Posts by philipmatthews
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Also pointing out the fearful contradictions of contemporary culture eg those folk who champion Avatar as an anti-corporate, anti-imperialist film, when all the profits are flowing to Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation, for cripes sake!
When this was being debated at Giovanni's blog, there was a comment from someone identified only as EM. It rang true for me:
"I would defend Cameron's film at the level of the Idea: it is better to make a statement against colonialism and imperialism (yes, even on behalf of the Other if you mean it) even within (since where is there authentically an outside?) cultural productions of capitalism than not."
Where is there authentically an outside?
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Sam -- I had a feeling I saw your review of Chronic City in the Listener a little while ago, but can't find it now. You were largely positive?
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any other candidates for finest century?
For some reason, that question makes me think of this great poem by Billy Collins, "Nostalgia":
Remember the 1340's? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called "Find the Cow."
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent a badly broken code.The 1790's will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess. -
Shot down by critics, it slides from the dizzying heights, free falls, and smashes into the street below, giving hundreds of reporters their last money-shot and a chance for some cheezy analysis.
That would be The Lovely Bones, wouldn't it?
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The Gordons stands out as one of the best albums to be recorded in New Zealand, IMHO. It's been fun to hear Dimmer covering 'Machine Song', but what I really want is someone good to have a crack at 'Coalminer's Song'.
Someone needs to have a word to them about a reunion tour.
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I see from your blog you've also read Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem - any thoughts on that one?
I had a review in Your Weekend, which is a newspaper magazine that goes out in The Dom Post, Press and Waikato Times on Saturdays. There's no link and I haven't got a copy at home, but my very short response is that it was superb. I was a fan of his Fortress of Solitude but this seemed a leap beyond that: much less realist, much more paranoid in the best (Pynchon-esque) sense and written with real flair and energy. You can tell he enjoyed himself.
I don't know a lot about Lethem's other books but I think there might be a loosely SF/parallel world feel in some of them as well. He appears as a Philip K Dick expert on the commentary track of Linklater's A Scanner Darkly, which makes sense. I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys Pynchon and PKD -- and David Foster Wallace. I must read more of his stuff.
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And I'm gonna grumble (with a smile) that the first one in the list, Tall Dwarf's Nothing's Gonna Happen was not a FN release, but on my (and Paul Rose's) Furtive label, months before FN existed.
Weren't the Gordons on something else pre-FN as well?
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It's not a bad selection at all. I'd never seen that Great Unwashed clip before.
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I am going to Vector tonight, can anyone tell me who is playing Support?
No, the Backstreet Boys were last night. Too bad.
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I'm still not willing to concede that George Lucas is politically or intellectually sophisticated enough to have a point of view on Vietnam or anything else.
You know that Lucas was pegged to direct Apocalypse Now at one point? Makes that 'Nam analogy thing with Star Wars a little more plausible. But I'm not 100 per cent sure I buy it either.