Culture - August

Books Read:

Fyodor Dostoyevsky - 'The Devils (Demons)'
Will Self - 'Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe' (short stories)
Ernest Hemingway - 'Death in the Afternoon' (non-fiction)

The first half of August was dominated by the reading of Dostoyevsky's 'The Devils', a mammoth political melodrama depicting the various ideologies, factions and personalities that together serve as a kind of prophecy for the Russian Revolution. Over 700-pages the wealth of character portraits is substantial and yet if it was sometimes hard work, Dostoyevsky's unique rendering of the machinations and deceit at the heart of the anarchist group plotting to kick-start a revolt was always engrossing. Particularly joyful was the sense of resentment burning from the page directed at the Russian author Turgenev, with whom Dostoyevsky had feuded and subsequently decided to lambast.

I had hoped that 'Death in the Afternoon' would be a fascinating insight into the culture and psychology of the practice of bull fighting, and in many ways it served that purpose, despite Hemingway's characteristic rambling prose style and laboured exploration of marginal details. Certainly I learned an awful lot about the tremendous bravery, precision and skill that a matador must possess; the strategy and processes of a fight; and found Hemingway's insights into the morality of the tradition compelling. However, I felt it to be overly protracted and far too rambling in form to really match up to my expectations.

Films Watched:

'Rec 2' (Jaume Balagueró & Paco Plaz)
'Finding Nemo' (Andrew Stanton)
'The Third Part of the Night' (Andrezj Zulawski)
'Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa' (Declan Lowney) (at the Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'Mr Smith goes to Washington' (Frank Capra)
'Eastern Promises' (David Cronenberg)

Not being particularly au fait with Alan Partridge, going to see his inflation onto the big screen was always going to have its pros and cons. The pros in that, being merely an amused onlooker to the 'cult of Alan', I was able to go in with considerably lower expectations that one of the devout followers. The cons, however, being that I couldn't shirk the nagging feeling that they were getting a whole lot more out of it than I was, as though it were a film-length private joke.

That said, despite the somewhat tenuous plot line, I found it consistently entertaining; not matching up to the peaks of other recent film incarnations of TV shows (such as 'In the Loop' or 'The Inbetweeners Movie'), but more than doing itself justice.

'Eastern Promises' was more of a let-down, certainly one of the most turgid and uninspired films I've seen for a while. I could perhaps have been more forgiving had I not been expecting so much from director David Cronenberg, the mastermind behind such gems as 'Scanners', 'The Dead Zone' and 'Videodrome'.

At the other end of the spectrum, ‘Mr Smith goes to Washington’ was a delight, a fine example of the ‘golden age’ when Hollywood was capable of churning out such timeless cinematic classics. James Stewart, in his first major starring role, is as exemplary as he would consistently be from then on. He plays Senator Smith, who has his optimistic wide eyes rubbed raw with the corruption and dirt of Congressional politics. This is a must-see for anyone with even the most cursory of interests in political processes, and remains as accurate a representation of power systems in 2013 as it was in 1939.

Albums Played:

Television - 'Marquee Moon'
Miles Davis - 'Kind of Blue'
Brian Eno - 'Ambient 1: Music for Airports'
Apparat - 'Walls'
White Lies - 'BIG TV'
Crocodiles - 'Crimes of Passion'
The Violet May - 'Strange Lives (EP)'
Disappears - 'Era'

This month I enjoyed rediscovering a handful of albums I'd neglected for a while. Television's 'Marquee Moon' is a truly seminal post-punk record to which recent indie epigones such as The Libertines, The Strokes, Franz Ferdinand and a thousand unnameable others owe a tremendous debt. Listening to the fabulous interweaving guitar lines and the fantastical lyrics ('I saw the darkness double / I saw lightning strike itself'), on the ten-minute title track you almost get a sense that it owes as much to progressive rock as to the punk movement that was more in vogue at the time.

The Violet May are a band from Sheffield who I first saw play to around 60 people in Manchester's Night & Day bar. at the time I thought they were magnificent, with a raw urgency and, in frontman Chris McClure, a sheer sense of attitude that is seldom seen in fledgling bands. In my semi-drunken state I thought I was witnessing 'the next big thing'. Now 2 or 3 years later I find myself lamenting their unrealised potential. Frontman McClure has been replaced with a decent-enough imitator, but for some reason the 6 songs on this new EP fail to ignite in quite the same way as their earlier output. It sounds prescriptive and safe, as though the edges have all been sanded down and the swagger diluted into something perhaps more marketable but, to my ears, ultimately less promising.

The new Crocodiles album is both psychedelic and adrenalised; one of the best things I've heard so far this year. As was the new album 'Era' by noise-rock band Disappears. Sadly though, the third album by White Lies appears to demonstrate their waning inspiration and appeal. First album was great, second album was average, this is just quite dismal. A shame.


Gigs Attended:

Prom 41: Borodin, Glazunov, Gubaidulina & Mussorgsky (at the Royal Albert Hall, London)