Culture - November

Books Read:

Gabriel Garcia Marquez - 'Love in the time of Cholera'
Arthur Miller - 'Death of a Salesman' (screenplay)
Albert Camus - 'The Outsider' (re-read)
Primo Levi - 'If This is a Man / The Truce'
Nicholson Baker - 'The Mezzanine'

As I entered the fraught month of November, I was charmed and pleasantly surprised by Marquez's 'Love in the time of cholera', an odyssey of unrequited love spanning two separate lifetimes that run along disparate and eventually parallel lines. Marquez has been lauded and criticised for his 'magic realism' style, and I must admit I found myself on occasion pining for just a splash of metaphor, but overall I found myself convinced by his careful appreciation and depiction of his characters, and the nuances and subtleties were intricately built up into a fairly life-affirming whole.

At the opposing pole of the emotional spectrum, Primo Levi's dual-masterpiece 'If this is a man' and 'The Truce' was a gruelling yet unparalleled depiction of the author's descent into the hell of Auschwitz and eventual liberation at the war's end. His brevity and poetic insight makes this essential reading.

Nicholson Baker's debut novel 'The Mezzanine' was an entirely different proposition. Set over the course of a single lunch hour, the writer explodes all preconceptions as to narrative or plot development, instead seeking to hone in on and dissect the microscopic details that inundate our routine-led lives every day and which largely go unconsidered. A real post-modernist breath of fresh air.


Films Watched:

'Captain Phillips' (Paul Greengrass) (at the Vue, Leicester Square)
'Gravity' (Alfonso Cuaron)
'Paths of Glory' (Stanley Kubrick)
'Enter the Void' (Gaspar Noe)
'A Hijacking' (Tobias Lindholm)
'Silent Running' (Douglas Trumbell)

This month I was enthralled by Paul Greengrass' 'Captain Phillips', the true-life story of the Captain's hijacking and kidnap at the hands of Somali pirates. What set this film apart was the even-handed illustration of the characters; by exploring the pirates' motives and desperation from a three-dimensional human vantage point, it managed to sail past the generic Hollywood pitfalls of relying on lazy (and often quite racist) cultural stereotypes in favour of ramping up action set-pieces.

I also sought out the Danish film from 2012, 'A Hijacking', which I found to be just as engrossing and nail-biting in its depiction of a cargo ship overrun and held ransom by pirates, but what distinguished it was its focusing on the boardroom negotiations carried out by the CEO and management team, delivering a fascinating insight into the gridlocked dilemma between business and real human melodrama.


Albums Played:

U2 - 'The Unforgettable Fire'
Bambara - 'DreamViolence'
Talking Heads - 'Remain in Light'
Bruce Springsteen - 'Tunnel of Love'


Gigs Attended:

Savages at The Forum, Kentish Town
A Place To Bury Strangers at The Shacklewell Arms, Dalston

Support act Bambara began with a rising swell of atmospheric howls and echoes reminiscent of Ligeti's 'Lontano' and Pink Floyd's 'One of these Days', as a pulsating bass line signaled the tone for the next 40 ear-perforating minutes. The drummer laid down one barreling tribal beat after another, as bassist and guitarist built layer upon layer of visceral and intense white noise.

All this was the perfect entree for headliners A Place To Bury Strangers, who erupted into one of the most incendiary performances I have ever seen. Not since Aphex Twin at Manchester's Warehouse Project have I felt that my nerves were literally being shredded by the aural avalanche in which I, along with everyone else, was helplessly immersed. The 3-piece barely paused for applause, piling into one thunderous onslaught after another, the dry ice largely obscuring them for the majority of the set, whilst the closing tsunami of white noise unraveled into mind-bending strobe effects before simply sinking into pitch darkness, giving the impression of being trapped inside a colossal machine undergoing some kind of terminal malfunctioning.

Whereas when I saw My Bloody Valentine earlier in the year, who were disappointingly turgid with the noise stagnant and uninspired, APTBS seemed to be a band caught in a riptide current, fighting for their lives as they fought to control their instruments, the lightning rods of all the chaos.

There is that magical point at which volume seems to actually liquify, submerging everyone into a sinkhole of pure and unadulterated sound. Noise rock of this order can only realistically be played in dingy and confined venues such as the Shacklewell Arms, with the sweat dripping from the ceiling and the band swinging the necks of their instruments inches from the audience's heads. Since its true hypnotic potency can only be achieved in such modest venues, its success as an artistic medium must necessarily be aggregated through the persistent limitation of its commercial success. Such was the aggressive and high-octane assault on the senses that I couldn't help thinking that all close adherents to the latest mainstream sensation should be subjected to this musical equivalent of a colonic irrigation, but then that would be to spread the word irretrievably wide.


Exhibitions Attended:

Kurt Jackson - 'The Thames Revisited' at The Redfern Gallery