etnobofin

Italian guitarist and composer Battista Lena has put together a couple of rather astounding records for the French Label Bleu in the past few years. One of them, (Banda Sonora), remains on my wish-list. The other is an orchestral eurojazz space opera that describes the fictional voyage of 3 Russian cosmonauts, with a dual libretto in Italian and French.

Mashup Challenge 2006: Update
Thanks for all the suggestions so far: we are still accepting late contributions. Our team of subservient house-elves will begin their deliberations tonight, and (barring hanging chads and ongoing issues with our dodgy IBM voting machines), we should have a Top 10 posted in the next few days!

By the Way…
Dave Douglas has a blog.

Crowded House vs Pharrell – The Weather Episode

matt mentioned John Zorn in a comment here last night, reminding me of an idea that I had half-baked and abandoned. The idea is still half-baked, but I’m dragging it out of the fridge serving it up anyway. It’s the stoopidest concept ever, with ther possible exception of Sudoku.

The Mashup Challenge 2006
The aim of this game is to come up with a list of the 10 most impossible artist mashups ever, the sort of mashups that would come with a health warning.

You don’t have to nominate specific songs/tracks. Just the artists. Bonus points may be awarded for the most surreal and silly.

Like Mornington Crescent, The Mashup Challenge 2006 is purely an intellectual exercise, and I don’t expect anyone to actually attempt to produce any of these in their bedroom studio. If anyone actually bothers, well, we’ll give them lots of respect. Or block our ears.

To kick it off, here are three that I thought of:

So… post your mashup ideas in the comments section below, and we’ll pull together the best ones for a Top 10!

(matt/Taxi Driver, this is why I don’t get linked by o-dub. Because I do dumb stuff like this.)

To be honest, I was not expecting to enjoy The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe quite so much. It is a film for kids, and Andrew Adamson has done a workmanlike, if not spectacular, job of bringing the C.S. Lewis book to the screen. But what made the film enjoyable for me was noticing the way I respond to the characters as an adult, compared to my memories as a child of 7 or 8, when reading the book for the first time.

When I read the book as a child, Edmund really annoyed me. I couldn’t understand what made him want to ride off with the White Witch and betray his brother and sisters. The Witch was so obviously evil - why did Edmund want to hang out with her? I wanted to get on with the big exciting battle between Aslan and the Witch.

But with a few more years under my belt, I now recognise that Edmund reflects some of the venality and selfishness that lies in all of us. (And of course Edmund’s fall and redemption is really the central drama of the story). By contrast, this time around it was Peter, Susan and Lucy that really annoyed me, appearing as little more than Enid Blyton cardboard cutouts, all eager for lashings of ginger beer. No wonder Edmund wanted to run away from them.

The other thing that struck me was that the Edmund in the film was the dead spitting image of Alexander Ekdahl, the titular character in Ingmar Bergman’s 1982 film Fanny and Alexander.

Despite the resemblance on celluloid, of course, Edmund and Alexander are far from parallel characters. Edmund ultimately casts aside his “childishness” through Aslan’s act of atonement (e~mergent kiwi offers a wider theological exploration of Aslan’s sacrifice). Alexander’s childishness (he’s gifted with a precocious imagination) is both a weakness and a source of great strength, but ultimately in F & A, Alexander’s stubborn belief in the imaginative act is vindicated.

I imagine that C.S. Lewis would not have approved of Alexander Ekdahl and his liberal humanist, Swedish bourgeois extended family. But at the same time, the Ekdahls are infinitely forgiving of the weaknesses among their whanau – an unconditional philosophy of acceptance that would put cantakerous old C.S. Lewis to shame.