Phosphorescent escape from Irish gloom

Okay, firstly it has been waaayyy too long since a last update, but better late then never and I have a lot to catch up, to be divided over a few posts I guess.  I am also taking the opportunity to test to see how the new Writer app works in terms of allowing me to type more fluently on the iPad. Seems pretty good so far!  The last few posts have been concert reviews, and I still plan a roundup of the year's music, movies etc, so I am just going to get stuck in.

Music

I realised I had some live clips I never put up from my amazing December gigs (Arcade Fire and The National), namely those I took of Phosporescent supporting the latter.  I had downloaded two albums by them (Here's to taking it easy and the Willie Nelson covers album) and quite a few tracks had favourably caught my ear (as opposed, I guess, to roughly grabbing it and yanking it half off my head), so I was quite interested to see them live, and they were certainly interesting.  The front man, Matthew Houck, initially seems hewn from the same kind of backwoods log as Bonnie Prince Billy in appearance and manner, but has a really distinctive voice which was lovely in concert.   His band looked kind of hairly and scraggly (with a particularly demented pianist), and sounded a lot louder in the loud bits, and quieter in the quiet bits, but there was generally a leaning in the direction of loud more than seemed apparent on record.

Anyway, the first of two clips is of my favourite of their songs, 'Rainbow parade':



While the second is the lovely if somewhat intruigingly named 'Picture of our torn up praise':



There is no doubt, in reflection, that 2010 was more like the inspiring 2008 than the insipid 2009 for music, with a lot of long-lasting favourites.  Number one of course must be 'High violet' by The National, although I must admit that this album perhaps did not entirely survive the forensic analysis I applied before and after its release, to the extent that it feels somewhat like a machine I took apart so drastically that it never quite reassembled into a coherent functioning whole.  It is hard to explain my relationship with this album, which is still head and shoulders above almost everything else for a long time, but somehow it remains a little spoiled by my own dumb failure to allow it a chance free from weighty expectation and dissembly. 

Most pleasant surprise was 'The suburbs' when Arcade Fire finally bludgeoned me into submission, and plain and simple pop joy (with attendendant goofy grins and addicted humming) of the year was 'American slang' by the Gaslight Anthem.  Other highlighted pleasures included the Drums, and Josh Ritter, while reissue of the year was the unexpected motown-flavoured pop masterpiece of Springsteen's 'The promise'.  Disappointment of the year was probably 'Contra' by Vampire Weekend, although this did yield the fantastic 'Giving up the gun'.  Gig of the year was clearly The National in the Olympia.

I didn't actually get much for a few weeks around Christmas, but made up for it in the last week by starting 2011 off in determinedly different style by downloading or being given Adele's '19' (I do like her voice), Kanye West's 'Fantasy' (my most radical departure, perhaps ever), Plan B (surprising but perhaps less so after mad Kanye) and Cee Lo Green (something about that voice!).  Comments on all will follow.
Albums currently being considered include those by The Decemberists, Iron & Wine and Anna Calvi for a start. Hopefully 2011 will be two good years in a row.


TV

In the weeks before Christmas, I really enjoyed 'The Walking Dead', which came to a halt after far too few (i.e., six) episodes, but had good characters (Egg from the classic This Life as a southern US cop!), good action, and scary zombies.  Definitely hope this got good enough ratings to warrant another (longer) series:



I also watched some of the sixth season of the US version of 'The Office', which I have always enjoyed and really see as something which now exists in its own right completely independent of its British parent, of which it is the bastard offspring that has gone off to make its own cocky way in the world.    Finally, working through box sets, I watched the again truncated entire life of 'Firefly', which was really a very strange mix of western (with eastern overtones) and Star Wars, like the original Lucas-Kurosowa mythological blend had been fed once more into a mad blender and mixed up to see what would slurp out.  Very odd, but very funny in places and probably worth more of a life-span than it got.  I must go back and watch 'Serenity' again, which I saw quite a few years ago and own on DVD.....

Books

It has been a busy month or so for books, with several on the go, and an unplanned shift back to the physical object as opposed to the virtual version.  First was a book on some particular individuals who have contributed overly notably to the recent tragic and spectacular demise of the Irish country.  The title, 'Wasters', says it all, and it chronicles an entirely depressing set of chancers, crooks and incompetents, which only feels progressively sadder these days as the impact of the damage down by these same losers leads us through simply bizarre days of Irish politics, to the point where it simply is not clear who, if anyone, is in charge any more.
In years to come, a new edition of Jon Ronson's 'Them' might include profiles of some of the same feckers, seen correctly through the lens of history as just as mad as the bizarre cast of characters featured in this edition, from conspiracy theorists caught up in actual conspiracies to the recurrent shadowy figures of the supposed secret rulers of the world, i.e., the Bilderberg group.  This is a slim but entertaining and sometimes sad and slightly scary book, a few years old at this stage.  I also read an entertaining if short book called 'A mathematician reads the newspaper' which collats a series of columns by a US professor of maths of misunderstandings of mathematical principles throughout media and politics; interesting an thought-provoking.

I also took on a major project on Kindle of 500,000 words by David Thomson, 500 each on 1000 movies - that is a lot of small screens of text!  What most shocked me about this was how many of the films I had never even heard of (at least 25%), and how man of them were from before 1940 or so. I estimate I have seen around 20% (at a generous estimate) of the books he discusses, which is tough when Thomson's style is unapologetically to assume the reader has seen the film in question, and to often jump straight in to some particular aspect of character or plot; I guess 500 words would suggest the straight-jacket of a brief symposis, which he clearly avoids, but it makes it hard to keep up somehow, although his fluent prose and eccentric turn of phrase make the effort worthwhile.  One thing that strikes me quite forcefully is to wonder how anyone could realistically find many of the more obscure ones he mentions, which led me to wonder how many old films even appear on TV any more, even allowing for how many channels that now exist. 

I am currently reading Steven Pinker's 'The stuff of thought', a complex treatise on the relationship between language and human thought which covers a lot of ground and veers wildly from the very funny (lots of movie references to keep me happy) to deep and serious considerations of specific details of grammar I didn't even know existed.  Learning a lot from this one!

Okay, there are a lot more things to talk about, including the slim few movies I have seen, Apple TV and more, but these will appear in future posts.

A lot of the distraction in recent weeks, particularly the last 2 weeks, has been the slow disintegration of my country's government, and the stripping bare of the sheer vanity, venality and incompetence of those in charge, and the lengths they will go to to remain so.  It certainly is a trying time to be Irish right now, as everyone who reads this, wherever you are, knows exactly how f***ed we are and how stupid we look. I am far from understanding most of what is going on, but as far as I see it, a small number of selfish bastards, in government and in banks, have led us into a deep dark hole from which there is no easy escape, and now no-one is prepared to take responsibility, and all semblance of order or sense at the top has simply evaporated.   Those who have caused the problems are turning on each other and the result is ghoulishly fascinating, and I have become addicted to political columns, TV and news shows and sites like never before. It would be great sport if it was happening to someone else.

And on that bleak note for a nonpolitical blog (although right now in Ireland everyone is political because everyone is in trouble) I will leave it.