What was he thinking, sending out inexperienced players last Saturday before an expectant, roaring crowd? You'd imagine, with all the lineup changes, the injuries sustained along the way, the fights, the firings and rehirings while playing away, that there's no way they could hold it together. But they came on so confidently, and as the skeptical fans waited nervously for the real action to start the champions pounded confidently along. Immediately we realised that they were going to be magnificent. They're playing so well, we thought, this can only end in glory.
At this point of course, you've probably realised that I'm not talking about Ireland's miserable performance against Cyprus last Saturday, but rather another spectacle entirely. Last Saturday evening the mighty Fall played the Village in Wexford Street and despite some ropey Dublin shows down through the years this time they were definitely a triumph.
Pardon my conceit though. The 'he' referred to is of course, Mark E. Smith, but there is a reason behind my duplicity. Smith has expressed a fondness for soccer once or twice and when explaining why the Fall have had so many lineup changes over the years in a recent BBC2 documentary he even likened himself to a football manager, who in order to get the best out of his team has to change things around a bit.
I've just noticed that Steven Poole of Unspeak was thinking along the same lines as me when I was giving out about Martin Amis' use the term 'functioning insantity' in his Sunday Times article about the 9/11 bombers.
To remind you gentle reader, here's what Amis said:
"The spectacular attack, “the big one”, was a non-starter until the fortuitous arrival in Kandahar of the “Hamburg contingent” (Atta et al): these men were superficially Westernised, and superficially rational: possessed by just the right kind of functioning insanity."
In my post I said "by attributing its motivation entirely to a state of mind, of 'funtioning insantity' of either the 'right' or 'wrong' varieties smudges the political realities behind it and generalize it as simply 'mad'".
But Poole deals with it properly:
"A fascinating mini-psychodrama is packed into the phrase “functioning insanity”. With the first word, Amis glibly lays claim to clinical expertise, appealing to the sense of “functioning” used in psychiatric assessments. Yet in the very next word, manfully impatient with such bullshit, he invokes the brute, non-clinical idea of “insanity”. In lightning succession, he postures in pretension to medical authority, and then peacocks his courageous rejection of that same authority. Superficially rational, indeed."
It generated a huge number of interesting comments, the best of which to my mind was: "At least we should give Amis some credit for presenting the same type of bullshit in perfectly hard little shit nuggets".
Dark hearted singer Will Oldham is currently starring in a new movie which has just been released in the US to rave reviews. It’s called Old Joy and Oldham, an old ham himself (gettit?) having played a young preacher in John Sayle’s 1987 movie Matewan and more recently in the odd-things-happen-when-you-meet-the-inlaws classic Junebug, plays Kurt, one of two friends who head out on the road one last time before his travelling companion Mark (Daniel London) becomes a father.
The New York Times reviews the film today, saying that it’s the finest American film so far this year, and considering that most of the films released on the run up to Christmas rarely become instant classics of the cinema its fair to say that they’re implying that its the finest of the year.
Critics elsewhere are also frothing with praise and it’s already garnered a ‘Tiger’ Award from the Rotterdam International Film Festival.
Its kind of a road movie in that they drive part of the way before hiking into a forest, get lost and finally find what they are looking for, a natural hot spring, as well as, if you’re to believe the NYT film reviewer ‘something that had gone lost, namely a sense of the other’.
The film, directed by Kelly Reichardt is based on a short story by Jonathan Raymond, who co-wrote the screenplay with Reichardt and much like other brainy US indie movies such as The Squid and the Whale the title points to a metaphor that underpins the theme of the movie.
Waxing lyrical, the NYT says: “At one point during their travels, Kurt tells Mark a meandering story that begins with a trip to a store to buy a notebook and ends with a scene from a dream. In his dream a woman gives Kurt a hug and tells him that “sorrow is nothing but worn-out joy.”
The sorrow in question seems to come from Mark, who has the worries of the world on him, even though he’s on the cusp of taking on more responsibilities. But his anxieties, it seems are a reflection of America’s anxieties at the present time.
This is an America “in which progressive radio (actually, snippets from Air America) delivers the relentless grind of bad news that Mark can only listen to without comment and with a face locked in worry, a face on which Ms. Reichardt invites us to project the shell shock, despair and hopelessness of everyone else listening in across the country”.
The Will Oldham character Kurt seems to be quite like the characters that Oldham portrays in his songs, namely men who lust for life and take what they can and look for no rhyme or reason in it. The film ends with the image of Kurt ‘out in the streets and alive to the world’, while his friend without any comment about when they would meet up again drives off with the radio news blaring.
Added bonus is that Yo La Tengo do the sound track.
Here's the trailer
Here's some Will on YouTube
And a great video from the Palace Brothers 'Come in'
Searching through the pickings in other people’s del.icio.us networks can yield some very tasty bits for the blogger in search of worthwhile content. Like many, I’m a fan of Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science Guardian articles and blog and I noticed today that he now provides a link on his site to his del.icio.us account. It’s only got a few entries but it did bring me to The Music Thing blog. The site’s founder Tom Whitwell is the former editor of Mixmag and deputy editor of The Face. He's also just been made Communities editor of TimesOnline.
If you want to read all about ‘weird and unusual’ musical instruments and left-field music stuff then this is the place to go. Some of the YouTube links are amazing, such as a clip taken from an old Tube show featuring The Art of Noise performing one of their hits. The gear used for the performance, it is important for you to know, includes: ‘three Fairlights, a PPG Wave 2, a MemoryMoog and racks of AMS RMX16 and Lexicon 224 reverbs’. In the clip the camera pans over the keyboards and green text filled computer screens with a ‘pornographer's lustful eye’. You also see a youthful Paul Morley working at the control desk with a glass of wine in hand.
Other stunning posts are about an eBay sale of 60s Mosrite/Von Dutch guitars (picture above) Dr David Deak's 'Acoustic Levitation Chamber', which uses three loudspeakers in a plexiglass cube to levitate a paper cup and make it move around by changing the frequency of the sound waves and the super smashing great Vocoder video.
Eamonn Fitzgerald in his post discussing the excerpt of Martin Amis' The Last Days of Muhummad Atta published in the Observer last Sunday also highlights what he agrees with in Amis' review in the Sunday Times of Lawrence Wright’s new book Looming Tower. While I'm an Amis fan I take issue with what appears to me to be an attempt to take the most significant event in recent world history only to pour it through the prism of his muscular and highly articulate prose, not necessarily for the sake of truth but for the sake of record - his record that is. But maybe that's just a reaction to a literary giant having the audacity to fictionalize a monolithic event that has cast such a long shadow over the World for the last five years.
In the review Amis has many fine points, such as "[t]hese men are fabulists crazed with blood and death; reality for them is just something you have to manoeuvre around in order to destroy it." But I found myself taking issue with him when talking about the "Hamburg contingent (Atta et al)":
"These men were superficially Westernised, and superficially rational: possessed by just the right kind of functioning insanity." These men's functionally insane minds were: "a death-brimmed bog of paranoia and credulity, [...] the state of mind of the armed fabulist. The conspiracy detected here is the infidel campaign to obliterate the faith. It all began with the retreat of the Turkish armies from Vienna and the confirmation of Islamic decline: the year was 1683 and the day was September 11".
Of course, there is the usual eloquent self-satisfaction: ‘the right kind of functioning insanity’. Right kind? As opposed to what, ‘wrong kind’? If they suffered from the wrong kind of functioning insanity may be they'd blow themselves up on abandoned waste ground rather than in built up areas.
