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.