Picture Show Annual 1961

Miles Davis In Musical Crime Shock!

In episode four of Michael Mann’s cop series, Crime Story, two characters walk into a club to the sound of Miles Davis. This is an episode I’d been looking forward to, knowing that the man with the horn was due to make a guest appearance.
   But hold on, something is very wrong. This is supposed to be set in the very early 60s, right? So how come it sounds as if they’ve walked into a wine bar circa 1986?
   The band is playing a kind of bland, mid-tempo jazz-funk. This is very wrong. And there’s Miles, looking just as he would have done when the series was filmed in ’86! He’s got his crazy long curly locks, shiny jacket and all. As you may know, for a man who once prided himself in his sartorial elegance, this period marks a terrible finale for Miles when it comes to threads. This is the time of the Tutu album (1986, that is, not 1961), an awful record which I try to imagine doesn’t actually exist. I think the man had just gone mad by then, crushed by the weight of a brilliant career, most of which was spent on the cutting-edge. So he tried to claw his way into the present via programmed drums and naff synth sounds.
   They couldn’t get him to cut his hair for the role, obviously. Imagine the scene. The director suggests a haircut for authenticity. “Fuck that muthafuckin’ shit,” replies Miles in that gruff voice of his. “And I’m not playing old muthafuckin’ music, either. Nor am I wearing that old muthafuckin’ suit.” The director and designers tremble before apologising and letting the legend do what he wants.
   So, it’s 1961 and Miles, looking as he would have done in ’86, is with a band playing some tepid ‘fusion’. It’s like a weird time warp in which a musical pioneer crops up in the past, playing the worst of his future, the worst of the genre he would transform in reality.
   Can you imagine the state my head was in after experiencing this?
   Why weren’t they playing ‘So What?’ or ‘My Funny Valentine’? Miles must have still had the chops to wing it for a few bars, surely.
   Mann had already used Miles as a pimp in Miami Vice. Concerned about this role, he was apparently told by fellow actors: ‘Man, it’s nothing, nothing but lies, Miles’. Perhaps he remembered that advice when appearing in this bizarre musical scene. Did he choose the musical style? If so, was it a joke on his behalf? Or was he trying to sell Tutu subliminally? We may never know.
   There’s ‘lying’ as an actor, but lying about history you were crucial too is going way too far.
   To help me recover from this I need some Miles as he really was in the early-60s...cue Some Day My Prince Will Come...

Miss Otis Regrets - Cole Porter

From the genius, Cole Porter, this song has joined the ranks of great ones that have buried themselves in my heart since I started listening to it again (and again) a few months ago.
As with all examples from the Great American Songbook it’s been covered many times but the version I’ve grown to love is by Ella.
The formality of the narrative content and brutality of the story’s conclusion (and imagery) create a stunning contrast as well as a master class in lyrical storytelling.
Miss Otis regrets, madam, that despite inhabiting the high society world of middle-class American manners she was driven to homicidal vengeance for being wronged by a man. She strayed down Lover’s Lane but ‘woke up and found that her dream of love was gone’.
Porter beautifully juxtaposes a symbol of opulence with the hard mechanism of death in the lines: ‘And from under her velvet gown/She drew a gun and shot her love down’.
The final great lines elicit our sympathy, even for a killer, how could they not? Dragged from jail by the mob Miss Otis is taken to the ‘old willow across the way’. This is another masterstroke which, consciously or not, exploits our fondness for things like that good old willow tree, here turned into a tool for violent ‘justice’. ‘And the moment before she died/She lifted up her lovely head and cried’.
Magic from the pen of Mr Porter.

Connecting French...Another ‘Histoire’...Melody Nelson

I'm posting this in case you're even slower than me in picking up on the genius of this album. I'm ashamed, really, but there you go. I tell myself I can't have heard every brilliant record, even at my age.
Sublime string arrangements by Jean-Claude Vannier, funky Herbie Flowers on bass, and fine guitar-playing by Alan Parker, especially on ‘En Melody’ - under 30mins of aural ecstasy (oo-er...can their be a more appropriate word to describe Serge at his best?).
Here’s a tale of pervy SG driving his Roller, hitting a girl who is only fourteen and, of course, falling in love...what a dirty rotter, as Steve Jones might say.
If you want the lyrics translated into English, they're here. (Sample: 'The surrounding walls/Of the labyrinth/Open up on the inifinite' Ah they don't write 'em like that anymore).
This album's retained its modernity (it was released in '71) through being sampled both literally and stylistically, although lush strings and a funky breakbeat may not be de rigueur, these days. How would I know? I’m miles behind what’s happening now, just as I was miles behind everyone with good ears in discovering this masterpiece.

Essential CD Collections: Jean-Luc Godard - Histoire(s) de Musique

You love the films...you’ve got to have some of the greatest soundtracks ever composed. Michel Legrand’s ‘Vivre sa Vie’ and Georges Delerue’s stunning work for Le Mepris are just two of the highlights. Paul Misraki’s music for Alphaville (‘Theme d’amour’ in particular), and Antoine Duhamel’s ‘Ferdinand’ from Pierrot le Fou are also highlights of this outstanding CD. It’s also features Anna singing. What more could you want? Put this on, don a trilby, chew on a cigarette and read ‘Capital Of Pain’ for that full ‘I’m in a Godard movie’ effect.

The Man From U.N.C.L.E Coloring Book (1965)

Bored on a Sunday? Enlarge, print and get out the paint set...

Teddy Pendergrass

So us UK soul boys and girls just lost an icon. Truth is we lost him over 30 years ago, along with our innocence, the baggies and crepe-soled shoes – lost everything but a love of his best tunes.
Risible now, perhaps, as the 70s lover man stud on stage and, along with Barry White and Marvin Gaye, responsible for half the births in America circa 1978, Teddy P’s finest records still resonate deeply with me.
With Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes he reached out to all us 70s teenagers with ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’. Hearing it today shoots me straight back down the time tunnel to nights spent sweating on the disco floor, dreaming of a girl, a favourite beat and the ultimate look. We were in love with the style of a soulful Saturday night just before Fever broke out.
‘The Love I Lost’ - how fine that still sounds today, it’s sentiment staying with us through our teens, when love was easy to lose and hard to find. And ‘Wake Up Everybody’, a high point in 70s Soul music’s call for social responsibility -‘You businessmen, stop cheatin’’, exhorts Teddy. Some messages don’t date, sadly.
I can’t eulogize enough about ‘Bad Luck’ - the bass line, arrangement (of course) and the way Teddy testifies to the gambler’s torment – the way he sings ‘You played that number ‘cause that number’s hot !’.
Aside from Punk making all the headlines in ’77 Teddy P’s first solo album appeared, and despite enjoying the white riot of noise my roots in black music meant this album gave me just as much satisfaction. It remained his best, containing in ‘You Can’t Hide From Yourself’, ‘The More I Get The More I Want’ and ‘I Don’t Love You Anymore’ a trio of absolute classics. The latter is a strange musical phenomenon in that it shouts a negative statement over one of the most joyous arrangements ever created.
He had one more dancefloor monster up his sleeve, delivered the following year in the form of 'Only You'. 
Teddy P’s colossal voice and the phenomenal Philly sound made amazing music for a while, and if he didn’t prove to be a long-term love affair for me, along with all those ‘ladies’, I succumbed (and still do), if for slightly different reasons.

Crime Story

Bought Series 2 in Fopp for a fiver out of curiosity, then 1 on eBay for £6.69, having read good things about it. Enjoyed the two-hour pilot. Now onto episode 3. Dennis Farina (an ex-cop in real life) is first-rate playing the typically world-weary detective who lives the job 24/7 but his fellow cops are 1D as yet.
Spoilt by the retro-styling excellence of ‘Mad Men’, it’s tempting to dismiss the look of this 60s-set show as a bit shoddy, but after a while I got used to that. Some of the clothes are a bit suspect, likewise some of the hairstyles, so as far as the look goes, the cars are the stars.
It seems that nothing made in the 80s had immunity from that decade’s complete lack of decent style. Even the inside of the police station looks like a set from a naff soap.
When using original tracks such as Brubeck’s ‘Take Five’ or The Impressions’ ‘It’s Alright’ the music works brilliantly (how could it fail?), but unfortunately the original incidental music dates it terribly and some wise guy thought a synthesiser would set the right tone along with some awful blues rock.
But it features the Jon Polito (who’s also superb in ‘The Man Who Wasn’t There’ and ‘Miller’s Crossing’) as a crime boss, the direction is good (especially the department store shoot-out in the pilot), the dialogue’s decent, the story line seems well plotted and I still want to watch more, so it has something going for it...possibly just the shoot-outs, cop talk and cars which all make for entertaining escapism.

Oleva - Mika Vainio (Sahko)

Another name, another album you’ve probably never heard (please correct me if I’m wrong). Then again, aren’t Pan Sonic a supergroup of electronica? And Vainio being one half of them, there’s a greater chance you’ll know this work.
He’s made a few albums but this being the first that I found today I’ll be exploring them all because it’s very good. In fact, I’ll be looking for Pan Sonic stuff too because I always ignored them since they sold out and played the Shea Stadium and that’s a travesty of everything I thought they stood for, which is maintaining a doggedly low profile underground, where all the best artists operate for reasons of creative purity untainted by the lure of the Devil’s main instrument, money.
Perhaps they didn’t play Shea Stadium. Can you imagine it, two men standing at their computers, watched by 57,000 people? Well, allowing for the fact that they’re not The Beatles (watched by around 56,000, apparently), they might attract a few less.
Do Pan Sonic have 57,000 fans in the whole world? I wonder. Sometimes I think I’m totally alone in enjoying this music, whilst knowing that’s not true, it is a feeling I get. Perhaps I should look for forums where fans of this stuff post...but then, I’ve grown to dislike forums...the ultimately unsatisfactory communication with strangers...the detachment guised as some form of attachment to other people...
And electronica fans are notorious nerds - something I am not! I dance to black music (OK, mostly in the flat, these days). I go out! Well, not much recently. I wear good clothes (he says, smugly)...except when I’m lounging around the house...which is most of the time...
Damn, what have I turned into?
At least I’m not nerdy about anything...having no great obsession or deep knowledge of one subject...which I’m not downing, of course.
You could say that ‘Oleva’ is music for the detached...the music of detachment, in the sense that it doesn’t try hard to elicit emotion in the way that singers of songs do. It creates atmosphere, though, in which you may dream and envisage all manner of things, as the best electronic music does. ‘Mojave’, for instance, could evoke images of a desolate planet...or empty city streets at dawn...even the silent chasm of despair one falls into when waiting in a supermarket checkout queue that is not moving...
There is tranquillity here, but also ‘Frekvenssi’ which, listened to over headphones, makes you feel as if you have two amped up live wires stuck into your ears whilst someone plays with the volume and cross-fade. It’s that good.
‘Muistetun Palaava Taajuus’ (don’t ask), encapsulates the textures and tones running throughout. This is a crafty combination of high-pitched single tone drone buzzing over what sounds like something played backwards and an enormous bass note and thunder, the like of which frequently puts oomph into this album.
‘Set The Controls To The Heart Of The Sun’ inspires in me no less than the idea of Milt Jackson guesting on a Kraftwerk track. How can that be anything but great?

Sweet Charity - Bob Fosse (1969)

Totally hip...



Not forgetting this also...

Deaf Center

David Byrne once informed us that Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens but that wasn’t meant to be a good thing was it? How about music where nothing ever happens? They call it ‘ambient’, but I don’t know if Deaf Center’s album, ‘Pale Ravine’, fully qualifies. Perhaps ‘Home Listening’ makes a little more sense, although that’s to suggest that you spend an equal amount of time in clubs, which most listeners don’t.
What happens is a mood, melancholic (sometimes) beautiful (always), whether in simple piano melodies or strings which soak your ears in sounds made, perhaps, for contemplation of an imaginary landscape in your head (that endless plain of possible thoughts)...or loss, memory, a ravine that is bottomless...whatever you like.
Once I had no time for this kind of music but last year I drifted towards it and this album was instrumental in that process. I kept on returning to it. Why not? I don’t care if the orchestration comes from the push of a button as opposed to the wave of a baton. This is our classical music, you might say. Poor things...we have no palaces in which to hear grand orchestras (well, there are concert halls for classical music but are you visiting them?).
Is it cheating? I guess the true maestros (composers and conductors) would have little regard for Deaf Center. But this is our shortcut to orchestrated beauty. I’m not saying it should replace Vaughan Williams, but there’s no reason it shouldn’t sit alongside. It may lack the refined intellectual grandeur of classical music, but then in this age of dumb culture, it still means a lot.
It sits in online stores alongside dubstep or techno (albeit in different categories) yet still in a world where segregation is not as clear as in the one outside.
Sometimes those cultural barriers seem impassable, even though, today, classical music is also just a click away.
By being included in the more tasteful stores, Deaf Center become a possible choice as opposed to the remote impossibility (seemingly) of stepping out and away from modernity towards the classic canon. This is modernity in a classical form, albeit one that owes more, perhaps, to cinema than Chopin, although the ghost of Satie also lingers here.
We listen by different degrees; rapt attention, intermittent absorption, casually (whilst doing something else) and so on. Quiet music can heighten responses, becoming either pure background, a distant sound, or something which rewards the most concentrated listening one can muster.
The world constantly vies for our attention, usually by way of these screens through which we communicate and become absorbed. We’re busy trying to catch what’s going on, following trails which we hope will lead us somewhere meaningful, hacking our way through the digital jungle, only to find more jungle, always...never the ending, seldom finding the clearing where there is peace, where we feel we can rest.
Although I live a quiet London street, a few hundred yards away the swarm of humanity rushes to and fro and some music reflects this perfectly, be it the urbane cool of Jazz or the futurism of Techno. Yet Deaf Center’s music in this environment is a reflection of that place inside where, if we’re lucky, there is a kind of calm, a stillness which many city-dwellers constantly seek as refuge from all that noise and movement.
If nothing really happens in this music to make the heart beat faster, or the mind to contemplate lyrical content, it has its own splendid lyricism and leaves our imagination free to create its own meanings. In a world where we are constantly being prodded into action and reaction by messages of all kinds, this freedom is a kind I wholeheartedly support.

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Solace

'There is nothing so bitter that a patient mind cannot find some solace for it' 
- Seneca, Roman philosopher

                                                                                                                

Strangers In A Strange Land

Depression set in whilst watching ‘History Of Now – The Story Of The Noughties’ on TV last night. The rise of the Chav phenomenon...‘Big Brother’...WAGs and credit culture...what was there to rejoice in?
To make matters worse, the narrator constantly used the word ‘we’ when describing the public’s reaction to it all, which was supposed to create an inclusive feeling for the viewer, I know. But that was the problem, the idea that he spoke for me when he discussed the way ‘we’ became so enthralled by all that shit.
We didn’t go credit card crazy in a bid to own everything, or watch ‘Big Brother’, follow celebrity fashion, buy ridiculous handbags and think that what footballer’s wives did was important.
There may be others like us but what we think is irrelevant in the grand scheme of defining and shaping popular opinion, attitudes and behaviour.
Media saturation is inescapable unless you possess the kind of will and organisational capabilities that can screen out all that junk. Perhaps that’s a worthy New Year’s resolution: set about applying a filter system designed to ‘purify’ sensory input. I need some kind of defence against The Brain Eaters. But they’re embedded so deeply in the media...the news, newspapers and internet...They are everywhere, utilising the front pages of the world to burn their information onto my retina, to ‘entertain’, and inform me of developments in a culture that I despise.
The price we pay for not conforming to the behaviour patterns of clearly definable social groups is, of course, this sense of isolation and disgust with mainstream culture; the feeling that society is not ours, but something we are merely visiting.
I sometimes feel like a stranger in a strange land...a man who fell to earth but, unfortunately, cannot afford to build a spaceship that will get me off this planet.

Report From The Bunker 2

Having written no fiction for months it feels as if my ability construct sentences in that way has diminished...been eroded by...something...lack of use...a part of my brain gone dormant...

If fiction no longer seems possible, is fact all that remains? Perhaps this blog is what remains...and it is all factual, of course...

But how much fact can one endure? Clicking on ‘Next Blog’ leads to pages containing photos of babies...click again and I find myself staring at a middle-aged woman with a back complaint, for which she has kindly provided a diagram to illustrate the problem...the next is written in a language I don’t understand and cannot begin to guess the origin of...with YouTube clips by bands I have never heard of...the next, by a teacher, talks about her family problems...it amazes me how personal people are willing to be...cathartic, I suppose...but do none of her family read the blog too?

Blog Land...a strange country...

Here in The Bunker the sky is blue out the front, whilst grey clouds gather over the back garden...dark, ominous, snow-laden, I presume. A blackbird enjoys the berries on the Pyracantha bush where, this morning, there was a redwing, the first we’ve seen in the garden. We watched it fly off to join a flock scattered throughout the trees at the bottom of the garden...ah yes, wild Camden...

I have come across bird-watching blogs...finding them more interesting than many others I’ve ventured upon by chance but I won’t be adding any to my list of Favourites...

All subjects are bloggable...

I contemplate, briefly, creating one about my fingernails, their growth, condition, cleanliness etc...someone’s probably already beaten me to it...contemplate blog searching ‘fingernails but wonder what the hell is wrong with me...it’s been one of those afternoons...unable to settle into doing anything....watched the start of ‘Apocalypto’ because someone leant it to me...but didn’t like the banter between the natives, although I’m sure ancient civilisations shared a joke or two...

Watched the start of the ‘Solaris’ remake...not bad, to my surprise...recall hearing, whilst we were there, that Clooney has a place on Lake Como...dream of a summer holiday...

Check my Amazon account to make sure no-one has bought what I’m selling because yesterday I was notified by the company that I was late sending a CD someone had bought...which I’d forgotten was even on there...but the sale did inspire me to put more stuff up for sale, that being my first I dream of a lucrative business but know full well the price the average book fetches and that I would have to sell a lot to make it worthwhile...

Contemplate selling loads of books...even more than currently sit in the two shopping bags on the floor bound for the s/h shop when I can be bothered...

Buying books is a habit; a bad one? If only they took as long to read as a film takes to watch...

Listen to Autechre’s ‘Quaristice’ album...on the headphones...and realise that they’re quite unique in the world of electronic music...and feel slightly stupid because people have been saying how good they are for years, although I’ve never fully got into them...wonder how many more artists I will ‘get’ when they’ve been producing music for years...

Sinatra and Jobim

One of my favourite YouTube clips. 1967 and Bossa Nova is ‘this exciting all new sound’, which is much more preferable to Sinatra than that that racket made by hippy revolutionaries. The feeling is that Frank’s had his fill of wild living so whilst the latest youthquake sends tremors around the world of pop culture, Sinatra can sit unperturbed, untouchable, as cool as you like in a wicker chair with Antonio Carlos Jobim to accompany him. The Voice, as rich as it would ever be, sings a medley from the new recording with Jobim, which proved to be amongst the greatest Sinatra ever made. The Voice, marinated in cigarette smoke and Jack Daniels, is beyond compare. He rolls the cigarette in his fingers, singing ‘Quiet Nights Of Quiet Stars’, and lights it as Jobim takes over, brushing ash from his knees, later flicking it dismissively onto the small circular podium. To smoke in a TV studio was allowed then but now looks like an act of defiance, of rebellion against laws yet to be passed. They move into Irving Berlin’s ‘Change Partners’...to dance with Sinatra is to never want to change partners again...the irresistible, seductive power of The Voice. Whenever skies look grey to me Sinatra’s take on Cole Porter’s ‘I Concentrate On You’ provides some kind of magical warmth, the glow of a perfect marriage between lyrics, music and The Voice. Tall, tanned, young and lovely, the girl from Ipanema doesn’t see Sinatra? It’s hard to imagine a girl not seeing him, yet Sinatra imbues the song with a sense that this really happened, just as he instils authenticity into every great song he sings.

Atlas - Monolake

Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976)

The American Friend (Wim Wenders, 1977)

Hopper arrived in Hamburg strung out from filming ‘Apocalypse Now’ (still dressed as the photojournalist) and was, according to Wenders, ‘Drugged out of his mind, almost suicidal...a living disaster, impossible to shoot with’. Miraculously, he looks his most handsome in this film, as befits his role as the seductive, duplicitous Ripley. Hopper’s real-life turmoil inevitably leaks into his portrayal of Ripley as an unhinged loner who’s successful

but far from happy. With a friend like that, you might say. But is this American a saint or sinner? Wenders draws out the moral ambiguity of Highsmith’s creation, playing with double-meanings...the framer, being framed, reality and cinematic ‘reality’ (there are roles for Nicolas Ray and Sam Fuller). It’s a film that’s partly a homage to film legend, but mostly a study of identity, the identity of the artist, the conman, and the family man capable of being driven from the security of home life towards homicide. Bruno Ganz is terrific as the picture-framer Ripley befriends; a man plagued by questions regarding his physical condition, the real nature of which is also in doubt. Hopper may have been suicidal, but the film also questions the value of life, and the lives of others to a man whose own looks increasingly fragile.