2019! THE LAST LAP!! Come, gather round this roaring fire, help yourself to a mug of good cheer and tell us all – what have you been listening to, reading, watching, or otherwise enjoying in the last month ?
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Read the new John Le Carre – very good, age han’t diminished his talent as he tears into Trump and Brexit.
Also Philip Pullman’s The Secret Commonwealth – enjoyed it more than La Belle Sauvage, but found some of the symbolism/allegory (if that’s the right description) a bit heavy handed.
Seen:
Surprising month in the reissue, re-package game.
I had such high hopes for period-set War Of The Worlds, but – good grief – how bad does something have to be that you need to force yourself to sit through the third episode..?
In contrast, I wouldn’t have even bothered with Watchmen if the first episode hadn’t been up to snuff.
But, it turns out, it is rather good, with a couple of outstanding episodes already.
Apparently America is not watching, which is a shame. Although… it seems our cousins across the Atlantic – at least when it comes to tv shows – are not gifted at quitting while they’re ahead. I suspect there’s one great series to be got from Watchmen and a ratings catastrophe might secure that outcome rather than, as often happens, the idea getting milked to death.
The brief fourth series of Rick and Morty means there’s not much room for substandard episodes and, I’m pleased to say, the first two were excellent.
Something I tried to watch but had to give up on is a programme called Pop Goes Northern Ireland. I imagined this would be archive footage of The Moondogs, Starjets etc but is actually a Norn Iron take on the “Rock n Roll Years” format. Now, I know the RARY has its share of Ethiopian famine/ sinking of the Belgrano type stories, but these would be interspersed with Mr Blobby and Eddie The Eagle or whatever. The NI version is just relentless horror – if RARY imparted wistful feelings about times gone, Pop Goes Northern Ireland appears only to make the viewer grateful that the past is behind them.
Heard:
I’ve been binging on my favourite music from the year so I will have my list ready for Mr Lodestone, but homework, in the form of more stuff I simply must listen to, keeps piling up.
The Chart Music Podcast remains an unparalleled delight –
“As thick as Barry White’s sh*t on Boxing Day morning” being this month’s phrase of choice.
Following a throwaway comment on the Bigmouth podcast, I’ve been catching up on the utterly filthy Dear Joan and Jericha podcast. Monstrously funny.
Read
Most of The Secret Barrister, one of those books without a declared author, which details the deficiencies in the British legal process and many of the consequences for those involved. Of course, everyone thinks their area needs the money most, but, for your average citizen, there are examples here, eye watering and jaw dropping, which would put the fear of god into you at the thought you might have to rely on such a system to work for you..
I’ve recorded the War of the Worlds, but I’d read a few negative comments, so I reckon I’ll bin it.
It’s surprising how dull they manage to make the threat of the end of the world. It looks good, and I enjoyed how some Tweeters complained about ‘shoe horning’ in references to the British Empire, apparently oblivious to the idea that the whole original book is a metaphor for the British Empire.
Seen – I signed up for free months on a couple of Amazon Prime add on channels (Shudder and Starzplay), so I’ve been watching dozens of horror & sci-fi type films and series. Some were terrible (Nekromantik, Faces Of Death, Apartment 143), some good (Channel Zero, Beyond The Walls, Counterpart, Behind The Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, Shrew’s Nest) and one of the films was absolutely excellent, The House At The End Of Time. It’s well worth seeking out, if horror/fantasy is your thing and I guarantee it will be the best Venezuelan horror film you’ve ever seen!
I also really enjoyed The Irishman, the new series of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Spiral, of course. And music wise, we were lucky enough to see Chris Difford do a songs and stories show in a small club in Farsley, near Leeds. We ended up sat at a table right under his microphone, so it’s fair to say we had a decent view. He did most of the songs you’d want him to do, plus a few of his solo ones, and his stories were funnier than some comics I’ve seen. I had a brief chat with him afterwards and he says Squeeze are the focus for the year ahead, with another major tour, so no new solo albums on the horizon, which is a shame, because I like his solo albums even more than I like the Squeeze ones.
Heard – The Prince 1999 boxed set is fantastic, as expected, as is the new JME album. I picked up a few bargains in the Black Friday sale, including the INXS Kick boxed set, which is brill. I’ve finally started liking them nearly 30 years after being dragged to see them by my girlfriend and thinking they were a bit rubbish. And new rap favourites this month are Sampa The Great, Equipto/Bored Stiff and Haviah Mighty. I am also enjoying listening to Seba Kaapstaad’s album, Thina, a sort of jazzy, not-quite-hip-hop album.
Read – as per the rest of 2019, loads of magazines on Readly, some comics and sort of an actual book, the Fleabag Scripts, with some (but not enough) notes from Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Next year’s plan is to start making time to read more books, providing I can keep me eyes open long enough to take anything in (a major problem with my new tablet regime!). Either that or stop ruddy buying them. I nearly spent £1,500 on a limited edition book of Linda McCartney’s polaroid photographs the other day, because it is signed by her hubby and I know it will increase in value greatly. I’ve only got Ringo’s autograph and I’d love the other 3, although I’d need a lottery win to get John’s. Fortunately I came to my senses, because I absolutely cannot afford it and, as the missus (who wasn’t as angry at the idea as I thought) said, the increase in value is irrelevant if I’m never going to part with it!
Read: David Hepworth’s A Fabulous Creation: How the LP Saved Our Lives. Look, it’s David Hepworth doing the David Hepworth thing and you’ve already made your mind up about him. If you didn’t like him before it won’t change your mind, I do rather like his writing and so enjoyed it.
Heard: retreated into old Jamaican ska compilations. No idea why but they’re making me very happy right now.
Seen: I’ve had a crash course in CBeebies in recent months. It’s the Waitrose of children’s TV although there’s still an awful lot of nonsense. But Moon and Me is utterly charming, Hey Duggee is genuinely funny (one episode contains an unexpected tribute to Apocalypse Now), and Sarah and Duck is possibly my new favourite programme. Seriously, if gentle whimsical humour is your thing, give it a go on iPlayer. The soundtrack is also a delight.
I’ve just finished “A Fabulous Creation” on my Kindle and found it disappointing. I’m glad I didn’t spend much on it.
Reads like a rather patchy magazine article, or possibly a little series of articles, cobbled together into a book with a further padded-out article (list of albums with brief comments on each) tacked onto the end as filler.
It’s quite telling that about a third of the book is the bibliography and the index. That index is 25% of the book on it’s own.
Yes, it was really annoying to get to something like 64% through, thinking there’s more to come, but then realising it’s all boring lists and an index. 99p was about right I reckon.
Seen
Three shows this month, taking in classical with spoken word, comedy and folk.
First up was Neil Gaiman with the BBC Symphony Orchestra for Dancing in the Dark (to be broadcast on Radio 3 on December 23rd). I’ve been a reader, if not a constant admirer, of Gaiman since his first graphic novel Violent Cases. I met him at Preston SF group at what I think was his first ever ‘event’ of that kind, so it was a pleasure to see him greeted like a rock start at a sold-out Barbican Hall. The readings covered a range of poetry and prose. They were considerably enhanced when the speakers which made him audible to those of us in the balcony were switched on, though that wasn’t until halfway through the first half. With no disrespect to his own interpretations of his work, the spoken word highlight was surprise guest start David Tennant giving a chapter from Good Omens. The music choice was as eclectic as the literature, and the orchestra superb under the dynamic conducting of Mihhail Gerts. Remarkably, Gerts was making his debut with the orchestra was a last minute stand in for an indisposed Alexander Vedernikov.
I have also been a longstanding fan of Eddie Izzard, though I really haven’t kept up with his comedy this century. He claims he has given is final tour, Wunderbar, before moving into politics full-time so I jumped at the chance to see one of his last shows being filmed at the Top Secret Comedy Club, a 200-capacity basement on Drury Lane. What came to mind was a line I once heard in the Comedian’s Comedian podcast. A young comic passed on some advice he had received early in his career – the first thing you need to be on stage is not ‘funny’, but ‘interesting’. If you’re interesting the audience will wait for the funny lines to come. In Izzard’s case the problem was that the stuff leading up to the quirky funny bit was pretty bland (‘Achieving is a matter of mind not body; if we all put our minds to it we could create a Wunderbar world for everyone’.) As for ‘interesting’, when the young woman next to me pulled out her phone I assumed she was going to take a sneaky photo, as I did myself at the very end as Eddie took his bows. She started scrolling through her messages instead. Standing ovations seem to be pretty much mandatory at shows these days, but come the end of Wunderbar perhaps half a dozen people were on their feet. I’m glad I saw him, but wish I’d seen him 20 years ago.
Two days later we were back in London for another sold out gig, Show of Hands at Union Chapel. Phil Beer and Steve Knightly are two of my favourite musicians, and Steve one of my favourite singers. This was a superb gig, made all the better by the atmospheric venue. On this tour the main duo is enhanced by Miranda Sykes on double bass (back in the fold after the birth of her child) and percussionist and bodhran virtuoso Cormac Byrne. There was a mix of classics (Cousin Jack, The Galway Farmer) as well as selections from the new album. I’m still not completely sold on Battlefield Dancefloor but get more from it after Steve’s explanation that the title track with it’s ‘1! 2! 3! 4!’ chorus, chanted on the off-beat, is influenced by Johnny Kalsi of the Afro Celts and what he has passed on about Punjabi music, another element to add to faux Irish, Cornish reggae and so in the Show of Hands ingredients.
On television, isn’t the BBC doing throwing a lot of money at big budget dramas at the moment? His Dark Materials started well by capturing the wonder and menace of the books but seems to have drifted off, and I agreed with everyone who was surprised and disappointed how they fluffed the ‘Severed Child’ scene. I have waited a long time for a War of the Worlds set in period, but found the threat of the end of the world kind of dull and unengaging. I liked the novel’s original themes being updated even if the setting wasn’t. I’ve also being enjoying Vienna Blood, which looks fantastic even if it is pure hokum, a sort of Mittsommermorde. The second episode revolved around a psychologically scarred soldier compelled to kill by The Magic Flute. On a lower-key level, Guilt was a great short series, about the fall out when attempts are made to cover up a hit and run death.
The best thing all month though was series two of The End of The F***ing World. Alyssa and James are back, which may come a surprise to everyone who remembers what happened to James at the end of series one, and on the lam again. I had worried that without the first series’ source material it might lack its impact, but it’s as funny and involving as ever and the central performances give as good a depiction as I have ever seen of what it feels like to be young.
When the film Mortdecai was released it was panned by critics and flopped at the box office. The only kind words I saw about it were written by the novelist Christopher Priest, who went to see it out of a sense of gratitude to Kyril Bonfiglioni, author of the Mortdecai novels, who had published Priest’s own first story, and was surprised to find himself loving it. The film has cropped up on Amazon, and even if I didn’t love it I can say that it is well worth your time. Charlie Mortdecai (Johnny Depp) is the roguish art dealer involved in a high stakes scam involving a Goya and his old rival the policeman Martland (Ewan McGregor whose ‘posh English’ accent is a lot less convincing than Depp’s). It was entertaining enough that I have begun reading the novels, starting with The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery, and they’re a blast.
Finally, the Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew is going to be talked about for decades. The most astonishing thing may not be the jaw-dropping interview itself, but the news stories after which reported that Andrew was telling everyone how well it had gone. Truly remarkable lack of self-awareness.
Read
The best book I have read for some time is Mudlark by Laura Maiklem. It gives a new slant on the history of London from the shoreline of the Thames, where Maiklem spends as much time as she can pulling the lost and discarded items which the river yields to those with the time and knowledge to look for them. Generally, these are humble objects of little financial worth, shoe buckles, shards of pottery, buttons and so on, but the value is in the insight they offer into millennia of life on the waterline. There is a community of mudlarks, generally solitary types who come to find some peace in the middle of the city, set their demons adrift on the Thames and accept the river’s ghosts in the form of small historic gifts in return. It’s a perfect read for anyone who has ever browsed the Thames shore and picked up an old coin or a piece of broken pipe stem to carry home.
Heard
Even for Christmas refuseniks like me there is room for some festive music, and the best addition to the genre since Thea Gilmore’s Strange Communion is Kate Rusby’s Holly Head, which must not, I repeat not, be listened to unless you to go around for the rest of day humming ‘I want a Hippopotamus for Christmas’ to yourself. And I love Michael Kiwanuka’s KIWANUKA, even if I’m not quite as bowled over as many seem to be. It’s a lovely sound from start to finish but I find it lacks big, stand-out moments for me to anticipate on each play. Even so it’s one of my favourite albums of the year.
The End of the F***ing World – forgot about that. Yes, enjoyed it as much as the first series, as I am with Motherhood, which I also forgot about.
The Kiwanuka album is one of my favourites this year too, and it’s one that I’m enjoying more with each play. Same with the new FKA Twigs album, which I’m listening to right now. A bit more difficult to the first album, which I’ve like since it came out but only just got round to buying on CD. She’s a bit like Kate Bush’s more experimental sister.
Starting with AOB (a bit oddly…)
Was quite enjoying the last month or so until Ofsted arrived on Tuesday this week. (I work in a 6th form college.) Still, the Inspectors have now retired to their bolthole to deliberate on the grade and as a result I can have a (completely exhausted) first lunch break of the week…
Seen
More Peaky Blinders for us, getting fully up to date now…I still like it but I don’t love it. There are some decent stories in there but the whole thing just seems a little bit overblown to me. Some of the street scenes in particular just seem, well, over the top.
War Of The Worlds…living locally to a lot of the towns and villages in the storyline has been quite fun but unfortunately this series has only been OK. It’s very watchable but it could rack up the tension a tad.
Read
Manchester: It Never Rains by Gareth Ashton is an excellent kind of oral history of the era building up to and including the punk era in, errm, Manchester. With its real life accounts, it is a fabulous read and each contribution is really alive and full of excitement. Great stuff.
All of which unfortunately made David Hepworth’s A Fabulous Creation a bit on the dull and possibly a bit formulaic side. Sorry.
Still reading And In The End-The Last Days of The Beatles by Ken McNab. Seems pretty forensic so far, fascinating on the business side of the break up too. Goes really well with…
Heard
Nothing Is Real podcast, done by Beatle fanatics for Beatle fanatics. Just two Irish blokes chatting about The Fabs but they really know their stuff and it’s great to listen to on my drive to work.
The Treehouse, Danny Baker’s new podcast, is now a few episodes in. It’s good, but it feels like he’s feeling his way back in a bit so far. Worth sticking with though I think.
President Of Wales by John Langford’s (ex Three Johns/Mekons) Men of Gwent is a highly likeable (unusally for me) piece of folksy, alt country/Americana type of thing. Good stuff.
Seen:
Spiral. Too many loose ends unmade. I’ll still watch the next series, though.
Family Guy – series 17 & 18. We’ve started on The Cleveland Show now.
Heard:
Rolling Stones – Beggars Banquet & Let It Bleed 50th anniversary LPs.
Ben Folds Five – Ben Folds Five LP.
Everything But The Girl – Walking Wounded half-speed-mastered LP.
Fiat Lux – Ark Of Embers LP. The unreleased 1984 album, which is CD2 of Hired History Plus.
Stargazer Lilies – Occabot. Woozy shoegaze/tape loop stuff from NYC’s Soundpool spin-off duo.
Pink Lemonade – Take It Squeezy. First EP from Rezillos-like Cambridge pop-punk all-girl trio. One of the best live bands I’ve seen for years. They’re all still 21. I feel very old. I’ve booked them for my 50th.
Tape Runs Out – Talking Through The Walls EP
Inspired by the ‘sadly they were never famous’ thread:
The Dawn Chorus – The Big Adventure
The Dawn Chorus – The Carnival Leaves Town
The Dawn Chorus – Tremendous Magic
The Retrospective Soundtrack Players – Cool Hand Luke
The Retrospective Soundtrack Players – The Catcher In The Rye
The Retrospective Soundtrack Players – It’s A Wonderful Christmas Carol
The Pony Collaboration – The Pony Collaboration
The Pony Collaboration – If These Are The Good Times
The Pony Collaboration – Everything Was Ages Ago.
The Morning People – Golf Sale.
Read:
Michael Mosley – The Clever Guts Diet: How to revolutionise your body from the inside out. Everyone should read this, sadly much of it doesn’t apply to people with IBD.
Seen: End of the f***ing world. It’s like an American offbeat kind of TV crime drama has been remade set in the UK. A Coen Brothers film transplanted to drab, humdrum England. I really like it’s style. A great show.
Read: Love Is Blind by William Boyd. I’ve read all the William Boyd fiction I know of. This is his latest and one of the best. As gripping as a thriller, great cast of characters and memorable settings.
Heard: Sharon Von Etten’s album. Great stuff. Heard some stuff via Youtube I like: King Princess was one:
https://youtu.be/BiyU8aaL7r4
Chromatics – Closer To Grey album evokes different sounds nicely, a bit of a shoegazey, dancey pop style.
Reading: The Christopher Priest run on Black Panther, which has a real kinetic energy to it. A couple of new-to-me thrillers by Lisa Gray. They are a little by-the-numbers, but good for all that. Also revisiting my Andro Linklaters, which are always thought provoking and well written. He is much missed.
Watching: Watchmen. Genuinely good TV, but it isn’t Alan Moore’s Watchmen. His Dark Materials, also very good. The rest of the tv is just background noise.
Oh. We went to the movies to see the S Korean movie Parasite. Beautifully made movie; it suffers from a little bit of identity crisis as to what kind of movie it wants to be, but wonderful to watch. Subtitles!
Listening to: Nothing new. Mainly ol’ school country.
Watched:
The Irishman – not overly impressed, see elsewhere
A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood – Was convinced to go by a friend after finding the trailer awful. It was a nice film, but I literally struggled to stay awake at times.
Ford v Ferrari (Le Mans ’66) – Wonderful old fashioned film making, that (unlike The Irishman) seemed much shorter than it’s lengthy running time (150 mins). Great performances from Damon and (especially) Bale.
The Good Liar – Seemed promising, first twist was ok, second twist as Kermode advised) was WTF!!
The Crown – First 3 episodes. Wasn’t sure I would be able to watch the “Aberfan” episode, but I made it through. They did a pretty good job.
No live shows.
Listened – Not much music, podcasts mainly.
AOB: I have shingles! It’s not much fun, folks. Get a jab if you are over 50 (and have had chicken pox).
Looking forward to – The Marvellous Mrs Maisel season 3, 2 Wilco shows in Chicago, Christmas.
I singularly failed to enjoy last year’s bout of shingles too.
Slight resultant nerve damage makes my right arm susceptible to annoying itching on occasion. My sister has just got it and is not best pleased.
My sympathies. Pain from rash is decreasing, but getting itchy, also feeling nauseous much of the time. It is certainly hanging around, 3 weeks and counting!
Read:
I’ve read a couple of Stuart Maconie’s old books recently – I used to knock these off in double quick time, these two were a bit of a labour
Heard:
Richard Dawson 2020 still doing lots of playing.
And I’ve been doing a bit of 2019 catching up. Finally bought (and no longer cherry pick Spotifying) Elbow – Giants Of All Sizes, and Bruce Springsteen – Western Stars (both good, but Bruce is better)
The new Who album arrived this morning – not heard it yet (saving it for tomorrow morning). I do hope it’s worth it (all the reviews suggest so …)
Seen:
November saw 2 events connected to 2 of my favourite albums.
Mark Lewisohn – Hornsey Road.
Very good, plenty of information and trivia for the Beatles nerd.
And he confirmed he is writing Volume 2 – he just didn’t say when it would be out.
The second was From The Jam doing the 30th Anniversary of Setting Sons. What an album, and a great show as always.
Support from The Vapors was good too – but Oxford Town Hall is not a great venue (too cavernous and the sound get’s a bit lost)
Lewisohn’s no spring chicken. He needs to get a ruddy move on!
I was thinking this when the last book came out, a mere six years ago. If he carks it early we;re fooked.
What makes it worse is the best bits are towards the end. Do we need to set up a ‘keep Mark Lewisohn healthy’ Just Giving page. Send him health foods, gym membership, personal physician, etc and warn him off holidaying in dangerous countries, getting on a motorbike in the rain, going in the wrong end at Millwall, etc.
Read somewhere he’s also doing (or has been doing) research for vol. 3 so after the next one comes out it will be quicker as he just has to write it, which is a relatively quick process compared to research, interviews etc.
That’s the other thing. Every year more and more of the people he’d want to interview are popping their clogs. I hope he managed to interview the oldest/poorliest first!
Read
Miami Blues by Charles Willeford
Willeford wrote like a dream and filled his crime novels with wonderfully off kilter characters.
March Violets by Philip Kerr
I could see that this is well written and well plotted. But I just didn’t engage with it.
Stories of our lives by Ted Chiang.
This book of short stories includes the one on which the film Arrival is based. His writing is gorgeous and vivid and thoughtful.
Seen.
Our daughter recently got into Marvel films, so we’ve been binging. Thor Ragnorok is just brilliant; riotously funny and brim full of outlandish action. Spider Man – Homecoming is a blast. It’s a high school movie, with caped freaks. There is a puppyish Peter Parker and Michael Keaton is a great villain. Looking forward to seeing some more when Santa delivers them.
Blade Runner.
Whilst I might not live in Los Angeles it was November 2019, so it seemed only right to revisit one of my favourite films. Good grief it is still so beautiful and richly textured.
Brawl in Cell Block 99.
This is a prison drama by the director who brought us Bone Tomahawk. So, like that western / horror hybrid, you get a slow burn build up to some brutal, ugly violence. Vince Vaughan is something of a revelation; a hulking, menacing presence.
The Belko Experiment.
Ever sat in the office, wondering how you’d act if things went all Hunger Games? Then this nasty little movie is for you.
Heard
Cocteau Twins. Dipping into their back catalogue for the first time in ages. And listening again to Loveless by My Bloody Valentine – still a woozy, dreamy roar of an album.
Bone Tomahawk: Clearly I had to see this after all the mentions last month. Have to say that, whilst I (sort of) enjoyed it, I didn’t find it all that gruesome. (Looked like a normal day at work for me!) But thanks for the prompting, it was certainly different. Other good films on Netflix/Prime included Stan & Ollie (delightfully sad), the Marie Colvin biopic, name passing me by (sound predictable glamorisation of a probably deeply damaged woman), The Hole in the Ground (creepy slow burner), Lincoln Lawyer (fab wish I were Mat Mac film, as in ask your wife), You Were Never Here, with added great Jonny Greenwood score (marvellously bleak contract killer film). Whizzed thought the new series of the Crown, rendered lacklustre by the Andrew revelations. O, and the Irishman, see elsewhere.
Why so many great records coming out at the tail end of the year? Blood/Allison Moorer is truly a classic, as good as the best of her sisters. Loved the Women Sing Waits, the Mose Allison tribute less, but both plenty good enough to warrant purchasing despite being sent review streams. No Treasure but Hope/Tindersticks is fabulous. No new direction here, just more of their maudlin lugubrious melodramatic. If more people like Marmite than Vegemite, this makes ’em a Vegemite band. And as for Ghosteen, this is just terrific. If the Nick Cave you like is the Nick Cave of meandering tone poems, this is yours. If you like the Birthday, Bad Seeds or Grinderman, I guess you won’t, even if this is nominally a Seeds record. I gather it was Nick mumbling into a microphone, Warren Ellis then glossing it up with sequencers and synth. Devastatingly sad in the uplifting way only a real downer can bring. Finally got around to the new on by the Rails, Cancel the Sun, resisting only because I have all their earlier, despite loving the new songs live. Of course it is a corker, their best yet.
Still haven’t finished that bloody book by my bed.
And, apropos the comment about the Cocteaus, I too had a splurge, hoovering up all the This Mortal Coli recordings, as homework for some scribbling I indulge in. Getting to much prefer Discogs to Amazon Marketplace.
A busy and expensive month, replacing a dead computer screen among other dull but necessary expenses that of course happened all at once. And then onto Christmas shopping…got it all done in a day last week (and now I’m broke). But I’ve also made myself a gingerbread castle and had julbord (Christmas smörgåsbord) at Operakällaren (not on my bill, thankfully – they have a star in the Guide Michelin so not very cheap). We even had snow for a short while, so I’m starting to feel festive!
Read:
Finished that Bellman tome a lot quicker than I expected, because it was so well written and interesting that I couldn’t put it down (well, I couldn’t lift it up either…huuuuge book!)
Then went on to read a book by my favourite living Swedish author, PC Jersild on writing; “Skriv först. Fråga sen” (“Write first. Ask later”) Like all books on writing it had interesting bits mixed with the same advice as they all give, but I’m a Jersild completist and didn’t buy it for the writing advice (I was mostly interested in knowing more about his own writing methods and how each his novels took shape – a little of that was there, but not as much as I wanted).
Then onto the Elton John memoirs. Good, but I don’t know, strangely they didn’t grip me that much.
After years of hearing the name Borges thrown around to describe a certain kind of stories and thinking that he sounded interesting, I finally bought his collected short stories and found that I didn’t enjoy them half as much as I thought I would. I could see myself liking them more at thirteen…now I just found them a bit underwhelming. I’m filing him together with Lovecraft under “Authors that has inspired other writers to do great work, but who aren’t very readable themselves” (I’m sure other Afterworders will disagree, but that’s my opinion).
I also picked up a copy of Diana Wynn Jones‘s “Howl’s Moving Castle”, having only seen the animated film despite enjoying many of her other books. Lots of fun, and now I want to rewatch the film to see how accurately it follows the book (I know I loved the film, but I can’t remember much about it).
Seen:
The drama comedy series Filip & Mona on SVT Play was quietly brilliant, in a similar tone as the Australian series “Please Like Me”: like that one it’s dealing with serious subjects in a darkly funny way, and sometimes being painfully embarrassing in a very real way. I hope they’ll make a series 2.
Also half-way through bingewatching the Country Music docu series. I’m starting to dislike a couple of the talking heads they’re using so far, and it’s a very traditional format, but it contains lots of interesting stories from the early days of Country.
Heard:
Swedish singer Sarah Klang, self-proclaimed “Saddest Girl In Sweden”, is back with her follow-up to the smash hit debut album of last year, and it doesn’t disappointment. Creamy Blue is the album title, and you could use those two words to describe her voice and singing style. The music is one part Country, one part breezy 60s west-coast pop, with a sprinkle of soul on top, delivered by a warm and silky smooth voice that elevates even the couple of weaker tracks that are here as well.
I’ve also really been enjoying the latest album by Vetiver: Up On High. Very mellow folky pop/rock with some slight echoes of Wilco and George Harrison on a few tracks, and a nice energy. A really lovely album, there’s no other word for it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it makes it into my Best Of 2019 list.
The new album from Red River Dialect, with the right mouthful of a title Abundance Welcoming Ghost, is also really good and a step forward from their last album. Full of great and very atmospheric tracks. Nice folky fiddles and I like the slightly wobbly quality of his voice.
The posthumous release of Rachid Taha’s final album, Je Suis Africain is very good, and a wonderful, quirky parting gift from a great artist that will be missed.
The Bantou Mentale album is quirky African steam-punk pop with funky grooves and a slightly druggy, cinematic atmosphere to it. In a similar vein to Kasai Allstars and Konono No. 1. Gets better and better the more I listen.