(The rather lovely Patrick Wolf, photographer currently unknown. But regardless, I'm very fond of this shot.)
MUSIC Extraneous personal stuff: I'm off to Cornwall for a few days in a few days, which means A) no pithy little pop culture nuggets for you, and B) Patrick Wolf's gorgeous second album Wind In The Wires for me. For the uninitiated: it's a record all about Cornwall, and I'm excited at the prospect of listening to it whilst zooming through the landscape it so beautifully sets to music. Here's the title track...
After stalking The Pains of Being Pure At Heart's Kip Berman on last.fm (findable here, if you're interested) and listening to his favourite tracks, I hit upon this absolute gem. Words just cannot convey how unbelievably cool this track is. There's just no other way of putting it. I give you Polaroid/Roman/Photo, by 'French synthwave[rs]' Ruth...
Also, and sadly not available on youtube, personal fanboy favourites Parenthetical Girls are set to release Part II of their Privilege 12" set soon. Part II is entitled The Past, Imperfect, and you can listen to the track Young Throats at this website heyar. (The frankly awful blather is simply not my responsibility; I link for the musc, and if that 'site poisons your mind I shan't be held accountable.)
Also, whilst I remember, and of course assuming you're interested, my last.fm can be found here.
______ BOOKS
Latest reading has been, newspapers and assorted articles aside, Wilde's The Critic As Artist. As far as I can tell, it's the fullest statement of his aestheticism, and crucially also a scintillating, wonderful read. It's in dialogue form, and often seems simply to be a vehicle for his infamous epigrammatic wit. I would talk on, but I don't want to spoil just how good it is for you. Well worth taking a day or two to digest and enjoy.
An online version is available here, but as ever I fear the printed word reads best when printed- your kindle/ipad/e-reader be damned. As a corollary: that version is 'unable to reproduce' the occasional bouts of Greek Oscar indulged in, so you will actually miss a fair bit of the dialogue's meaning. Yet another reason to get yourself to the bookshop.
Reading whilst I am away shall be: Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, a book of Plath's poems, a book of essays on the philosophy of law, and nothing else. For now, goodbye.
"Let us go... and look at the roses. Come! I am tired of thought."
I wanted so very dearly to hate Tennis: descriptions of their music mention how "lo-fi" this husband and wife duo are, the fact that they write songs about their boat trips- and so on and so nauseatingly forth. It seemed the perfect set up for a lambasting- I thought something about 'following the chillwave trend' could be employed; I believed I had a perfect storm of disgust to unleash 'pon their unsuspecting heads.
But the problem with preconceptions is that they often highlight just how wrong one can be; all thoughts of being rude were forgotten when I actually listened to this dinky little EP. Its three tracks all pack wonderful melodies swathed in a kind of summery haze, and beyond track titles, a few discernible lines and guesswork, I haven't really got the foggiest what these songs are about- and I couldn't give a fig. This EP, as Oscar might've said, is almost irredeemably charming- and at seven minutes 18 seconds it may have an insubstantial running time, but pray don't let mere appearances deceive.
As I've been working away and not achieving very much on a bunch of nowhere near finished pieces and ideas, here's some music:
FOALS- Brazil Is Here (b-side to the Balloons single)
It's kinda interesting that, for me at least, a lot of Foals' better songs are b-sides to the singles, or stuff that just never got released in any official way- and this is especially pronounced around the time of their first record. To wit: the track above, Unthink This, Astronauts and All, Gold Gold Gold- hell, even Hummer and Mathletics were single-only. Add to that earlier, much more math-rocky stuff like Try This On Your Piano (and the even earlier, unreleased, brillaint Modern Art Is For Pricks) and you have quite a sizable collection of quality music. Happy hunting- and if you haven't already, check out the now-sadly defunct sister band Youthmovies. Good Nature is a great, great album.
So, apparently Hyetal's (yet) another not-really-dusbstep, prodigously talented producer from Bristol. And this is an absolute gem: euphoric, brilliantly put together... It has everything I could ask for in a song. Plus the synth line that appears later in the song is quite simply one of the most lovely things I've heard all year. As someone I saw on a blog said: this stuff is weirdly close to electronica legend Vangelis, whose composing work on films like Blade Runner make for great albums in and of themselves. (Incidentally, of his studio records, my favourite is the wonderful Albedo 0.39. Well worth yr time, is Vangelis.)
Canzonetta Sull'aria, from Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro.
Most famous for its rather memorable appearance in everyone's favourite film TheShawshank Redemption, this is a gorgeous little piece of music. Tellingly, I've been lead to believe the title translates to 'a little tune on the breeze', although this could be completely wrong.
To be perfectly honest, I never really got the deal with opera; I always was under the impression it's just a glorified, posh person's musical. This, obviously, is not correct, and I'm slowly coming around to the idea that it might actually be rather interesting. The costumes are still ridiculous, though.
Polar Bear- Peepers (live studio recording for The Guardian)
And a little ditty from London 'post-jazzers' (ololol) Polar Bear. I've talked about this band a lot before, so: this is a slightly longer version of the title track of their latest record, which I've been listening to a fair bit. Great stuff, and it's good to see Seb Rochford's hair remains as vertiginous as ever. (There's also a video of them playing Jools Holland, but the sound's a bit off: the guitar is waaay too high in the mix, and the band sound kinda flat. Shame, really.)
...and finally, a track I'll say nothing about, save the fact I've been playing it constantly. And Then He Kissed Me, by The Crystals. Magnificient, classic wall of sound Phil Spector.
LATE EDIT. OR, ONE MORE! Beam Me Up, remixed by Jacques Renault, original by Midnight Magic.
This has one mother of a groove. From the guys and gals of Hercules and Love Affair, yet another disco revival slice of awesome.
Twenty-four years remind the tears of my eyes. (Bury the dead for fear that they walk to the grave in labour.) In the groin of the natural doorway I crouched like a tailor Sewing a shroud for a journey By the light of the meat-eating sun. Dressed to die, the sensual strut begun, With my red veins full of money, In the final direction of the elementary town I advance as long as forever is.
(Dylan Thomas- Twenty Four Years)
MUSIC. Mainly it's been Arvo Pärt's beautiful Tabula Rasa that's been e-spinning on my laptop recently. In a similar way to the fact I find my admiration for Caspar David Friedrich's overtly religious paintings a bit strange, in an abstract sort of way I feel I ought to find Pärt's music offputting, as again they're (supposedly) primarily religious in character. (He's been called the "foremost composer of minimalist devotional music" and this work in particular "the pinaccle of the 'Holy Minimalist' movement") But, as ever, abstraction ignores the music- and Tabula Rasa (literally: "blank/clean slate") is heart-stoppingly beautiful. The "religious composer" tag is, I think, something of a misnomer: I'm sure it informs his compositions a great deal, but it's not something I think I'd've guessed at hearing the pieces 'cold'. Rather, this is wonderfully concentrated, contemplative stuff: two violins, prepared piano; two movements- and to simply leap from 'contemplative' straight to 'necessarily religious' seems a tad lazy. Needless to say, the religious don't necessarily have a lock upon the concept of 'contemplation- regardless of the personal beliefs of the composer. Death of the author, innit!
Anyway. An exquisite little ocean of calm, and something I've been playing a great deal. It feels as though it manages to articulate the infinite wonder of the universe as a whole.
Below is first movement Ludus- my favourite of the two, the second, Silentium, I couldn't find whole on youtube.
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BOOKS.
In keeping with the whole 'infinity' theme that seems to have developed (and though not a particularly RECENT ENTHUSIASM), I'd like to talk a little bit about David Foster Wallace's wonderful novel, 1996's Infinite Jest.
It's hard not to merely recapitulate what many others have said about this book- there's certain salient features that kind of beg to be mentioned: the unbelievably extensive footnoting; the vivacity and inventiveness of Wallace's prose; the daring and brilliance of some of his conceits; the heinously complex and self-consciously surreal plot(s); its sheer length (w/footnotes IJ comes to something like 1100 pages, +/-)... It's a list that has the potential to be extended for a very, very long time: this book is brimful of ideas, devices, themes and just straight up hellaciously interesting stuff. To the point where, regardless of whether you actually enjoy the thing, as with any project of this scale, it kinda demands admiration, at the very least.1
So I'm kind of spoilt for choice as to what I discuss here: do I talk about Eschaton's hilarious mix of tennis prowess (large chunks of the novel are set in an academy for promising tennis players, by the way) and simulated global thermonuclear war utilising only tennis paraphenalia and a mobile mainframe computer? The (quite literally) lethally entertaining film Infinite Jest that gives the book its title, and attempts to locate said film by Quebecios separatists? The sly, constant parodying of (among a great many other things) latter-dayconsumer culture? The manifold and frankly bizarre subplots? The vividly sketched characters occupying the AA meetings and halfway houses that populate this tome? The ferocious sense of humour; the puns? Or even just pick apart grammatical things like the Wittgenstein-esque, ever-present '...', indicating a non-reply/lack of speech- or even, say, just the fiercely convoluted syntax? These are all important, probably vitally so, in explaining why I think the novel succeeds on so many levels- but I don't think, by and large, that they're the point.
Now a statement like that probably needs some unpicking, so here goes: all the 'postmodern-er than thou' stuff, DFW's "verbal high jinks"- they're kind of a side-show. They occassionally mask, and at other times reinforce, a wider, much deeper, and much more important message about human communication (and hence human experience), on a very basic level.2Infinite Jest should, I think, be seen as the culmination of much of his work (both pre- and post-IJ's publication), much of which serve like great (in a physical size, rather than prestige/stature kind of way), separate expositional footnotes and illustrative addenda to IJ.3 Things like the Kenyon commencement speech, or the short stories The Depressed Person or Good Old Neon(which can be found both online and in the collection Oblivion: Stories) are primarily about "the existential angst that occurs when existential angst itself becomes a cliché",4 and at a very basic level how to deal with being alive.
It's something Jonathan Franzen pretty much nails down in the heartbreaking speech he gave at Dave's memorial service: his work is about exploring ways out of loneliness. It's about avoiding the "gut-level sadness" that seems inherent in Western culture. And it's certainly no accident that the unashamed, openly-accepted, comment-free 'sharing' that (apparently, I don't actually know for sure) goes on at AA meetings gets such frequent (if sometimes oblique) mention: that's, as I think he saw it, the main way to deal with the great (same sense of the word as above) destructive power of irony in rendering discourse lonely and essentially meaningless. If you're never sincere, never say what you mean, what does this add up too? And it's here that Infinite Jest's great (other sense, obviously) success is evident: espousing a basic message of sincerity, of unimpeded communication but doing it via the (literally) deconstructive tools of the ironist; using their own weapons in for a diametrically opposed purpose. You can see it in two therapist characters, one from IJ, one from aforementioned short story The Depressed Person: in the latter example, exaggerated to such an extent as to render the "value-neutral" approach taken is rendered ridiculous- it does the patient no good whatsoever, and exacerbates her condition; in the former case, Hal Incandenza's horrendously self-conscious approach to grief counselling totally impedes him from any kind of meaningful discourse.5 The artifice he erects stands between the two interlocutors, and it's no real wonder that Hal's a basket case. He's us- exaggerated, sure- but the essentials are all there. In both cases, and many others, Wallce is employing exaggeration to parody,-not to mention all the other staples of so-called 'maximalist postmodernism': incessant references to high and popular culture, rapid vaults through authorial register, authorial interruption, and etc. etc.- but for a purpose other than deconstruction. And this isn't even beginning to scrape the surface of much of Infinite Jest- and that, I think, is why it's such an essential book.
1. Admittedly the same is true of most immensely long novels- apart from those godawful fantasy ones that just go onand onand on, and that have characters named such that one gets a forehead-punchingly obvious distillation of that character's traits from name alone. 2. Again, what I'm saying here isn't a particularly new insight into the text, as you'll see when I start quoting people, but it's sure as hell an important one for understanding it, as far as I can see- especially when somewhere like Time Magazine gets it so spectacularly wrong. If there's one thing this book isn't, it's a "sendup of humanism at the end of its tether". Also, on this point, and many others, I'm especially indebted to Jon Baskin's fantastic essay on DFW, available here and probably a great deal more concise and interesting than this. 3. I mean, you could see it as the other way round, but that seems kind of obtuse and churlish- the smaller pieces, by definition, aren't a thousand pages long. Nothing screams 'defining, definitive artistic statement ahoy!' quite like length. 4. A turn of phrase I owe squarely to a wonderful article found here. 5. Again, a point owed the article of footnote #4.
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ART
(Richard Long- A Line Made by Walking, 1967)
Bristolian Richard Long's art isn't so much infinite as infintely beguiling: his subject, quite simply, is walking. Works are often stark descriptions of certain walks rendered without value-judgement, photographs of natural features rearranged subtly (see top) or altered (as just above) by the very process of walking, or the assembly of naturally occuring objects (rocks, primarily) into geometric, strangely pleasing patterns. It's oddly fascinating, and a lot more than it seems prima facie.
(Thoughts on: David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, George SteinerAt The New Yorker and Will Self's Feeding Frenzy.)
Just to kick things off with a caveat: this isn't an exact non-fiction compare-and-contrast matchup- of these three books, one (ostensibly) is largely about restaurant and architectural criticism, one chiefly concerned with the reviewing of books (and by extension, often the authors and their ouevre), and one a freely ranging high-speed meditation on whatever the hell takes the writer's fancy*. But there's a common theme: these three all, in their idiosyncratic ways, typify central features of that rather nebulous bunch: the polymaths. (Indeed, references to Steiner's purported polymathic nature occur, (implicitly or explicitly) five separate times in seven review excerpts on the back cover of ...At The New Yorker. Draw your own conclusions.) Their interests are wide-ranging, insatiable and often passionate: Self riffs on psychogeography, the Tate, food, and interviews Morrissey; Steiner wields unbelievably prodigious skill with languages: justified-looking critiques of translations from French, Italian and German (amongst others I forget) appear frequently, as does a seemingly inexaustible knowledge of the lit. canon (both modern and ancient); and Wallace tackles subjects massively disparate subjects: the Illinois state fair, the professional athlete as modern-day religious figure, holidaying on cruise ships and (possibly premature) critical exultations about "the death of the author". Everything seems to be grist for their respective mills.
And they all certainly make for invigorating reading- though often wildly different in style, each is certainly engaging. Steiner's prose is pellucid, his criticism sharp and exacting. Wallace is variously deliciously straight up, especially when discussing supposedly "difficult" topics ("The wicked fun here is to watch how Hix employs the deconstructionists' own instruments against them.") or wonderfully obtuse (the much vaunted "and but so" and variants; chunks of essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction) and Self is... Well, he's Will. He leaps between evisceration (his skewering of Quentin Tarantino is just beautiful. Representative quotes: "... Mr. Tarantino is essentially a pasticheur and an artistic fraud"; "...I read Mr. Tarantino's script, and found it to be illiterate..." etc.), archly surreal reviews (a few pages on a place called "Bluebird" take the form of an hallucinogenically weird vignette where Self himself is briefly cradled by Terence Conran) and several surprisingly generous pieces on Oasis, among many, many others.
But there are similarities: both Self and Wallace are laugh-out-loud funny, and they also both often delve into their respective manic, ticcy styles. It feels as though both writers are but a few steps removed from the worlds of their novels: DFW's essaying tone is regularly set to the 'self aware, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink' level of information overload, a mere skip and a bound from the 'horrendously self-referential, everything-including-the-kitchen-sink-and-a-whole-lot-more-crap-you-never-even-noticed-before' data deluge of Infinite Jest or the short stories. Similarly, Self's frequent forays into frankly bizarre discursive wanderings** permeate his writing, fiction and non-. Steiner's erudite discussions are, by contrast, infinitely more restrained, often sticking to broadly the same formula: apparently tangental, unrelated introduction (sometimes drawn out (occasionally frustratingly so) to over two pages in length), the relevance of which becomes quickly apparent at the interesting picking apart of author/thinker/biographer/biographed stage, followed by a sucker-punch surprise ending, pithily summarising and adding to the above. (Viz: "[this collection of E.M. Cioran's aphorisms] does raise the question not so much whether the emperor has any clothes as whether there is any emperor.")
What all three do have in common, however, is an often overwhelming sense of fairness in their treatments of various subjects. I don't necessarily agree with all the conclusions that are reached by some (more on this shortly) but one feels that each writer is scrupulously careful and considered in their arguments and eventual conclusions. Wallace's frequent, horrendously self-aware admissions of supposed pretensions in his analyses of various phenomena, of being "abstract" or "arcane", or of beating around an ideological bush mask a seriously sharp mind: his even-handed simultaneous deconstruction of both the films of David Lynch and critical hubbub around Lynch is masterful, especially when it coalesces around a wider point about cinematic violence and imbedded American filmic archetpypes and expectations. And when Steiner issues an edict like "A bad book is the death of a good forest." (referring to John Barth's LETTERS) it feels, for want of a better word... true. They've done the critical legwork, and the judgements passed down are thus largely judicious and, well, just.
But it's not all perfect for Steiner. (And I'm not sure if I think this because A) because I really like, on a personal level, the other two writers, and thus have less of a connection with the newly discovered Mr Steiner and am thus more inclined to pick holes, or B) because these criticism are actually justified. But here goes.) Occassionally it feels like Steiner, if he really likes something, descends (or possibly ascends?) to some kind of gushing blather, especially when he talks about 'the national spirit of Russia' or something in Under Eastern Eyes. His general thesis there seems to be that Russians are more attuned to and capable of withstanding physical and mental punishment. It just sounds- and I can't put this any other way- bullshitty. It's not everywhere- his careful dismantling of Russell*** and Orwell is inspired, for example- but these kind of wide-ranging generalisations and amateur (well, possibly not so amateur) cultural studies twaddle does cast a shade, especially when the other essays are of such a high standard. It's not something I can really explain- I mean, see the section in parenthesis above. It seems to me like some awfully strange aberration- one minute there's erudite, informative discussion, the next these sweeping statements about 'national character' informing the works of a particular author, and a pretty clear break from the 'scrupulous fairness' mentioned above. Deuced odd.
The other is a more piddling concern, and more caveat emptor than censure: Self's Feeding Frenzy can become rather repetitive if one reads for an extended period of time- one would do well to heed Self's advice, and choose to "sip phrases delicately, carefully selecting them to accompany word dishes" and not "chomp" through all the essays, arranged as they are non-thematically and non-chronologically, essentially inviting one to dip in and out. Thus, I would recommend not 'pigging out', as it were; it was a word-binge I regretted.
The Wallace, however, I unreservedly endorse. The longer form that his pieces largely take (A Supposedly Fun Thing... has seven separate articles over its 353 pages; At The New Yorker has 28 over 328 pages; Feeding Frenzy like 128 over 370-odd pieces of paper) draws out Wallace's strengths in close, terrifically interesting analysis- by comparison, it sometimes feels as though Steiner is hampered by too-short articles. Self, by contrast, seems perfectly suited to the small piece- see above. In fairness, they're all of roughly equal worth, all things considered, but DFW has a special place in my heart- which is something I probably should've mentioned at the beginning of this so my words could be taken with a pinch of salt.
But never mind.
I feel I should ape Steiner and say something pithy and concise at this juncture, but as there hasn't exactly been any continuous theme, a phrase in summation would more than likely just sound retarded. But certainly, these three are critics as worthy of reading as the things they criticise, and sometimes probably more fun. And it's not often you can say that about a critic.
*I realise, however, how nauseatingly po-mo it must seem to be reviewing books that are largely comprised of reviews. Believe me I'm ambivalent about the quality of this idea too, but am continuing pretty much regardless anyway.
**Far more than just shades of Burroughs and Pynchon here, people.
***Which I distinctly don't agree with, but for reasons too involved and convoluted to even start to get into now. The piece on 1984, however, is pretty much spot-on.
(This piece was published (if you can call it that) ages ago in Bristol university's student newspaper Epigram, and I'd totally forgotten about it. It was for a section called Promised Works, which is essentially designed to inform/remind people about great, under-the-radar albums. I have no idea why it's called Promised Works, so if you know, please, do let me know. This is unretouched since then, so any spelling mistakes/grammar issues will remain. Apologies.)
NICK DRAKE// Pink Moon.
By 1971, the English singer-songwriter Nick Drake was reaching the end of his metaphorical tether: depression, insomnia and the near-crippling shyness that marked his earlier career combined with an increasing dissatisfaction at the poor sales of his two previous records, (1969's Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter, released in 1970) and culminated in an almost total withdrawal from public life. This withdrawal, however, also resulted in the recording of his final album, Pink Moon, a collection of songs of such beguiling, unique beauty as to place them amongst the finest ever written.
Put to tape over the course of two, two-hour long sessions beginning at midnight, Pink Moon is, quite literally, extremely sparse: across its twenty eight minutes, the only thing interrupting Nick's singing and guitar comes in the form of a piano lightly decorating the title track. What's left behind, after all else is stripped away, are the winding, ever-shifting melodies that struggled to escape over-orchestration on Drake's previous work. On Pink Moon, the focus is squarely upon eleven intricately written guitar parts, and the lilting, haunting softness of Drake's voice. It is, without wishing to descend to hyperbole, a completely realised, utterly cohesive set of songs: each perfectly complementing both the track previous, and the song to come.
Lyrically, too, the album coheres around two central themes: recurrent images of nature, and of a continuous, quiet hope for the future. It's tempting, as with any artist that dies young, to view any final work as a kind of 'early warning sign' of things to come, (and, indeed, Nick Drake passed away in 1974, two years after Pink Moon's release, overdosing on anti-depressants) but to do so in this case is to do the album a great disservice. Its gentle, understated feel, though conceived in a state of increasing turmoil, stands as testament to the ability of an individual artist to create something moving. As Nick sings on the final track From The Morning: "the day once dawned/ and it was beautiful". A simple statement, but sometimes it's the simple things that are the most powerful- and therein lies Pink Moon's ineffable power.
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TRIVIA
Apparently, gypsy-punk hoodlums Gogol Bordello were once going to be named Hütz and the Béla Bartóks. For some unknown reason this makes me very happy indeed.
Below is rabble-rouser-in-chief Eugene Hütz (often mistakenly named Gogol Bordello, probably because he pretty much embodies the spirit of the band) talking wonderfully about music, and below that is their wonderfully madcap performance of Not A Crime on Jools Holland a few years ago. Note the dub-esque breakdown!
(Mark Rothko, No. 14 1960. Can be found along with lots of other stuff (including a Richard Long sculpture!) at the SF MoMA.)
[Brief introductory spiel: I've been in Northern California (San Francisco, Napa and Yosemite, if you're interested) for the past two weeks, as you'll probably be repeatedly and nauseatingly reminded in the following few paragraphs, so this post is broadly about all that junk: a rough summary of reading and listening habits whilst abroad. More detailed and hopefully more insightful stuff will follow in the next few days- book and record reviews and unorganised reflections on America such.]
BOOKS.
So, whilst I was away I managed to plow my way through about half the reading list in the previous post, and some other stuff too. The following were polished off: The Unbearable Lightness of Being; Burroughs' Naked Lunch; A Crisis of Brilliance; Alex Ross's (fantastic) The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century; a collection of George Steiner's essays onvarious writers/thinkers, entitled At The New Yorker; David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. The Neruda and Ginsberg were dipped in and out of, too, and the book on the Nuremberg trials turned out to be rather dull.
I can't really say anything particularly insightful about all these books in this (relatively) short space, but I will, as I intimated above, hopefully write something about most of them soon. My favourite, though, was probably the Alex Ross; he's fully fired up my interest in 20th Century classical and avant-garde music, and the book is wonderfully engaging and surprisingly quite funny.
This is also a shout-out to the fantastic shop CityLights Books, which was, originally, simply a vehicle for Lawrence Ferlinghetti to publish Ginsberg's defining collection Howl, and somehow sprawled into a three-storey bookstore on the edge of Chinatown. An excellent, cramped selection (think the shop in Black Books, but much, much bigger), with an entire floor devoted to poetry, and one of the finest philosophy sections I think I've ever seen outside of specialist philosophy bookstores. If you're ever in SF, a visit is pretty much obligatory; I ended up going twice and purchasing three or four books there, plus a few postcards. _____
MUSIC. Not suprisingly, this's been influenced by the Ross, and any and all vaguely modern classical music on my music box was devoured: Stravinsky, Part, Reich, Glass... Being home now is rather a boon, and I've been mercilessly exploiting Spotify's (often confusingly mislabeled) archives. Other listening consisted mainly of Mingus's The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, Ms. Newsom, and The White Album (many, many times over), among other stuff I can't remember. I seem to recall listening to the last few tracks on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust quite a lot, too.
Anyway. Below is one of the Newsom tracks I've been obsessing over. From her incredible album Ys, this track has possibly one of the most wonderfully sibilant lines I've ever heard: "a scrap of sassafras, eh sisyphus?" It really isn't hyperbolic to describe her as a poet: just that one line is so perfectly judged, with the other sounds modulating around the steady 's's... Brilliant.
AND! AND!
One of my favourite 'new' artists, the wonderful Gold Panda, who I may or may not have mentioned on here, is releasing his debut album Lucky Shiner Oct. 12th. Free download of new track Snow & Taxis and information available at this website right here: http://luckyshiner.com/
His (for Gold Panda is the work of but one man) music is a wonderfully evocative mixture of nervy, cut-up samples, nifty little drum patterns and synths. Part of the reason I like him so much is that it's hard stuff to pigeonhole: it has a sort of future-nostolgia I can't quite articulate; the static that seems to hang around his tracks (and especially teh beats) kinda feels like the visual noise on a polaroid, and the constantly flickering, never quite identifiable, chopped and changed around samples carry a rich collection of sub-conscious assosciations, whilst the synths are close to that great misnomer IDM and the current crop of post-dubsteppers. A very, very talented young man, and I'm looking forward to the album a great deal. He's kind of similar to Mount Kimbie and James Blake, although not in any way that's easily pinpointable; it's more of an approach thing.
And as I can't believe I haven't posted this already, his original breakout track Quitters Raga, with a wonderful fan-made video. Pretty much the perfect visual accompaniment. Enjoy.
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ART an' ting.
So, after a pretty extensive visit, I can reveal SF is pretty good for galleries: the amusingly named MoMA's collection is generally really, really good. A great number of pieces from Warhol, a fantastic Wayne Thiebaud nude (I think) which I can't remember the name of because I stupidly didn't write it down, a Rothko (seen at the top) and a lovely, peaceful rooftop sculpture garden with the aforementioned Richard Long sculpture, among many others. You can bet I was pleased.
The De Young museum in the Golden Gate Park is less impressive, but not for want of trying. Lovely building, but a rather less inspiring free collection and stupidly long queues for the (expensive) temporary exhibitions. They did look good, but I had neither the money nor the time to wait. Having said that, the free stuff is probably quite good if you like that kind of thing: lots of native American art, pieces from ancient civilisations and a lot of 17th & 18th Century stuff from American painters, but none of these are really my bag, and the comparatively small modern art section was mostly quite bland. They seem to have invested quite heavily in some boring expressionist Bay-area painters, much to my dismay. A lovely Oldenburg sculpture and a Thiebaud painting, though- his choice of colours for shadows is just wonderful, and there also a few lovely works by contemporary landscape painters I'd never heard of.
Oh, and the food there is absolutely stunning. Seriously. I'd recommend going just for the soup, regardless of the art.
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FILMS.
The flights (both to and from) were something of a Pixar fest, which (obviously!) was brilliant. It also solidified, at least as far as I'm concerned, Pixar's preeminence in the world of digital animation: comparing Toy Story 2 with the latest Shrek offering (both were available on the flight back, and I watched Ratatouille about three times on the way over) pretty much confirmed Mark Kermode's views of the respective film series*: which, in essence, is that Pixar rules.
The crux of the it seems to be this: whereas Shrek is a flimsy, plot-light husk with references bolted on (in the later films, both to itself and to pop culture in general), the Toy Story films, and Pixar films in general, have at their heart a story. As Kermode points out, look at the first Shrek film: already it's seriously dated, because a lot of the references either don't mean much anyway or are so conspicuously pointing to a very time-specific (and thus now time-stamped) pop-cultural thing. Or indeed both. And Toy Story just doesn't have this problem, because they don't insist on alluding to anything and everything, or engaging in blindingly obvious story-archetype deconstruction (an ogre! But good at heart! Oh how smart of you!): the original film is still as watchable as it ever was, and ditto with number Two; I found Jessie's story just as heartbreaking as the first time I saw the film. Indeed, there's something incredibly warm and lovable about these films, and it's almost certainly the reason why Toy Story 3 (which I haven't yet seen, sadly) is doing so well: they're done immaculately, and inspire large amounts of devotion- even amongst otherwise jaded teens. Again, following Kermode's analysis, Pixar don't separate viewers into 'children', who apparently want only slapstick, and 'adults', who want references to famous films, famous people, etc. etc. Rather, they make me smile- not pat myself on the back for getting the joke. Referencing is a very tricky balancing act anyway, and Shrek totally overloads its seesaw in this respect.
Shrek's problems are kinda borne out, albeit in a slightly different light, if one compares them to the Wallace & Gromit films. W&G is jam-packed with allusions (to both high- and low-culture) but they're fun, too. The nods are normally too manifold to spot on first viewing (especially the cheeky little puns in the book and record titles- Fido Dogstoevsky, anyone? Poochini?) but again there's a kind of warmth emanating from the films, and often the nods aren't particularly time-bound, or that contemporary. They're just lovely, and clearly incredibly well thought out- in comparison, Shrek just feels like an empty set of gestures, of pointing at things ("I know this! and this! and this!"); there's nothing to anchor it all together; no centre around which to coalesce, or indeed particularly intelligent usage of the referentiality they employ. In W&G, the massive Aliens hat-tip at the end of A Matter of Loaf and Death is a central, hilarious plot point, whilst in Shrek nodding to Monty Python's Holy Grail is just nodding to Monty Python's Holy Grail. At root, I think it's a problem of audience connection: one must have a base of goodwill upon which to build, and I feel no connection with Shrek (or indeed any of the film's other characters), whilst Woody and co, or indeed Wallace and Gromit charmed their way into my heart first, and drew upon other works a distant second. It's this lack of connection that's the Shrek series' central, critical failure. And don't even get me started on the gaping plot holes.
(*If you're looking for a good, regular film review podcast, Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's weekly film reviews on BBC Radio 5 Live are wonderful. I'd go as far to say I can't really recommend them enough: the good Doctor Kermode is insightful, interesting and occasionally infuriating, and his reviews are normally spot-on.)
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GENERAL REMARKS.
Two, further, brief (and unrelated to anything above) addenda: firstly, the apparently in vogue airport trend of wearing training shoes with a suit most distinctly does not make one look insouciant and cool; as a matter of fact it makes one appear a sortorially clueless buffoon. Secondly, suit jackets and shorts never work. Please, all concerned: cease and desist.
(The rather lovely Patrick Wolf, photographer currently unknown. But regardless, I'm very fond of this shot.)
Latest reading has been, newspapers and assorted articles aside, Wilde's The Critic As Artist. As far as I can tell, it's the fullest statement of his aestheticism, and crucially also a scintillating, wonderful read. It's in dialogue form, and often seems simply to be a vehicle for his infamous epigrammatic wit. I would talk on, but I don't want to spoil just how good it is for you. Well worth taking a day or two to digest and enjoy.
