Bush of Goats

Life's too short for empty slog. ans.

January 6, 2012 • 12:54 pm 0

Playing a game of Limbo

My Xbox 360 has sat under all the TVs in our new house, but for the first time since we moved here nearly three years ago, I’ve recently found the time and the inclination to play it. My first act was to finish a game I bought from the arcade 18 months ago, but never really had the time for. But now I’ve played it and finished it and loved it.

Limbo is an independent production from Copenhagen and does game play just as I like it. Simple, with repetition in small part, not overly long, a plot you only really get to understand in the blank empty spaces as you try to figure out how the latest little block & weight puzzle needs solving, and perhaps most importantly, a really quick reload. Control is simple (back, forward, jump, action) and the manner of executions hilariously macabre: your little 8 year old boy is impaled by hidden spiders, crushed by blocks, drowned by dirty water and best of all, minced by circular saws. Luckily, all that horror and gore is depicted in a Jan Pienkowski-esque silhouette, adding to the fairytale feel.

Despite the youth of the protagonist, this is a very adult game (asides from the deaths) as you are given no real eexplanation for what is happening, or why. You must trust its worth it and do without the clodden hoofed exposition most games seem to think it is their duty to impart. best of all might be the ending, which tells you something – there’s a girl – but tells you nothing really. Seriously: she looks up; not even at you. I had feared the gloom would lift and it would be revealed as some kind of Nyan-Cat Mario-Land, but developers PlayDead held their nerve. I await their next production with much interest.

 

 

Filed under: Uncategorized

January 6, 2012 • 12:09 pm 0

The Hunt of Tony Bliar

Last night m’wife and I watched, from a recording, The Hunt For Tony Blair.

The Hunt takes place in an imagined England of the 1940/50s and has an opening not unlike 39 steps, where the central ‘everyman’ (Blair) is framed for a crime and must flee to prove his innocence. Blair, on the run, searches for help from the friends he has bought along the way, who all hang up on him or double cross him. He eventually finds himself on a tumbled down neglected country estate, owned by none other than Lady Thatcher, sprawled like a 40s movie star across a chaise longue. In the end, it’s a crazed Gordon Brown who shoots Blair in the arse, falling from the open doorway of a cruise liner into the sea. After appearing to have drowned, lying facedown in the drink, Blair rolls over, and clasping his hands behind his head, drifts off to a happy ending.

Narrated throughout by Steven Mangan’s Blair, it is the view from inside Blair’s head; ‘of how it really happened, you know?’. He is, in his vision of what happened, immensely smart, somehow unique and surrounded by naive dummies. As everyone around him is forced to adhere to the rules of the genre , trapped and laid low by the challenges of an everyday Britain – Cherie appears several times to complain that the washing machine has broken – Blair himself is permitted to sidesteps the rules of his own imaginary universe. The restrictions of the genre, of the world Blair has created, act as a beautifully conceived cipher for the manner in which all around him is trapped by a certain comprehesnion of the universe, and are therefore incapable of thinking outside of the box. Only he is allowed to step out of the  game – like an 11-year-old forced to play with 7-year-olds, he must be allowed to manage the rules, because only he could hope to understand what the game is actually about.
Despite all this, it remained somehow lacking. The script was good, if not consistently brilliant, there were some lovely shots, lighting and dress, and it did on occasion feel like a lost Powell and Pressburger, but overall it felt laboured (which you could almost argue was a product of the millieu – the overlong look into camera – were it not for the looks of knowing on the actor’s faces). There were many great ideas (repeated references to the published biographies of Blair, Bush and Mandelsohn, Thatcher as a fallen idol, obsessed with ‘her war’) and some laugh out loud performances (Robin Cook chief among them) it just didn’t bite quite hard enough.

I heard a a thought on the radio recently (I cannot recall from whom or in what context, but it might have been Andrew Collins) about satire. He said, ‘the only satire which has ever worked was Smashie and Nicey. Overnight, every DJ on radio, everywhere, abandoned the radio personality they had spent years refining and began to speak normally.’

I wonder if in an even tighter homage to the era and its media, this should have instead been a serialisation: wherein the grinding ubiquity of Blair’s dogged adherence to his doctrine over everyone else’s might be exposed in its simplicity and unilateral benefit. If we were to have this week in, week out, it might start to have the imagined power of satire and perhaps even bring a closer examination of the man responsible.

Not ‘arf, mate!

Filed under: Thinking

December 3, 2011 • 1:41 pm 0

CLARKSON POOS ON BABY!

I’ve never had any time whatsoever for Jeremy Clarkson. He’s an insufferable pillock, adept at moaning about how hard-done-by the well off are. I’ve never found him funny (intentionally) and his recent comments about Mexicans displayed not only the sort of lazy stereotyping you’d expect from men of his age and privilege, but a lack of awareness of just how much effort they’re currently putting into brutally slaying and torturing one another to death for the right to keep Americans high. His turgid attempts at sparking controversy bore me to tears, but in an astonishing twist of fate, I actually found myself siding with him over this preposterous hullabaloo about firing squads.

While the unions ‘sought legal advice’ over whether he might be arrested and made to pay for his inhuman suggestion and (currently) 21,000 of the professionally offended jammed the BBC switchboard, he managed to keep his massive flapping gob shut for once and allowed a spokesman to point out his comments were taken out of context.

Many’s the time I’ve heard people claim that their comments were taken out of context. For the first time this week, it actually seemed to be true. The first rendition of Clarskongate I heard featured only the line about the shooting. It was only later the full clip emerged and set his words in a wider context.

He’d begun by thanking them (the strikers) for keeping London’s streets and restaurants empty so that he (and his equally privileged chums, no doubt) could zip about more easily, before going on to point out that as this was the BBC, and they were required to present a balanced view, that they should all be shot. In front of their children. Clarkson said sorry, the BBC said sorry and th- OH BY THE WAY, DID I MENTION MY NEW DVD, FEATURING LOTS OF SIMILARLY FAUX CONTROVERSIAL TOSH, IS NOW IN THE SHOPS IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS? -en a subtext leaked out all over the place. Thank you Bonnie Greer – who I think I might actually love – once again proved herself to be the smartest observer in the room, in her appearance on Any Questions:

Bonnie Greer comments on ‘Clarksongate’. Any Questions, 2.12.11 ©BBC

My other favourite media was this little funny from The Times, spotted and tweeted by @IndiaKnight:

The last para    -      just here ^ .
So there we have it: JC has a DVD out for Christmas, the BBC is impartial and some people still take themselves and everyone else much too seriously. As you were.

 

Filed under: Noticing

November 28, 2011 • 2:11 pm 0

Day 13: A song that is a guilty pleasure

The Boy is Mine – Brandy & Monica

My old friend Adam and I used to disagree vehemently over this. It came out around the time he left – as it proved, permanently for the Southern Hemisphere – and I did him a minidisc mix (ha! remember minidisc? No, me neither) which contained not only several false starts of it, but a complex set of gags about it using the editable track title function of said format.

How guilty do I feel? well, obviously not *that* guilty: it’s a great song. What is there to feel guilty about? If I wanted to have some actual guilt, I should prolly pick something by Screwdriver, or Wagner, or Tomorrow Belongs To Me (although the Cabaret scene is amazing), so there’s no pleasure part.

In my quest for guilt, I suppose there’s a not-so-subtle undercurrent of masculine infidelity, but the video puts the lie to that, with Mekhi Phifer getting the door slammed in his face at the end. He might have been slippin’ it both ways for an undisclosed period of time, but Brandi and Monica have come to an understanding and he gets a double rejection. (You can read a brilliantly deadpan promo synopsis and all the other details here.)

What occurs ot me now, writing this is that whenever I hear this, I end up thinking about a clip I once accidentally saw of R Kelly, dressed in a business suit, wearing earrings and lifting a pair of baby seats (containing babies) out of the back of a Ferrari. I’ve tried to find the promo it came from to check it is actually two babies, but after wading through the confused ego of R Kelly for twenty minutes, I can take no more. It’s a brilliantly lazy shorthand for half a dozen aspirational mores – ‘Hey, chicks, dig me – I’m professional, successful, caring and busy’ –  but it seems my subconscious has made the connection for me, whereby a pair of innocents are used only as ciphers in a male control fantasy.

OK, now I feel guilty.

Filed under: Uncategorized

November 17, 2011 • 10:59 am 0

Day 12 – a song from a band you hate

Wonderwall – Oasis

(It’s a strong word, hate. I don’t know I’d really say I hated Oasis; as someone very succinctly said of Ricky Gervais’ recent call to the haters to ‘bring it’, you have to care to hate and I don’t know that I really care enough about Oasis to hate them. But anyway, hate is the rules, so…)

There was a time when I was quite impressed by Oasis. I remember seeing the video for Supersonic on the Saturday morning chart show and being impressed with how arrogant and boisterous they were; how unlike the prevailing trend (this was 1994: the charts were a cheez-rave sponsored by Lucozade) and how they seemed to make guitars matter again. But as time went by, the bravura they showed in front of camera proved to hide nothing deeper, they were that arrogant all the way down. Money, fame and attention only made them (and by ‘them’ I mean the Gallagher brothers) worse. Noel proved himself a second rate Beatles copyist, and Liam… well. Rarely has so much affection and adulation been wasted on so underserving a wretch.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the working classes – why, great-Grandfather Daddo even worked at a colliery (admittedly, he was site manager, but he still washed his hands before he had a wee) – whereas Liam Gallagher represents just about every good reason why the class system should be firmly re-established. What little stage presence he had was based purely on his evident willingness to fight anyone who could get passed his minders; over the course of a decade he had the massive chip on his shoulder gilded, feathered and sequined in an attempt to convince all and sundry of his artistic relevance, while all the time decrying anything so fey as artistry. Oasis’ appeal is/was a largely working class one I suspect: there were a lot of people for whom feelings of superstardom and power were entirely bound up with weekend drug experiences and disbelief that fit girls would be willing to screw you if you acted like you deserved it. But Oasis never did anything more with this potential: they continued to act as if they were just like the audience: lads, out for a few, with a bit sniff on a Friday and Saturday night, when they were by now so wealthy as to be able to buy huge swathes of Manchester , should they so choose. But they didn’t. They continued to stick it up their noses, piss it up the wall and spend it on Rolls Royce’s in swimming pools for album covers.

There are many Oasis songs; I don’t even hate this one the most (the one about having, ‘been around the world’ makes me want to kill dead things). I chose Wonderwall because while on the surface it was a great record, it quickly became ubiquitous and was adopted by everyone as a special anthem. It was at this point I turned on them because everyone was starting to love them and if they were who they claimed to be, they should have been The Fall and told everyone to fuck off.

These days they’re reduced to whining at one another about clothes and side projects to drum up the column inches. Perhaps they only thing that depresses me more than the Gallaghers is the music press’ willingness to give them the attention they think they deserve.

Filed under: Uncategorized

September 27, 2011 • 2:35 pm 0

day 11 – a song from your favorite band

Metronomy – The Look

Obviously, having ‘a favourite band’ is massively dumb, but right now Metronomy are my best ones. (Them and JLS).

Eight or nine years ago, I picked up an mp3 from a music blog (can’t remember which one, and it’s probably not there anymore anyway). It was during the initial concepting phase for a bit R&D project for the BBC ID&E project (don’t bother looking for it, it’s probably not there anymore either). I started to obssess about the way the song was layered and how game-like it was. An odd refrain is clumsily played on an accordion (or squeeze box or more likely, pro-tools plug-in) then reiterated on a guitar as chords and finally stitched together with a whomping drum-loop to create an off-kilter finale. It spoke of practice, and trying again and finally, success and I began to write a game-world where this idea of practice and play were intertwined: where no matter how unlikely (in fact the more unlikely the better) you started from, youwould always make your way to a play experience. The song was ‘Black Eye, Burnt Thumb’ by Metronomy, from ‘their’ (I say ‘their’ because at that point it was only really a ‘him’) first ep/mini album ‘Pip Paine pay back the £5000 you owe’ (which I can’t help but call, ‘Pip Pan, pay back the 5 grand’). That track almost made it as the one, but in the end, this won out.

Metronomy’s most recent, Mercury nominated album ‘The English Riviera’ is a beautiful, careful, outwardly delicate, inwardly, stoic record about places, growing up and going back.

‘The English Riviera’, as envisaged by the devon tourism and  marketing board, comprised Torquay, Brixham, Paignton and Torbay and was mocked and ridiculed at the time (if you lived in Devon, you’ll remember how everyone who came on holiday did so with a ready made quip about it, ‘hardly being the French one’.) And it stands now as a vast elephant of hubris and English failure.

But was it a failure? Should it be? Should we automatically dismiss the past, when we tried hard to be something we maybe weren’t quite? Looking back with cynicism and dismissing those periods when we might not have been quite as cool or looked quite as good as we thought we did is the default reaction. (It’s called post-modern, yeah?) But Metronomy have struck gold by doing exactly that: sharing the teenage diary; grasping that uneasy embarrassment and looking again, refusing to be ashamed and therein getting practice to make perfect. This is an album that will stand next to your teenage self,  put its arm round their shoulder and say, ‘hey awkward teenage kid with a walkman on a bench in the rain, don’t let them get you down. Don’t give up. Your hair looks terrible right now, but you are worth it. Those bigger boys, the one’s who sneered, ‘Did you read it in a big book? Maybe it was them who were scared; maybe that’s why they’re giving you the look. You’ll escape, you’ll find the gold elsewhere, But for now, let’s enjoy sitting on this bench in the rain, eh?’.'This town, this town… it’s the oldest friend of mine.’ Metronomy are post-post-modern: they mean it.

Metronomy – The Look

Filed under: 30 days of music

September 12, 2011 • 4:08 pm 0

Day 10: A song that makes you fall asleep

Tears in Rain – Vangelis (Blade Runner OST)

I first saw Blade Runner with the flu. I kept drifting off into sleep, leaving fragments of dialogue and 80s synth washes dotted around my fevered dreams. Then ten years after that, The Rutger Hauer snippet kept cropping up in ambient mixes, triggering in me the woozy sensations all over.

I still struggle to stay awake through the film, but that’s mostly for pleasure nowadays.

You may or may not know/care that the film and the soundtrack have been reversioned several times (5 versions of the film, going on 40 releases of the OST), but you should be able to get everything you ever possibly could from it here.

Filed under: Uncategorized

June 16, 2011 • 2:01 pm 0

day 09 – a song that you can dance to – Heatwave by Martha Reeves & The Vandellas

I can actually dance to pretty much anything (as I am actually an awesome dancer) but this is a song that is designed from the ground up to make anyone dance, no matter how leaden footed they consider themselves to be. Try listening to this on headphones, walking along, and I bet after those first few bars you’ll break into a little skippety hand clap on your very own black n white soul train highlight.

Martha Reeves & The Vandellas – Heatwave

Filed under: 30 days of music

June 2, 2011 • 9:55 am 0

Things I should be doing

Things I should be doing today include writing a pitch, moving the downstairs cooker and laying the stones around the chicken yard.

Things I shouldn’t be doing include dicking about making mix tapes. But seeing as I have…

Harsh Words In Savage Times 

Filed under: Uncategorized

June 1, 2011 • 11:33 am 0

day 08 – a song that you know all the words to – Subterranean Homesick Blues – Bob Dylan

I was tempted to insert a modern ‘hit’ into this gap, as I’m struggling to find somewhere to fit something by current faves Metronomy, Jo Mount is truly a genius songwriter (not to mention arranger and composer) but I’ve managed to fit them in elsewhere (stay tuned, song fans!) Seeing however as this entire endeavour is mostly an exercise in showing off, I thought I’d choose my party piece (I don’t get invited to many parties these days. Go figure!). Haven’t done it in a few years, so some of the lines might be out of order – and there is obviously no point me checking, because I’ll then be tempted to change it.
It’s an interesting song this one; I’ve heard Bob Dylan lambasted recently for (amongst other things) writing lyrics that only work when sung; that when written down, hold no value as ‘just’ poetry.
That might be true in some instances, but there’s some brilliantly fleet imagery and great one liners in here:

Johnny’s in the Basement,
mixing up the medicine
I’m on the pavement
thinkin’ ’bout the government
A man in trenchcoat
badge out straight off
says he’s got a bad cough
wants to get paid off
look out kid,
it’s somethin’ you did
God knows when
but you’re doin’ it again
Better duck down the alleyway
Get yourself a new friend
man in a coon skin cap
and a pig pen
wants 11 dollar bills
but you only got ten

Maggie comes a fleet foot
face full of black soot
talking bout the heat puttin’
plants in the bed but
her phone’s tapped anyway
many come and many says
they must bust in early May
orders from the DA
Look out kid
don’t matter what you did
you better walk on tiptoes
don’t tie no bows
and keep away from those that hang around the fire hose
keep a clean nose
and watch the plain clothes
you don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows

aww, get sick get well
hang around the ink well
ring bell hard tail (?)
If anything it’s gonna sail
try hard, get barred
get back, write braille
get jail, jump bail,
join the army if you fail.
look out kid
your’e gonna get hit
by users, cheaters
six-time losers
girl by the whirlpool
is looking for a new fool
don’t follow leaders
and watch the parkin’ meters

Get born, keep warm
learn to dance, short pants romance
get dressed get blessed
try to be a success
please her, please him
twenty years of schoolin’ and they put you on the dayshift
ah look out kid,
they keep it all hid
you better jump down a manhole,
light yourself a candle
don’t wear sandals- you can’t afford the scandal
don’t wanna be a bum
you better chew gum
the pump don’t work ‘cos the vandals took the handle.

go on, test me:

Bob Dylan – Subterranean Homesick Blues

Filed under: 30 days of music

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