Clive James on Amy Winehouse

Typically sensationalist piece of piffle on C4 last night about Amy Winehouse. Most of what needs to be said gets said by Clive James:

When people say that you have a duty to your talent, they all too often mean that you have a duty to them. But they're misstating the case. The duty of the greatly talented is to life itself, because what they do is the consecration of life. I could end with something that Pavarotti once told me in his dressing room before I interviewed him. He wouldn't say it on air, for fear of sounding immodest. He said he knew his gift was from God. But perhaps a better ending would be what Philip Larkin said to the ghost of Sidney Bechet. "On me your voice falls as they say love should, like an enormous yes". Come on, kiddo. Give us a song.

At our place in Greenford, there’s an exceptionally large garden, but it’s almost completely overgrown, having been abandoned for the better part of a decade. It’s strewn with molehills, anthills and knotty and ineradicable tufts of grass; and what used to be the vegetable patch is now just a tangled and impenetrable mass of brambles. Nevertheless, over the weekend, we managed to clear a few square feet of old patio. We can, we will, defeat nature! Failing that, a barbecue will do…

But all that rampant, ungovernable growth is impressive, even faintly scary. So, in honour of the “force that through the green fuse drives the flower”, here’s Song of the Earth, about monumental composer John Luther Adams.

And, talking of terrifying, here’s the Sacrificial Dance from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring:

links

Why the haters are wrong about Mariah Carey:

But it is unfair to damn Carey for the sins of her lesser imitators or to judge her based on a set of musical values that she explicitly rejects. Emotion is not really the point of Carey's songs—not even when she's singing "Emotions."
Her music is first and foremost an expression of power and technical prowess. There is a place in pop for bombast, especially when it's coupled with virtuosity. I have learned to cherish Carey's singing for its brute force, blinding technique, and, yes, showboatiness—to place Mariah's vocal "runs" in the tradition of John Coltrane's "sheets of sound," the pummeling drumming of Led Zeppelin's John Bonham, and Eddie Van Halen's "Eruption" (aka the Magna Carta of shredding 1980s guitar solos).

Up to a point. Would you really want to listen to the melismatic equivalent of "Moby Dick" over and over again, like, forever?

Invisible Jukebox with Carl Craig

Tree of life continues to evolve:

God is just a Type 1 error. What's a type 1 error?

How much progress have pyschiatry and psychology really made?

The Onion: Researchers discover massive asshole in Blogosphere

Zimbabwe

Extraordinary piece in the LRB by R.W. Johnson about the unfolding catastrophe in Zimbabwe.

Perhaps the most important thing about the election was that, because Mbeki and Mugabe had miscalculated so spectacularly, Zanu-PF was caught off-guard and for several days there was complete uncertainty. That period provided an aperture through which Zimbabweans could glimpse an alternative future – and many did. It was clear that, with a new democratic government, there would be immediate British and American help, quickly followed by the EU, the World Bank and IMF, with the emphasis on food aid and the restabilisation of the currency. One consequence would be that Zimbabwe would cease to be a client state of South Africa and instead become more generally dependent on developed country donors and investors. Doubtless, Mbeki and Mugabe would see this as a victory for neocolonialism, though one is bound to say that even if the prospect was described in those terms, ordinary Zimbabweans would happily vote for it.

Robert Downey Jr.

He was the best thing in Zodiac, which is saying something, and the best thing in A Scanner Darkly, which isn't. He's Robert Downey Jr. and he's a blinkin' genius. Christopher Orr in The New Republic gets it just right:

Is there any actor alive who takes more obvious delight in his line readings than Robert Downey Jr.? He is precise yet baroque, contemplating each word with casual bemusement as it leaves his mouth. Though he is one of modern cinema's fastest talkers, it's not because he's in a hurry to tell us anything. Rather, he seems to feel that once a remark has passed through his mind, it's already happened; uttering it aloud is almost an afterthought. It's a form of delivery at once self-deprecating and self-absorbed: Are his thoughts unworthy of being shared? Or are we just unworthy to hear them?

Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago

Spring! The sun’s coming out, the foxes are frolicking in our garden and the album of the year so far just keeps on getter better and better. Bon Iver (as in French for 'good winter') is Mr Justin Vernon and the album is For Emma, Forever Ago. I tracked it down based on a recommendation from the Guardian’s Laura Barton, who’s quietly become their best music writer. In her rapturous piece, she’d said her usual listening habits had been disrupted by For Emma, which she was more or less compelled to listen to on a continuous loop. I now know how she feels.

The story goes that Vernon retreated to a cabin in rural Minnesota to get over a pretty disastrous relationship. Living only on beer and deer meat, he wrote and recorded the album in just a couple of months. Yet there's far more to For Emma than just backwoods verite. True, there are squeaking frets, sharp intakes of breath and the ambient sounds of rural America twittering away in the background.

But the music itself is something else, uncharted territory. There's something of Elliott Smith, of Neil Young perhaps, The Band - even Prince on The Wolves Act One (and check out those tiny moments of auto-tune!). But there are ghosts milling in these songs; something sacred. The wind in the wires, the strange drones, the wide spectrum of Vernon's chorus of angelic voices (it’s often impossible to tell which is supposed to be the lead voice). It's secular church music. The lyrics tumble across odd time signatures: “Gloomy feathers on the flume”. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds lovely.

Along with Ane Brun's Changing of the Seasons, this is my album of the year; everyone else is going to have to go some if they want to improve on this startling, haunted debut.

Humphrey Lyttelton

A moving piece from Marcello on Humphrey Lyttelton:

" [...] A fine and unrepeatable man who never got bored with opening doors, ever eager to move on to the next chapter - standing gainly and gladly outside any restricting glasshouses, and never once wanting or needing to throw stones."

And who else could deliver a single entendres as unassailably perfect as:

"Samantha tells me she has to nip off to meet her new gentleman friend who's been ringing her all day in a grumpy mood. Despite being very busy, Samantha says she can always find time to handle his testy calls."

Cheers Humph.

London Lite etc

K-Punk:

The free paper plague is infesting all areas of London life. From dawn to dusk... Arriving at the station in the morning, the Metro already piled up, waiting. Leaving the train, slipping into your somnambulent self, commuter character armour freezing into place, automatically making the Waste Land walk across London Bridge ('I had not thought that death had undone so many'), the way already blocked by reps proferring City AM. (London Bridge is a film set now (hyperreal city): there's barely a day where there isn't a camera crew or some out of work actors playing a bit part in some promotional pantomime.) And in the evening, rushing to escape the black hole of the city, you have to play live-action Pac Man with the London Lite and the londonpaper drones blocking the pavement every few yards. As if London needed people - poorly paid members of the city's immigrant subproletariat, at that - actually being employed to obstruct the pavement. In the train, the free papers are everywhere, their dull gloss a lurid temptation for the drained mind ... cut and pasted PR ... nothing happening forever ... cocaine celebrities ... a survey says... join in the debate... vote: more or bore... your texts... consume it and feel lulled and sullied... Semiotic parasites designed to prey upon hypnagogic drift. Weapons against the city's intelligence. Almost no-one reads books any more. London litened, littered, public transport desolated into a time waste land. Look around the carriage, snapshot of a MySpaced city: diversity without difference, homogeneity without communality - bodies reduced to claustrophobic zombie meat fighting for space, background hum of mutual hostility simmering, yet everyone is reading the same thing...

Couldn't agree more. I angrily shake my head and reject the proffered paper - then get attack of self-loathing that I've been so rude. And this happens at least twice a day.

The Tindersticks - The Hungry Saw

The Man in Amsterdam waxes lyrical about Devotchka's lovely record. Annoyingly, they were a bit forgettable on Later… (mind you, so were Portishead)

Thinking of the Devotchka's sound, which makes the Yes think of fine Bavarian clockwork, for no good reason (and a host of poor ones), we offer up The Tindersticks' fine new album The Hungry Saw (Beggar's Banquet). It's their first record in five years and, yes, Stuart still has that endearingly mumbly-whuh voice of his in full effect (the title track has him mumbling low-down and then mumbling high-up). Oh, but the shades here - it's a rich and dark and velvety album, like The The's Dusk without the aggro. There are so many chewy chocolately chord progressions here, swishing like the plushest brocade (to mix metaphors with cavalier abandon).

Somehow, I like this even more than Simple Pleasure, which snuck out of nowhere to become one of the best of 1999.

The Department of Truth #1

[From The Language Log]