Lou Reed

Not a perfect day, but a most enjoyable evening. Simply sitting and playing football on my 360 and listening to some new CDs. Not much, you may think. This has been the first evening that my mind and body have both been functioning to a sufficient level to allow me to apply my motor skills to moving virtual players around a pitch.

The music is more important, however, as this is one of the first time I have sat down and listened to a whole album in months. Usually, as is the way when you have a portable music player of any type, you forward to the songs you like, and with an MP3 player, you don’t even get the joy of snatches of songs as you stop to hear how much more of the cassette you have to fast-forward.

Secondly, it is actually an event - I remember that there was a slightly ritualistic nature to playing vinyl - it is a large black disc that you have to turn over after 30 minutes or so, and there is something tangible to the experience - this is less so with CDs, but it is unusual for me to sit down uninterrupted without reading or doing the cleaning. And without, again skipping tracks (although this is mainly due to the lack of batteries for the remote control).

So, I hear you ask, what are you listening to? Well, dear readers, Leonard Cohen features quite strongly. His delightfully miserable first three albums have just been reissued, and I cannot recommend them highly enough.

Beyond this, I have been engaging with German dance music (not the standard dreadful techno) in the form of Compost’s Black Label series - a wonderfully eclectic mixture of the sounds that appeal to the more left-field dancefloors of Europe.

The final CDs have been an attempt to engage with youth - firstly revisiting my own in the form of Rumble in the Jungle - these are tracks I remember hearing John Peel play back in the day - parallel to dub reggae - and I remember being entirely mystified as to how someone so beloved of the NME at the time, and someone who played grunge and American indie music (as was the fashion at the time) could play this music that sounded like angry Jamaican men shouting at a drum machine that kept malfunctioning - as far as I was concerned at the time, one could like one form of music only. For the rest of your life. Ironic, no? Anyway, here is General Levy and M-People (not that one) with ‘Incredible’

The final CD, an attempt (of sorts) to engage with the youth of today has pleasantly surprised me. I had heard masses about ‘dubstep’, as it is termed, a musical movement from the south of London that seemingly has grown out of the UK garage scene and mixed it with reggae, jazz, hiphop, brokenbeat and jungle sensibilities. I had envisaged a form of music utterly impenetrable to me - although the influences are my bread and butter, my fear was of Craig David-style pap. Burial, as those of you who have received a recent set of CDs will know, sound like Massive Attack with slightly unusual beat sand time signatures, and this is the way I would categorise the little dubstep I have heard.

Today’s offering was the album by Skream!, and it reveals a depth of understanding and musicianship that belies his youth - there are all of the influences above on the album, and they are all part of an organic whole. The standout track for me, so far at least, is ‘Check-It’, featuring the talents of Warrior Queen - a wonderfully warped dancehall track. Anyway, I am pausing and hesitating now. The point is, it is rather good.

The Party and the Guests

has finally arrived from Second Run DVD - after repeated delays I finally managed to see the film banned forever by the Czechoslovak authorities in 1973. The film had been made in 1966, banned, released in 1968, and then, as I said, banned forever. Or until 1989 at the very least.

And not without reason, I might add. The film has a dark absurdism, rooted firmly in the very nature of Czechoslovak history, especially of the 1950’s and 1960’s, yet also drawing on literary works, both Czech (Kafka looms large over the film, especially the Trial and the Castle), and more international - Beckett and Ionesco would both have revelled in the situation the director dreams up for the protagonists. And yet as allegorical and playful as the film is, one cannot help but see the dark heart that beats just beneath the surface, as the various characters change their behaviour over the course of the film.

The film opens with an idyllic scene of the main characters, four men and three women, three couples and a charming single man, enjoying a picnic in forest clearing (standard Slavic romantic images of birches and meadows along with a sense of bourgeoisie calm) - they are going to a banquet/celebration/party (the word ’slavnosti’ is problematic to translate - similar to the German ‘Fest’) to be held nearby later. So, they eat, drink, and be merry.

They then dress up and head off to the party. As they walk up a path, they are accosted by a strange individual, Rudolf, who asks them numerous personal questions and refuses to leave them alone. As they try to leave him, a group of men appear from the woods and lead them off to a clearing.

The men form a perimeter, and a table and chair are set up at one end of the clearing. The seven guests stand before it, and the Rudolf sits down, holding a folder. He again questions them, and at the suggestion of the other men, they split themselves in to two groups, men and women, and stand in an area marked out as an enclosure. The single charming man engages with his interlocutor, whilst another falls silent, and a third tries to leave. He is grabbed by the thugs and beaten.

At this point, the host arrives and apologises profusely - Rudolf and the other men, it turns out are his adoptive son and other guests from the party.

At this point I need to head off to bed as I am still recovering from a cold, but more will follow tomorrow, hopefully with some images and maybe even a trailer. There is so much more to outline, before I even try to get started properly on analysing it…

Not much to write about

apart from expressing my admiration for Tim Robinson’s Connemara - up for numerous Irish literary prizes, this book manages to combine history, geology, biology, folklore, literature in a beautifully evocative picture of this small part of the west of Ireland - the author has lived and worked mapping this part of the world for the last couple of decades, and the depth of understanding of the various processes (historical, meteorological, geological and so on) that go to shape this most peripheral part of Europe combined with his eye for small cultural details (he frequently deviates from the grand narrative to engage the reader in some village gossip, or in an old folk story) ensure that the area truly comes alive.

I hate Almodovar.

There, I’ve said it. I should duck for cover now, I suppose. Volver is absolutely dreadful as a film. A waste of nearly 2 hours of my life. Clearly his Catholic homosexual oedipal complex has a great appeal for a great many people - not least the thousands of people who go to see his films each year, then buy them on DVD. He is number 8 in the 50 men who really understand women - as Penélope Cruz states: ‘Pedro loves women, he is very curious about the way we think, the way we feel. He finds us complicated and he likes that complication.’

No, he doesn’t - his women may be complex, but the complexity is an almost cartoon style, in which the most feminine traits are amplified to hyperreal proportions - his characters are as paperthin and as far removed from real women as the heroines of comic books, or silent films, or Dostoevskii novels. He paints them with poster colours, even the promotional material for the films echoes this. All About My Mother, Talk To Her and Bad Education all suggested to me that he was maturing as a filmmaker - despite the occasional lapses (absent transexual fathers, for example), all of these displayed psychological subtlety, but his latest effort has far more in common with his earlier films.

It is a tragic indictment of the Spanish film industry that he is the foremost director - many of the directors are still using the Civil War as a backdrop (even Pan’s Labyrinth), and therefore deal with this topic, no matter how tangentially. Where is the heir to Bunuel? Latin American cinema, despite a comparative lack of investment, produces far more interesting and engaging films. Most other European cinemas have overcome/are overcoming the effects of far more strict censorship and repression than Franco’s regime imposed and in a shorter period.

This week’s CD

Is not going well with the fuzzy headache I have as the latest strain of the flu struggles to overcome my immune system. New York in the late 1970’s - mid 1980’s was a real melting pot of musical styles and fashions. I’m sure all of us know the clumsy cross pollination between early rap, disco and punk/new wave in the ever blissful ‘Rapture’ by Blondie, whilst Talking Heads were again melding soul, jazz and funk with rock guitars.

Anyway, I digress, as these bands are merely the tip of the iceberg (and, of course, the most commercially successful). This compilation brings together some of the more underground sounds of NY in this period. Proto-electronica, jazz, dub, cavernous hiphop, very unusual lo-fi production techniques, mergers of music with performance art, and just about everything in between appear here. Arthur Russell, a classically-trained cellist, created expansive, almost ambient dance-inflected soundscapes, Sonic Youth went on to become one of the defining bands of the late 1980’s, and Glenn Branca wrote symphonies for the electric guitar. Of course, alongside these more avant garde musicians, there are of course some delightful 3 minute punk-pop tracks - The Ramones, were, of course CBGBs stalwarts.

This is the third in the series (part one is excellent, part two still has to be delivered), and has once again deepened my knowledge of this period in NY’s musical development, the repercussions of which can still be heard not only in the recent slew of pop-punk bands, but also in the electroclash fashion of a couple of years ago, and in some of the more expansive dance music and hiphop. And it has the second best version of ‘Jailhouse Rock’. Ever.