Posts by philipmatthews
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Only Rob Mayes, bless him (it is Xmas after all) has put any real effort into a careful revisiting of the lost past.
His Children's Hour live CD was a good one, especially considering that F Nun never managed to get off their arses in the 90s or this decade and reissue any of that stuff. Also his compilations of non-FN post-punk bands like YFC and Beat Rhythm Fashion. If there is to be a FN reissue programme it would be good to see it go beyond what the consensus of NZ rock history has identified as the important acts from that label -- ie the (yawn) "Dunedin sound" -- and cover some of the more left field acts. This Kind of Punishment. Scorched Earth Policy. The Pin Group. Marie and the Atom.
Yes, I'm sure everyone and their dog is boring Roger with their wishlists ...
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I think you've just convinced me to watch it, Rob.
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In case you missed it, you were pegged, this morning, by Denis Welch as a "standout writer" in his yearly media wrap-up.
I heard that, thanks. Very nice of him.
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So what are the books that you've read a zillion times?
The blogger and, more recently, novelist Mark Sarvas says that he has read The Great Gatsby at least 20 times. I've read it maybe three or four times and can imagine another three at least and I know other people who regularly go back to it as well. Why is this? I think the closing paragraphs might be the greatest, and most moving, that I know of. These lines below give me goosebumps every time I read them or think about them and I'm not sure why:
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
There aren't many sentences better than that last one. It's a small book that contains a huge amount and I think that's why we keep going back to it. Somehow there's always more in it. It's the Tardis.
I used to have two unofficial policies. 1) Why re-read when there are so many books out there that you haven't read once? 2) If you start a book, finish it. Maybe it's a side effect of getting older that I've abandoned both rules. You know you will never read everything, and life's too short to persevere with a dud. Increasingly, I'm giving up on books after only 10 or 20 pages. And increasingly, I'm going back to favourites -- another author I re-read just for the sheer brilliance of the writing is DeLillo, that stretch of books from The Names through White Noise (which is a bit dated now), Libra, Mao II and Underworld. I think Libra might be his masterpiece.
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While we're talking books, can I plug a mail order bookstore in the UK called The Book Depository? Unlike Amazon, they offer free worldwide delivery. It also helps that the pound is looking pretty rooted -- I believe that's the technical term -- against the Kiwi dollar. Website is bookdepository.co.uk. I've found them fast and reliable.
Books of the year? We talked about Geoff Dyer's Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi at another, more notorious thread, but he's been my discovery of the year: funny, erudite and coming to the Wellington arts festival next year (I'm not getting paid to say these things). I also liked Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism which I probably couldn't summarise as well as Giovanni Tiso could. That was through Zero Books and I have a couple more of theirs coming from the Book Depository: Dominic Fox's Cold World, which is subtitled "The aesthetics of dejection and the politics of militant dysphoria", and the Fisher-edited The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson.
The Zero Books website is here: http://0books.blogspot.com/
But my holiday reading looks like being a lot of stuff for work in the new year, too: the new Martin Amis (apparently he's sorting feminists out this time; I realise I haven't read a new Amis since the reviews collection back in about 2001), the new Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City, which I'm excited about it and the last two from Richard Dawkins.
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resistance is futile:)
I'm painting myself blue and taking up throat-singing as we speak.
But seriously, that's what I meant by it being an allegory for all human history. It's flexible and eclectic enough. The indigenous people looked and acted largely Native (North) American to me but if you're in Africa, they probably look African, if you're in South America, you're probably thinking of the Incas, and so on. That's part of Cameron's achievement, I guess.
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Roger Shepherd and Flying Nun -- to make this truly authentic, he needs to shift his label office back to Christchurch. We all know that everything went downhill when things shifted to Auckland.
Records of the year? 2009 wasn't a big year for me, but this is what I bought (all on CD) and liked, only some of it actually released this year ...
Stroke, of course. Especially the Will Oldham and Bill Callahan tracks.
The Clean -- Mashed. Makes me ashamed that I've somehow never managed to see them live.
UnicaZurn -- Temporal Bends. Electronic psychedelia, or Tangerine Dream on weirder drugs. A side project of the excellent British electronic group Cyclobe.
Pelican -- The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw. Art-metal continues to be a big one for me. The trick is getting rid of the vocalist -- why didn't metal bands think of that earlier? See also: Mogwai -- The Hawk is Howling, Sunn O))) -- Monoliths and Dimensions, Black Boned Angel -- Supereclipse.
Portishead -- Third.
Patti Smith -- Twelve. A very patchy record but bought really as a delayed souvenir after seeing her live in Melbourne last year. It's a covers album and, no, I didn't need Patti doing Tears for Fears or Paul Simon but her "Are you experienced?" and "Smells like Teen Spirit" are worth it. -
Shamelessly, my two cents -- the number 7 refers to it being on my year's top ten list (link to the left if you want to see the others):
7. Avatar (James Cameron)
Both Hollywood-archetypal and deeply, personally weird, James Cameron’s Gaia-loving space opera manages to be an allegory for everything, maybe all of human history, but especially: the loss of Native American lands and cultures, war in Iraq, war in Vietnam, “the environment” and our relationship to it, rainforest clearances, Cameron’s own purported journey from gun-loving machinery-nerd to feminine-side ecologist. I think of it as Malick’s Pocahontas story The New World with Apocalypse Now battle scenes (indeed, as a years-in-the-making war film with deeper meanings, this probably is Cameron's Apocalypse Now) and it is also surely a need-to-see-it-in-cinemas overhaul of viewer expectations and technology just as The Matrix was in 1999 and Jurassic Park was in 1993. So, after all that, why do I feel like I don’t love it as I should? Maybe because the storytelling is perfunctory, even juvenile – which you could never say about Cameron’s two Terminators (it's this perfunctory: people named Miles and Grace define the militaristic and peaceful poles of its human experience). Maybe because it can feel like watching someone else play a computer game. Maybe because two hours and 40 minutes is a long time to be looking at that artificial scenery and those artificial people. But, yes, the phosphorescent jungle at night was very, very trippy in 3D. -
Sounds like I was about three years behind you -- but the same generation. The notion that Polanski's Macbeth was his response to, or processing of, the Manson murders is a common assumption, and one a lot of critics made at the time, but in his autobiography Roman, Polanski said:
Most American critics assumed that I’d used the film for some cathartic purpose. In fact, I’d chosen to make Macbeth because I thought that Shakespeare, at least, would preserve my motives from suspicion. After the Manson murders, it was clear that whatever kind of film I’d come out with next would have been treated in the same way. If I’d made a comedy, the charge would have been one of callousness.
Not that Polanski is someone we can rely on to tell the truth at all times, of course.
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Let's hope that Shields never writes a book about, say, genocide.
He could call it Human Shields.