More Bonny goodness

In honour of this man and his furious truth, I thought I'd post the following clip. I don't think I could wilfully underplay just how much that Friday's particular parade of reprobates, ne'erdowells and mediocrities stank up the Jools Holland that this clip's taken from.

But it all turned out alright in the end:

There's no words...

Chelsea denied

Barney Ronay in The Guardian:

Credit to the losers as well. In the build-up Petr Cech had advanced the view that "history only remembers winners". Chelsea deserve a little better than this. This has been a wonderfully bloody-minded and cussed pursuit by a team with genuine steel, a quality it draws from its core of indomitable spirits in key positions. Under both Avram Grant and José Mourinho Chelsea might not have played with a consistently thrilling, gung-ho commitment to attack. But football would be a poorer, less satisfying business all round if there was no reward for this type of cussed, physically resilient, attritional brand of excellence. It's not supposed to be basketball.

And there's always Moscow.

Norm on The Great Fire

Reading Norm's post about Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire, I'm forced to agree. That book has been pushed on me more than once by people who are, in all other respects, lucid, literate and sane. I've picked it up at least three times, determined to give it a fair go; but, every time, I've been defeated by its stylistic quirks.

Now I'm also no stickler for, let's say, lexical exactitude, so I'm not sure why this particular book enrages me so. A novel like the wonderful Fugitive Pieces also made me stop and re-read its lyrical sentences. But that was an intensely rewarding experience. With Great Fire, the quirks seem perilously close to being just mistakes. I'm quite sure they're not: she's an award-winning novelist, after all, and I'm very much not.

But take this sentence from the very first page (I quote from memory): "The platform faces faded into the expression of those that remain". Every time I prepare to lower myself into what I've been led to believe is the warm bath of the book's sensual poetry, I'm slapped about the chops with cold fish sentence like that. I can see what it means if peer at it closely; but the sentence was hardly worth reading once, let alone twice.

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.