Can you believe I didn't have a proper copy of London Calling until two days ago? Ridiculous, innit?

versus

Janina writes about The Dreamers, and she's not wrong, you know. Comparisons between this and Lost In Translation probably arise only because they're the last two films she & I saw, but they have a few things in common, not least of which is the excellent use of music in both (I am reminded yet again how I feel about Hendrix). Whether the difference between the two films represents an American/European divide, I'm not so sure. If I wanted a handy soundbite with which to sum up the difference in ideologies, I'd say that The Dreamers knows that privilege is an immensely enjoyable pleasure which one should work to undo, whereas Lost In Translation labours under the illusion that privilege is a difficult, troubling burden which nevertheless must be maintained.

Apparently The Dreamers has been damned by the critics in certain quarters - I've not been privy to much damning, but I can see why it might provoke some hatin'. You know what the word most often used in a pejorative sense about films I like? Pretentious. I have no doubt that stuffy film critics a-plenty queued up to call The Dreamers 'pretentious', not to mention 'arty', like that was a bad thing. They probably added 'self-indulgent' for good measure. Like Chuck said: "All the critics you can hang 'em, I'll hold the rope."

If I were to string together a longer post on the film, it would probably focus on its place in a miniature genre which also includes Performance, Y Tu Mam? Tambi?n and Withnail & I. In each one, a kind of squalid bohemia is achieved only to fall apart as a result of or in conjunction with the intrusion of a harsher reality, usually overtly or implicitly connected with political repression/conservatism. Each film also concerns homoerotic tension or anxiety, although Withnail doesn't fit in quite so well because women are just absent from the movie rather than providing a catalyst, or to put it more simply excuse, for the guys to almost or actually get it on. Okay, that's all I got for now. You should go see the movie, if nothing else all three leads are easy on the eye in their own way. I might even need to see it again.

It's good to be reassured about your mental state.


Season Three - A lot of people say that you're the
best, and who could really argue - you're
pretty, witty, and you've got one of Buffy's
best adversaries: the Mayor. Pound for pound,
you're why so many people love Buffy.


Which Season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Are You?
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But of course.

in the spirit

The second term of my second year as an English Literature student was probably my low point in terms of motivation, discipline and feck. One of the tutors whose job it was to make my ragged lazy ass do some work was a young, serious man teaching Restoration comedy (mostly good), Rochester (bleak and nasty as fuck but brilliant with it), and Dryden (holy God, the worst writer I ever studied), among other things. He had a monkish quality, the kind of mental intensity and rigour that tends to suggest a person can never quite gel with the day to day practical indignities of the modern world, and he gathered us in an appropriately spartan, dingy basement classroom. I felt a little guilty at the time for my comparative intellectual flab and slop, and the guy was also forced to endure precocious stunts like one of my fellow students returning her copy of Rochester's poems, torn in two, in place of an essay (this may have been the first time I understand the awe-inspiring power of the puritan streak that can be present in radical politics).

So I hope the poor long-suffering man had some inkling of the effect he had in making at least a couple of us buck our ideas up and get back in the game that year. In particular, he once told us something that has stayed with me ever since, and which I try to apply whenever I write about any kind of art or culture or... pretty much anything. He said: "When you write an essay, you should always try to ensure you capture something of the nature of the subject in your writing itself." In other words, it's not good enough to write about something, you have to write "in the spirit" of the work - in yr lunatic Christian mystic sense. A form of possession.

With that in mind:

Sugababes - 'In The Middle'

omiFUCKINGgodthisisthebestUHUHUHsongEVER!!!!!!!

...

Thank you.

So that's three great singles in a row, and one of them was even a ballad - plus they haven't yet put out 'Nasty Ghetto' despite the amount of play it's getting (which makes it their 'Friday Night', Darkness fans). I suppose I have to go get the album now.

PERMALINK MECHA-MEGA-UPDATE CONSTRUCTICONS COMBINE FORM DEVASTATOR

I've always felt a little weird about the fact that the column on the left isn't arranged in any way - part of me thinks it's a bit rubbish that you have people I drink with who update once every four months nestling next to qualified genius music-fu cats I just found on the internet like everybody else, part of me thinks it's cool that people just have to guess based on the name. One day I may get round to organising it all, but I doubt it - I'm a luddite, mostly, I just type in the box and keep it simple as I can. Anyway, it's out of control now, and I've added a bunch of people/places with more to come... Anyone who's reading this, links to me somewhere, and would like me to return the favour - or if you have any recommendations for who/where else I should link to - holler.

Here you go then...

Fiery Furnaces, Highbury Garage, 24/02/04

In The Bailey beforehand: great pub, the Thai food makes me drool just writing about it, it's always full of indie kids about to go see a gig, and sometimes members of the band - tonight it's packed with people watching the football too, which at first kinda sucks but once we have seats and a couple of drinks under our belts it starts to feel like fun - go on, "the" Arsenal! - even once you include the bloody, bone-crunching violence (goalkeeper's face collides with someone's knee, afterwards with blood covering most of his face he's still standing, trying to shake it off, "don't worry guv I'll be okay" - stirling work)...

I'm telling you all this so you can understand my mood that evening. I was in the kind of mood where you mind seeing brutal sports much less than the prospect of a nice indie band with clever instrumental arrangements and songs about puffins. This was the setting for me to tell my companions:

"I'm in completely the wrong mood for this - I want to see a loud, dirty rock'n'roll show."

Surprise, surprise, this is exactly what the Fiery Furnaces gave us. They up the tempo and roughen the edges and rattle through previously quite sedate tracks like 'Up In The North', which means that when they get to the more rough'n'ready'n'rowdy stuff from the record - 'Asthma Attack' in particular - wow. "ROCK", as I'd say if I'd had a lobotomy this morning.

I definitely get why they keep mentioning The Who in interviews now, it makes a lot more sense, and it's not the only thing. I never quite understood what all the fuss was about Eleanor Friedberger, but seeing her perform live, I totally get it now. She really becomes the focal point for the live version of these songs, especially once they strip down the instrumentation and it's just her and her brother with maybe a guitar or two between them. She has this jittery intensity that's really compelling, because it's not an obvious nervousness bordering on neurosis (like say, Cat Power on a bad night), but then it doesn't look like confidence in the way people are used to frontpersons being confident, either.

Definite highlight of the new songs played: the one about being single, or is it wanting to be single, which has the violent / sexual chorus about, well, "banging". Other high points: the switch from 'Don't Dance Her Down' into 'Inca Rag / Name Game' (I will admit, I thought of Flux at this point); 'Crystal Clear' being hugely appropriate and euphoric given the lyrics about finishing work, getting paid, etc and the day I'd had; 'Worry Worry' absolutely ruling (perhaps I did have that lobotomy, but I can think of no other term except the equally redundant "it was sex"); 'Rub Alcohol Blues' sounding better than ever after all that raw rock'n'roll: a song for the collapsed and drink-sodden, a moment of tenderness for tired, troubled and worried minds.

I got this vague sense that the band might not quite be used to a certain level of enthusiasm for their live show from the crowd. That was my perspective, but then I did get down the front fairly early on, and I was a trifle tipsy, so I could be wrong. Still, I'm pretty sure I've read that Matt Friedberger can seem a little pissed-off with their audiences (?), but tonight he almost seemed taken aback by how into it people were (at the front anyway). And Eleanor was doing her staring at people schtick but didn't seem to stare at people for very long at a time: maybe it was 'cos they stared back. Or maybe that was just me.

ice cold

Dug out my copy of Hounds Of Love / The Ninth Wave last night whilst doing domestic chores - I always find myself reaching for that record when the temperature really drops. It's so... frosty: the only thing I've ever heard that evoked winter so magically is Bjork's Vespertine, although the icy, icy land on Hounds is more specifically English, not to mention more sinister. The title track in particular, I still find astonishingly other-worldly and joyous, from the sampled "through the trees! it's coming!" dialogue that kicks if off, to the "take my shoes and throw them in the lake!" line, to the literally barking backing vocals.

Anyone surprise by Big Boi calling Kate Bush his favourite artist ever ever ever - c'mon, dude has ears! And he also likes dogs a lot. But now it occurs to me - is 'The Whole World' meant to sound like a track from a different Kate Bush album - is it meant to sound like 'Babooshka'? Because it really does. Get on it, bootleggers!

Specifically, 'Too Young' by Phoenix? I am SERIOUSLY feeling that song right now. Good times tinged with a hint of melancholy: I am such a sucker for that stuff.

a-ring-a-ding-ding

Sod it, I may as well stick my overdue, rambling thoughts on Lost In Translation here. Short version: great soundtrack, half-decent film, I'm on the fence. Interesting that this film has mostly polarised people, whereas it split me down the middle.

Things I liked:

- The soundtrack (just amazing, I'm not sure I've ever seen a film which blended original music with selections of existing music to such great effect - plus, shoegazing is hip now, who'd a thought?). Never has a certain kind of listless, hard-to-pinpoint angsty melancholy been better evoked.

- The cinematography.

- Bill Murray. Specifically, Murray's ability to convey being incredibly emotionally damaged with very little in the way of fanfare (highlights being two phonecalls: begging his agent to get him out of Japan, with his back to us, voice cracking; calling his wife drunkenly late at night after being out partying with Charlotte and friends, a really important scene because it tells you that he still genuinely loves/misses her, thus avoiding a standard lazy cliche of "poor adulterous male protagonist, he is stuck in a loveless marriage" which elsewhere threatened to emerge.

- I'm glad Coppola's acknowledged Wong Kar Wai in her Oscars acceptance speech, because I did find myself thinking "this film wants to be Chunking Express so badly" - but that's not necessarily a bad thing: more people need to start using music like that, for one thing.

- Something else I was reminded of: Bob's jetlag/insomnia/cultural displacement is almost identical to Laney's experience of Tokyo in William Gibson's Idoru. Don't know if that's conscious, but I'm always happy to be reminded of one of favourite stretches of writing in Gibson.

- The ending. Best bit of the film, and The Jesus & Mary Chain have never sounded better.


Things I disliked:

- The racism (in the debate about this, what both sides seem to have missed is the fact that the racism in LIT is omnipresent and inherent, but usually not overt, not protruding above the surface - in fact the only people who seem to have really got it are the ones who asked "so is any film about a couple of white people being all alienated and shit in Japan racist?" - because yes, of course it is, of course, very much so).[1]

- The cultural snobbery demonstrated by the sledgehammer cartoon paper tiger straw people who are Giovanni Photographer's friends - he makes hip-hop beats, stupid haha! (He should be into Elvis Costello instead, right Sofia?)

- This, coupled with the fact that I couldn't quite see what she's so miserable about, made me find Charlotte an unsympathetic character for large portions of the movie. [2] At first I assumed she was meant to be alienated from the modern world in total, but when she gets together with her cool friends it's different - so she's really just a snob, right? When the Cameron Diaz diss character says she's checked in as Evelyn Waugh, crucially that character NEVER SAYS that Everlyn Waugh was female. Charlotte just assumes that - which could be a moment of subtle, telling, uncharacteristic criticism of her character, if the rest of the film wasn't so indulgent to her. And yes, rich pretty privileged young people are allowed to be angsty and stare out of hotel windows in their underwear, just don't expect me to care too much. Coppola at certain points in the film really is saying "look at these stupid people, how terrible it is for sensitive alienated people like me and my characters to be surrounded by stupid people" - which I agree 100% is something everyone feels at one time another, but it's still kinda annoying. Basically I'm not sure it's a sentiment to wallow in, which the film is sometimes guilty of doing.

- The opening shot. WTF? It's basically saying: "Do you like this arse? Well, do you?" Thanks to Todd for pointing out, however seriously or not, that this may be a reference to Bardot in Contempt...

[1] Okay, so that isn't phrased as well as I would like. Persephone from Queer Granny summed it up much better elsewhere:

I have this slight feeling that there's this fantasy of purity behind both absolving and condemning this movie for its racism. My reading of the movie is that it's about a feeling of dislocation that is exacerbated by the existent racism of the characters, which exists also in every person making and watching this movie.

That's what I was trying to get at. I wouldn't absolve or condemn the movie per se either, and remember that I'm using racism as a term in a much wider sense (alas to thread!) - it's not necessarily about hatred - and bear in mind that I'm a former English Lit student who digs Edward Said and Anthony Julius, in other words I do think it's possible that you can have an artistically valid piece of work that at the same time is deeply problematical on a sort of moral/political level... I don't expect purity, but I feel the need to comment when I see some people claiming it's there (cf the Barbelith thread on the film where more than one person has basically said there's nothing dodgy going on at all, which seems insane to me given "lip my stockings" etc).

[2] I have worried quite a lot over whether my sympathy for Bob and lack thereof for Charlotte reflects some deep-seated misogyny, but I think it's actually all about age. Bob strikes me as a somewhat ruined figure: he loves his kids but can't remember their birthday; he loves his wife but can't not cheat on her; he used to love his job but somewhere along the line ended up hating it. I'm not sure his life can be fixed. Whereas Charlotte's worries are that she doesn't know what to "do" with her life - she tried writing for a bit, but she's not sure if she's any good... *sigh*... she takes photos sometimes... y'know... it's just, like... what does it all mean? All very adolescent. I'm not sure I can explain why, but with Murray's performance I really got the feeling that if and when Bob's nasty, it's a pathetic defence against feeling confused and vulnerable - whereas Charlotte just seems spoilt. Maybe she does remind me a bit of someone I used to know, though, and that's influencing my take on the film... I still can't help wonder whether perhaps what Bob whispers to her at the end isn't "Get a job."