links for 2008-03-31
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“I felt that was essentially a 13-week promotion for a musical - where’s our 13-week programme?” Spacey said. I agree with him, and would also add that they’re fucking awful TV shows. Wipe them out, all of them.
links for 2008-03-29
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“Before I bought this book I often found avoiding huge ships to be a constant problem. Not a week would go by without some sort unforseen collision occuring and ruining my day.”
links for 2008-03-28
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Nice chap that Colin.
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Um. Did anyone tell that subtitling it ‘No Intelligence Allowed’ might not, er, give quite the message they wanted to?
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Wow. Nice chap. All he asked in return was the knife that the mugger used to mug him. Blimey.
Beirut Videos
Beirut are one of the best bands around. Fact. Zach Condon, who is bile-inducingly young, has the best voice in modern music. Fact. And, to add wonderful insult to beautiful injury they go and make the best videos too. If I was a professional musician I would shoot myself now.
Luckily for everyone, though, I’m not, so I can enjoy their genius, and so can you with this little run through of some of the best of Beirut Youtube has to offer.
To start with, something I’ve blogged before, which is the video to Postcards from Italy, made from various bits of patched-together Super-8 footage. Beautiful:
Another official video of theirs is the intriguingly great Elephant Gun, featuring, amongst other things, some mustache goodness:
During the shoot of this video, Zach Condon did this great impromptu version of the above Postcards from Italy:
Here’s a version of Nantes from the streets, hopefully of Nantes, but I have no idea really, it has some great bin-drumming:
This is another version of Nantes from some stairs in Brooklyn. It builds fantastically:
And from the same collection of Flying Club Cup album videos, here’s In The Mausoleum, the guy sitting in the chair’s wearing my t-shirt!:
Here are some members of Beirut and Arcade Fire onstage at the Bowery Ballroom in New York doing a transcendent version of The Gulag Orkestar:
I could go on and on, but if you want to catch some more wonderful Beirut/Youtube goodness, you can find their official channel for the Flying Club Cup album here, and learn more about the band here.
Review: Rushmore
Wes Anderson Season 2008: Part 2
This is the film that kicked off my little Wes Anderson season. It’s one of my favourite films. I watched it first back in 1999 when it first came out (well, first came out in the UK anyway).
It’s difficult not to love this film. From the early wide-angle shots of Max Fischer’s (Jason Schwartzman) various school clubs (Rushmore Beekeepers, as an example, even play a small role later in the film), to the closing Vietnam-based play that he stages (complete with helicopters and explosions) Fischer’s character is one that’s easy to warm to. Similarly, Bill Murray’s Herman Blume is a weird and sometimes pretty nasty piece of work, but his general ineptitude and disrespect for his money, position or children is hugely charming.
The third lead character, Ms Cross (Olivia Williams), the object of Herman and Max’s attention generally has to take a slight back seat to allow the competition between the two male characters to take centre stage. Max’s affection towards Ms Cross is beautifully drawn as being entirely blinkered, ludicrous, temporary, but also heartfelt, as a 15 year old boy’s love is. Herman’s love is exactly the same, as a middle-aged man’s love is.
In some ways this film is an archetypal ‘two men fight for the affection of one woman’ film, but this is not what you could call archetypal. Between Max and Herman’s attempted creation of huge multi-million dollar aquarium, through Max pretending to be injured so he can climb Romeo-style through Ms Cross’s bedroom window, the basic underpinning of the plot is there merely to support the flights of fancy that reflect Max’s ambition and imagination. You can almost choose your own message from this sometimes pretty mysterious film. However, one I often come back to is the fact that a 15 year old boy’s imagination, unemcumbered by the realities of the world (represented by Herman) are a magical, if ultimately transitory thing. In the end, there’s nothing wrong with reality or imagination.
So Rushmore’s a coming of age drama, and it’s a comedy, and it’s a love story. But in the end, almost everyone I know that’s seen it has taken something slightly different from the often enigmatic plot, and that makes for one special film.
Next: The Royal Tenenbaums.
Review: The Apprentice Series 4 Opener
Watch this episode in the UK here for the next week.
It’s that time of year where a group of delusional tosspots get together to embarrass themselves in front of the nation Alan Sugar. As always at this point in the series, they seem like a particularly odious bunch. “In life,” states one buffoon, opening the show, “there are two types of people. Winners, and the second type. I can’t say it, I won’t say it.” Is is it ‘fuckwit’? ‘Moron’? ‘Jerkwad’ for a more Atlantic flavour? Don’t keep us guessing, please.
When the BBC introduce this programme as the ‘Job interview from hell’ I’m sure they mean that it’s supposed to be highly pressured; that sooner or later most will come up in front of Sir Sugar of Cockney have the ‘you’re fired’ finger of doom waved in their slimey little faces. As far as I’m concerned, though, it would be spending a few months with these parasites that would be hellish.
One pipes up, early on “As a salesperson, I probably rate myself as the best in Europe.” What she fails to understand, however, is that it doesn’t matter how she rates herself. If she was the best salesperson in Europe, she’d be making money rather than embarassing herself on this show. Still, for all my whinging, I have to watch her do so, for I am a cruel man with a shrivelled heart, and there’s little I enjoy more than seeing overly confident idiots fail. And fail they will. Oh yes.
An early bit of snappiness comes from ‘International Car Dealer’ Sara. What exactly is an ‘International Car Dealer’? With the UK car firms having been bought out by their larger brethren, aren’t all cars International now? Anyway she starts off the fish-selling task by attempting to shout an answer out of a mildly bemused shopkeeper before berating her colleagues for interrupting her ‘negotiations’. Does asking a man which is the best market really count as ‘negotiation’? I’m not an International Car Dealer, so I don’t know.
One lesson that I did learn early on in the ladies’ and the gents’ fish salesperson career is that a good way of getting customers is by selling at below the wholesale price. It’s also worth knowing the difference between pounds, kilos and units. Useful stuff.
Nicholas de Lacy-Brown is apparently very good at Law. He regards his single ‘B’ at GCSE, amongst ‘A’s throughout his school career as his ‘only failure’. He should probably add the weird little tuft of vaguely satanic facial hair to that list, alongside his inability to price lobsters. I don’t know whether it was his idea to go to a solicitor’s to sell fish, but as their decisions go it was one of the better ones. Which is saying a lot about the quality of the boy’s team decisions. The solicitors are much, much better negotiators than the contestants, however, which is a joy to behold, and the team comes away having sold £130 worth of fish for £50. Genius.
Eventually, after both teams have sold most of their stock for far too little money, they head back to the boardroom to be shouted at by Sir Alan while they concentrate on stabbing each other in the back. Raef, whose key skill appears to be keeping an amazing amount of hair balanced on his head is the best at patronising people, it transpires, and uses this skill less than judiciously. He failed at labelling the fish, it seems, while Baron de Lacy-Brown failed at the pricing. Those two with team captain Alex are the final three to face incredulous looks from Sir Alan the next day where their fate is decided.
Raef could get on with prince or pauper, he claims, where Nicholas doesn’t get on well with people who like football. Alex is a “Regional sales manager at the age of 21″. It’s difficult to know which one I wanted to get fired more. As it transpires, its another opportunity for Nicholas to face the lowly world of failure, and so his freakish facial hair will have to languish in the law courts of the country instead of gracing the ‘Boardroom’ for another week.
One of the vile idiots started the programme by stating “I’m quite happy to cut people out of my life if it helps me be a success, a winner.” Judging from this opener, I doubt you would shed a tear to be cut out of the life of any of them.
links for 2008-03-25
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Each time you use one of these ideas a fairy dies.
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A fine argument from Polly Toynbee about the need for morality (not religion) in all commons bills, and for common sense rather than superstition to prevail in the embryology bill. Hear hear.
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Billy and Bobbie on Bebo. Sounds like a kid’s story. Anyway, Bragg and Johnson are right - musicians should be paid for what they do, even if record companies are arses - opposing this doesn’t help small-scale musicians.
links for 2008-03-24
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Mildly flawed, but it’s not the fault of the app. This could be very useful.
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And if you’re both quick and from the UK, you can watch the interview with him on the iPlayer. The man’s a genius in the truest sense of the word.
Review: March Of The Penguins
I’m not what anyone would call a patriot. I don’t believe I’m anything special because I was born in Britain, nor do I believe that Britain is particularly special because I live in it. That said, there are a lot of things that make me glad that I’m British. We know how to make good tea, we’ve got a pretty darn good music scene, we make a lot of the best comedy, and we get to watch David Attenborough nature documentaries.
So you’ll understand when I say that throughout this perfectly reasonable, and in places beautiful and fascinating documentary, I spent most of the time wishing that it was being narrated by David Attenborough. It’s not that Morgan Freeman did anything wrong. Or that the script-writer was all that terrible, it’s just that once you’ve seen a David Attenborough nature documentary, nothing else really seems quite right.
As I mentioned, though, this really isn’t bad. There’s some wonderful footage of the life cycle of a penguin, of the bleak Antarctic habitat and, my, the ickle baby penguins are sho, sho cuute. On the downside, there’s a strong tendency to anthropomophise their lives, and there’s one cringe-inducingly horrible moment when they put some ‘comedy’ music over some footage of penguins squabbling. It feels a bit like you’re watching a film called ‘Penguins Do The Funniest Things Pt 17′ and it almost made me give up the rest of the film as a bad job.
I’m glad I didn’t though. This is, for all its faults, a great documentary, and David Attenborough shouldn’t have a monopoly on making nature programmes, even if he is, to my eyes and ears, the best at it.
One final thing: if you don’t want to scratch out your eyes with a fork when you read that tag-line on the poster, you really should feel that way. It’s only natural.
***1/2
Review: Shroud of Turin: Material Evidence
BBC 2 Saturday 22nd March
View on iPlayer in the UK here until 29th March.
There’s something fascinating about the Shroud of Turin. Not, from a personal perspective, because I believe that it’s the burial cloth of Jesus, but because it tells us a lot about the way that particular objects are revered by the Christian faith and how this reverence comes into being. The Shroud is probably the most interesting of any of these objects. It supposedly has a direct connection to Christ; it has a history that we know stretches back to the 12th Century; and, of course, it’s come into direct contact with modern science when it was carbon-dated 20 years ago.
This documentary showed promise. It aimed to show, from a scientific perspective, the history of the shroud, and potentially why the carbon tests might need to be redone give us more information to make a decision about what this object is. To be fair, there’s a lot of facts in this documentary which are interesting, and can give a perspective on the shroud that has not been made clear before.
However, this documentary falls down in the way that so many previous religious/scientific documentaries fall. That science is there to be disproved, and, essentially, once you have disproved (or potentially disproved) a scientific hypothesis, that the only explanation left must be that found in the bible or in the church. The fact is that such a fanciful hypothesis of the Shroud being that of Christ with the image being that of Christ’s face is an extraordinary claim, and that requires extraordinary evidence to prove it. The evidence in this documentary, interesting though it might be, was nowhere near extraordinary enough to back up the religious claims made throughout. There is far too much reliance on biblical stories which themselves are open to question, and from other sources that themselves are not what you’d call of the highest historical veracity. To be fair, the documentary never quite leaps to any conclusions about the shroud’s origins, but it really does seem to have set out to prove the shroud is real, or at least to disprove any evidence that suggests it’s not.
However, the more information that we can find out about the shroud, the more interesting the story becomes, so I have no problem with a documentary that teaches me more, even if the presentation and assumptions are not what I would expect from a real, scientific programme. I expected more from a scientific documentary, but what I didn’t take into account is that making a scientific programme about such an iconic object is nigh-on impossible, and that, in itself, is perhaps the most interesting thing this documentary has to teach us.
links for 2008-03-23
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From my ill-fated days teaching, I really couldn’t agree with this sentiment more. There’s nothing wrong with a lack of self-confidence most of the time. It’s what makes you strive to make something better.
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PZ Myers is not allowed in to see the creationist movie ‘Expelled’ (oh the irony), but they do allow his guest in. His guest, Richard Dawkins. Genius.
links for 2008-03-20
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Although I take the point about the latent misogyny in society, a lot of Heather Mills’ vilification stems from the fact that she is, actually, a liar, extremely annoying and the press will exaggerate any character flaw for a story.
Machine Gun - Portishead
Normally, when a band disappears for ten years, when they come back the result tends to be less like the Sistine Chapel and more like them breaking into your house and pooping on your bed. Twice. And yes, Stone Roses, we’re all looking at you.
Not Portishead though. Their new album, ingeniusly titled ‘Third’ is probably the greatest thing that they’ve done, a work of amazing bleak, beautiful genius. The first single is Machine Gun, and the video for it was released yesterday:
And the rest is just as wonderful. I’ll be reviewing it shortly.
links for 2008-03-19
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Another Apple article from Wired that takes rather a long time to tell you little that you didn’t already know. But we do now know about Jobs’ car parking preferences, which is something.
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A Twitter service to tell the world your terrible eating habits. I really like this, why aren’t more people using it?
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Turns out lap-dancing isn’t a very pleasant job, and the men who partake of the service are shits. Who woulda thought?
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Wow - these are beautiful - I want one! Or Two! OR MORE!
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From Merlin Mann’s wonderful ‘5ives’ site, this made me laugh out loud - especially #1.
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This looks absolutely wonderful, and likely to be attacked as soon as possible by a creaking music industry. Is anyone using it already?
links for 2008-03-18
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“Not since Dylan’s ‘Positively 4th St.”, have I been so inspired to find love, start a revolution and start believing again.”
