Covers are AMAZING

I have always adored covers - i don't know why... Perhaps because they give a new, a second chance to songs, perhaps because they remind us that there are many ways to see things, there are many ways to listen to a song. Often people think that good covers are reinventions of bad/mediocre/unknown songs. The cover that I have over here however is so NOT that... 30 seconds to Mars (indie American band that i didn't know but are fronted by Requiem for a Dream hottie Jared Leto) are covering Lady gaga's bad romance. And it's amazing. Stripped from the exuberant campness and theatricality of gaga, bad romance remerges as an epic, melodic ode to lost love, grief, despair and bad romance.

Enjoy... even without the classic roar 'ga ga ou la la'...

Things aren't always what they seem to be..

When I first sew this young man in Jonathan Ross's show -I think he was probably wearing the same suit- I was immediately convinced by my preconceptions that I will definitely hate his music as much as I disliked his attitude. To be a bit more specific: my first thoughts were that he is an alcoholic, or at least a drug addict, or a Portsmouth football fan, or Pete Doherty's second cousin, he writes cheap hip-hop music, wants to be famous, wears a suit because he is on a Friday night show in BBC and most likely I will never recall his name or his music.
When he opened his mouth, two things happened: 1. My mouth dropped, I could not match the voice with the image and 2. I felt he could be the male version of Amy Winehouse. Although I haven't heard anything else form his work, this song stayed with me easily.

Blogger's block

I am pretty sure that every single blogger in the universe has written a post on not wanting / not being able to write a post. I am not so sure this is an interesting topic for others to read but we all keep writing it anyway. Perhaps it makes us feel less guilty - for not having posted anything for a long time (like it does for me ) or perhaps it makes us stop seeing the previous post that has haunted our blogs for as long as our block has gone on. And also it buys us a bit of time, to think of something more, something new and interesting and posting it swiftly after our non-post.

So I will start thinking later tonight and I am sure I will come up with something really to cool very very soon.

Queen of the damned?

I went to see lady gaga live in Belfast last week and i've been trying to write something about it for a while. The truth is I am not sure how i feel about lady g anymore, so I don't know what to write about her.

On the one hand she is clearly different from other popstars: she can play the piano (amazingly even), she can sing like a jazz singer, she is sexually liberated |(like only one other popstar-madonna), she writes her own songs, songs that are about her relationship with her alcoholic father. In the show she proclaimed herself as the queen of the freaks, the little monsters, her fans that she says she loves so much. She said repeatedly that she knows how to feel the odd one out, or feel like an idiot even, and she likes for her little monsters to feel at home with her, in the monster ball.

Now this is highly commendable, especially in a time and age where appearances is the one thing where people care about the most. To have a popstar, a member of the cultural elite of our times tell people that it doesn't matter how they look like is something.

On the other hand, there is no other way to put it: gaga is a shallow popstar. She has rilke tattooed on her arm, and dresses as if she comes directly from a fashion museum, but she is shallow. She writes and produces overwhelmingly shallow pop songs, with pop lyrics. The only thing that saves her is that her shallow lyrics are very sexual, something that is fairly oddball for a female song-writer.

And then it is her show: a weird mixture of theatricality, over the top-ness, wardrobe malfunctions (or not) combined with out of place personal confessions (about her alcoholic father for example and about how she loves us, the little monsters). Such combinations make the show look more mismatched than eclectic and make gaga look more schizophrenic and undecided than brilliant.

Prophets and other religious entities

Prisons are for movie directors, what lollipops are for children: they cannot get enough of them. And just when you think you've seen enough of prison dramas and there no other new thing you could possibly want to see, Un prophéte appears and sets a whole new ball game all together.

Let me be entirely clear about something: I loved the movie. And funnily enough I didn't expect that at all. For once, it is a French movie and I don't get along very well with French movies, I find them slow, long, pretentious and tedious. But this one so was not all of these. I think the best way to describe the movie was that it was crystal. Some movies have this quality, of being so clearly good that you don't have to think about them, you don't have to qualify your answer, you don't have to excuse the mishaps, you don't have to half-cringe some moments when you watch them. You just sit there and enjoy them from the beginning till the end, and just simply like everything about them. I think the last movie I felt so clearly about was oldboy. And un prophéte is way up there with the cunning Korean.

Perhaps it was the script: the rise of a nobody in the microcosm of the French prison, Malik's relationship with Cesar: so complex and deep, the clear analogy between the anthropology of the prison and French society, the haunting relationship between Malik and Reyeb.

Perhaps it was the acting: The glorious newcomer Tahar Rakim as Malik, with his piercing eyes, Niels Arestrup as the arrogant and fooling Cesar and everybody in the supporting cast.

Perhaps it was the cinematography, the grittiness of the prisons, the bluntness of the blood, the sharpness of the Northern sun. Or the innovative techniques of freeze frames, the combination of cinema verité with magic realism and the colours of the movie.

The success of the prophet is found in the combination of all of the above to tell a seemingly banal story (petty criminal enters the prison as a frightened nobody and exits it as a crime lord) with an unexpected breath of fresh air.

If it doesn't win the foreign language film Oscar, I will eat my hat.

In anticipation (a.k.a. ode to the past)

**** Update: awesome album! Fresh, exciting, dark but not solipsistic, modern yet a classic. As always.



Massive attack are releasing their new album, Heligoland, tomorrow. In anticipation of this, the guardian has a small retrospective on their work, their collaborations and their most inspirational moments. Reading it made me realise that some things are really classic despite seeming too era-specific. Let me explain: sometimes it seem that the notion of timelessness that is often associated with classic things is also in turn associated with something that when you see it (hear it, read it etc) it does not reveal the era that it came from. Ancient Greek tragedies for examples are archetypical stories, that when stripped from their era-particular characteristics, they can function perfectly in any space and time. You can direct Medea set in the 21st century and the backbone of the story (revenge and jealousy- the beast that lies in us all) can still work.

I think however that for something to become eventually a classic it needs to be exceptionally modern (almost ahead of its time) at the same time. Medea would have never been a classic if it hadn't been so modern when it was written. Hamlet would have never become a classic if it hadn't shattered the norms of theatre, with the introduction of the ultimate anti-hero, the reluctant prince, when it was first written. There is no way something will become a classic if it is not also painfully new and modern.

Massive attack's music is, for me, the ultimate '90's music. Unfinished sympathy is often labelled the song of the decade (like Paranoid android is the song of the '00's) and the band itself had been the pioneers of the quintessential '90's movement, trip-hop. In that sense, when you listen to blue lines or protection, some songs might sound dated and essentially yesterday-ish. But I think, this is what makes Massive attack's music so classic, it is a product of its time and yet it was ahead of its time. It defined and decade and can therefore classically represent this decade forever.

Holden's father is dead

What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a good-by. I mean I've left schools and places I didn't even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don't care if it's a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I'm leaving it. If you don't, you feel even worse. ~J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 1



Anyone who knows me, knows that I adore 'the catcher in the rye'. I read it when I was 15ish and Holden has been my friend ever since. For some time, obsessively he was my best friend, I kept reading the book again and again, thinking that i would find something new each time i read it. The funny thing is that I did, I found new things all the time: a sentence that i had missed, a detail that made the story better, a line by Holden that was better, more intense than the previous one. I never read another book by JD Salinger, i am not sure why. Probably I was scared i wasn't going to like it as much and i would feel bad about catcher in the rye as well. Or because I thought that what on earth can ever be better than Holden Caulfield?

I remember being intrigued at the mystery of JD Salinger, his self-imposed seclusion, his aversion to the press, his life outside the limelight. And now that he died, all I can think of is that he will not have to hide anymore.

I don't even know what I was running for - I guess I just felt like it. ~J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 1