k d lang - Hymns of the 49th Parallel

An elegant and lushly autumnal collection of covers of songs by other Canadian songwriters - it was "Helpless", playing over the end credits of Away From Her, which caught my ear and then brought Hymns to my attention, and lang also does "After the Gold Rush", "A Case of You", "Hallelujah" and others, all pleasantly.

No Country for Old Men

People are hailing this as a masterpiece, but I'm more inclined to say, a bit grudgingly, that it's merely very good. Unremittingly tense and grimly existential, and at the same time a careful study of character and evil and a thorny-edged love letter to the American Western, graced by performances which invoke and undermine archetypes in a way that one doesn't notice at all while watching, it's impressive but just not a film that I can love.

(w/ Wei and Julian F)

"IMP November 2007"

Is it wrong that my favourite song on this mix, apart from those that I already knew, is by Michelle Branch? Anyway, this is a mellow, cafe-ready set - "The Blower's Daughter", "Right To Be Wrong", Frou Frou, Sigur Ros, etc (plus two in a similar vein which I both know and like a great deal - Powderfinger's "Passenger" (ah, the memories) and Cary Brother's "Blue Eyes" (off the Garden State soundtrack)) - and, if a bit middle of the road, still nice to listen to.

(from Jeff in Boulder, CO)

"Listen, again"

A mix from trang whose avowed purpose is partly to familiarise the unfamiliar while defamiliarising the familiar; it also flows as, to quote, "a piece of dreaming and nostalgia and longing". The unfamiliar is made up of traditional Asian (mostly Vietnamese) music; the familiar (whether or not I already knew the particular pieces well) is mostly misty, wistfully melodic pop from the western canon (Nancy Sinatra's "As Tears Go By", "God Only Knows", the Velvets' "I Found A Reason", etc). It's all very nice, but the real revelation is Roberta Flack's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face", which I suppose I'd heard before, but never really listened to - it's slow-burning, soulful and quietly wondrous.

Mean Girls

It's a teen movie and it has claws, though they're largely retracted in the film's closing stretch - Heathers it ain't, but one thing that Mean Girls does well is temper the more saccharine, formulaic tendencies of its genre with a pretty sharp satirical edge (evident from the title, if from nothing else).

It's a cure premise - Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan), home schooled all her life and having spent the last several years in Africa with her zoologist parents, starts at a public school for the first time in her life and becomes entangled with the ruling girl clique, 'the plastics'...cue many analogies between the law of the jungle and schoolyard practices (including amusing fantasy sequences of students acting out animal kingdom jungle behaviour) and some impressively mean behaviour all round. Lohan, who I haven't seen before, is good (and reminded me of someone I know who I suppose I shouldn't name), as is the rest of the ensemble (special mention to the long-suffering maths teacher, Tina Fey (who actually wrote the screenplay); also, Lacey Chabert has grown up and is completely unrecognisable; and, of course, Amy Poehler is always welcome). Liked it.

Underworld: Evolution

Underworld: Evolution looks and plays exactly like a video game - which is, of course, exactly what I wanted. Nearly every minute drenched in blue and black, and with cracking action sequences and back story revelations coming hard on each other's heels throughout, it never slows from the get go. There isn't much to it (although it does have Derek Jacobi up its sleeve), and the actor who plays Michael, Scott Speedman, is still a curiously charisma-free zone, counter-balancing Kate Beckinsale's dramatic (if not exactly demanding) 'hot vampire death dealer' turn, but the film does what it promises.

(Underworld)

The Golden Compass

Much like the part of Hogfather that I saw a couple of nights ago, The Golden Compass sticks fairly close to the letter of its source text, and in doing so comes up with something which quite satisfyingly imparts something of the pleasure and feel of that source without coming near to its magic. Everyone's well cast, everything looks right (down to the slightly hazy edges surrounding everything), and it sticks reasonably close to Pullman's novel, but it comes off as a bit choppy and ungrounded, leaping from one apparently deus ex machina moment to another (apparently d.e.m. because the background is insufficiently fleshed out to convince). But impression definitely overall positive, and fingers crossed that the next two get made.

Roald Dahl - The Witches

Eek! This book freaked me out when I was a kid, and the film was even worse. Good though, innit?

Pony Up! - Make Love to the Judges With Your Eyes

Somewhere between wry and wide-eyed is where these popsters stake their camp, and just about bring it off, too. Not an unqualified success, nor fully living up to the promise of "The Truth About Cats and Dogs (Is That They Die)", but good enough to get by on.

"Pretty girls keep growing up": Don't You Know Who I Think I Was? The Best of the Replacements

Maybe you had to be there. I like this kind of stuff well enough, and sometimes I can almost feel how it could really take someone, but somehow it never really quite takes me. You can certainly hear the influence their melodic-anthemic punk-rock had, indirectly or otherwise, on any number of others who came after them - Buffalo Tom and Foo Fighters being the two most obvious for mine.

Hogfather

Only caught the second instalment of this two-parter, and regretted not seeing the first - it wasn't perfect, but it was possibly as good as one could've hoped for, given the difficulties needed to be overcome in bringing a Pratchett to screen. It's pretty faithful to the book, though it inevitably loses much of the nuance and sheer joy - even allowing for Hogfather probably being one of his darker novels...a darkness which happily comes through in just about the right degree - and most of the characters look about right (Susan being particularly important, seeing as she's (1) the central character in this one and (2) one of my favourite Discworld characters, along with Vimes, Vetinari and (it goes without saying) Death). If they make more of these in a similar vein, I will be very well pleased.

Star Wars: A New Hope

I don't think I've ever watched this all the way through before! Anyhow, watched out of its historical context, it's more than a little hokey, but still okay for all that.

Roald Dahl - Kiss Kiss

Revisiting these for book club (we're doing The Witches and an at the moment ill-defined assortment of short stories), they haven't stood up particularly well. Part of the problem, I guess, is that I can pretty much remember the 'twists' in each of the stories - not that they're all dramatic blind-siders, with many being more in the way of straight up, if unanticipated, plot turns or events. But a bigger part is possibly that I don't have such a taste for this kind of under-the-skin, more than a little nasty style of story - though that doesn't explain why I like John Collier so much. Oh, and some of them have morals, some don't...

Bruce Springsteen - Nebraska

Barren and resonant, like everyone says it is. But in the time that I've been listening to it (months now) I haven't yet been moved to give the album the close attention that I suspect it requires to reveal itself deeply.

Spoon - A Series of Sneaks

Heck, this one's good too. More wiry (even more wiry) than their latter-day records, and more likely to drop in familiar-sounding rockisms, but, as usual, filled to the bursting with Spoon and all that - indeed, though they've continued to refine their sound with each successive record since this one, they seem to've emerged pretty much fully formed.

Boa - Love & Honesty

Apparently Boa is the most popular k-pop artist going around, but on the strength of Love & Honesty, she's nothing to get excited about - glossy and hyper-produced (which is to the good) sub Michael Jackson-esque (distinctly not to the good) dance-pop belted out by Boa herself.

Joss Stone - Introducing Joss Stone

Her latest, title notwithstanding - a bit more of a contemporary feel, but still recognisably the same artist as that behind Mind, Body & Soul. It's come more to life for me since seeing her live but still hasn't made a large impression.

Saint Etienne - Sound of Water

Pretty atmospheric / atmospheric pretty, but I haven't had a 'Saint Etienne moment' with this one yet, even after a few months of background - and sometimes foreground - listening. Still, if past experience is anything to go by, it's only a matter of time.

Kelly Clarkson - Thankful

Best songs: "Low" and "Just Missed The Train" - which are, truthfully, kind of the same song, but hey, who's complaining? The kind of song that is, incidentally, is the usual rocky sort of pop anthem, in which the soaring chorus is the name of the game but it's the little things surrounding said chorus which really make the song. Elsewhere, there are other things to like - "Miss Independent" and "Beautiful Disaster" come to mind - but the more straight up pop (or slightly soul-infused numbers) tend to be a bit boring. Not a patch on Breakaway, but not too bad either.

Only the Bones: Deborah Conway's Greatest Hits

Hey, guess what? "Only The Beginning" is actually a lot like "Just Like Heaven"! Apart from that, no revelations in this set, though it's much stronger and also more interesting than I would've expected, had I ever stopped to think about what a Deborah Conway greatest hits might be like.

Amanda Palmer @ the Spiegeltent, Thursday 13 December

[snip]

I was at a show last night that I think you would have enjoyed, actually...you may have heard of the Dresden Dolls? Anyway, one of their members (there are only two, I think) - Amanda Palmer - did a midnight gig at the Spiegeltent, and it was excellent - a sort of art-punk-cabaret-performance amalgam (much like the Dolls' stuff)...many goth kids in the audience completely losing their minds with excitement, particularly when she came down off the stage and walked through the crowd, still singing (never mind the capering, heavily made up performers who ran amok throughout).

(Also, she did a cover of "Creep" (w/special guest), and one of "Hallelujah". It really all was very good - dark and romantic and more than a bit baroque, shades of This Mortal Coil.)

(w/ trang, and two of her friends - E-L and a David)

Joss Stone @ the Forum, Sunday 9 December

One thing's for sure - Joss Stone is a sensational live performer, possessed of a spectacular voice and great presence, and backed by a five star supporting cast (especially the three harmony singers) which seems straight out of Memphis, and that alone made this a good show. But I felt about it as I do about her recorded material (Mind, Body & Soul, and the bits and pieces I've heard of the other two) - she is much better than her material, which tends to be pretty average...the best moments are those when she's able to really pour herself into the music, which means mostly the slightly rockier songs and the near-ballads (which even come close to torch on occasion). All up, though, was worth checking out.

(w/ Steph)

Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

From: Choo, Howard
Sent: Thursday, 6 December 2007 11:25 AM
To: [WL; AC; AB; CM; KC; DP; JF; TV]

Subject: the thieving magpie - exhuming book club


Hallo all,

I think the last consensus date for book club was this Saturday (the 8th), but with that date almost upon us, how is everyone for Saturday the 15th? Assuming the weather holds up, I was thinking perhaps a picnic-y thing beginning early afternoon (say 1pm and make a lunch of it) at the Edinburgh Gardens, but other suggestions are most welcome.

For anyone who has - quite forgivably - forgotten, the current book is Murakami's "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle", which is about solitude, memory, loss (also society, perception, and discoveries), and pasta. It also features metaphysical sex, snatches of opera, recollections of wartime atrocities, a really deep well, beautiful women, near-death experiences, one of the weirdest villains ever, much contemporary anomie, sundry unexpected disappearances, and of course several wind-up birds…all wrapped up in a steam train of a story, natch. What's not to like?

Howard

* * *

(last time)

FreeRice

A vocabulary game that helps to feed the poor - try it.

freerice.com

(The highest I got to was level 46, and I tended to hover around 43 to 45. You can't play for too long, though, or the words start to repeat.)

Little delights

1. Today I learned a new word: autology. Hurray!

2. This year's Turner prize was won by a video of a guy dressed up in a bear suit.

3. And Scarlett Thomas's website is still the cat's meow.

The Bangles - Greatest Hits

Back when I was less generally sanguine about things than nowadays, there were a handful of songs frequently making up my winamp playlist for night-time gloom - music for playing over and over in fits of inchoate despair...well, most of us have been there in one way or another. Anyhow, the point is that "Eternal Flame" was one of the mainstays ("Strong Enough" and "I'll Stand By You" being the other two which have particularly lingered), and so I've got a soft spot for the song a mile wide - no cynicism here!

But I always had an idea that that big ballad wasn't characteristic of the Bangles, and this greatest hits shows their style to be much more a minimalistic, tuneful rock-pop thing replete with quiet (but immediately apparent) charms. Their take on "Hazy Shade of Winter" is easily the best thing on the cd, though "Manic Monday" is also particularly liable to charm me.

Feist - The Reminder

For me, there aren't any real standout songs on The Reminder, nor any especially show-offy ones; what there is instead, is an elegant, understated, coyly soulful twist of a thing, with plenty of depth as well as a pleasing airyness which stands up well to repeat play...

Robyn - Robyn

Finally, this one gets a local release, and it just about lives up to expectations, too. "Konichiwa Bitches" and "Be Mine!" are still the bomb, and "With Every Heartbeat" is just as good; "Who's That Girl" is another big fave of mine. As usual, I end up thinking that it doesn't get much better than Scandinavian pop - some things don't change.

Rilo Kiley - More Adventurous

Pretty good - Rilo Kiley have a very listenable quality even during their least inspired, and while there's little on More Adventurous that's really striking (the exception - and it's a big one - is "Portions for Foxes", which is still too, too delightful...it's just everything that a pop song should be) it's still plenty engaging for all of its surprising modesty.

Also: when I trotted up to the counter with this cd in hand a couple of weeks ago, the record store girl glanced at the back of the cardboard slipcase and was moved to exclaim, of Jenny Lewis, "Hey, she's cute!"...which is, of course, perfectly and incontrovertibly true.

"Space & Sci-Fi mix" (IMP October 2007)

An entertaining listen from start to finish, this, and some good stuff on it. High point is 14-minute mix closer "2001" (a prog-jazz-disco rewrite of / elaboration on the "2001" theme by Phish); "Space Oddity" sits dead centre; elsewhere, Ornette Coleman, Gnarls Barkley, Calexico (with a song tres cool, "Attack Robot Attack"), the Flaming Lips, and a host of others less well known jostle for space.

(from Sean in Albuquerque, NM)