Time-lapse video has provided me with some of my most memorable cinematic/TV moments. From Ron Fricke’s wonderful Baraka, Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi or the sequences seen in many of David Attenborough’s BBC wildlife documentaries. Have a look at this beautiful Sean Stiegemeier film, shot in Iceland in the area surrounding Eyjafjallajökul during the more active phase of the current eruptive cycle. Music is by Jónsi of Sigur Rós fame.

The opening section of Dark Night of the Soul reminds me a lot of Sparklehorse’s brilliant It’s a Wonderful Life of 2001. In fact, despite the wealth of talented collaborators involved here, ranging from Nina Persson, Gruff Rhys, Wayne Coyne, Jason Lytle, Iggy Pop and Suzanne Vega, it is the influence of Mark Linkous that comes through most strongly throughout the 13 tracks. There is enough variety of musical style here to appeal to fans of many different genres of music and Danger Mouse ties it all together with masterful production. Very highly recommended.

Inspired by a David Lynch photoshoot, here’s a video preview of the tracks on the record.

Shearwater and The Decemberists are currently my favourite two American bands. Last year’s The Hazards of Love by The Decemberists keeps getting queued up during my working day and the new release from Shearwater, The Golden Archipelago, is next on my list of albums to which to lend my ears. I strongly urge you to search these releases out.

Tattoos normally do nothing for me but I must admit to loving this one.

Originally from celebrityskin

This week I watched A Serious Man (Coen brothers, 2009) and I’m still turning it around in my head and puzzling over aspects of the film. I enjoyed it at first viewing and have found that my enjoyment of it has increased in the hours that followed and with the luxury of reflection. However, I can see why some viewers would find watching it a frustrating and unsatisfying way to spend 2 hours. This review is full of plot spoilers and also probably won’t make complete sense if you haven’t seen the film.

Successful theatre actor Michael Stuhlbarg is cast as Larry Gopnik, our latter-day Job and principal protagonist. He excels in the role and I think it does wonders for the film in general that the star-heavy casting of Burn After Reading is shunned for far less ‘well-kent’ cinema faces. Other particularly notable work comes here from George Wyner as Rabbi Nachtner and Fred Melamed as Sy Ableman, although the acting from the entire cast is impeccable throughout.

The photography for the film is another masterclass from long-time Coen brothers collaborator Roger Deakins. Each scene is beautifully framed and naturalistically lit, with just a nod to hyperreality. Deakins has also done great work for other directors on such films as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, The House of Sand and Fog, Kundun and Jarhead.

For the benefit of anyone who is unaware of the plot, A Serious Man is the story of an ordinary man’s search for clarity and meaning in a universe where, just lately, bad things keep happening to him for no apparent reason. It is late spring 1967, and Larry Gopnik, a physics professor at a quiet university in the US mid-west, has just been informed by his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) that she wants a divorce, or ‘get‘ as she puts it. She has ‘become very close’ with one of the family’s more pompous acquaintances, Sy Ableman, who seems to her to be a more substantial person, a serious man (or mensch) in comparison with Larry.

Larry’s unemployable oddball brother Arthur (Richard Kind), forever locked in the bathroom draining a sebaceous cyst on his neck, spends a lot of his time working on a hugely complex probability map for the universe, which he calls ‘The Mentaculus’. Larry’s son Danny (Aaron Wolff) is a weed-smoking idler at the local Hebrew school preparing for his bar mitzvah while continually sidestepping a $20 debt owed to his drug dealer classmate. Daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus), when she’s not fruitlessly waiting for Arthur to get out of the family bathroom (“I’ll be out in a minute!”), is stealing money from Larry’s wallet in order to save up for a nose job.

While his wife and Sy Ableman make new domestic arrangements Larry is forced to move out to The Jolly Roger motel with his brother. An anonymous hostile letter-writer is trying to ruin Larry’s chances for tenure at the university, alluding to his supposed ‘moral turpitude’. Also, a South Korean student is trying to bribe Larry for a passing grade in Physics while the student’s father threatens Larry with either a defamation lawsuit or an allegation of corruption, depending on whether the alleged bribe is accepted or not. The beautiful woman next door torments Larry by sunbathing nude and his other neighbour is brazenly encroaching over the boundaries between their properties with his lawnmower and his plans to build a boathouse. And so the pressures build on Larry’s shoulders. Struggling for explanations and direction, he seeks advice from three different rabbis. Hilarity ensues.

The film has many intriguing talking points but it is the opening sequence and, particularly, the ending that I find myself pondering about most. The film opens with a most perplexing prologue, entirely in Yiddish, set in a nineteenth century shtetl within what was then Russia and is now Poland. A man returns home to tell his wife he has met someone interesting on his trip back from the marketplace to sell geese, a respected elder that she knows. When he names the man however, her demeanour darkens. She proclaims that God has cursed them, insisting that this elder died three years previously of typhus and that her husband must have encountered a dybbuk. There’s a knock on the door and the husband reveals he has invited the man back for some soup. When the visitor refuses the soup, the wife takes it as proof that this really is a dybbuk (demons do not eat) and stabs him in the chest with an ice pick. At first the old man just stares at the wife, there is no blood and then he starts to laugh. We begin to think she may well have been right, but then, as the old man turns his attention to the husband we see his shirt begin to darken and, saying he does not feel well and knows where he is not welcome, the old man gets up and stumbles outside into the snow. The husband laments his ill fortune, while the wife, still apparently convinced that the visitor was already dead, tells him not to worry. The screen fades to black and the opening credits roll.

What are we to make of this? Later in the film, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and the paradox of Schrodinger’s cat are mentioned several times and I think this prologue should be viewed with these in mind. Once the old man has stumbled out into the snow, there can be no certainty as to whether he really was a dybbuk or if the couple have just murdered an innocent elderly man. The husband and wife’s future luck, or lack thereof, may or may not have anything to do with the incident, but the fact that they may believe that it does may push them towards making decisions based on an interpretation of the event that has no inherent meaning. No certainty.

So to the ending. Larry is in his office, his son Danny is in the classroom with his transistor radio listening to Jefferson Airplane‘s Somebody To Love. Arlen Finkle, the comically italicised man from the tenure committee standing in Larry’s doorway, has congratulated him on Danny’s successful bar mitzvah and hinted that Larry will be pleased with the forthcoming decision on his tenure. Danny is trying to repay the $20 he owes to his dealer. The universe is about to find balance. You feel the worst must have now passed for Larry. But then …. Larry opens a $3000 invoice from his retainered attorney and as the weight of his burdens finally break him he erases the F grade given to his blackmailing South Korean student and replaces it with first, a C grade, then after a 2 second consideration, a C minus to assuage his guilt. What happens next could be seen as a direct consequence of that damning afterthought. The phone rings immediately the minus is added to the C grade and Larry’s doctor then tells him that he’s cleared some time for him and needs to see him right away about Larry’s chest x-ray results (“How about right now? Now is good.”). Medically, it does not sound good for Larry at all. Then cut to the exterior of Danny’s school and the kids waiting outside the locked basement doors as their elderly teacher ineffectually fumbles with the keys and a giant tornado crawls ominously towards them …… roll credits.

Job 1:19 “And, behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead”

You may view this type of open-ended closing sequence as thought-provoking and startling or, alternatively, you may think these fade-to-black Sopranos-style endings are all the rage because they tend to imbue the film-makers with a hue of genius where that hue may or may not be deserved. I personally felt that here it was a poignant and perfectly fitting way to close A Serious Man. Before those final five minutes the film seemed to point, depending on your religious inclinations, either to Jesus’s declaration that “God sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” or the fact that the universe is both chaotic and indifferent to the actions of human beings. Everything else is “mere surmise”. That ending throws you what I believe Americans call a ‘curve ball’.

“The Uncertainty Principle proves we can’t ever really know what’s going on. So it shouldn’t bother you, not being able to figure anything out.” Larry tells his students during a dream sequence. “Although you will be responsible for this on the midterm.” Life doesn’t make sense, but we’re still responsible for it, even if we had no idea what we were doing. Like killing a man thinking he’s a dybbuk, if he turns out not to be. Or when, by doing nothing, we become responsible for buying Santana’s Abraxas from the mail-order Columbia Record Club. Incidentally, the gnostic meaning of the word Abraxas as a God higher than the Christian God and Devil, that combines all opposites into one Being, can be viewed as interesting as Larry “does not want Abraxas, does not need Abraxas and will not listen to Abraxas”. Heap on more peculiarity as Santana did not release Abraxas until 1970, three years after this story takes place. The plot thickens.

The film has the feel of a parable, and the Yiddish prologue does much to set it up that way, but I think the ending purposefully denies it any sort of all-encompassing meaning, or much in the way of guidance beyond the message from Rashi that opened the film – Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you. Or, as the South Korean student’s father urges “Please. Accept mystery.”. A Serious Man is an extremely well-crafted and thought-provoking film which undoubtedly raises many more questions than it answers.

Mainstream commercial music may be controlled by Simon Cowell (or as I think of him, the Beast) but as the collection of sublime albums below testifies, the alternative scene is as strong as it ever has been. These 50 albums could quite happily keep me going for years on a desert island but if I had to select a few for special praise I think I’d go for those releases by The Decemberists, Bill Callahan, Malcolm Middleton and Grizzly Bear as being those I’ve gone back to the most.

The list is, as last year’s, not in any order of preference but follows a more conventional alphabetical listing.

Bubbling under …….

Regina Spektor – Far
M. Ward – Hold Time
Japandroids – Post-Nothing
Eels – Hombre Loco
The Clientele – Bonfires On The Heath

I had originally intended spending the night in the back of our trusty Volvo estate, parked up in the lovely lochside car park on the east bank of Loch Lubnaig. However, on arrival at nightfall, I found 3 or 4 boozy bonfires in full swing and any thoughts of a quiet contemplative hour with a lager and the moonlit loch quickly disappeared. I continued north on the A84 to Strathyre and found refuge in the large (and empty) car park there. I marvelled, as I always do when outside the city, at the vast number of stars on show and the easily discernible Milky Way.

I was awake, fed and dressed by 7am, dropped the car at the side of the road at Ardchullarie More and set off on foot through the trees towards the path north through Glen Ample. The walk is initially very picturesque, tree-covered and very steep until breaking out into Glen Ample proper. After around 7.5k of fairly easy walking you reach the farm called Glenample and turning right immediately start ascending steeply through the trees towards Ben Vorlich. The path appears and disappears seemingly at random but in general skirts a hundred metres or so to thenorth of Allt a’ Choire Fhuadaraich, ascending relentlessly and quickly revealing good views of the surrounding area. On reaching the summit of Ben Vorlich I was a little disappointed as the cloud base was covering the top 50 or 100 metres and obscuring what would otherwise have been a wonderful view all the way back across Stirlingshire towards Edinburgh.

While devouring a scotch egg and some chocolate I gazed across at the possible routes up neighbouring Stuc a’ Chroin. From this viewpoint it was apparent that there are at least two routes. There is the easy, if steep, pull up the corrie wall lying to the north of the summit and a harder and steeper climb up a chimney lying just to the left of the bealach ridge between Ben Vorlich and its neighbour. I made for the chimney but backed off after some indecision. Perhaps if I had been with another climber I would have chanced it but on this solo trip I settled on the safer option.

The clouds lifted a bit while making for the summit of Stuc a’ Chroin and revealed some better views out to the north. It had been my intention to make for the corbett of Ben Each on the way back towards Ardchullarie More but upon reaching the flatter ground between there and the previous munro I began to feel fairly washed out. I’d brought too little in the way of food for such a lengthy walk and I began to feel what road cyclists and marathon runners refer to as a “bonk” coming on. I made for the path through Glen Ample some 350 or 400 metres below.

The walk back through the Glen was not nearly as pleasant as that of the morning due to fatigue really settling in but upon reaching the car I could reflect on a good day out on the hills. Supplies of food and drinks were fallen upon and inhaled and I’d happily made it back in time to listen to the second half of the football on Radio Scotland. Hibs failing to produce anything resembling a decent display, going down 2-0 to Hamilton.

First attracting public notice as the guitarist from the now disbanded Arab Strap, Malcolm has forged a pretty successful solo career and has released five albums of material under his own name in the last 7 years. Self-deprecating, darkly humorous and laced with ironic jibes at modern “cultural” life, his music is nowhere near as miserablist in timbre as his public reputation would have you believe. It is this reputation that has prompted him to state that this will be his last album release of this kind. He feels “pigeon-holed” and wants to experiment with new musical directions. Having heard him play a couple of instrumental solo acoustic pieces, including the wonderful Returning, I’m looking forward to hearing what he comes up with.

Cabaret Voltaire‘s not a great venue if you are merely of average height and want to actually see the stage while the gig is in progress. I often resort to standing on the steps leading down from the bar. You get the best view but have to put up with folk coming and going past you all the way through the gig. The music from Malcolm and his band is great and infects the crowd with a jokey bonhomie. Lots of songs from the new(ish) album Waxing Gibbous, with a few older numbers thrown in for good measure. There’s even a tongue-in-cheek rendition of Brian Adams’ Run To You as a closer. The album itself now ranks as my favourite of Malcolm’s so far, overtaking 2005′s Into The Woods. You can get Malcolm’s album for a bargain £8 from Full Time Hobby records.

After the gig we repair to the Jinglin Geordie pub on Fleshmarket Close. Nicely tucked away from the braying festival hordes lining the Royal Mile. A nice wee pub for the discerning Edinburgh tippler.

I didn’t keep a note of the set list on the night but, from memory, it was something like this:

Red Travellin’ Socks
Subset Of The World
Box & Knife
Loneliness Shines
Kiss At The Station
Shadows
Zero
Choir
Speed On The M9
A Brighter Beat
We’re All Going To Die
Blue Plastic Bags
Ballad Of Fuck All
Don’t Want To Sleep Tonight
Run To You

Email me if the list is wrong and I’ll rectify.

photo of Malcolm at the Cabaret Voltaire by Martin Senyszak

A group of ten of us, all locals, descended on The Stand in Edinburgh as part of an evening of Festival cheer. I had never seen Stewart perform live before, outside of television or DVD, and I felt my high expectations for the hour long set could not possibly be met. This set starts without making any reference to a distressing world event in an unfamiliar and confrontational manner in the way some of his earlier shows have done. Never more hilariously than at the very start of 2004s Stand Up Comedian where Lee opened with his take on American “over-reaction” to the events of 9-11 (the 9th of November). This evening’s opening material centres instead on an incident which happened to Stewart in a London branch of Café Nero with his young son.

One of the great things about Stewart Lee’s stand-up is that you just don’t know how serious (or not) he is about some of his pronouncements. Does he really wish full blindness upon Jeremey Clarkson’s three children? Does he wish equally, that Richard Hammond had been decapitated during the dragster crash he had in 2006, his still sentient head bouncing across the tarmac into a pool of urine? These are just “jokes” he says. In the Top Gear sense of the word that is. Still, “they are also co-incidentally” what he actually believes. This ambiguity creates a real emotional awkwardness in his audience which rarely fails to induce laughter.

Did Lee really attend the same school as Richard Hammond? I suspect he did, but the stories of their time there together probably hold only the very slightest grain of truth, if any. Does it matter? Of course not. Lee finishes a tale of his heroic, but ultimately thankless, rescue of Hammond from bullies through the use of his privileged status as a library monitor with the proviso “now, that story about Richard “The Hamster” Hammond (he isn’t a real hamster) isn’t true, but I think it tells us a lot about him”. Such is Lee’s relaxed manner with the audience, and the rapid rapport he builds up with us, that we all nod along in agreement. Hammond is indeed an ungrateful rat of a man who selfishly sold us out. Us, the rightful heirs to any profit to be made from book or TV deals resulting from the near-fatal crash which we, the licence fee payer, funded. Relax, it’s a “joke”.

Like Hammond, the cider manufacturer Magners was also the recipient of Lee’s ire. Not only had they appropriated their TV ad strapline “Give it to me straight, like a pear cider made from 100% pear(s)” from the common and varied usage the phrase had enjoyed within the Lee family for generations but, more painfully, they had ruined Steve Earle’s The Galway Girl for Lee by using it in a previous TV ad. The song had been Lee’s favourite of the past decade or so and had held warm associations with his wife, the comedian Bridget Christie.

Stewart Lee is always keen to push the boundaries of his chosen artform and closed his set by confronting what he described as “the final comics’ taboo”. This, in his words, “is to do something sincerely, and to do it well” and involved him performing The Galway Girl (albeit with a couple of comic additions) with an acoustic guitar, accompanied by an on-loan fiddle player. Whilst this form of finale is almost the stylistic polar opposite of the surreally dark “vomiting into the anus of Christ” skit which closed his 90s comedian show of 2005/06, it still surprised his audience. It was heartfelt and the audience saw that. Highly recommended.

photo of Stewart Lee credit to: Gavin Evans

Broadly, the book tells of the author’s gradual relinquishing of his passion for amateur racing cycling in the face of growing maturity and the responsibility which arrives with becoming the father of twins and, little more than 18 months later, the tragic death of his wife Ruth from breast cancer. His racing career is mapped out over ten years and is told in parallel with his developing relationship with a fellow student, who is to become his wife. Seaton is a talented writer and the descriptions of his training bike rides and race meetings are vivid. The detailing of race strategy and the complex unwritten etiquette of the racing cyclist are enlightening, written in a way which is appealing to cyclists and non-cyclists alike. I don’t think I have ever read a book which better brings to life the experience of serious road cycling.

I identify with this book most strongly due to the restrictions on my own two-wheeled ambitions brought by the responsibility of bringing up my own twins. I have never been dedicated enough as a cyclist to regularly shave my legs or join a cycling club for instance but the dream of riding the route of the Tour de France in the wake of the real riders one year, stage by stage, must in the real world remain just that, a dream.

Even if you have almost no interest in cycling I would still recommend this book to you. It is an elegy both to the author’s late wife and to the obsessions and freedoms of youth. Poignant, honest and beautifully written.

Eli appears to be locked into a bizarre relationship with an old man named Hakan (Per Ragnar). He is assumed to be Eli’s father by the neighbours but actually he serves as a supplier of blood, in an increasingly inept fashion, killing random strangers at night and siphoning their blood into plastic containers. In the novel, I am led to believe Eli’s adult helper is actually a paedophile who has lost his job as a teacher and has been taken in by the vampire. In the film version he has become a submissive vampire “familiar”. The book spells out in far greater detail how perverse their relationship can be. The film only suggests at his perversity in the overpossessive way he reacts to her friendship with Oskar and in the regal disdain she occasionally exhibits in return.

The film is mainly accurate in the depiction of traditional vampire lore. Eli is unnaturally strong, moving with speed and stealth, she climbs like a spider, she deteriorates into decrepitude if she doesn’t feed, sunlight burns her, and she must be invited into a house before entering. What happens if a vampire enters your house uninvited is shown here in truly memorable fashion in one of several breathtaking scenes. The bravura closing scene at the school swimming pool is brutally unique.

Tomas Alfredson directs in a restrained, atmospheric, at times almost documentary style that plays down the supernatural aspects and the gore. This more subtle approach lends the film’s more visceral moments added punch. The audacious sound design also adds much to the film’s success, with the vividly impressionistic noises made by the vampire while feeding or while physically growling with hunger particularly effective. Unlike most modern “horror” films, which tend to rely on gore and bloody violence to disturb the viewer, it is the quieter moments in this film that make the experience at the same time both sweet and unsettling. In some ways Let The Right One In is more concerned with the everyday horrors of childhood than the more visceral horrors of the blood-thirsty undead.

At one point in the film there is a brief shot of Eli’s genitals as Oskar accidentally sees her dressing. He gives an audible gasp as he sees that she appears to have been mutilated. A large scar is evident where the missing genitals should be. The scene is very brief and it is never discussed afterwards but it presents the possibility that Eli was originally a boy. Earlier in the film she stated to Oskar that she “wasn’t a girl” and you assume at the time she is hinting at her vampirism. The novel does give more in the way of backstory for Eli and her familiar, Hakan, but the film version leaves things in a far more ambiguous position.  Lina Leandersson’s voice has been dubbed with a less feminine sounding voice throughout the film to increase the androgynous quality of her character.

While Hedebrant is very good as the vulnerable Oskar who, while meek and introverted, displays a disturbing potential for future violence, Leandersson is particularly impressive as Eli, the conflicted young vampire who wants nothing more than to be an ordinary girl (boy?) again. By turns sweet, shocking and ultimately genuinely moving, Let the Right One In is a stunning and original film that you will be glad you sought out.