The sun and warmth is beginning to return to London and after hermetic winter blues it’s refreshing to take to higher climbs and take in a panoramic view of the blossoming of spring in this wonderful city.
Alexander Palace, the highest point in London, offers fantastic views of the city as well as some historical carry on to muse over. But getting to Ally Pally requires some navigation of the transport network. One of the easiest way is hopping the Piccadilly Line east from Central London and alight at Turnpike Lane, some 20 minutes later.
Turnpike Lane, an old high street and as the name indicates a tollgate was once located on the Lane, now the title is held by the sole pub on Turnpike Lane. Turnpike is a small strip of the east/west running A504 and is lined with residential and retail shops. Also there’s a bus station in behind the tube station where the 144 via Ally Pally can be caught.
But why so fast? A short walk west along Turnpike Lane to the next stop allows for a cultural download not found in many areas in London. Turnpike Lane has a hustle, bustle and liveliness with a mash up of cultures interacting and retailing. But first, if you’re after the lens of weed to take in the views of Ally Pally and don’t want to be carrying any on the tube, duck into Ducketts Common as soon as you leave Turnpike tube station. Look out for a clusters of loitering Somali youths with soft drinks in hands. Presumably ‘cheese’ at a reasonable price and questionable quality is not far away from those hands. (http://www.duckettscommon.org.uk/History.html)
Ducketts Common was once a place for locals to graze their sheep, now its where young entrepreneurs learn a trade alongside one of North London’s few flood lit public basketball courts. The common still has plenty of grass to lazily graze upon if you have time waiting for a companion or bus.
Venturing further west, an assortment of traders line the Lane that is for the most parts of the day bustling with automobiles and local folk who patron many of the local independent retailers. And this is Turnpike Lane’s most noble trait. This short starch of bustling road is crammed with independent retailers all etching out business: Halal meats, restaurants, confectionery, Saree emporiums hairdressers, computer repairs, newsagents, jewelers and one grand light and lamp store at the western end of this grassroots and defiant corridor, where the sprit of commerce in open London survives.
Turnpike lane is a bastion of small, family run businesses in the midst of all the high street chain shops that seem to be linking together and slowly choking out small traders. It would be easy to see Turnpike Lane from the bus, but a short stroll down the lane to the next 144 stop can see you fitted out with fresh foods, beers and bohemian bric-a-brac for your venture up the Palace to take in the city.
Friday, 25 March 2011
Wednesday, 23 February 2011
Forest Swords - Dagger Paths
A first impression contemporary of Forest Sword could be Sun Araw, but that would only be to get an idea. Sun Araw has the knack to mix and processing things up into none recognition whilst Forest Swords tends to let his references and styles be more apparent. Dub being a heavy influence and faded base lines bounce along in the back of the mix accompanied with percussion that sounds as if it has been recorded from some distance away from equipment.
This gives a distinct ghostly and vacuous aesthetic that is in keeping with many of Forest Sword’s contemporaries. But unlike many of them his treatment of guitar is elevated up in the mix. But then these guitar lines are meandering and elusive at the same time as being right there in the face of the of the dub chamber, creating a stark forlorn estuary of dub wash. And the distinct impression from Forest Sword is of remoteness and a trawling of sad memories.
And of course sounds from the past are one of the stark unifying correlations of this H-pop (or its other names…) sound of the moment. But whilst uploading these past sounds and style fragments from exposure to everyday life, Forest Swords is able to create a spacious and still place that many others simple cant achieve.
This gives a distinct ghostly and vacuous aesthetic that is in keeping with many of Forest Sword’s contemporaries. But unlike many of them his treatment of guitar is elevated up in the mix. But then these guitar lines are meandering and elusive at the same time as being right there in the face of the of the dub chamber, creating a stark forlorn estuary of dub wash. And the distinct impression from Forest Sword is of remoteness and a trawling of sad memories.
And of course sounds from the past are one of the stark unifying correlations of this H-pop (or its other names…) sound of the moment. But whilst uploading these past sounds and style fragments from exposure to everyday life, Forest Swords is able to create a spacious and still place that many others simple cant achieve.
Sunday, 13 February 2011
“Melodramatic popular songs”
Sex Worker is the current solo side project of Mi Ami rocker Daniel Martin-McCormick. The name is catchy and as it happens the music can be catchy too, but in some dirty anti-catchy sort of way. This pop music doesn’t have bright corners.
For sure this is pop music and it comes courtesy of the Not Not Fun stable that has also brought us Sun Araw, Pocahaunted and other acts that seem to be riding that washed out, west coast and sun faded shitgaze, chillwave, hypnogogic pop or whatever term you may want to splash on it wave of popularity and creativity at the moment. Sex Worker along with their peers give us the flip side of pop, the pop that isn’t so easy to listen to, not so clean and pristine and the sound that you wouldn’t take home to your parents for fear of them suspecting that it’s a new generation of ‘play it backwards and the devil speaks to you’ songs.
Hysterical yelps are Sex Workers vocal style and his compositional palate mainly constitutes simple drum machine loops that punch away and synth sludge/drone that’s sounds as if it could be a waste product making its way through the drainage system of some dilapidated grimy brick building. But there is also pulsation and life to Sex Workers music and it exists in the face of corporate mass made pop. Often Sex Worker will faze in some exquisite high-hat and cymbal track into the mix that will elevate the mood that is pure pop class.
A few youtube video exist as well a some Viemo clips, this is under the radar stuff and even pitchfork have yet to drop the name. It’s hard to say if Sex Worker will break through, it depends on the focus of McCormick, but a lot of what’s on offer on his second release Waving Goodbye is catchy as fuck and a growth from Sex Worker’s debut.
For sure this is pop music and it comes courtesy of the Not Not Fun stable that has also brought us Sun Araw, Pocahaunted and other acts that seem to be riding that washed out, west coast and sun faded shitgaze, chillwave, hypnogogic pop or whatever term you may want to splash on it wave of popularity and creativity at the moment. Sex Worker along with their peers give us the flip side of pop, the pop that isn’t so easy to listen to, not so clean and pristine and the sound that you wouldn’t take home to your parents for fear of them suspecting that it’s a new generation of ‘play it backwards and the devil speaks to you’ songs.
Hysterical yelps are Sex Workers vocal style and his compositional palate mainly constitutes simple drum machine loops that punch away and synth sludge/drone that’s sounds as if it could be a waste product making its way through the drainage system of some dilapidated grimy brick building. But there is also pulsation and life to Sex Workers music and it exists in the face of corporate mass made pop. Often Sex Worker will faze in some exquisite high-hat and cymbal track into the mix that will elevate the mood that is pure pop class.
A few youtube video exist as well a some Viemo clips, this is under the radar stuff and even pitchfork have yet to drop the name. It’s hard to say if Sex Worker will break through, it depends on the focus of McCormick, but a lot of what’s on offer on his second release Waving Goodbye is catchy as fuck and a growth from Sex Worker’s debut.
Saturday, 12 February 2011
Do the right thing
With Biutiful, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu for the first time in the ten years he’s been making features works with out his usual scriptwriter, presumably from force of circumstances. But the rest of the back room team of editor, cinematographer, composer and production designer all remain the same from Iñárritu’s previous three features back to Amores Perros, the film that first brought him to international attention. And almost completely the temporal complexities of Guillerma Arriaga structuring have been discarded for a simpler linier narrative.
It could be argued, with Amores Perros these structural complexities paid off but the subsequent 21 Grams and Babel were impeded. The story development and lightness that Inarritu’s storytelling deserves, considering the ambitious Atlas like undertakings, mindboggling interconnectedness and hysterical realist interrogations require a character or something manifest to ground and channel the global concerns Inarritu precipitates
So a tabula rasa of sorts then for Inarritu. Set in Barcelona amongst the crowded, narrow and littered streets of the immigrant working class and poor Biutiful uses the story of the last few months of Uxbal’s life, who’s just been diagnoses with a malignant and terminal cancer. As it happened Uxbal ignored the initial symptoms and when asked by the doctor why he didn’t do something about it straight away he replies that it never hurt as much as it does now. But now, as it turns out, is too late, Uxbal is in deaths waiting room waiting to be taken over with a few months of ‘quality of life’ left.
For Uxbal’s this is a ‘few months’ to sort out the almighty mess that this untimely development creates. Uxbal’s a man walking in the valley of life and death and his life is tangled up in the lives of others, in other words he can’t just walk off and let the curtain drop. Uxbal has two young children, an estranged wife who’s a prostitute and bipolar and is unfit to care for their children add to this his dealings with corrupt police, illegal immigrant hawkers and sweatshops that become death traps. Oh and Uxbal has the gift of being able to talk to the recently deceased and make a little side earning by consoling the bereaved with messages from beyond the grave.
Uxbal is a man trying to make ends meet and is being pulled in different directions by said ends. Stylistically Inarritu has maintained his realist bleached out color palette and this gives rawness to light and we get to experience Uxbal’s sensitive eyes from too many sleepless nights. Barden as Uxbal is exceptional; he brings a nuanced stoic sensitivity to the lead role that operates as an anchor for the rest of the story and its issues to revolve. Uxbal is a struggling man trying to do right he is no superman.
A life, any life, is almost unbearably precarious and when woken from this somnambulistic tread of everyday repetition how will one confront that ‘light’ that we all must conform to. Using agents of capitalism's exploited itinerant victims Inarritu weaves a meditation for confronting your own time.
It could be argued, with Amores Perros these structural complexities paid off but the subsequent 21 Grams and Babel were impeded. The story development and lightness that Inarritu’s storytelling deserves, considering the ambitious Atlas like undertakings, mindboggling interconnectedness and hysterical realist interrogations require a character or something manifest to ground and channel the global concerns Inarritu precipitates
So a tabula rasa of sorts then for Inarritu. Set in Barcelona amongst the crowded, narrow and littered streets of the immigrant working class and poor Biutiful uses the story of the last few months of Uxbal’s life, who’s just been diagnoses with a malignant and terminal cancer. As it happened Uxbal ignored the initial symptoms and when asked by the doctor why he didn’t do something about it straight away he replies that it never hurt as much as it does now. But now, as it turns out, is too late, Uxbal is in deaths waiting room waiting to be taken over with a few months of ‘quality of life’ left.
For Uxbal’s this is a ‘few months’ to sort out the almighty mess that this untimely development creates. Uxbal’s a man walking in the valley of life and death and his life is tangled up in the lives of others, in other words he can’t just walk off and let the curtain drop. Uxbal has two young children, an estranged wife who’s a prostitute and bipolar and is unfit to care for their children add to this his dealings with corrupt police, illegal immigrant hawkers and sweatshops that become death traps. Oh and Uxbal has the gift of being able to talk to the recently deceased and make a little side earning by consoling the bereaved with messages from beyond the grave.
Uxbal is a man trying to make ends meet and is being pulled in different directions by said ends. Stylistically Inarritu has maintained his realist bleached out color palette and this gives rawness to light and we get to experience Uxbal’s sensitive eyes from too many sleepless nights. Barden as Uxbal is exceptional; he brings a nuanced stoic sensitivity to the lead role that operates as an anchor for the rest of the story and its issues to revolve. Uxbal is a struggling man trying to do right he is no superman.
A life, any life, is almost unbearably precarious and when woken from this somnambulistic tread of everyday repetition how will one confront that ‘light’ that we all must conform to. Using agents of capitalism's exploited itinerant victims Inarritu weaves a meditation for confronting your own time.
Thursday, 27 January 2011
A new year and a tidy point in time to start making a new bracket. By something of a NY resolution I decided this year to listen to less pop music and investigate other ‘interesting’ sounds. What I have discovered so far is more pop, although the first bona fide discovery of the year can be classified in the Hypnogogic pop lump. So it is pop music but not pop music quite as we know it.
Something of a Pacific beatnik hipster complete with plaid shirt Dirty Beaches sounds, and it always is the sound to which is returned, like it’s excavated from vintage 1950’s era America from a time when ‘all was swell’ but as the sound has been hauled through time it has picked up quite a bit of noise and lo-fi distortion.
Dirty Beaches can croon and be maudlin like few have in recent years but can also hurtle along wild and white knuckle. And this is where Dirty Beaches sounds like something of an Elvis/Iggy Pop fusion with the sound of Suicide playing along. This add to an interesting concoction, for a lot of the carefree that we may automatically associate with the 1950’s is lost from Dirty Beaches and the dark night of that era comes out.
Something of a Pacific beatnik hipster complete with plaid shirt Dirty Beaches sounds, and it always is the sound to which is returned, like it’s excavated from vintage 1950’s era America from a time when ‘all was swell’ but as the sound has been hauled through time it has picked up quite a bit of noise and lo-fi distortion.
Dirty Beaches can croon and be maudlin like few have in recent years but can also hurtle along wild and white knuckle. And this is where Dirty Beaches sounds like something of an Elvis/Iggy Pop fusion with the sound of Suicide playing along. This add to an interesting concoction, for a lot of the carefree that we may automatically associate with the 1950’s is lost from Dirty Beaches and the dark night of that era comes out.
Monday, 26 April 2010
The rub of it
With The Hurt Locker the Western public and specifically the United States of America has a pared down examination of the situation on the ground in Iraq. For ease of viewing The Hurt Locker is ostensibly an apolitical representation of the Iraq war: a paradigm that suits the complicit sensibilities of Western audiences. The character study aspires to being guilt and complicit free but ends up as diet analysis. To take The Hurt Locker at face value is to overlook the film as an agent of United States hegemony in the field of popular consciousness.
The film opens with a U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit in the heat of their task defusing bombs and comes complete with requisite war movie banter. However the dialogue, short and lean as it is, is laced with signs that suggest Hollywood war movie motifs that push American hegemony. When Sargent Thompson bemoans how if the Iraqi’s are going to leave bombs on the road side then they will blow up the neighbourhood, neutralise the situation and in the process give the locals something to think about. This line is delivered in an exasperated tone and is so fleeting it is almost forgettable. But it does slip in and the ideologies that the line mask are being played out
This shock and awe gung-ho approach is reductive and toes the line of a post Cold-War mono-power world. We are presented with the silent push of United State hegemony; the soldier believes in what he is saying, and we the audience are coerced into taking the side of the soldiers. The uses of some subtle set up shots frame the Iraqi civilians, who are standing around the bomb site, with silent hostility and potential menace. As the soldiers take shrewd glances around the bomb site the camera follows their gaze and with quick shoots that root out potential threats, we the viewer are given the impression that all Iraqi’s are a threat and there is need for this EOD unit to teach Iraq a lesson in tough love, bring freedom to their neighbourhoods and wrestle then from the grips of insurgency.
Sargent Thompson immediately goes on to wonder if it is strange that right then he craves a Hamburger. The message, it would appear is that these U.S. troops would rather be home in their own neighbourhoods than disposing bombs in a foreign land. And this suggests an early war film motif of reluctance in going to war but all-the-same fighting the good fight. During World War II the United States was forced into entering the war and Hollywood positioned the United States as heroic and reluctant fighter, see Sargent York. Now in the early 21st Century Sergeant Thompson speaks with the belief that fighting in Iraq is a good and just thing. It would appear that history rhymes.
Much like how the EOD unit explores and digs around a potential IED, when the composition of the opening scene of The Hurt Locker is explored it becomes apparent that a silent hegemony is guiding the narrative of the scene, one that presents the United States and it’s actors as reluctantly and justly bringing good to a foreign land. And this is a silent method of validating the war and gaining public complicity.
The film opens with a U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit in the heat of their task defusing bombs and comes complete with requisite war movie banter. However the dialogue, short and lean as it is, is laced with signs that suggest Hollywood war movie motifs that push American hegemony. When Sargent Thompson bemoans how if the Iraqi’s are going to leave bombs on the road side then they will blow up the neighbourhood, neutralise the situation and in the process give the locals something to think about. This line is delivered in an exasperated tone and is so fleeting it is almost forgettable. But it does slip in and the ideologies that the line mask are being played out
This shock and awe gung-ho approach is reductive and toes the line of a post Cold-War mono-power world. We are presented with the silent push of United State hegemony; the soldier believes in what he is saying, and we the audience are coerced into taking the side of the soldiers. The uses of some subtle set up shots frame the Iraqi civilians, who are standing around the bomb site, with silent hostility and potential menace. As the soldiers take shrewd glances around the bomb site the camera follows their gaze and with quick shoots that root out potential threats, we the viewer are given the impression that all Iraqi’s are a threat and there is need for this EOD unit to teach Iraq a lesson in tough love, bring freedom to their neighbourhoods and wrestle then from the grips of insurgency.
Sargent Thompson immediately goes on to wonder if it is strange that right then he craves a Hamburger. The message, it would appear is that these U.S. troops would rather be home in their own neighbourhoods than disposing bombs in a foreign land. And this suggests an early war film motif of reluctance in going to war but all-the-same fighting the good fight. During World War II the United States was forced into entering the war and Hollywood positioned the United States as heroic and reluctant fighter, see Sargent York. Now in the early 21st Century Sergeant Thompson speaks with the belief that fighting in Iraq is a good and just thing. It would appear that history rhymes.
Much like how the EOD unit explores and digs around a potential IED, when the composition of the opening scene of The Hurt Locker is explored it becomes apparent that a silent hegemony is guiding the narrative of the scene, one that presents the United States and it’s actors as reluctantly and justly bringing good to a foreign land. And this is a silent method of validating the war and gaining public complicity.
Wednesday, 17 February 2010
Somewhere over the rainbow
Back just before the turn of the millennium we were given, with Fight Club, an example of the disorientating and debilitating effects of air travel, for Edward Norton’s character it was the medium that took him further into his isolation. Then with the 9/11 attacks air travel tucked terror under its wings and we were presented with the plane as potential coffin, see Snakes on a Plane and United 93.Verily the care free days of air travel are a faded contrail in Hollywood’s skies and Frank Sinatra does really sound dated when he crops up on the iPod play list.
So, no surprise that Jason Reitman’s latest Up in the Air a film about a travelling ‘axe-man’ deals with the isolation and alienation of frequent flyers. Up in the Air starts of upbeat enough with the opening credits taking in super crisp aerial shots of the American city and landscape and this is coupled with a cover of Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land is Your Land’. Yes from a distance all looks fine and dandy. But the credits end with a plane touching down. Upon arrival in the film proper we meet Ryan Bingham, played by the ever suave George Clooney and as per usual on face value everything couldn’t be better in the world of a Cooney character. It’s by getting to know these characters that we learn of their emotional delicacies that is lie behind that winning smile with perfectly formed white teeth. Yet Reitman and Clooney, with the help of some swift editing that captures a poetic flow of calculated movements, introduce us to a character who seems to have their life so organised and controlled that they can moonwalk through it.
Bingham is a T-Rex of his chosen profession, he flies around the country arriving at some company or another in one location or another that’s outsourced the wielding axe of downsizing to his Omaha based company. Job done and off to the next company in the next city and so on. This is how Bingham lives: an itinerant staying in traveller hotels, clocking up air miles and of course with the present economic depression its boom time for those that make a living out of firing people. But flying is a huge overhead and a new age seems to be dawning in Bingham’s world where web cams and Skype enable the wielding of the redundancy axe from one fixed location. Bingham’s chosen lifestyle is in danger of extinction and that spells the demise of the personal touch that Bingham has mastered of ‘easing’ a person into the dark waters of redundancy. Not to mention that Bingham would be fixed to one location and with one foal swoop the lightness in his life would be gone: grounded.
But this sudden prospect of job transformation and the coincidental on the road romance that appears to be bearing fruit of deeper attraction and a yearning for loyalty brings about a self reappraisal of Bingham’s life. And this, it would seem is the real object of the film in highlighting a latent desire in a physically removed individual for companionship and some place to call home.
Mid-way through the film Bingham propositions that we are not ‘monogamous swans’ – meaning that we are destined to live and die alone. Too which we may ask ourselves, have we as western individuals evolved to a hyper state of individualisation and its downstream effects of isolation and lack of permanent emotional relationships? Guru Bingham believes this detached and visceral assessment of existence, but one gets the impression that his heart isn’t in this proposition.
The flight path of the second part of the film courses Bingham’s existential dilemma, how does one remain physically up in the air yet able to be emotionally grounded with a home that one looks forward to returning to. And the film answers this by suggesting that the choices are ours to make and formulate.
So, no surprise that Jason Reitman’s latest Up in the Air a film about a travelling ‘axe-man’ deals with the isolation and alienation of frequent flyers. Up in the Air starts of upbeat enough with the opening credits taking in super crisp aerial shots of the American city and landscape and this is coupled with a cover of Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land is Your Land’. Yes from a distance all looks fine and dandy. But the credits end with a plane touching down. Upon arrival in the film proper we meet Ryan Bingham, played by the ever suave George Clooney and as per usual on face value everything couldn’t be better in the world of a Cooney character. It’s by getting to know these characters that we learn of their emotional delicacies that is lie behind that winning smile with perfectly formed white teeth. Yet Reitman and Clooney, with the help of some swift editing that captures a poetic flow of calculated movements, introduce us to a character who seems to have their life so organised and controlled that they can moonwalk through it.
Bingham is a T-Rex of his chosen profession, he flies around the country arriving at some company or another in one location or another that’s outsourced the wielding axe of downsizing to his Omaha based company. Job done and off to the next company in the next city and so on. This is how Bingham lives: an itinerant staying in traveller hotels, clocking up air miles and of course with the present economic depression its boom time for those that make a living out of firing people. But flying is a huge overhead and a new age seems to be dawning in Bingham’s world where web cams and Skype enable the wielding of the redundancy axe from one fixed location. Bingham’s chosen lifestyle is in danger of extinction and that spells the demise of the personal touch that Bingham has mastered of ‘easing’ a person into the dark waters of redundancy. Not to mention that Bingham would be fixed to one location and with one foal swoop the lightness in his life would be gone: grounded.
But this sudden prospect of job transformation and the coincidental on the road romance that appears to be bearing fruit of deeper attraction and a yearning for loyalty brings about a self reappraisal of Bingham’s life. And this, it would seem is the real object of the film in highlighting a latent desire in a physically removed individual for companionship and some place to call home.
Mid-way through the film Bingham propositions that we are not ‘monogamous swans’ – meaning that we are destined to live and die alone. Too which we may ask ourselves, have we as western individuals evolved to a hyper state of individualisation and its downstream effects of isolation and lack of permanent emotional relationships? Guru Bingham believes this detached and visceral assessment of existence, but one gets the impression that his heart isn’t in this proposition.
The flight path of the second part of the film courses Bingham’s existential dilemma, how does one remain physically up in the air yet able to be emotionally grounded with a home that one looks forward to returning to. And the film answers this by suggesting that the choices are ours to make and formulate.
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