Go Get It They Got It

Reckless Records slashed 20% off everything (everything being already cheap second-hand CDs), and Benny called with the good news.

Queuing up to pay in the dance branch, I met Dave, who I hadn’t seen since our second year in university.

As we were chatting outside, along came Yoichi, who I’d told about the sale. We said hello, David and I parted ways, Yoichi went into the dance branch and I into the rock branch. Soon after this Benny turned up and went into the dance branch. Neither Benny nor Yoichi knew each other, but Yoichi overhead Benny on the phone to me.

Later all three of us were in the rock branch and I introduced Benny and Yoichi. It was one of those rare moments of my life when people I knew from completely different spheres somehow managed to all converge on one spot. The power of music, eh? Or geekdom, I suppose.

—

Purchases:

  • It’s All Happening Now (Lewis Parker, £7.19): BLOODY MARVELLOUS, probably the best UK hip-hop album I’ve ever heard, certainly one of the best hip-hop albums I’ve heard recently from anywhere.
  • Come Get It I Got It (David Holmes, £7.19)
  • Fantastic Damage (El-P, £7.19)
  • Ether Teeth (Fog, £4.80)

Etre Et Avoir / Whale Rider

After a fairly long dry spell there are finally some movies out worth watching.

Etre Et Avoir is ridiculously, wonderfully sweet, probably the best thing I’ve seen this year since City of God, and certainly the best film I’ve ever seen about the teaching profession. You know how you can be fairly cynical, and rather wary of the ubiquitious attempts of various segments of the media industry to use sappy moments, pretty flowers, soaring Enya music, fuzzy animals, and cute kids to manipulate you into some particular emotion, but sometimes a moment just gets you with its overwhelming adorability and you catch yourself in an unreserved “AWWWWWWWW!”? Etre Et Avoir is two hours worth of those moments, mostly involving cute kids and a lovely, lovely teacher who we couldn’t believe could possibly be single (as he appeared to be), given that he was intelligent, sensitive, good-looking, and actually a real person rather than some perfect teacher a scriptwriter made up. Unless you detest being reduced to a puddle of utterly endeared goo, and are unwilling to have your faith in the nobility of discovering and realizing vocation reawakened, watch this – and bring a teacher you love with you.

Whale Rider involves a simple, touching story told extremely well, excellent actors, an appropriately evocative Lisa Gerrard soundtrack and lots of shots of whales. What’s not to like? If the last film about Maoris you saw was Once Were Warriors, rest assured that this one is considerably less harrowing, although it certainly does have its tearjerking moments. (And if you’re Singaporean, please try not to crack up when you learn the name of the ancient saviour of the tribe is Paikea. I’m sure it means something in the Maori language that isn’t juvenile delinquent.)

I’m also curious about Buffalo Soldiers, but probably only because the whole Saving Private Lynch myth tends to annoy me, and watching a film that does actually dare to portray the US military in a bad light would irrationally soothe that annoyance. Then again, I could spend my £5 worth of America disgust on a Noam Chomsky book instead, which would be a rather more cerebral form of protest.

Excerpts: Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)

I first read Jane Eyre when I was eight. I never thought I appreciated it on a level higher than that of a trashy romance novel, but rereading it this past week seems to suggest it may have influenced me in ways I wasn’t aware of at the time. In teenage years I developed (and still hold to) characteristics and views extraordinarily similar to hers, but I certainly never consciously sought to emulate her.

On the self:

“I can live alone, if self-respect and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give”…”Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions may rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgment shall still have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote in every decision. Strong wind, earthquake-shock, and fire may pass by: but I shall follow the guiding of that still small voice which interprets the dictates of conscience.”

On hating how most of your fellow females talk to men:

“Surely she cannot truly like him, or not like him with true affection! If she did, she need not coin her smiles so lavishly, flash her glances so unremittingly, manufacture airs so elaborate, graces so multitudinous. It seems to me that she might, by merely sitting quietly at his side, saying little and looking less, get nigher his heart. I have seen in his face a far different expression from that which hardens it now while she is so vivaciously accosting him; but then it came of itself: it was not elicited by meretricious arts and calculated manoeuvres; and one had but to accept it – to answer what he asked without pretension, to address him when needful without grimace…”

On how to address the man you are completely in love with, after being separated from him for ages, and meeting again to find him blind, crippled and morose:

“Have you a pocket-comb about you, sir?”
“What for, Jane?”
“Just to comb out this shaggy black mane. I find you rather alarming, when I examine you close at hand: you talk of my being a fairy, but I am sure, you are more like a brownie.”
“Am I hideous, Jane?”
“Very, sir: you always were, you know.”

Jane rocks.

Yo La Tengo/Calexico (Somerset House, London, July 2003)

Monday was a brief respite from international trade law into indie music.

I trawled Berwick Street with ever-patient Benny, sold about 10 CDs and justified buying more on the grounds that I’d probably have to pay expensive import prices for these in Singapore:

  • King Geedorah: Take Me To Your Leader
  • Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks: Pig Lib
  • Manitoba: Start Breaking My Heart

This was all a prelude to meeting Alec (and Benny’s friend Polly, as Yo La Tengo mad as me) for the Yo La Tengo/Calexico gig at Somerset House in the evening.

Yo La Tengo started off, which seemed strange given their relatively senior status in the indie pantheon. They played many songs off Summer Sun, which I haven’t listened to yet, a fun frantic screechy version of Cherry Chapstick, and Tom Courtenay, which I love madly, and which they didn’t play the first time I saw them live. They finished with Sun Ra’s Nuclear War and left the stage with its ending whispers of “Goodbye.” They displayed everything I loved about them the first time I saw them live, and given the same amount of time with them I feel certain I would have emerged in a similar state of gibbering. But that pleasure was denied me. The length of the set seemed distinctly that of an “opening band”, which is really a bit of a travesty given that the marketing of the gig never indicated that Calexico would be headlining, and Yo La Tengo relegated.

I guess it’s a credit to Calexico that they mostly managed to assuage my dissatisfaction with the length of the YLT set by putting on an excellent show. It seemed as if they livened up the Feast Of Wire songs a little for the performance, which worked fine for most of them, but disappointed me for Black Heart, where they opted for Bond movie music razzle-dazzle, glitz and glam and general high campness in the strings rather than the mournful, desert-on-the-darker-side-of-dusk feel it had (and I loved) on the album. It seemed as though they’d decided that the overriding tone of this gig would be a party, which isn’t necessarily a bad decision, especially when you have trumpets and frequently do that country-yodelly “Aiiiiyiyiyiyi!” thing at appropriate bits in the songs.

Leaving the gig, it occurred to me that I’d actually seen both these bands in the space of an April week a little over two years ago, Yo La Tengo headlining (as they SHOULD be, damn you Somerset House) on the Tuesday and Calexico opening for Stephen Malkmus on the Thursday. I saw both gigs with Marten, who was, at the time, the only person in my London circle of friends who had even heard of most of the bands I wanted to see (I had abundant clubbing companions, but only Marten for gigs). I remember coming back from the Malkmus gig and meeting Alec, about to get drunk, in the basement of our hall. Neither of us had the tiniest inkling of any future connection beyond mild recognition of each other’s photos in the hall yearbook.

How things change.

Wrong G-Word

Oh dear. You know you’re working too hard when out of the corner of your bored, roving eye you read the review excerpt on the back of your copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned as:

“A prose that has the tough delicacy of a gusset.”
– New York Review of Books

and you’re like “A gusset? Ewwwww!” and then you look closer and it was garnet, which makes much more sense.

Low/Radiohead (Bergamo Arena, Italy)

I’d initially been really excited about the fact that Low was opening for Radiohead. I missed Low’s gig at the Union Chapel earlier this year because it was Valentine’s Day weekend and I grudgingly recognized the need to do something romantic rather than drag long-suffering Alec to yet another gig. The sacrifice was more than worthwhile, but I always hoped I’d get another chance to see Low, and this was it. The problem was that their beautiful, deliberative harmonies were completely incompatible with a jabbering crowd of people who didn’t seem to give a damn about them. Little Argument With Myself, so well-suited to late nights alone in my room, lying on the bed in the dark waiting for sleep, just didn’t work in a huge outdoor venue. With twilight more than an hour away, that sublime climax of “Cos there’s nothing as sad as a man on his back counting STARS” fell flat, or at least it was hard for me to feel much while trying to shut out the clamouring Italians around me. Oh well. Great band, wrong place and time. A pity.

So finally, Radiohead. What can I say except that they were a dream come true, and by this I don’t mean the kind of dream where all my teeth are falling out and I can taste the blood but the kind where I’m roller-blading and I’m amazing, I can jump and turn and land and do all the cool stunts, but of course I’m not weighed down by all that pesky safety gear ‘cos I don’t need it, I’m amazing, and at the end I even start to fly.

Here’s a setlist:

  • There there
  • 2+2 = 5 (Thom swats flies which keep clustering around the mike, nice parallel with “I swat em like flies but like flies the buggers keep coming back” in the song although I don’t think he could possibly have planned it.)
  • Lucky
  • Talk Show Host
  • Scatterbrain
  • The National Anthem
  • Backdrifts
  • Sail To The Moon
  • Kid A
  • Bones
  • Where I End and You Begin
  • I Might Be Wrong
  • Fake Plastic Trees
  • A Punchup at a Wedding
  • Paranoid Android (Thom: “This is a song called Paranoid Android.” As if you needed to name it.)
  • Idioteque
  • Everything In Its Right Place
  • The Gloaming
  • Pyramid Song
  • My Iron Lung
  • Like Spinning Plates
  • Exit Music (For A Film)
  • Sit down. Stand up.
  • Karma Police

The feelings of inadequacy that plague me every time I try to write about music are slapping me around the head with a vengeance here. I feel almost, well, unworthy to review a Radiohead concert. We are not on the same musical plane, they and I. They make music and I learn to like it, it’s that simple. This doesn’t require much effort, but I sometimes need a fair amount of time to get my head round the music, which leads me to the first thing I was going to say.

Most of the songs sounded pretty much similar to their studio recordings, which is not a bad thing given that their studio recordings sound bloody fabulous, but I guess I was hoping for more radical reworkings. I’d have quite liked to work more to figure out the songs, rather than recognize them instantly from the start. On the other hand, this may not be the best way to do a big outdoor summer gig which people don’t expect to be “difficult”. So I’m not too sure what to make of their rather happy romping versions of Kid A and Everything In Its Place. They were certainly interesting to listen to, but they featured nothing I’d liked about the recordings. The piano version of Like Spinning Plates, however, was heartstopping.

In general, HappyThom was the order of the evening, dancing like a loon to Idioteque, doing Karma Police like a massive goodbye singalong with none of the claustrophobia or despair of the album version, no venom at all in the middle section of Paranoid Android where he used to spit “Kicking squealing Gucci little piggy.” Dancing crazily is rather endearing, but I’d have rather liked a bit of the old bitterness in the latter two.

This isn’t to say that everything was sweet and fuzzy. Guitars went mad in Backdrifts, which is even more fantastic live than it is on the album. The National Anthem, Bones, and I Might Be Wrong rocked hard, and the buildup in Sit Down Stand Up to the frenetic “The raindrops” climax was brilliantly agonizing.

Would I have changed some songs in the set? Well, yes. I’d have taken out Scatterbrain, Kid A, Bones, Pyramid Song and My Iron Lung, but only because I like them less than Black Star, No Surprises, You And Whose Army (make that most of Amnesiac, actually), I Will and Wolf At The Door.

Okay. Enough of this attempt at objectivity, balance or good writing. I SAW RADIOHEAD!!! THEY PLAYED LOTS AND LOTS OF SONGS!!! I REALLY REALLY LOVE RADIOHEAD!!!

A Bellagio By Any Other Name

Although the main purpose of the Italy trip was a Radiohead gig in Bergamo to fulfil my dream of seeing them live before I leave, we also spent two days in the Italian Lakes. We based ourselves in Bellagio, a little village on Lake Como. If you imagine Lake Como (see this map for best guidance) as a lithe, sinuous dancing girl in mid-step, you will come to realize the exceptionally pleasing location of Bellagio.

On the first night, Alec presented me with an inflatable sheep. I have received many bizarre love tokens from this man, including purple punk whore boots and a cigarette with “I love you” written on it, but an inflatable sheep complete with mascara’d eyes, coquette-red lips, beauty spots and, er, orifice, did rather push the boundaries. He said he could explain. He said he’d been thinking about how annoyed I get when bad weather on holidays makes for lousy photographs, but remembered how much I like sheep, and so he decided to get me a sheep so that I’d be happy even if we ran into bad weather. I think I’ll name her Bellagio.

Unhappily Distracted

When you are one week away from dissertation deadline, and are so worried about being wastefully distracted from your finely-honed dissertation production routine that you have taken the dramatic step of packing up laptop, books, photocopied articles and a couple days’ worth clothing and hefting it all to Alec’s hopefully distraction-free flat, you don’t expect to find yourself having read two entire non-dissertation material books in two days at the end of it all.

Given that the last author you mentioned reading on this site was Salman Rushdie, it is even less expected that these two books will both have been written by Tony Hawks. Let me explain.

On Monday I wanted something to read over breakfast, and surveyed Alec’s bookcase. I should say, for the sake of fairness, that it does contain many fine volumes brimming with literary merit, but I don’t like that over breakfast when I am trying to write a dissertation, which is why I decided The Vision Of Dante (1894 edition, respect!), and Baudelaire, The Complete Verse would have to wait. Here were some of my other options:

  • Classic Irish Whisky, Jim Murray. Too basic. After all, I am an authority on Classic Irish Whisky Breath and have no need for such entry-level efforts.
  • The Catechism Of The Catholic Church. Perhaps some other time.
  • The Story Of Lucy Gault, William Trevor. I would have read this, but after Two Lives recently felt like struggling my way through a literary quicksand of depression and tragedy, I need a little time before my next foray into William Trevor world.
  • Playing The Moldovans At Tennis, Tony Hawks

Well, there you go then. It was riveting. I confessed my daytime exploits to Alec who found this highly amusing given my usual literary pretension.

On Tuesday I wanted something to read over breakfast, and surveyed the bookcase again. Here were further options:

  • Les Miserables (Volume Two). No volume one. Go figure.
  • On The Genealogy Of Morals, Nietzsche. A gift from me, I must confess. He read it politely. I owe me no such politeness.
  • The Ultimate Pipe Book, Richard Carleton Hacker. See entry for Classic Irish Whisky.
  • Round Ireland With A Fridge, Tony Hawks.

So Alec calls at lunch and asks solicitously how I’m doing with the dissertation. “Well,” I venture with quavering, self-hating voice, “Tony’s just left Ennistymon, they wanted to take the fridge scuba-diving but thought better of it in the end.”

Hail To The Thief – First Impressions

On first three listens to Hail To The Thief, the songs which are standing out to me are Backdrifts, I Will and Wolf At The Door. But anything could happen between now and 7 July (when, after four years of trying and failing to get Radiohead tickets because they sell out in this country within 10 minutes, I’ll finally, finally, finally get to see the band live, although I’ll have to go to Italy for it). Meanwhile, I haven’t been this excited about listening to a new release (by any artist) since, well, Amnesiac, and there’s a whole 56.37 minutes’ worth of fascinating sounds to explore here, plus supercool limited edition roadmap packaging and sleeve notes! (Just grant me this small joy, will you, I’m writing a fucking dissertation.)

Fury (Salman Rushdie) – First Impressions

Fury contains an overwhelming maelstrom of socio-economic-cultural-political-philosophical-mythological-literary-you-name-it-he-references-it references Rushdie pulls out and brandishes before the (probably, well anyway I am) less well-read reader.

My first reaction to this is to feel very stupid. I mean yeah, when he talks of Spinoza and Derrida, I know they’re philosophers; when he refers to Alex Portnoy and Mr Roth I know he means Philip; and when he mentions Jil Sander power suits and Marcus Schenkenberg hell yeah I know what he’s talking about there, but when he describes a building with a cornerstone etching of “to Pythianism”, I’m afraid I must admit I was unaware that this was a clash of Greek and Mesopotamian metaphors, or that Pytho was the ancient name of Delphi, or that Pythian verse is written in the dactylic hexameter, so thank you for telling me, Mr Rushdie.

My second reaction is that he’s trying a little too hard. In describing a girl, I don’t quite get the need to include that she is wearing a black D’Angelo Voodoo baseball cap, except so that Rushdie can say look at me peeps, I still got love fo’ the streets. When describing a commercial featuring a group of fashionable vampires wearing Ray-Bans, I don’t quite get the need to explain that “thanks to Buffy on TV, vampires were hot”. It’s something I noted about The Ground Beneath Her Feet as well. I can’t say there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just that I have this recurring mental image of Salman Rushdie doing Dr Evil’s “I’m cool…I’m hip…t-chk-a-chk-a-chk-a etc.” routine, and it’s kinda scary.

But it’s early days yet. I’m only 49 pages into the book, and although I may poke a little fun at him now and then, Salman Rushdie is still a writer whose mastery and flair with the English language makes me quail and kowtow and wonder why the hell anyone ever bothers reading this website when they could be reading Salman Rushdie.