Camp Bestivalling

...that scene in Alex Garland's The Beach, when they're all half-dead from squid poisoning, the beach sliding into new sewage and it all gets a little Hearts of Darkness? That's my last memory of Lulworth Castle... Fecal fluttering, bad tidings, hallucinatory stumblings... the castle looming like it's made of bones, the ground swallowing when I couldn't, some kind of Medieval Banquet taking itself a little too literally; finding historical accuracy in Campylobacter jejuni, in Shigella, in hordes of prettily dyed exotoxins...

But that was then.

I'm going back to Lulworth Castle, this time for the clean air and puffed chests of Camp Bestival, packed full of children, and stuffed full of sun-starch... it's gonna be a big one, literally nothing can go wrong. Like Glastonbury, the music is hardly the point but still: Marc Almond, Lee Scratch Perry, George Clinton, Madness, The Fall, The Human League... with Joker and Joy Orbison and Jonny Trunk on the decks...

Asking around long-term Camp Bestivallers, it seems like Jonny Trunk might be the natural soundtrack to this place; cutting-egde circusssssssssss music, Freaks, library reels, spitting/spoken word rolls, tie-dyed electronics, sheep worrying frequency mods... "violently pretty" someone described it (I think they meant the Festival as a whole, rather than the girl he brought back who was, frankly, tarnished by her experience) and I'm still hoping to concur, or at least understand... maybe we might all join in with Bill Drummonds ultra-socialist/pirate show choir The 17; sing our bits out, playback everything...

It seems that Camp Bestival might be a feedback loop worth pursuing; it's certainly the only time I've ever felt brave enough to venture to a 3 dayer with the whole family...

And littlest Loki might get to see The Ballet and The Gruffalo and wear as much fancy dress as the heat allows...

Inception: Dreams as Memory Consolidation

Spoilers, if you look hard enough.

I liked what jonnymugwump said on twitter: "inception may be flawed but I feel that's a little like criticising Dali for having the wrong time on his melting watches" an apposite image and critique, there's surrealism shot-through this movie, surrealism before marketing, when it was just a few guys in suits fucking around with each others' dreams. Inception is flawed perhaps, but not vitally. As an experience, an immersion (and a suspension), it sets itself apart; Nolan has taken a huge gamble with a bad old dream theme and he's come out, well, enhanced. This teeters, almost falls over itself, but works quite beautifully in places and does provoke new thought... for an unashamedly Summer Blockbuster this is a simply astounding achievement.

Even the weaker - predictably snowbound - action/adventure scenes are full to the brim of memory (this is Nolan's thrash at the Bond movies, playing with the archetypes... I was reminded of someone's -2ndFade?- memory of watching the Bond 'The Spy Who Loved Me' Union Jack Parachute Jump in the cinema and the crowd going mental - an impeccably old cinema story, an entirely different time) and memory is the real theme of this film...

Dreams as memory consoldation, as process rather than product, verb rather than noun. Dreams as essentially layered constructions, added to and substracted from memory, as forming new schemas; new ways of looking at the world. The dreams are the memories struggling towards the dark, wanting to be forgotten... this is the reverse of Psychoanalysis, an indictment even... I'm wondering who had what crappy experience with which Psychoanalyst...

Inception seems especially about the way sadness and regret (and joy, and happiness) detourns events, perception, experience... the way it changes the world.... causes roads to contract and flip over themselves (I have similar, very personal, feelings about Paris as, I suspect, does Nolan), causes time to expand...

...a dressing gown cord becomes a noose, a mirror becomes a shield, a home becomes a prison, a view becomes a dead drop, a watch becomes melting camembert...

Even Leonardo De Caprio's face(even the name Leonardo)follows the theme; it's a face unravaged by memory, or at least untarnished by it, his weaknesses come from not looking old enough but in this film (in most of his films - he chooses well, I think) this works to his advantage; he's old literally beyond his years, he's not allowed Chronos in at all... his memories are old, his body is not...

Contrast, if you've seen it, with the Ken Watanabe's character and then look again at Joseph Gordon-Levitt, at Ellen Page, even at Tom Hardy and consider whether this is a cast chosen at random...

Look at the hollows in the face of Cillian Murphy and the re-emergence of Tom Berenger...

There's a million strands to this film, it's brilliantly, beautifully considered and very difficult to alternate (i.e. hard to say: "What if this guy played that character..."). There are flaws and Hollywood sops (I'd like to see the him and her story foregrounded and the action flashbacked) but Christopher Nolan went for a bigger audience and I hope he finds it. Can't wait for my 12 year old to see this; it's the kind of thing we talk about all the time and now it's up on screen, shining brighter than any mainstream Hollywood film I can think of in, um, recent memory...

Crawling To Lhasa

Found this album via the cosmic/kosmichings at the brilliant Tonton Mahood - here, in fact - and it's been on a light rotation ever since. Pretty, occasionally threatening, odd combinations of firethrottled acoustic guitar and pan-pipes. Comus is perhaps as good a reference point as any; the deity and the band. I hear that bar/club from Fire Walk With Me during Tante Olga and the whispering nasties from Current 93 in Nearby Shiras... there's morsels all over this album, tasty bits of meat, plucked from teeth...

Ritualistic and Golden. Thrown from shadows. Gongs and bongs.

Trust me, if you're normally a cynic about these kinds of wig-outs, these little Golem tangles, these nonsense psychbits then forget all you know... this is as good as Krautrock gets and it's a little hard to believe that someone hasn't re-released it. Maybe they have.

If you find it, buy it.

Gentleforce-s

Listening to Gentleforce - Learning To Forgive

There's something understated and creepy about this. Music on top, of course, but also between the lines. Not paid that much attention to this before but on headphones there's little slivers of melody and, well, insinuation. It's kind of anti-minimalism, maybe minimalism+

Must check out more of this; it's getting to be that there's too much music out there that is happy to be just surface.

Hope this track isn't a happy accident.


(NOTE: just noticed that Kek has already gotten here before me, lil' bugger that he is... and it seems like it's not a happy accident)

(NOTE+ and I just went over to the Gentleforce site and it seems like Ekoplekz is somehow involved as well, or at least lurking in the sidebars)

(NOTE++ So I guess that somewhere down the line this might not exactly be my discovery...)

For those MP3 diggers amongst you, there's a track here, courtesy of Who The Hell.

And I guess Feral Media and New Weird Australia ought to get a mention.

Finally, enough digging for now, there's a mix here, which features (is by?) Gentleforce alongside his influences...

I've just bought the CD, I think maybe some of you ought to, too... there's little stuff around out there that gets me; hope it's not the hallucinatory power of the 8.36 to Bridgwater...

From The Wytch Machine (and latterly via other, less mangled, devices)

The Numbers Of The Kindly Ones

Just started reading this, just a few pages in and already something has struck me: the scale of it is sending obsessional shivers through me, causing me to focus on the very things the book begins with; numbers. There's almost 1000 pages. 1000 pages. 1000 pages.

I've been away from books since the World Cup, more or less. Read a few bits and bobs: short books. Books that didn't require this attention to... I'm not sure what.

The narrator ploughs through the numbers of the dead; mistaking, realigning, conjoining and the book per se lends itself to these details. The form is the content, at least for a moment. I found myself reading by reduction: I've read 10 pages, that means if i do that if I do the same 100 times, I'll be at the end. I've read 20 pages, if i do the same just 50 times, I'll be at the end.

The numbers are acting like they're in some kind of Ligotti meta-narrative - that short story about writing a short story in amongst the creeping horror. There's definitely something in the numbers. Just a glimpse.

Hope I'm not going mental.

Just What Is It With Castle Cary And Ray Bans?

From The Wytch Machine...

Great Western (Coyote Clean Up)

Train like a blast of iron etc.

Coyote Clean Up have been playing / played (never sure) quite a lot recently. A more feminine Sun Araw? More gleeful - recent connotations of that word aside. The feel of desert dancing as opposed to desert-blasted wandering...

While Sun Araw reminds me vaguely of a perhaps archetypal, perhaps apocryphal scene in a Western where someone's sun-skinned face lurches up at the
Saloon after months with only rock and peyote for company, Coyote Clean Up are the soundtrack of a Southern American teen horror movie before things turn nasty...

The kind that Melissa George might be in. Though she'll always be Angel to me.


From The Wytch Machine...

The Art Of The Non Spectator

An Imaginary Art Installation

The World Cup final. At the whistle, the crowd fall silent. Sit for ten minutes in complete silence, each feigning a different form of shock and awe. Then, row by row, still in silence, they all file out the ground. By half time, the stadium is empty. The players have to come out after half time to an mystifyingly empty stadium. 5 mins into the second half, all the spectators run back into the stadium mouthing wordless obscenities and doing an odd dance like they've developed a 24hr strain of autism. Sit down and watch in silence for the rest of the game.

Gold Blood go Italo

So, Gold Blood. Anyone?

There's the name, I suppose. Gold and Blood being the old, odd Alchymical Twins. And I don't want to judge these guys before I've heard anything by them but, consider this and wonder if someone hasn't just emptied the entire contents of their playlist onto the page...

“A darkly, self-consciously melodramatic and brilliantly OTT mix of Fantomas, Coil, Vex’d and Virgin Prunes.” Time Out

I mean, that would be good wouldn't it? Though it does also describe early Coil so perhaps the part will eat the (w)hole...

Not sure who wrote the Time Out review. Not even sure that it was written; smacks of robot logic, a Pandora Radio review, an amalgam of iTunes or Amazon page views.

“Sounds like White Zombie gone Italo – amazing!” Wanstead Flats

I can see it. Sort of. I think more things should go Italo. Thinking about putting together an Everything Goes Italo megamix...

I'll check them out. I'm curious.