Lots to update on these weeks, as summer allows a bit more time to catch up on the finer things in life (and some coarseness too).
Music
I mentioned The National's live album exclusive for iTunes last week and finally got around to listening to it a bit more and it is well worth a listen, if admittedly not exactly essential (except for those lucky enough or sad enough to count as Nationalist Competists like me). They certainly brought their horn section with them, and it seems like they worked on the principle that they should earn their air fare to London (where I presume they lived their life in the rain?) by playing all over all the tracks. However, while I am not the greatest horn fan in the world (compared, say, to a Spanish bull-fighter) it works unexpectedly well here; for example, 'England' (which has a nice audience hand-clap-along welcome) has horns apparent from the start, and the little 'parp' before the final chanty it which somehow always annoyed me on record is less blatant as a result. 'Brainy', which I always saw as the dumb one on 'Boxer' (punch-drunk, perhaps) works much better here, and 'Mistaken for strangers' seems somehow a little slower and more majestic than usual, and its incredible drumwork stands out. Despite it being much dismissed in reviews of 'High violet', I must admit 'Anyone's ghost' has really grown on me, especially the final movement, and I think the live version of 'Afraid of everyone' flows better than the album one, where the segue to the final (different) chanty bit always felt a bit awkward to me before. All in all, a good live release, and perhaps a good intro for anyone foolish enough not to have allowed 'High violet' to completely and insanely dominate their listening and waking lives for most of the last few months. It has certainly only further built my enthusiasm for Electric Picnic in September, at which I will demonstrate my love for this band by spending three days waiting for their one hour or so on stage.
I didn't find many of the tracks from the actual album on Youtube, but I did find 'Start a war' from 'Boxer' from the same show, as below:
I also downloaded the Arcade Fire album 'The suburb's and (perhaps surprisingly for me) first impressions are pretty positive, particularly for the later songs on the album, but I will need some more time before a review on that so will finish today's music section with a few more tracks that featured regularly on my holiay playlist.
The first is Ryan Adams (well, Whiskeytown's) gorgeous and achingly melancholic 'Houses on the hill'; both his band and solo stuff has moments set for the sunshine we didn't regularly get but yearned for, sunny yet sad (as country should be):
My kids also love the Flaming lips' 'Yoshimi battles the pink robots' (so much that we came very close to naming our new dog Yoshimi, until someone asked how we would feel calling that loudly in a park, at which point said pet promptly become Juno), and one of my fondest concert memories of recent years was a mass singalong in the Marquee in Cork to this one; I found a live clip below:
The final track is from one of Cork's greatest contributions to rock (short list, admittedly), The Sultans of Ping, with their heartrending ballad about one poor soul's existential angst on losing a favourite cherished garment, 'Where's my jumper?':
Hard to follow that, so time to switch tack.
Magazines
Holidays are also about catching up on magazines and Total Film had a list of cool things from movies, and the one which really caught my eye was the death scene of Rutger Hauer's character in 'Blade runner' which contains some of my favourite lines of movie monologue ever, capturing unseen vistas of attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion and C-beams glistening near the Tannhauser Gate, which always to me sounded like the best science fiction images I have ever heard; I found the clip below:
My second favourite movie scene ever is probably the 'Untouchables' railway station steps shoot-out sequence, which I could not find an embeddable clip of but did find here.
Sticking with magazine, Uncut had a major interview with Nick Cave, including a list of his top songs, and veered very much towards mad Nick as opposed to mellow Nick (I previously posted about him here), with the top 10 (in descending order) being 'Junkyard', 'Do you love me', 'Tupelo', 'We call upon the author', 'Straight to you', 'Release the rats', 'The ship song', 'From her to eternity', 'Into my arms' and 'The mercy seat'. Of these, I would keep only numbers 1, 3 and 5, and add the holy trinity from 'Boatman's call' of 'There is a kingdom', 'People just ain't no good' and 'Are you the one that I've been waiting for', plus 'He wants you', 'Breathless' and possibly 'God is in the house'.
Books
I finished Bill Bryson's wonderful 'At home', which raised the really interesting question of what happens when a travel writer doesn't? In other words, what is the opposite of doing what a travel writer does? Presumably this would be to not go outside their front door, and write a book about their house, particularly if it happens to be an 1850's rectory with lots of rooms and history, which can spin off all kinds of ruminations and anecdotes about every aspect of furniture, clothes, rooms, social ettiquette, medicine, hygiene, gardening and lord knows what else. And that is exactly what Bryson has done, bloody wonderfully. He truly is my favourite among all wielders of words (he would never use a construction as crap as that, for example), but rather sentences like the following, talking about a fork believe it or not, which truly leave me in awe:Movies
I read a very good article by Joe Queenan on the idea of 'Random Fandom' in the Guardian here; this involved him going into cinemas and asking the ticket-seller to give him a ticket to whatever film they thought he might like; what a great experiment, and a lovely story.
I saw (with full premeditation, and one dry run, or rather a wet one on arriving at the cinema a few days before but being able to get in as the nest few shows were sold out) 'Toy story 3', which I did enjoy, if I would not rave about it quite as much as I will rave in my next post about 'Inception', which I will write about once I have disentangled my brain after seeing it last night. TS3 was, as expected, well-made, funny (if not as funny as the hybrid trailer where it got mashed with 'Inception's sound track), famliar (although the reuse of some images and lines surprised me), moving (yes, I did blub a little at the end under my cheap 3-D glasses) and scary (although no-one could have expected the incinerator to Gollum them, really?) but I am not in any rush to see it again or anything.
On DVD, I really liked the first half of 'An education', but got a little less enamoured as it went on; there seemed to me no real chemistry between the leads, or at least not as much as between her and his lifestyle and what he could offer her, but she was great, and the script (recognisably bearing Nick Hornby's touch) was very good.
Other stuff
In another holiday indulgence, we watched the second half of the final series of 'The West wing', with the emotional roller-coaster of Josh and Donna's final getting-together, Leo's death, Santos' election and the end of the whole shebang. What an incredible piece of television. I know the last 2 series did not scale the heights of quality ascended by the first few, but the quality of script and story and acting on display was just so far in excess of anything else around as to be quite laughable. I found a clip prepared in very nice tribute after Leo's death (so mush more poignant as having been demanded by actor John Spencer's own untimely suddern death) here which I will put in as tribute to man, character and show:
Finally, after another epic post, I will end as I did last post with a picture of the week, this time the wonderful sight of two cars (the front worth £1.2 million, the second a cheapie at £350,000) owned by the new Quatari owners of Harrods, clamped after being illegally parked outside the store:
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