tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-208856222024-03-13T05:57:38.179+00:00Jones Is DyingMy irritability keeps me alive and kicking...
Writings on inner culture since 2006Chris Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02108337196370083674noreply@blogger.comBlogger270125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20885622.post-50146885673222773672021-02-26T10:46:00.005+00:002021-02-26T10:46:47.180+00:00Sonic postcards<p>This blog has, for all the usual modern reasons (COVID, nobody reads blogs anymore, I've been fucking busy etc.), become a bit of a wasteland in the last year or so. But if anyone's interested, I have a bunch of new audiovisual stuff up on <a href="https://vimeo.com/user2444758" target="_blank">Vimeo</a> these days. <a href="https://vimeo.com/user2444758">Try it</a>, you may like it!</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0SDGGGzXMGcRkx8P-N0qLK5wGlwtVS1ncJltCDc54wjG2rjID0u4-KREtZpkqTnTKAYm4w43EiFaAP6Zv6qmRhN0bQFXQUs0fUHxRu8ipO-jUmxu-EjG8UITOn_Tp7UkGV7fZ/s1920/vimeo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="921" data-original-width="1920" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0SDGGGzXMGcRkx8P-N0qLK5wGlwtVS1ncJltCDc54wjG2rjID0u4-KREtZpkqTnTKAYm4w43EiFaAP6Zv6qmRhN0bQFXQUs0fUHxRu8ipO-jUmxu-EjG8UITOn_Tp7UkGV7fZ/w533-h268/vimeo.jpg" width="533" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p>Chris Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02108337196370083674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20885622.post-9039352945931683902019-10-22T10:46:00.001+00:002019-10-22T10:46:08.273+00:00Grand Finale<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEir1sg7fhPwCITfUN9E-Dr1CzpUE6HYAGFHTt7W67UBQCW3a85Ox8yKiZrWFB8WBQw0kp-nlWXQ28myU8P2RCJ8LI05N9u3a4qXO2CSownGNSaQdftTt08Qu52H1MBx-_irrIxA/s1600/cassinicover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="914" data-original-width="1200" height="243" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEir1sg7fhPwCITfUN9E-Dr1CzpUE6HYAGFHTt7W67UBQCW3a85Ox8yKiZrWFB8WBQw0kp-nlWXQ28myU8P2RCJ8LI05N9u3a4qXO2CSownGNSaQdftTt08Qu52H1MBx-_irrIxA/s320/cassinicover.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
No, it's not the end of this blog (although time constraints and more activity on my other site have made this place all but redundant these days), but the title of the debut album by my band from South London: Cassini Flyby.<br />
Recorded over two years ago, it's been a slow journey (not unlike the Cassini mission) to a conclusive physical (and streamable) release. To save time, here's the official PR release to set you straight on what to expect on the album. Without being too egotistical about it all, it's a pretty cool slice of space jazz rock, propelled by Tom and Pete's fantastic rhythm section. My guitar just adds icing to an already explosive cake. <br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><i>"In 2016 Tom
Clarke (drums), Peter Marsh (bass & electronics) and Chris Jones (guitars)
– all veterans of London's improvisational/experimental music scene - began
regular sessions in the heart of London's Brixton. Combining a shared love of
jazz, krautrock, Canterbury and electronica, the band began exploring the
possibilities of improvisation, but combined with a strong rhythmic undertow. <o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><i>Simultaneously,
NASA's Cassini-Huygens probe, which had begun its own exploratory journey
nearly 20 years beforehand, had entered the final phase of its mission: a
series of data-gathering 'flybys' of Saturn and its satellites. During the
band's earliest sessions, the probe was regularly sending back sublime and
awe-inspiring images of our Solar System that seemed to mirror the ominous yet
driving aesthetic at the heart of the trio's music. Suddenly, the band had a
name…<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><i>Like all
semi-improvised music, this was a delicate balancing act between form and
chaos; between the solid and the ethereal. At the beginning of 2017, Tom and
Peter entered Baby Microbe studios in Brixton to record a set of backing tracks
which were subsequently sent to Chris; now living in Northern Germany. Guitar
overdubs were recorded in Germany and then taken back to London to be mixed.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><i>The Cassini
mission's final approach toward Saturn's surface was known as the 'Grand
Finale': a carefully pre-planned and audacious dance between the various moons
and rings of the giant planet that ended in a fiery plunge into the super-dense
atmosphere. This combination of daring, science and auto-destruction also plays
out in the band's debut album. From the vastness of space to the microscopic
click's and buzzes of digital circuitry under duress, Grand Finale is a wild ride into the unknown…"</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
The album was released on October 18th and is available via the Off label site <a href="https://off-recordlabel.blogspot.com/2019/10/ocd044-cassini-flyby-grand-finale.html">here</a>.<br />
Alternatively the album is available to download or stream at <a href="https://backl.ink/34450189?fbclid=IwAR3uZJFiYXExL-x_zcw7sdvyYDh-GiLzQMIwpxg8Pz0UgJXGU-jFAlSYdVo">these locations</a>.</div>
Chris Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02108337196370083674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20885622.post-38253312262159859472018-12-05T16:42:00.002+00:002018-12-05T16:43:01.834+00:00Too much, man...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
As ever, this blog squanders away in a state of unloved disrepair, but meanwhile I've cranked up the writing muscles again to bring you another woeful exploration of a great guitar solo, encased in a lousy song. This time it's the incredible Steve Hillage and his version of 'It's All Too Much'. Read it over at <a href="https://lousysong.com/2018/12/05/steve-hillage-its-all-too-much/">Lousysong.com</a>...<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_W1E3FoxAH6wrHDHAy3L39UX7NuaaS8HSf4C9gY1K-uEVxvJJMxe2ztjmeIcdoVhFHHHkW9umogvWCOTUij5mmuT9XcdTMou2Ls4oSev0lg66J8FgM3QwSEOPDnJ1R02ashhK/s1600/At%2527s+All+Too+Much_45.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="299" data-original-width="298" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_W1E3FoxAH6wrHDHAy3L39UX7NuaaS8HSf4C9gY1K-uEVxvJJMxe2ztjmeIcdoVhFHHHkW9umogvWCOTUij5mmuT9XcdTMou2Ls4oSev0lg66J8FgM3QwSEOPDnJ1R02ashhK/s400/At%2527s+All+Too+Much_45.jpg" width="398" /></a></div>
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Chris Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02108337196370083674noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20885622.post-79406823593783535702017-05-05T19:31:00.001+00:002018-12-05T16:43:23.914+00:00Knuking The Knack (again)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<img alt="https://lousysong.com/2017/05/04/the-knack-my-sharona/" border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAS2pY5scb4_fcJvuVGWHFrjIvsE74FD7OuoJcyDCIiGLQBdnTFNSDModVr61gwp1Amt9veJooBk3dyEF2hRxKO8m2kGpHEuNX9AqARqUKiAue_Jmn994URsDWXDiUxldSvn-D/s400/theknack.jpg" title="" width="400" /></div>
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<a href="https://lousysong.com/2017/05/04/the-knack-my-sharona/">Over on my other blog</a>, I've been examining why 'My Sharona' is, at once, so terrible and so great. (Clue: it's the guitar solo)</div>
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Chris Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02108337196370083674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20885622.post-44434547768540586872015-11-04T11:38:00.002+00:002017-05-23T16:55:46.676+00:00Eivind Aarset<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
One of my <a href="http://www.eivindaarset.com/">favourite guitarists</a> recently played the Bielefeld Bunker and I was lucky enough to see him and his band in such intimate conditions. There are a few pictures of the gig <a href="http://jonesislooking.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/eivind-aarset-live-at-bielefeld-bunker.html">on my photography blog</a>, but also there's a rather tech-y (but fascinating to guitar nerds like me) interview with the great Norwegian on the <b><i><a href="http://www.guitarmoderne.com/artists/eivind-aarset-ie-interview">Guitar Moderne</a></i></b> blog. Check it out...<br />
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Chris Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02108337196370083674noreply@blogger.com25tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20885622.post-80390711774550985842015-11-03T11:22:00.001+00:002017-05-23T16:55:57.503+00:00Noble Truth<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A break in my fallow blogging period to let you know about my latest project - a new EP under my Jonesidying pseudonym entitled: <b><i>Noble Truth</i></b>.<br />
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The EP is released as a digital download through the new label of my great friend <a href="http://www.dgmfsmedia.com/">Simon Hopkins: DGMFS Media</a>. Below is the press release.<br />
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<div style="background-color: white; clear: none; font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 19.8px; margin-bottom: 11px;">
<em>jonesisdying is the performance name of <strong>Christopher Jones</strong>, a South London resident who specialises in making <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar" rel="wikipedia" style="color: #8ca0b3; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="Guitar">guitars</a> sound as little like guitars as possible and who takes inspiration from space rock, psych, krautrock, Norwegian jazz, classic country and much else besides. Using electronic processing, found sounds and post-production, Chris seeks to express concepts rooted in Buddhist meditation and other more esoteric traditions, as well as primal emotional states.</em></div>
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<em>noble truth contains four ambient pieces originally commissioned for an abandoned project. The initial recordings were then rescued, overdubbed, remixed and re-mastered when Chris realised that the work contained a core that existed entirely free of any external motivations. </em></div>
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<em>Track list:</em></div>
<ul style="background-color: white; clear: both; font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 19.8px;">
<li><em>truth 1 - suffering</em></li>
<li><em>truth 2 - causes</em></li>
<li><em>truth 3 - cessation</em></li>
<li><em>truth 4 - path</em></li>
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<em> Credits:</em></div>
<ul style="background-color: white; clear: both; font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 19.8px;">
<li><em>Electric & acoustic guitars, synthesizer and left wing musical box: Christopher Jones</em></li>
<li><em>Produced by Christopher Jones</em></li>
<li><em>Mastered by Simon Hopkins</em></li>
<li><em>Cover image: Hans Dieter Beetroot & Mukmuk</em></li>
<li><em>Cover design: Vera Brüggemann</em></li>
<li><em> </em><em>For further information about jonesisdying, contact <a href="mailto:garuda.chris@gmail.com" style="color: #8ca0b3; text-decoration: none;">garuda.chris@gmail.com</a></em></li>
</ul>
The EP is available on iTunes and <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/noble-truth-jonesisdying/dp/B016V6744Q/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1446549738&sr=8-3&keywords=jonesisdying">Amazon</a> (it's a bargain!) and is also streaming on Spotify (link below).<br />
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<iframe allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" height="380" src="https://embed.spotify.com/?uri=spotify%3Aalbum%3A1c7cPbIYcrXYUBQS4eSuSu" width="300"></iframe><br />
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Many thanks to Simon, Sarah, Vera, and everyone else who said nice things.<br />
Enjoy!</div>
Chris Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02108337196370083674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20885622.post-65275701066577326432015-05-15T15:42:00.000+00:002015-05-15T16:02:49.112+00:00Mad Max Fury Road (2015)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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By the time you read this you'll probably have seen <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392190/">Mad Max Fury Road</a></i></b>, George Miller's astounding return to the franchise he gave creative life to in 1979. And if you haven't… for once believe the hype.To echo the plaudits, <b><i>MMFR</i></b> is a huge, tattooed and scarified middle finger to just about every major studio blockbuster that claimed to be an 'action' movie in the last 30 years. It really is that good.</div>
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Releasing the movie a mere couple of weeks after the confused mess that is two and a half hours of Joss Whedon's studio exec-hamstrung (if you believe his recent whining in interviews) <b><i>Avengers: Age of Ultron</i></b> is a stroke of genius. After what seems like an eon of utterly CGI-drenched stuff based on (adolescent) comics and impossible physics where even 'normal' humans move with lightning speed and can survive any number of crushing collisions with walls that cave in like memory foam, here comes Miller reminding us that explosion-filled, loud, visceral thrills CAN make not only narrative sense, but can still have us gnawing at our cuticles like tiny children in front of an episode of <b style="font-style: italic;">Doctor Who </b>as well. I swear that throughout the film, not ONCE did my mouth close. I think I may have even grasped the man next to me's hand at one point. <b><i>MMFR</i></b> is filled with a master's innate knowledge of what makes a simple chase sequence not only coherent and exciting, but almost enough to fill a screen for two whole hours without once becoming repetitive, boring or anything less than gripping. So how on earth has Miller managed this vastly welcome renaissance of a genre that looked so spent? Well, there's so much more going on under the hood (if you'll forgive the car metaphor) of Miller's glorious celebration of speed, destruction and (yes, really) feminism.</div>
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A lot of this may be down to Miller's Australian background. The freewheeling aesthetic at the heart of this movie draws heavily on the indigenous culture of gritty outback realism coupled with an anarchist's appreciation of those wide open spaces which we lack in the UK. For this reason there's a lot of Western about <b><i>MMFR</i></b>. But, as in the second and third <b><i>Mad Max</i></b> movies, it's a Western peopled by Australian crusties, But Miller goes far beyond mere body adornment and tattoos (and also avoids the annoyingly trite gewgaws of bloody <i>steampunk</i> - my particular favourite detail was the War Rig's human femur as a gear shift). Here the marks of identity that come with every character range from the fine white lines of subjugation and self-harm that decorate both Immortan Joe's's War Boys as well as his Wives. <b><i>MMFR</i></b> is a film that also belongs the tradition of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0115218/?ref_=tt_ov_dr">Todd Browning</a>, Luis Bunuel or Alejandro Jodorowsky, warping genre by revelling in physical non-conformity. <b><i>Fury Road</i></b> is filled to the brim with misshapen bodies, amputated limbs and freakish fashion. One brief scene involving women kept as a source of milk (to drink) could have sprung straight out of <b><i>El Topo</i></b> or <b><i>The Magic Mountain.</i></b> Even Charlize Theron's character has an arm missing, necessitating the use of a prosthetic. But this celebration of the ragged ends of a civilisation gone insane delights in the strangeness, letting the fever dream drift over the viewer until you <i>inhabit</i> this world. One can only imagine how the casting sessions went. </div>
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Secondly, for anyone who's forgotten how good the original <b><i>Mad Max</i></b> films were, one of Miller's most radical contributions to car chase movies was his revolutionary use of editing. This is cutting of the highest order, and it's a dark art that seemed to have been forgotten by every director since Michael Bay and explains why every second of every <b><i>Transformers</i></b> film is a confusing loud jumble of blurred nonsense. Every second of <b><i>MMFR</i></b> is coherent, and paced like a swiss watch on steroids. Even the rare moments where the film slows down to allow you to breathe are perfectly timed. There's one post-pile up moment where Max emerges from the golden sand which is just as oddly surreal and transfixing as all the hurled spears and war-mongering. </div>
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And for all its violence this is no testosterone fest, but a salutary lesson in post-apocalyptic feminism. Again, to bait all those Whedon fans, measure <b><i>MMFR</i></b> against the garbled fudging of women's roles in <b><i>Avengers</i></b> or even stuff like <b><i>Firefly</i></b>. Here each woman's role is formed by the grim implications of rape and slavery in a society where the simple act of survival of a tribe becomes twisted by despotism, tyranny and a bogus system of religious symbolism (the War Boys, in their desperate 'half-lives', face violent annihilation with a chrome death's head grin, sprayed from a can, believing they're heading for apotheosis in Valhalla). This is no accident, as Miller used feminist playwright Eve Ensler, an expert on the atrocities in the Congo as a consultant. Essentially the film is fascinated by the implications of power in a near-medieval society and finds the real wisdom residing in female strength. What's more (and this is massively heartening) a large number of major (and positive) roles go to women in their 60s and 70s. To be truly faithful to facts, the real hero of this film is Charlize Theron's Imperator Furiosa: a woman who has played a waiting game since childhood to gain freedom for her and her female charges.</div>
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A synopsis (as was discussed by my friend and I in the pub afterwards) is also another clue to where Miller and co. have absolutely hit the nail on the head. The plot is almost laughably simple. And simply bonkers. Again, compare this to Marvel's more recent product (discounting<b><i> Guardians of the Galaxy</i></b>, which was a real hoot) where plot threads and insanely cloddish expositional dialogue obscure the occasional whip-smart wisecrack. Miller has a veteran's instinct for what makes a film work. It may sound utterly pretentious, but his remarks about seeing <b><i>Fury Road</i></b> as a form of cinematic poetry makes perfect sense. He has stated that this is a film that could be seen (without any subtitles) anywhere in the world and it would still be completely comprehensible: and he's right. The whole film probably contains about ten pages of dialogue. This concision allows every other detail in the movie to help convey back stories and detail, giving it a richness that no amount of blurby exposition can solve. Tom Hardy as twitchy old Max, delivers scant remarks, all prefaced with unsure grunts which convey his fight with insanity by making us believe that he's come so far that nothing can go past unquestioned or without a worried shake of a guilt-filled head, filled with hallucinations of his dead family and friends. What's more, you don't even see his full face until about halfway through the movie. </div>
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To sum up: Theron hits the road in a giant 'War Rig' - a big black truck that looks like it just got pimped in a very dark fetish club - with treason on her mind. She's stolen the Citadel leader, Immortan Joe (played to the hilt by Max veteran <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0117412/?ref_=tt_cl_t4">Hugh Keays-Byrne</a>) 's bevvy of 'Wives' (essentially the film's only conventional eye-candy): young women who are kept as breeding machines. No longer prepared to be treated as 'things' the women (one of whom is pregnant) attempt to reach a place of sanctuary. Joined by former road warrior, Max Rockatansky (Hardy) they then go for a two-hour chase across the best deserts I've seen since <b><i><a href="http://jonesisdying.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/lawrence-of-arabia-1962.html">Lawrence of Arabia</a></i></b> (in actual fact, Namibia). The post-apocalyptic hell serves (pretty much as Monument Valley did in John Ford's <b><i>Stage Coach</i></b>) as a superbly linear backdrop to the action, which involves pumped-up dune buggies that ROAR with throaty V8 engines along with an army of other modified gas-guzzling monstrosities. One even comes complete with a set of big war drums and a GUITARIST. This is a society which depends on the triple gods of water, oil and bullets. Pretty much like today, then…</div>
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Max and Furiosa cross a desert or two, and then go back again. Things blow up. People get mangled. And that's about all there is. And the amazing fact is that you really don't need more. I saw <b><i>MMFR</i></b> two days ago and I'm STILL thinking about it.</div>
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Of course, too much proselytising will transform a two-hour joyride through surreal mayhem into something it would never claim to be. And yet <b><i>MMFR</i></b>'s brilliance is that it reclaims a genre grown so tired and hackneyed due to its reliance on a slickness born of studio accounting and computerised reliability. While <b><i>Fury Road</i></b> does boast CGI trickery, it merely serves as a way of more efficiently delivering the very real stunts and destruction wrought by Miller's cast and crew. never once do you doubt that what you see on screen is exactly how it would go down. Such suspension of disbelief seemed impossible in this day and age. It's taken a 70-year old Australian to show us that fun hasn't gone from our screens forever.</div>
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Chris Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02108337196370083674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20885622.post-3188517141208629932015-03-14T18:12:00.001+00:002015-03-15T23:34:39.014+00:00Daevid Allen (1938-2015)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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So farewell then, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daevid_Allen">Daevid Allen</a>, the one, the only real Pot Head Pixie.<br />
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Since <a href="http://jonesisdying.blogspot.de/2013/02/kevin-ayers-1944-2013.html">Kevin Ayers</a> passed away a few years ago, this leaves only two original members of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_Machine">Soft Machine</a> - the ‘Canterbury scene’’s most important band - left alive. And more importantly it leaves us with one less true maverick. It seems entirely appropriate that he died on Friday 13th...<br />
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Many have already said it far better already, but the wit, irreverence and irrepressible optimism which ran through his entire canon marked him out as a true original. Ironically, like many of my generation, I have arch-capitalist Richard Branson to really thank for my introduction to Allen and the Gong clan. Regular post-school visits to the local Virgin record shop in Coventry in around 1974 were spent staring longingly at the strange album covers and spending literally hours trying to decide which to buy with my woefully limited teenage funds. Oddly the first dip into the world of Pot Head Pixies and the little green planet outlined in Allen’s self-authored mythology was with the first of the classic ‘Radio Gnome trilogy’: <b><i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Teapot_%28album%29">Flying Teapot</a></i></b>. This is strange because at the time Gong’s previous release, <b><i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camembert_Electrique">Camembert Electrique</a></i></b> (first released on Jean Georgakarakos, Jean-Luc Young and Fernand Boruso’s BYG label in France in 1971) was also available for a bargain price of 59 pence. Having fallen deeply in love with <b><i>Flying Teapot</i></b> and its blend of silliness, <i>motorik</i> funk and cosmic electronica, <b><i>Camembert Electrique</i></b> became my second Gong purchase. (side note: I also bought Faust’s erm… challenging - for a teenage Bowie fan - <i><b>Faust Tapes</b></i> for the same price. The nascent Virgin label catalogue was, at the time, composed of a truly life-influencing blend of European oddness (krautrock, electronica etc.), along with the notorious <i><b>Tubular Bells</b></i> and various Canterbury, jazz-rock offshoots such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Cow">Henry Cow</a>. In fact, I really should get round to writing about how virtually everything that label released in its first few years was to influence my musical tastes. But enough of the old-man-reminiscing bullshit.)<br />
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A few months later a school friend lent me <b><i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel%27s_Egg_(album)">Angel’s Egg</a></i></b> (the second in the Radio Gnome trilogy) and the game was up - I was a fan. Its more coherent feel was bolstered with extraordinary musicianship, innumerable genre touch points from bebop to space rock and all topped off with Gilli Smyth’s frankly erotic space whisper and Allen’s deeper-than-you’d-realise philosophy (the whole notion of the flying teapot was indeed borrowed <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot#Parody">from Bertrand Russell</a>, of all people). Even better, a lot of the album was recorded in a wood on a full-moon. Far OUT!<br />
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Allen’s roots lay not in the more commercially handicapped mid-‘60s hippie era but in its roots in beat culture from earlier in the decade. Moving from his native Australia in 1960 to the UK via Paris, he was a polymath more typical of the times, writing poetry and dabbling in the visual arts as well as playing jazz-influenced rock ’n’ roll. His credentials by this point even included working with William Burroughs. It was his shared love of jazz as well as his automatic status as role model due to his greater age and free-thinking, freewheeling peripatetic experience that drew the other, younger members of the early Soft Machine to him. These included the son of his Canterbury landlady - Robert Wyatt - on drums. It was only Allen’s forced expulsion from the band in 1968 (due to an expired visa that meant he couldn’t return to the UK following a French tour) which allowed the band to gradually morph from countercultural leading lights into full-on jazz-rock bores by the mid-‘70s. Back in France, Allen and partner Gilli Smyth forged the communal umbrella of Gong and their very own brand of space rock was born.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Soft Machine w. Daevid (far right)</td></tr>
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Gong’s somewhat degraded status in the pantheon of ‘cosmic’ rock (compared to, say, The Grateful Dead or Pink Floyd) undoubtedly lies in one simple fact: they were slightly late to the party due to bad business decisions and, let’s say, a somewhat ‘laid back’ approach to the revolution. The band’s first album proper (if you discount the cheaply recorded <b><i>Magick Brother, Mystic Sister</i></b> album on the free jazz label BYG/Actuel (home of Archie Shepp, Don Cherry, Art Ensemble of Chicago and Anthony Braxton among others) appeared in 1971. But <b><i>Camembert Electrique</i></b> was initially only available in the UK on import from France and was almost instantly commercially scuppered when the label ran into financial trouble the following year. Thus, their ‘classic’ period truly began with the recording of <b><i>Flying Teapot</i></b> at Branson’s Manor Studios, and after Branson’s new label bought the distribution rights from BYG and made the album the second release after Mike Oldfield’s <b><i>Tubular Bells</i></b>.<br />
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Truth be told, the appearance of a band of free-thinkers who espoused cosmic love via a metaphorical story of invisible pixies in teapot-shaped spaceships from a green planet in another dimension was at odds with the zeitgeist, and while they found a home in the ragged remains of countercultural thinking, Allen’s seed vision remained a cult proposition at best. Yet over 40 years later the mythology lives on and Allen’s legacy not only spans Soft Machine and Gong, but a whole heap of solo projects that saw him work with everyone from Bill Laswell to Sting.<br />
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Musically, DA was (as in all things) an oddity. In many ways he resembled a more cosmic John Mayall, drawing a ream of talented players into his fold while remaining true to his own idiosyncratic path (to the point of leaving Gong just as they looked set to make it big). Each of these players drawn, almost mystically into Allen’s lunar orbit, was comically re-christened as they became part of the Gong cast of characters. Thus, bebop and world music sax specialist, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didier_Malherbe">Didiere Malherbe</a> became ‘Bloomdido Bad De Grass’, and future Hawkwind electronics alumni, Tim Blake was dubbed ‘Hi T Moonweed’ etc. He himself used the names Bert Camembert, Dingo Virgin and many more. The band’s revolving roster of musicians included ex-members of Magma (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Moze">Francis Moze</a>), Yes (Bill Bruford), The Nice (Brian Davison), Kevin Ayers’ band (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Hillage">Steve Hillage</a>) and even jazz rock legends <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pip_Pyle">Pip Pyle</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_Allan">Laurie Allan</a> and Pierre Moerlen (as you can maybe tell, the band had trouble hanging on to drummers): the latter of whom went on to lead the band once Allen quit in ’75.<br />
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Unlike Mayall’s sturdy and (musicologically) important but intrinsically dull blues appropriations, Daevid had chops that put him in a class of his own, both philosophically and aurally. A friend often used to point out that early Softs and Gong recordings (before he teamed up with Steve Hillage) bear the mark of a true original on the guitar. For a thorough exploration of his technique I recommend the aforementioned <b><i>Camembert Electrique</i></b>, or his earliest solo album, <b><i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Moon">Bananamoon</a></i></b>. But in terms of true innovation on six strings he struck gold much earlier in the ‘60s. Following the Soft Machine’s appearance at the legendary Alexandra Palace <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_14_Hour_Technicolor_Dream">14 Hour Technicolour Dream</a> in 1967, Allen witnessed Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd in their full acid-drenched glory. It was Barrett’s technique of ‘stroking’ the strings with a polished zippo lighter (itself, a technique borrowed from AMM’s Keith Rowe) that led to Allen ‘inventing’ ‘Glissando guitar’ (also referred to by him on occasion as ‘aluminium croon’): a method of using massive delay along with the use of polished surgical instruments to coax ethereal sounds from his guitar. It was <a href="http://www.guitarplayer.com/miscellaneous/1139/steve-hillage/12161">adopted by Steve Hillage</a> and influenced a slew of other guitarists (including… ahem… myself), and if there’s ONE thing alone that Daevid should be remembered for, it’s this.<br />
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Allen himself was a gloriously self-effacing and honest man who played the holy fool: part guru, part inane joker. His two volumes of autobiography make great reading, not only for his unshakeable belief in the spiritual quest which marked his muse, but for the honesty with which he paints himself as no saint, caught up in a business which rarely suffers such eccentricity for long. Despite the plaudits currently flowing about the man’s generosity of spirit, he, himself admits his tendency for an occasionally fiery temper matched with an egotism that stood at odds with his world view but was necessary to get his message across. But overall Daevid was a true idealist who never quit the search for real alternatives to late capitalism, and it often seems a shame that his adoption by the Glastonbury/Hebden Bridge brigade perhaps hampered such dialogue from reaching a larger audience. While the musical imprint of work he was involved with was immeasurably deep on my own tastes and directions, the world which he envisioned and the simple, playful ways in which it was explained were my first true introduction to so many things; from Eastern philosophy to consciousness-expansion. Like the fading traces of an acid trip, the end result always saw you returned to earth with a bump (just like Allen’s alter-ego, Zero The Hero at the close of the <b><i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_(Gong_album)">You</a></i></b> album) but the journey was always so much fun.<br />
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A few years back <a href="http://jonesisdying.blogspot.de/2006/11/gliss-bliss.html">I finally saw the classic band</a>, along with all the attendant offshoots and followers of the Gong family, at their Unconvention in Amsterdam’s Melkweg. That one weekend still stands as possibly one of the most joyous, warm events in my life. The sense that everyone was there for the same reason was overpoweringly positive and for a brief spell I truly felt like I’d come home.<br />
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In short, he was a real hero, not a zero… </div>
Chris Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02108337196370083674noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20885622.post-37971534948262661552015-02-06T17:45:00.002+00:002015-02-06T19:28:15.124+00:00Lousy Song, Great Solo #5<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Famous bands' first
guitarists: there’s possibly a book to be written there. You know: the ones
that either left, lost their marbles or turned up at the studio to find that
their gear was in a skip outside with no explanation (only to get a phone call
from a roadie two months later) etc. etc.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">From The Yardbirds
onwards (Eric Clapton making way for the superior Jeff Beck) the ‘60s and ‘70s
are littered with examples of groups who lost founding axe men only to finally
make it big. Pink Floyd, of course, had Syd Barrett who, at least, had a few
months working WITH his replacement, David (don’t call me ‘Dave’) Gilmour
before he was ousted; The Moody Blues lost future Wings member, Denny Laine,
but ended up with Justin Hayward (un)luckily for them; Thin Lizzy’s Eric Bell
drank himself out of a job, only to find that his replacement of TWO guitarists
would lead the Irish rockers to world domination; Jethro Tull replaced Mick
Abrahams with Martin Barre; Genesis parted ways with Anthony Phillips due to
his stage fright (which almost split the band up) before they opted for Steve
Hackett; and Yes ejected <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Banks">Pete Banks</a> after a brief power struggle (and a
disagreement about the use of an orchestra on their second album, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_a_Word">Time and a Word</a></i></b>), meaning that they could employ boring old perfectionist, Steve
Howe.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Which brings me to the
subject of this episode of Lousy Song, Great Solo: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_O%27List">David ‘Davy’ O’List</a>, who had
the honour of being in TWO bands who went on to greater things <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">after </i>he left them: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nice">The Nice</a> and Roxy
Music. The poor guy must have felt cursed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Born in Barnet, and
rising to prominence in London’s swinging sixties scene in a third rate bunch
of psychedelic chancers known as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Attack_(band)">The Attack</a> (whose biggest claim to fame was
that they recorded ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’ a few days before Jeff Beck), he was
nonetheless a gritty, suitably far-out guitarist who (not unlike Pete Banks in
Yes) actually managed that most difficult of tricks: having a truly distinctive
sound. Unfortunately (again, as with Banks) the ability to play is rarely
enough when you’re in a band with some other erm… <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">strong</i> personalities. Fate was ultimately not kind to these men.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">O’List was recruited to
join the ensemble that had initially been put together as P.P. Arnold’s backing
band by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immediate_Records">Immediate label</a> boss, and industry manager/provocateur, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Loog_Oldham">Andrew Loog Oldham</a>, The Nice. Of course the band already had one show-off in their ranks in
the shape of organ-mutilator, Keith Emerson. However at this stage Emerson’s
legendary stage high-jinks were tempered by a deft touch on the B3 which owed a
lot to his jazz heroes (Jimmy Smith etc.). He had yet to meet Bob Moog and
unleash the full force of progressive rock on an unsuspecting public. But along
with the powerful and sprightly rhythm section of Brian Davison (drums) and Lee
Jackson (bass and gruff vocalisation) The Nice were, in truth, true pioneers.
Their sound was both muscular and psychedelic, matching sonic experimentation
with classical chops and the ability to stretch out arrangements live. Add to
this Emerson’s exhibitionism, such as his tendency to stab his Hammond organ
with a Hitler Youth dagger (given to him by their roadie at the time, Lemmy
Kilminster), and the band were all set to become one of THE bands to watch in
the Summer of Love.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Equally adept at mauling
respectable stuff by Bernstein (‘America’) or Bach (ahem… ‘Brandenburger’) as
well as writing their own freak-friendly numbers, The Nice looked set for big
things. But this was 1967 and show business had yet to understand how to handle
or present such wild stuff. It’s here that O’List’s story not only crosses
paths with Syd Barrett, but even comes to mirror it. The band were booked on a
‘package’ tour with what now seems like a dream ticket for anyone interested in
the period. Stuffed low down on a bill that included The Jimi Hendrix
Experience, The Move, Pink Floyd and Amen Corner, time constraints meant that
each act played short sets which veered wildly in content and barely allowed
for the full force of their stage craft. Remember, this was famously the period
of misguided ‘commercialisation’ which was leading Syd Barrett to rapidly
unravel. With a hit (‘See Emily Play’) on their hands and faced with screaming
teenagers, such a tour didn’t sit well with the Floyd (or indeed many of these
acts who were trying to break free of their ‘pop’ shackles in search of
something loftier and more exploratory). Syd became more and more unreliable as
the tour trundled on.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">It’s interesting to note
that Syd’s legendary instability actually led to O’List being drafted in at the
last minute to sit in for the missing Madcap at a few shows. By all accounts he
was more than up to the task. And yet, less than a year later, the strains of
competing with an ego as large as Emerson’s had begun to take a similar toll on
the guitarist. Well, either that or some kind of chemicals... Scant footage of the band (see below) shows O’List cowering in
the background, unable to compete with the organist's flailing acrobatics. The
camera barely registers his presence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">What’s more, some
accounts paint O’List as suffering similar mental troubles to Barrett, but
whatever the truth, he, himself, became unreliable, arriving late for gigs etc.
and following a fateful gig at Croydon’s Fairfield Hall the axe fell. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">It’s here that O’List’s
destiny almost crosses paths with another of the guitarists mentioned above -
Steve Howe - as it was he who was initially auditioned as a replacement. When
he eventually turned down the job the band continued as a trendy power trio (in
the mould of long-forgotten pioneers, Clouds), upped the classical pretensions
and eventually imploded due to lack of success and Emerson’s longings to find a
better vocalist (more of which later) and be taken seriously as a composer
(stop sniggering at the back).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">A couple of years
drifting in rock limbo for O’List ended briefly when he placed an ad in the
music press looking for a band to fill the void in his professional life. As it
happened the person to answer was none other than Bryan Ferry who’d seen O’List
in concert at Newcastle City hall in 1968 and had been impressed. And for half
a year O’List helped Roxy Music gain shape, even up to the point of <a href="http://theultimatebootlegexperience7.blogspot.de/2014/02/roxy-music-1972-1973-bbc-sessions.html">recording five numbers</a> for John Peel’s <b><i>Top Gear</i></b> show, all of which would eventually turn
up on the band’s debut album a year later. By all accounts (barring O’List’s –
<a href="http://www.vivaroxymusic.com/articles_279.php">his own account</a> makes for some mighty peculiar reading) the guitarist’s
eccentricities quickly wore on the other members and with a young <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Manzanera">PhilipTargett-Adams</a> (later to be renamed Manzanera) in the wings as their road
manager, the writing was on the wall. Once more fame and fortune had eluded
O’List.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">This isn’t the end of
his story, however. As the above linked interview recounts, O’List’s hasty
ejection from Roxy seemed to have left Ferry feeling uncharacteristically
guilty, and he was invited back to provide some guitar on Ferry’s second solo
album, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_Time,_Another_Place_%28album%29">Another Time, Another Place</a></i></b>. O’List’s <a href="http://www.vivaroxymusic.com/articles_279.php">claims</a> to have played on <o:p></o:p></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">the later hit, ‘Let’s Stick Together’ seem somewhat far-fetched, yet his
contribution to Ferry’s ‘74 hit: a version of Dobie Grey’s mod classic, ‘The
‘In’ Crowd’, is an undeniable fact. I’d even considered picking </span><i style="font-family: Helvetica;">this</i><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> number as the subject for this
LSGS. The wigged-out solo at the close of the track is just about the only
thing that redeems its rather plodding approach. Attacking a soul classic with
a rhythm section made up of not only Roxy’s Paul Thompson (never a subtle
drummer) but also John Wetton on bass was never really going to suit the number,
and Ferry’s delivery can only be described as dull.</span></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqH0jZC7omcRN1xEAR_10Oqb7oLftqBpW2bQSizSE5SKtt9cgIzchTueIou03rQCkQHWx_llWnqy7p1M24ca5fdcOA33g5hTsKiN4-7hSViuSHD7GWaTCJStQZQNhCMCVLMm0q/s1600/nice4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqH0jZC7omcRN1xEAR_10Oqb7oLftqBpW2bQSizSE5SKtt9cgIzchTueIou03rQCkQHWx_llWnqy7p1M24ca5fdcOA33g5hTsKiN4-7hSViuSHD7GWaTCJStQZQNhCMCVLMm0q/s1600/nice4.jpg" height="400" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">But to return to the
subject of this article: back in 1967 The Nice were signed to Immediate records
and recording their debut album which went under the amusingly cod-serious
title of </span><b style="font-family: Helvetica;"><i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thoughts_of_Emerlist_Davjack">The Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack</a> </i></b><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">(see what they did there?).
This was to be The Nice at their most concise and approachable as well as their
most psychedelic. The album, coupled with the single version of ‘America’
(which features a great solo by O’List at its core), would turn out to be one
of the great defining documents of English psych. From the revved up re-tooling
of Dave Brubeck’s ‘Blue Rondo A La Turk’ (here renamed ‘Rondo’) via the full-on
baroque pop explosions of the title track and outtake (included on reissue),
‘Diamond Hard Blue Apples Of The Moon’ to the creepy experimentalism of tracks
like ‘Dawn’; the album is actually a delightful product of its time. O’List is
on fire throughout: just check out his explosive intro to ‘Bonny K’. However,
also very much a product of its time are Lee Jackson’s hokey, jokey, florid
lyrics.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOhf75OCJYuq6PH5DlN28Bo-zvNdMGw6MN2ndNylOpGGvsmLE_GtAreNJDHI9dl3gpCR0oPMBM3-zPmZiZr2RZs19vuRQLAc2HZeV8JH7u5Z9qJEAHbhVFhhKY_92b3UlWHpbV/s1600/nice3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOhf75OCJYuq6PH5DlN28Bo-zvNdMGw6MN2ndNylOpGGvsmLE_GtAreNJDHI9dl3gpCR0oPMBM3-zPmZiZr2RZs19vuRQLAc2HZeV8JH7u5Z9qJEAHbhVFhhKY_92b3UlWHpbV/s1600/nice3.jpg" height="320" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">While I can understand
why Emerson would eventually tire of Jackson’s rasping, oft-shouted vocals,
preferring the angelic pipes of Greg Lake as an accompaniment to his
mock-symphonies, I have a bit of a soft spot for his voice. On later work, such
as their take on Dylan’s ‘Country Pie’, I think his Geordie bluster fits the
bill nicely. But there are times when it can grate terribly. One such moment is
on the song chosen for this series: ‘The Cry Of Eugene’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Closing the album, this
track sums up just about everything both right <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and</i> wrong with The Nice. Emerson’s delicate organ intro displays a
sensitivity that runs counter to his usual, more outré approach (as on the
bombastic piano ending to ‘Tantalizing Maggie’ which <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Freeman">Alan ‘Fluff' Freeman</a> used
as a comedy jingle for years on his Radio 1 rock show) and promises far more
than is delivered. O’List at this stage limits himself to a weird, overdriven
viola-like accompaniment. Enter Jackson, burbling what can be only described as
<a href="http://lyrics.wikia.com/The_Nice:The_Cry_Of_Eugene">psychedelic drivel</a>. The song’s dreamy atmosphere is completely broken by his
barking delivery of lines like ‘’The cry of three plus two times nothing at
all, splits all time’s mind asunder.’’ Please, if anyone has the foggiest idea
what the song’s about, let me know. Here, the internet has failed me…*<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Building in intensity
the song reaches a histrionic zenith at the exact mid-point where a frankly
wobbly cornet adds a touch of typical English baroque-ness accompanied by
Emerson’s thumping Rachmaninov impersonations and all hope seems lost. But out
of nowhere at 2’ 45’’ comes O’List playing an arpeggiated, fuzz-drenched
six-note motif that rips open the feyness and forcefully shoves the song into
its tortured climax. Six notes, played over and over but they all matter. It’s
as if someone left the studio door open and the zombie ghost of Jeff Beck
walked right in. From this point on all hell breaks loose. Beneath Jackson’s
laboured delivery O’List goes positively APESHIT. I can still remember the
first time I heard this as a teenager, and even then I recognised the
greatness. And, if that weren’t enough, as a masterstroke, 20 seconds before
the end of the track the motif reappears, devouring all before it until the
song does the only thing it can: stop dead. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Nearly 50 years on, the
track (and the album) remain favourites of mine, mainly for O’List’s manic
attack. Jackson obviously felt offended by his bandmates’ treatment of the song
as he re-recorded an insipid version on the debut album by his follow-up band,
Jackson Heights. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crtjjjtXzt0">This version</a> just emphasised how lousy the song was, and yet
O’List’s solo remains a highlight of British ‘60s rock.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><iframe allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" height="380" src="https://embed.spotify.com/?uri=spotify:track:027pF81Pjz1i8CxZBULe7M" width="300"></iframe></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">*<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Also, I have no idea if the use of the name Eugene had any influence whatsoever on The Pink Floyd's later 'Careful With That Axe Eugene'.</span></i></span></div>
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Chris Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02108337196370083674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20885622.post-35595131056994239562015-01-31T14:05:00.004+00:002015-02-06T19:41:14.350+00:00Ex Machina (2014)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9hngrZPmIhi99AFamAJP_UJbray6Ye5n505id3WNAkFqb7RUZUdHdUjLwNq6ZYPBO3X2LhGrBvCuzXWMu-EVnkpchrt64Yr2EfNeb6jIF8YtJug9x2ks_JE5ipbrQO70GEN4r/s1600/posters-image-4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9hngrZPmIhi99AFamAJP_UJbray6Ye5n505id3WNAkFqb7RUZUdHdUjLwNq6ZYPBO3X2LhGrBvCuzXWMu-EVnkpchrt64Yr2EfNeb6jIF8YtJug9x2ks_JE5ipbrQO70GEN4r/s1600/posters-image-4.jpg" height="400" width="268" /></a></div>
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It’s taken me over a week to write about <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0470752/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Ex-Machina</a></i></b>, not because I’ve been too busy (although I have) but unfortunately because I saw it on the same day as the previous two films reviewed on this blog. Comparisons may be odious but sometimes they make even a reasonably good film seem a bit lame. And <b><i>Ex Machina</i></b> IS reasonably good, but misses the mark on quite a few levels.</div>
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<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Garland#Filmography">Alex Garland</a>’s had a long run-up to this, his directorial debut. It’s a solid gold fact that the man knows his sci-fi. <b><i><a href="http://jonesisdying.blogspot.de/2007/04/weekend-views-and-self-referential.html">Sunshine</a></i></b>, his second joint project with Danny Boyle was entertaining even if it contained more sly references and obvious rip-offs than was, perhaps, decent. Meanwhile his reworking of Judge Dredd’s basic building blocks into a second attempt at bringing Mega City’s law-enforcer to the screen was just <a href="http://jonesisdying.blogspot.de/2014/04/cinema-in-post-gaming-world-gone-to.html">magnificent</a>. And yet what hampers <b><i>Ex Machina</i></b> is both its failure to ultimately surmount cliche as well as the disappointing development of what could have been some interesting variations on the hackneyed idea of man-made life and the consequences that lie therein.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLoKsr7kcwvMI5GWS83Dj-xMhmssynyBCVgnXpjna4OGKBRlm_oKuHXS_jCJziKLKJE3qTjbrOvX9XiGv355J6rILSTUMwHQzGJ586L5m0xXqJdpXCSu1_ey3Hoh6DfBjHI0L4/s1600/Ex-Machina-Gallery-01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLoKsr7kcwvMI5GWS83Dj-xMhmssynyBCVgnXpjna4OGKBRlm_oKuHXS_jCJziKLKJE3qTjbrOvX9XiGv355J6rILSTUMwHQzGJ586L5m0xXqJdpXCSu1_ey3Hoh6DfBjHI0L4/s1600/Ex-Machina-Gallery-01.jpg" height="181" width="400" /></a></div>
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<b><i>Ex Machina</i></b> basically takes all of the previous templates for the dangers of man playing God, from <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017136/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Metropolis</a></i></b> to Spielberg’s <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0212720/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1"><b><i>A.I.</i></b> </a>and tries to give it a spin based on (presumably) Stephen Hawking’s <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30290540">recent warnings of the dire consequences of such actions</a> (in short: as soon as machines gain sentience we’re fucked). The idea has become common cinematic fodder recently, in our post-Syri world so it’s little surprise that this aspect of the plot feels rather worn. It even formed the basis of an episode of <b><i>Elementary</i></b>. And last year we not only got the truly woeful Johnny Depp vehicle about merging man and machine, <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2209764/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Transcendence</a></i></b>, but also Scarlett Johanssen in not one, but TWO films exploring the concept (<b><i><a href="http://jonesisdying.blogspot.de/2014/02/her-2014.html">Her</a></i></b> and <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2872732/">Lucy</a></i></b>): both equally terrible albeit for different reasons. <b><i><a href="http://jonesisdying.blogspot.de/2014/02/her-2014.html">Her</a></i></b> was glib and pointless while <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2872732/">Lucy</a></i></b> was just hackneyed shoot-‘em-up schlock. </div>
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This is not to say that <b><i>Ex Machina</i></b> is anywhere near as bad as these films. It shares the underground research facility meme with <b><i>Transcendence,</i></b> but there any similarities cease. Garland’s scripts are never dumb and the setting of <b><i>Ex-Machina</i></b> is a far more believable ultra-chic modernist lair set not in a desert but in the northern wildernesses and filled with glass and cool concrete. The performances here are also much finer. Both male leads are actors who deserve close attention. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1209966/?ref_=tt_cl_t3">Oscar Isaac</a> (who was superb as <a href="http://jonesisdying.blogspot.de/2013/12/inside-llewyn-davis-20130.html">Llewyn Davis</a>), portraying Nathan, the billionaire tech as an odious, manipulative creep is great, while <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1727304/?ref_=tt_cl_t2">Domhnall Gleeson</a> is also excellently dazed and confused as Caleb, the office nerd who seemingly gets granted the golden ticket to visit Nathan’s Willy Wonka-style research facility. Meanwhile <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2539953/?ref_=tt_cl_t1">Alicia Vikander</a> transcends her role as sexy robot, Ava to make her possibly the most sympathetic character in the whole film.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZTY_2fNeAWtwpy-0V7u6PcPZCfuocHF8tuZfIaufthPwYbQalloCxoSBIPsChSkeI8TI3q51U_tg5_gTEQjhQvYS9CGGcXnHqfBfNt4Ke00T9tkMhnAfnwOtwMU28D5mBBlli/s1600/ex-machina-official-teaser-trailer-1-2015-oscar-isaac-domhnall-gleeson-movie-hd.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZTY_2fNeAWtwpy-0V7u6PcPZCfuocHF8tuZfIaufthPwYbQalloCxoSBIPsChSkeI8TI3q51U_tg5_gTEQjhQvYS9CGGcXnHqfBfNt4Ke00T9tkMhnAfnwOtwMU28D5mBBlli/s1600/ex-machina-official-teaser-trailer-1-2015-oscar-isaac-domhnall-gleeson-movie-hd.png" height="227" width="400" /></a></div>
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Well, so it seems at first, when Caleb has been helicoptered to the wilderness to seemingly test the true self-awareness of Ava, but, of course, there are far more sinister things at stake here. In tone the initial third of the film felt closest to John Fowles’ masterpiece, <b><i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magus_%28novel%29">The Magus</a></i></b>. And of course a single, lonely, awkward coder is the perfect dupe to fall for the sexual mind-fucks which subsequently arise.</div>
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But it’s in the portrayal of Nathan that the film has its most interesting thread. Here Garland dissects the kind of <b><i>Wire</i></b>-reading uber-jock who both parties and practices physical self-improvement hard. He calls Caleb ‘bro’ and bud’, has a truly annoying beard and talks in horrid 21st century cliches. Unfortunately the film’s transparency doesn’t allow for you to feel anything but repulsion for the man, and his manipulation of Caleb is patently obvious from the start, defusing any plot twists in the final third. Yet Garland’s obvious critique the Schmidts, Zuckerbergs and Jobs of this world who assume the cloak of liberal progress while perhaps harbouring far more sinister motives for mankind could so easily have reaped really interesting results. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFvRR6LhiiFBfHGqq3JwmIy3skydwxHUEvwGKKD1VEIJsv5wJvvJy07NuKUwiupqn6JFnJA4IJdnm75v9SjM-dxCSARLi1-sLiZ2D2C4OBLA7HKNG9bRL-IW4_Mq1kDX7WKXaq/s1600/exm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFvRR6LhiiFBfHGqq3JwmIy3skydwxHUEvwGKKD1VEIJsv5wJvvJy07NuKUwiupqn6JFnJA4IJdnm75v9SjM-dxCSARLi1-sLiZ2D2C4OBLA7HKNG9bRL-IW4_Mq1kDX7WKXaq/s1600/exm.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></div>
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Ava’s final (inevitable) revolt also contains the seeds of some interesting notions. Based on the predication that once men, are given godly powers (or the internet) it will only be a short matter of time before ether use it for some kind of pornographic ends, the film dares to position itself as a post-feminist fable. Yet here sisters (and robots) are still doing it for themselves in high heels and designer dresses, even if ( a little like another Johanssen performance in <b><i><a href="http://jonesisdying.blogspot.de/2013/12/under-skin-2014.html">Under the Skin</a></i></b>) they use these feminine whiles to gain their bloody revenge. There’s a glimmer of intrigue in the notion that - just maybe - AIs could already be amongst us, we just don’t<i> know</i> it. But <b><i>Ex Machina</i></b> takes too long trying to look cool to really thoroughly explore any of these innovations. </div>
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Again like <b><i>Sunshine</i></b>, Garland lifts plot lines and references wholesale: the notion of browsing history as a method of measuring man’s behavioural patterns is (if anyone’s interested) is lifted from the abortive <b><i>BSG</i></b> prequel, <b><i>Caprica</i></b>, for starters. And just about anyone who’s seen a movie about creating artificial intelligence knows, it’s hardly ever going to work out well.</div>
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<b><i>Ex Machina</i></b> does have a few things to recommend it. The portrayal by Vikander of Ava is initially tender and nuanced enough to recreate the same sadness that pervades Spielberg’s <b><i>AI</i></b>. This seeming bewilderment at her own creation is oddly touching. And there is a point in the movie where you genuinely start to wonder exactly who is real (just as Caleb questions it himself once he’s figured to the extent of his role as unwitting pawn). But ultimately <b><i>Ex Machina</i></b> is merely a very diverting one hour and 40 minutes, instead of the truly original, intelligent science fiction film that we deserve. Still, one hopes that Garland will keep trying.</div>
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Finally, if there’s one thing on which I seem to disagree with most other critics about: it’s the soundtrack. At what point did it become <i>de rigeur</i> to fill every other film with cookie cutter post-rock, prefacing every plot highlight/revelation with a twinkling guitar glissando that crescendos into four-four <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortoise_(band)">Tortoise</a>-isms? Maybe it was the success of Mogwai with their soundtrack to <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478337/?ref_=fn_al_tt_3">Zidane</a></i></b>, but the stuff has become obvious, unsubtle and just plain intrusive for me. Geoff Barrow’s approximation of the trope here is just terrible.</div>
Chris Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02108337196370083674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20885622.post-89013483259685067182015-01-24T20:58:00.001+00:002015-01-25T17:33:32.346+00:00Inherent Vice (2014)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsirc-eR0sz22huz4XrfA4edcJLKRc9_6MEJX5W2CiRHRkc44v3uIaxs0ssjtHy-qR9ezMFHPYgzPEzKmyKaUI4dTPzgNe6wfYXaELyhHRpzcCN9iiUInpVTWeXzHa4djeEJAI/s1600/iv1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsirc-eR0sz22huz4XrfA4edcJLKRc9_6MEJX5W2CiRHRkc44v3uIaxs0ssjtHy-qR9ezMFHPYgzPEzKmyKaUI4dTPzgNe6wfYXaELyhHRpzcCN9iiUInpVTWeXzHa4djeEJAI/s1600/iv1.png" height="226" width="400" /></a></div>
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There was a point in the midst of <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1791528/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Inherent Vice</a></i></b>, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000759/?ref_=tt_ov_dr">PaulThomas Anderson</a>’s latest examination of recent American history, that I began
to wonder if he’d made the film just for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">me</i>.
I loved every single second of it, but listening to various (considerably younger)
fellow viewers’ comments as I left the screening, realised just how much
baggage you need to carry to withstand the two and a half hours of screen time.
Dripping with authenticism and almost hermetic in its depiction of a very
particular moment in the USA’s road to post-‘60s cynicism, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Inherent Vice</i></b> demands
that you know your stuff, counter-culture and politics-wise, not to mention
musically. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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(I apologise wholeheartedly if that last paragraph sounded
like some pompous way of saying <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I liked
this film and therefore I know a lot of stuff and you will only like this film
if you are clever like me.</i> What I’m actually trying to say is that I liked
this film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">so much</i> that I want
everyone to like it too, and I worry that it may be a little too niche for many
peoples’ tastes.)<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Pynchon/">Thomas Pynchon</a>’s typically character-rich, absurdist view of
the West Coast in 1970 is both dreamily nostalgic (in a good way, says
Anderson) for a lost era and the closest equivalent to Chandleresque as he ever
got. The shaggy dog tale of Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello, a dope smoking P.I. in
requisite khaki combat jacket, shades and sandals, simultaneously chasing a
missing construction magnate, an ex-husband, a drug cartel and a lost love. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
The oddest thing about Anderson’s film is that, for the first
time that I can remember, it bears comparison with and references other films.
Of course any circular tale filled with great cameos, stoner logic and an
impenetrable mystery is going to make anyone think of <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Big Leibowski</i></b>, and
the plot tangles give the whole piece a doper-grandson-of-Chandler dynamic. At
about the halfway mark, pretty much as in <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038355/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2">The Big Sleep</a></i></b>, you give up on any
kind of grasp on who has done what to who. Apart from the other
Altman/Chinatown/Long Goodbye etc. etc. allusions there’s a whole Hunter S.
Thompson Gonzo section featuring Martin Short as the superbly deranged dentist,
Dr. Rudy Batnoyd. And if that weren’t enough, here’s <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001125/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t16">Benicio Del Toro</a>… as a
lawyer! This attorney is, however, an endearing marine law specialist with a
taste in deep fried steak. Come to think of it, just about everyone in this
film is in some way endearing. Even the villains are acceptably erudite. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Somewhere in between good and bad is, naturally, the
policeman nemesis to Doc’s P.I.: Detective Christian ‘Bigfoot’ Bjornsen, played
by <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000982/?ref_=tt_cl_t7">Josh Brolin</a> (above), channeling his inner Tommy Lee Jones again. The love/hate
hippie/pig relationship is superb, especially as half of their exchanges are by
telephone, showing the hilarious juxtaposition of the straight and far out
lifestyles of our protaganists. Other turns by <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000702/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t24">Reece Witherspoon</a> as Doc’s Deputy D.A.
sort-of main squeeze; <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2239702/?ref_=tt_cl_t2">Katherine Waterson</a> as Shasta Fay, Doc’s ‘ex-old lady’ who
leads him into the labyrinth, and even – wow- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000616/?ref_=tt_cl_t8">Eric Roberts</a>(!) as the missing
Mickey Wolfmann are all suitably on the money.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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In tone (as you’ll undoubtedly expect if you’ve seen the
trailer below) the film is Anderson’s lightest for years. It’s not the
slapstick-fest you may be expecting from the trailer, but its central
performance by <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001618/?ref_=tt_cl_t3">Joaquin Phoenix</a> as Doc contains a vast amount of physical comedy.
Phoenix has always been a deeply physical actor, but here his facial mugging
almost steals the show. An inveterate stoner’s habits mean that dialogue comes
thick and…err, thick. More than one reviewer has pointed to one scene between
Doc and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005562/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t19">Owen Wilson</a> (as it turns out, the real point of the movie) as junky sax
player and snitch, Coy Harlingen which is all but unintelligible. But when it
comes to <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Inherent Vice</i></b>, it’s appropriate that it’s the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">vibe</i> which pervades the entirety which
is the most wonderful thing. Not since <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118749/?ref_=nm_knf_t3">Boogie Nights</a></i></b> has the director been
this jolly. <o:p></o:p></div>
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As mentioned above, the numerous Black Panther, Manson
Family,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Aryan Brotherhood, Vietnam, L.A.
music scene, Nixon etc. references mean that maybe this is just a film set to
entrance only the likes of me and my crazy ‘niche’ tastes. But I’d like to
think not. <o:p></o:p></div>
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When it comes to the music, I can take or leave the
Debussy-liteisms of Jonny Greenwood. It works just fine. But the other stuff is
a whole heap of ‘60s and ‘70s goodness. Any film that opens with Can’s ‘Vitamin
C’ and also features some Les Baxter already has me halfway there. But as Anderson has said in recent interviews:
the real musical inspiration of <b><i>Inherent Vice</i></b> comes from Neil Young;
in particular, his three post-Harvest era masterpieces. Two numbers (<b><i>Harvest</i></b>
and <b><i>Journey
Through The Past</i></b>) feature prominently in the soundtrack.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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The yearning in Neil feels just right. If there was an NY
album that <b><i>Inherent Vice</i></b> put me in mind of most, it was <b><i><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/n5zf">On The Beach</a></i></b>. The mellow but wary-as-fuck, post-Manson killings vibe is all
offset by endless sea and sunshine or twinkling beach front cafes and
faux-medieval Topanga mansions filled with tanned ‘teeners’ as Shasta Fay
describes them to Doc. But there’s already a sense that the good stuff happened
long ago, there are too many memories, too many ex-old ladys, too much
paranoia. The lost love does finally come home, but only to tell Doc that she’s
not back. And the nemesis pops round to knock down his door, apologise and
finally eat his stash. Bummer.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
How much of this feeling is from Pynchon I have yet to
discover. I feel the need to read it. Any regular readers will know that I
raved about Anderson’s last work: <b><i><a href="http://jonesisdying.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/read-this-post-without-blinking-master.html">The Master</a></i></b>. And while <b><i>Inherent
Vice</i></b> immediately resides inside me in a place that’s closer to my
heart, that’s weighed against the fact that <b><i>The Master</i></b> had
life-defining performances by Phoenix and the late Philip Seymour Hoffmann.
Time will tell no doubt tell which film wins, but in the meantime, if you want
to see one more film about the death of the hippie ideal, make it this one.
It’s brilliant.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Inherent Vice is released in the UK on 30 January.</i></span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Chris Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02108337196370083674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20885622.post-65386631396531027962015-01-24T17:33:00.000+00:002015-01-25T17:34:25.051+00:00The Duke Of Burgundy (2014)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkV44HbBoblXyKITPf5UuCS-Z3Bx9PpW-Kz9Xxyn8CN4YR3bi4yuipqSsb2QiWpEFU0-7-7mh2NB5i8hRzjU9aIPccZFTcN_5V8t6vO7DCdQXdmlPOkq20DqNRJEYkqgMzXxzG/s1600/dob1.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkV44HbBoblXyKITPf5UuCS-Z3Bx9PpW-Kz9Xxyn8CN4YR3bi4yuipqSsb2QiWpEFU0-7-7mh2NB5i8hRzjU9aIPccZFTcN_5V8t6vO7DCdQXdmlPOkq20DqNRJEYkqgMzXxzG/s1600/dob1.gif" height="300" width="400" /></a></div>
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One of the natural by-products of a post-feminist world for
old codgers like myself who did most of their ‘growing up’ in the ‘70s and ‘80s
is that you often end up watching a film and not being sure if you’re even <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">allowed</i> to enjoy it. Remember that
lesbian love scene in <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0166924/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Mulholland Drive</a></i></b>? I’m still not
entirely certain that David Lynch should have got away with it. And there’s a moment
about 15 minutes into <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3270827/?ref_=nv_sr_3">Peter Strickland</a>’s latest film, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2570858/">The Duke Of Burgundy</a></i></b>,
where you begin to question your own motives in watching the film as well as
the (male) director’s for making it. But rather than leaving you about to
vacate your seat Strickland pulls an almost genius trick which completely
reverses your preconceptions of what, until that point, seemed dangerously
close to exploitative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8M1NCmCrGNdxUQG0Sf4nWeFerj36ZlwtAqixwQKz7HHa5JXu9YeN5oVtxqg6EiyKzMFz14oLuVTYMb-KHaXRWc5yh7kcFxWLS0ZfqKwo-ArxLif-Gv2gkLZAMm1M5C6z4ZBEa/s1600/dob2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8M1NCmCrGNdxUQG0Sf4nWeFerj36ZlwtAqixwQKz7HHa5JXu9YeN5oVtxqg6EiyKzMFz14oLuVTYMb-KHaXRWc5yh7kcFxWLS0ZfqKwo-ArxLif-Gv2gkLZAMm1M5C6z4ZBEa/s1600/dob2.png" height="266" width="400" /></a></div>
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Rather childishly referred to as either ‘mucky’ in the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/sep/07/duke-of-burgundy-review-toronto-film-festival">Guardian’s review</a> or 'kinky' in <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/toronto-film-festival/11079997/The-Duke-of-Burgundy-review-hair-raisingly-kinky.html">the Telegraph's</a>, <b><i>The Duke Of Burgundy</i></b> actually examines a
rather touching lesbian S&M relationship between Cynthia and Evelyn. The
most notable immediate fact about their mannered, repressed, corseted world full
of display cabinets filled with butterflies and moths is the fact that there
are no men in it, whatsoever. The two women inhabit a huge villa in some
academic town in some unknown country (actually Hungary), and appear to be
spending the summer/autumn months pursuing a shared interest in entomology,
studying in a dusty old library and attending lectures along with a whole crowd
of what can only described as similarly attired MILFs. Strickland uses these
lectures to up the weirdness factor (for some unknown reason, one of the
attendees is a lifeless mannequin – presumably to highlight the film’s
dressing-up subplot). One of them involves the entire audience of women
listening to a field recording of an insect’s stridulations (I never thought
I’d ever use that word): all them staring vacantly ahead, like some insect-worshipping
cult.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4vOrD3ZVBEBsfJ5VmJAQiraK7wJnbUFpvK2Ez_5ZXHpE4Nzd6ej8qEfBFQ6Swxrjue752NIz_RH8fXDAK5sUu7LGhz6QM-rvVQ1gYFWPrxwtdQTfDcIZwNQ_gQa3Z6EnB0Y1H/s1600/dob4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4vOrD3ZVBEBsfJ5VmJAQiraK7wJnbUFpvK2Ez_5ZXHpE4Nzd6ej8qEfBFQ6Swxrjue752NIz_RH8fXDAK5sUu7LGhz6QM-rvVQ1gYFWPrxwtdQTfDcIZwNQ_gQa3Z6EnB0Y1H/s1600/dob4.jpg" height="225" width="400" /></a></div>
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Together the pair explores the notions of power, control,
fetishism and role-playing within a love affair. Their games initially entail
aspects of humiliation that quickly reach levels that, as mentioned above, will undoubtedly test the endurance of the un-kinkier members of the film’s
audience.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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Yet, suddenly the surface is stripped away to reveal the
mechanics of exactly <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">how</i> such a
sado-masochistic relationship can function. At its heart the film pokes away at the glossy surface of lingerie and bondage to ask questions as to
how you maintain such a peak of erotic play while keeping both partners
satisfied. It’s basically an extremist examination of the old cliché of ‘how to
keep your relationship fresh.’<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgACkdHfBzj_YDYHopKAvPLoFd3m7vQyyxp-r6JdRjPwWVv_KSdGrjwAGCAmJVA12PiX-YH1qUXRw2gFRtYRaTwfHpJPAdmIcWcMjKmRkrGEd4Du2yInjxmes5058mixcnOY8W5/s1600/dob3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgACkdHfBzj_YDYHopKAvPLoFd3m7vQyyxp-r6JdRjPwWVv_KSdGrjwAGCAmJVA12PiX-YH1qUXRw2gFRtYRaTwfHpJPAdmIcWcMjKmRkrGEd4Du2yInjxmes5058mixcnOY8W5/s1600/dob3.jpg" height="400" width="268" /></a></div>
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There’s an imbalance born of age difference that inevitably
sees the ‘games’ become increasingly strained in their artifice. But the film’s
masterstroke is in not doing what last year’s <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2278871/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Blue Is The Warmest Colour</a></i></b>
did with its supposedly ground-breaking depiction of gay love, and resorting to
an inevitable decline and break up. Just as you think you have figured out the
imbalance of power in the relationship (the film’s focus of power is always
ambiguous despite the pair’s well-defined ‘roles’ in their games) it takes a
new turn and we’re returned to the possibility that just maybe these two women
can make their very special form of foreplay work, despite the effort and
commitment required. On top of this it’s a heartening depiction of an older
woman as sexual and real.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfo6Hqcfx_vmCWGVhKmWf2e0CGzY066HeToVKOCAYbQrBIcZRD0FX61qRHQbIo8pTqZo1KxT77WoAIbRKrfZdDmb1lF6QlajzR8ml20RYu_H6jNqlhPjd9NmuVqpQdX4xS_13c/s1600/dob5.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfo6Hqcfx_vmCWGVhKmWf2e0CGzY066HeToVKOCAYbQrBIcZRD0FX61qRHQbIo8pTqZo1KxT77WoAIbRKrfZdDmb1lF6QlajzR8ml20RYu_H6jNqlhPjd9NmuVqpQdX4xS_13c/s1600/dob5.jpeg" height="280" width="400" /></a></div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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This isn’t to say that that the film’s narrative, like
Strickland’s last offering, the excellent <b><i><a href="http://jonesisdying.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/berberian-sound-studio.html">Berberian Sound Studio</a></i></b>, ever strays
too far from the psychedelic/experimental (contrasting ‘70s film effect tropes
with digital technology). In fact Strickland’s modus operandi, on the surface
can often seem to be a homage/resurrection of ‘70s film genres (not unlike
producer Ben Wheatley, whose own next project in retro fetishism after <b><i><a href="http://jonesisdying.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/a-field-in-england-2013.html">A Field In England</a></i></b> is a promising adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0462335/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_2">High-Rise</a></i></b>). Here in <b><i>The Duke Of Burgundy</i></b>, the source visual
material is a disconcerting blend of the same Hammer/Giallo horror that drove
his last film, along with distinct nods to perhaps the last taboo from my
formative years: arthouse soft-porn. The opening credits ape the style of early
‘70s adult flicks, meanwhile the spirit of Ingrid Pitt constantly lurks,
especially during Evelyn’s nightie-clad, candelabra wielding, night time walks.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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Post-production dubbed dialogue and use of prismatic filters
all add to the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Emmanuelle</i></b>-reborn ambience, but <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The Duke of Burgundy</b>’s often cold, formal tone and mannered
performances - not unlike Peter Greenaway’s best work - is also offset by
humour: for example, in its opening credits for a perfume manufacturer. It’s
also possibly the only film you’ll see this year that has closing credits that
include the species of insects in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">order
of appearance</i> (trivia fans note: the film’s title is a species of
butterfly) as well as notations of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">exact
locations and equipment</i> used for sourced field recordings. <a href="http://www.chriswatson.net/">Chris Watson</a>
would be proud. It’s also a nod to <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Berberian Sound Studio</i></b>’s <a href="http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0385799/?ref_=tt_cl_t1">Gilderoy</a>
and his recording equipment fetish. Whether this highlights Strickland’s own,
more masculine fetishes to offset the feminine plotline remains unclear.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioxs2mQiqjTQTcx84Eaa9qgIeWpXd-AXwpqgMjLT23zliEcgmToK8neXnmkL_IBVHKLT1fMnrhg2ObBxge5bcfJPZHUOlBrgWNKcb1_3Decm5U26vZb7rpGIRdgAjh5ueK7fZY/s1600/dob6.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioxs2mQiqjTQTcx84Eaa9qgIeWpXd-AXwpqgMjLT23zliEcgmToK8neXnmkL_IBVHKLT1fMnrhg2ObBxge5bcfJPZHUOlBrgWNKcb1_3Decm5U26vZb7rpGIRdgAjh5ueK7fZY/s1600/dob6.jpeg" height="280" width="400" /></a></div>
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But in fact the film seems to act as a rejoinder for all the
women who are so murderously exploited off-screen in <b><i>Berberian Sound Studio</i></b>,
with the film’s main female protagonist, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3272744/?ref_=tt_cl_t5">Fatma Mohamed</a> reappearing here as ‘The
Carpenter’, a woman who wields a tape measure like an instrument of pleasure and
supplies not only bespoke fetishist’s furniture but also the film’s funniest
line (about a 'human toilet' - don't ask...).</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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Such an audacious attempt to map the perverse means that <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Duke of Burgundy</i></b> is a film which tries, almost too desperately
sometimes, to defy description or pigeonholing, as if Strickland wants his
audiences to go back to friends and family to gasp, ‘that was bonkers!’. Well,
it IS bonkers but as a protracted exercise in weirdness it falls slightly short
of the mark, mainly because the trick of maintaining an hallucinatory quality
alongside an almost scientific examination of the strains attendant to such a
depicted relationship is an almost impossible one to pull off. Strickland still
remains one of our most promising directors, despite all of this.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="p1">
Perhaps most importantly, as a depiction of the possibilities of mutually agreed levels of punishment and ritual as sexual it’s undoubtedly streets ahead of this year’s most eagerly awaited piece of populist schlock erotica, <b><i>50 Shades of Grey</i></b>. In fact I’d challenge any independent cinema owners out there to show the two in a double bill. While I’ve no idea (or interest, even) in how the latter will play on the big screen, I’m 99.9% certain that it won’t approach <b><i>The Duke of Burgundy</i></b>’s level of intelligence, daring or transgression. </div>
<div class="p1">
<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">The Duke Of Burgundy is released in the UK on 20th February</span></i></div>
</div>
Chris Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02108337196370083674noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20885622.post-18581614932741458642015-01-04T14:54:00.000+00:002015-01-04T15:43:24.049+00:00Irgendjemand liebt dich immer<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />
Earlier in 2014 I was honoured to be invited to give an opening speech at an exhibition in North Germany by two very splendid artists: <a href="http://verabrueggemann.de/index.html">Vera Brueggemann</a> (N Germany) and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/bruce.lamongo">Bruce LaMongo</a> (Vienna, Austria). The exhibition - at Bielefeld's <a href="http://www.artists-unlimited.de/">Artists Unlimited Gallery</a> - was entitled <b><i><a href="http://www.artists-unlimited.de/2014/vera-bruggemann-und-bruce-la-mongo/">Irgendjemand liebt dich immer</a></i></b> (trans: There's Always Someone Who Loves You) and featured two rooms containing the individual works of either artist as well as one large room that exhibited the results of a collaborative project that the pair have been working on for the last two years.<br />
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These last works consisted of texts sent to each other and then interpreted into graphic form according to each's own whims. The object was seemingly to enjoy not only each other's visions of phrases, cliches and popular sayings selected by the other, but to also revel in the misunderstanding and mis-communication that can result from the clash between two entirely separate cultures and intellects. The results were darkly humorous and wildly creative. Both artists dwell in the realm of the linear but their approaches are fabulously disparate, with LaMongo's perverse pop/trash culture references contrasting with Brueggemann's more precise meditations on disappointment, desire and death.<br />
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The final results of the duo taking their lines for a walk have now been collected in a single volume and I'm utterly proud to have been asked to write the commentary for the book (*below). My own text - in the true spirit of misunderstanding which drove the original concept - was written in English and translated (badly) via online translation engines. The book was beautifully designed by another Bielefeld artist, Jana Topel.<br />
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The limited print run of <b><i>Irgendjemand liebt dich immer</i></b> is <a href="http://www.editionguillotine.com/edition-guillotine-catalogue.html">available to buy</a> via the new <b><a href="http://www.editionguillotine.com/edition-guillotine-news.html">Edition Guillotine</a></b> website (which, incidentally, will be publishing more volumes by both these and other primarily German and Austrian artists in the coming year), for the ridiculously small price of €25 (plus p&p).<br />
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Get it while it's hot!<br />
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Edition Guillotine website: http://www.editionguillotine.com/index.html<br />
Edition Guillotine on FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Edition-guillotine/831977560210991<br />
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<u>Text for the book:</u> <i><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">They say opposites attract. What they (whoever </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">they</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> are) don’t tell you is that opposites often create a considerable amount of friction: friction that can cause the white heat of creativity, or just the dark, dense, deadening force of confusion. You hold in your hands the evidence for this: Brueggemann and La Mongo: together they fight not crime, but mediocrity. This is no match made in heaven, but a fighting partnership bursting with demonic force, erotic displacement and tasteless truth-telling. And it’s great.</span></i><br />
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<i>Like Chinese whispers, the pair’s dialogue - initially conducted long distance via the internet - is rife with misunderstanding and often (unintended) hilarious wrong-turns. Spurred on by the other’s phrases, they often seem to wilfully disregard any obvious interpretation. Instead we see the alchemy of misrepresentation and the occult science of nonsense, raised to the level of the profound. </i></div>
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<i>Let’s face it: they got lucky.</i></div>
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<i>This doesn’t mean to say that under their own steam these artists wouldn’t deliver the goods. Brueggemann casts a sly linear glance over the world: her wonderful drawings managing the balancing act of being both humorous and sinister. Sexual deviance; death and nature’s indifference all mingle in her worryingly artful pencil and ink work. Meanwhile, La Mongo stuffs his obsessively detailed work with layer upon layer of pop/trash culture references, making psychedelic vortices from the deepest recesses of his mind. It’s all brought to glorious life in felt-tips and forbidden imagery. </i></div>
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<i>But, when put together, what do we get? A hilarious, weird juxtaposition of the precise with the messy; the childish with the ancient; the good, the bad and the ugly. Don’t say you weren’t warned…</i></div>
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<i>At the planning stage this meeting of minds and temperaments would look disastrous, but, ironically, on paper it works perfectly. This book is the wreckage following the car crash between Westfalia and Vienna. An autopsy of how not to get along. La Mongo and Brueggemann: they may fight mediocrity, but they’re no longer speaking to each other…</i></div>
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Chris Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02108337196370083674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20885622.post-81840155697991754212015-01-04T14:13:00.001+00:002015-01-04T14:13:56.916+00:00Happy New Year!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
And we're back...<br />
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2014 is DEAD - long live 2015!!!<br />
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Chris Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02108337196370083674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20885622.post-41749817787508773202014-11-22T20:34:00.001+00:002014-11-23T13:52:24.292+00:00Lousy Song, Great Solo #4<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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By 1977 English art-pop perfectionists, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10cc">10cc</a>, were in crisis. Actually, they weren’t just in a crisis, they were <i>fucked</i>. The only thing was: they didn’t know it. </div>
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Famously 10cc were born from the ashes of nascent careers writing hits for the Hollies and Yardbirds (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Gouldman">Graham Gouldman</a>), paying dues with Wayne Fontana (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Stewart">Eric Stewart</a> had actually sang lead on The Mindbenders' biggest hit, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Groovy_Kind_of_Love">'Groovy Kind Of Love'</a>) or just being jobbing session players and studio rats (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Godley">Kevin Godley</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lol_Creme">Lol Creme</a>). Following a reasonably lucrative period running <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawberry_Studios">Strawberry Studios</a> in Stockport and masterminding other faux-bands' singles, as well as a minor hit as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotlegs">Hotlegs</a> (with 'Neanderthal Man'), the band were signed to Jonathan King's UK label, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10cc#Original_line-up.2C_1972.E2.80.9376">given a questionable new name</a> and they were off. </div>
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The next four years had seen them put into effect what was almost a masterplan of pop strategy, moving them from cheeky chart contenders to album conceptualists. Their self-titled <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10cc_(album)">debut album</a>'s parodies laid their stall out with aplomb. It was full of 50's pastiches such as 'Johnny Don't Do It' or 'Donna' and the censor-baiting rockers such as 'Rubber Bullets' while displaying a fearsome grasp of studio trickery. Here was a band that not only had the ironic detachment of, say, Steely Dan (a band with whom 10cc are most often compared, both bands having learned their trade via the '60s equivalent of Tin Pan Alley on either side of the Atlantic) but also the smarts to make top 40 gold out of what was far more grown-up fare than that of contemporaries such as say, Slade or Gary Glitter. The following year's album, <b><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheet_Music_(album)">Sheet Music</a></i></b>, saw the pastiches jettisoned and the band truly find their own sound. What was effectively a pair of duos combined Godley and Creme's cerebral love of art rock and musicals with Gouldman and Stewart's ear for an irresistible tune. sardonic, knowing hits 'Wall Street Shuffle' and 'Silly Love' rubbed shoulders with hilarious deconstructions of the ridiculous trade in which they worked such as 'The Worst Band In The Word' ('<i>Never seen the van, leave it to the roadies, never seen the roadies, leave 'em in the van</i>') or 'Old Wild Men' (possibly the first song to conceive of rock stars ageing), while third world politics and terrorism, were also fair game to these clever boys. </div>
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Of course the following year's <b><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Original_Soundtrack">Original Soundtrack</a></i></b> contained <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_Not_in_Love">THAT SONG</a> and the world now seemed theirs for the taking. However the cracks were beginning to show. The differing approaches of the two pairs was becoming more obvious with Godley and Creme's post-modernism ('The Film Of My Love' or the overlong tri-part 'Une Nuit A Paris') sounding at odds with Gouldman and Stewart's more straightforward rock and pop craftsmanship. It was still a fantastic album, however, and by 1976's <b><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Dare_You!_(album)">How Dare You!</a></i></b> these cracks seemed less apparent, to the point that the album could stand as their masterpiece, containing suites in miniature like 'I'm Mandy Fly Me', 'Art For Art's Sake' or 'Don't Hang Up'. But in the studio the four had reached breaking point and Godley and Creme headed for the hills (and a future in video pioneering) holding their art school credentials high and leaving the remaining duo to wonder whether to carry on as 5cc.</div>
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The unfortunate decision was to draft tour drummer, Paul Burgess as a full-time member, recruit some other fine session players and soldier on. The sense that Gouldman and Stewart did this just to show the quitters just how much they didn't need them is borne out by later interviews. Both parties now admit culpability with Godley and Creme admitting that maybe they could have gone off to make the overblown <b><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_(Godley_%26_Creme_album)">Consequences</a></i></b> album (ostensibly a triple album vehicle to advertise their patented <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gizmo">Gizmotron</a></i> guitar tool which was hamstrung by a little too much self-indulgence and weed) and simply brought the resulting lessons learned back to be used by 10cc, Gouldman and Stewart meanwhile found it impossible to sanction any hiatus by the others while they were at the peak of their earning powers. Ah, foolish youth…</div>
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But be quiet, big boys don't cry; this lengthy back story serves as a scene setting for what came next: the truly awful <b><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deceptive_Bends">Deceptive Bends</a></i></b> album. Although by no means a total disaster (especially when compared to the following studio album,<b><i> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Tourists">Bloody Tourists</a></i></b> which contains 'Dreadlock Holiday'. The world's most racist hit? You tell me…). Obviously Graham and Eric weren't dunces, and their ear for a hit hadn't deserted them, but somehow without the worldly cynicism of Kevin and Lol they had to rely on their own more forced sense of humour. <b><i>Deceptive Bends</i></b> contains ten of the cleverest, most slickly produced cuts, but somehow it's a joyless affair. Just compare 'I'm Not In Love' from two years previously with 'The Things You Do For Love'. or 'People In Love'. The sly irony has vanished and instead it's replaced by something utterly impressive and yet lifeless.<br />
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But worst of all was the lead track which when released in 1977 made it to number 5 in the UK charts: 'Good Morning Judge'.</div>
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For starters, there are the lyrics, concerning what Allmusic describes as 'a career criminal'. Let's have a look at the first verse: </div>
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<i>Well good morning Judge, how are you today?</i></div>
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<i>I'm in trouble, please put me away</i></div>
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<i>A pretty thing took a shine to me</i></div>
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<i>I couldn't stop her, so I let it be (repeat three times) etc.</i></div>
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So in the very first verse our 'hero' is admitting to <i>what</i> exactly? It sounds suspiciously like an 'ironic' reference to either sexual assault or under age sex to me (good grief, what was I saying about Gary Glitter?), especially when you examine the following verse's reference to a car theft ('<i>I found a car but I couldn't pay. I fell in love so I drove it away</i>').</div>
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Nice!</div>
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Riding on a jaunty beat that drives home the repeated refrain at the end of each verse, it also contains what by now had become the band's stock in trade, the doubling of lead vocal with a bass voice an octave underneath. In other words, with this, the first song of a post-split 10cc, the band have begun to parody <i>themselves</i>. If this isn't warning enough, the stand-in for a chorus ('<i>I didn't do it, i wasn't there</i>' etc…) sounds like the pair are making excuses for their own musical crimes.</div>
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And yet, at the end of each verse there's something strange happening. Eric's ultra-nimble slide guitar which had appeared in the middle section of the previous year's 'I'm Mandy, Fly Me' reappears to make a startling little interjection before droning up the fretboard and away. Clearly the chops hadn't deserted them. And, as if that wasn't frustrating enough, at the 1'31'' mark the slide returns to usher in perhaps Eric's finest moment: a solo that manages to combine Bakersfield with a call-and-response chickenwalk and blows your head away, all before the 1'58'' mark when it gives way to a bottom end riff (again, merely reiterating the band's superior earlier work) that signals a return to the laugh-free irony fest. </div>
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It's doubly annoying here because not only is it a blinding solo - perhaps one of my top five of all time despite its brevity (or maybe because of it) - but also because it resides in a completely shit song that objectifies women, trivialises crime (Rubber Bullets at least knew it was springing from a tradition that included 'Cell Block Number Nine' or 'Jailhouse Rock') and, worst of all, was catchy as hell.</div>
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To be fair, at the age of 16/17 I thought it was very clever and loved it to death. But age, wisdom and a heavy heart now lead me to cringe every time I hear it. All except for those scant 25-odd seconds of six-string heaven in the middle...</div>
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Chris Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02108337196370083674noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20885622.post-5121578588756915282014-11-22T13:30:00.002+00:002014-11-22T13:38:25.622+00:00Of monsters and men: Nightcrawler ( 2014), The Babadook (2014), Mr Turner (2014)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I recently mentioned on this blog that the year 2014 didn't really seem to have offered up too many film highlights, yet looking back I've realised that I was being my usual half-empty self, and that maybe I've been a bit hasty. For instance: 2014 did at least give us one of THE best science fiction movies of the last thirty years (<b><i><a href="http://jonesisdying.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/under-skin-2014.html">Under The Skin</a></i></b>); Lars Von Trier's <a href="http://jonesisdying.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/nymphmaniac-volumes-i-ii-2014.html"><b><i>Nymph()maniac</i></b> </a>was just great and, having viewed it again, I'd still maintain that <b><i><a href="http://jonesisdying.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/commemorating-d-day-with-scientologist.html">Edge of Tomorrow</a></i></b> is as good a slice of rip-roaring entertainment as you're likely to get in any year. Add to that the major diversion of Summer blockbuster, <b><i>Guardians of the Galaxy</i></b> (again, it bears multiple views <i>plus</i> who can resist Bradley Cooper as a talking Racoon and Vin Diesel as a monosyllabic tree?); Wes Anderson's charming <b><i>Grand Budapest Hotel</i></b> and the impending release of Paul Thomas Anderson's <b><i>Inherent Vice</i></b> as well as what will (hopefully) be a good third outing for Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen… even the final <b><i>Hobbit</i></b> movie (if it's as good as the last) looks like fun and, well… maybe I was being a tad harsh. Maybe it's just that inevitable save-it-all-until-it's-autumn/Oscar nomination time wasteland that we now have to endure all Summer which made me feel so bleak three months ago.</div>
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So, putting behind us the (inevitable) disappointment of <b><i><a href="http://jonesisdying.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/interstellar-2014.html">Nolan in Space</a></i></b>, it may not be that unusual to note that in the last week alone I've seen three great films all of which I could write reams about. <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2872718/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Nightcrawler</a></i></b> (dir: Dan Gilroy) stars a gaunt, sociopathic Jake Gyllenhall as the titular ambulance-chaser-with-a-flipcam creep, Lou Bloom, who embodies the lengths post-recessional capitalist zombies in West Coast America will go to to make their fortunes. It's not dark. It's <i>black as pitch</i> and offers no succour to those who believe in humanity's best instincts. The film's co-star, Rene Russo, as the news station chief editor who'll sell her (questionable) soul for ratings, no matter what she has to pass off as 'news' is equally impressive. Imagine <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074958/?ref_=nv_sr_2">Network</a></i></b> crossed with <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060176/?ref_=nv_sr_2"><b><i>Blow-Up</i></b> </a>with the cynicism turned up to 11. It's shocking and impressive…</div>
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Next up was <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2321549/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_1">The Babadook</a></i></b>. Directed by former actress, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0448768/?ref_=tt_ov_dr">Jennifer Kent</a>, and <a href="http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/the-babadook/32451/jennifer-kent-interview-directing-the-babadook">based on her previous short, <b><i>Monster</i></b></a>, this Australian horror movie takes a very northern european trope (a creepy children's book character which looks like a cross between an Edward Gorey drawing and Struewelpeter that invades the home. Eek!) and comes up with an inventive twist on the 'monster in the cupboard' model of horror. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0204583/?ref_=tt_ov_st">Essie Davis</a> is just incredible as the single mother dealing with her son who is displaying some worryingly disturbing behaviour in the wake of a fatherless upbringing. I won't say much more other than it's superbly stylised look at grief, dysfunction and the way in which both adults and children deal with loss and fear. It also had me experiencing something I haven't had from a horror movie in years: genuine chills up the spine. Don't go on your own (like I did).</div>
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But best of all was <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2473794/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Mr Turner</a></i></b>. Being told by critics who have the luxury to be jetted out to film festivals months in advance that a film is close to being a masterpiece is usually a real passion killer for me. So it was with Mike Leigh's latest. even if it was about my favourite painter and starred <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001758/?ref_=tt_cl_t1">Timothy Spall</a> who can pretty much do no wrong (even those Wickes advert voiceovers are somehow reassuring and he was the real cherry on the cake in another fabulous biopic: <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1226271/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_35">The Damned United</a></i></b>). After being told for nigh on six months that this would be the film of the year it became the last thing that I really wanted to see. (yes, <a href="http://www.dgmfsmedia.com/my_weblog/2014/11/family-guy-brian-the-contrarian.html">as my friend Simon would say: I'm a contrarian</a>).</div>
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Thank god, I didn't listen too hard to that inner voice. I've said it before, but <b><i>Mr Turner</i></b> confirms it: I'm a sucker for the biopic, especially the old-fashioned Hollywood episodic type that leaves you rushing for Wikipedia 'facts' by the end. I may get round to expanding on this, but friends know that one of my all-time favourite movies is Martin Scorcese's criminally underrated <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338751/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">The Aviator</a></i></b>, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes. Not only is it the film where I realised that Leo is a great actor, but for some reason everything about it makes me happy, from Cate Blanchett's pitch-perfect Katherine Hepburn to the cinematography of Robert Richardson. But really, from Fritz Lang's almost entirely fictitious <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032983/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">The Return of Frank James</a></i></b> (1940) via a visibly crumbing Montgomery Clift as <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055998/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Freud</a> </i>(1962) to Ron Howard's high-octane study of James Hunt and Niki Lauda in <b><i><a href="http://jonesisdying.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/rush-2013.html">Rush</a></i></b> - there's something about a 'real-life' story that always gets me hooked. Even though there's nothing remotely real about any of it.</div>
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And <b><i>Mr Turner</i></b>, while probably (I've been resisting reading reviews until now) being lauded as something extraordinary (which it is) is, under the skin, another film in the great tradition of condensing uncomfortable reality into a two-hour entertainment spree. For this reason Leigh serves up not only a reasonably accurate depiction of the world of academic painting in early 19th century Britain, but also teases a moving love story out of the life of a truculent man who famously had few friends.</div>
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It manages to carefully shoehorn in every famous anecdote you've ever heard about Turner (including the fictitious one about him being tied to a ship's mast during a snowstorm) and every significant painting that marked the geniuses' move towards proto-abstraction; all without too much visible artifice or contrivance. Only twice did I feel a little too spoon-fed: Once, when someone suggests that the sight of <a href="http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/joseph-mallord-william-turner-the-fighting-temeraire">HMS Temeraire</a> being towed to its grave by a steamer might make a suitable subject for Turner's canvas, and secondly when, despite his drunken adage, he turns to Ruskin's new young bride, Effie, and tells her that she will eventually find love (putting him in the role of mystic or seer).</div>
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A little like Gilles Bourdos' lesser study of a painter moving towards death, <b><i><a href="http://jonesisdying.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/summary-round-up.html">Renoir</a></i></b> (2012), the digital palette on offer today now means that directors can make their films about famous painters match the colour schemes of their masterpieces. <b><i>Mr Turner</i></b> constantly and inventively hints at Turner's use of colour in its mise-en-scene while (thankfully) keeping to a minimum any sunset profiles. </div>
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From Petworth (above) and its deer park to the Academy and his famed rivalry with Constable and even up to his eventual fall from fashion via the machinations of ludicrously pompous fan-boy Ruskin and his PreRaphaelite disciples (as well as the later Victorian zeal for genre painting), this film never misses a trick. Yet it's far from dry history, despite its slavish attention to detail (witness Pa Turner shaving a pig's head near the beginning!).</div>
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At somewhere around the halfway mark, the film - which until this point seemed far less narrative-driven and more concerned with brief snapshots of Turner's later life (which seemed ironic, considering the role that nascent photography takes later in the film) - coalesces into a far more traditional tale of JMW's burgeoning relationship with his Margate landlady. This, along with the rather generic strings and saxophone soundtrack was about the only thing I could point to as being close to disappointments. Such is Leigh's masterful hand (and, of course, I'd forgotten that he was a master at this sort of period frolic, having given us <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151568/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Topsy-Turvy</a></i></b> in 1999) and the sheer brilliance (forgive the hyperbole, but there's no other word for them) of the entire casts' performances.</div>
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Spall as JMW is as rough and graceless as contemporary accounts confirm, using dismissive grunts and porcine snorts to convey both disapproval and approbation while never failing to be less than erudite in the company of those more high-born than himself. It's a study of passion trapped inside a rotund, misshapen body but made eloquent both by the use of his hands and by a disarming grace with words. The language is a delight and even his faltering rendition of a Purcell song when duetting with a lost aristocratic love manages to convey a vast pathos, all the while sounding like a 19th century Tom Waits.</div>
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The (mis)treatment of women, represented by his abandoned mistress and progeny as well as the ill-used housekeeper, Hannah Danby (<a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0040709/?ref_=tt_cl_t3">Dorothy Atkinson</a> (above): who really should get an Oscar for best supporting actress) contrasts with his discovery of domestic bliss in the arms of Mrs Booth (Marion Bailey) Yet Leigh never sugar-coats the contradictions and injustices, instead balancing them with the mores of the day and the painter's rejection of human injustice and fascination with the rapid progress of the scientific and industrial revolutions of the age. It's the work of a director who uses his own canvas to paint a portrait of a man for whom nature could never became dull and who, beneath a grim exterior, possessed a huge heart. </div>
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Chris Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02108337196370083674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20885622.post-68371006643719379992014-11-10T16:31:00.002+00:002014-11-10T21:16:07.581+00:00Host (2014)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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A couple of weeks back <a href="http://jonesisdying.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/new-broom.html">I posted</a> about the new improved (?)
<a href="https://jonesisdying.bandcamp.com/">Bandcamp site</a> that I now have with new artwork, links and such, and also
promised I’d write when my latest project was ready for public consumption.</div>
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<b><i>Host </i></b>is a multimedia project created initially for <b><i>Auflage #1</i></b>:
an artist’s book fair hosted over two weekends at <a href="https://www.facebook.com/galeriegum?fref=ts">Galerie GUM</a>, in Bielefeld, N.
Germany and curated by <a href="http://www.gabriele-undine-meyer.de/">Gabriele Undine Meyer</a> and <a href="http://verabrueggemann.de/about-english-vera-brueggemann-illustration.html">Vera Brueggemann</a>. The original
idea was to publish a book of photographs which would come with a CD of new material,
but time constraints (and the lack of a decent printer) meant that the concept
changed. <b><i>Host</i></b> is now a limited edition of ten signed box sets containing ten
hand-written postcards (complete with neat space-themed stamps!) and a CD of
ten new tracks.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbDSc5M8hZaxhWqkd1eqA73dX4w724sCBICVu7XUqmQ5yFUrnibvifdcOCvh46WH_m0WNONdh12hJdJMvRG2S9Rq1D25eLVvn9T7Q1URIZQvQsD4N7KdKALgyrgyM9Rv9nGn-I/s1600/IMG_2086.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbDSc5M8hZaxhWqkd1eqA73dX4w724sCBICVu7XUqmQ5yFUrnibvifdcOCvh46WH_m0WNONdh12hJdJMvRG2S9Rq1D25eLVvn9T7Q1URIZQvQsD4N7KdKALgyrgyM9Rv9nGn-I/s1600/IMG_2086.jpg" height="212" width="320" /></a><br />
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The five boxes taken to Germany amazingly all sold and the few remaining
copies (three at time of writing) are now <a href="https://jonesisdying.bandcamp.com/album/host">available to buy on the Bandcamp site</a>
for £70. If all copies sell I will be creating a second edition before the end
of the year. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy5qMT_cSRRvWzBevF5QhvOijBKkgp-9V_oOhQ-UA7PW4IK0IHMuaRVT8AstGLmIg2dWJm3V5f-vNngtRC1j3IgKaJnVrPhjJVuT7BRmvoxJv-Y8Z2W3-jCeR38K7pxKnn6Q-Z/s1600/IMG_1945.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy5qMT_cSRRvWzBevF5QhvOijBKkgp-9V_oOhQ-UA7PW4IK0IHMuaRVT8AstGLmIg2dWJm3V5f-vNngtRC1j3IgKaJnVrPhjJVuT7BRmvoxJv-Y8Z2W3-jCeR38K7pxKnn6Q-Z/s1600/IMG_1945.jpg" height="212" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0OznHGytEV8OXJxuI3V7if2mRbj0Wf5qZBuuGQm_rv8BijvD4N7QYNgEeIGrmE-wxo9SpejyWFy1-HcnkiK0pkLjaZBQiQrhXB8sUHlBaZE28K6vswy0HplP4HdH6pCUF1MXa/s1600/IMG_1943.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0OznHGytEV8OXJxuI3V7if2mRbj0Wf5qZBuuGQm_rv8BijvD4N7QYNgEeIGrmE-wxo9SpejyWFy1-HcnkiK0pkLjaZBQiQrhXB8sUHlBaZE28K6vswy0HplP4HdH6pCUF1MXa/s1600/IMG_1943.jpg" height="212" width="320" /></a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2FWusmsYoHJopyKMyQvIiXq2OlyzfjkdM7UvrkU8cCom_N61IOe2PTl2NQMlVJTim7r_CPEJyDR9eTpVOHSXLXHt9c9hcebtUrCZsXF_toZG9b3o434qQCbVYI3NKDtqayRFC/s1600/IMG_2034.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2FWusmsYoHJopyKMyQvIiXq2OlyzfjkdM7UvrkU8cCom_N61IOe2PTl2NQMlVJTim7r_CPEJyDR9eTpVOHSXLXHt9c9hcebtUrCZsXF_toZG9b3o434qQCbVYI3NKDtqayRFC/s1600/IMG_2034.jpg" height="212" width="320" /></a><o:p> </o:p></div>
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The idea was a particularly neat solution for the problem of
what I could confidently bring to such a gathering of talented people, mainly
because it plays to my three main areas of interest, music, writing and
photography. Each card (the images can be found on my photography blog <b><a href="http://jonesislooking.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/host.html">here</a></b>) depicts a landscape that somehow
conveys an otherworldly quality (hence the stamps). Each short message/story
may or may not relate to the image featured: the same being true for each of
the ten pieces of music. The listener/reader can choose exactly how much
meaning they wish to imprint onto these sets. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikv7tbTS76ad_whRVo2-gR4l-UtTY4bCVkXrfm662lXjps4kveVcG1urdrno0TLJ1ba2HLBKy710Tx2y8j47x7Wvpv2HMIu8tOPQx9w2YVdoDeIqKmUSJyNcRhLoEOQ-CI6Lvs/s1600/IMG_2018.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikv7tbTS76ad_whRVo2-gR4l-UtTY4bCVkXrfm662lXjps4kveVcG1urdrno0TLJ1ba2HLBKy710Tx2y8j47x7Wvpv2HMIu8tOPQx9w2YVdoDeIqKmUSJyNcRhLoEOQ-CI6Lvs/s1600/IMG_2018.jpg" height="320" width="213" /></a><o:p> </o:p></div>
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The music is also available separately as a
digital download from the Bandcamp site.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhh4gqhHzly76di3LLsgNc51o53nRgnZTcGTR4yFsOkpiUg5x4CbW_SG03vXuFs6uT-vxs5hgchIGkTZ3KjLrUTZ5sT8-swuzj_MvyTk42b-pMOXbALErEo9nMloYCU6yqEjsz1/s1600/IMG_2000.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhh4gqhHzly76di3LLsgNc51o53nRgnZTcGTR4yFsOkpiUg5x4CbW_SG03vXuFs6uT-vxs5hgchIGkTZ3KjLrUTZ5sT8-swuzj_MvyTk42b-pMOXbALErEo9nMloYCU6yqEjsz1/s1600/IMG_2000.jpg" height="212" width="320" /></a>The project has been a considerable amount of work over the
last month or so, but I have to say I’ve been thrilled at how it seems to have
turned out exactly as I envisaged it. </div>
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Thanks to everyone who encouraged me or bought the box, and
especial thanks to Vera and Gabriele for being so generous with their time and
their opinions.</div>
<!--EndFragment--><br />
<iframestyle border:0="" height:470px="" seamless="" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=2860670976/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=0f91ff/tracklist=false/transparent=true/" width:350px=""><a href="http://jonesisdying.bandcamp.com/album/host"><iframe seamless="" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=2860670976/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/tracklist=false/artwork=small/transparent=true/" style="border: 0; height: 120px; width: 100%;"><a href="http://jonesisdying.bandcamp.com/album/host">Host by Jonesisdying</a></iframe></a></iframestyle></div>
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Chris Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02108337196370083674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20885622.post-9583142676362383592014-11-09T17:35:00.001+00:002014-11-10T11:32:02.760+00:00Interstellar (2014)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiy-n3bktFMsn2cUkB6dyBrx7ehK0_0olV-MWvFzEAvXICoM5kwx5zo8LWYLb4yFb4HsqZjiIf9pqZddFWKzPPUYpcP9p_GUPklH4KJt0QdkL2gdDpLJrphbZ0tcWBV0Ii3VaP/s1600/interstellar3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiy-n3bktFMsn2cUkB6dyBrx7ehK0_0olV-MWvFzEAvXICoM5kwx5zo8LWYLb4yFb4HsqZjiIf9pqZddFWKzPPUYpcP9p_GUPklH4KJt0QdkL2gdDpLJrphbZ0tcWBV0Ii3VaP/s1600/interstellar3.jpg" height="400" width="255" /></a></div>
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The inevitability of me writing about <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0816692/"><b><i>Interstellar</i></b> </a>is as great
as the fact that no matter what Christopher Nolan did, it would be bound to be a
disappointment. This doesn’t mean
that<b><i>
Interstellar</i></b> (Nolan’s fourth film to date beginning with the letter
‘I’) is a complete failure, far from it: it’s a never less than thrilling hunk
of eye candy supported by a suitably cosmic plotline filled with enough twists
and turns to keep any audience engaged. And while ubiquitous Matthew
McConaughey may just be on the cusp of wearing out his welcome on our screens
with his stock in trade breathless fatalism, as with his recent searing
performance as Rust Kohl in <b><i>True Detective</i></b>, he projects stoic
capability and glowering, world-weary passion unlike any other screen actor I
can think of at the moment.</div>
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But this is Christopher Nolan (along with, as usual, his
brother Jonathan) doing serious science fiction. And on a week when Kubrick’s <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">2001</i></b>
is re-released for the umpteenth time in cinemas, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Interstellar</i></b> has to be
(deservedly) judged by a higher set of values than just another blockbuster.
Nolan obviously expects it, so logic dictates that it should be criticised on
the same terms. And for that reason alone, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Interstellar</i></b> fails.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgV1YkE2Jexa_1XPu6gTZe_yf4yRhAhpAupxWt28nktiEC2DhogJxLHR08uG9aHz-Wx4nkYSO-9KHulgCfr1jw_TrgdyRdkuyC2tTBrfBzIuTUtrpzZ_2LdhzxoX_yb6qeLGd_G/s1600/Interstellar-Matthew-McConaughey-850x560.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgV1YkE2Jexa_1XPu6gTZe_yf4yRhAhpAupxWt28nktiEC2DhogJxLHR08uG9aHz-Wx4nkYSO-9KHulgCfr1jw_TrgdyRdkuyC2tTBrfBzIuTUtrpzZ_2LdhzxoX_yb6qeLGd_G/s1600/Interstellar-Matthew-McConaughey-850x560.jpg" height="237" width="400" /></a></div>
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I’ve been all worked up over this film for well over a year
now (when they started showing trailers in cinemas). The anticipation I felt
for Nolan’s epic was born of the fact that this was, reportedly, a comfortably
old-fashioned look at space travel and was flagged as a true return to the
glories of Kubrick and Clarke’s science-based vision of the human race’s
inevitable journey to other galaxies. I was thrilled about the possibility of a
film that could once more get to grips with the realistic conception of
interstellar travel, how it could work and the mysteries any adventurer would
encounter: a return to the glorious scientific optimism of my generation’s
childhood.</div>
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So what does <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Interstellar</i></b> bode for our notions of
science fiction? Ostensibly it’s a ‘hard’ sci-fi film but is weighed down by its inability to stop pointing out how clever it is while dragging along a
parallel plot regarding wispy notions about of the power of love (which, if I
take Nolan’s point correctly is comparable to gravity in its ability to
transcend space and time... or something).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
indeed, Nolan is here cheerleading for culture’s latest hot date: sexy old
science. In a future where mankind has found itself facing imminent destruction
from crop failure, corn is the only remaining plentiful food source. I imagine
that this would be a world where if someone offered you cornflakes for
breakfast you’d probably punch them in the throat (and I also admit to
wondering what such a reduced diet would do to the human digestive system). But
Nolan has no time for lily-livered eco warriors intent on being a ’caretaker
generation’ (even to the somewhat unbelievable point of being moon
landing-deniers, for fear of inflaming a human race for whom such money wasting
on space travel may seem idiotic when all energy needs to be focussed on
providing food). It’s a strangely <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boys'_Own">Boys' Own</a></i></b> notion where Matthew McConaughey,
as Cooper (or ‘Coop’), is an ex-<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA">NASA</a> test pilot who rails against his lost
chances for glory and lives vicariously through his troubled prodigy of a
daughter, Murph. In a nicely feminist touch her older brother is a pleasant
knucklehead who actually likes farming. What a rube…</div>
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No, only the truly brave and reckless will win this grim day
for mankind, so despite his attachment to his family (that significantly lacks
a mother figure) Coop’s heading for outer space to seek out new worlds etc.
after some suitably cosmic coincidences that bring him together with Michael
Caine (doing his Nolanesque weepy old man thing again) and his scientist
daughter, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0004266/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t10">Anne Hathaway</a>.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEid3JxDhh3XTVP68EWvmu5ddfomQlxxVtTsW2Puf52c0CnZAQLhpqQLDQcCd702LmN3TDCsALHyhgsKfLHTqdBa4jH0gPwRBVWnmXe3PzVf3hK0DXJy2gTRDaySvIQ3MGSIswpw/s1600/interstellar.black_.hole_.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEid3JxDhh3XTVP68EWvmu5ddfomQlxxVtTsW2Puf52c0CnZAQLhpqQLDQcCd702LmN3TDCsALHyhgsKfLHTqdBa4jH0gPwRBVWnmXe3PzVf3hK0DXJy2gTRDaySvIQ3MGSIswpw/s1600/interstellar.black_.hole_.png" height="216" width="400" /></a></div>
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The film’s second half is filled with the typical post-<b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1454468/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Gravity</a></i></b>
nuts and bolts derring-do-in-a-vacuum stuff that no epic sci-fi movie can be
without (as usual involving air locks, docking and terror in stomach-churning
spinning spaceship fashion) but it’s also here that Nolan veers a little <i>too</i> close to Kubrick’s hallowed ground.
A final encounter with the ‘hard’ maths of an event horizon/singularity makes
deliberate nods to <b><i>2001</i></b>’s finale – cue Coop’s helmet glinting with the
retro-styling of the spaceship’s computer consoles etc. as he hurtles towards his encounter
with higher powers - and maybe this is why <b><i>Interstellar</i></b> resists any genuine
sense of awe, because Nolan’s initial vision of Humanity having lost its ability to crave adventure and take
chances (‘Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt,’ Coop
says early on, while sipping a manly beer on his porch with grumpy
father-in-law, John Lithgow) also relies on the kind of Dawkinsian triumph of
science and rationalism which
will somehow explain away the ‘ghost’ from daughter Murph’s childhood. Planets
in <b><i>Interstellar</i></b>
are inert balls of rock for us to plunder, or play out our very human dramas;
the abandonment of our world is just an inevitable fact as we follow the
unfashionable notion of progress into the future. <i>Just get over it, hippies…</i></div>
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The trouble is that <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Interstellar</i></b> wants its huge galactic
cake and it also wants to eat it at the box office. Nolan’s for all his
high-mindedness is in thrall to money-making machinery that will always preclude
making a truly hard sci-fi movie in the modern age. Time and again the film’s
insistence on drawing attention to its science credibility rubs uncomfortably
against a need to inject emotion and drama thrilling enough to keep less
attentive viewers watching. These devices, when cast against just about the
biggest background you can have, can come across as hackneyed (for instance:
the race against time device in the film’s last third is both contrived and
unnecessary as it’s obvious how it will play out) and at times even cynical.
The concentration of the camera on the defrosting of one of the advance team of
scientists who preceded Coop’s mission is only there to make you supposedly
gasp at the revelation of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000354/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t22">another major star</a> late in proceedings. Meanwhile one
ten-minute section uses the incomprehensibility of the spoken lines to put the
audience on tenterhooks before the whole thing is again explained to them.
Meanwhile Coop’s inexplicably rapid promotion to mission pilot (from farmer)
seems only there so he can ask all the dumb questions that the audience may
have.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I would have far preferred
the steely pragmatism of <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">2001</i></b>’s crew as they attempt to
repair their craft, instead of a ship where everyone’s worried about their own
personal agendas. Surely there would be some kind of psychological evaluation
before you’d send people on such mind-bending voyages?</div>
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Compare this to Kubrick’s approach: he never really bothers
to explain matters until the point at which the mission has very nearly failed
and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000">HAL</a>’s dying act releases the briefing video that finally tells Dave what
he’s about to encounter. And, even then, the viewer is left to themselves to
contemplate the real meaning of the final psychedelic showdown. For Stanley the
alien’s purpose should always remain shrouded in mystery, only hinting at
wonders beyond our comprehension, but in Nolan’s universe the face of God is
not only knowable, it’s revealed to be ourselves. <b><i>Interstellar</i></b>, much like a
vast amount of Nolan’s other work, contains a monstrous hubris at its heart.</div>
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And like the fifth dimension where Coop finally sees the
workings of his own familial drama laid bare <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Interstellar</i></b> ultimately has
feeling of being a film reverse engineered for cleverness. And in the same way
that <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Inception</i></b>
started with an intriguing notion and then proceeded to explain the life out of
it, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Interstellar</i></b>
asks you to accept its <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">deus ex machina</i>
fudging until it’s all neatly explained (as with all time travel paradox
malarkey in movies) by a final reel replete with happy endings and cute
end-tying. We’re expected to sit back and marvel, not just at the cosmos, but
at the director’s big brain.</div>
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I know comparisons can be belittling, but let’s be honest,
Nolan’s not really hiding his influences that well. Beyond the inevitable
parallels with Kubrick, Hans Zimmer’s organ-heavy soundtrack injects enough of
the planetary-scale gravitas of Philip Glass and <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085809/?ref_=nv_sr_2">Koyaanisqatsi</a></i></b>, but other
reviews have also pointed to the less flattering ghost of M Night Shamalyan
that hangs over the film. It’s not helped by the setting of the first third on
the dust-drenched cornfields of Cooper’s farm. What is it with science fiction
and cornfields? From the laughably contrived <b><i>Looper</i></b> to
Shamalyan’s not-that-bad-actually <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0286106/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Signs</a></i></b>
and even in this year’s so-bad-it-was-nearly-genius <b><i>Transformers Age of Extinction</i></b>:
the vast stretches of nascent popcorn seem to some kind of touch point which
may be necessary to capture those vast mid-Western audiences. Or maybe it’s
just because Ray Bradbury stories often took place on such archetypal
farmsteads. But in the end <b><i>Interstellar
-</i></b> beyond its incredible imagery of other worlds and (with the
consultancy of physicist Kip Thorne) in conveying what a real black hole may
look like – contains nothing really original to the genre. And yet, this
doesn’t make it a bad movie in any way: Nolan’s too seasoned a director (and
rightly deserves to inhabit the same lofty realm as people such as Spielberg).</div>
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Mind you, it was also probably a bad idea to send a mission
equipped with another sci-fi space yarn cliché - two sardonic robots. Never
really given enough space (they get just about all of what counts for the
film’s ‘humorous’ lines) – they nonetheless only draw attention to the fact
that Anne Hathaway has zero screen personality. Far better is <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1408543/?ref_=tt_cl_t15">David Gyasi</a> as
the poor ‘pure’ scientist, Romilly, whose twitchy reaction to the tenuous
nature of space travel leads to one of the film’s most effective (albeit brief)
moments where the Lazarus spacecraft drifts around Saturn’s rings accompanied
by the sounds of Earth’s wildlife. In another of the film’s finest moments
Cooper and Brand (Hathaway) return from a short, disastrous trip to a planet’s
surface to find that 23 years have elapsed due to the relativistic effects of
the nearby black hole. Not only is McConaughey’s reaction to seeing his
children become middle-aged adults via archived video diary messages deeply
affecting, but Gyasi’s quiet edge of insanity brought about by the extreme
loneliness he’s suffered is beautifully observed. Luckily Coop’s daughter has grown
up to be <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1567113/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t19">Jessica Chastain</a> (already a proven natural at playing steely–faced
women with a serious job to do in the awful <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://jonesisdying.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/zero-dark-thirty-2012.html">Zero Dark Thirty</a></i></b>) who
manages superbly to convey the contradictions in someone for whom the pain of
abandonment is trumped by her own scientific curiosity (luckily for mankind).</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Popcorn for dinner... again</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Set against a truly cosmic background the petty squabbles
and cheap Hollywood gewgaws designed to ramp up the excitement seem too cheap
and extraneous. Even Steven Soderbergh’s re-tooling of Stanislaw Lem’s <b><i>Solaris</i></b>
(a book which never reaches any conclusions about the mysteries we may
ultimately encounter out there and was, thus, suitably spiritual ground for
Tarvoksky to use as well), while focusing on love managed to remain in awe of
the ineluctable grandeur of the universe and the unknowable face of God. Yet <b><i>Interstellar</i></b>
is a pretty great film. As with <b><i><a href="http://jonesisdying.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/commemorating-d-day-with-scientologist.html">Edge Of Tomorrow</a>,</i></b> earlier this year, it’s no shame to make a film that
contains not one ounce of originality and still blows you away. <b><i>Interstellar</i></b>’s
fault is that it aims, both literally and figuratively, for the stars but
forgets to leave in any sense of the mysterious. By explaining every detail of
its intricate mechanism, it’s a film that’s ultimately earthbound. File under
‘brave attempt’.</div>
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Chris Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02108337196370083674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20885622.post-88824528244496014562014-10-20T18:08:00.000+00:002014-11-23T13:57:53.916+00:00Lousy Song, Great Solo #3<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Louie Shelton</td></tr>
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I bet you thought I'd do a couple of these and then stop, but NO. I have at least another three already lined up - so let's get this rather obvious one out of the way.</div>
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To anyone over the age of 40, this particular song means one thing and one thing only: Lionel Richie pretending to be a drama teacher while his blind girlfriend makes a big clay Lionel head. Yes, it's 'Hello' - the cheesiest, most superbly, cloyingly awful schlock that Richie ever produced.</div>
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Well, apart from 'Say You, Say Me', 'Stuck On You', 'Penny Lover', 'Truly', 'You Are, My Love'… hold on a second… Lionel made <i>hundreds</i> of these monstrosities! But 'Hello' pips them all, if only because of <i>that </i>video. You want to see it now, don't you?</div>
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There… happy? </div>
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Let's get to the nub of the matter: 'Hello' is not actually the very worst thing LR's ever done. The thing is, by this point (1984) he'd been around the business for <i>years</i>. His industrial grade funk with The Commodores had proven that he had the requisite soul chops, but the gigantic success of 'Easy' and the knowledge that he had a very particular talent for the kind of records that Simon Bates used to dredge up every other day on his <b><i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Tune">Our Tune</a></i></b> slot on daytime Radio One, meant that our Lionel was destined to follow his star (and maybe his agent's advice) and literally churn out the tooth-rottingest pop imaginable. Ma Richie obviously didn't raise no idiots - the cash registers rang merrily for most of the '80s, by which time Lionel had gained his apotheosis.</div>
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And don't get me wrong - I actually <i>like</i> Lionel Richie. 'Machine Gun' and 'Brick House' are solid gold classics on any planet. And 'Hello'?: well, it's terrible, but no worse than later Stevie Wonder dross (and let's face it, his golden period was over by about 1979). No, we have the video to blame for the reputation of the song. And Lionel obviously <i>never</i> really took himself seriously. Watch this little clip and see if I'm not wrong:</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/9UiUsA_4fC0" width="480"></iframe></div>
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Point taken?</div>
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Anyhow, this doesn't get us to the main point: that 'Hello' may contain more E numbers than Sunny Delight, but it has at its heart a truly awesome guitar solo.</div>
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Popping in at around the 2'48'' mark - this jazzy little confection is the cherry on top of Lionel's sticky creation. It's in no way flashy, but it's perfect for the setting - a little supper club, a little yearning too. </div>
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The solo is played by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Shelton">Louis 'Louie' Shelton</a> - a legend among session players whose career crossed paths with just about every late '60s and early '70s MOR act that scored a hit. He also plays the rather more complex flamenco style solo that appears in the 1968 Monkees' hit 'Valleri'. It's worth revisiting that on video as well, just to watch Mike Nesmith attempt (and heroically fail) to mime the solo. You also have a levitating Davey Jones in there. Good times!</div>
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But to return to this particular lousy song - Shelton's solo exudes the kind of Grant Green-in-a-sweet-shop vibe that always got my attention, even though I knew that the place it resided was forbidden territory. It was this solo that I was looking for...</div>
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Chris Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02108337196370083674noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20885622.post-81567875456984482712014-10-20T17:00:00.000+00:002014-11-22T12:24:54.150+00:00Post-tabloid feeding frenzies and the c-word: Gone Girl and Maps to the Stars (2014)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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For some reason the will to write about films this year has been lacking. I say, 'for some reason' yet I think I'm being disingenuous for the simple fact seems to be that great films this year are in worryingly short supply. Pessimists (or optimists, depending on your point of view) would refer to the rise of the box set diet and point to the the 'wealth' of quality drama series, with top box office talent to boot, leading to a leaching of talented writers and directors, lured - in straitened financial times - by guaranteed returns, efficient factory-line production processes and the strong chance of repeat fees until they turn grey. This is no shock to anyone with a TV or a laptop.<br />
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Yet I see no reason to regard this zenith of chapterised entertainment as any kind of 'threat' to serious cinema. To me that's a little like saying that soap operas could challenge literature - the two function entirely separately in their cultural purpose, and anyone who regards TV as offering any really serious talking points is missing the point entirely. I refer to this age we inhabit a 'zenith' for a simple reason. TV, like all mass communication in capitalist frameworks can only reach a certain point before it starts to mimic itself and rely on formula. And it's way past that point as far as I can see: with new 'landmark' series being announced virtually weekly. </div>
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Sure, cinema does this too (and Hollywood is nothing, if not a knee-jerk reactionary industry mainly devoid of people able to think beyond percentages and sequels. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmCP-RM1m8M">Thanks again, George Lucas etc. etc.</a>), but like the literary novel, its medium allows for (and demands) a rigour and an economy of story-telling that is notoriously hard to pull off on a small screen. I loved <b><i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_(TV_series)">Hannibal</a></i></b>, but it's still a prequel that has strayed into one forthcoming season too many. <b><i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_(TV_series)">Elementary</a></i></b> was another re-tooling of Arthur Conan Doyle for the 21st century; <b><i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Cards_(U.S._TV_series)">House of Cards</a></i></b> was a remake of a '70s British drama… you get my point. </div>
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People who think <b><i>Game of Thrones</i></b> is high art, just because it comes from a multi-volume series and thus requires several seasons to cover or because it's a loose analogy of early medieval history, have missed the point (again). We watch these weekly instalments because we long, like children, for narrative closure. I recently watched the excellent <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2356777/">True Detective</a></i></b> with Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey being dragged through the swampy underbelly of Louisiana towards some kind of Lovecraftian non-revelatory climax: it was superbly acted, written and directed. In fact, only the awful T Bone Burnett faux-bluesyness of the opening music, and the hurried last episode spoiled the thing. And yet… by the end I realised that the whole thing worked better as scene setting for a new long-running detective series starring Marty Hart and Rust Cohl, because now we really had explored their respective back stories (and still left more to explore, for instance: Rust's Alaskan upbringing) and had established a rather fine dynamic. But also at the same time I enjoyed it because I knew <i>there were only eight episodes</i> and that I would have the requisite closure.</div>
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I admit that I never got through more than five episodes of <b><i>Breaking Bad</i></b>, not because I didn't enjoy it, admire it or even want to see more. Put it down to time constraints. And yet I'm willing to bet that no one really got a great deal of philosophical, moral or didactic grist from the series, despite the slick writing, superb acting or the thrilling portrayal of a descent into darkness. Actually, I've just realised that I lied just now: it wasn't time constraints alone that put me off completing these commitments to fiction - it was the sure and certain knowledge that I would always, in some way, be <i>let down</i>. I lost (haha) six YEARS to <b><i><a href="http://jonesisdying.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Lost">Lost</a></i></b> and look how THAT turned out. <b><i>Homeland</i></b> was, and is, when all's said and done, pure fantasy with one coruscating central performance (Claire Danes) by a character who you very quickly get sick of. What's more, its central premise: that any one of us may be the mole/spy/religious nut, was directly lifted from <b><i><a href="http://jonesisdying.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/battlestar%20galactica">Battlestar Galactica</a></i></b>. </div>
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<a href="http://jonesisdying.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/battlestar%20galactica">I used to write a lot about <b><i>BSG</i></b></a>. That was my first real experience of the joy of box-bingeing. And yet it celebrated its ten-year anniversary this week. <b><i>Homeland</i></b> appeared in 2011 - which implies that in seven short years the now-ubiquitous water cooler series has reached its tipping point. <b><i>BSG</i></b> was both an exemplary and a terrible place to start my series-watching habits, mainly because it dared to address contemporary matters both spiritual and political in a brutally serious way, and also because space opera is a far more forgiving arena for examining such weighty matters. Maybe because our expectations are lowered by the genre it succeeds far better at sneaking in the subversiveness. Nothing these days can really compete with that initial thrill of seeing something that dared to openly criticise American society on a small screen. But even re-watching <b><i>BSG</i></b> revealed the occasional hackneyed sub-plots or dodgy performances. And on a week after David Lynch and Mark Frost announced a return to <b><i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Peaks">Twin Peaks</a></i></b> - surely THE high-water mark for TV drama subversion - no one seems to have remembered how bitterly disappointing the second season was - descending into soap opera and second-rate sci fi nonsense when Lynch fell out with the network. </div>
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Lynch's recent pronouncements that now only TV has the funding and scope to produce serious high-level drama is both cowardly and incorrect. I'd argue that TV can easily subvert our expectations, but its format can only ever lead to serious compromise and ratings chasing. Let's face it, the BBC wouldn't be in such a parlous state today if it hadn't bowed down to these market forces. And no amount of HBO/Netflix/Amazon Prime shenanigans will replace the rigour of sitting still with no adverts for two hours watching a large screen. And while this insistence on the effort involved in getting off your fat arses and hauling them to the local fleapit may seem quaintly archaic or even Stalinist, I truly believe that for true film art people will always need to return to the cinema.</div>
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Which brings me onto the two films mentioned in the title: because one is an example of a director who dabbles in both genres quite happily (as Lynch used to do) but sees no paradox or even crossover. The other is an auteur who consistently derides the constraints of shrinking budgets by creating superb, low budget arthouse movies that always challenge thinking and twist perceptions of modern/future thinking.</div>
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David Fincher's remake of <b><i>House of Cards</i></b> was undeniably superb on every level. The cold-hearted dissection of the Washington snake pit moved like a well-oiled machine through the degradations of a modern, socially networked and post-tabloid world. Of course it didn't hurt that the leads (Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright) were completely believable as steely-eyed pragmatists and power game whores. But Fincher's heartland (again like Lynch) is still the big screen as <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2267998/">Gone Girl</a></i></b> proves. There's nothing in <b><i>House of Cards</i></b> doesn't appear in some form or another in his cinema, in fact it's pretty much all there in <b><i>Gone Girl</i></b>, apart from the overt political overtones. The adaptation of Gillian Flynn's novel (with apparently a slightly more ambiguous ending) is crisp despite being overlong, biting and above all: funny. Really funny, in fact. The skewering of the media frenzy surrounding an alleged disappearance of a beautiful wife from small town Missouri is filled with knowing dialogue, priceless asides and brutally accurate portrayals of the human scum that rises to the top during a circus that attends every high profile court case, from Madeleine McCann to Oscar Pistorius: this is a timely movie, just as <b><i>The Social Network</i></b> was. I have to admit I found the story of Zuckerberg slightly more compelling in its observances of the rise of social media and the bratty nerdy heart at the centre of this latest phase of 'civilisation'; but then I've had to work in that particular swamp of egotism for a few years now.</div>
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But with a razor sharp script, an outstanding collection of casting choices (not one actor seemed out of place) and denouement that refused to see so-called justice meted out, <b><i>Gone Girl</i></b> is a truly 21st century film. The meta jokes come thick and fast: even including Ben Affleck's chin (even the investigating police officer in charge of the investigation makes a joke about the bar Affleck's character owns as being a 'meta bar' because it's called The Bar). It's the kind of film you wish you'd seen with a notebook, so many are the great one-liners. I guffawed when Rosamund Pie's rube ex-boyfriend of (played by Neil Patrick Harris doing his best Niles Crane impersonation) says, of the plan to run away to a Greek Island: 'fresh octopus and scrabble!'. <b><i>Gone Girl</i></b> is not a great movie but it is a <i>very</i> good one. Fincher has his signature style, yet he falls far short of being an original (no matter what you may think of boys' 'cult' stuff like <b><i>7even</i></b> or <b><i>Fight Club</i></b>) - relying too often on established forms or other people's words. On watching Mark Gatiss' guide to European horror films last night I realised that <b><i>Gone Girl</i></b> was very similar to <b><i>Les Diaboliques</i></b>, although it cleverly avoids the final twist ending that would make it another bloody M Night Shamalyan 'why see it more than once' special.</div>
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<b style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2172584/">Maps to the Stars</a></b>, meanwhile,<b style="font-style: italic;"> </b> continues David Cronenberg's recent spate of literary adaptations although this time it's merely the script (and experiences) of Hollywood writer, Bruce Wagner (who, like Robert Pattinson here, worked as a limo driver while attempting to get his scripts filmed). Wagner may be remembered by some readers as the man behind <b><i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Palms">Wild Palms</a></i></b> - a wonky mini-series based on his comic book, which recycled a lot of Cronenberg (and Philip K Dick's) ideas.<br />
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If there's one sure sign that you've made it as an arthouse, yet mainstream auteur in Tinseltown, it's by making a film about Tinseltown. Billy Wilder, the Coens, even Lynch etc. etc. the list is almost inexhaustible. And if we're talking meta, <b><i>Maps…</i></b> is so stuffed with self-reference and cultural nods that there's barely time to fit in a scant plot about incest, madness and (what else) narcissistic self-involvement. Beginning a little like a Robert Altman movie (disparate characters whose paths gradually enmesh) - in fact it was <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105151/">The Player</a></i></b> which I was most reminded of. Many lines brought to mind that fantastic scene in Palm Springs where Greta Scacchi says to Tim Robbins: 'I thought these places only existed in movies'.</div>
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It's not just Altman who gets a nod here: there's a line about P T Anderson (and his ability to resurrect careers): and of course Julianne Moore gave another powerhouse performance in <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0175880/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Magnolia</a></i></b>, as similar tale of self-interest and incest in Los Angeles… And other actors don't get of lightly either. Robert Pattinson, a man whose career is completely worth following in my opinion, gets to reprise his limo-dwelling role from recession-fever dream, <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1480656/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_4">Cosmopolis</a></i></b>, only this time he's <i>driving</i> the limo. He still has sex in the back, however (in years to come, people may possibly refer to this period of Cronenberg's career as his 'Robert Pattinson shagging in the back of a limo' phase). Come to that, even Cronenberg references himself - as one character is bludgeoned to death with one of his own (Canadian) film awards. Talk about sneaky and snarky,eh?</div>
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It does have its flaws: Wagner's cynical dissection of John Cusak as self-help snake oil salesman, 'Dr' Stafford Weiss seems a little hypocritical when you consider that he's a pretty new age guy himself (as most cynics tend to be): <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Wagner#Mysticism">a former follower of Carlos Castaneda and a current follower of <span class="s1">some other guru</span></a><span class="s1">. Here his harsh nibbling of the hand that feeds him is also predictable as hell. But this is why Cronenberg can now be considered a master. In his hands the material takes that brilliant odd half-turn that always leaves you feeling slightly disoriented. </span> While, just like Fincher, he's fascinated by the rapid changes that shape all of our lives, he also layers it with a surrealism that's never obvious. In any Cronenberg film there's always bound to be sex, disease and decay, yet here you get the sense that Cronenberg holds out some hope that there's a universality in the suffering of these spoilt denizens of the Hollywood Hills. Evan Bird's Justin Bieber-alike brattishness masks a deep, and surprisingly mature worldliness. His final line is 'I made 13 summers, not so bad.' which sounds like the words of someone five times his age. He's a boy who grew up far too fast. His parents played to perfection by Cusack and a wonderfully under/out of control power-hungry Olivia Williams are only one step ahead of the same media feeding frenzy that consumes Ben Affleck and his family in <b><i>Gone Girl</i></b>. The ending is inevitable, yet the Greek tragedy aspect adds weight and dignity to these deeply flawed lives. </div>
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It's only Moore as fading, mother-obsessed star, Havana Segrand who doesn't escape complete damnation. Like Madonna… well, pretty much as you\d expect her to be, she's a egotistical harridan who bludgeons her way across the screen. Her end is almost welcome and while all reviews have identified her as the real kinetic force behind the film, I found myself tiring of her 'intensity'. at times. She's brilliant, of course she is, yet such an unsympathetic character diluted the film's important message about how ageing and death haunt each character, like the spectres they glimpse in the wee small hours. At one party young Weiss' two girlfriends cackle about anyone over 30 being 'menopausal'. It's a world where time is both literally and figuratively catching up with everyone. And while this is by no means Cronenberg's best moment (I've been so sick of every geeky hipster critic waxing nostalgic DC's early body horror shockers - as if he's not allowed to stray into serious cinema - while letting us know how well-versed they are in his work. Idiots) it's, as always, reliably intriguing, wonderfully performed and as creepily funny as everything else he's made in the last ten years. But then, I thought <b><i>Cosmopolis</i></b> was near-genius. Feel free to disagree. </div>
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And while I've just written a huge amount on the reasons why cinema will survive (goddamit) - I also get the feeling that what links these two films is that they dare to say 'cunt' a lot. Something you still can't get away with on TV.</div>
Chris Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02108337196370083674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20885622.post-13227008799180091382014-10-06T13:22:00.001+00:002014-11-23T13:58:27.388+00:00Lousy Song - Great Solo (#2)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This man changed history</td></tr>
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In the spirit of moving things along I thought I'd jump straight back in with another of this new occasional series highlighting terrible songs that still have some redemption in the shape of twangy goodness at their hearts.<br />
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In fact, it was while researching the <a href="http://jonesisdying.blogspot.de/2014/10/lousy-song-great-solo-1.html">previous inaugural piece</a> that I discovered the dark secret behind this particular song. Reading an<a href="http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/best-guitar-solos"> interview with Brian Setzer</a> (probably best known to my generation as the blonde leader of rockabilly one hit wonders, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stray_Cats">The Stray Cats</a>) I stumbled across the tragic back story behind one of my least favourite singles in the history of recorded music: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Around_the_Clock">'Rock Around The Clock'</a> by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Haley_%26_His_Comets">Bill Haley and his Comets</a>.<br />
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Setzer, listing his five favourite solos of all-time, chooses a selection of predictably 'jumpin'' numbers that fit right in with his (admittedly hugely enjoyable - the man really is a great musician) jive-friendly profile. I was surprised that in amongst the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Gallup">Cliff Gallup</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Cochran">Eddie Cochran</a> credibility was Haley and his Comet's workmanlike if record breaking, err... record.<br />
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I'm fully aware of the song's importance as the first real rock 'n' roll crossover hit in 1954. Written two years earlier by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_C._Freedman">Max Freedman</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_E._Myers">James Myers</a> and originally recorded, not by Haley and his combo, but by the awfully-monikered, Sunny Dae and his Knights; the song was rock's first number one hit and unquestionably opened the door to far more exciting fare from the genre's most exciting pioneers, from Elvis to Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. Yet at this distance the song sounds even more bland and <i>ersatz</i> as it did in my youth. My particular generation couldn't escape the simplistic 12-bar tedium of it, even in the '70s, as I distinctly remember it being re-released (undoubtedly as a 20 year anniversary celebration) and gaining the top spot in the UK charts all over again. Happy days.<br />
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And while one may argue that 25 million plus copies sold is proof enough that this is a great song, its anachronistic jump jive delivery and hokey lyrics seemed (to me) obviously cooked up to cash in on something that was already well underway amongst the youth of '50s America. Not only that, but Haley and co. looked like creepy uncles in their matching tartan drape coats and receding hairlines. This is remarkable because when Haley recorded the song for Decca he was still <i>under 30</i>. In fact he was only 55 when he died in 1981 (seemingly of alcoholism) - but I well remember thinking that he looked about a million when he reappeared on the TV screens in the early '70s. People really DID age faster in those days...<br />
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But I'm not here to bash poor old Bill but to deconstruct the song that, once it was featured in the following year's <b><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Jungle">Blackboard Jungle</a></i></b>, became a three-minute encapsulation of wild, untamed teens, drinking soda, ripping up cinema seats and sassing back to their moms and dads. Its attendant <a href="http://www.metrolyrics.com/rock-around-the-clock-lyrics-bill-haley.html">hour-counting lyric</a> was tailor-made for dividing the song into three verses (four hours apiece, natch), not unlike Eddie Cochrane's similarly brain-dead <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbkHhp-v1OI">'Twenty Flight Rock'</a>, wherein our hero climbs some stairs, leaving him too knackered to 'rock' (hehe). But Eddie looked, sounded and played like a proper lithe young rock 'n' roll idol. Haley's Comets deliver a strangely lumpy melange of rockabilly slap bass and big band bluster. Coming from a country background the song's instrumentation was also odd: marking some evolutionary mid-point that prefaced the stripped-down approach that set teenagers free to make their own racket. One look at film of the band taken at the period shows the line-up boasting not only an ACCORDION player, but also a pedal steel guitar. I'd argue that until the late '60s and the birth of true country rock via The Byrds and The Grateful Dead, this instrument had <i>no</i> place in the birth of youthful rebellion*.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/ZgdufzXvjqw" width="560"></iframe><br />
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And it drags terribly. Every time this came on the radio (and due to its lack of fade out) you HAD to hear all 12 hours of the dreadful thing, and it seemed like three minutes lasted an eon. Listen today to 'Great Balls of Fire' or 'Tutti Frutti' and adrenaline still stirs in these ageing veins. This was never the case for 'Rock Around The Clock'. And yet a whole previous generation, from John Lennon to David Gilmour, went on record to say how their lives were irrevocably altered by this one song. Why?<br />
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Well, obviously in 1954, the radio was ostensibly a wasteland, devoid of up-tempo thrills beyond the odd jived-up country number from the likes of Hank Williams ('Move It On Over' bears a striking resemblance to RATC), jump blues of the likes of Louis Jordan (early rock 'n' roll's true precursor), rare airings of bop jazz or really turbo-charged big band fare. So Haley and his band - scoring the first mainstream airplay for rock - must have sounded pretty radical in comparison. But only up to a point.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Danny Cedrone</td></tr>
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I'd argue that the real gravy lay in the guitar solo that transports the song into a much more dangerous realm. And here's where the story gets tragic. It turns out that this arpeggiated beauty was performed by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Cedrone">Danny Cedrone</a>, a jazz-influenced session man who led his own band (The Esquire Boys) and who played sessions for Haley, when his band were called The Saddlemen. It was this band who recorded a cover version of 'Rocket 88', a song which lays claim to being one of the first rock 'n' roll songs ever written (in 1951). As to why Cedrone's superb solo represents a tragedy? Well, a mere week after the session was recorded, the man fell down a flight of stairs and fatally broke his neck at the age of 33. <br />
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Thus one of the first (if not <i>the</i> first), most influential and best electric guitar solos in history belongs to a man who never even lived to hear it played on the radio or earn a single cent of those 25 million sales. And what's more, it's in the middle of a lousy song. Life, readers, is NOT fair at all.<br />
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*<i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">I'd also argue that the accordion has no place anywhere, but that's a different issue altogether</span></i></div>
Chris Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02108337196370083674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20885622.post-41849280875057187972014-10-05T11:53:00.002+00:002014-10-05T16:16:07.623+00:00Maybe I'm a Leo*<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The current re-acceptance/re-evaluation of the currency of progressive rock (or Prog) as a genre worthy of our renewed attention seems to have reached some kind of critical mass in the last couple of years. Magazines devoted to the subject; award ceremonies; endless deluxe reissues**; approval from indie bands who should know better; young bands with sixth form poetry names and Hipgnosis rip-off album covers; even <a href="http://cruisetotheedge.com/comingsoon.html">Caribbean <i>cruises</i></a>, ferrchrissakes... I leave it to you to decide as to whether this is a good thing, but it cannot be denied that for anyone with more than a passing knowledge of the whitest popular music of the last fifty years there have been some fucking hilarious reminders of why, way back in its heyday, it came to be regarded as something of a joke.<br />
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One of the undeniable joys of life is watching <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088258/"><b><i>This Is Spi</i></b><b><i>nal Tap</i></b></a>, but I worry that a generation introduced to its pleasures these days may think that the antics of the Tap are some kind of extreme cartoon comedy version of the life of a band on the road in the '70s, and may not realise how close to reality the events depicted are. Rob Reiner's 'rockumentary' succeeded so well on its first release because just about everything that happens to the band is ridiculously close to the preposterous self-importance with which the music business took itself all those decades ago. This affectionate (and it <i>is</i> as affectionate as much as it is thorough) document is drawn from so many actual events that it's impossible to list them here, but as one example I draw your attention to this ELP documentary: <b><i>The Manticore Special</i></b> - a 1973 TV documentary which features several segments which Reiner et al HAD to have seen when preparing <b><i>Spinal Tap</i></b>. Carl Palmer's petulance regarding the quality of his hotel pillows is quite obviously the template for Nigel Tufnel's dressing room pre-show tantrum regarding the food on the rider. You're just waiting for him to say 'I've got this, and I don't want this'.<br />
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Anyway: this is digression. The reason I bring all this up is because I came across another splendid reminder of the high seriousness with which bands marketed themselves in the mid-'70s (just prior to the commercial reckoning/come-uppance that could only result from such hubris).<br />
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Another recent release in the seeming production line recontextualising of music from the era: Steven Wilson's remix of Yes' 1975 album, <b><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relayer">Relayer</a></i></b>, is announced <a href="http://yesworld.com/2014/08/relayer-5-1-hi-res-stereo-remixed-expanded-steven-wilson-2014/">via the band's official website on a page that contains the tour programme</a> that supported the promotion of the album. And it makes for superbly funny reading. <br />
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The tour programme begins with a reasonable biography of the band up until that point: from their beginnings as a post-psych bunch of ambitious chancers raised on Beatlesque consciousness-expansion and Simon and Garfunkel (a duo who seem to have been airbrushed from history with regards to their monumental influence on all popular music at the close of the '60s) to their then-zenith as stadium-stuffers.<br />
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It's at this point that the chuckles begin. A member-by-member bio consisting of a questionnaire-style series of answers to things such as 'musical influences', 'instruments played' etc. all seem fairly straight forward (and it's worth remembering that this was the standard format for most bands' tour programmes at the time - I have a very similar one somewhere in which Be Bop Deluxe answer very similar questions). But closer inspection reveals the level of contradiction and sheer nonsense that surrounded what was mainly a bunch of superannuated, self-taught 'musicians' (apart from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Moraz">Patrick Moraz</a>: it seems that it was always the keyboards which demanded a more rigorous educational standard. No wonder they're always the snooty ones).<br />
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Starting with 'Maestro' <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Anderson">Jon Anderson</a> (as Bill Bruford once referred to him), we see a fairly unpretentious set of facts. A Scorpio from Accrington, this northern soul regards his influences as 'anything good and moving.' Fair enough, but then take a look at his 'Most influential LP's' (the apostrophe is theirs) - it's the usual bunch: Beatles; Simon and Garfunkel, Mahavishnu Orchestra (<b><i>Relayer</i></b>, of course, being the most jazz rock of all the band's albums) etc. until right at the end there's a nod to the obligatory classical stuff. To whit: '... <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">and any of Sibelius, Stravinsky, Mozart, Ilhan Mimaroglu'</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">Woah... hold on there, </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14.4444446563721px; line-height: 20px;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%B0lhan_Mimaro%C4%9Flu">Ilhan Mimaroglu</a>?!? Turkish avant garde electronica? Well, he was a house producer for Atlantic records at the time...</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14.4444446563721px; line-height: 20px;">To continue; guitarist, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Howe_(musician)">Steve Howe</a>, is also self-taught (and an Aries), his songwriting influences are 'personal experiences'. Deep stuff. But as I say, it's the details which draw you in. One of his favourite 'songwriters' is John Dowland (1563-1626) (note the need to include the DATES), after which he lists not only Verdi's <b><i>Four Seasons</i></b> as his favourite album, but notes the CATALOGUE NUMBER. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14.4444446563721px; line-height: 20px;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Squire">Chris Squire</a>, appropriately for someone nicknamed 'The Fish' is a Pisces, and to be fair doesn't seem to be too up himself (which is possibly ironic as he's the most upper middle class of the lot). Meanwhile Gemini drummer, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_White_(Yes_drummer)">Alan White</a> is doing ok until you find out that his '</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">Songwriting inspiration' is 'The World' and his </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">'Most influential LP' 'The big disc in the sky.' Good grief...</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">As if the astrological guff (which, of course, reappear in <b><i>Spinal Tap</i></b> in the form of David St Hubbins' girlfriend, Janine) and sense of self-importance conveyed here weren't enough, we then (after a run-down of the stage crew) get treated to an 'essay' by friend of the band, Donald Lemkuhl entitled (and I wish I was making this up): </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;"><b><i>When life speaks, its voice is music. Listen.</i></b></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">Lemkuhl was also a pal of the band's in-house designer at the time, <a href="http://jonesisdying.blogspot.de/2013/04/roger-dean-interview-2002.html">Roger Dean</a> (who along with his brother Martyn, designed the stage sets for this tour and which gets parodied, again in <b><i>Spinal Tap</i></b>, as the 'pods' in which bassist, Derek Smalls, gets trapped). He specialised in this kind of airy-fairy cosmic-speak, writing not only the the introduction to Dean's own first book, <b><i>Views</i></b>, but also 'composing' the poem which appeared on Relayer's cover as well as on the promotional advert. Another fine example of those far-off moments when ambition outstripped self-awareness. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">Lemkuhl's prose in the tour program featured here features gems such as:</span><br />
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<i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">'</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">It is the voice life in you. All music is your music. All music creates you and re-creates you. And you create music. Through music, you are creator and created in One.'</span></i><br />
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<i>So, listen. The air is full of music. You hear the music, now, for you are the music. And the music is you.'</i></div>
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Thanks, Donald. No really, <i>thanks</i>.</div>
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So, kids, your parents or elderly relatives may at some point insist that you watch Spinal Tap, and you may come away wondering why such a silly film is in any way important. </div>
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Remember: it's not a comedy, it's a LESSON. We can only avoid this kind of thing by learning our history.</div>
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Don't say I didn't warn you...</div>
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<span style="font-size: 14px;"><b>*</b></span><i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">I'm a Virgo btw</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14px;"><b>**</b></span><i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">At some point I may get around to writing a serious piece on why I decry these endless 5.1/Blu-ray blah blah remixes. In short: I see no point in essentially reinventing (and radically re-imagining) their basic structure of works which, for their time, were noted as 'state of the art' productions - meaning that anyone discovering them for the first time now will hear something which really bears no relation to the original music as exoperienced by the audience back then. It seems a bit like reading a Dicken novel in 2014, re-written by J K Rowling.</span></i></div>
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Chris Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02108337196370083674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20885622.post-60885435560682995172014-10-05T10:09:00.000+00:002014-10-05T10:13:01.905+00:00Boom Logistics - Fifth (An Interim Offering) - work in progress<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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A short note on the latest work from my good friend Simon Hopkins who manages the uncanny act of alchemy (or more accurately spinning gold from of the straw of my own playing) in his ongoing Boom Logistics/Abyssal Labs projects. The latest instalment under construction of <a href="http://simonphopkins.typepad.com/my_weblog/2014/10/boom-logistics-fifth-an-interim-offering-work-in-progress.html">Boom Logistics - </a><b><i><a href="http://simonphopkins.typepad.com/my_weblog/2014/10/boom-logistics-fifth-an-interim-offering-work-in-progress.html">Fifth (An Interim Offering) - work in progress</a> </i></b>- is the second full-length album and, as usual, is constructed from disparate sessions recorded at Simon’s Brighton home. As well as my noodling, there’s the usual suspects, Nick Reynolds and Peter Marsh and - making a huge difference to the end results imho - the piano of mutual pal, Steve Morgan. This gives a lot of the <i>sturm und drang</i> of Simon’s dark ambient <i>modus operandi</i> a very German vibe, in places approaching the condition of Cluster. High praise indeed…</div>
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Anyway - he’s put the new work into a handy Youtube playlist <a href="http://youtu.be/51EFTwXUU-E?list=PLsdLdJV8J-ADC3y0b57aM6XJuCzN0p-p8">which you can enjoy here</a>.</div>
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It was an honour to take part, as always…</div>
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Chris Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02108337196370083674noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20885622.post-35412888332010261292014-10-01T21:20:00.000+00:002014-11-23T13:58:54.546+00:00Lousy Song - Great Solo (#1)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Yes, you read that right: a new series of pieces will unfold in front of your very eyes and yes, you’ve already guessed it, it’s about songs that for multitudinous reasons fail as decent examples of the form and yet hide within them some glimpse - no matter how tiny - of six-stringed greatness. The idea came to me while listening to Peter Frampton’s <b><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frampton_Comes_Alive!">Comes Alive!</a></i></b> late one night (I <i>KNOW</i>) - now there’s a man whose entire career consisted of lame AOR lifted (barely) by a genuine talent for axe wrangling. But we’ll get to the blonde bombshell at some later date. Maybe never… Who cares?</div>
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For now, after much prevarication, I’ve decided to kick off this occasional series with a piece on one of the world’s most enigmatic (in the true sense of the word) guitarists - yes, the Black Knight himself (hoho): <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritchie_Blackmore">Ritchie Blackmore</a>. </div>
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If I’m completely honest, this opening piece for what I hope will be a long and fruitful series of rants, complaints and miserably ill-informed put-downs, reveals one fact: that I’ve been fascinated by Blackmore for <i>years</i>. A few days of immersion in the man’s work reveals a character for whom the word ‘contradictory’ seems to have been invented. Every single quote about him, every single utterance from his own mouth seems to serve merely to either make you despise him or wonder if his entire career has been one of the practical jokes for which he’s renowned. For starters, check out this video interview with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronnie_James_Dio">Ronnie James Dio</a> - the original singer with Rainbow whose diminutive sword and sorcery <i>schtick</i> made that band such a template for a generation of reality-escaping rockers. It’s quite something: from the allegations of spitting at fans to the fact that he’s a ‘cruel, cruel’ man (and what exactly DID he do to keyboardist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Carey">Tony Carey</a>? One dreads to think). </div>
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For those not versed in these things, and I’m assuming most of you have stopped reading by now: another FABULOUS example of how perverse Blackmore can be is the fact that he fired Dio because he was sick of his penchant for the fantasy medievalism that peppered Rainbow’s early classics such as ‘Sixteenth Century Greensleeves’ with lyrical guff about ‘crossbows in the firelight’. This from a man who nowadays tours German castles dressed in faux-minstrel garb with the Unicorn-scaring <a href="http://www.blackmoresnight.com/">Blackmore’s Night</a>! One might even think that Ronnie invented his famous ‘devil horns’ hand sign as a mark of respect for Blackmore.</div>
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To be clear, I have no love for most of the music with which Blackmore’s been associated (more of which, later) but cannot in all honesty deny both his influence and sheer skill. </div>
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As a teenager in the mid-‘70s I was beset on all sides by friends who espoused the genius of the man in black and his prowess on a Stratocaster. And just as with <a href="http://jonesisdying.blogspot.de/2013/03/the-history-of-eagles-2013.html">The Eagles</a> and Black Sabbath (both of whom I now ‘get’ at least, if not love, exactly) Purple were, for years, a total mystery. Compared to the pseudo-Tolkienesque bullshit blues rock of Led Zeppelin; the technical wizardry and seeming erudition of progressive acts such as Yes, Genesis or even ELP; the sexual sophistication of David Bowie etc. etc. DP seemed workaday, emptily posturing and with no seeming regard for the awfulness of their album covers (a big point against any band when I was 14 or 15). Certainly, the artwork for <b><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Purple_in_Rock">In Rock</a></i></b> and <b><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fireball_(album)">Fireball</a></i></b> still make me snigger uncontrollably.<br />
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Listening today I don’t really find much to change that viewpoint. Ian Gillan’s vocals/screeches still grate (as much as they seemingly did with Ritchie himself) and his lyrics beggar belief in their half-assery: stuffed with cliche and crass innuendo. Just try deconstructing the ‘poetry’ of their sensitive epic, ‘Child In Time’. Go on, <i><a href="http://www.lyricsfreak.com/d/deep+purple/child+in+time_20038756.html">try</a>.</i> Meanwhile, even when viewed with a post-<b><i>Spinal Tap</i></b> eye for irony, something as hateful as ‘Strange Kind of Woman’ (about a hooker that was known to the band and imaginatively originally entitled ‘Prostitute’) seems unacceptable. Actually, this is odd as Gillan in subsequent interviews seems charming, self-effacing and quite an intelligent guy. His words in this interview about how the rest of Purple breathed a collective sigh of relief when they finally were rid of the tyrant guitarist seem to be genuinely heartfelt:</div>
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Elsewhere Jon Lord’s heavy-handed Hammond, obviously based on the gruesome template of proto-heavy acts such as (urgh) Vanilla Fudge lend the band a solidity which, when welded to the exciting drive of rhythm section, Ian Paice and Roger Glover, is invigorating; but when exposed in his solos seems clodhopping in the extreme. </div>
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And yet, watching a recent documentary on BBC Four about the ‘legendary’ <b><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_Japan_(Deep_Purple_album)">Made in Japan</a></i></b> double live album (a tedious fixture on every turntable at every grim teenage party for a huge part of my adolescence) I was struck at how effective their brand of what is now termed ‘jam rock’ was in the live arena. Footage of them tearing through ‘Highway Star’ - another contender for most inept lyrics of the century, right there - was exhilarating. Paice’s drums are astoundingly deft and Ritchie’s solo during the last third displays all of his plus points and several minus ones as well. Returning to the band’s early ‘70s work I was amazed at how much of that nonsense had remained in my head. And how, well, enjoyable, his playing seemed. </div>
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One thing IS clear: that Ritchie always knew that he was - to every band he was <i>ever</i> in - their meal ticket and that he didn’t really care who he hurt while exploiting his position of power. Ian Gillan’s remarks about how psychologically damaging it was for Jon Lord <i>et al</i> to endure Blackmore’s petty tirades and petulant walk-outs during their ill-fated reunion of 1993 is well backed up by this video of their performance of ‘Highway Star’ during their last gig as the mark II line-up. Watch as Ritchie doesn’t even bother to come on stage until his solo, leaving the remaining four to brazen it out for the first five minutes. And then when he does appear he showboats like an egomaniac before throwing a glass of water over a cameraman. Classy… </div>
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This performance echoes his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAUJoZvj0qE">famous tantrum</a> at the 1974 California Jam festival where he does a camp jig on his guitar and smashes a TV camera with the self- same Fender. Me and my good friend Peter Marsh always enjoyed watching this ‘performance’ late at night after refreshments. Allegedly he was annoyed at the TV producer, not the cameraman as he explains in (possibly) <a href="http://www.theuncool.com/journalism/rs184-ritchie-blackmore/">the frankest interview he ever did with Cameron Crowe</a>. The whole thing’s worth reading because you get a tiny glimpse into Ritchie’s rather odd and (again) contradictory world view (‘fuck it, I’m having a great time as a moody bastard’ he says, after flinging a steak across a restaurant<span class="s1">)</span>. He doesn’t like Jimmy Page’s showmanship, and yet he knows he can blow others off stage due to the showmanship he learned from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screaming_Lord_Sutch">Screaming Lord Sutch</a> for whom he worked in the mid-‘60s (‘I could be very sexy onstage’<span class="s1">)</span>. </div>
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It was this early career as Page’s rival in London session circles (also working for Joe Meek) that taught young Blackmore his chops and by 1968 he was ready to conquer the world. Research into sundry interviews and articles reveals that his ego was already fully-formed by this point as well. He rated Hendrix’s stagecraft but didn’t really rate him as a guitarist. His distaste is also dished out to Pete Townshend (‘overrated’) as well as the aforementioned Page. However he respects and loves Jeff Beck, if only for his four-fingered fretting technique. Indeed, the man’s own technique by the late ‘60s was in that bracket marked ‘scary’. With the pre-Gillan and Glover (and Stratocaster!) line up of Purple mark 1 you realise that, if he’d have given two hoots for it, he could have very possibly been a great jazz guitarist.</div>
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But no, for Ritchie it was the RIFF that beckoned, and here we come to the crux of the matter. His riffs are STUNNING. His solos are tasty too, but between 1970 and 1978 he effortlessly helped lay the ground rules for hard/heavy rock while inadvertently (and unfortunately) also paving the way for what we now know as ‘shredding.’ That solo on ‘Highway Star’ basically contains the seed for every tedious guitar solo that Yngwie Malmsteen and his hideous ilk have churned out ever since. Yeah, thanks for THAT, Ritchie…</div>
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Never mind, all that, the fact remains that Blackmore’s use of a Strat and a Marshall amp, eschewing the central pick-up for a more honest throaty roar, mixed with fluid arpeggios, still can set fire to your ears, after all these years. Claiming to love classical music more than most of his contemporary acts led to some hilariously misguided attempts to ‘class up’ his flash, but one listen to the unbelievably catchy riffage of ‘Never Before’ on <b><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Head_(album)">Machine Head</a></i></b> or ‘No, No, No’ or ‘’Demon’s Eye’ on <b><i>Fireball</i></b> are enough for me to cement his reputation as a guitarist, if not his standing as a decent chap. Here he is providing the only thrills in the overlong ‘No, No, No’ live on German TV. Also note the fact that he appears to be having fun. This was not to last…</div>
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What’s more surprising, for a man who has a reputation for being a ruthless taskmaster and all-round venal bastard, is that he’s always been honest about his appropriation of other people’s work as his own. For instance ‘Black Night’’s riff is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWh_EVM3L-4">lifted wholesale from Ricky Nelson’s ‘Summertime’</a> while the dazzling work on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnIgXtE4K5U&list=PLR-uBiaq_AC0wuwfKEB2N5HMGQNxAY1fh&index=1">‘Lazy' from <b><i>Machine Head</i></b></a> is basically a supercharged version of<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGJSKFZWM8M"> Eric Clapton’s interpretation of Buddy Guy’s ‘Steppin’ Out’</a>. The difference between him and the ‘credible’ work of Jimmy page, is that he was entirely open about his pilfering, to the point where he even ripped off JP’s own ‘Kashmir’ on Rainbow’s <a href="http://open.spotify.com/track/1ra9odBzXcLqb5EsmsYsxm">‘Stargazer’</a>. How’s that for cheek? It kinda makes me respect him a little bit more…</div>
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Back when the album that ‘Stargazer’ came from - <b><i>Rainbow Rising</i></b> (now THERE’S a proper album cover, at last!) - I was in thrall to punk and was in danger of missing out on my West Midland heritage of rock in its loudest incarnation.</div>
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Yet my childhood pals in Coventry, siblings Brian and Cathy Gould were patient enough to put up with my youthful snobbery and still let me come along to their beloved hard rock gigs, two of which were, indeed the aforementioned Sabs (supported by Van Halen, believe it or not) and Blackmore with Rainbow. (This raises another divergent point: can you remember when music was important enough to help you actually <i>choose</i> your friends? I spit on modern tolerance and pan-acceptance. I long for the days when an opinion was both acceptable and expected.) </div>
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To be honest, that show at Stafford Bingley Hall will live on in my memory forever. Never had I seen something so preposterous (Cozy Powell’s drum solo on a hydraulic ramp that lifted him over the crowd, coupled with Ritchie’s entirely obvious change of a beautiful vintage sunburst guitar for another cheaper WHITE model before he smashed it into oblivion) and yet so, well… <i>life-enhancing</i>. As far as I could tell as a callow 17-year-old; <i>no one</i> in that hall took <i>any</i> of it seriously, and it felt liberating. This is possibly why metal remains the most enduring of all genres: it allows for pomp, stupidity, visceral thrills and musical mastery of the chosen instrument while never forgetting to laugh at itself. Long live rock ’n’ roll, indeed.</div>
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But you’ll notice that I’ve yet to choose the one song from hundreds of albums-worth of grim song craft that lives up to this article’s title. Which to choose? Accepting that his work with early Rainbow verged on the tasteful, if only because Ronnie James Dio really could sing well, and his lyrics, while hilarious at least make <i>sense</i>, it has to be one from Blackmore’s previous band: Deep Purple. And the one I choose is, surprisingly, a number that, live, usually showcased Ian Paice’s drum solo: ‘The Mule’.</div>
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The studio version of this track is subsequently half the length of its live compadre from <b><i>Made In Japan</i></b>, and it stinks. Allegedly about ‘The Devil’ according to Gillan, the murky lyrics live up to his best/worst. It even begins with a riff (doubled up with Lord on the organ) that’s below par for Blackmore. These riffs were often the only thing that the band had to start a song when they entered the studio, and it makes way for some desultory singing from Gillan that, at least, doesn’t resort to ‘the screech’. Underlining the paucity of ideas here, Lord then reappears to make some strangely retro-sounding (for 1971) psychedelic organ. There’s really nothing to see here. And then… at the 2’41’’ mark in storms Ritchie with a stuttering marvel of a solo, backed by Paice's clattering funky drums. It’s hair-raising stuff which morphs into some space wailing that decides to get all modal at its finale, a mere minute later, and it’s back into that riff again. Blackmore’s tone, attack and aggression are everything that a rock solo should be, and it bears the mark of the spontaneity that he was renowned for: hating to spend time in the studio at that or at any time, and never writing or preparing his solos. </div>
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It still stands as one of the most astounding minutes in rock history, and it’s there buried in one truly lousy song! </div>
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And what about Ritchie today? He does seem to have mellowed. Anyone who saw the <b><i>Made In Japan </i></b>doc will have seen him crack a genuine joke about how he came up with the original riff for ‘Smoke On The Water’ as a baroque lute piece, but the band preferred the more basic version. It was… odd, but then for any outsider Ritchie will always be an enigma. Perhaps this interview (by some German teenager) conducted with his partner, Candice Night, goes some way to shedding light on where he’s at these days. Certainly, the profundity of his Bob Dylan anecdote will live with me for a while. The wig’s still ridiculous, though.</div>
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Anyway, I think we’re off to a fine start. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions for additions to the series, drop a line below. And remember: you’re <i>all</i> the man!*</div>
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<i>*an obscure Ronnie James Dio joke, sorry</i></div>
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Chris Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02108337196370083674noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20885622.post-46365014234520453552014-09-29T11:56:00.001+00:002014-11-10T21:49:24.355+00:00Decked<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I've been running a Wordpress blog simultaneously to this one: primarily for the purposes of writing about more personal growth/spirituality/meditation blah, etc. but have decided that it's all a bit surplus to my already time-hungry social media requirements. And besides: who really cares? But while thinking of the ways to exit gracefully I realised that my interest in Jodorowsky and his use of the Tarot (his <b><i><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Way-Tarot-Spiritual-Teacher-Cards/dp/1594772630">Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards</a></i></b> is possibly the ONLY book anyone ever needs on the topic, if only for the fact that he uses the deck as a psychoanalytic tool and debunks any foolish notions of 'fortune telling' or 'prophecy' connected to this ancient game/system) had resulted in some rather interesting images, as I tried to contextualise the card of the day into my day-to-day activities. And as I was experimenting with Pinterest's 'widget' options for a client I thought I'd share this lot with you.<br />
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My favourite is the one with the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mettwurst">Mettwurst</a>.<br />
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<a data-pin-board-width="400" data-pin-do="embedBoard" data-pin-scale-height="200" data-pin-scale-width="80" href="http://www.pinterest.com/jonesisdying/tarot-shots/">Follow Chris's board Tarot shots on Pinterest.</a><!-- Please call pinit.js only once per page --><script async="" src="//assets.pinterest.com/js/pinit.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div>
Chris Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02108337196370083674noreply@blogger.com0