Mana Wind Howls

At Taey's opening night we were very happy to get a short performance from the brilliant Whang Bo Ryung (황보령), playing solo with only an acoustic guitar for accompaniment.

Her voice is a marvel just by itself- gravelly, heavily textured and full of gradient, accelerating from half-reflective dream-talk to full-throated aggro-punk yelp in the space of a bar.

The songs veered wildly across rapid, almost Celtic strumming, to rippling and unresolved arpeggiation, to sprawling, panoramic landscape.

With any luck, we will be able to see her play a big show on the 30th in Seoul in support of the vast and unpredictable "Mana Wind" record, which has been soundtracking our mornings here this last week.

Older and Angrier

Chris and I were at the Camden Underworld last week, sharing a warren of bad-tempered bars with an embarrassingly male crowd, many of whom were plainly mourning the passing of Sleazy Christopherson from TG the previous night.

The support band plainly had no awareness of this, as they were two fresh faced Canadian women on a rush from some greasy cross-channel ferry to make the show on time. The name "Pack A.D." didn't bode well, but they were a brilliant object lesson in using every ounce of capability and nerve they possess to exponential effect. The drummer was using her sticks like hammers, and barely played off the 1 and the 3 all gig. This didn't matter in the slightest as she was plainly the social and logistical lynchpin of the group; her compadre was a razor-blade slim guitarist who played deceptively simple chords and riffs, but never the same one for very long at a time. Her singing had the traumatic bawl of a Kristin Hersh and the urgency of Johnny Cash. None of their songs seemed the same, which is always a sign of a great group.

No Means No have a set of songs that don't even sound like songs, which is why we love them so much. A blizzard of contorted, compulsive gestures, tunes and rages, kicking off with a squall of frustration called "Old": 'The older I get/ the angrier I am'. Glorious stuff.

Malfeasance

Stacy Makishi once again strides into uncharted, snowbound and doughnut-shaped territory, in search of something that sounds like identity, but thankfully turns out not to be. Her performance of "Bull: The True Story" at the Chelsea Theatre delights in flooding the pre-show audience with the performance, and contaminating the performance with the audience.

Two guests from the audience are blindfolded, and stood in front of a doughnut suspended by string from the ceiling; they lick and prod with their noses, hesitantly. Stacy is possessed by the spirit of characters within "Fargo", weirdly re-enacting responses and motor functions from the movie and pre-empting her audience's relationship with the doughnut.

This chilling symptom-esque physical projection is a parallel of the disturbing story of a (real?) Japanese woman searching for the fictional (?) money buried in the snow in the film "Fargo"; Stacy embeds vanishings and noisy fictions into the performance without so much as a missed missing persons poster. If this wasn't already enough, there's a tour de force of a self-re-morphing with a pair of tights pulled grotesquely over her head. Winning stuff.

Brain Bugged

Paul Verhoeven's "Starship Troopers" surprisingly turned up among the 25 best science fiction films of all time recently, and being a sucker for a convincing space opera, I had to check it out.

Reading some responses and commentaries online, there seemed to be some house-room for the idea that this movie is a clever commentary on fascism, militarism, the mediatised advertorial recruitment docudrama.

This is monstrous tosh of course. To create the anger necessary for this attack on an actual political course and working-through, Verhoeven would need actual characters who we care about enough to identify ourselves as the audience in opposition to that militarism. However, he seems to also want to make an homage to the square jawed camaraderie and paraphernalia of the first wave of technically pornographic cliffhanger sci fi on television.

However, this simply depoliticises his entire enterprise and leaves the wafer thin plot being prodded forward on a listless parade of barked orders, white toothed Americans, aliens disintegrating under a hail of bullets, and shiny spaceship interiors.

Family Fortunes

These two movies couldn't be more different; or more precisely, the characters in them have completely different relationships with their creators. Almodovar can even reserve some love for his reptilian construction magnate, and the voyeuristic poseur son. However dark, fearlessly exposing and vibrantly vengeful the exchanges in Solondz' film, I was left with the sense that he really doesn't like any of his characters, and that simply asks the question: Why should we pay them any attention? Only Philip Seymour Hoffman can carry the weight of the self-pitying, phone-masturbator without descending into a stagey live-action cartoon. There's nothing as naked as the moment Penelope Cruz steels herself to walk back out of her hotel bathroom, made-up and ready to perform after exhausting sex with the magnate.

'Broken Embraces' is carried strongly enough by Almodovar's respect for his creations to carry the very simple blindness-creation dichotomy that his plot sets up; in contrast "Happiness" only blares misanthropy at every masturbation scene and accusation of molestation or mutilation.

A Little Local Difficulty

These two novels are set more than a century and many thousands of miles apart, though they both tell a story of relentless inevitability and painfully intense locality. They both have the desperate sexual weakness of men at their heart, and both are fuelled by the unravelling of flimsy narratives to account for that weakness.

McCarthy gives us a travelogue, covering what seems to be only a few square miles of blasted yet fecund and revoltingly natural terrain, across which a woman travels searching for the son her brother fathered and gave to an itinerant. Stunted relationships with remote and fearful communities wither after a few pages each, as she ploughs on.

David Peace has written a war-story of a novel set in the heart of a police investigation into a series of brutal and lurid sexual murders in the North of England, jubilee year. It hasn't quite the shocking effect of "1974", and the dreadfully sticky, greasy, bluntly functional familiar details of relations between the English genders are not quite so garishly lit; I'm sure all the fuel and flesh missing from the TV adaptation is here.

Wasted Lives

Nick Cave can still grind out masterful couplets, probably jotting a dozen down before breakfast most days. "How many of you been wasting your lives/ On booze and drugs/ husbands and wives?"

Grinderman, playing especially in the slightly peeling, unpleasantly branded'n'sponsored, pink trifle of an interior that is the Hammersmith Apollo, are a splendid object lesson in Keeping It Simple.

These are songs about the wailing, flailing, obstreporous, vindictive tides of men's desire, and they never outstay their welcome or lose their sense of the ridiculous. There's rudimentary but fearsomely effective drums and bass, Cave's slash'n'burn guitar hysterics, and the wonderfully decorative but absolutely essential violin, bouzouki and maraca abuse provided by Warren Ellis, whose presence is symbolic of only the centrality of posture, hair, sweat and stare.

Be Quiet! We Can't Hear the Noise.

Our first visit to Cafe Oto, which is shamefully close by. It's an absolutely wonderful venue: Despite showcasing some of the most experimental, earsplitting music imaginable, the system is wonderfully understated, just filling the room with sound, letting your presence in the space be enough exposure to the noise. They also have an excellent alcohol policy: An amateurishly biro-ed sign propped on the bar announces "No sales during the performances".

This was absolutely essential during the solo cymbal with mixing/processing by Oceans of Silver and Blood. Long episodes of clanging, chiming silence, gradually shifting rise-and-fall of frequency reverberation. The cymbal player was out of sight behind his huge tam-tam, which added to the drama. "When's the next noise coming"?

ARAR had charmed us with home-made radio transmitters, simple jury-rigged wave-form machines and a sound propelled by the humane ebb and flow of bass frequency.

Good Dog, Good Dog

We were at the Oxford Playhouse last Friday, for 40 minutes of brilliantly delivered relationship analysis through Lassie, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and fearless self-examination. Stacey Makishi and her real-life partner Vick act out, in every sense of the phrase, a stream-of-consciousness dream sequence fuelled by the vivid visual and cinematographic residue of the thrashing, repetitive, resigned end of a relationship.

There are several tours-de-force: Vick pours water from a jug while stood at the top of a metal stepladder, into Stacey's mouth while she lays flat on her back at the base of the ladder, trying to sing through the waterfall; they both sit opposite each-other at a white-covered table, a pillow, a knife, and a black glove each between them and dinner when they both leap onto the table and eat like dogs.

Excellent visceral stuff delivered with gusto and good grace.

Ever Seen A Butcher Smile?

As always, the music is beautifully placed and judged, which is the marker for a film that is likely to be the same. (Michael Chion: "Sound is the principle means by which consistency and coherence are maintained and stimulated in cinema"). There's no music track at all during the 'action', or dialogue in "Eyes Wide Open"; simply the brief interludes, barely a minute long, feature some brief sketches of piano or string, repetitive short sequences of notes, playing the part purely of a Nothing, a breathe-in, a punctation mark. This technique places huge demands on the dialogue and the silences within the dialogue; as if to say: there is nothing in this film apart from what the people are doing and saying, and the music only occurs to remind the viewer of this point, and adds an exactly-judged Nothing to highlight it.

On the face of it, it's a just another dark love triangle. The most powerful scenes are really those between the butcher and his wife; heartbreakingly, she is only too aware of what he is doing at the shop, but carries this and confronts him with all the kindness and tact she can. The scene where the rabbi defends the butcher from the mob, but only at the cost of his ability to reason and convince, purely invoking his authority, is a desperate one. The film is a wonderful exercise in keeping-it-simple; there are no long sequences of speech, even from the Rabbis.

Frankfurt to Wiesbaden

There's a deceptively light social comedy style about this that manages to almost entirely mask the horrifying naivete, self-deception, broken trust and shallow propriety that fuel the wonderfully slight plot. As Ian McEwan does these days, with a great deal more portentousness and pomp, the faintest shift of events has consequences of hinted-at remorseless carnage. The climactic, almost apocalyptic horse-ride into the forest has left me actually quite shaken. You can probably get this for 99p on Amazon.

... Stands For Comfort

We were out at the Rio on Thursday night for the newest film by the maker of the brilliant and eye-popping "괴물", "Host", 봉준호 (Joon-Ho Bong).

A mother doggedly searches for those responsible for framing her son for the lurid and theatrical murder of a sexually precocious schoolgirl. It's not really a crime thriller though.

The male lead, such as he is, is played beautifully and subtly by Bin Won, and essays a vulnerable, autistic, hesitant, virtually directionless character.

The libido of the plot is entirely driven by the mother's relentless, innocently single-minded pursuit of the invisible, the hidden, the ignored, the conveniently forgotten. This takes her to some bleak scenarios, but the locales are never allowed to overwhelm her sense of purpose.

There are some visual tours-de-force: A golf course at first light, a man picking a driver out of a lake and wading to the bank with it. The mother pours soup into her son's mouth as he pisses against a blue-grey concrete wall by a bus stop.

There's an echo of Laura Palmer in Ah-Jung, as she wonders aloud about the explosive contents of her mobile phone photo folder, and an extremely unflattering portrait of the men of the legal and medical professions in small-town Korea in the reptilian and unctuous lawyer.

The mother's wonderfully judged awkward encounters with the town's schoolgirls, and the unblinking relationship they have with the denied world that Boon can hint at with his bored functionaries, offhand policemen, and self-serving institutional place-men, are compelling and nervelessly drawn.

Family Snapshots

Two films about families at war, with themselves, with each-other, and with the world at large. "Wasp" is a short by Andrea Arnold (maker of the brilliant "Red Road"), that plunges the viewer straight into the torrent of anger, pride and depthless devotion between a mother and her 4 daughters living on an unnamed estate somewhere in Essex. It's impossible not to hope that the children manage to keep themselves amused and safe outside a brutal bungalow-pub while their mother ekes out the couple of pounds she has trying to turn an old flame home from the army into boyfriend material, while trying to explain the children's presence away to him. Desperate and compelling stuff; I'm not sure if I cold have stood up to more than 25 minutes of that sort of tension, so the short format was just as well.

"The Brotherhood" (Tae Guk Gi) is a vast flashback of a war film, which derives all its power from the short sequences at the outset, framing the gunfights and civilian deaths in a search for the body of a lost 'other', a brother captured by the North Korean army and apparently turned into the leader of a terrifying elite unit. It's impossible not to see the enactment of a hoped-for reunification of North and South in the recovery of the older brother's body and the uncovering of the post-war life he had hoped for had he survived the war. The tools for progress in the future are firmly buried in the most violent moments from the past.

No Names

One from the 'Why Did I never Get Round To Watching' file. To it's credit, for a movie that provoked all kinds of moral froth and pompous outrage at the time of its release in 1972, Last Tango In Paris has not dated at all. The rightly infamous anal rape scene with the butter is perfectly set within the economy of the film as a whole; a sequence of moral and psycho-sexual tableaux are set up within the spatial personality of a Paris apartment, which seems to exert a terrible influence on "Paul" (Brando)and Jeanne (Maria Schneider). By far the strongest elements are the relationships and barriers set up and enabled by the apartment building itself: Glass partitions, door-frames, window blinds, shower curtains, internal windows all form a supporting cast of blindnesses, impediments, silences, exposings.

The film seems to lose its psychological confidence about an hour in: The asides featuring Jeanne's husband-to-be become ugly gear-changes, and the Paul-Jeanne relationship loses its dreamlike, Tragic dimension. Paul's character is far too over-drawn in comparison with the brief and comparatively lightweight treatment of Jeanne's life outside the apartment. The early sequences feel as if they are the scenes you would imagine reading a novel, fleshing-out spare words on a page.

Changed The Future

With Yoola, Gail, John, and Heidi we went to Brighton to see Lali Puna. This is a brilliant example of a group that is greater than the sum of its parts: Three fairly anonymous, charisma-free German rock-indie types with a drum kit, a bass guitar, and a heap of sampling kit. They are fronted, if that's not too crassly a rock role to be cast in, by a continuously nervous woman playing a sampler and a keyboard. The vocals are pale, repetitive, non-sequiturs and opaque sloganeering imprecations. It has a completely immersive and hypnotic effect, as if looped from a radio station that had ceased to be inspected by the sponsors some time ago.

I remember seeing Stereolab in a tiny hall somewhere in Hackney in about 1991, and this show had a similar effect; songs in the form of communiques or sonic postcards, a total lack of Rock Action, a quiet but compulsive buildup of persistence of form. It's completely refreshing to feel so un-performed-at but still entranced.

Land Locked Jazz

To obvious English ears, Eastern European music has a perceived tendency to the wild, psychotic, deranged, threatening. Of course, that only tells us so much about the elements of the English psyche that have been firmly denied and/or projected onto foreign musics.

These two groups were great fun; engaging, dedicated to their respective sounds, with no attitude toward their audience other than appreciation that they had one.

The bearded singer of Uz Jsme Doma made an excellent introduction: "It's great to be playing here in London at our first concert in the UK. However we have played in 57 different countries up to this point, so let's not get too excited about that..."

A couple of wild and extremely drunk Czech youths gyrated in front of us, ensuring a decent sized cordon sanitaire around them as those protecting their eye-wateringly expensive lager moved aside.

The aforementioned Uz Jsme Doma (Now We As At Home, my Czech-descended friend Simon tells me) were a bracing blast of punky post-Beefheart, with an excellent song that sounded like it was called "Siva A Schiva". That's unlikely to be real Czech there, though. They also did a nice shouted ballad about the time when there were Czech seafarers.

Much of the audience departed about then, including about half our compadres, muttering about "I ****ing hate ****ing jazz, you ****ing know I won't ****ing listen to it".

I really have no critical language to talk about jazz, which I think helps. The Contemporary Noise Sextet were just a very listenable modern jazz group. Drums, piano, and bass set up a rhythm: saxes, horns and guitars strike up a pleasant 5- or 7-note melody; melody breaks down into freeform soloing; city-scape back-projection works nicely with this: horns come back to the melody again, via some gurning from the guitarist and some so-happy-it-hurts smiling from the pianist. Simon and I kept wondering: Shall we make a run to the pub? No, let's catch one more by this lot.

Indian Ink

There's a luminous kind of writing, which creates a memory as if from one of your own dreams. It's troublesome to read, though, because I now think I have been to Venice during a Biennale, and Varanasi in the off season. Dyer seems to be writing about either someone else's story that he's convinced is his own; or about a dream he is yet to have.

Geoff Dyer is always very dryly funny, self-deprecating (when you know the character is his own cipher), and always puts you in the room. In "The Colour Of Memory", I was in the Brixton pubs and flat-shares that his characters rolled through. In this novel, I was in the heaving, Bellini-swigging tents of ego-fuelled installations.

Strangely, the second section set in India, is less powerful. Perhaps because I've been there for a little while, and the scenes have no dream-space to live in within my own memory. No room in the ethereal.

Zestless City

We were at the ICA recently, hoping for more of the widescreen, Little England Writ Large, almost autistically densely researched "London Orbital". Or at least some of the vivid observational and psychogeographic travelogues that Ian Sinclair dies so well. When his schtick works, it challenges you to see your own neighbourhood with the intensity of the foreign traveller or the manic anthropologist.

However, what we got was a high point of Sinclair reading from 'The Rose Red Empire', a beautiful passage drawing his own history as a flaneur, his partner's life alongside him, the research threads sewn into him by his friends, and the ever-present ghosts of Hackney's history.

After that, things went downhill rather drastically. Stewart Home could not get through a sentence without reference to his True Punk roots, or get away from a camp, stagey, verbose lecturing style. We all write texts essentially telling our own story louder than our subjects, but we do try to keep the Walter Mittyisms and name-dropping to a minimum, if only so that our audiences don't get the overwhelming impression that we are trapped in 1977 with a pocketful of SWP pamphlets and a Crass LP for interpretive tools. To hear Home talk, anybody would think he was a motormouth standup with no jokes and trapped in an orbit around a couple of memories of gigs at the Clarendon.

Ian Sinclair, sadly, was barely better. There was a dreadful encroachment of glistening-eyed memorophilia, beamoaning of practically every effect of the last 25 years. His riff on the Ballardesque fate of the Athens Olympic site absolutely honked.

Surely the task here in London is to generate the tools and language to capture the torrential and n-dimensional flux of developments, and to identify the flow of events around the built environment, be it fragile, irresistible or vanishing.

London's ghosts are going to be living in a louder world; they haunt cultures and traditions all over the world, so whining about the vanishing of the pub where someone's mum met someone who wrote teenaged Trotskyist manifestos is only ever going to come over as the most parochial backward-looking nostalgia.

The reason that "London Orbital" works so beautifully is that there is a powerful sense of the history of place being acted out, the making-itself-felt of the past, without the sepia-tint sense of a wish to return to it. London has a terrifying and unique ability to remind you of yourself, to cut you down to size, to confront you with episodes and scenes that you might have forgotten, or wanted to; to re-cast itself as a constant character in your life.

As place becomes contested and congested, as locality becomes overshadowed or emptied by the virtual and viral, as public space is redefined and colonised by commercial requirements, a psychogeography of London must resist the temptation to become inward-looking and nostalgic.

Auto Destruction By Appointment

There's a wonderful scene halfway through this novel, in a car during a heavy, wet snowstorm. The characters are stranded, one worrying about how long the engine will run, how long the heater will work, how far it might take to walk to a store through the clogged and draining snowdrifts, whether they might be hit and killed by a snowplough if they abandon the car. The other character sucks Chupa Chups and idly fantasises.

A nameless narrator preys on the lonely and directionless, two brothers bicker and fight over a girl who is intrigued by neither of them. The novel is fastidiously and thoroughly soundtracked, and there are no accidents in it.

Celluloid space-time

All the films I've seen recently have had a fraught or effortless relationship with space; space for events to occur in, space for characters to be in, space for events to flower in naturally, and not be cattle-prodded into motion by the demands of plot or 'action'.

I was thrilled to discover that the opening line to the beautiful Italian pop song "Rosetta e Cioccolado", from the soundtrack to 'Conseguenza dell'Amore' features a request for raspberry syrup.

It's a harsher, more gnarly film than I recalled from the cinema several years ago. Titta di Girolamo is more of a cipher, restlessly and fruitlessly twisting the strands that surround him. The scene in which he bluffs a Swiss bank into giving him £100,000 by simply sticking to his story that he had it when he came in, is gloriously offhand. Di Girolamo is sat in an upright chair, facing a nearly-drawn curtain, smoking languidly. A bank manager stares furiously at his clerks as the total they count up to falls a hundred grand short time and again. Titta smokes on, faking obliviousness.

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"The Double Life of Veronique" appeared to me to be one long dream sequence with the logic of a character study. The light, sudden unpredictable leaps of location, camera movement, focusing of peripheral characters in their rooms, are beautifully woozy and impenetrable, slightly threatening. It was the inverse or mirror image of the 'proper' movie, that might use dreamy techniques to tell the 'actual' story. Here the dream was the story, and the two Veroniques were broken up by the force of the fantasy she was living out.

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"Born Into Brothels" is a completely compelling documentary about the efforts of an American photographer who arrives in Bombay to make a photo essay about the women working in then sex industry there; once in situ, she realises that the children born to these women (and heart-rendingly, kept from school or college with the connivance or collusion of their mothers) are more urgent in terms of engaging subjects than her photo essay would have been. She gives them all disposable cameras, and teaches them to take pictures. The Bombay of the film is a seething, asymmetrical, Escheresque dimension. Several sequences take hand-held footage as

the camera rushes through alleys, rooms, cramped quarters, plunging the viewer into a space in which unimaginable sacrifices of motherhood and childhood are made without a blink.

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"You Ain't From Around Here"

"Let The Right One In" is almost certainly being remade and ruined in Hollywood as we speak. It's a brilliantly grey-white, muddied-snowfield of a film about the messy and contradictory and awkward and relentless business of being foreign and Other. The vampire element is wonderfully submerged within the alcoholism, teenaged fascination, petty small-town regrets, fears and revenges.

The snow is often slushy and dirty and scuffed and stained with mud or road grit or blood. A housing estate looks efficiently made, but essentially cheap, and probably poorly insulated. Sudden silences and empty schools after hours are cavernous, charged and active characters within the visual population of the film.

Plainly, there's an allegory for the disorientation and alienation of the immigrant, or stranger experience. It's never over-egged though, and the disappointed, pinched lives of the locals are well drawn in some lovely drinking scenes.

When the two children first meet, there's a beautifully awkward adult moment; only she knows why they can't be childhood friends, and they are both just ready to feel there is more than just being friends. She is hanging from a brutal metal climbing frame at her first appearance in the scene, and dismounts from it as she begins to speak. It's the only time we see her purely framed as a child in the film, and as soon as she speaks, the spell of her childhood is broken.

Miroslav Balka at the Tate Modern

It's all about the moment you have to walk forward. A gaping metal gangway up into a large rusty metal container, which echoes unnaturally dully. Only dim, pale shapes that do not appear as people are visible in the gloom. As you move forward, the motion of the shapes begins to resemble the hesitant rise-and-fall of walking. Sounds are faint and fuzzy at the edges. The slightly more confident shuffle of people emerging from the darkness is a reproach, a challenge to have to guts to step forwards into a profoundly unpredictable and unknowable place. Like all the best of the Unilever Commissions at the Tate Mod, it works by radically redefining the space of the Turbine Hall, rather than by trying to fill the space with new material. Its a genuinely disturbing moment, best experienced alone.

Make It Really Mechanically Tricksy

Last night, we pedalled our way in the gloom from Shadwell to Dalston, where the fine people of the Turkish community helpfully provided us with some lovely spinach and cheese pastries. Even a brief-ish French knockabout comedy drama would be too much for a pair of mostly empty stomachs.

MicMacs is a rarity in the French cinema that I'm used to: A straightforward politically motivated revenge drama, propelled by some very matter-of-fact slapdash physical capers.

It feels like a faint echo of the dreadfully enjoyable doom of Delicatessen, but retained a sepia, timeless visual element.

The best scene involved the simple matter of distracting, or otherwise incapacitating a security guard. Our gang of misfit heroes and heroines (the young woman with the unrequited crush was named Calculator) decided that the best plan was this: Contact a couple who live in the apartment block opposite, and arrange to meet them in a cafe. Bribe them with fake Thierry Henry football shirts to have very visible and extended sex at their window the following night. With the security guard training him cameras on the couple, send a contortionist in through the ventilation system, where she will lower a sugar cube laced with knockout drops, on a string, through the vent and down into the security guard's coffee. When he is exhausted from watching the extended rogering, he takes a sip from his coffee, and is unconscious moments later.

How simple!

Not The TV Show

It's a very passionately written story of a young woman arriving, spitting angry, in the mental health system, and her gradual socialisation. There are some jokes that ring true ("MAD money", the monolithic benefit system for the mentally ill; the names given to the doctors and the drugs evoking the casually hellish, archaic and demonic- "Phlegyapam", "Cerberum", "Dr Diabolus", "Dr Azazel") but too many of them are repeated too often. There's a sense of endless repetition about the book as a whole, which gives it a powerful air of realism- evoking the endless chain of cigarettes, waits for medication, waits for appointments, the predictable and deadening routines of out-patient mental health care. But it is also absolutely exhausting to read, and owes too big a debt to the comedy of Catch 22 and the central conceit of ' One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest'. I'd like to have read a slightly different novel, that spent more time drawing the environment of the parallel-universe Camden and Chalk Farm, the Darkwoods Estate. This might have given the paranoia-political subplot a world to live in.

I've no idea if the TV version is any good, mind you.

Old England

I watched a couple of old movies this week. From this distance, they view like propaganda material for the austerity years immediately after the war.

"The Nanny" is set in 1960, and stars a painfully controlled Bette Davis as an ultimately murderous, insane household employee. It's very difficult to like this movie or any of the characters in it. The son is an impossibly spoilt brat, the father is a distant foreign office apparatchik, the mother a hysterically tearful bag of nerves, her sister a pill-popping casualty of the permissive scene. At the finale, the boy enthusiastically embraces this family, saved from the homicidal machinations of the nanny, who we (very late in the day, and in a clumsily inserted flashback) discover is motivated by the death of her daughter, who had been abandoned and was pregnant when she died, having fallen in with the 'bad crowd' of legend.

Credit to Davis for taking a role in which she not only plays an insane, morally decrepit child murderer, but also carries the can for the suffering in a toxically repressed middle-English family.

"The Blue Lamp" is watchable only on the back of an early Dirk Bogarde performance as an unstable desperado, trying to get a toe hold in London's early 50s crime underworld, and some interesting period footage of the Edgeware Road. Other than that, the film's main function is a unabashed publicity and recruiting tool for the Metropolitan Police.

Psychedelimetallurgy

Chris and Sean both knew that the Monarch and the Barfly are not the same place, so I pitched up late for our date with the makers of "Aqua Dementia". I'd been in a place peopled by Camden punks, paunchy industro-goth survivors, but smelling of furniture cleansing and new leather. "Indie rock smells better than it did in '94" I texted to Chris. "You're in the wrong pub", he replied.

Pithy to the max, as always.

I struggled to take nu metal seriously. If there's one thing that kills the necessary fantasy stone dead, it's self-regarding, histrionic moralising. The acting-out of autistic fantasies of Tolkeinish adventure or pseudo-sci-fi rebellion is very tedious as long as you don't need your fantasies shouted at you. So there needs to be a pretty brutal distancing and reimagining of the position of the metal sound to break free of the cliched dream.

And somehow, Mastodon manage this. Their sound seethes and roils like an invertebrate. The vocal is reduced to a purely rhythmic device. It's properly psychedelic, constantly altering and rolling over itself without anything as crass as doing the same thing twice.

Exile On Coldharbour Lane

It was all too sad that by far the best moment of Massive Attack's Brixton concert late last year was a take of Unfinished Sympathy with the same singer they'd employed at the same venue 10 years previously. There were a very small handful of moments that threatened to spray the crowd with magic, but these were lost in a welter of rocked-up guitar from a fearful arse in a platinum bleach haircut, or else completely poisoned by the self-aggrandising running commentary delivered by the couple in front of us. Thinking of the wonderful dub spaces opened up in their first record, and the sparse arrangements of their second, and the splendid paranoia of their fourth, this gig replete with every bit of sonic house-room stacked full with percussion and tasteful instrumentation was a real shocker. The hit-me-over-the-head-with-a-breezeblock-I-don't-think-I-quite-got-your-point sloganising on their back-projection did nothing to hold our attention either.

Birth, Suffering, Death... And Fluffiness

I had seen the Cinematic Orchestra some time back at

ATP, providing an unpredictable but well-manicured electro-acoustic backing to something that almost certainly wasn't Battleship Potemkin or the Bicycle Thieves, but might have been. It was definitely very old, in black and white, and in a very scratched-up print. This was extremely likeable and effective; a chamber group, carefully marshalled by someone who obviously has plenty of technical feel for soundtracks giving a room full of non-cinephiles a reason to see some cracking footage. It's therefore a very doubtful state of affairs to find the group expanded hugely, and fronting a preview screening of a Disney natural-world sob-fest about the (admittedly beautiful) pink flamingoes that inhabit one of the vast lakes in central Africa. The filming is very showy, like an emotional cattle-prod wrapped up in an airline commercial.

"Europa! Europa!"

At the risk of over-cooking the significance of the Fall, the synthesised, bricked-up, unforgivingly-lit landscapes of "Code: Selfish" could be the songs playing on the radio as the Poles drag Our Hero out of the car in the middle of a frozen mud-heap after his 'escape' from the West. Songs like "Birmingham School of Business School" and "Free Range" hint at exactly the tawdry horizons that surround the post-Cold-War figures with which Kieslowski populates his harsh, depthless world.

It's a bitter and relentless lesson; getting on and growing up are a direct function of reducing everybody else to the plasticised level of the manipulated. The story here generates its (chillingly plausible) momentum from a sequence of greedy land deals, in which ignorance, naivete, and lack of ambition are flushed down the u-bend of empty-eyed investment. There's an echo of all of this in the deals current in Spanish football at the moment: talented and promising youngsters are bought out from under their clubs by Real Madrid, not because Real have any use for them, but to prevent their rivals developing a player who might threaten their control of the means of televisual (re) production.

It's a minor miracle that we really care about the romance, because the plot and the characters give us no reason to.