Emmylou Harris - Wrecking Ball

Relatively recent Emmylou - 1995 - and my first of hers (though I borrowed Pieces of the Sky at the same time), and, it has to be said, the music sounds the way I'd imagine 'cosmic American music' would sound (thank you, Gram). A key thing about this recording seems to be that it was produced by Daniel Lanois, who also wrote two of the songs (and co-wrote a third) - which may go some way to explaining why the Lanois-penned opener "Where Will I Be" is so reminiscent of U2 circa Achtung Baby - and he brings a clean, subdued air to proceedings, over which Harris's voice drifts and glitters.

When I got this cd, the first cuts I wanted to hear were the Lucinda and Gillian songs ("Sweet Old World" and "Orphan Girl" respectively), and after initial consternation I've grown to like Harris's interpretations (particularly of "Orphan Girl"). She also does songs by Dylan and Young which I didn't know (the Young composition, "Wrecking Ball", giving this album its title), plus Steve Earle ("Goodbye" - one of the album's best moments), Julie Miller, Hendrix, Anna McGarrigle ("Goin' Back To Harlan", another highlight) and two which she had co-written with others.

Listening to this record and Pieces of the Sky, I was initially a sceptic, but both have won me over in the last week or so. Harris can certainly sing, and judging by the ones whose originals I'm familiar with, she has a knack for bringing her own voice (literally and otherwise) to the songs she chooses. I said earlier that I thought this recording could well qualify as cosmic American music, and by that I meant that it has the sort of wispy widescreen country flavour, tinged with a discrete rock bent, that I've always associated with the phrase...I like it.

Preacher: War in the Sun & Salvation

(More...)

JJL and other celebrity crushes

Having managed to watch three Leigh films in the last two nights, I've been thinking about celebrity crushes (I've done my little disquisition on this general subject, or at least on a particular sub-species thereof, the indie-rock crush, elsewhere) - it's always nice to have at least a couple of these. But the list is pretty short, really - Leigh's the main one, and I'm finding it hard to think of any others. Audrey Tautou, maybe, but that's more an Amelie thing than anything else. Zadie Smith, but only while I'm reading White Teeth and for a few days after I finish the book. Dorothy Parker, perhaps, if it's possible to crush on someone who was dead before one was born (and in any case that probably owes much to Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle). Aimee Mann? Juliette Binoche? Well, not really...and I think that's it.

Kansas City

Strikes me as something of a cinéaste's film - directed by Robert Altman, it's a film about setting and period and, to be honest, not much else. Kansas City, 1934 - petty thieves and organised crime, deal-making politicians and violent enforcers, laudanum-addicted socialite wives and tough-talking dames, cacophonous jazz bars and neon-lit nights. But the jazz scenes are great and Leigh completely carries the film - as far as I'm concerned, there's no one more watchable in cinema today - ably supported by Miranda Richardson and the rest. So, all in all, I wasn't disappointed.

In The Cut

Really only rented this because Jennifer Jason Leigh had a supporting role in it - the prospect of watching Meg Ryan in a psychosexual thriller didn't particularly do it for me. And unfortunately In The Cut is, in a word, dull (though all of the actors are very good in it) - I was tempted to give up on the film at several points. As a thriller, it's frankly uninteresting, and while Campion seems to be trying to make some points about the psychology of desire, it's all too murky to unravel (if there was a point to the ice-skating flashbacks, I didn't pick it up). A while ago, Penny gave me a copy of To The Lighthouse, and possibly having made it more than about a third of the way through before giving up might have augmented my appreciation of this film (I do intend to have another go at that book one of these days)...

eXistenZ

Second time round, this one (if I've remembered correctly) having been another that I originally caught on the big screen in the months between high school and university. I'm pretty sure that it was my first Cronenberg (not that there've been all that many since), but I have a feeling that I was already enthused about JJL at the time, at least if the magazine cover dated July 1999 and still on my wall today is anything to go by. I remember quite enjoying it that first time without loving it, appreciating the reality/virtuality thing, and on principle liking the existentialist ponderings (though even at the time they struck me as worn a bit on the film's figurative sleeve) but feeling somewhat let down by the ending (and being terrified by Willem Dafoe's Gas). On this viewing, the film stands up as a neat package, the flatness of the visual style struck me more clearly (a flatness which is entirely apt to the settings), and the ending seems less like a cheat (after all, it had to end in something like the vein that it does, one way or another), but eXistenZ is still somehow on the insubstantial side and not as satisfying as it might have been.

"Better than wrestling": Ed Wood

This was one of those films which kept me in a state of wry amusement for its entire running time, occasionally prompting smiles and even laughter (particularly in the scene where Wood's motley assortment of associates sneak into the warehouse in order to steal the suspended mechanical octopus). The aesthetic is very Tim Burton, and it works well; it would've been easy to slide into outright ridicule of Wood and his ilk, and there are plenty of other obvious targets woven into the fabric of the film, but instead Ed Wood chooses the more difficult route of presenting its subjects as both ridiculous and sympathetic. We're meant to feel both exasperation and a sort of admiration in relation to Depp's Wood, and likewise towards the whole industry, its hucksters, conmen and icons alike, and that's exactly how I felt.

There's pathos in the figure of Martin Landau's Bela Lugosi, abandoned by the industry that made him great and reduced to a tattered morphine addict, and, less obviously, in Bill Murray's melancholically ageing queen, and Sarah Jessica Parker as Wood's long-suffering girlfriend is spot-on in her scathing assessment of Wood's crew as a bunch of no-hopers and never-weres, but it's all balanced by the sheer enthusiasm of Ed Wood for the films he makes and for cinema itself, constantly talking himself out on the fine edge of nothing, filled with joie de vivre and chutzpah but also faintly aware of the tenuousness of it all, and the appearance of Orson Welles (Vincent D'Onofrio) near the end is just what was needed to tip things in the right direction, both for Wood and for us as viewers, so that Ed Wood ultimately appears as a celebration of all things cinematic, remaining true to its fond, if unsparing, tone throughout.

M.I.A. & Diplo - Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1 and Diplo - Favela on Blast

The Piracy Funds Terrorism mix preceded the release of Arular but contains remixed versions of cuts from that album along with other sampled material; because I was never excited enough to track it down before I heard the album proper, I'm actually in the position of hearing the two recordings in the order in which they would, had the natural course of events obtained, have been made available to the masses. Perhaps that explains why I'm comparatively unexcited about Piracy Funds Terrorism - I've largely heard these rhymes and beats already, and in a more familiar (to me) and concentrated, if less fluent, setting (ie, the lp itself). The "Baile Funk" tracks backloading the mix are something a bit different, though.

Diplo's 30-minute Favela on Blast mix is, for me, far more interesting to listen to. Apparently 'favela' is the Brazilian term for shanty-towns, and the music here is based on a genre called 'baile funk' which emanates from Rio, and listening to it (Diplo is, from what I gather, a sort of cultural reappropriator, equipped with sample machine and usual tools of the trade), I can see that the influence is pretty strong on Arular, from the outright copping of the trumpets for use on "Bucky Done Gun" to the haranguing vocal style and heavy, straight-up beats. My favourite parts are the vocal which carries the first five minutes or so and the call-and-response at around the 15-minute mark, but it stays at a pretty high level all the way through.

Both of these are legitimately available here.

Paul Auster - The New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room

I first came across the name of Paul Auster earlier this year, while doing reading for Genre, and have just now followed it up (reading it in the gaps between doing other things over the last fortnight or so). The trilogy is made up of three inter-connected novellas, each bringing a slightly different perspective to bear on the theme of writing and the world. These tales of detectives and writers, constructions and disappearances, signs and meanings, are impeccably postmodern in their particulars, right down to the references to key texts from Hawthorne's "Twice-Told Tales" to Don Quixote to Walden.

While doing research for my Genre paper, I came across Brian McHale's characterisation of the shift from modernism to postmodernism as a change in dominant from the epistemological to the ontological. He comments that this was particularly evident in detective fiction, and while I can't remember whether McHale discusses Auster in this connexion, it's an apt way of approaching the New York Trilogy - the nature of the detectives' investigations is continually shifting, as is the figurative ground under their feet, and these shifts occasion striking alterations in the realities of the world as they experience it.

This time round, I read these for pleasure (these themes fascinate me, after all), and I feel as if I've only scraped the surface of Auster's reflectively multi-faceted text-structures. The closing section of The Locked Room made my head spin with its bewildering juggling of signifiers and images from City of Glass and Ghosts, and especially with its sudden reorientation of the position of the reader and writer of all three books, and I suspect that it all fits together on a deeper level than I've yet properly thought through...needless to say, I enjoyed these very much.

K J Bishop - The Etched City

Not bad, but not great, either. Aspires to be a dark fantasy somewhat in the mold of Miéville, and has its moments, but doesn't quite have the sense of pacing and scope which would have allowed it to work. In her city descriptions, Bishop's obviously going for a sort of 'teeming metropolis' vibe, but it doesn't come through properly, and neither the city nor its characters really come to life (even the central protagonists, Raule and Gwynn, didn't strike me as being especially clearly drawn - moral ambiguity is all very well, and in fact is something that Bishop does well, but lack of vividness of characterisation is something else altogether). Also, the way in which the philosophical ruminations are handled is rather tedious - it isn't so much their content as the way in which they are expressed, in long monologues on the parts of the characters (occasional stiltedness of dialogue and descriptive writing also dog The Etched City). So, a litany of criticisms - but all of that said, I'd probably be willing to give Bishop another go if she puts more books out in the future, because there are hints of something pretty good in here.

Daria: "Disenfranchised" & "School Dysfunctions"

Just renewing my acquaintance with the delightful Daria through this pair of video collections, the forming including "Cafe Disaffecto", "Malled", "This Year's Model" and "Lab Brat", and the latter being made up of "Arts 'N' Crass", "Fair Enough" and "Through A Lens, Darkly". I came across the show on tv back in high school and (television never having been a big part of my life) probably only watched about a dozen or so episodes, maybe twenty at tops, but the impression it left was deep nonetheless.

Returning now (a couple of these episodes seem familiar, but I think most are wholly new to me), I'm surprised by how gentle the humour is, but therein, I suppose, lies much of the show's charm - Daria and Jane may be teenage desaffectées par excellence, but for all their sarcasm and negativity neither is truly sad or angry, and both remain wired into the rest of the world to a very large extent. On the flip side, many characters who could've been unremittingly obnoxious (Kevin and Brittany, say, or Quinn and the rest of Daria's family) instead come across as basically sympathetic albeit on a different planet from Daria herself...it's not as dark as Ghost World, say, or, for that matter, real life - despite their differences, everyone more or less gets along in Daria's world (well, for a given value of 'more or less', anyway). But it's that sugarcoating which makes the show go down so sweetly.

"Life just kind of empties out": Aimee Mann - The Forgotten Arm

At first, this album seemed all a bit samey, I definitely felt the absence of more (or any) soaring moments - there's no "Pavlov's Bell" or "Today's The Day" to immediate grab one's attention - which added up to a fairly lukewarm initial listening experience. But I expected that it would get better with time, and on about the third or fourth listen, The Forgotten Arm just opened up for me; "Goodbye Caroline" was the first song to really hit home (what is it with songs referencing girls called Caroline?) but I'd felt the sense creeping up on me before, and from there it was all magic.

Have since listened to the album over and over (in the process, incidentally, also remembering how great Bachelor No 2 is) and it continues to grow (most recently while doing the long train ride and walk home today after a day which should have been fun but somehow just wasn't, mainly because I was so incapacitatingly tired, I think - an appropriate mood in which to be listening to Aimee Mann). The 'concept album' conceit works, I reckon - there does seem to be a suitable flow to its narrative from beginning to end, both lyrically and musically, and I doubt that closer "Beautiful", for example, would've had the impact that it does without the story structuring the album as a whole.

At the moment, the high point for me is the stunningly sad double punch of "Little Bombs" and "That's How I Knew This Story Would Break My Heart" (that latter, tremulous yet direct, is something of a cousin to the wonderful "Wise Up"), but "King of the Jailhouse" is brill (working particularly well in the context of the album's conceptual scheme), too, and I also like "She Really Wants You", even though it's probably the most obvious song on the album, rather a lot.

Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

While not as perfectly pitched to appeal to me as The Secret History, I very much like The Little Friend, Tartt's second novel. The first time I read it, a couple of years ago or so, a lot of its charm lay in the central character, Harriet Dufresnes - a precocious, bookish, prickly, and distinctly unlovable little girl preoccupied with solving the mystery of her brother Robin's death (which occurred too early for Harriet to remember, when she was a baby)...given those character traits, it's not hard to see why I like the character so much, I guess.

Anyway, this time round, for one reason and another I happened to be feeling quite sad over the period in which I was reading The Little Friend, and, perhaps for that reason, the sadness which permeates the whole book was at the forefront of my mind throughout. Not only is the entire family haunted by Robin's spectre, but there are other sadnesses too - the old, quiet tragedies of Edie and the aunts, Libby's untimely death, the departure of Ida Rhew, the only sketched-out plight of Lasharon Odum and all the others like her in the background, Danny Ratliff's inability to escape his family and circumstances, the growing away of Hely from Harriet, and, hanging over everything, the oppressive weight of the Mississippi atmosphere and the grim history of that part of America.

There are some loose ends, and things which feel unresolved (most notably, the central mystery regarding how Robin came to be hanged from the old black tupelo tree in the yard on that fateful day), but I don't feel that they particularly detract from the novel, for The Little Friend functions primarily as a treatment of the ramifications and reverberations of loss, secondarily as an imagining of a particular childhood and the passing of much of its innocence, and 'tertiarily' as a study of a certain slice of small-town America of the past - not, in any meaningful sense, as a murder mystery...in its rendition of the latter two, the book has definite shades of To Kill A Mockingbird, and indeed, Tartt seems to nod to Lee's book by including a passing reference to a girl who is a champion baton-twirler (though possibly I'm reading more into that than was intended). In some ways, it's quite a distanced, reserved book, but it speaks to me anyway.

Gemma Hayes - Night On My Side

On my first couple of listens through this album, I was distracted by Hayes' odd, subdued ululations, but they soon receded into the background; what I couldn't shake, however, on repeated spins, was the feeling that these songs just aren't very good. There are hints of something better - "Hanging Around", "Let A Good Thing Go", "Ran For Miles", "Lucky One (Bird of Cassandra)" - but even those ones only half work for me, and most of the album blurs into a gently indistinct wallpaper.

'Til Tuesday - Coming Up Close: A Retrospective

Aimee Mann's old band - I'd heard and liked "Coming Up Close" (the song) before, but didn't really have a sense for what the rest of their stuff was like. From that starting point, this collection was initially a little disorienting - the selections from the band's first two albums, Voices Carry and Welcome Home, in particular are very 'eighties' in sound, dominated on first listen by that decade's characteristic, dreaded drum machine/synth sound (my thoughts turn unavoidably to "Take My Breath Away" and its ilk). In fact, though, rather incongruously, I prefer the cuts from those two to those from the band's third lp, Everything's Different Now, even though the latter are, unsurprisingly, closer in style to Mann's solo work.

The charm of those earlier songs - of which "On Sunday" is, apart from "Coming Up Close" (which is in an entirely different league), my favourite - lies in their straight-ahead, swooping melodies and dramatic choruses. By contrast, the picks from Everything's Different Now are, if somewhat more sophisticated, rather on the anemic side - for mine, Mann's songwriting wasn't quite strong enough at this point for these more elliptical, delicately-fashioned songs to fully work. With the benefit of hindsight, I think that Whatever and I'm With Stupid saw her striking out in a slightly different (and successful) direction, before really bringing all the various 'Til Tuesday and solo-to-date threads together in Bachelor No 2 (then more or less treading water with the very good but somehow undistinguished Lost In Space) - songs like "How Am I Different", "Red Vines", "Deathly", "Calling It Quits" and so forth are wonderful because they have those sweeping irresistible melodies and the stately Bacharach-esque elegance (plus, by then, the synth was long gone and to the forefront come a clean, biting electric guitar which perfectly set off Mann's voice and songs...).

Anyhow, glad to own this cd, but I think that it has pretty much sated my curiosity as far as 'Til Tuesday goes.

China Miéville - The Scar

Another treat from Miéville's chest of dark wonders - weird and fantastic in every sense. Even more shades of grey than Perdido Street Station or Iron Council and just as gripping - which really is saying an awful lot.

Sophie B Hawkins (and a long-standing mystery solved)

From Ms Hawkins' official website:

* * *

Q

Hi Sophie,
I like your song "As I lay me down." I work in a bank and we listen to the radio all day long and hear your song alot. Me and the girls at work were listening one day, and this new girl started singing your song. And in the background music on one part the new girl thinks it says "I like tacos", but I think it is just music or humming. This has been a big controversies between us and I was wanted you to answer my question. So does it really say "I like tacos" in the background?? Sorry for the silly question.

Thank you,
Alicia
Tulsa, OK

A

--Dear Alicia, this is a sweet question. I love tacos, but that's not what I'm singing in the backround, it's "ooh la kah koh", which is an indigenous language of the Ballantine tribe. It means, "wash your feet before you sleep", which is good advice on any account. I hope you all keep enjoying the song, and check out my new album, "Wilderness", there are some cool backrounds on that album, too. Take Care, come see a show and you and your friends can sing the backrounds on stage! Bye, sophie.

* * *

Have idly been reading a bit about Hawkins, who I know solely through "As I Lay Me Down" and, before that, "Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover", both of which I remember from years back and have always rather liked in that ubiquitous radio song kind of way. Seems that there's rather more to her than just those two songs, though - have been halfway inspired to try to listen to a full album somewhere along the line.

Haruki Murakami - Sputnik Sweetheart

This is a nice book, preoccupied with the gaps between people, and the divisions within them - with how people can almost but never quite feel or perhaps be complete, either in themselves or when paired with another. And it's about writing, and language, and, in some enfolding-yet-within kind of way, how they relate to all of the above. It's briefer than most if not all of his other novels, and perhaps for that reason it produced a couple of almost paradoxical responses in me. On the one hand, I found it quite tricky to get a handle on - while I 'felt' the overall sense of what was being written, I didn't really see the point of some of it. But on the other, Murakami seems a lot more obvious in places than he normally allows himself to be. In a way, they're both criticisms, I suppose, but they didn't really detract from my enjoyment, because being able to grasp the shape of a Murakami book is enough, at least initially.

Anyhow, saw a bit of myself in K but, to be honest, more, in some indefinable way, in Sumire (I'm still too young, undamaged, unpoised to identify with Miu); also, Sputnik Sweetheart seemed, if not sadder, then at least less optimistic than anything else Murakami has written, though I haven't really systematically thought about this...

The Replacement Killers

A splashy bit of fun. Wastes not a single minute of screen-time and always looks (and sounds) the part - the unusual camera angles are a particular highlight, though the taut gunplay shouldn't be underestimated either. Chow Yun Fat and Mira Sorvino are excellent with what are basically cartoon cut-out roles, and likewise the supporting cast of villains, police officers and associates. There's nothing to this film, but it's an entertaining ride.

Built To Spill - Keep It Like A Secret

I'd been aware of Keep It Like A Secret for a while, partly because it was well received critically, and partly because of its extremely cool cover artwork; having taken the plunge, it took me a couple of listens to get my ear in for it (as it always does with this kind of rock) but, having done so, the album is growing on me pretty strongly.

Even though some of the songs are pretty long, the band doesn't muck around with these songs, throwing in plenty of melodies (half-melodies) and hooks (half-hooks) and doing a really good job with that indie-rock thing of taking a song in a number of different directions over its running time while always bringing together the various aspects in some kind of intricate mesh ("The Plan" and "Carry The Zero", two of my favourites, do this particularly effectively). There are guitar heroics a-plenty, and also some nicely spacey cuts ("Else" being the obvious one in that latter regard); drawing on my own musical vocabulary, I'd say they're sort of like Buffalo Tom meets latter-day Dismemberment Plan (though obviously there are antecedents for both of them which may have more directly influenced Built To Spill, and Keep It Like A Secret actually came out in the same year as Emergency & I and before Change).