May 2013
8 posts
Funny stone…
The best thing about working in a library is the people you meet, and indeed the friends you make. Of course it’s a small minority that you actually have enough in common with to think of them as friends, but one such, on discovering that I hadn’t read Keith Richards’ autobiography, immediately went home and got it so he could lend it to me. The usual arrangement is that we...
Where is everyone?
Sometimes gigs are crackling with energy with virtually no audience; it depends on the bands. Last night at the North Street Tavern in Sudbury there were times when I was the only audience member not playing in one of the bands, but it really didn’t matter. A few more people drifted in (and I ran into a whole bunch of people I wasn’t expecting to see, which was really nice, even...
My music on heavy rotation up to May 18
Over the past twenty-sixth of a year I’ve listening obsessively to the following records:
Slayer - ‘Reign In Blood’ On the one hand this is a manic frenzy of speed and volume, the perfect union of the punk and metal aesthetics; on the other hand it is crammed full of strange, angular riffs, abstract solos and otherworldly dissonances, courtesy of Jeff Hanneman who died a...
Flesh made word
I’ve just finished reading King Rat by China Miéville; as with all of Miéville’s novels I began reading at a measured pace, and ended up devouring it in huge gluttonous mouthfuls that took the place of doing any work of my own… I began reading Miéville’s work with the ‘Bas Lag’ trilogy, as part of my general effort to familiarise myself with what’s been...
Drawing, writing, and other cosmic life and death...
This is a really extraordinary book, this Habibi malarkey; I don’t really know where to start talking about it. Craig Thompson’s previous big fat famous comic book, Blankets, was a beautiful and accomplished piece of work, and as it’s pretty autobiographical in nature, it’s the source of most of my information about the author/artist; it gives a hint, through its...
Spread the word
I came across An Anarchist FAQ online, I forget exactly how. It’s what it says it is, a general guide to anarchism, organised according to the commonly asked questions on the subject, e.g. ‘isn’t that a load of old tosh?’ and ‘anarchists, aren’t they the ones that wear black and throw bombs?’. Well, those aren’t actual examples, since the project...
My music on heavy rotation up to May 4
For the last 336 hours, I have been listening repeatedly to the following sounds:
Ayria - ‘Flicker’ Uncomplicated futurepop, a combination of bouncy EBM/electro-industrial dance beats and Jennifer Parkin’s vocals, which set out to be a bit dark and badass, but just come out cute. It’s a paler shade of cyber-goth music, very energetic, and accompanied by a full album of...
Chips and beer and vitreous enamels
Dave Charleston continues his campaign to make the village of Stoke-by-Nayland into the cultural hub of rural South Suffolk, with an exhibition of prints and enamels by the excellent Dale Devereux Barker, at the tiny but exciting Open Road Bookshop. The work has been up for a week, but the opening was last night. Although I was quickly inebriated enough to loudly ridicule it and its author in...
April 2013
9 posts
Unfeasibly cheap at the price
Saturday night, out at a gig. This is hardly a commonplace occurrence lately, and I had more reason than usual to stay in, as a very dear friend was visiting for the weekend and it would have been nice to spend a bit more time with her at home. However, not only were three most excellent bands of the local noisy bastard fraternity performing, the mightyThumpermonkey were making a rare visit...
My music on heavy rotation up to April 20
The last two weeks have been Krautrock fortnight.
Can - ‘Tago Mago’ One of the most experimental and avant-garde recordings among the definitive texts of Krautrock. This record is the first of Can’s albums to feature Damo Suzuki on vocals, and has been hugely influential, as one of the first examples of work within the rock/pop compass to transcend the American influence, and...
An unlicensed, underground enterprise that...
Between each book I read, I read a magazine. I read several, some short some long, some technical and some packed full of entertainment. I don’t normally bother to make a note of what I read; I write something about every book I read, every record I listen to, every film I watch, every exhibition I go to, but my magazine consumption goes largely unremarked. I thought I’d like to...
Fun, clever and revolting
Although I was an avid fan of The League Of Gentlemen’s TV series as it aired, I’ve never watched it since, and I never saw this movie, which came out in 2005. I watched it yesterday with spouse (also a fan of the TV series) and spawn (huge comedy geek, but not familiar with the TV series). Spouse was unimpressed by its metafictionality, and considered the appearance of the...
The witch is dead; long live the monetarist...
Margaret Thatcher died today. That’s a circle completed for me; my first awareness of politics (other than a giant head wobbling atop a Ted Heath impersonator during a demonstration outside 10 Downing Street after the Tories lost the first general election of 1974) was of the general election campaign that brought Thatcher to power. Until I was nearly twenty years old, politics was a...
Brilliant contemporary Shakespeare
We randomly turned on the telly last night just before the start of Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus. I’d never heard of the film, as I don’t pay much attention to the cinema, but I was intrigued by the description, to whit, that it was staged in a milieu based on the Balkan conflict. Shakespeare in contemporary costume is often very effective, so I began watching with high hopes....
Moral horror and aesthetic beauty
I don’t generally read (or watch) much horror, mainly because it doesn’t horrify me. For me, the night is dark and full of the same shit as the day, only a bit harder to see. I have definitely loved some horror movies, but usually for reasons other than their purportedly horrifying nature (usually the humour!). The kind of horror that can get hold of me is the stuff that postulates...
My music on heavy rotation up to April 6
Fourteen days of intensive listening, largely devoted to:
The Scaramanga Six - ‘Cabin Fever’ Theatrical, extravagant and frankly mental songs, performed with hard-hitting rock chutzpah and intensity. One foot in the camp of musical sophistication, and the other in the camp of noisy aural aggression, this is some of the most intelligent and exciting rock music you’ll...
Playing at contingency…
I’ve made at least two attempts to watch this movie, and taken the DVD back to the library, box un-opened. My life just doesn’t have time for watching movies in it too often (since I usually start writing again as soon as I’ve eaten supper). However, I’ve been taking things easy for the last week or two, so we rented this on iTunes and gave it a go. I won’t...
March 2013
7 posts
Good, empty fun
Headhunters is a very entertaining, well-made thriller, about a top corporate headhunter whose wife is so expensive that he has a parallel career as an art thief in order to keep her in galleries and other toys. He runs into some trouble with a potential client, suspects infidelity, steals a painting, gets hunted by a psychopathic and well-trained killer… It has a satisfyingly intricate plot...
A tale of one good author
What have I read of Bryan Talbot’s? Well, there’s The Adventures Of Luther Arkwright, an era-hopping, psychedelic, parallel worlds adventure; there’s Brainstorm, an underground comic following the adventures of a hippy alchemist named Chester P. Hackenbush; and although I haven’t read them yet, there’s a sequel to Arkwright, and there’s Grandville, a furry...
The time is now.
The Coming Insurrection, written for good and obvious reasons behind a screen of anonymity and credited to The Invisible Committee, is a brief but incisive essay, proceeding from a critique of the state to a plan of action for those who would like to bring about its end. The book has been used as evidence in the persecution of the Tarnac Nine, a group of French anarchists accused of terrorism...
My music on heavy rotation up to March 23
The past fortnight has been largely coloured by the following soundtrack:
Frank Zappa - ‘Hot Rats’ This is just one of those albums; often imitated, but never surpassed, it sounds as fresh as ever. It’s one of the few true jazz-rock fusions, produced by someone with an insider’s understanding of both styles, and it is just pure, unadulterated brilliance from start to...
A small digestible codex
This memoir of a Hebridean childhood between the wars was sent to us (collective pronoun indicating spouse and self) by one of the very lovely friends who have accommodated us (collective pronoun indicating spouse, spawn and self) in Glasgow for our summer holiday the past couple of years. I’d never heard of Crowdie and Cream or its author, but now that I’ve read it, Finlay J....
My music on heavy rotation up to March 9
Mainstays of my listening for the past two weeks have been the following albums:
Bill Evans Trio - ‘Sunday At The Village Vanguard’ An absolutely sublime set of performances from one of the most astonishing piano trios in the history of jazz. Dazzling, lyrical bass virtuosity (recorded only ten days before Scott LaFaro’s untimely death), shaded by the piano’s most...
A promethean fantasia…
I didn’t know anything much about this series before I started reading it; Alan Moore’s writing credit was enough of recommendation for me to buy all five volumes and read them through as a single book. I guess I had some vague awareness that it featured a heroic female protagonist and some mythic themes. Well that (as you might imagine given Moore’s track record) ain’t...
February 2013
9 posts
She surprises…
The thing I like about speculative fiction is that it shows you what a writer can do with their imagination when the chips are down; historical fiction presents a similar set of challenges, the more so the more distant the era in which it is set. The eighteenth century is certainly distant enough to weed out the fakers. The real feat of the imagination that’s required to make a convincing...
My music on heavy rotation up to February 23
For the past fourteen days I have immersed myself in the long loud abrasions of classic drone metal:
Earth - ‘Earth 2’ This is the founding text of drone metal, and it sets the paradigm that still prevails. The music is essentially ambient, as although there is some rhythmic figuration, its primary material is the continuous tone; unlike ambient music however, this is intended to be...
Partial protest
Dorian Lynskey’s 33 Revolutions Per Minute is a history of protest songs, told through the chronological examination of thirty-three examples of the genre, starting with Woodie Guthrie, and ending in the noughties with the likes of Green Day. Each song is examined in context, and although the earlier chapters focus largely on the song at their centre and the artist who made it famous,...
Well written, but that's nothing new
This is the latest (and purportedly penultimate) book in the Temeraire series, which inserts dragons into an early nineteenth century earth similar to our own in most other particulars. I’ve said things about all the earlier volumes in the series, so I won’t go over the top here, except to say that Crucible Of Gold is better than the previous book, and that it maintains the...
My music on heavy rotation up to February 9
This fortnight I have mostly been wearing…
Alestorm - ‘Black Sails At Midnight’ This is hilarious stuff, but also musically expert, blending folk and sea-shanties with extreme metal techniques, for that most awesome of modern genres, pirate metal. What could be better? Well, ninja metal, obviously, but until that comes along…
Various Artists - ‘Below The Radar: Telephone...
The Lives Of Others
The Lives Of Others was a random loan from a workmate of spouse. I’d never heard of it, nor had she; we started watching it, realised after a couple of scenes that the German dialogue wasn’t just for dramatic effect, and started again with the subtitles on. It’s bloody brilliant. It’s a story about intellectual and artistic life under the communist regime in East...
Family Shenanigans
Last night at the Open Road Bookshop was Pym Night! The ubiquitous Pym family was out in force and entertaining the troops with their multifarious talents; there were Jude Pym’s lovely photos on the walls, Dylan and Dan Pym’s splendidly rural acoustic music in the air, and young Henry Pym performing a range of beguiling card tricks – or so I hear, I missed that part, but he was wearing...
It's the way you tell 'em…
I have lots of catching up to do in the comic book zone; this one came out in its hardback omnibus form thirteen years ago, and attracted a great deal of hyperbole at the time. The New Yorker called it ‘the first formal masterpiece of the medium’, which goes to show just how aware of what happens in the medium a mainstream magazine is likely to be, but it’s true, not many...
Buying ale from the Vicar
Had another great night at Mistley Church Hall on Friday, at the regular (but all too infrequent) Samo Hurt’s Caboose Bar & Music Club; this time I took Mr. A. Lindsay with me, or rather he took me, so I was able to purchase enough Green King Hobgoblin to make me feel quite pleasant (all the sweeter for being sold to me by a minister of religion). This time organiser David Stephenson...
January 2013
5 posts
MY MUSIC ON HEAVY ROTATION UP TO JANUARY 26
North Sea Radio Orchestra - ‘North Sea Radio Orchestra’ Enchanted pastorals in the interzone between rock, folk, Romantic and contemporary classical , built from the textures of chamber music; which makes it sound less accessible than it is. It’s deeply rigorous and incisively intelligent, but also uncomplicatedly beautiful. Astonishing stuff.
Max Tundra - ‘Mastered By...
Desperate optimism in a futurology of the past
Next up in my campaign to introduce the spawn to the classics of SF cinema was 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was only as I watched that I realised how few times I’d seen it, and how long since the last; I’m not sure of the precise figure, but I may not have been much older than the offspring. Why then have I always thought of it as a film I know very well, and why indeed do I know it very...
Contradictions and negations
When you open the collected proceedings of a symposium on ‘black metal theory’ it’s not exactly clear what you should expect; it would be quite plausible for academics to put black metal on the dissection table as outsiders, to examine it as an anthropological, psychological, whateverological phenomenon. The symposium of which Hideous Gnosis is a record was not like that: it was a meeting of...
A childhood friend revisited…
My daughter likes science fiction; she’s reached that wonderful age where you can just be into things together without any patronising adult/child bullshit getting in the way. I’ve been introducing her to some classic SF movies, and I bought her a couple on DVD for Xmas. The first one we watched was Blade Runner, which came in the ‘final cut’ edition. I grew up on the old...
My music on heavy rotation up to January 12
Strapping Young Lad - ‘City’ Probably the most coherent album from one of extreme metal’s most incisively creative acts. Technically inventive, irreverently satirical and heavy as fuck, it’s a real pleasure to listen to however many times I hear it.
Big Block 454 - ‘Fistula!’ Colin Robinson’s trademark bizarro avant-rock noises, interspersed with...
December 2012
13 posts
Complex allegory, thrilling adventure, thoughts...
Michael Moorcock is a big name in science fiction and fantasy, best known for his Elric stories, respected as a literary author by the British establishment, but somewhat dismissive of that regard for reasons eloquently expressed in his introduction to Bryan Talbot’s Adventures Of Luther Arkwright, namely that he thinks the most important truths about modern culture and society have been...
What I read in 2012
The spouse’s niece, http://hemmingwhale.tumblr.com, has been doing this 50 book challenge thing, writing a little about each of them and posting it; it’s worth a look, she has some interesting things to say. It got me thinking about my own reading, and as I’ve been posting about everything i’ve read on my Tumblr, I decided to count up and see how many books I’ve...
Impeccably middling…
Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series is an essay in literary professionalism; there was a time when commercial fantasy fiction had extremely poor standards, in both design and execution, but Novik is scrupulous in her research and and meticulous in her prose. Given her basic premise, that dragons have been a part of human history, but that said history has the same general form as that with which...
My music on heavy rotation up to December 22
Misty In Roots - ‘Live At The Counter-Eurovision’ This album has a huge reputation among reggae aficionados, but has sadly been out of production for a long time. It’s an incredible recording of a band at the peak of their earthy, righteous and very stoned powers. Pretty religious in tone, but that just adds to its power. This is as good as reggae gets in my view.
Various...
Beautiful pornography
Clever man, that Alan Moore; it’s not really a surprise that when he turns his hand to pornography the result is is a complex, multi-layered narrative that engages a whole variety of themes and discourses. What might be somewhat more of a surprise is just how pornographic it is; but Moore is not a man to take the easy option, which in this case would have been to tell a culturally high-brow...
Formulaic, excessive, flaccid and I loved it.
So on Saturday I spent a very long time watching the first part of a film adaptation of a short children’s novel. I went with spawn, spouse and parent: spawn and spouse had predictable reactions (love and hate, respectively), and parent? Well, I’m not too sure, because I just couldn’t get past the fact that she took Waitrose spinach falafels, instead of sweets like a normal...
Good times at the Caboose Bar
Working in a library has brought me into contact with some interesting people, one of whom sings in an old-school blues band known as the Samo Hurt Band, and also promotes gigs in Mistley Church Hall, a beautiful Arts & Crafts movement building that seems to be very little known in the area, and which transforms itself for such occasions into Samo Hurt’s Live Music Club and Caboose Bar...
Arbitrary, superficial, and a good read
Lin Carter, a leading editor and writer in the post-war American fantasy fiction scene, wrote some of the first critical books on the subject. He began with studies of Tolkien and Lovecraft, and continued with Imaginary Worlds, which has achieved something of a legendary status. Not only was it the first general treatment of the subject (combining a history of the genre and a brief discussion of...
My music on heavy rotation up to December 8
Two weeks, five albums, one happy man.
John Coltrane - ‘A Love Supreme’ The word ‘supreme’ definitely belongs in the title to this album. It is quite simply the most intense set of performances I have ever heard on record. Superlatives are inadequate. Three tracks played with total commitment by some of the finest musicians ever to walk the earth. It’s jazz, but it...
Bombed out…
‘Bombed out in space with a spaced out bomb’ is the slogan by which John Carpenter’s Dark Star was promoted. It suggests a stoner science fiction movie, and that is indeed precisely what you get. Friends have been recommending this film to me since I was a teenager, but this was the first time I got around to it. It is indeed extremely funny in many places (the philosophical bomb...
