Parentheses Before Sleeping

I was lying in bed the other night waiting to fall asleep, and the Sigur Ros () album was playing softly as it often does at these times. The first three songs of the album always seem to me to convey a sense of deep, unutterable yearning (I can see the movie soundtrack producers lining up already). A gentle tension starts to build when track 3 introduces that repeating (but not repetitive) sequence of notes on the piano; they ascend and descend over and over again, and even though the notes are always the same you get the feel of wafting slowly upwards, maybe following a loosely spiralling path, and when the piano finally comes in several octaves higher with the same sequence of notes I find myself imagining fireworks underwater, clarity found, and quiet contentment.

[Posterity music-geekness note: Strange. I was writing this, and also remembering how, at the time, my anticipation of that pivotal moment was affecting my ability to enjoy the music as it happened. This also happens with Orbital’s In Sides album, when I’m waiting for The Box Part 1 to segue into The Box Part 2.]

The Hours

My capsule review of The Hours (movie): Felt like hours. Buy the book instead.

And now the long rambling one: I have a long-standing habit of marking passages I particularly like in books, and typing them into my computer as part of a compilation I keep of such passages. Soon after starting the book, I abandoned the exercise, because I realized it would involve typing in almost the whole book. Every time I grope around for a word to describe the quality of Michael Cunningham’s prose, I always end up with luminous, but don’t like using it because it sounds so pretentious (“Luminous, darling, an absolute triumph!”). He combines lyricism and economy of language with such success that every sentence, every page seems to take on a disproportionate amount of beauty and insight relative to the slimness of the containing volume. When I finished the book I was disappointed it had ended so soon, and seriously considered reading it again.

In contrast, at certain points during the movie I was convinced Virginia Woolf’s longing for death couldn’t possibly exceed my own. I was annoyed by its lack of subtlety, bemused at the poor quality of acting, and generally b-o-r-e-d. Julianne Moore was flaccid and one-dimensional and Meryl Streep was slightly better but laid on everything way too thick. Strangely though, I thought Nicole Kidman looked more attractive in prosthetic nose and frumpy dresses than I’d ever seen her before, and Claire Danes was so gorgeous I momentarily questioned my sexual orientation. Alison Janney was fine but shouldn’t even have bothered getting out of bed for a movie role that so grossly underused her considerable talent.

Fun moment: when Leonard finds Virginia at the train station and she pleads with him to move back to London. They’ve been staying in Richmond, a peaceful suburb, since they’ve been advised that London destabilises her and was apparently behind her previous suicide attempts. The problem is that she loves London and is bored out of her skull in Richmond. She says something to the effect of “If Richmond is life, and London is death, then I choose death. Between Richmond and death, I choose death.” Everyone in the Odeon Covent Garden cinema chuckles smugly.

Later, we walk home along the same streets of Bloomsbury where Virginia Woolf lived and loved and went slowly mad all those years ago. Hopefully I will leave these years in London having done only the first two.

Goodbye Barbados

Apologies for recent silence. After lovely weekends away (we went here and you must too!) one tends to come back to earth with a resounding kaboom.

I’m reading Jane Kenyon, and while the Malvern Hills are far from Barbados (literally, ha ha smack), and even though the student life I return to in my Bloomsbury flat in the heart of my beloved London is far from torturous, this stanza still struck a chord:

“Goodbye Barbados – goodbye water, hiss
and thunder; scented winds; clattering palms;
stupefying sun and rum; goodbye turquoise,
pink, copen, lavender, black and red.
Tonight another couple will sleep in our bed.”
– from Leaving Barbados, Jane Kenyon

Sex And Lucia

Sex And Lucia involved more fucking with my mind than with Lucia, which is saying a lot considering the amount of action she gets in the film. Given that films at the Bloomsbury Theatre only cost £2.50, I can certainly say I got a lot of bang for my buck.

But let me not be overly narrow in describing the artistic vision of this movie. It is definitely about more than Lucia fucking Lorenzo, Lorenzo fucking Lucia, Carlos fucking Elena occasionally, Carlos’s enormous penis, Antonio fucking Belen’s mum the porn star, Belen fucking herself with her mum’s dildo while watching her mum’s porn films…

There really is more to it than that, it’s just that after today’s mind-numbing hours of IT copyright law and comparative discrimination law, lecturer voices straining over deadened air in lethargic lecture theatres, page after page of paragraph after paragraph of refined civilised Times New Roman espousing refined civilised legal principles in the refined civilised library, I really just want to write FUCKING.

Poems: Missing God (Dennis O’Driscoll), Sweetbread (Robert Wrigley)

The Saturday poem in the Guardian Review is one of those little weekly happy nuggets in the family-size bucket of happy that is the Saturday papers. I kept the page with Missing God (Dennis O’Driscoll), from December. It did occur to me that it could be found online, but there’s something about the dog-eared, raggedy-edged pages of newsprint that I’ve built up over my few years here that’s more appealing than liquid crystal displays.

Elsewhere in poetry, Sweetbread (Robert Wrigley) is most definitely the loveliest poem about offal I have ever read.

Spending To Save

The latest order from Django:

  • Owsley: Owsley
  • Migala: Arde
  • High Llamas: Gideon Gaye
  • Come: Near Life Experience
  • Sneakster: Pseudo Nouveau/Fifty Fifty
  • Six By Seven: The Closer You Get

Free shipping, man, free shipping! I’m spending to save.

Extreme Retail Therapy

Borders Student Discount Day yesterday yielded:

  • Statute book for my IT law course, blah.
  • Selected Poems (Galway Kinnell), which I’ve been wanting for ever so long and couldn’t find in the UCL library. I was also tempted by Mark Strand, Jane Kenyon and A.R. Ammons, but successfully resisted those.
  • My Beautiful Demon (Ben Christophers)
  • A Leaf Label sampler (stuff by Manitoba, Susumu Yokota, Boom Bip & Doseone. Also Asa-Chang & Junray, who I’ve always found too weird for even my listening tastes, but perhaps they’ll grow on me.)
  • A Bella Union compilation (stuff by The Czars, Dirty Three, Lift To Experience, Rothko among others)
  • What’s Up Matador, obviously a Matador sampler (loads of Matador artists)
  • A Sub-Pop sampler (Migala, Mark Lanegan, Red House Painters, The Shins, more)

Bright sparks will note a pattern – the sampler fixation is simply due to the fact that I could probably get most of the other albums I want cheaper from Berwick Street or the Internet even with the 20% Borders discount, but samplers aren’t any cheaper in second-hand stores than they are in Borders, probably because they’re dirt cheap anyway. So I got them for dirt cheap, less 20%. Yay.

I came home and somehow found myself at the Django site with about $30 worth of albums in my shopping cart. Then I noticed their “Free shipping worldwide for orders over $50” offer, and couldn’t refuse. For $50, I’m getting:

  • Laika: Sound Of The Satellites
  • Firewater: Psychopharmacology
  • Third Eye Foundation: You Guys Kill Me
  • Prodigy: Dirtchamber Sessions Vol. 1
  • Bows: Blush
  • Ted Leo/Pharmacists: The Tyranny Of Distance

I should probably feel guilty for this, but you know what? I’ve just spent a month writing an essay which shouldn’t have taken anywhere that long to write, but I haven’t been able to go any faster because it’s been bloody difficult stuff, I have to do a second essay as well by the end of the month, all my other Masters course reading has been completely neglected and will remain so for a good while, my brain is so tired I collapse into bed every night by 2 am (you have to know me to understand how rare this is) but since my dreams seem to constantly feature me getting chased by unknown shadowy menacing figures, or getting stung by swarms of bees, or all my teeth falling out, sleep hasn’t been much fun either, and honestly, the pure simple intense joy I get from coming home with new music to listen to just makes what I spent fucking worth it, okay?

Rawk Quotes

From Ink 19’s Top 19 Rock Quotes of 2002. Drummers are always the most quotable, somehow.

“Believe me, even on the shoot no one knew what they were doing. It was like “Get the triplets in the jacuzzi!” or “Get the midgets in wet suits and put them here!” or “Why are we in this make up and why do we have these outfits on? I don’t know!”
– Ray Luzier, DLR Band drummer on the making of the video David Lee Roth’s No Holds Bar-B-Que.

“That was when, I think, anything we’d ever dreamed about was surpassed. You can have dreams, you can be focused and you can do things, but when you go beyond that dream, that’s what happened on the Billion Dollar Babies tour.”
– Neal Smith, Alice Cooper drummer, remembering the glory days of Rock & Roll

“Well, after we’ve been out on tour together, we all get our periods at the same time, absolutely.”
– Gina Schock, Go Go’s drummer on the challenges inherent in being in a band comprised of all women.

Review: Bel Canto (Ann Patchett)

When I was fourteen or fifteen I read a trashy romance novel called Perfect by Judith McNaught. It was about a Hollywood superstar (male, ruggedly handsome) framed for the murder of his wife, escaping from jail and taking a hostage (female, beautiful, feisty) in his bid for freedom. They drive across the country to his remote log cabin in snowy mountains, bonding along the way despite their implacably opposed positions in the situation. Yet even as she gradually comes to believe he is an innocent man, and he is falling more and more in love with her despite himself, the fact that she is important only as his shield from police gunfire lurks continually in the background. Things come to a head one night in the cabin. His paranoia explodes into fury. Terrified, she tries to escape. In pursuit, he comes to a frozen river and thinks her car has gone through the ice. He plunges in to try and rescue her, risking his own life. She saves him, and from then on they take on the world, prove his innocence and celebrate their new-found love. He takes her to parties in Hollywood and she dances with Patrick Swayze and Kevin Costner. Happy ever after. The end.

Bel Canto (Ann Patchett) is Perfect, minus the great sex. Terrorists storm posh party in poor Latin-American country hoping to take President hostage, but it turns out the President skipped the party in order to watch his favourite soap opera. Yes, really. Terrorists say “Oh, poo” but decide to keep everyone else hostage anyway. Japanese CEO of behemoth electronics corporation and opera singer fall madly in love despite the small glitch of not being able to speak the same language. Everyone else also falls madly in love with opera singer, by the way, because she’s beautiful and her voice is wonderful, wonderful, Maria Callas and Kiri Te Kanawa eat your hearts out; it makes grown men cry and gives young terrorists hard-ons in ways that jungle warfare never did; no one can think of anything more wonderful than sitting and listening to her sing all day, every day, because of course everyone loves opera. CEO’s translator and young girl terrorist called Carmen (aha, allusion!) also fall madly in love, but oh my God, she’s a terrorist and he’s a hostage, how will it all end?

[Spoilers follow]

It ends, my friends, in tragedy. The terrorists have been making ridiculous demands – freeing of prisoners, aid programmes, a Playstation 2 for every member of the organization etc., and the government won’t budge. Special forces decide after a couple of months of sitting around scratching their balls that yeah, they should probably storm the compound. In a cruel twist of fate, Japanese CEO is killed trying to protect Carmen the girl terrorist (I forgot to mention that all the hostages and the terrorists really get along by now. It’s quite a love-in. They play football and all, although I think the Latin-American Terrorists vs Japanese Electronics Corporation People fixture would have been a bit of a foregone conclusion). Translator and opera singer are heartbroken. How will they recover from this loving and losing? They will marry each other, that’s how, even if they displayed not a jot of romantic interest in each other all the time they were imprisoned (well, the translator did proposition the opera singer for sex, but that was on behalf of the CEO). They marry in Puccini’s birthplace, and will live in Italy, where opera singers should live. Happy ever after. The end.

I’m thinking the people who gave this book the Orange Prize and Pen/Faulkner Award must have seen something in it that I’m not seeing. I’m thinking I wasted a few days’ worth of reading time on this. I’m thinking Judith McNaught should be sitting in a room somewhere really pissed off.

The Roots (Jazz Cafe, London)

The Roots. At the Jazz Cafe. Last night. Seamless. Seminal. Wow.

That’s the condensed version. Let the gibbering version begin by saying I’m a little worried: I might just have seen the best gig of my year already, although I’m hoping Sigur Ros and Massive Attack will prove me wrong. And there’s always the hope of a Pavement reunion tour (ha bloody ha)…

We begin with the venue. If you were more than 20 metres from the stage you’d have been really unlucky. I’m so glad I jumped at the chance to see them at the Jazz Cafe instead of in the vastness of Brixton Academy on March 29.

I suppose the quickest way to describe the performance is that The Roots live are every bit as amazing as you’ve heard they are. Half the time they’re a band that rocks harder than any of the NME’s latest “The ______s” darlings. The rest of the time they’re pretending not to be a band any more but a collection of classic records in the dextrous hands of a turntablist, except that they’re live musicians rather than recorded sounds, and Rahzel’s not using his hands. He’s “scratching” MC Black Thought’s rapping. He’s sampling. He’s cross-fading. I run out of DJing knowledge to describe most of what he’s doing, but the important thing I need to stress here to the uninitiated is that he’s using his mouth. The only other time I’ve seen live beatboxing was Killa Kela doing a solo gig at Cargo, which didn’t prepare me at all for the way The Roots fit it all together. Other highlights included their alternate ragga, ska and heavy metal versions of You Got Me, their ‘tribute’ to Jam Master Jay where they pretended to be Run DMC posing for a photo session, and the call-and-response bonus track from Phrenology for the encore.

Okay. I now redescend to essay-writing hell, but God bless The Roots for that brief foray into hip-hop heaven.