One Night To Speed Up Truth

Lord knows how I missed this.

Mew - No More Stories

Discovering an undiscovered hankering for Danish proglite, I've been feeling Mew's No More Stories.

Here comes music journalism: there's a song called "Silas the Magic Car". With a children's choir. Mmm.

Yeah, exactly.

Here's the video for the first single, "Introducing Palace Players", a song angular in much the same manner as the Giant's Causeway, but with a brilliant little video:

Leviathan, or The Whale

High on the list of books I must read this decade, certainly much higher than any number of gloomy Russians or periphrastic Frenchmen, is Melville's Moby Dick. It was James Wood's essay, unpromisingly titled "The All and the If: God and Metaphor in Melville" that got me hooked on this shaggy mammal story. The way Woods tell it, Melville is second only to Shakespeare in his awesome attempt to encircle a world with a mad effusion of words. I've tried before, only to be done in by the awesome tedium of that chapter-long sermon which, I'm ashamed to say, occurs before our heroes have even left the land.

Clearly I'm just going to have to skip the damn thing, having just read Philip Hoare' quite wonderful Leviathan, or the Whale. The book, an intoxicating hybrid, mixes W.G. Sebald's gloomy peregrinations and gnomic musings with a bloody history of whaling. Hoare, depressed by the murk of London and the death of his mother, travels to New England and meditates upon the obscure biology of the sperm whale, describing how a great American industry was founded upon the wholesale slaughter of this fabulous beast. We see just how uniquely dangerous the life of a whaling Nantucketer really was, as they rowed in their tiny boats to the Whale's blind side, hoping to harpoon it before it panicked and stove in their puny vessel. We also follow the feckless Herman Melville, the new enfant terrible of American letters who's hoping to write a great adventure novel but who instead meets Nathaniel Hawthorne and is gripped by the transcendental fever that would elevate Moby Dick from the merely picturesque into a new American mythic.

We've killed hundreds of thousands of sperm whales in the last three centuries. Whale oil has been used in surprising ways, even lubricating the moving parts of the Voyager satellite. Here's a video where the balance is, however fleetingly, redressed:

Sperm whale attack
by dmars72

Carol Brown

They said it wasn't as good as the first season. Pfft. 'They". They know nothing.

Arcadia

We saw Tom Stoppard's Arcadia last night. I don't need to tell you that it's a wonderfully mind-bending couple of hour that touches on literary authenticity, 18th trends in gardening, the second law of thermodynamics, Lord Byron and his devilish ways, the heat death of the universe, iterated equations and much else besides.

Iterated equations? Yes. Feed X into equation, get Y. Let Y be the next X and repeat. From such humble beginnings can come all the patterns of nature. For instance, take a look at these truly extraordinary computer generated flowers:

This dance is like a weapon

A new song played at Latitude:

múm "11 songs to drown in a lake to"

"11 songs to drown to" - a múm mixtape by seaninsound

From Normblog:

The claim made by Richard Dawkins, and mentioned by Martin in passing here, 'that imposing parental beliefs on children is a form of child abuse' surely merits some clarifying explanation before we assent to it. It is, of course, easy as well as necessary to draw a distinction between putting a belief to children in a way that makes it plain to them that there are alternatives to, questions about, disagreements over it, and insisting on the belief as the sole unchallengeable truth. There's a difference between trying to educate children in a spirit that encourages interest in the world and finding out about it, on the one hand, and indoctrination, on the other. However, teaching people anything at all must involve putting across some points, beliefs, theses, in a more favourable light than others. If nothing else, education in a non-doctrinaire spirit means explaining the different modes of holding a belief and why leaving them open to falsification in the light of counter-evidence or the demonstration of internal inconsistency is an intellectual virtue. Again, must we not discriminate better from worse as between maintaining some standards of personal cleanliness and not doing so, or between behaving with consideration and kindness and being rude and dishonest? More generally, educating children involves, willy-nilly, the imparting of moral beliefs. This cannot be done without the presentation of some things as good and others as less good or downright bad. Even done in a non-doctrinaire way, it must involve a degree of active direction. It's misleading, therefore, to pretend that only dogmatists and fanatics narrow the minds of their children to the available sum of human beliefs. Everybody does it to some extent. Socialization of any kind would be impossible without it. It begins with the teaching of language.

The Abstinence Teacher

My better- or rather, my vastly superior - half recently bought a copy of Tom Perotta's The Abstinence Teacher from Shakespeare and co in Paris. Since I had only brought How to Lose Friends and Alienate People along as holiday matter, I needed a new book, and stat (not because Toby Young's memoir is awful - it's not. It's just that it's one of those little pamphlets you can hoover up in more or less a single sitting: cf. those of Marcus Trescothick and Michael Atherton; I scanned the salient chapters--the crack-up, the Ashes--in various Borders around town). Anyway, I wheedled and pouted like a sad champion until I was allowed to read.

It's actually brilliant. I sort of knew it must be at least a bit good, since it had been hugely well reviewed just about everywhere. It's a nice question, therefore, why the book I never trained my voracious I MUST BUY THIS kleig lights upon the book for even a fleeting moment. Anyway. The book is about a sex education teacher in a small American town, whose turf gets encroached upon by an incongruously gamine Christian pushing her abstinence-only program into the school, and who also has to deal with her daughter's soccer coach who, after much drinking and drugging, is now born-again.

Apart from the brilliant interior voices of the assembled pastors, sad-sack teachers, ex-wives and husbands, defiant teens and jarringly perky Christians, what stands out is Perotta's compelling facility with dialogue and plot. Fantastic set pieces, such as the recalcitrant teachers having to relate a "sexual experience I regret" or the born-again convention, are powered forward by the smooth engine of the plot, all its part moving in lovely harmony as the book's smooth groove's crescendo hits a surprising note at the climax.

Fantastic.

Antichrist

Some thoughts about the movie Antichrist, about which I hardly know what to think, which seems to me puts it three quarters of the way to greatness.

Now, heaven knows, it seems a lifetime since we had a honest-to-goodness movie scandal, an attempt by the redtops, in the name of all that is decent and holy, to foment outrage over what they would have you believe is some squalid awful little movie fit only for immediate banning, then the burning of all involved. Not so very long ago, when we were still being treated as innocent lickle bunnykins by the State, you only had to say "Cronenberg!" and the offending piece of celluloid would be removed from our sight, never to be seen again.

I remember in the early days of VHS coming into possession of strange almost samizdat catalogues that listed thousands of titles that I could never hope to see, with strange and impossibly exotic titles: Clockwork Orange; Straw Dogs; I Spit On Your Grave; Driller Killer; Last Half on the Left; Texas Chainsaw Massacre. What on earth did these titles portend? And when the original video nasty scandal got them all banned (I seem to remember Videodrome being held up as a paragon of all that was evil. Why?), naturally I became all the more curious. These movies all but promised to freeze my young blood, harrow up my very soul, make my two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres and, since we're on the subject, cause each particular hair to stand on end like quills upon the fretful porcupine. Fantastically scary shit, in other words.

Now, with every two bit video nasty finally released and detoxified and with even Cannibal Holocaust watchable over the webular intertubes, we've all got a bit blase. Who's gonna shake us from our slumber?

If the papers are to be believed, and there's a statement that needs strong shoulders, then Lars Von Trier's latest noisome concoction is just the thing to reawaken outrage muscles not flexed this millennium. The way the critics are telling it, Antichrist is little more than horror porn, Hostel or Saw taken to a shocking new extreme. Real penetration? Genital mutilation? This is one sick snuff movie that must be banned forthwith.

Actually, it's nothing of the sort. Rather, it's a beautiful and bleak film with a talking fox.

Yes, Antichrist is surpassingly strange and disturbing, a fever dream of a film. It reminded me of a more elliptic Whicker Man, with its obsession with rituals and symbols and the pagan heart of nature beating beneath a veer of Christian respectability; although it should be said that Antichrist made that film look like Carry On Pagan - there are no songs, or Christopher Lees or prancing virgins in this.

Rather we have a movie that spends its first hour in a sickly trance of anxiety, less film than a high gloss version of the DSM V. It's a case study of pathological and profound depression, as Charlotte Gainsbourg's unnamed character tries to get through the anxiety attacks that plague her since the death of her and Willem Dafoe's child. He's a therapist; he treats her; tries to get her off the drugs; has a therapeutic nostrum for all her symptoms. Gainsbourg is all too believable as she struggles with tremors and paralysis and numbness and his impotent rationalism. Von Trier says that he identifies with her character; the film was born from a period of profound depression he suffered. It's all up their on the screen.

At this point, Defoe wants the couple to go to the woods where Gainsbourg had previously attempted to finish her PhD concerning the torture of women (by women?) throughout the centuries, a thick tract entitled Gynocide, replete with photocopies of medieval woodcuttings and modern outrages. He wants her to confront her fears. It's fair to say that things don't go quite according to plan. From here on in, there's a great deal that's symbolic, referencing (I assume) animistic traditions, folklore and paganism, even shamanism. A constellation called the Three Beggars becomes important (even though, as the man points out at one point, "there's no such constellation"). Foxes, crows, deers. Ants and acorns. Nature as Satan? Sure. It's all in there.

I'm not at all sure what it all means. That's part of why I thought it was fantastic. Any film that features, in no particular order, beautiful ultra-slow motion black and white scenes of snow and sex soundtracked by Handel, a hand covered in ticks, a miscarrying deer, a hatchling bird being devoured by ants, an oddly unkillable crow, weird lensing effects, such that the forest seems to be a living and devouring thing, a most terrifying dead tree, the aforementioned fox with its terrible message, childishly scrawled titles, a classic "book that explains the madness" scene, and an epilogue that is both very moving and not entirely comprehensible, is worth the experience.

The genital mutilation? I closed my eyes.