deeper and deeper into his own personal jungle; just more aloof and resigned to the care of the details of his film, not heeding the executive vultures circling ominously. The unsung hero (or Sancho Panza) of the film is the focused and impressively organised first AD, Phil Patterson. When he’s about to quit you know the film is doomed. Depp doesn’t have much of a say; there’s no conclusive remarks from Rochefort himself which are absolutely necessary; and there’s very little original footage (am afraid to say that very little was actually/probably shot) which could’ve made some great bonus features. The focus is too much on Terry and he comes across like the mischievous director at play with all his fancy dreams. The director, I feel, could’ve learned some important production lessons from Fellini — basically overspend on everything (especially sets), overdraw and go nuts with every detail so that when the executive crunch comes you’ll at least have a basic complement of sets and stages to work with. At least, he had an indulgent De Laurentis to back him; but it’s a good way for dreamer-directors to operate. It’s sad that there’s a recurrent theme of indulged failure to Gilliam’s work; a behind the scenes doco of Baron Munchausen would’ve been very interesting (DVD reissue, anyone? Extra Uma?). But, on the whole, I am keener than ever to get my hands on the Criterion Collection of Fear and Loathing. Particularly eager to get into the amazing sound engineering on that one.

There’s not much to say about the Oscars (which sound infinitely funkier in French: La Cérémonie Os-Car) beside Spike Lee wearing a Fez, but there was a telling audience/recipients/reaction shot, bearing in mind the occasional crowd-shuffling, and which indicates the Academy’s idea of Seating Seniority, a shot of Alan Alda sitting in front of Martin Scorsese, who was actually up for an award. That was surely no accident.

2005-02-23T15:45:00.000Z

Notes from an Airport Lounge

(Well, maybe holding bay would be more appropriate.) Looking out onto the snowy drizzle of a very white Dublin morning, planes parked under drapes of snow, with the news that Hunter S. Thompson has offed himself with a gun. Not like the Doctor to go for the broadly symbolic exit, neither for dramatic purposes nor for want of Papa-worship or anything. Either the drugs stopped working or Hunter simply stopped working. Massive betting debts, writer’s block, sheer ennui and antipathy at the Bush regime or the general decline of the American state and the ultimate disenfranchisement of its citizens; these and probably a dozen other reasons and theories will roam the mediasphere. Or, of course, it could be something very simple like bad health. Rolling Stone will do a loving but misguided tribute on HST’s madness under a deadline, written by a hack going for a ten-gun Nixonian send-off; Johnny Depp will come out distraught and maybe Bill Murray will provide the most moving and respectfully insightful eulogy of them all. I see Ralph Steadman has done the Independent and the Guardian the service already. Whatever comes out of it, I am certain that the world is going to seem a lot less sane without him around.

Leuven: Leffe Bruin, Mort Subite (kriek), Westmalle Tripel (trappist) and Orval (trappist). Four beers and I'm already in heaven. And these just from the local corner store. My long and no doubt continuing novel about all of Belgium's beers is progressing. All that editing is just so much additional fermentation.

I wish it were possible to write while drunk or at least mildly hammered on Belgian beer. As I sit in a warm café at the foot of the St. Pieterskerk of Leuven (sadly stunted and incomplete without its tower, but impressive enough in the swirling snow), I consider sending off a quick mental prayer to the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson, asking for guidance and stamina in the task ahead. The good Dr. Thompson, you will recall, had an almost superhuman ability to conflate drugs and alcohol with the journalistic brief at hand. The Doctor could've aided my long and continuous researches into these beers. But I believe that ultimately, when faced with the sheer scale and variety of Belgian beers and their swift alcoholic punch, that even he would've taken an early retirement.

Also, I've the bad luck to be in Belgium at the same time as George W. Bush. Some observations I've made: a president who preaches fear and militarism naturally believes his own cult of fear. When his blue jumbo landed at Zaventem airport, his was the only plane in a deliberately restricted airspace and landing schedule. The airport was blocked off, a massive garrison of US security guards and FBI agents took over, including sharp shooters on roof buildings, riot squads etc. The Pres got into his bomb-proof limo and drove as part of an armed convoy direct to the US embassy in Brussels in what must no doubt be the record time of 26 minutes. I mean, this is Belgium; the Prez could've cycled in and heckled a few startled shoppers and none would bother to take a pot shot at him, if only to relieve the boredom. That massive defence budget must be spent somehow, and his trumped up importance underlined by any means and technology available. Secondly, and this is in line with the jibes levelled at Bill Clinton during his regime (all fries and cheeseburgers): every time George W. comes out of some conference or meeting with European dignitaries and does the smirk for the cameras, all he seems to be able to talk about is the meal just consumed. First there was the breakfast with the Belgium PM ("We had a nice lunch together") and later on there was a little glad-handing with Chirac (who just towers over GWB in every sense, statesmanship, presence, seniority) in what was declared to be a dinner he "had been looking forward to a lot" and which was the "first since getting reelected". All the time, Prof. Rice sits nearby with a look of blank concentration. She doesn't really need to be here as part of the ambivalently billed "charm offensive" (would that be bilateral or unilateral charm?) but she has the deliberately studied look of the understudy hard at work, waiting for a morsel. One of the strangest double acts in politics today. When the Belgian news used direct feeds, it again becomes glaringly clear how inept GWB is at attempting to string together incoherencies and platitudes for the media: the same old spluttering inanities, just as Blair (for instance, as breakfast guest) stands next to him with that decidedly bambi-ish look of open-mouthed dazzlement and reels off something far more coherent but subtly GWB-propping.

2005-02-14T12:44:00.000Z

Hayseed Dixie, live at The Village, Dublin

A good American is one with a sense of humour and at least a shred of irony. What great hillbilly fun: a quartet of drinking guys in cut-off overalls having way too much fun on stage. Noodles of talent. And everyone invited back to the hotel for pool and rack assessments (for the next album cover, so they say). Sticking mostly to AC/DC covers in a very tight 1.5 hour set, with a lot of tongue in cheek preacherisms (It was revealed to me… my path was clear… I want to testify… or maybe that’s the hooch in them talking) and some absolutely ace banjo playing (Don Wayne Reno, you are a legend). Personal favourites include Big Bottom (The looser the waistband, the deeper the quicksand) and Fat Bottom Girls and The Ace of Spades. You just can’t appreciate these songs until you’ve heard them rockgrass style. Also, what is unarguably the best cover of Walk This Way ever performed. All part of music about drinking, cheating, killing and going to hell. The insight of the night was the prevalence of lunch songs, if you know how to look for them. A band for whom performing and drinking time are the same thing. Best covers band of the year.

2005-02-11T16:20:00.000Z

Another New Journal idea

Yes, this has been a somewhat slow review week, this week, but I’ve been having all sorts of kooky themed journal ideas (it could be the flu putting me in that deliberate convalescent mode of perception). This one, inspired by reading a Dorothy Parker interview on The Paris review site, whose excellent ‘DNA of literature’ section features heaps of interviews (and is slowly expanding, it seems). Parker laments the death of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ("Poor son of a bitch") saying how no one rocked up to his funeral, and the ignominy of being a Hollywood hack slash scenarist. The Wikipedia couldn’t flesh this anecdote any further, but it got me reading up ferociously on all the flappers of the Lost Generation with their smarties and petting parties. And how this brief little era still has potent associative function in the idealistic paradise of American Pipe Dreams and Fairy Castles (subdivision: literary scenes). The Round Table, the pre-Depression bobs, the booze. Ah, memory. To wit:

The Twenties Journal (specialising in brisk short fiction)
And the Twenties Press (an online archive of forgotten writers)

2005-02-10T13:54:00.000Z

More Smile notes

I’ve been comparing the original Smile bootlegs with the finished product delivered unto us last year. Also, watching a doco with brief audio snippets of the original tapes reminded me of some noticeable differences which only now become more apparent. It’s all in the voices, the vocal approach. And Brian’s singing style or brief to the BBoys. The singing is much younger, of course, and hence fresher and better suited to innocence slash youth themes (Carl, always so fresh!). But most significantly, the original vocals are fused and forged with melancholy, with a kind of hashed-out sadness slash longing slash emotional feel. In Brian above all. A vocal on the cusp of self-alienation, regarding the self from a slight distance and perceiving a sadness therein. It comes out on the extra scattered tracks from the period as well, stuff like With Me Tonight. The new and completed album, despite all its slickness and clarity and musical precision, skims off this rich layer of melancholy cream (ugh, great curdling metaphors, Batman). The new album’s (backing) vocals are great, except as mentioned earlier, Brian sings all the leads and Brian’s voice is several generations removed from the young man of 25 — it’s as though the care he took with 'feels' in the 60s has been lost; his inflections are pedestrian and aged. The melancholy infusion is gone; the sheer emotion and originality that so impressed critics and sycophants in '66. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful we have a finished product at all; but the subjective layers of the originals flatten the feel and beauty of the new stuff somewhat, they lack a tiny but noticeable degree of emotional range. And the material is so well suited to melancholy shades and browns. Compare, for reference, the versions of Wonderful, even Vega-tables, their sheer evocative power.

Also, on PopMatters now, my bit on Dublin fruit and flowers and Moore Street.

People in Dublin seem to be congenitally afflicted with the habit of walking into others, thereby making any venture onto a crowded street a thoroughly haphazard and jaunty experience.

2005-02-04T08:26:00.000Z

DH Lawrence, The Rainbow

No, I haven’t completed it again, although I might feel differently about it a few chapters later; but of all Lawrence’s novels, bearing in mind that all his openers are strong, I find the Rainbow's first chapter the most powerful (with Women in Love, naturally, a close second). A complete and thorough introduction to character, method and theme, it's psychologically acute and representative of everything to come after. In a way, he is mad in his completeness and reach for succinct totality. DHL is a subjective surgeon operating in a strange world of animal darkness, of pained relationships with their insidious needs and smarting negations, the biblical knowing and biblical language; of couples desperate for completion and yet too intense for the ultimate possibility. It's all shockingly animal. A 'scape where instinct battles for spirituality but fails in its fires. A place where winds in the trees mirror the windy strains of the heart. It's an amazing personal achievement — I can’t think of any other writer of late that has as much subjective force. It had me thinking again of one of Henry Miller's finest passages (from Nexus, methinks) where he expresses his love of characteristic openings in novels: some authors floating high over the work but casting vultural shadows, others mad and schizophrenically intertwined with every word and seed of the book.

He put on all clean clothes, folded his stock carefully, and donned his best coat. Then, being ready, as grey twilight was falling, he went across to the orchard to gather the daffodils. The wind was roaring in the apple-trees, the yellow flowers swayed violently up and down, he heard even the fine whisper of their spears as he stooped to break the flattened, brittle stems of the flowers.
‘What to-do?’ shouted a friend who met him as he left the garden gate.
‘Bit of courtin’, like,’ said Brangwen.
And Tilly, in a great state of trepidation and excitement, let the wind whisk her over the field to the big gate, whence she could watch him go.
He went up the hill and on towards the vicarage, the wind roaring through the hedges, whilst he tried to shelter his bunch of daffodils by his side. He did not think of anything, only knew that the wind was blowing. (p40, Oxford Classics)

The actual courtin' scene itself is a masterfully succinct piece of subjective difficulty and violent otherness (to use a term I'd rather not). Full of instant and flushing transformations. Vivid.

2005-02-01T15:50:00.000Z

Wong Kar Wai, 2046

A room, a time, a place and a novel, 2046 is a completely sufficient and enclosed cinematic world. Stylistically separate but twinned with In the Mood for Love, it broadens the relational scope of the lead(s) and deepens the narrative topography of (a) love in 60s Asia.

I love the international (or intra-Asian slash migratory) approach of a story blended with a Western-looking culture and sexuality. A film fused with the romance of life. At times magically composed and shot, Wai's cinematic language is intensely created and affective and personal and image-driven. He seems to make the same (if not a thematically similar) film again, varying only his techniques and the relational settings in a curious mix of Murakami and organic subjectivism. The dramatic-realistic Tarkovsky perhaps? I saw Chungking Express about a week or two previously, and it's kind of shaped the way I look at Wai's oeuvre-contour. Particularly his approach to meetings and love's early petals. He's very much the horticulturalist of Asian cinema, dedicated to the careful cultivation of fine and dramatic cinematic flora. Beautiful to look at and wander through, wanting to be read symbolically.

Technical-trope-wise: A bold use of the production company logo as narrative bookends. A strong sense of space and enclosure slash privacy given by the deliberate use of obscuration in the dialogues: when one character speaks, the other (or even the lead) is obscured by a panel or wall or fitting, forcing a lot of the dramatic action onto a third of the screen. It's an unexpectedly intimate effect. Further deepened by what feels like a very naturally-lit film with alternate camera speeds, and an execution mostly between close-up and mid shot. Wai is one of the best directors of interiors, period. I can’t remember any major establishing exteriors in 2046.

Tony Leung and Gong Li are masters of nuance and subtlety, the latter probably more so, every bitten lip a treasure of suggestion on the big screen. Leung’s character seems to have become much more chauvinistic and easy, less a writer in love. Emphasis now falls on the failed love of the women. And of course all their unspoken secrets, their generosities and demands. The emotional terrain of the film is further typified by what's left out of it in the generically-Hollywood sense: guilt, remorse and happy endings. It makes of true love a complex memory, something only approached in real experience and then under constrained circumstances, but best left to ponder over later or in another place (distanced within), leaving one smarting and hardened and closed to other loves or the love at hand. And hence making excellent philanderers of us all. With rent owing and drunk girls in hand. It's still Tony's film.

The future story lacks pathos and counterpoint, its script-gears not fully meshing (in a commentary or metaphorical sense) with the 60s story (in fact the whole secret-hole thing becomes a bit trying). Which is a shame because it stretches the ultimate believability and humane reality of the latter. It (the future story) seems to represent an emotionally barren but hypermobile state of affairs without any angst or ennui (especially in that French way) (or even a technophobic slash cybernetic paranoia) (or strong contrast) which might've turned this into a truly great arthouse/artistic film, if only in a causal/metaphorical sense — fleshing out the emotional-consequence landscape between the many temporal and subjective layers of the film. But when the mechanics of filmmaking are so beautiful you can almost feel Wai's creative idea-plant grow, you don’t really care.

Just a little too long and occasionally ill-paced with respect to music, and possibly not as great and thorough as Mood, it's still pure cinema. Pure style and vision in execution, Wai's art and technique are flawlessly tuned and fused (sounds great, eh? Doesn't really say much. See it yourselves).

2005-01-28T13:26:00.000Z

The Mash Album

OK, the first anniversary of Grey Tuesday is coming up; and what’s changed since then? Copyright is still an important legal issue and royalties are more important than ever. Apple announced it’s hocked a quarter billion licensed MP3 tunes just as it undertook legal action against a kid who posted Mac gossip on his blog. Lisa Marie has sold the entire Elvis Industry to some higher-level marketing venture; and in Britain advertisers want to use Gene Kelly’s Singing in the Rain routine to plug a car. If marketing companies can throw huge sums of money into cultural stealing (which is what it amounts to: usurping a tune’s familiarity and or subjective-musical power to invest a product with cultural kudos and association, colonising our minds), and thereby keep making more money unfairly with respect to the original artists and or writers, then their legal hunting down of the small-time mixers having a bit of fun with the music, in an effort to protect their profits, is obscene. Visions of an army of Colonel Parkers with teams of snide grey Simpsons lawyers, simply because they can afford them, to pick on some kids with mix and sampling software. Conversely, I love the idea of CopyLeft but it just doesn’t function in higher-level capitalism with its profit-ownership obsessions. The future utopia for artists or musicians (in the sampling age especially) is to make all music free. Which of course makes it impossible to protect, and so the whole vicious cycle begins again. The system prevails. Some snide manager whispers into a bored musician’s ear that there’d be no more coke riders. Or Moby renegotiating for the umpteenth time his commercial-use royalties ('I hear we’ve just got New Guinea'). Any industry protects its interests across the board, from legal protections to voting Republican. The music, ultimately, represents very little. Add to that all the profitable re-issues and greatest hits packages and you’ve got a shiny, healthy music industry that can afford to cry foul over missed revenues.

But after all the sampling and mashing and riff-lifting and rap-tracking, what’s actually changed in the state of music itself? Or more specifically, in light of all the people moaning about the decline of the true album format and the inroads that shuffling MP3 players make on people’s music listening experiences, has anything truly new and original happened in the spirit of music? Is there anything more than just the occasionally brilliant or truly affective combination of sample, beat and wildly crossed context? The mad cut-up or the sublimely dissing pisstake? Within its own context mashing is great fun, but it ultimately doesn’t add to the music; its just another means of reducing everything to sample material and raw unprocessed context. It’s the quality of the original materials or the power of the raps that are laid onto it, or the occasional wild accident that matters — if everyone was making mash albums there’d soon be a shortage of stuff to sample. Which means that ultimately it’s a reductive venture, given the hacker kudos of playing against corporate copyright rules. Of course, the Beatles were a great white elephant just waiting to be brought down (DJ Danger Mouse just got there first). With their rights in limbo, neither Peg Leg Paul nor Ringo Superhero are gonna pen personal letters of cease and desist (‘White Elephant Jumps at Grey Mouse’). Mashing also means deliberate provocation and baiting, deliberately planting little copyright stings on record companies too slow to act legally over the internet. Which is fine in context but ultimately another tiring, reductive maneuver, a difficult pose to maintain for any length of artistic time without genuine smarts and creativity. Which brings it all back where it began, in Dub. Technically speaking, mashing is an extension of the history of mixing that began with Dub. And what did Dub do when it ran out of source materials? It started making its own. Y’all should be looking back to what Sly and Robbie were doing in the 70s.

The decline of the album format is another issue. A lot of the mash stuff actually tries to tie it all together with shout-outs and dissing and bragging. But there’s a strong sense of limitation — again, the source materials issue. And if music doesn’t play at expanding its expressive or spiritual boundaries from within (jazz) then its net emotional gain and relevance will stay academic, and undergraduate at that. A fun little exercise only. Also, mashes are quite listener-fatiguing. The odd 99 Problems / Helter Skelter mash is great, and it might sound very odd to hear me say this now, but I really want to hear songcraft and good choruses and not some hastily sequenced non sequiturs. I want to hear intelligent writing and ability again. Gentle ability, handmade, soulful.

2005-01-27T13:14:00.000Z

Fela in Concert (DVD)

Recorded in Paris in 1981 on what’s billed as an all-night session, this is a good little guide to how African big bands do it. It's so easy-rolling that an entire evening could’ve been filled this way. At times eerily reminiscent of the early 70s JBs but almost diametrically opposed in rhythm structure (tight lock grooves vs. this freeform rolling improv), this is more an exercise in African jazz. Long solo excursions, big horn sections. Fela is the same hard-driving lead man, strutting around with a joint, goading musical cues, cueing the change, calling the shots. And directing the sound engineer to turn up the bass or cancel the effects. One man leading a big band. He discusses US and European-supported police-government/colonialism in Africa with the audience. Talking 'bout the government through music, but potently. He struts and moves almost the entire show. Leads the chant. There’s about 17 members to his band (The Africa 70). The show isn’t so much about putting on a show as expressing music as life: you’ve gotta be pretty deep in the groove to pull this off all night long. Call and response, horn breaks and wide open spaces slowly building and breaking again. Then heavier breaks. Fela does choppy organ chords and horn solos (the latter not as accomplished). His painted and bangled dancers come out and do an, er, floorshow (ever seen African women dancing on their hands and knees?). And all of it on the simplest beat: just a rimshot with a ricochet echo and a two-note bass hit. Building up all the time. 'Hey darling, show me your living license.' 'How can you criticise music when you’re not playing it?' It's great just to see the man in action, get the full picture. The only pity is the rather poor video transfer and atrocious sound. The entire band just doesn’t come across clearly; and the early 80s editing fit this into very late or early morning French TV schedule where only stoners come across it. But with the rhythm and horns in full swing, Fela at the console, it’s pretty great stuff. All night long. I want all music to be like that.