freckles_and_doubt | Entries tagged with music

What is it with Arcade Fire? There's something about the two-punch of "Crown of Love" followed by "Wake Up" which makes me cycle them on endless repeat. I think it might be the beat, that repetitive pulse, or perhaps the repeated note, like a ground bass. Something about a strong, driving bass line really works for me, gives a song an underlying thrust and coherence which is quite separate from the actual tune. See also "Strangers When We Meet", "White Winter Hymnal" (when the beat gets going, with added bonus in the crescendo, which Arcade Fire also does in spades), "Love is a Stranger", "Tusk", "All Tomorrow's Parties", "Love Will Tear Us Apart", "Why So Sad", "We Will Become Silhouettes", Big Wreck's "Head in the Girl", "Where the Streets Have No Name" (serious build-up points), "Colours" and "Lucretia", She Wants Revenge's "These Things". I don't have the necessary musical wossname to actually describe the shared quality, but it's a visceral effect, my whole body responds.

I have been playing Arcade Fire on repeat as a means of escape from a continual string of desperate students, who are in their first week of exams and are tending to flail wildly as they work out how many of them they're actually going to fail. I respond to this with my usual calm professionalism, i.e. by situating on my desk a large jar of mini chocolate bars, which I hand out to anyone who looks stressed. It's quite effective. Especially when I'm the one looking stressed, which happens several times a day. Damn.

Now I shall twiddle my thumbs until the nice ITS person arrives to migrate my email to Outlook. I shall endeavour not to simulate retching in the corner, but it'll be difficult. I loathe Outlook. Gruesome little beast.

Current Mood: vaguely analytic
Current Music: Arcade Fire on repeat

I woke up on Friday morning with "Me and Bobby McGee" on my brain, where it has remained throughout the weekend. I grew up with the Kris Kristofferson version, which I actually prefer to the Janis Joplin; Janis gets a bit strident for my taste, although I love her whisky-soaked huskiness. I have attempted to exorcise the earworm by hauling out my guitar, which I haven't touched in about a year, and (after a rather extended tuning episode, gosh I have neglected the poor thing, it was about a minor third out of tune) footling around with the song's slighty basic chords and pluck pattern, but it's still rattling around my skull. Currently I have the Kristofferson version on repeat. It may be helping. I wish, however, that my brain wasn't so damned random with these things. I mean, please. Bobby McGee? Honestly. I haven't heard the damned thing in years.

I am feelin' nearly faded as my jeans on account of my sleep patterns, which appear to have been woven, over the last few days, by that spider they gave the caffeine to. I'm twitchy and insomniac, and when I do get to sleep I have nightmares: last night was notable for multiple wakes in which I crouched on the end of my bed saying "please don't" in accents of pitiful terror to the man with the rocket launcher. In retrospect I think he may have been Agent Coulson, which is sad, as I'm fond of Agent Coulson. Phooey. Tonight I shall mix a double dose of the sleeping tabs with a shot of rum, and damn the torpedoes. Bored now.

Current Mood: undeadundeadundead
Current Music: Kris Kristofferson "Bobby McGee"

Hooray! I am back in the familiar embrace of Winona, with all my logins automatic, instead of having to type the wretched things in manually on my mother's computer. I miss my own virtual space. I am also much in favour of Virgin trains, which are currently trundling me happily towards Euston with a power point and a table for Winona and easily-accessible internets, with no greater drawbacks than occasional fainting fits in the wireless connection, and a slight tendency to double-type when we go over a bump. Ain't the future wonderful.

I had a truly lovely week in Sedbergh with my lovely mother, and have now sadly left her to her pre-term preparations for the 71 teenage girls who descend on Wednesday. My mental image is of her manning the bunkers wearing an army helmet and an expression of grim determination. She does, however, send love to any of you lot who are acquainted with her.

It is also the start of another month, which is (a) terrifying on account of how the year is doing that acceleration thing, (b) means I missed

wolverine_nun's spanky birthday party on Saturday, woe, and (c) obligated me to pay my intellectual debts. Unsuspecting sources from whom my subject lines have ruthlessly nicked euphonious words over the month of August are as follows:

1st August: one of the more crescendo-to-silly bits of the Arithmetic Song from the Doctor Seuss Song Book, a copy of which I joyously possess. It's actually surprisingly atonal and tricky music to play, but the inherent insanity of the lyrics makes me very happy.
6th August: the Obligatory David Bowie quote, here, of course, from "Life on Mars" in rather nicely layered commentary on Curiosity's perfect landing. The ineffable satisfaction with which a quote clicks into place on several levels simultaneously is... well, ineffable.
10th August: Charles Dickens, the opening Chancery bit from Bleak House, in which he is sustainedly and beautifully rude about lawyers.
14th August: you should have spotted this one - pretty much my statement of weather-related creed from "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head", which was written for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid by one of the world's great song-writing duos, Burt Baccharach and Hal David. Those guys wrote great music, particularly for piano rendition. Hal David, by an unpleasant co-incidence, died a couple of days ago.
19th August: a somewhat prescient reference to The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, since, while I have neither seen nor read the work concerned, I have spent the last week rather dementedly catching up on my YA girly literature from the library in the boarding house. This has involved a slightly gruesome amount of paranormal romance in addition to teen fantasy and a bucketload of Meg Cabot. Meg Cabot is fun - funny, acute and surprisingly well written. As a bonus, scientific experimentation suggests I can whack through a Cabot novel in about an hour and a half, which means that the total number of books I've read in the last week is... *counts on fingers* ... somewhere slightly in excess of fifteen. I feel much more frivolous now.
20th August: a horrible pun mashing up the conference venue with the sort of agony-column state I was in after completely screwing up that first conference paper. My second paper is much shorter and more ruthlessly shaped, and I am poised to watch myself like a hawk for unnecessary elaboration.
23rd August: dear Bilbo, slightly drunkenly at his birthday party, quoted in mitigation of the slightly drunken ability of a select cohort of academics to correctly remember the quote at the after-party.
30th August: William Wordsworth, naturally, from "The Prelude". Sticking a pin randomly into "The Prelude" at almost any point will yield a quote useful for heading posts about sight-seeing in the Lake District.

I'm in London for a couple of days, crashing with

egadfly, and lunching with various peoples who are being very kind about my feeble flutterings at the idea of navigating London with a giant suitcase in tow. I go through to Kingston for the conference on Wednesday, and then head back to CT on Sunday. I feel very globe-trottery.

Current Mood: happily futuristic

There's been a big red ABSA poster up in my corridor for two weeks, advertising some sort of graduate development programme. It has a little mathematical conundrum on it, which reads as follows:

2+3=10
7+2=63
6+5=66
8+4=96
9+7=?

This bugged me for a couple of days, as I dashed madly past it in Hellweek flurries, and eventually I stopped and looked at it properly. 9+7 in this context probably equals 144, but I'm curious - is this a strange and random ABSA pattern-recognition game, or some sort of recognised mathematical procedure with a label of its own? I'm thinking the former, mainly because it apparently works with my vaguely organic pattern-recognition brain. Structuralist study of narrative does weird things to the pattern recognition.

Apparently the cosmic reward of being determinedly and successfully nice to students all last week (only one slight slip-up in the last few hours of Friday) is that I'm grumpy as hell this week. Then again, this week they're trying to do stupid, illegal things which show they haven't read the notices. I am becoming progressively more crone-like and codgerish about non-notice-reading gazelles.

And, in other news, it's August! aargh! I still have to finish two papers in less than three weeks, although I do pretty much know what I want to say and how I want to say it, which helps. However, a new month also means the monthly assault on another prevalent vice, namely unmarked quotation.

4th July: I am quoting, of course, "As time goes by", which will now proceed to ear-worm me for a couple of days and give me a random, rootless desire to re-watch Casablanca. Than which, I suppose, there are worse things. I woke up this morning with A-ha's "Take on me" on the brain, for no adequately defined reason, so I should count my blessings. Anyway, it was also an egregious but slightly lateral pun on both the passage of time and fundamental particles, since I was burbling about the Higgs boson at the time. (Absolutely the best and most definitive response to the Higgs boson is, of course, from Scenes from a Multiverse. Of course they're conspiring. With cigarettes dangling out the corners of their mouths.)
9th July. As any fule kno, this is a quote from the Mutant Enemy zombie logo at the end of Joss Whedon productions, and anyone who didn't recognise it should be properly ashamed. Ashamed, I say! *waves unreasonable geeky fangirl flag with unrepentant chauvinism*
13th July. I have no idea what I was doing here, other than conflating Joss Whedon randomly with incense. Why, I can't say. I don't like incense.
15th July. I wish I could say I was quoting Walt Whitman, but in fact I'm quoting Robin Williams in, of course, Dead Poet's Society, and once more I cannot say why, I can't stand the film. While being, of course, one hundred percent behind the idea of captains. Notwithstanding which, there seems to be a certain level of masochism in this month's subject line choices.
18th July. This one was for wolverine_nun, who knows as well as I do that this comes from Flanders and Swann, "The Gasman Cometh", and I have no doubt that a select but gratifying number of you also recognised it. I couldn't give tuppence for all of the rest.
23rd July. We used to play and sing this in guitar club at school - mountain folk song about the miner's life, which is insanely catchy and which I suspect I've quoted before. Both the Tennessee Ernie Ford and the Johnny Cash versions are jauntier than I remember it being, we tended to sing it a bit more like a dirge. Well, obviously. "Another day older and deeper in debt", after all.
25th July. Oh, dear. I am quoting Bobby McFerrin. I seem to do insane amounts of research for these subject line glosses, and this batch has revealed that the 1988 hit version is actually completely a capella, which I never realised before and which makes me very happy indeed.
26th July. My contractually obligated David Bowie quote. I was ridiculously proud of the thematic fit in this one, given that post was about Tom Cruise and the lyrics are from "I'm Deranged", and at various points insist that not only is it funny how secrets travel, but "It's the angel-man" and "Cruise me babe".
29th July. Omar Khayyám, who has, as evinced by outbreaks of bloggery in November and December 2005, has a quote for absolutely everything.

This week's quotation round-up brought to you courtesy of hopeless inconsequentiality, and a headache. Now I go to fend students off with a crowbar and meet my Deanly-requested teaching and learning report-construction doom.

Current Mood: headachy and grrrr

Friday-working-at-home, hallelujah, since I currently feel as though I've made a hamfisted and inexpert attempt to hang myself, failing miserably to produce any positive outcome other than a really sore neck. There are apparently high-pressure pain conduits running from under my ears down my neck and under my chin, where they quite distract me from the sinus headache. This degree of pain is a new one for the glandular wossnames, bless their experimental little hearts; I can only hope that my hapless form is not a lab-rat to a spirited attempt to blow my head off by inflation or constriction.

I have been noodling happily around various work projects all morning, to a sound-track composed entirely of random YouTube linkage (mercifully, the inexplicable yen for ELO, which has occupied most of the week, seems to be over). The usual trail of arbitrary link-following has led to a couple of truly lovely covers of Toto, by variously (a) pub acoustic cover-band guys with excellent voices, and (b) a full a-capella choir. "Africa" is one of those beautifully anthemic pieces with strong harmonies and a rousing chorus that really lends itself to this sort of thing, and I refuse categorically to be embarrassed about my thorough enjoyment of both these versions.

Watch on YouTube

(The Perpetuum Jazzile version is absolutely worth waiting through the slightly lame rain-simulation at the start, although I have to give them props for the effectiveness of their thunder. Also, latent Belladonna experience makes me heartily jealous of their tenors).

Watch on YouTube

Finally, Doctor Horrible gave me the vague idea that Felicia Day's voice was a bit thin and quavery. Apparently not. She kicks butt in this one, which is also insanely cute and catchy.

Watch on YouTube

Now I shall set about ruthlessly re-defining myself as an academic in HR jargon, and writing plaintive remonstrances to the Dean about mentorship programmes. I like Fridays. Work is done by mystic processes while pretending to be something else.

Current Mood: a bit dead, actually

Yesterday was Star Wars day, which means, ye gods, it's May. You can tell by the weather, which is still pleasingly damp and becoming bloody cold with proper wintery gravitas, and my state of fret. I give a conference keynote in less than two weeks, and the paper currently consists of about six pages of notes with "aargh" written at intervals, and a giant pile of books on the school story, through which I propose to wade this weekend.

You must forgive my lack of blogging: my moments of free time, of which there have been significantly few owing to an insane rash of meetings interspersed with angsty students, have been pretty evenly divided between finding succinct and creative ways to be rude about the Hogwarts idea of education, and retreating from same into a re-play of the first Mass Effect. (Because I played so badly first time around. My skills and tactics were horrible - I realise, post the Mass Effect 2 experience, that I managed to play the first game entirely without using cover, which does explain the wear and tear on the medi-gel. This time round I am pwning it slightly more handily, as well as picking up all the bits I missed).

It also means it's a new month, and time to acknowledge my debts. (This is becoming easier given that my blograte is so far down. This is a temporary state of things, I promise.) Reading chronologically, April has nicked bits thusly:

2nd. I actually have no idea where I dredged this up, it's one of those phrases which has passed into the proverbial lore of the slightly pretentiously gothic. It's actually Falstaff, from Henry IV Part II, a play I have never actually read. (Although I studied Henry V for A-Level, and am rife with opinions about it). The correct quote is "We have heard the chimes at midnight". I vaguely associate it with Thurber, although I suspect that's just the slighly ponderous gait of the phrase.
3rd. A quote from a rather amusingly sadistic nursery rhyme sort of thing, in which there were three in the bed and the little one said "roll over", so they all rolled over... etc. In retrospect, it's rather dodgy. You start out with a veritable orgy of ten in the bed, and whittle them down until the little one ends up splendidly alone and going to sleep. I remember my mother singing this to us, I have absolutely no idea where it originates. It does resonate rather well with my sleeping habits, though.
10th. A fragment of Magnetic Fields in marginally depressive mode. The song is "Infinitely late at night", off their album I; the flavour of the tune is sort of languidly-swaying French-ballady, a mode I associate with the fake-Frenchy elements of "Those Canaan Days" from Joseph. (News from the front: I can still recite all the colours of Joseph's bloody technicolour dreamcoat).
17th. "Jade Lady" is the name given to Phyrne Fisher by her luscious Chinese lover Lin. It refers to her tendency to look like a Manchu princess apart from the bright green eyes.
20th. The obligatory David Bowie quote, here from "Cat People", which is a song I seem to mine fairly regularly for quotes, it being strangely congruent with my interests.
22nd. Quote and song title from Postal Service, one I've actually used before, but it's such a lovely image. (Although the song is apparently about nuclear war, it has an odd balance of apocalyptic and sappy: "I've got a cupboard with cans of food, filtered water, and pictures of you/ and I'm not coming out until this is all over...")
28th. I actually referenced this one: Joss Whedon on cats.
30th. Quite one of my favourite quotes from The Avengers, entailing probably my two favourite characters in the film, and deploying the nicely Whedonesque balance of reference, fan service and tongue-in-cheek, ironic reinterpretation. Postmodern, in fact. Damn, I must write that review. Maybe tomorrow, if I conquer the school story theory.

Allons-y! Dissing Dumbledore waits for no man, although it may actually wait until I've finished Virmire. Dammit. My self-discipline is not only a small, fluffy, reluctant thing lurking on a rock somewhere, it's lurking on a rock while hunched manically over a computer game and refusing to be distracted. Sigh.

Current Mood: determined
Current Music: Magnetic Fields

Goodness, April. I cannot condone the helter-skelter promiscuity with which the months leap headlong into each other's recently-vacated beds. In particular, I cannot but feel peeved at the fact that April this year seems to have heralded a full-on glandular resurgence, which means I'm dragging myself around the show in a dazed and non-functional state, wibbling. However, five-day break over Easter. (I took Thursday off to spend it with my Mama, who arrives from points British on Wednesday night, hurrah!)

It being a new month, I am obliged to follow my New Year's Resolution, namely to acknowledge the sources of my involuted subject line references. March shakes down as follows:

1st: English proverb. Have you ever noticed how many English proverbs are concerned with the weather? Poor things.
6th: David Bowie, lyrics of "Teenage Wildlife", appropriately enough given the subject of the post.
8th: beautifully apposite quote from Avengers trailer.
11th: quote from Rango.
16th: Quote from one of Gollum's riddles.
20th: quote from one of my favourite T-shirts, although not, confusingly, the anti-Twilight T-shirt featured in the post. We rejoice in a plethora of anti-Twilight t-shirts, suggesting that there's hope for today's youth.
24th: Logan quote from Veronica Mars. Logan is eminently quotable. Also, Logan/Veronica 4 EVAH!
27th: an infusion of my usual "< Weekday > Wol is..." formula with a mutated LOLcat slogan.
29th: Quote from "Teach Your Children Well", which is a catchy but saccharine Crosby Stills & Nash song I learned in guitar club at school.
21st. Self-conscious invocation of the traditional diss of a clichéd fantasy novel or D&D game, and simultaneously a deliberate subtextual referral to the slash fan fiction I teach in the course whose web pages the hacker is routinely hacking.

In other news, if you haven't yet seen The Guild's new musical number + video, do so. It's a marvellous geeky revenge fantasy, but it's also an incredibly clever piece of film which plays lovely games with visual matches and with pretentious rock-band tropes.

Current Mood: amused, but dead
Current Music: to my EIGHTH GRADE CRUSH who PUSHED ME IN THE POOL...

Last night I dreamed I was getting married to one of my curriculum advisors. It was one of those worrying, subtly-wrong marriage dreams: drifting around a giant, elaborate wedding in a rather pleasant woodland, being faintly perturbed by the fact that I didn't want this sort of wedding and didn't really know this person, and that all the guests were his friends, not mine. While I think the actual imagery was sparked by a general discussion of weddings in theory and practice last night (several in the vicinity lately), I also think that it's patently obvious that my subconscious thinks I'm in a bad relationship with all this curriculum advice, and perilously close to an unwise commitment. Today has borne that out. I keep stumbling over these giant omissions and errors that I've made while trying to run two major jobs simultaneously, and I find it deeply upsetting.

Also, I still have bloody Roger Whittaker on the brain. For all that it is, as strawberryfrog pointed out, a horribly schmaltzy tune, it's also ridiculously catchy. Apologies to anyone else such as Pumeza who is of the same vintage as I am, and thus open to this particularly persistent and syrupy earworm.

Now I need to email my mother, who will otherwise be horribly shocked by her cellphone bill, since her phone apparently phoned me off its own bat this morning and spent several minutes leaving a voicemail recording of a rambling conversation between mother and someone rather muffled about leaks in dormitories. Since she's in the UK, this is a rather expensive form of butt call. If you read this first, mother, chastise your phone.

(Subject line Goats, of course. Goats will provide a surreality for all known occasions).

Current Mood: tired, dispirited

Memory is a weird thing. I woke up this morning with a fragment of song on my mind, which, after mulling over it for a bit, I realised was Roger Whittaker's "The Last Farewell". After ten minutes I could, in fact, remember the entire tune. I got up and played it on the piano, more or less without hesitation. I don't think I've actually heard it for nearly thirty years. The mental images I associate with it are of Makoholi, which is the research station in Zimbabwe (near Masvingo) which we lived on until I was in Standard 3, making me nine or ten years old when I left. I mean, who listens to Roger Whittaker any more? He was one of those singers whose popularity is very much about a specific time. I don't even think my parents had any of his records, I must have heard the song on the radio, or (I vaguely think, the memory is very fragmented) at the house of one of my parents' friends.

I couldn't remember much of the lyrics, but enough (mostly the phrase in my subject line, for some reason) that I could identify the song to pull it up on YouTube and play it. It's making me cry. I have no idea what I'm associating it with - that much of memory doesn't survive, so I'm experiencing a sort of isolated gut-punch attached to nothing in particular. Of course, the time it's linked to in my memory is actually in the middle of the Rhodesian war, and has every reason to be a bit fraught. But it's so strange, that the actual event and emotion are lost, but the emblem endures with all its baggage. Music is very powerful.

So, apparently, am I. On an unrelated note, I spoke to a bunch of parents-of-students at parents' orientation yesterday, in a quick reassurance of we-are-looking-after-your-offsprings'-curriculum which seemed to go down very well (lots of laughter and nodding, always a good sign). One of the dads came up to me yesterday and showed me an SMS his daughter had sent him from the middle of orientation last week. "Am in orientation! its cool!!! Jessica is funny!" Given that my unenviable task is to make about four hours total of detailed curriculum overview somehow entertaining, it quite made my day.

Current Mood: relieved it's Sunday

By way of dancing upon the aged and recumbent corpse of 2011 in an appropriately upbeat fashion, herewith Joseph Gordon Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, Prince and Princess of Whimsyquirkalicious, being, frankly, adorable.

Watch on YouTube

Surprise! Ms Deschanel has a lovely voice, which seems ideally suited to the vintage of the song. JGL is perfectly competent, but gets by mainly on charm. JGL always gets by on charm.

Tonight we are having a medium to small select dinner with a medium to small and select bunch of people, which has become our annual gesture in defiance of Giant New Year Celebrations. 2011 has been in many ways a complete bugger, and adorable celebrity duets notwithstanding, I shall trample its corpse with righteous satisfaction and the assistance of French 75s. As I go forth to randomly stuff chickens with wild rice, I wish to you witterers all the best for the new year. It can, they say, only get better.

Current Mood: tramplesome

Today I appear to be listening only to music from bands in the letter C. Reading from the top in the pile of random CDs which recently arrived from Loot and still need to be ripped to my work machine, these are The Cure, King Crimson and The Carpenters. I accept no responsibilities for muscle trauma resulting from your conceptual whiplash, thank you very much.

Talking about concatenations by odd thematic link, we had Movie Club on Friday night, with a theme of vampire movies which was - gasp - not actually chosen by me! Stv was, in fact, guilty of the choice, probably more accurately described as "really odd and thoughtful semi-art-house vampire movies", with a side order of "human emotional realism and pathos arising from unnaturally prolongued life". When I say that The Hunger wasn't in the mix but darned well should have been, you will (if an educated vampire-fancier) immediately realise that the movies we watched must have been Guillermo del Toro's Cronos, and the ~~Norwegian~~ Swedish Let The Right One In. Neither of which I'd seen, incidentally (although I have a copy of the original Let The Right One In novel, which I haven't got around to reading yet, does it count?), so I consider my vampire-fondling street cred to have been materially raised by the evening's watching.

Cronos made me realise exactly why Guillermo del Toro was keen on a Mountains of Madness adaptation, and why he'd be perfect for it. While being considerably beyond my ick-barriers in terms of the usual delToroid gaping wounds and peeling flesh, Cronos made me incredibly happy because it's completely and perfectly Lovecraftian. It has the fascination with the past, with ancient tomes filled with occulted, terrible, secret knowledge; the greed and blind obsession of men desperate for particular kinds of power at any cost; the occluded mystery and inexplicable significance of supernatural manifestations; and the inevitable self-destruction which results from grasping at the forbidden. No-one does "hideous things man was not meant to know" better than Lovecraft, and del Toro gets that, perfectly. He's materially assisted by the cinematography, which is atmospheric and often oddly beautiful - the framing of the last scene in particular was heartbreaking. (Guillermo Navarro, the cinematographer, also shot Pan's Labyrinth and both Hellboy films, and, oddly enough, From Dusk Till Dawn).

Cronos was particularly fascinating, though, because del Toro also has a far more real and meaningful grasp on actual human emotion than Lovecraft ever did (other than fear, of course); the grandfather/grand-daughter relationship at the heart of the film is warm and vital and often endearingly sweet, which makes the bloody horror of the film's denouement all the more telling. Mad props to the child actor playing Aurora, who speaks precisely one word in the entire movie, but manages to convey volumes through her silence. (Also, Ron Perlman is always watchable, if hammy beyond ham. Seeing his cheerfully dim lout stumble through the film somehow made me want to see him play Bulldog Drummond). As a vampire movie it's also interesting in its ability to render explicit the costs of immortality, and the abject, bodily grossness of an addiction to blood-drinking.

I don't think Cronos is a great film in absolute terms, but I think it offers an almost perfect rendition of its chosen tropes. Let The Right One In, on the other hand, is a great film. It's exquisitely shot and beautifully paced, and the story-telling has a minimalist restraint which is peculiarly satisfying and deeply evocative. Once again the film is carried as much by its child actors, who are wonderful, as by the stark chill of its snowscapes which so powerfully underpin its exploration of childhood themes - innocence, trust, dependence and, ultimately, power.

I loved Let the Right One for its exploration of the vampire myth. For such a deliberate and thoughtful film, it's actually using an extremely conventional version of the vampire - supernatural strength and speed, sensitivity to light, inability to enter without an invitation. All that's missing is the fangs. Nonetheless Eli is anything but a stereotype, a fascinating construction skating with exquisite poise on the liminal edges of child/adult, predator/vulnerable, monstrous/pathetic. One responds to her with a curious mix of terror and empathy, as does Oscar himself. In fact, empathy is a powerful device in the film; you cannot help but sympathise with the dogged, desperate incompetence of Eli's protector, with the narrow but likeable world of her victims, even with the abusive home life of Oscar's main tormentor. Ultimately, though, the film suggests that Eli is not the monster; her violence and her disturbingly drifting identity (this film does incredible things with gender) are simply an externalisation of the strange undercurrents of alienation and violence and eroticism which underlie Oscar's everyday world.

The vampire in the twentieth century has become internalised, psychologised; rather than othering the monster with proper terror, we seem to be driven to understand it. Both these films represent a highly-developed form of that impulse. They deny the easy erotic appeal which motivates many more popular versions, in their empathetic address to the unnaturalness, the loneliness, the physical distastefulness of being a vampire. If the monster is not in the vampire, disturbingly, it must be in us.

Current Mood: astonishingly tired
Current Music: The Cure, Wish

Much as I enjoy noodling around on the piano reproducing pop tunes as my wayward fancy takes me, it's all too often that I encounter Actual Pianists who rub my nose inescapably in the fact that it would be extreme hubris to even think of myself as a two-bit hack. This is another Youtube discovery not entirely unrelated to yesterday's Piano Guys. Apart from being a rather fun piano piece all on its lonesome, as a distillation of a full orchestra it's quite something. (It's also reminding me of quite how much of the Skyrim music is ripped off from this, or from LotR). His Harry Potter version is also lovely, but I rather like the ending on this one.

Watch on YouTube

It's also obscurely comforting to discover that the guy's a professional who does this sort of score-creation for Yamaha. I'm able to vaguely think "ah, corporate shill" and go my merry way with the inferiority complex marginally mitigated.

Apropos of nothing at all, a random concatenation of ideas has just reminded me of last night's Salty Cracker (La Boheme in Sea Point, lovely food) at which the usual wayward puppy conversation suddenly reminded me of a dream I had the other night. I dreamed I seduced C.S. Lewis at a garden party, more or less directly as a result of feeling horribly embarrassed. I'd just spent twenty minutes declaiming to this amiable bespectacled gent about fantasy novels, finishing up with a condescending supposition that he'd probably never heard of C.S. Lewis's Ransom trilogy, but they're very interesting books despite their overly heavy Christian bit, at which point I suddenly realised I was talking to the author himself. (I plead in mitigation that he's been dead for a while, I wasn't to know). Shamed and irritated, I seduced him, presumably as a form of distraction (or possibly a subversive attack on the overly heavy Christian bit). Memo to self: do not recount this one to therapist, I'm not entirely sure I want to know what it means.

Words cannot express how grateful I am that it's Friday. My exhaustion levels form an interestingly steeply-pitched graph that starts at "manageable" on Monday and then wantonly climbs to the weekend.

Current Mood: ded
Current Music: Pirates piano solo

I am totally enamoured of this beautifully ridiculous Star Wars cello battle. Not because of the actual battle, although it's beautifully ridiculous, but because the arrangement of Star Wars theme music is actually amazing and wonderful. Also, the Wookiee is genius.

Watch on YouTube

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Darth Vader theme in my head

wolverine_nun asked for more t-shirt deconstructions, foolish lady, and because they are really more fun than is probably strictly legal for an unofficial academic, I am deliriously happy to oblige. She does encourage my known proclivities very gratifyingly.

The only reason I don't wear this shirt all the time is because I incautiously bought it a size too small, and my current state of tummy sag and resulting fabric strain renders it inaesthetic in the extreme. But it's another excellent example of vintage John Allison laterality, i.e. it's a Scary Go Round one, this time still perfectly available.

Pangaea is, as any fule kno, the hypothesised supercontinent from which our current continental configuration springs. Way back in the mists of time they were all wodged together, and then they drifted apart, presumably because of artistic differences. The t-shirt's image of a "reunion tour" thus plays with parallel notions of groups forming, drifting apart and reforming, re-imagining the continents as a band, and creating the fan or roadie t-shirt which commemorates such a hypothetical endeavour. (To fully play out the joke the shirt would need to have a list of gigs on the back, although they would all read "Earth" plus various dates. It would be entirely in Scary-Go-Round character for one of the venues to be "Mars".) The visual impact of the design, particularly in the font choice (spiky, informal, slightly hand-written) plays very nicely on the kind of image branding a music group habitually creates, and its illusion of personality and authenticity; the re-united continent itself is a slightly bizarre equivalent to an actual band photo.

The implications here are much more subtextual and less obvious than they are in the Nosferatu shirt, but are nonetheless kinda entertaining. I think there's an additional, implied joke revolving around the notion of "super": the shirt builds on the form/separate/reform joke by potentially conflating "supercontinent" with "supergroup", in a nod to the continents' current discrete existence. More importantly, though, it stuffs around with notions of nostalgia, the re-creation of something from a distant past in a present which doesn't really have a place for it. Reunion tours by long-defunct bands are always faintly sad; very few of them seem to recapture anything like the value of the band in its original iteration. Of course, a continental reunion tour would go way beyond sad into catastrophic seismic and political upheaval.

Nonetheless, I love this shirt because I would totally be there for a Pangaea reunion. The joke is effective because it appeals to the kind of science geeky wearer who not only knows what Pangaea is but thinks it would be way cool for the continents to get back together, in the teeth of the odds. In that they're no different to the kind of geeky band fan who will be there for a Rolling Stones reunion, in their authentic early tour t-shirt, in the faint hope of recognising the old magic. Both iterations of "reunion" celebrate the special knowledge and emotional investment of the fan concerned, their existence as part of an elite faithful whose commitment endures beyond the mere drifting apart of continents and into their geo-politically unlikely, hypothetical re-formation.

Bonus background info: the creator (not to be confused with the Creator, since we're talking about continents) notes, on the blog post where he tinkers around with the design: "Do you remember in 1982 when Pangaea got back together? It was insane. Eurasia and Australiasia all snuggling up while North America complained that South America's feet were a. cold and b. in its ear." Which makes it sound more like a relationship (one of those complicated polyamorous ones) getting back together than a band, and is incidentally even more insane. Personally I want this t-shirt to actually read "Pangaea Reunion Tour 1982".

Additional bonus, unlikely layer of meaning: after writing all this, I am bloody well going to lose some weight so I fit into this t-shirt again. Which probably means I shouldn't have eaten all that malva pudding. Bugger.

Current Mood: randomly analytical

I reproduce my subject line, unedited, from the closing sentence of the latest Harper's Weekly. The juxtaposition of the horrible punning sentence with a cetologist called Thomas Jefferson completely cracked me up. Also, I recommend Harper's Weekly as an injection of global happenings, great and small, into your inbox in a pleasingly punchy format rife, on the macro level, with weird juxtapositions. Also, "juxtaposition" is a lovely word.

I seem to be turning into the kind of blogger who blogs about her cats, which is alarming: I shall attempt to stem the tide by blogging about other people's cats. I have developed a sad addiction to the detective fiction of Lilian Jackson Braun, whose books are rife with eccentric life in American country towns. Her middle-aged sleuth attains the truth with supernatural aids, namely his cats, who are charming brats, and psychically sussed in spades. (I have also been attending Flanders and Swann revues, can you tell? I thoroughly recommend Hats Off! at the Theatre on the Bay. Their performance of "Madeira, m'Dear" is pitch-perfect).

Abandoning spontaneous doggerel, I shall simply say that the slow pace, whimsical detail and slightly wry tone of Braun's writing really works for me in my current state of fatigue, which has been particularly bad this week. It seems to be the case that I'm OK as long as I only try one activity per day that isn't noodling around on the internet or lying on the sofa reading slim "The Cat Who..." vols. I've given four hours of seminar this week, catching up after The Great Migraine Debacle, and am consequently somewhat deader than usual. I discover, however, that it's perfectly possible to keep absolutely on top of my work email if I'm at home unbothered by students. There's a tragic irony in there somewhere. Sigh.

Tonight, tapas! Salty Cracker hits Fork. In preparation, I have been lying on the sofa all day, so hopefully I won't actually slump gracefully into the marinated sardines.

Current Mood: fit for the fainting couch

When I went to see my doctor last week in re the exhaustion levels, I subliminally expected her to tell me to buck up, stop whinging and simply get on with my life, taking it slightly easy if at all possible until I'd regenerated some health. (It's easier in Dragon Age). The result of her unexpectedly concerned response is to somehow have given me permission to be ill: "take a week and a half off work" appears to have allowed me to stop pretending I'm not exhausted all the time, as a result of which I'm rather more than semi dead and very, very glad I don't have to drag myself up to campus. The mind is an odd thing. Also, her image choice ("you're starting to live off your capital") is really sticking with me in an extremely cautionary way. Things To Do This Week: rest. Also, wrestle boss in re extended leave.

Since ill health is boring, have some linkery of various degrees of joyous-makingness, depending on your personal proclivities.

For dance fans, fashion fans and fans of very nifty editing, this ad may hit your buttons with the cheerful octopoid multitudinosity with which it hits mine.
For players of Dragon Age II, particularly the girly ones, Fenris cosplay! Amazing costume, and the dude has the necessary level of elven emaciation going, but I have to say, the I Have My Arm Around Felicia Day Effect notwithstanding, he's way too cheerful for strict verisimilitude.
For music lovers of approximately the same vintage as me, and/or who cherish a fondness for 80s dance music, Goth or New Wave, She Wants Revenge. I had never heard of She Wants Revenge before matociquala linked it. How did that happen? It's like Bauhaus mated with Sisters of Mercy and had the offspring raised by Depeche Mode. It seem to make it slightly redundant to have actually gone through the 80s.

Watch on YouTube

In other slightly happy-making news, the problem with Winona seems actually to be the On switch. If I dig my fingernails under it I can persuade the thing to switch on for about five seconds and start to boot up, although it won't stay on. I don't want to fiddle any further because the rapid on/off cycling can't be good for the hard drive, but at least I have a diagnosis, if not a solution.

Current Mood: buggered, but content
Current Music: Lucretia My Reflection, in my HEAD!

A student wandered into my office yesterday, and for a wonder didn't immediately get snarled at for interrupting, which is regrettably tending to be my default response of late. Instead I looked up, slightly cross-eyed, from my 35th replay of Arcade Fire's "Crown of Love" tinnily through my desk speakers, and said vaguely, "Oh, right, it's the same chord but they're not using the tonic in the base progression. Sneaky sods." Then I dealt with the curriculum question, which I assume, since I can't remember it, was trivial and routine and had nothing to do with contemporary alt music, and sent the student, slightly bewildered, on their way.

See, I sort of play the piano. Sort of. As in, I took formal piano lessons and did the exams at school, all the way up to O-level Music and the Royal Schools Grade 6, which I scraped a pass in after being heartily sabotaged by a nasty little modern Russian piece which featured enormous, merry, octave-and-a-half leaps in the right hand. Since I never practised worth a damn and it's bloody impossible to hit enormous leaps accurately without practising a lot, the whole enterprise should have been doomed from the start. What saved it was the fact that I have a fairly good ear, in so far as I'm reasonably capable of reproducing, albeit in truncated and simplified form if it's complex, pretty much anything I hear that isn't hard-core classical or jazz. I fumbled my way through most of my formal piano pieces on memory, a good ear and a reasonable streak of actual musicality, but I don't have anything whatsoever that you could identify as technique, and my stabs at sight-reading or correct fingering would make a piano teacher spontaneously combust, weeping.

All this notwithstanding, I still derive considerable enjoyment from noodling around on the piano. I am fortunate that I have mine lying around the living room courtesy of my amazing mother, who stuck it on the back of a truck and brought it down from Zim when she fled the country, and my amazing friends, who paid for it to be refurbished as a birthday present a few years back. I stuff around either with classical pieces (Chopin nocturnes!) or Cole Porter, or 80s hits, or, most often, whatever random song has caught my attention because of interesting chords, or has been floating around my backbrain and needs to be exorcised by reproduction (this is surprisingly effective). I do it when I'm depressed, tired, annoyed, have a spare moment when the EL's not in the house, or am waiting for the kettle to boil for tea.

Playing the piano is a personal, private and solitary vice; I do not care to inflict my stumbles and experiments on anyone else, because there's a lot of stumbling, mostly while I play the wretched song over and over again on the CD player, leaping at intervals to the piano with cries of illumination (see above). And this is in defiance of the fact that a lot of rock/pop/folk music is, in chord pattern at least, very simple. Yer gets yer tonic, subdominant and dominant chords, the basic triad which tend to define pop tunes, occasionally with a minor or seventh or key change or something flung in for good measure. (The very first thing I ever taught myself to play, when I was about 11, was "Michael Finnigan", which uses two chords, tonic and dominant. I hacked my way tentatively through it and the scales (hah!) fell from my eyes. The world opened up. Suddenly I could play anything. I still have an incredibly vivid memory of that moment. It also led, indirectly, to a gig playing light poppy background music at one of the five-star hotel restaurants in Harare while I was still at school; I also have a vivid memory of breaking into "Mama Tambo's Wedding" as a warm-up before any of the diners had actually arrived, and having the waiters all bopping in the aisles.)

Despite this innate simplicity of chord, it's actually quite difficult to make a single piano operated by an indifferent pianist (and if I practiced very hard for about three years I'd probably qualify as an indifferent pianist) reproduce the different strands of sound which make up a contemporary rock/pop number. You keep the beat going in the bass with your left hand, often in octaves, cunningly synthesising both the drum beat and the actual bass line if you possibly can. Your right hand reproduces the characteristic guitar riff (or, occasionally, piano accompaniment) which fills out the middle range. In the same range, and with your third hand, or possibly foot, you carry the actual tune, since if you're me you can't sing loudly enough to hold it and, besides, that's not the point. Your second foot is reserved for the embellished descanty bits that someone like Arcade Fire sticks in with a violin just to keep things interesting. The occasional cymbal clash you supply with your nose, or a passing cat. If you were a decent pianist, such as I ain't, you could play something like "Total Eclipse of the Heart", which has a beautiful piano accompaniment, by melding the accompaniment and the tune into one with your right hand, but I can't. That's high tech piannering, that is. I'd break a finger.

And there's the final Achilles heel. I try to play stuff in the same key the originators do, but it is my seekrit sorrow that I can't do flats. I tend to default to the keys of D, A or G, or related minors; I lack moral fibre sufficiently that I shy away from whole thickets of sharps, but flats bring me out in a cold sweat. This is not unrelated to the problem I have with the eight times table, which back in kindergarten days I for some reason never learned properly by rote. Sevens, fine. Nines, OK. (I like the nine times table, it's aesthetically pleasing). I wasn't concentrating when we did eights, and to this day I count on my fingers when calculating them. Likewise, I clearly skimped on F major and B flat major and all those evil flatty keys back in the good old days of scales, and it's haunted me ever since. Which is a bugger, because David Bowie loves the bloody things.

Things I have recently taught myself to play: the above Arcade Fire. ("Wake Up" is also fun, mostly because of the driving base). Kermit the Frog's "Rainbow Connection". ELO's "Midnight Blue". A particularly bastardised and inadequate version of "Life on Mars", which really needs four pianos, a full orchestra and a death wish. Annie Lennox's "Into the West" from the LotR soundtrack. If you cherish any fondness at all for any of these tunes, don't for FSM's sake come anywhere near the house when I'm playing them. It'll make you wince, but worse, I'll have to stop playing in sheer embarassment, and you'll interrupt my ham-fisted happy.

Current Mood: musical(ish)
Current Music: still with the Arcade Fire

Still homicidally misanthropic, a state not improved by contemplating the need to interview 60 potential orientation leaders in three days next week after spending the weekend writing a report for the Dean. Eek. I console myself with random linkery, hoping thereby to also entertain you, because by gosh and by golly just at the moment in my own right I'm not entertaining at all. I also suspect I'm giving innocent Scrooges and serial killers the world over an undeserved bad name.

China Miéville does it again, where "it" entails being lyrically strange, wayward, incisively political, sad and haunting. I am completely seduced by this story, it has a beautiful, inscrutable and tragic inevitability, and some really weird literary echoes. Also, China Miéville is one of the few writers I can think of who could make the phrase "hydrocarbon Ragnarok" do so much work. Covehithe. You should read this.
Random Heartwarming Moment: Paul Simon makes a simple fan very, very happy by hauling her up on stage to sing and play guitar. She does pretty well, despite the inevitable hyperventilation. It's a sweet enough moment to penetrate even my current homicidal misanthropy.
Just for smoczek, chart porn. Many of these are witty and recursive to an extremely pleasing extent.
Fafblog, predictably enough, weighs in on bin Laden's death with the proper perspective. The mash-up of the "killed thing" with the royal wedding, while perfectly politically pointed in terms of media spectacle, cracked me up completely.

While I hate everything and everyone, I hope you have a lovely weekend. Please to raise a glass at some stage to my esteemed mother, whose birthday it is today - one she shares, weirdly enough, with the esteemed

egadfly. Homicidally misanthropic felicitations to both of them.

Current Mood: homicidally misanthropic

I woke up this morning with, for no adequately defined reason, a hymn on my brain. Not any hymn, but specifically "Lord Dismiss Us With Thy Blessing", the hymn of choice for the last day of term at all of my junior schools and at least one of my senior schools. (As far as I remember the government school I attended for my first two years of high school didn't do hymns in assembly, but my subsequent private school sure as hell did, I used to play the piano for them. Badly. Because I never practised enough).

"Lord Dismiss Us" is, of course, not only fairly ridiculously thundering and catchy, it's also the hymn most likely to be lustily belted out by the assembled scholars, with the fine, careless rapture and considerable verve that only the approaching holidays can bring. (The term-starting version, "Lord Behold Us", is always a comparatively pale, limp and spiritless thing). I seem to remember my junior school headmaster, Mr. Horsefall, particularly liking "Lord Dismiss Us", which would figure as he was also the teacher who took our music sessions, and he pounded out songs on the piano with maximum volume and élan and absolutely no delicacy of touch at all, with the net result that I distinctly remember him breaking a piano string by thumping, twang in the middle of the chorus of "The Hippopotamus Song". (Although, to be fair, if ever a song was an invitation to thump, "The Hippopotamus Song", with its wonderful waltz-time chorus, is it). And, of course, hymns in general are bloody good fun both to sing and to play; their characteristic chord progressions, arrangements and cadences are enormously satisfying on some fairly profound and slightly simplistic level. Singing old-fashioned hymns is absolutely the only thing I ever enjoy about being in a church.

But have you ever looked at the words for "Lord Dismiss Us"? It seems to have been written by a staunch Victorian, Henry James Buckoll, in 1843. Henry James Buckoll was apparently an assistant master at Rugby, and clearly an embittered ironist, driven to ruthlessly pillory the horrors of life with children. "Pardon all, their faults confessing, time that's lost may all retrieve?" The dear little kiddies have clearly spent the whole term driving him up the wall, in frivolous pursuit of faults rather than learning. "May thy children ne'er again thy Spirit grieve"? "May all taint of evil perish"? They've been really bad. God is sad at them. And "help us selfish lures to flee"? The writer holds out very little hope for the holidays, which will clearly be given over to hedonistic vice. When he asks "sanctify our every pleasure; pure and blameless may it be" I don't think he's optimistic. The whole tone of the thing makes one see "all who here shall meet no more" in rather sinister terms, don't you think? Oh God, he's asking, let some of them be eaten by bears over the holidays.

I love the Victorians. So gloomy.

It occurs to me that the presence of this joyous little ditty in my cerebellum this particular morning is because the dear little gazelles have all just come back from the 10-day vac, which means today is the rude shock after a blissful week of empty campus. Clearly I'm wishing they'd all go away again, particularly since a major course drop deadline was on the Friday before the vac, and I can guarantee that I'll have a stream of them through my door being stunned and wounded because I can't bend the rules for them. At any rate, I shall pursue the rest of the day with the hymn resounding around my skull, and with any luck I've ear-wormed you lot properly as well. It's a small consolation.

Current Mood: amused, Victorian
Current Music: "Lord Dismiss Us" IN MY HEAD!

Gosh, Magazine. Who knew? Layered, complex, astonishingly tight and experimental British post-punk. This is all Nouvelle Vague's fault, they cover "Parade", which is unreasonably beautiful, and thus somehow caused me to go and acquire all the Magazine albums I could (ridiculously cheap on Loot). Also, Magazine has an album called "The Correct Use of Soap". How can one not approve?

On a note entirely unrelated except for general enthusiasm, this is amazing and magical.

Watch on YouTube

Current Mood: approving
Current Music: Magazine, Real Life

Profile

December 2024

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Base style: Modular by branchandroot
Theme: Purple Haze by timeasmymeasure

Freckles & Doubt

With my mastery of narrative structure I should be ruling the cosmos by now.

Entries tagged with music

somethin' filled up my heart with nothin'

feelin' nearly faded as my jeans

I'll catch the first train, bag in hand

divide by three bananas, that makes eleventeen

seek to cure what's deep inside

while nature wantons in her Pryme

they all rolled over and the one fell out

Can't sleep. Semantic memory reclamation drones will eat my imaginary fiancee.

more dearly than the spoken word can tell

welcoming in the New Year, New Year's Eve

what a fantastic death abyss

like which fury Hell hath no

you are my father, prepare to die in the key of E minor

Pangaea Reunion Tour

"We call them 'porpitrators," said cetologist Thomas Jefferson.

dance the ghost with me

the spark is not within me

hydrocarbon Ragnarok

may their seed-time past be yielding year by year a richer store

the light pours out of me

Profile

December 2024

Syndicate

Page Summary

Tags

Style Credit