etnobofin

“At the junction of the state line of Colorado, its arid western one, and the state line of poor Utah I saw in the clouds huge and massed above the fiery golden desert of eveningfall the great image of God with forefinger pointed straight at me through halos and rolls and gold folds that were like the existence of the gleaming spear in His right hand, and sayeth, Go thou across the ground; go moan for man; go moan, go groan, go groan alone go roll your bones, alone; go thou and be little beneath my sight; go thou, and be minute and as seed in the pod, but the pod the pit, world a Pod, universe a Pit; go thou, go though, die hence; and of Cody report you well and truly.”

-Jack Kerouac

YouTube is a trove of little gems, many of which would not be otherwise available to most of us. Here are a few videos related to Jack Kerouac.

Kerouac’s books were the first I read as a teenager that demonstrated an entirely new way of writing and describing the world. In quick sucession I read On the Road of course, Dharma Bums, and the weighty Visions of Cody, which I started on a long bus trip across the Arizona desert in 1996. (I recall that Miles’ Bitches Brew was on near-permanent loop on my walkman – heady times for a 17 year old).

The first video is one of the few extant films of Kerouac reading his own work, on the Steve Allen Show in 1959:

And although Kerouac was one of the writers who most deeply revolutionised the use of written English in the mid-20th Century, he was in fact francophone by birth. Born to immigrant Québecois parents in Massachusetts, he didn’t learn English until he went to school.  Here he is interviewed on Canadian TV in the mid-1960s, speaking the thick joual dialect of his childhood:

A documentary that seems worth seeing is the 1999 film The Source, recounting the origins and development of the Beat movement in the 1940s and 1950s, and the lives of Kerouac and his contemporaries such as Allan Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. This extract is set to music by British composer Mike Westbrook.

Son of Rambow is one of those small, low-budget British films that might have disappeared without trace, had it not been for a rave reception at Sundance 2007. The film subsequently obtained significant distribution in the UK and worldwide this year.

It’s a little film, in the sense that it aims to tell a simple story well, rather than investing energy in exploring deep themes or symbolism. And it’s precisely this lack of ambition that makes Son of Rambow work. Viewers will either find this absence of guile either endearing or intensely annoying.

The basic plot is simple enough. It’s southern England in about 1983. Lee Carter (an Artful Dodger of the home counties, a bully and latchkey kid who lives in a retirement home with his older brother while his parents live in Spain) is making his own version of Rambo:First Blood. He ropes in naive, timid Will Proudfoot to act as stuntman, but Will’s imagination is soon unleashed, and once French exchange student Didier Revol and his admirers invade the project, chaos ensues.

But movie-making is not the heart of the film. In fact the only thing that prevents Son of Rambow exploding in a crayon-coloured fireball of implausibility is the unlikely friendship that develops between Will and Lee .

Will has grown up in a stern, restrictive Brethren household and Lee’s makeshift film finally offers an outlet for Will’s creativity. And Lee, a bully who is unpopular at school and deeply seeks approval from his older brother, finds Will to be the first person who doesn’t judge or manipulate him. The relationship is portrayed with sensitivity and naturalness by first-time actors Bill Milner and Will Poulter.

Sometimes the shallowness of the rest of the film lets us down. For instance, the implications of life in the Plymouth Brethren are not explored in great detail. And while Jules Sitruk plays Didier as a fantastically louche teen heartthrob, (a French Fonzie?), it is implied that Didier is much less popular back home in France – tension in his character that remains tantalisingly vague.

Despite its lightness of touch, Son of Rambo is hardly a movie for kids – it’s an adult’s recollection of what it was like to be a young in the 1980s. In this fantasy world you can perform aerial stuntwork in an abandoned power station, shoplift without sanction, and turn your 6th Form Common Room into a debauched New-Wave disco. Of course childhood was never quite like this, but for 90 minutes it’s good fun to pretend that it was.

The River Cherwell at Mesopotamia

After living in Oxford for two and a half years, it becomes easier to take the city for granted. You become oblivious to the tourist hordes sweeping up Cornmarket. Ancient college walls become a peripheral, sandstone-coloured blur in the rush through town to Boots to buy shaving gel and new razors, weaving your bike between the queue of buses on the High. The Oxford of legends and ghosts, the Oxford of et in Arcadia ego and the youth of Empire seems buried beneath the bustle of the day-to-day.

But just occasionally, Oxford hints at deeper traditions that grind on at tectonic pace. Like the rare, furtive swish of geisha’s kimono hurrying down a back alley in Kyoto, small scraps of mythological Oxford reveal themselves, for a briefest of moments. Blink and you’ll miss them.

Radcliffe Square

A harried don cycles up Catte Street in the early evening, sweating in full sub fusc and robes that billow behind, perhaps late for his pre-prandial sherry at All Souls;

It’s 9.05pm and you happen to be passing up St Aldate’s as Tom Tower intones its bell 101 times, as it has done every day since the time of Henry VIII;

An island among the tourists, a small group of pilgrims pray in a circle around the paved cross set into the Broad where the Protestant martyrs were burned at the stake by the Catholic Queen Mary in 1555 and 1556. (Thirty years later, half a mile away outside Magdalen College, under a protestant Queen, Richard Yaxley and George Nichols were hanged for being Catholic priests);

New College

While queuing for sushi at Edamame, a chattering crocodile of miniature undergrads in black duffle coats and mortar boards rustles up Holywell Street, led by a porter in bowler hat – it’s the New College choristers heading back to school after evensong;

After a few ales on the Cowley Road, you glide agreeably back towards town, pausing on Magdalen Bridge at midnight where you wonder if a young Oscar Wilde or T.E. Lawrence ever watched the moon pass behind a cloud above the slack, muddy Cherwell.

The priest’s door at St Thomas the Martyr

In most ways, modern Oxford is like any other provincial city in the south of England – suburbs, factories, narrow streets choked with traffic and the usual clustering of chain stores. But in small scraps of time – at midnight, or when the light is just right, or on the sidelines of your daily routine, you sense that a more ancient rhythm still plays onwards.

It’s obviously a fine novel, but it’s time to give up for the moment. After 3 months of listless effort, Middlemarch is going back on the shelf for a time when concentration and time is more generously available. Like when I’m drawing a pension.

Top 5 excuses for not finishing “Middlemarch” by George Eliot

Make your own Top 5 list on 5alist

The thing about Cosmology is that lots of us are really interested in it, but very few are actually patient and smart enough to do the measurements and the maths necessary to figure out where the heck we might fit in the universe.

Luckily there are people like Brian Greene to do the maths and then explain it to the rest of us “normal” humans. He’s director of the Institute of Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics at Columbia University, with a DPhil from Oxford.

I’ve been listening to a conversation Greene held with Robert Krulwich from WNYC’s Radiolab recently as part of a science lecture series organised by the YMCA in New York.

Brian and Rob explore the multiverse theory, swiss cheese, free will, bubble baths and the probability that our universe is a giant simulation being run by super-smart ubergeeks from the planet Xantar.

50 minutes of brain-expanding talk, and pretty funny too. There’s an mp3 to download or it’s listenable on the Radiolab website.

Lolcats is the meme that will not die… today the Grauniad had some fun with George W. Bush at the Olympic Games.

Hopefully Isaac Hayes, who died yesterday, will be remembered for more than just the Theme from Shaft, Chef’s voice in South Park and providing the original style template for “pimped-out”.

Even before he was a solo artist, he wrote songs and arrangements for the Stax stable, including some guy called Otis Redding. His career as a songwriter, singer, pianist, arranger includes some of the most kick-ass re-imaginings of pop songs ever (try his 18+ minute version of Jimmy Webb’s By the Time I Get to Phoenix on 1969′s Hot Buttered Soul). Anyone who doesn’t appreciate how massive was the Isaac Hayes phenomenon in the early 1970s should watch Wattstax, a highly entertaining doco in which Hayes is the headline act of the 1973 Stax artists concert in Watts. A moment in pop culture history indeed.

But back to Shaft. Everybody seems to forget that the film itself is rubbish – the best thing about it is the soundtrack. The video shows Hayes and his band rehearsing and writing the music in 1971 with director Gordon Parks, including an early cut of the immortal Theme .

Requiesce in pace, brother. Daaaaaamn right.

Donald Byrd – Perpetual Love
From Kofi : Blue Note [Buy]

Normally, emotional attachment to physical possessions is best avoided. Except affection for teddy bears and music collections. But there was a twinge of regret today as I wrapped up my Fender Rhodes Mk 1 Stage 73 to be shipped to its new owner. A Rhodes is a heavy awkward object to transport, and with the amount of travelling coming up in the next 12 months, keeping it really wasn’t a practical option. So I sold it.

Indeed, in a 21st century of brilliant Korgs with stunning digital sound patches, there is virtually nothing practical about owning a Rhodes. It’s like owning a pet. Rhodes are temperamental beasts, requiring re-tuning and a little tender loving care now and again. They’re a bitch to take to gigs, and there’s always one note that sounds just a little bit broken. (With mine, it was the middle C#)

But a Rhodes will always look great in the lounge, and SOUND even greater- like licking meltwater from a velvet glacier while fanned by the wings of angels.

So much of the music I love was performed on a Rhodes. While I was packing it up today, in between berating myself for my stupidity, I tried to think of my personal favourite Rhodes jazz performances – which are less about improvisational brilliance than simply how the keyboard sounds. Here’s a list of three:

- Keith Jarrett’s 1971 “broken key” solo on Funky Tonk (Miles Davis Live-Evil)
- Herbie Hancock’s live version of Butterfly in Japan, 1975 (Flood: Live in Tokyo)
- Duke Pearson’s playing on Perpetual Love in 1970 (Donald Byrd Kofi)

I’ve shared Perpetual Love because it’s probably less well-known, although the players on the session are top notch: Donald Byrd (tp), Frank Foster (ts), Duke Pearson (Rhodes), Wally Richardson (g), Ron Carter (b), Mickey Roker (d), Airto and Dom Um Ramao (perc).

Here’s follow up to a post from last month about Auckland band The Hot Grits. It seems that their video is too controversial to be shown on national TV channels in New Zealand.

Not even a “post-9pm/Adults Only” rating. Actually banned from the airwaves. It’s apparently the only music video to have been banned by TVNZ since 1988.

TVNZ broadcast Bugsy Malone at least once a year, which features kids acting out gangland violence and murder. But apparently kids drinking milk is offensive? Sure there is adult subtext here, but is there nobody at TVNZ who could see humorous intent? Sheesh.

Zorbing – Stornoway
From Letters From Lewis EP: Hatpop/Independent [iTunes]

Last weekend’s Arcane Festival at Tetsworth was a lucky opportunity to hear a live performance by Stornoway, surely one of the most interesting bands currently working in Oxford. Their deceptively simple, pentatonic-based melodies are filtered through folk-rock and various bits of electronics with trumpets, violins and banjos.

Smart lyrics hide a few coy winks to their home town – the title of the song posted above refers to “zorbing through the streets of Cowley” – and one suspects that the river that runs through the centre of their song On the Rocks might just be the Cherwell or Isis as they wend their slow way towards the English Channel.

You can hear a lot more on their myspace page, and see more photos in their Flickr group.

Photo by Platform3