actionaid apply to demolish st paul’s
Thursday, July 31st, 2008
Great stunt, good cause.
archive for July 08
official internet mini phenomenon
Friday, July 25th, 2008Matt’s ever popular Alpaca Approach video was set to Star Wars music last week by some enterprising individual – check it out here. It’s become a little internet phenomenon and been replicated in various other places, and even appeared on a live US television show called Attack of the Show!
I’m having an involuntary wave of internet hysteria about it!
crocodile kong dreams
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008I’ve been having funny dreams this week.
Last night I dreamt I was being chased by a 25 foot long crocodile. It was enormous and very very fast. I seemed to spend the whole night running up and down this building trying to avoid it as it inexorably sought me out. Early on in the dream I had a companion, but he got eaten pretty fast. Luckily I woke up before anything too unpleasant happened to me.
Must have been because I watched Peter Jackson’s King Kong on Saturday night! I had problems with quite a lot of that film. I can see how Jackson was pulling out all the stops and making it as big and extreme as possible, and that deserves our applause, but I really didn’t like the screaming racist savage natives on the island, or the implausible dinosaur scenes where all the humans just happened to avoid being trampelled as they skip along in front of them, or the self indulgent utterly unrealistic pit of insects, or the way Kong flung Ann around like a rag doll and she never even got a bruise. In fact the whole middle section on the lost island is just silly – digital special effects with no reference to physics, evolution or biology! And the whole film could have been a lot shorter.
But the beautifully realised and shot 1930s Depression New York was stunning and totally immersive, there was a nice Al Jolson song near the beginning, lots of great actors, and of course the central relationship between Ann Darrow and Kong was just brilliantly done – understated, wordless, achingly doomed, and culminating in the amazing Empire State Building scene. The final scene is a masterpiece of modern cinema! I guess you probably had to sit through the rest so that it could be.
the rake’s progress
Saturday, July 19th, 2008Matt and I went to see The Rake’s Progress at the Opera House last night. It’s a Stravinsky opera, with a rather lovely libretto by WH Auden, about a young man who inherits loads of money and is lured by the devil into drinking, gambling, loose sex and finally Bedlam and madness! The supporting cast were particularly fun, playing lots of different varieties of character rather than coming on all looking exactly the same in identical brown peasant smocks as normally happens with these things. Their finest moments were during the final Bedlam scene when they all adopted different guises of wild haired rocking laughing madness.
We ate Divine white chocolate with strawberries in the interval.
we asked for signs, the signs were sent
Friday, July 18th, 2008Have been well and truly blown away by Leonard Cohen at the O2 centre. What a magnificent performance. Matt, Steve C, Josh and I took the boat along the Thames to the Dome, joining Andy, Helen and the Two Daves.
Leonard bounded on and off stage, keen to show his vitality at 73 years old I guess, dressed in a fabulous dark suit and gangster’s hat. He was backed up with a band of musicians all at the top of their game: his long time collaborator Sharon Robinson, the amazing close harmony Webb sisters, a Hammond keyboard diva Neil Larsen, a gentle drummer “the prince of precision” as Leonard put it, Rafael Gayol, “the master of breath” saxophonist Dino Soldo, and possibly the coolest of them all, Javier Mas who played various Spanish guitars and brought an amazing gypsy sound to the proceedings.
It felt like they were a band of merry super adventurers, gathered together for this world tour, all enjoying themselves and playing with the considerate ease of consummate musicians with nothing to prove. There was a lot of space around their performance, allowing different instruments to take centre stage at different times, with a few rare well judged crescendos of mighty sound. This also made it very easy to hear what was going on. Perhaps it was also the quality of the O2 centre sound system, but I have rarely found it so easy to follow the detail of the sound at one of these massive concerts.
But then rarely have I also been so familiar with every single song being played! It was a glorious setlist, played over three hours, mostly set in the territory of the later albums like I’m Your Man and Ten New Songs. The jazzy, loungey, backing singer heavy sound of those albums suited the band, and Leonard often stepped back to give them the space to lead. The Webb sisters did a lovely performance of If It Be Your Will, and Sharon Robinson takes over at times, especially of course for a beautiful rendition of Back On Boogie Street.
Leonard kept us flattered and entertained with polished patter and lovely jokes that are apparently repeated at every performance. “Last time I was in London I was sixty years old, just a kid with a crazy dream!” When we cheered as he took to the keyboard for the one finger keyboard solo of Tower Of Song, he smiled and said “you are too kind!” The feelgood vibes were almost overwhelming, and not just because we spiced it up with a little MDMA! This man knows how to keep an audience happy and has the best back catalogue in the world with which to do it. He managed to make the Millennium Dome feel like a little intimate club.
The setlist was brilliantly put together, building up languidly till the second half when he began to blast us with incredible performances. Hallelujah was an unexpected highlight for me. I have always found it a fairly overplayed song, and certainly with cover versions much better than Leonard’s original on Various Positions. But Leonard took it by the scruff of the neck and made it his own again, closing his eyes and falling to his knees and swelling like an orgasm into the choruses! It really hit me hard.
I loved Take This Waltz, was thrilled by a thumping powerful Democracy Is Coming To The USA, with Closing Time in one of the encores I suddenly understood the line about the feeling when something ends: “looks like freedom but it feels like death, it’s something in between I guess”. Ain’t No Cure For Love was achingly sexy. At other times, the band faded back and Leonard created moments of powerful intimacy with some of the older songs: Sisters of Mercy, Suzanne, Bird On A Wire.
Incomparable. I may have to see him again in the autumn!
woodchip on the wall
Thursday, July 17th, 2008Have just sent Steve C from our flat where he has been staying into the damp and lonely Thursday afternoon to meet his Deborah. He bumped into a girl he went out with at primary school yesterday, and they’re meeting for lunch today. She’s even bringing her baby! With his big glasses and brown overcoat, Steve actually is Jarvis Cocker. It all makes sense now.
across the universe
Monday, July 14th, 2008Steve C, Alex, Matt and I watched a cool film called Across the Universe as we gradually came down from La Dolce Vita on Monday. It’s a film, almost a musical but not quite, based entirely around Beatles songs – 33 of them in fact, all beautifully re-recorded and sung by the cast.
Jude from Liverpool travels to America and meets Lucy and her brother Max. Max and Jude travel to New York and rent rooms in a bohemian household run by Sadie. They are joined by Jo-Jo and Prudence, who even crashes in through the bathroom window. There’s nothing subtle about the names or the songs and at times it does feel contrived, but still it holds together rather gloriously, you can’t help but be entranced and delighted. And the movie really goes for it, heading into some very surreal and trippy territory.
Early on there’s some great numbers with that Once More With Feeling vibe where the everyday denizens of whatever place start doing coordinated backing dancing as the lead character bursts into song. Prudence sings I Want To Hold Your Hand while gazing wistfully at a blonde cheerleader, wandering across a playing field as big jock football players cartwheel and backflip in slow motion around her, a very Buffy moment.
When Max is summoned to a US army induction centre, the Uncle Sam posters on the walls come alive and point down at him, singing I Want You (She’s So Heavy), as he is stripped to his underwear and dragged with other recruits through rows of robotic soldiers to be inspected and assigned, the song continuing as the new recruits, still in underwear, drag the Statue of Liberty on their shoulders through the Vietnamese jungle.
My favourite bit is when they sing Dear Prudence to Prudence, who’s sulking in the bathroom, and as she emerges, the walls dissolve into bright blue sky and the camera pans around the characters during the “look around round round” of the bridge. There are various acid-drenched party and merry prankster bus scenes, including Eddie Izzard playing Mr Kite as the film heads into totally animated Yellow Submarine style territory. And there’s a lovely homage to the Beatles’ rooftop concert near the end.
climate change
Wednesday, July 9th, 2008Things aren’t looking good for climate change these days. The “danger level” of 2 degrees of warming now seems optimistic, with Arctic ice disappearing faster than expected. Arctic ice may disappear entirely in the summer months by 2018, with the dark open water then absorbing more solar energy, a positive feedback loop that could trigger other tipping points like releasing trapped methane from thawing permafrost.
Greenhouse gas emissions continue inexorably to rise, and even if all countries were to emulate the UK’s climate change bill, this would only be likely to stabilise global temperatures at 4 to 5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. These are pretty scary temperatures: huge increases in land prone to extreme drought from 2 to 3 percent now to 30 percent by the end of the century; mass extinctions of a wide range of species; hundreds of millions of climate refugees; many large coastal cities under threat from sea levels rises; and so on.
I was amused by an acid press release from Friends of the Earth in response to the G8’s statement on climate change from Hokkaido today:
G8 leaders today signaled their support for climate chaos by spewing futile rhetoric that will do nothing to stop the toll that global warming is taking on people and the planet.
Doesn’t mince its words.
morocco photo printing night
Saturday, July 5th, 2008Spent a lovely evening at Andy and Jo’s flat – the last days of Mostyn Lodge! – with Jim and Abbie too. It was a very enthusiastic Friday night, with lots of banter coasting along on a surge of drunkenness. We printed out pictures from Morocco to stick into our little holiday journal that we wrote together. Re-reading all the lies in it now, we didn’t know what lots of it was about, probably the effect we were hoping for at the time! Andy and Jo excelled themselves once again with some lovely Moroccan style food.