ph: Arthur Elgort
Saturday, September 24, 2011
First Lines: The Diary of Samuel Pepys
Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain but upon taking of cold.
New Stuff: Treme
New series by David Simon based on the neighbourhood Treme in New orleans, 3 months after Hurricane Katrina.
Songs in the key of my life: Dinosaur Jr. - Little Fury Things
Dinosaur Jr. are one of my all-time favourite bands - and luckily they have re-united recently and are still releasing great albums. In the late 80s they re-establised the lead guitar as the central instrument in alternative rock combining Sonic Youth's noise with more conventional songs and a touch of Neil Young, or like Allmusic.com says: "they injected late-'80s alternative rock with monumental levels of pure guitar noise." 'Little Fury Things' is the first song on their album 'You're Living All Over Me' and it goes off with a bang! In fact the first 3 songs go on with the same immense power, before some more slower titles are played. In concert Dinosaur Jr. were quite overwhelming, I got to see them once in Munich at the time the album came out. A still little-known band called My Bloody Valentine were support, soon to be another one of my favourites! We arrived early at the concert hall, actually a small pub in a more suburban part of the city, and J Mascis was standing around and asked me where to go to get something to eat. Unfortunately I had no idea, the area was surrounded by depressing apartment complexes, but no stores or shops besides this pub...
'Little Fury Things' has remained something like a personal anthem for me.
Monday, September 19, 2011
First Lines: Mervyn Peake - Titus Groan (The Gormenghast Trilogy)
Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls.
Canyon Passage (1946)
A businessman is torn between his love of two very different women in 1850's Oregon and his loyalty to a compulsive gambler friend who goes over the line.
Skilfully made standard western with a more sophisticated psychological plot.
End of Days (1999)
At the end of the century, Satan visits New York in search of a bride.
And yes, the movie is just as ridiculous as the plot sounds.
Songs in the key of my life: Sonic Youth - Schizophrenia
Another one of the many bands that have been accompaying my life since their beginnings is Sonic Youth. My theory about rock music is that all the truly great bands have taken the music and sounds they love and re-invented them anew with the means they had available to them. It's therefore not necessary to be a studied musician at all (too much knowledge might even ruin it), but simply to go ahead and do it. Sonic Youth famously use a myriad of second-hand guitars, each one tuned differently to fit the sound of each separate song. This way their songs sound so different compared to mainstream music, since they're intregrating atonal tunes and noise with beautiful, sometimes even lullaby-like melodies. In my opinion the album 'Sister' is their masterpiece, where these techniques have finally been mastered to create a classic album of innovative rock music. I know everybody declares it's their next album afterwards, 'Daydream Nation', which I can agree with to the degree that that album was more of a perfecting and summing up of what they had already achieved. I could pick out any song from 'Sister', since I love them all, but 'Schizophrenia' is the first track on the album, and the first time I put the needle on that record, it was like a revelation: great new innovative guitar-based rock music! Like all their best songs it's more than just a mere song, but rather a miniature opera/symphony. You can listen to the title over and over again finding new aspects of how it is built, how it's being played asking yourself where they got this or that particular tone from, and their timing is so impeccable. Sonic Youth can start a song and then turn it into a 20 minute cacophony of the weirdest noise, but if you were counting, they'd return to the song on the pin point. The clip is a newer recording of the song and less noisier than the original, but you can clearly watch (and hear) how the song works. To this day Sonic Youth have stayed true to their beginnings and have been making their own music uncompromisingly and are still striving to break down barriers - and this all very successfully.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
First Lines: Ian McEwan - On Chesil Beach
They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.
New Stuff: Broken Heart Collector
Another band introduced by Harry Lachner on his radio show: broken.heart.collector is the project of the Austrian superband BULBUL, clarinetist Susanna Gartmayer and Slovenian artist/singer Maja Osojnik
New Stuff: Tori Amos
As I'm a Tori Amos completist I got this new album on its release date. Allmusic.com "Night of Hunters was created because of a commission by Deutsche Grammophon, to create a 21st century song cycle that took into account classical works from the last 400 years. She built it around 14 songs from variations on Bach, Debussy, Granados, Alkan, Satie, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Mussorgsky, and Gregorian chant."
The X Files: I Want to Believe (2008)
Mulder and Scully are called back to duty by the FBI when a former priest claims to be receiving psychic visions pertaining to a kidnapped agent.
June 14, 2009 I wrote:
Basically a stand-alone story within the series, this is more or less just a better episode produced with a bit more dough. Still there's fun to be had for die-hard fans, especially that the 2 are now a couple!
I still needn't to add anything to that, unless I consider it was a bit boring the second time around.
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