I like this band from Perth, Western Australia, which produces a clever update of sixties psychedelia. I possess their first EP, and first two studio albums, Innerspeaker(2010) and Lonerism(2011). The psychedelic sound is now much misunderstood — listeners today confuse it with glam-rock, early heavy metal, and other trends which were distinct back in the sixties and seventies. They even looklike psychedelic bands actuallydid, rather than the cartoon hippies imagined by the media. I think this band comes much closer to the introspective, dreamlike quality that musicians back then achieved after dropping acid while camping in the desert, or some such inspiration. It’s a little more calculated and technologically hip, but it’s at least in the same ballpark. There are plenty of memorable songs, with distinct mood and character, in their corpus, so far: “Skeleton Tiger” and “Half Full of Glass” on the EP; “Solitude Is Bliss”, “Lucidity”, “Expectation” and “Why Won’t You Make Up Your Mind?” on Innerspeaker; “Elephant” and “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards” on Lonerism. All three records are good, but Innerspeakerappeals to me most. I can’t listen to it without feeling like I’m waking up on an empty Western Australia surfing beach, after a night of hard partying, with a philosophical twinkle in my eye. Lonerismis gloomier, with Aussie innocence shifting into European artfulness.
Tame Impala
Thursday, July 18, 2013 — Steve Muhlberger on “Democracy in Trouble”
A fine, succinct post on the current dysfunctional state of democracyin both Canada and the United States.
sample:
Indeed an even more important principle has been lost track of in just the last few years. That is the idea that the Prime Minister and his cabinet only hold office when they can command the confidence of the House of Commons. Remember when Steven Harper was held in contempt of Parliament by majority of the members? And the Governor General let him get away with ignoring this and treating it as merely a partisan stunt? One can have a certain amount of sympathy for the Governor General who probably felt that if she fired Harper instead of letting him prorogue Parliament, she would enjoy no support whatsoever in the political class. She was right, but right here the Canadian Constitution broke down, and few people noticed or at least took it seriously.
Wednesday, July 17, 2013 — Tim Burton Predicted Toronto’s Fate in 1992
When Rob Ford was elected Mayor of Toronto in 2010, I felt no hesitation in predicting that he would unleash a tidal wave of chaos, incompetence and corruption on our fair city. His type of phony-baloney “populism” was nothing new to me, and the results predictable. My evaluation has been confirmed a thousand times over.
This evening, I was watching Tim Burton’s second Batman film, Batman Returns(1992), and was in stitches over the obvious resemblance between Ford’s campaign and personality, and the Penguin, as portrayed by Danny DeVito. The Penguin runs for mayor of Gotham City on pretty much the same platform, and his physical resemblance to Ford makes it all the more delightful. Thinking I might find a good still from the film on the internet to illustrate my point, I discovered that many other people had made the same connection. The above image was all over the web. Kudos to the anonymous humourist who created it.
Umekichi — The Voice of the Geisha
I listened to this album while watching one of Yasujirō Ozu’s silent films, Passing Fancy [出来ごころ; Dekigokoro] (1933), after a massive sushi lunch. Umekichi is the performing name of Okayama Kurashiki, a pop/folk musician who sings and plays shamisen. It seems that she pokes fun at both Japan’s ephemeral pop music and the classical tradition by effortlessly blending the two. This, apparently, has not been taken well by Japanese folklorists, for whom every ditty about cherry blossoms is sanctified. The playful sarcasm comes across to me in her voice, though of course I can’t understand a word of it. For me, it’s just one more tentative little foray into Japan’s immensely complex and thoroughly confusing popular culture.
Image of the month: The Space Willies
An Ace Double cover from 1971, a typically impish one by artist Kelly Freas. This is ACE DOUBLE 77785, a reprint with new cover art of D‑315 published in 1958. By this time, ACE Doubles had switched to the “tall” format to conform to standard paperback racks. ACE Doubles had two books bound together, each upside down in relation to the other. In this case, both sides were books by Eric Frank Russell (the other one was a short story collection called Six Worlds Yonder). Russell was British, but his style was convincingly American, and few readers of American SF magazines knew this. In some ways, he was similar to Clifford Simak, but with a more satiric tone. As early as 1941, Russell was crewing his future space ships with multi-racial characters. One of the earliest Science Fiction stories that had an intense emotional affect on me was his Dear Devil, which I read as a small child.
FILMS – JUNE 2013
(Winchcombe 2012) Orkney’s Stone Age Temple
(Griffith 1909) A Corner in Wheat
(Castle 1963) Zotz!
(Cline 1941) Never Give a Sucker an Even Break Read more »
First-time listening for June, 2013
22269. (James Brown) Greatest Hits
22270. (Drowning Pool) Desensitized
22271. (Philip Glass & Allen Ginsberg) Hydrogen Jukebox
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READING – JUNE 2013
20973. (Erik R. Kandel) In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind
20974. (Steve Muhlberger) [in blog Muhlbergers’ World History] George R. R. Martin, Master
. . . . . Storyteller [article]
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“The Hunters Who Owned Themselves” Translated into Japanese
There is now a Japanese edition of The Secret History of Democracy. I am most curious to know, but will probably never know, how my prose in “The Hunters Who Owned Themselves” reads in Japanese translation, or how the mixture of English, French, Michif and Cree terminology was handled. Unfortunately, I do not yet possess the publication data… only that a Japanese edition has existed for several months. Perhaps some Japanese reader who is fluent in English will report to me on this matter. Read more »
Bombay Bicycle Club
The first I heard of Bombay Bicycle Club was the song “How Can You Swallow So Much Sleep?” from their third album A Different Kind of Fix(2011), which got some play here in Canada. But other songs I heard, from an earlier album, didn’t sound very similar, and I didn’t connect them in my head until, searching for the EP version of “How Can You…”, I acquired all three of their albums. We are in an age in which musicians are much less tribal than they used to be. The bands that make the strongest impression today tend to be eclectic, drawing on many sources for their style, and changing their style as the mood suits them. They cannot easily be classified. This London band exemplifies the trend. A Different Kind of Fixis Read more »