Making Something Good: “July Flame”
Posted by: danhartland on: February 9, 2010
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'July Flame' by Laura Veirs
July Flame, the latest album from US singer-songwriter Laura Veirs, is appropriately titled: summery and sweet, it is as peachy as the fruit itself. Veirs can be chilly – her widely-praised 2004 record Carbon Glacier is a case in point, but so too is the glossy full band effort, Year of Meteors [2005] – so this return to Veirs’s early neo-folk sound strikes the listener immediately. The record’s producer, Tucker Martine, is the new man in Veirs’s life, and their happy co-habitation may be part of the record’s sunny disposition. Certainly, Helios is prominent throughout – one of the album’s stand-out tracks, ‘Sun is King’ states its allegiances mostly simply.
All this warmth seems to bring out the best in Veirs, though. July Flame is her seventh record, and still she languishes well beneath the radar; but here she is both accessible and consistent. There are more properly good songs on this record than on any of her previous efforts which I’ve heard; from the Fleet Foxes-ish opener ‘I Can See Your Tracks’ to what comes close to being the singalong ‘When You Give Your Heart’, a happy Veirs seems to make also for a charming one. On ‘Life Is Good Blues’, she sounds like a chipper Gillian Welch; on ‘Wide-Eyed Legless’ (“No more looking back / Faded epitaphs”) she might even make you fancy a satisfied slow-dance.
None of which is to say Veirs is any more generic than before – for starters, so many styles are covered beneath the record’s deceptively smooth surface that the listener will most enjoy a different song each time. But her lyrics, too, are as unexpected and as eviably elliptic as ever: on the instantly likeable ‘Silo Song’, she’s still singing, “Dreaming of a silver silo / Burning in the light / Venus de Milo / Soldered in the side / Thought I could her smile.” ‘Sleeper in the Valley’ – Veirs is known for revelling in the outdoors – is adapted from the poem by Dylan’s old favourite, Arthur Rimbaud. There’s an awful lot to enjoy here – and enjoy is indeed in the word. Go on, settle into an early summer.
Another Weekend…
Posted by: thestoryandthetruth on: February 8, 2010
- In: Fashion| life
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Stressful weeks seem to outnumber calm weeks at the moment, so another weekend spent relaxing and recuperating – though Dan rehearsed with the Brave Sons ahead of their gig this coming Wednesday at the Nursery Tavern, Coventry [alas, this has now been cancelled in a bout of double-booking fun]. We did, though, watch The September Issue, RJ Cutler’s documentary following Anna Wintour and her Vogue US staff, and their efforts to put together their September 2007 issue – the biggest of the magazine’s history. It was hard not to agree with Wintour’s own daughter when she answered ‘no’ when asked a question about whether she intended to follow in her mother’s foot steps: there’s more to life than fashion – though the behaviour on show here might not have suggested that! Wintour, in fact, was one of the few people who seemed to recognise – particularly when discussing her more seriously-occupied siblings – that fashion was an ephemeral old business.
In that exchange, too, was the core of the film’s main conflict, between Wintour and her talented fashion editor, Grace Coddington. Coddington’s preternatural eye for the look and feel of a photograph is praised by all; Wintour’s steely determination simply to turn out a polished, cohesive issue which stays ahead of the market is also noted by every participant, and yet seemed a flintier talent next to Grace’s art, even when it was deemed excess to requirements (shades of Slings & Arrows, Dan thought). Wintour herself, one suspects, knows that – and thus those famous sunglasses…
Finally, Dan’s review of Deborah Biancotti’s strong collection of short stories, A Book of Endings, is up at Strange Horizons today.
Of Course It Is A Possibility
Posted by: danhartland on: February 6, 2010
Look Behind You.
A sympathetic interview with Nick Clegg in the Telegraph today (by Mary Riddell, natch), in which the Lib Dem leader comes off quite well. The key, quote, though, is the following: “If voters decide no party deserves an overall majority, then of course you’re going to have to start thinking how we could run a stable government for the British people.” (Though, look too, at the components of his ‘fairness agenda’ – which party, Labour or Conservative, would find it easier to sign up to all those measures?) Clegg has done his best until now to avoid the prospect of a hung parliament and stick to the idea of the Liberal Democrats as a proper party of government; this is his first side-step into accepting his own and his party’s potential future role.
Andrew Sparrow had some encouraging words for Tory strategists this week, and opinion polls are of course a tricky set of tea leaves – the election will be won in a handful of seats which national surveys do not necessarily best reflect. But Clegg’s sudden openness to talk of a hung parliament still makes sense. I linked last week to that Telegraph piece about Tory backslides, and, though the Political Betting Index put four seats back into the Tory column yesterday, the last seven days have seen little forward momentum given to the Tories. This despite prolonged economic woes, the Iraq inquiry, and MPs’ expenses (which may, to be fair, have a plague on both houses effect – but can no hay be made of Messrs Morley, Chaytor and Devine?).
Both Andrew Grice and Nicholas Watt analyse these Tory stutterings today, and Grice in particular emphasises the party’s lack of experience as the principal cause of their current travails. Both writers single out the dismal 0.1% growth rate as a spanner in the Tory works – this margin-of-error growth prevents them from making the full-blooded cuts arguments they were planning on using to contrast themselves with mealy-mouthed Labourites. One might also say, from a Labour perspective, that the figure fully justifies Gordon Brown’s caution, his insistence this week in front of a Commons select committee that defecit spending was still necessary. The battle, then, is joined – and not on ground of Cameron’s choosing.
Are things looking up? For Nick Clegg, perhaps.
Politics and Play in Early Modern England
Posted by: danhartland on: February 4, 2010
Just thinking aloud [ablog?] …
“Other phenomena of the Elizabethan political world might also be considered as phenomena of the casuistical mode in which people were driven by conscience to do things that they would in other circumstances consider improper. [...] Casuistry provides the framework within which we can understand a world in which even the most conformist of people might be driven to acts of disloyalty.” [Glenn Burgess, British Political Thought 1500-1660, pp. 126-127]
A Mirror for Princes?
Burgess’s overview of Reformation and post-Reformation political thought in the British Isles is, by the author’s own admission, a little idiosyncratic: the thinkers he includes, and those he excludes, will no doubt continue to lead to great debate in the review pages. But it represents a convincing portrait of an age in which the central political question was one of obedience, to whom it was owed and from where it was derived. The issues of monarchy whuch Burgess shows writers returned to again and again run through the period and the islands from Buchanan to Lilburne: is the monarch divinely or temporally sanctioned (most commonly, an arcane and ambiguous mixture of the two was devised), and, either way, how far does that writ stretch? Essentially, is anyone allowed to resist the monarch’s authority, and if so under what circumstances?
The theatre of the period is rich with responses to, and instances of, this vexing question: Marlowe’s Edward II prefers Gaveston to governance, and is duly overthrown; Webster’s Duchess of Malfi is pitted against wounded and riotous courtiers; and Henry V, in no fewer than three plays, is put under a lens by Shakespeare, and for every rousing St Crispin’s Day has a moment of cold and unflattering disavowal (of Falstaff, of his father). What is interesting about each of those examples, but especially Shakespeare’s, are the personal elements at play. Shakespeare’s Henry V is not just shown on the throne, but shaping himself for it; Prince Hal is first seen as a dissolute, scheming, human adolescent. This personal dimension is not covered by Burgess for obvious reasons, but it seems fundamental to the battle over the monarch’s mystique which he sees in the philosophy, and which scholars such as James Loxley have seen in, for instance, the poetry of the 1640s.
In his Soul of the Age, Jonathan Bate in unapologetic in placing Shakespeare at the heart of the controversies of his day: “He lived between the two great cataclysms in English history: the break from the universal Roman Catholic church and the execution of King Charles I. His plays were made possible by the first and helped to create the conditions that made possible the second.” [pg. 18] Bold stuff, but Bate’s ultimate argument seems fair enough: in examining the personal lives of lords, ladies and kings, Shakespeare and his theatrical contemporaries were rendering the authority of mysticism untenable. Kevin Sharpe has suggested that “the playhouses of the 1630s did something to substitute for the absence of parliaments” [Criticism and Compliment, pg. 32]; the political role of theatre surely had a longer pedigree, and a deeper effect, than merely that.
Erland and the Carnival
Posted by: danhartland on: February 3, 2010
- In: albums| music
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Erland and the Carnival
Folk rock.
The reaction you had to those two words may or may not say a great deal about you as a person; but certainly ‘folk rock’ is a genre which, despite what some might argue is its inoffensive ubiquity, is peculiarly divisive. For everyone who loves Fleetwood Mac, there’s another person who would happily burn a thousand copies a minute of Rumours; for every fond image of Bob Dylan there is another of, well, Jethro Tull. In recent years, even the two genres involved seem to have decided their relationship wasn’t working: as part of the wider nicehing of the music industry, folkies and rockers stay a little further apart than they once did.
So Erland and The Carnival are in many ways an unfashionable band. Not only do they retain some of the Britpop swagger of The Verve and Blur, with whom multi-instrumentalist Simon Tong once played; their debut record offers contemporary arrangements of a series of traditional folk songs, ‘Love Is A Killing Thing’, ‘Was You Ever See’, and ‘Gentle Gwen’ among them. The album opens with a woozy overture which would not have been out of place in The Whicker Man, and Erland Cooper, the band’s singer and driving folkie force, has the fey lilt of his forebears. Even originals – such as ‘The Derby Ram’ – sound less like bold forays into new territory and more like Drever, McCusker and Woomble.
They lack, then, much in the way of Bakhtinian release. There may even be something of the dread Kula Shaker in their appropriations of indigenous forms. But if you get past its essential formalism, the record is accomplished and even affecting – often in no small part thanks to the drumming of third band member David Nock. ‘Trouble In Mind’ might be an early contender for indie pop hit of the year; ‘My Name Is Carnival’, all Sixtiesish whirling backing and hooky tacits, is more memorable than many songs on worthier LPs; and the David Kitt-ish closer, ‘The Echoing Green’, proves that there is more to the group than their opening gambit. If, ultimately, the record gives the impression of a souped-up-but-not-quite-as-clever Butcher Boy, that might not be unfair. But it might obscure some of the other pleasures it has to offer.
You can test them out for yourself, of course, on their MySpace.
Beyond the Gallery Walls
Posted by: annafrench on: February 1, 2010
The Fourth Wall...
I’ve just joined Twitter, and I’ve ‘tweeted’ twice. This is all part of my ‘great social media experiment’ for my museum studies course. I want to get to grips with how art galleries use blogs and social networking sites to engage with audiences.
And engage they do, it’s a wide world out there, well beyond the four walls of many galleries. I’m especially caught by the V&A’s resident bloggers: artists and professionals who embody the gallery’s messages as contemporary creators, and extend the gallery’s message from the past into the present.
I’ve been following Stuart Frost’s blog on the making of the Medieval and Renaissance galleries, which opened early last December, with interest. I’m fascinated by how medieval and early modern objects can be exhibited and interpreted for modern audiences. Also worth a look as is Concealed, Discovered, Revealed, Sue Lawty’s blog on how traditional and contemporary, historical and modern, textile techniques can be entwined to produce truly innovate designs.
My View Then And My View Now
Posted by: danhartland on: January 30, 2010
- In: Politics
- 2 Comments
Say What You See.
The Iraq Inquiry is not about personal guilt. The anti-war protesters outside yesterday’s session, with their bloodied Bliar masks and furious placards, were only ever going to be disappointed. Tony Blair, who testified for a full six hours before Sir John Chiclot and his panel, was not about to admit to war crimes or even express regret; we are by now familiar with his self-possession and certainty, with his Bush-like defense that he was ‘the decider’, and that Saddam was a threat – nay, a thorn in the side of Blair’s newly envisioned post-9/11 world order. There were to be no renditions to the Hague yesterday.
But what the Iraq Inquiry is meant to achieve is a clear account of the UK Government’s decision-making process which led to war, where it was weak and where the lessons for future administrations might lie. Blair, in being allowed to state his personal case – and his testimony was far more focused on himself that, for instance, Lord Goldsmith’s or Jack Straw’s – contributed less to this holistic view. His reputation as the quartet’s man in the Middle East was in question, and to some extent it was understandable that, as the Prime Minister of the time, he was questioned less as a cog in the machine than as its fountainhead. But why, for instance, was he not pushed further when simultaneously contending that Saddam was in significant breach of UN resolutions – when, of course, since he had disposed of his WMD, he was not – and that there was no more time for intelligence-gathering? Had more time been allowed, after all, we would have discovered Saddam could not be pursued under the cover of UN resolutions. One might imagine that such precipitate action might represent the greatest lesson for future administrations; as it was, both this muddy thinking and the man responsible for it was let off the hook.
One of Blair’s key phrases of argument was ‘the calculus of risk’. Gordon Brown might be well to apply the equation to his own appearance before the Inquiry. Blair yesterday dismissed as a slip of the tongue his suggestion in an interview last year with Fern Britton that, had WMD been discovered not to exist in Iraq prior to the war, he would have found another reason to go to war. But it was, one feels, also a classic Blair tactic – leaking the headline before the announcement. By softening us up for his unrepentant appearance, and crucially by softening his rhetoric having already confirmed what we all thought, he managed our expectations of his testimony beautifully, and rendered it something of an anti-climax. Brown, by contrast, has made next to no public pronouncements on Iraq; everything he says in his testimony will be new. Given that polls are currently moving in his direction, how to calculate this risk should be a question of utmost importance to him…
Rathbone’s ‘Hound’ and ‘Adventures’
Posted by: danhartland on: January 28, 2010
"Oh, Watson - the needle!"
As threatened, I’ve been watching some of the old Basil Rathbone movies. Conveniently, I received the complete set of his Sherlock Holmes pictures as a gift at Christmas. So far, I’ve seen only the first two, made at Twentieth Century Fox in 1939 and the only entries in the series which take place in the Victorian period. The later films, set contemporaneously during World War II and made by Universal, are spoken of as variable in quality and tone, and, though at times inspired by canonical stories, are also wildly free with them. (This should give some Sherlockians, who often prefer Rathbone even to Brett, some pause for thought before they trash Guy Ritchie.)
These first two films, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, were actually unusual in the history of Holmes cinema up to that point – they were the first deliberately to evoke the authentic period. Those later Universal ‘travesties’ were in fact a sort of reversion to form – prior to 1939, most Holmes films had simply been set whenever the films were set. (Of course, this became more and more difficult to sustain the further that film makers found themselves from the nineteenth century.) The Hound of the Baskervilles is indeed a fairly faithful adaptation – it makes cuts to fit its brutally short running time of just eighty minutes, but even Nigel Bruce’s Watson – later infamously a bumbling comic foil – is allowed to inhabit the competent role Conan Doyle gave him. At the end of the story, Holmes insists he must retire for the evening – and calls Watson to bring him his needle. This is a quite astounding fidelity to the text for 1939.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is less faithful. Though it features Professor Moriarty, and closes with the villain falling from a great height, there is no Reichenbach and there is nothing approaching a plot similar to any of those in the collection which shares the film’s title. Instead, a rather good George Zucco has his Moriarty plan what Conan Doyle’s Holmes would have found a quite trifling crime, in order to distract from his grander scheme to, erm, steal the Crown Jewels. This Moriarty more resembles Rattigan from the infinitely more entertaining Basil The Great Mouse Detective. There are some excellent moments early on which do as much as anything in The Final Problem to establish the curious mix of rapport and revulsion that exists between Holmes and his nemesis, but otherwise the plot proceeds very plainly. Also, Rathbone dresses up as a music hall singer and performs ‘I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside’. For reals.
These films do atmosphere well – both develop a murky Victorian dread which works well for the stories, and the music in Adventures in particular is properly eery. Rathbone, of course, is acerbic, urbane and thoughtful as Holmes – though also, perhaps, a little too healthy and level-headed. Was Conan Doyle’s Holmes really so robust? Still, if it’s not quite what you might want from your Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles in particular is a decent 80 minutes of easy entertainment – and isn’t that at the very least a large part of what we should expect of the great detective?
Eels’ “End Times” is Here
Posted by: danhartland on: January 26, 2010
- In: albums| music
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'End Times', by Eels
On the rear page of the booklet contained inside End Times, the latest album from Eels, we are helpfully directed to “Other EELS CDs you may or may not enjoy”. There are, from Beautiful Freak to Useless Trinkets and including the Meet The Eels best of, ten records in the list, one of which was a double album. That first record was released in 1996, and 11 records in 14 years is not a bad strike rate. It might, too, be the source of my awkward relationship with the band. For every Daisies of the Galaxy which I listen to death, there’s a Souljacker which I just can’t get into. Complicating the issue is the fact that no Eels album is properly bad - Blinking Lights and Other Revelations is, I’m quite sure, a work of sprawling intelligence, but it’s one I have never figured out or quite warmed to.
Eels is, of course, essentially the solo project of one Mark Oliver Everett, or E as he often prefers to be known, and End Times is his break-up album. It is, however, one with significant thought put into it – the break-up it chronicles happened in 2005. There’s always been this deliberate tention in E’s music between the trope of the guileless troubador and the elaborate artifice of his songcraft. Most of his lyrics curl wryly at the edges, as on this album’s ‘Nowadays’: “And trouble is a friend of mine/ I’d like to leave behind / I like my friends more refined.” Moments like this are what relieve E’s often despairing experiences of the world. On ‘Little Bird’ – a typically, almost manipulatively, poignant lament – he sings, “Little bird I guess you’re right / I can’t let it take me without a fight / But right now I can’t see making sense of this world.”
E’s trick for the catchy but catching melody, a singable tune which doesn’t quite make the turns we’d expect, is also in strong evidence here, amidst the sparseness of these home-recorded four-track arrangements. In many ways, the simplicity and arch gentleness of the songs most evokes Daisies of the Galaxy, but in all honesty the most successful songs would be more comfortable in E’s alt.rock records: both ‘Paradise Blues’ and ‘Gone Man’ stand out amongst the mid-tempo shoegazing as songs which best pull together E’s pose of depressed frustration. They also get to the heart of the album’s purpose, which is as hoary as singing away the blues (its last line is “I just gotta get back on my feet”). For every admission of inevitable failure – on this front, ‘I Need A Mother’ is another highlight – there is a sweet memory (‘Apple Trees’) or a bit of modest defiance (‘Unhinged’).
End Times might at times seem to repeat itself, but its unity is also a considerable achievement. Perhaps a tad over-familiar, then, but not so much so that it breeds contempt.
71 is the number of an apartment we return to regularly in Whinfell Forest, Cumbria. We like it there.
‘We’ are Anna French and Dan Hartland. The Story and the Truth is a sort of inadequate catch-all term for what goes on here: we tend to talk about novels, history, food and fashion, politics and music, but there may also be photographs of soft toys and musicians. Stick around and see.
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Sounds We Like
Midnight At The Movies, by Justin Townes Earle
Steve's boy comes good - an eclectic selection of American roots music, with rockabilly-ish stuff to go with Earle's haircut, and Dixie jazz to go with his voice. Plus a song by Paul Westerberg and one that sounds like Whiskeytown. Not the grab-bag any of that makes it sound like, Midnight At The Movies is a thorough-going good time record with some very fine songwriting indeed.
Words We Like
The Damned UTD, by David Peace
Exhilarating stuff from Peace, who takes a break from writing about criminal psychopaths in order to write about sporting sociopathy. The story of Brian Clough's 40 days at Leeds United, his novel revolves around its protagonists point of view, shifting from first person to second person (in which we experience Clough's glory days at Derby County). The central personality is brilliantly turned, and if it probably isn't the real Clough - certainly there has been enough controversy about the novel to suggest that it isn't the full picture - it is nevertheless a bravura fictional creation. Blisteringly good fun, with a healthy slice of disturbance.
Flicks We Like
Doubt (2008)
Slowly we catch up on last year's Oscar contenders, just in time for this year's ceremony. You can tell at times that the film has been adapted from the stage, but the central performances of Streep, Hoffman, Adams and David bely the static cameras and dialogue-heavy script. A quick Google reveals that the role played by Hoffman was on stage filled by a younger actor, and this feels to us to have been the better choice; but otherwise a solid, impressive bit of film-making.
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