Woebot

Woebot, whose knowledge of music is phenomenal, brings us up to date on the new releases of 2006 here.

We’ve had notable long-playing wax from Ghostface Killah, Matmos, Hot Chip, Scritti, Scott, Various, Johnny Dark, Villalobos, Luciano, Burial, Lily Allen, Devandra Banhart and The Arctic Monkeys, but they’ve all been distinguished by their distance from each-other, working apart in different scenes. It’s been a year for the Neo-Rockist Pop picker.

It’s been a good year for re-issues as well. Floating my boat have been the two exquisitely packaged Music Box records, fully-endorsed and taken directly from Ron Hardy’s stash of reel-to-reels, great stuff on the Trunk label, the second No-Wave Sampler on Soul Jazz (hold tight for Argabright’s Vol.3), the Broadcast collection of rarities and Martin’s “Roots of Dubstep” compilation.

And in a 2004 post speaks about MP3 blogs and download ethics.

It may have escaped your attention that the “hot boys” of the internet right now are none other than Fluxblog, Popnose [defunct], and Said the Gramophone. They represent a new hybrid of the FTP collective and the blog. They’re calling themselves mp3 blogs.

Political cinema and social realism

Inspired by an article at Wikipedia called political cinema, some research I did on social realism, some films by Godard and a search at Google consisting of “social realism” “political cinema” , I found this article by Mark Cousins (The Story of Film (2004) [Amazon.com]) with the title Cinema Gets Real which was published in prospect-magazine.co.uk in June 2006. It deals with the concept of realism in film.

Some quotes:

… The remarkable success of Brokeback Mountain showed that leftfield American filmmaking can do well at the box office and begin to form its own liberal mainstream. Brokeback missed out on the best picture Oscar, … the point remains that Brokeback Mountain is a new high-water mark of success in political cinema.

… Mention of Michael Winterbottom brings up another, unrelated area in which recent cinema has become, in a sense, more real. Despite showing genital close-ups, erections and ejaculation, his film 9 Songs was passed for an 18 certificate in Britain. When Patrice Chéreau’s British film Intimacy, which also featured explicit sex, was given a similar rating, it felt as if the new millennium had ushered in a more tolerant attitude to explicit consensual sexual activity on screen, and so it had. Encouraged by French films like Baise-Moi and Anatomy of Hell, both made by women, the taboo on showing erections in mainstream cinema just seemed to fade away.

… Life did feel like a disaster movie in the days after 9/11, prompting Belgian ultra-realist directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who have won the Cannes Palme d’Or twice, to observe: “Today’s paradox is that the aestheticisation of reality requires the de-aestheticisation of art.” And it is not only realist directors who feel this. Michael Haneke, who had a recent art-house hit with Hidden, explains the intensity of his work by saying that reality is losing its realness.

… the very thing that the earliest filmmakers fell in love with—a camera’s ability to hoover up reality and re-project it in motion and detail on a big screen—is not quite as valuable as it once was. The best European filmmakers today—Haneke, Lars von Trier, Bruno Dumont, Claire [Claire Denis?] —are equally sceptical about film as a medium of social realism.

Excellent.

Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965) – Georges Perec

Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965) – Georges Perec [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Perec’s Things reflects Roland Barthes’s 1957 Mythologies, in which Barthes used semiological concepts in the analysis of myths and signs in contemporary culture. [Aug 2006]

I’ve been told that Myths & Memories is Gilbert Adair’s homage to both Roland Barthes’s Mythologies and to Georges Perec’s Je me souviens.

Henri Barbusse (1873 – 1935)

Henri Barbusse (1873 – 1935)

I was thirty years old. I had lost my father and mother eighteen or twenty years before, so long ago that the event was now insignificant. I was unmarried. I had no children and shall have none. There are moments when this troubles me, when I reflect that with me a line will end which has lasted since the beginning of humanity. —Hell (1908)


This Is Stranger Than Love

Via dadanoias:

Yann Tiersen – Comptine d’un Autre Ete.mp3

So beautifully mellow and sad, why did Amélie made me feel depressed? That faux happiness? Even this piece has its schmaltz and look how many people recorded themselves playing it at Youtube. There is – and this one has the highest level of kitsch, but it works – a version accompanied by an animation film (Aidan Gibbons – The Piano) of an old man reminiscing about his past life .

Eric Satie – Gymnopedie.mp3

(check the 1987 version This Is Stranger Than Love by the British dub and industrial musician Mark Stewart And The Maffia. It has added vocals and sparse electronic beats, and is co-produced by Adrian Sherwood.)

Digression 1:

The Gymnopédies are three piano compositions by Erik Satie, which were published in Paris starting in 1888.

This article, besides describing the compositions and their orchestration by Claude Debussy, also discusses why Satie and his friend, the poet Contamine de Latour, chose to use the word gymnopédie, which refers to an Ancient Greek dance, the gymnopaedia.

Because the original gymnopaedia was danced in Sparta by naked boys, some see this as a not-so-subtle allusion to Satie’s supposed homosexuality. This article also addresses that question.

Digression 2: I was lead to believe that Satie’s condition was asexuality rather than homosexuality.

The modernist movement and the cult of ugliness

“The modernist movement is still dominant in literary culture, especially the post-World War II idea that a fiction is worthless unless everything ends badly. But a lot of science fiction and fantasy literature doesn’t end this way, because the books are based on the conflict of good v. evil [see Stephen King’s The Stand], and end with the triumph of good. —RM Vaughan, Weekend Post commenting on the release of, A Feast for Crows, the fourth of seven planned novels in A Song of Ice and Fire, an epic fantasy series by American author George RR Martin.

Women read fiction, men read non-fiction

I am still with Resa Dudovitz  book on women’s fiction and it strikes me that there is truth in the notion that “women read fiction, men read non-fiction”. This is confirmed by Nina Baym’s 1978 Women’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America, 1820-1870 and Dudovitz herself. In keeping with Walter Benjamin’s and my credo: “I have nothing to say, only to show,” some quotes from the interweb:

The Google query used is “women read fiction” “men read”

Add to this elitist ideology the marketing mantra, prevalent in Canadian publishing circles, that women read fiction and men read non-fiction (a foolish and sexist notion) and you get an annual flood on the Canadian fiction lists of so-called “women’s books” — interchangeable novels set in the domestic arena that deal with realistically portrayed family crises. –Canadian National Post

According to Camille Paglia, plot, is a Western male, well, plot. “Tragedy is a male paradigm of rise and fall,” she says, “a graph in which dramatic and sexual climax are in shadowy analogy. Climax is another Western invention.” Traditional Eastern stories, she continues, are by contrast “picaresque, horizontal chains of incident. There is little suspense or sense of an ending.”

How does this sit with the fact that for decades the novel’s readership and, increasingly, its writers, publishers and theorists have been predominantly female? Two centuries back, fiction was forbidden, dangerous territory for women; this, some speculate, may be what generated its attraction. Now, it’s more like territory abandoned by men. Women read fiction, men read non-fiction. The novel has become women’s business.

The novelist Ian McEwan recently described his efforts to give away good novels (not exclusively his own) in a park near his London home. Only women were interested. “When women stop reading,” McEwan concluded, “the novel will be dead.” –Written by The Sydney Morning Herald columnist, Elizabeth Farrelly

It has often been suggested that men read less than women (England 1992).

The BML (2000) report “Reading the Situation” found that young women aged 17-34 are “3 times as likely as men in the same age group to borrow from a public library (54% compared to 18%)” (p.14).

The report also found that 77% of women read fiction compared to only 44% of men.

England and Sumsion (1995) also made this discovery, (p.22). This information tells us that women are more likely to read fiction and borrow from libraries than men. But what about men who do read fiction, does this mean they are more likely to buy what they read? It would appear so, England, (1994) found that heavy book buyers were more likely to be men than women a discovery also made by Mann in 1991. Mann stated that “buying (40%) was higher than amongst women (35%)” (p.12 in Kinnell 1991). –Buy, borrow or beg? An investigation into how fiction readers get their books

Using the Iwan McEwan quote in Google I found:

Every young woman we approached – in central London practically everyone seems young – was eager and grateful to take a book. Some riffled through the pile murmuring, “Read that, read that, read that …” before making a choice. Others asked for two, or even three.

The guys were a different proposition. They frowned in suspicion, or distaste. When they were assured they would not have to part with their money, they still could not be persuaded. “Nah, nah. Not for me. Thanks mate, but no.” Only one sensitive male soul was tempted. –Hello, would you like a free book?

P. S. Curious, no, how the notion of reading has become synonymous with reading fiction? A person who does not read much is a person who does not read much fiction. Why is it that we reserve such admiration for the reading of fiction, of made-up stories; is it because we have lost the power to dream, fantasize and fabulate?