This week, I was in London and Cambridge for a family holiday and was pleasantly astonished to learn of The National Gallery. Imagine a whole gallery full of images of my favourite band! Imagine my surprise to learn it was not that kind of National!
Okay, I am not that dumb (most of the time) but I did visit said Gallery to pay homage to a very different kind of culture to that usually featured in these posts, which made me then think that this blog was not quite what I had intended when I started it. It had evolved (well, it definetely was not intelligently designed) into something far more narrowly focussed than I had planned, sticking pretty much to music, with very few posts on movies and one on a book. So, I have decided to try an experiment, where each post, to appear weekly if I can manage it, will be a compendium of shorter reviews and thoughts on all sorts of culture I have encountered since the last post, roughly arranged into categories, which may not all feature each week.
Firstly, howewer, I want to digress (or, as I haven't started, perhaps it should be pregress?) about one of the best columns I have read in a while (which can be seen here) was by Donald Clarke, the Irish Times' excellent film reviewer, and concerned a theme which I will pick up in my post below. This concerns the fact that the internet has unquestionably increased access to eveything (music, movies, etc.) to an extent that would have seemed umimaginable only a few years ago, which has huge benefits, but does remove the thrill and excitement of tracking down a rare CD or hard-to-find anything. This is a point I completely agree with, and have blogged about before, but I guess it comes down to balancing the losses with the gains, which I will come back to below.
So, anyway, I am going to give the new approach a lash and start with a header which definetely will not appear every week.
Actual art
In a single wonderful room in the beautiful National Gallery lie, within an incredible 20 feet of each other (surely my ultimate happy place), my two favourite paintings ever, both discovered as a child (through a sibling's art magazines, I think), pursued through a study of art in school, and both attempted (poorly) when I tried to develop my own (very meagre but extant) artistic skills. I am very conventional in my taste in art, and modern art does nothing for me whatsoever, so these two paintings are 'The hay wain' by Constable and 'The fighting Temeraire' by Turner, and I have pasted them below (sure makes a change from Youtube clips, but I will get back to those shortly).
First is 'The hay wain'; I am far too philistine to explain why I love this, but it is just so rich in detail and evocative of place and time, and you can just almost smell the countryside. I am a city boy through and through but this for me is some perfect essence of the other side of life:
The 'Temeraire' is obviously very different, and this for me is a mood thing, so sad and ghostly, with the famous contrast of old ethereal past with dark demonic future; also, I love the moon and the ghostly shapes in the background.
Music
Now this is me back on more familiar ground. In the last while, as my recent posts and tweets have made clear, I have been pretty dominated by The National and finding tracks from 'High violet'; I did find a clip of the missing 'Lemonworld' on Youtube, but the audio quality was too poor to put up here. I have found two early reviews of the album, one on thefly.co.uk here and the other on thevine.com.au here. The former review is track-by-track, albeit not very detailed, but the latter is very exciting to this reader (who barely needed more excitement on this one) with references to strings, harmonies and odd instrumentation leading me to hope there will be more of the wonderfulness of 'So far around the bend' than the live clips suggested.
Otherwise, I have downloaded Oliver Cole's eccentrically-titled 'We albatri' and 'Go' by Jonsi (from Sigur Ros); with travelling I haven't had much time to listen to them, so will comment in the next post.
Being in London, I thought I would include three London-related classics from my youth, though. The first is 'Up the junction' by Squeeze, which has a just wonderfully unique intro and a great story line:
Having spent a lot of time on London's famous public transport system, the second could easily have been 'Going underground' by The Jam, but I am going to go with 'Down in the tube station at midnight', which I always loved the menace of:
When I first moved to Cork, the anthem of my reorientation was 'strange town' by the Jam. I will finish this London triple-track with 'The queen is dead' by the Smiths, having managed to fit in a visit to the Palace during the week. 'She said I know you and you cannot sing/I said that's nothing, you should hear me play piano' is still one of my favourite Morrissey lyrics ever:
Finally, under the general heading of music, I was intrigued by a reference in a Guardian article to a new Twitter-like service for music files called mFlow, which doesn't seem to be up and running yet, and may ultimately be only available (at least at first) in the UK, but which I will keep an eye on.
Books
I have a habit of having several books on the go at any one time, and have been working through 'Physics for future presidents' by Robert Mueller (bit preachy but very interesting, particularly the very balanced sections on climate change) and 'Solar' by Ian McEwan (not a great reader of fiction, I have always found his books heavy going [although unquestionably technically incredibly well-written] and not very likeable, but the science setting of the new one interested me, and it is actually, perhaps for this reason, much more engaging to me, if still not necessarily enjoyable).
However, something has just happened which has completely and perhaps irrevocably changed my relationship with books for ever, just as (and for the same reasons that) the iPod changed my relationshop with music: the Kindle app for my iPod Touch. I did download eReader some months ago, but never quite worked out how to get books on to it and my iPod, and did download one book (about the CIA and the Bush II administration) only to discover I already owned it in hard copy, so effectively abandoned that effort.
Then, a few weeks ago, I came across a reference to the Kindle app somewhere, and downloaded it, followed by two science books I had seen in Waterstone's and found on the Amazon.com Kindle store. Then, I looked at Matt Cooper's book (Who really runs Ireland?) in a local book shop for €22, found it on Kindle for half that price and downloaded it. This one I actually read (not finished yet, as reading in parallel with the two 'real books' mentioned above and the one to come below) and discovered to my great surprise that I had no problem whatsoever reading the book on the small screen, no problem whatsoever. I started to weigh up the pros and cos of real versus electronic books; the pros are the convenience of not having to carry around a book, the ability to carry many many books around at once, the ability to read in low light anywhere, and many more. The cons of course are the loss of the actual physical artefact of the book itself, and the threat to bookshops, my favourite shops. The latter factor is actually a major guilt issue for me, but I am afraid the pros have gradually stifled and stuffed the cons, and I have rapidly become a zealous convert, and have gone mad on it this week.
For example, I saw a posted in a tube station for a book by Guillermo Del Toro (interesting director indeed, soon to be hero if 'The hobbit' works) called 'The strain', which I was able to get within hours through wi-fi onto my iPod (the downloading is so simple it makes using eReader look like defusing a nuclear bomb), and rapidly became hooked on. It is a fantastic blend of CSI-style procedural, science fiction and ancient horror, and completely captivating. This has proven the workability of the pod-Kindle, as I have read it almost everywhere in the last few days.
There is no doubt that my reading/consuming habits have undergone a paradigm shift. A few days ago I was in one of my favourite book shops of all (Heffers in Cambridge) and instead of leaving with a bag of books (Ryanair's baggage weight restrictions being one factor of course) I felt with a scribbled list, some of which I downloaded from Amazon (science books and one new history of world war 2) and two others (not available on Amazon electronically, but also the kind of hard-bound books that just need to be held) ordered on Amazon.co.uk (no postage for Ireland anymore!).
This is a profound revolution for me, just like the effect of the iPod on my music habits. My iPod had assumed a new role, as my pocket-bound library. Incredible.
Movies
Before leaving, I did get to see 'How to train your dragon' with the kids, and thought it one of the best kids' movies I have seen in a long time (if not in 'Up' class), with good visuals, good gags, great action (certain scenes even reminded me of LOTR) and a strangely moving final realistic note. When away, I saw 'Sherlock Holmes' on a hotel room movie channel, and it was absoultely great, and I really need to see it again (and probably soon). Robert Downey Jr is without question one of my favourite actors, and in this he is just great, and I particularly loved the final scene where he explains all the clues he picked up during the case with suitable flashbacks which suddenly made enormous sense, although they almost passed by unnoticed at the time; Jude Law, who I am generally ambivalent about, was also great, and the atmospherics and action were very well handled. Overall, much better than I expected and one of my favourites for quite a while.
TV
Having been away this week, I have not seen much, but my Sky-plus box is heaving with content for me to watch during the coming week and maybe comment on later; this includes episodes of '24' (liking season 7 more than the last one - more gritty and semi-believeable - by 24 standards - compared to African mercenaries breaking into the Whie House by an inderground river), the first two episodes of 'The pacific' (such a huge and terrifying campaign, both militarily and promotionally), Battlestar Galactica's 'The Plan' and a movie which looked interesting about the 2000 US election. Will have to come back on all of those!
Games
Not much time this week for games, barring Peggle and Scrabble on the iPod (the simplest can be the best). In another example of the change in access which Donald Clarke wrote so well about, I recently downloaded the full set of original Half-Life games onto my PC (including Blue Shift and Opposing Force) recently, once again acquiring the content without the packaging, without the physical excursion, but with reduced cost and infinite convenience. It is all a trade-off, and while I do recognise the implications of this for retailers, I am afraid I am clearly adopting a very new kind of accessing my culture, for better or for worse. With a few very busy weeks at work, all I have had time for is an occasional snatch of nostalgically working through this in recent weeks (graphics remarkably not as ropey as I expected for a 10-year-old game).
Other media
This bit of the column will consider podcasts (my favourite of which by a mile is Mark Kermode's BBC film review session uploaded every Friday evening, which I am listening to as I type this) and bits from magazines (I always read New Scientist and Uncut, get Empire every other month or so, and catch others irregularly, but still hold onto a decades-old habit of - guiltily but persistently - skimming all music and movie mag reviews in the newsagent every weekend) and newspapers (e.g., Irish Times and Guardian reviews on a Friday).This week I will mention just one thing that caught my eye (besides the Donald Clarke column cited above). This month's Uncut (not a great cover CD, unfortunately) included a piece on 50 great lost albums, which referred to one by Paul Quinn and the Independent Group, and this in turn reminded me of my great lost song of all time, which I think I discovered through pirate radio in the early 1980s, and still absolutely love, while recognising that I may be the only person on earth to hold a flame for it. This is 'One day' by the aforementioned Paul Quinn but with Vince Clarke (probably at the time between Depeche Mode and Erasure, not sure where Yazoo fits into the chronology); it is simply wonderful, showing that synths can do epic when matched with a great voice like Quinn's:
Gadgets
I read a preview (perhaps completely speculative) about the iPhone 4.0 (5.0 MP camera, completely tactile casing?) with a probable release date of July. I decided some time ago that when the iPhone memory exceeded 32 gB (the size of my Touch) I would make the move, and recently read that they have worked out how to fit 2 32 gB chips into an iPhone and still leave room for the innards, so looks like I have only around 4 months to wait! Other tech news is that a Corsair 32 gB USB key died on me after 18 months of continuous heavy service - I had some warnings and most was backed up but it was a sharp reminder that these things are not immortal.
Finally, another stop on the London trip was the incredible Science Museum, where I saw a brilliant clip called 'On the move', which shows what a lot of inventive minds with time on their hands can achieve when let loose with the oddest objective and collection of bits and pieces ever assembled:
31 days to 'High violet', and counting down.
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