Time for one of these posts again…
Right now I’m listening to ‘A Lifetime of Temporary Relief’, a new box-set of B-sides, rarities and unreleased stuff by Low. It’s particularly interesting to hear the very first demos; two tracks recorded on a four-track cassette machine in a friend’s apartment. The quality is pretty bad, but through all the hiss, it’s easy to hear how the band’s characteristic sound was so well established even in 1994.
Also on the “new arrivals” pile are Mike Keneally’s ‘Dog’ and the latest Modest Mouse album ‘Good News for People who Love Bad News’.
Mostly, though, my rock/pop listening takes a backseat during the summer, because I get so enthused by the Proms and get to discover loads of new things. No major new discoveries this year (although I’ve made a mental note to explore the music of Benjamin Britten and Charles Ives) but I’ve been listening repeatedly to some of the pieces I’ve heard at the concerts (I like the way live performances often make me appreciate details I’d never heard before)… Mahler’s 1st and 7th symphonies, Stravinsky’s ‘Petrushka’, ‘The Firebird’ and ‘The Rite of Spring’, Messiaen’s ‘Turangalila’ and ‘Des Canyons aux Étoiles’, to name a few.
In film, the only new release I’ve been interested enough to go and see right away (as opposed to waiting a few months for non-feature showings) was Michael Moore’s ‘Fahrenheit 9/11′. I thought it was an excellent piece of work, but then he doesn’t have to convince me, so I can concentrate more on whether the whole thing hangs together as a piece of good cinema (I think it does) rather than trying to see the flaws in his arguments. For what it’s worth, I think his only crimes (as with ‘Bowling for Columbine’) are an occasional overuse of clever editing for comedy effect and a tendency to go for the pathos jugular, but I can live with that. He doesn’t lie, cheat, oppress or wage illegal wars, does he?
Away from the glitzy glare of the big movie circuit, the NFT ran a decent crime season last month. James Cagney’s fimography is heavily biased towards cheesy comedies and musicals, but ‘The Roaring Twenties’ and ‘White Heat’ show how grittily effective he was as psychotic gangsters (with some very Freudian problems). From the other side of the pond, ‘The Third Man’ and ‘Brighton Rock’ are fine examples of British film noir and excellent adaptations of Grahame Greene’s books. And that provides me with a link to another creative medium… I’ve just finished reading ‘Brighton Rock’.