Klaus Nomi is cold

I was trying to post this somewhere else, but I couldn't. So I'm putting it here.



I bought the rather fabulous Harmonia Mundi Masterworks - fifty milestones of Western music. I'm not really qualified to make judgments on classical music but I think anyone can spot this is a bargain. And the performances are exellent and the choices have sent me down various avenues (though there is too much baroque for my taste). I loved Purcell's opera King Arthur from which this is from.
It appears to be going for £70 (over 100 yoyos) on Amazon.cock. I bought mine for €40 on Presto - Amazon never delivered so I cancelled. So maybe not such good value any more:)

Addendum: it seems not to be too readily available any more, but Harmonia Mundi have it for £29 English pounds. So that's less than a quid a disc which is alright.

Previews

I really meant to write something serious here yesterday. It was to do with sentencing policy and drugs and stuff. But I didn't. I did write some previews of DVDs that arrived in here yesterday so I'll post them instead.

Don't look back (classic DA Pennebaker Bob doc)

Into great silence (god botherers being quiet for once - most popular film in the IFI last year)

20 to life: the life and times of John Sinclair (doc on life of MC5 manager and White Panthers chairman who got 20 years for two joints)

Gram Parsons Fallen Angel (biopic of dilletante heir and musician whose sweethearts of the rodeo, Burrito deluxe, grievous angel etc. are the palimpset for ALL country rock)

South (Shackleton, antartic, in glorious white and white)

Life and debt (mandatory viewing apparently)

Sicko (Moore)

Early cinema primitives and pioneers (you've read about all the films here in media studies books. Now you can watch them too. You lucky lucky people)

Two disc version of Nosferatu (we have the BFI one. I challenge you to find a film this old which still works as well as a film and not just as a historical document)

Lenny - (biopic. Swearing is $$^$ing great. It's big AND it's clever)

Nil by mount (nil by eyes after watching this)

Control (Ian Curtis biopic - for the fans)

Britannia Hospital (was Lyndsey Anderson a ruined genius or just a prick who couldn't be bothered getting on with other people - transpose your opinions on Roy Keane)

Network (it's studied for the script - but there's much more going on. Inchoate rage. The only sensible emotion)

1984 (original poster tag - will ecstasy be a crime? prescient)

Animal farm (the CIA funded one unfortunately - not the famous video nasty)

Deathproof (Tarantino's entry in the torture porn genre)

What have I done to deserve this (perhaps Almadovar's most misanthropic film - a must see)

Coming home (Vietnam film I bought under the mistaken belief that it won the best film O$€£r the year that Apocalypse now and Deer Hunter were out - it didn't. But Hal Ashby is still the forgotten great of 70s US film)

Exiles (Cannes winner 2004)

Chinese Odyssey 2002 (Chinese spoof on Crouching homo hidden hamster)

Myra Beckinridge (legendary "they didn't do that? Did they?" version of Gore Vidal shock sex satire with Racquel Welsh)

Rio Grande (Wayne, O'Hara, River, Big)

Phil Mulloy extreme animation (he tattoos the animations on his schlong, lasers them out, starts again. Looks like a rasher in the microwave for 10 hours.)

Atonement (utter and complete SHITE. waste of two hours. By turns opaque and infuriatingly facile. Keira Knightley isn't even the most annoying thing in it.)

The wire (don't bother - I have it first)

Jury's still out on The Wire - I've watched two episodes and it doesn't strike me as being a radical departure from the genre. Maybe incremental rather than revolutionary.

St. John's Passion

Seeing as how my living circumstances have changed this year I only went to one performance in the Living Music festival. I went to none last year but it was John Adams and after having to sit through the RTE Concert Orchestra while they dragged their lazy arses through a soporific rendition of short ride in a fast machine I didn't feel like putting myself through it. Part should have been different and I would have gone to lot more if Back of Head wasn't in my life. I chose to go to the Passio on Saturday night in Christchurch and brought my mother as a Christmas present. I am vaguely familiar with the piece - I have the Naxos rather than the Hilliard ensemble recording and the presence of the Hilliard Ensemble was part of the reason to choose this rather than one of the other performances.

Hmmm.... they play it considerably slower. Glacially paced. Sure nothing much goes on in the music anyway but the pace, for me, exposed it's thinness. I love devotional music but rarely pay attention to the words. I often find myself walking down the road singing "chant down Babylon" but when I think of Babylon I think of Gilgamesh and rather appreciate its impact on world culture (apart from chunks of the bible being nicked from old Babylonian poetry. That's not so cool.). I digress. I had much time to pay attention to the words of this passion. The text comes from the latin version of St. Paul. It's a rum choice for a passion. The authorial interventions by The Evangelist (in the role of Basil Exposition) are many. And frequently elongated and monotonic. Jesus in this version is not a sympathetic character: he is aloof, a grudging participant in fate. And a smart arse "are you the king of the jews?" asks Pilate, "you say I am" Jesus replies. No Jesus, he didn't, he asked you a question, now tell him the answer and get out of there. The only attractive character, and played by the tenor who gets the liveliest musical line, is Pilate. He doesn't want to kill Jesus. He is forced into doing so by "the jews". This passion is a deeply anti-jewish text written as an apologia for Roman imperialism. Jesus was doing his job, so was Pilate: it was the nasty jews who weren't. It's quite obviously written for a Roman audience.

Most of these flaws are within the text itself. It does not lend itself to a sympathetic narrative of the passion. Its racism is out of tune with the modern world (if it was anti-roman we wouldn't really mind...) Its Jesus is almost old testament in his aloof disregard for creation, with only an almost modern Bart Simpson smartarse personality lending him humanity.
Po faced and solemn rather than moving and contemplative. I shifted on my wooden chair for the duration.

I don't care what Giovanni says - Arvo really does look like a hunched up Salman Rushdie.

I also wasted two hours watching Atonement at the weekend. If it wins an award for best supporting actor or something it should be the house that does it. The house was the best dressed, most interesting character in the film. The film was a strange mix of difficult and facile. The child was a proxy for the author in a crass way - her atonement was anything but. The exposition was sometimes so subtle as to make you feel a scene had been cut. Which it probably had.

Despair, hope, Repuberlick, and the Trap

As I have said many times before - it's not the despair. It's the hope that kills you.

Might I be allowed to watch republic playing a match without peeking through my fingers shaking my head groaning numbing myself with drugs and alcohol beseeching the elder ones in syllables beyond language?

I can see it all: I turn up. Spruce. Alert. Hopeful. Watchful.

My spirit gets dashed against a pebbledash wall and rubbed repeatedly while raw down to a stump.

Or:

He doesn't turn up as manager. Even Venerables decides he's too cool for us (and in fairness, too cool for the repuberlick is not too hard: the most high profile toupee wearer in English football is too cool for us) and we get somebody else who once coached Scunthorpe reserves through their bad patch before the current renaissance.

Adam Curtis' the trap pitched a world of theoretical people: hard hearted criminals the lot of them upon which the political / economical elite / establishment based its calculations for control. If only we were those people. The prisoner's dilemma would be simple: always assume the worst about Irish football. Always assume failure. We are trapped not by failure but by hope.