A shorter omnibus post today (and a few days late), as I have already put in a long one on the wonderful 'High Violet', but as ever a few things I want to share!
Music
Of course, the story of the week/month/year is 'high violet', and I have just posted my full track-by-track review of the stream from the New York Times Website. Wonderful, fantastic, epic, gorgeous. Nuff said!
One a non-National note, I have been trying to track down info on a French project I heard of called the Fitzcarraldo Collective (or Sessions) which seems to include several very interesting folks, such as Stuart Staples from Tindersticks, members of Calexico, Craig Walker from Power of Dreams, and others. I found some teasing little clips here and here. Need to find out more!
The other musical story of the week is that I bought Josh Ritter's new album, So runs the world away, on iTunes, and have been listening to it when not on-line listening to 'High violet'; it does feel a little like cheating on The National, but I can't be tied to an internet connection all the time (tragically). Anyway, as with all Josh's albums there are quite a few nice songs which just have this classic American feel of historical weight and folk authenticity, but yet also invoke the vocals and poetry of Leonard Cohen. Best tracks so far are the really brilliant 'Lantern':
And 'The curse', which I remember from recent gigs of his (a previous review is here). It is gorgeous, and hugely reminiscent of one of my favourites of his, 'The temptation of Adam', a typical boy-meets-girl, boy-loves-girl, boy-thinks-about-triggering-Armageddon-to-avoid-losing-girl song):
I am going to see John in Cork on 1st May, and review will follow, along I'm sure with more on the album.
Movies
A birthday party brought me to 'The spy next door', on which I have only one point to make; what was he logic behind all the wierd ET references, from the look of the house and the street to the Holloween scene and, in particular and least subtly, the mother's Catwoman costume? Could the ultimate message be that China is another planet, and Jackie Chan is an extra-terrestrial?
I also saw 'Kick ass' at last, and found it really enjoyable, as someone who is not a fan of superhero movies, and who found the Kill Bill movies left me completely unimpressed. It was much better than I expected, despite the reviews, and I liked the strange mix of believability (in the characters) and utter disbelief (at their actions). I know all that is wrong with applauding the actions of Hit Girl, but the actress is just amazing, and she has the best sweet scowl I ever saw.
Books
Okay, I finished Ian McEwan's 'Solar', with something approaching relief. The plot was certainly quite full (although most of the lines pulled up short at the end), I liked the time-jumps in the narrative, and the was subject interesting, but the central character, Michael Beard was just unlikeable, as were almost all other characters; perhaps I am shallow to say this, but that makes the book hard to like for me. Beard was to me so odious that I could just not believe how the only sympathetic character, Melissa, could be so in love with him. Also, while I am NOT a Nobel-winning physicist, I am (in part) a professional scientist, a keen observer of scientists in action, and a voracious reader of scientific biographies and studies of scientists, and to me, for reasons I cannot quite define, Beard did not feel like a real scientist to me. He felt more like a scienist character in a book than a real one, and that bothered me.
TV
The only thing to comment on this week is a wonderully funny clip someone pointed me to with a Welsh comedian called Rhod Gilbert on Michael McIntyre's show. It is just brilliantly funny, as seen below:
Gadgets and the web
Technology-related thought of the week; if PDF stands for Portable Document Format, what exactly is a non-portable document? Most of my Word files, even the big ones, fir on a USB stick. The only counter-example I could think of is perhaps the Book of Kells, because that is kept in a glass case. Strange.
I also loved the story of the Apple employee who left a prototype iPhone 4.0 in a coffee shop, from where it found its way to a very happy technology website, which leefully took it apart and reverse-engineered it as best they could (see article here). Apparently the rest of us will see the real thing in late June.
Finally, there is a new Irish website called http://www.joe.ie/ which looks like it will include some interesting stuff on comedy, music, movies etc., and seems to be a good one to keep an eye on.
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