B is for Baader Meinhof

In the pages of Frank's APA we have started doing this thing where we go through the letters of the alphabet and talk about something we like beginning with each letter. This is my entry for the letter B.

Some time after recording the third Auteurs album Luke Haines found himself beginning to lose interest in the band. For some reason he found himself listening to a lot of funk and reading about West German left-wing terrorism in the 1970s. He hit on the great idea of combining the two in a concept album about the famous Red Army Faction (colloquially as the Baader Meinhof gang, after its two most famous members). Thus in 1996 he released this record.

The album overall has a mutant funk feel to it, with odd flourishes of vaguely Middle Eastern sounding strings, calling to mind the links with Palestinian groups the RAF ineffectually cultivated. A lot of the percussion sounds like handclaps or something akin to tablas, with the opening track ('Baader Meinhof') in particular being hand-claptastic.

I do not think this album did that well - I keep seeing people on the Internet saying that they love Luke Haines but that for them this is easily his worst album. These people are wrong. Or maybe they do not share the interest in 1970s terrorism that I have; for me the combination of Luke Haines' cultivated nastiness and a view of the subject gained from reading the likes of Tom Vague's Televisionaries makes this the best thing ever.

The songs take us on a tour of the strange radical politics of the period, throwing out references to the likes of Rudi Dutschke and Carlos the Jackal, as well as to such RAF stalwarts as Andreas Baader, Petra Schelm (not so much a RAF stalwart as their equivalent of Freddy from Superfly) and Holger Meins. The lyrics maybe get more poignant as the record rolls on, increasingly hinting that the RAF was a bloody failure, both for its members and its victims. The closing track, a reprise of the opener, makes the obvious point that far from undermining the state, the RAF's failed campaign reinforced it, by creating a climate of tension that caused people to back more intrusive policing methods.

Lyrics about West German terrorism may not be everyone's cup of tea, but surely everyone can enjoy this album's mutated white English take on funk.



record cover image source

Televisionaries image source



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"Art Will Save The World: a Film About Luke Haines" (2012)

Back in 2007 Luke Haines played Dublin. Two civil servants attended the concert. One of them went up to Mr Haines after the show and said, "I would like to make a film about you". When that fellow revealed his status as a civil servant, Mr Haines laughed in his face and told him to fuck off, but the fellow persevered - dropping out of the service, going to film school and finally securing the funding to make the film, eventually winning over Luke Haines' support for the project. As a result, he made a film which I then saw at a Sunday afternoon screening in the Irish Film Institute. No one knows what happened to the other civil servant.

In some respects this film follows the usual music biopic model. There is a bit of narration form Mr Haines telling the story of his amazing career in music. Archive footage shows his past bands appearing on television and stuff. Various people appear and talk about what they think of Luke Haines and his music (sadly there is no appearance by Metallica or Steve Albini). But it also does a bit of deconstructing he documentary, man, bringing home the blah blah blah artifice of the form, with some people saying things they affirm not to be true. There are also scenes where a load of chancers are auditioned for the role of playing Luke Haines (sadly there are then no scenes of any of these people being Luke Haines, perhaps with one of them fighting Luke Haines to establish which one is the real deal and so on).

I enjoyed this film, particularly the archive footage and any of the scenes were Haines was talking to camera, but I also found it a bit disappointing. Some of this I think comes from the inevitable disappointment of seeing a documentary about a subject you already know a lot a about - I was sorry they did not include more of this or highlight the importance of that. The fairly low budget of the film was a factor here too - the filmmaker attended a talk afterwards and said it was all shot in a couple of days or something, and it does rather show. I suspect, though, that these are the quibbles that come with too much knowledge of a subject - if you just knew a couple of songs by Luke Haines (or less) and were curious to know more about him then this would be a great film to see.

Another problematic feature of the film was that it seems like it came to the cinemas last year but was made some time before that, so events had passed it by somewhat. Obviously the film could have done with an in-depth discussion of Mr Haines' concept album about 1970s British wrestlers and an Irish audience may have been interested in some coverage of his recent collaboration with Cathal Coughlan on the uncovering of the North Sea Scrolls. But the area where the time lag seemed most of a disappointment was in the film's lack of engagement with the whole Jimmy Savile business and the rounding-up of every man involved in the entertainment industry back in the 1970s. The seedy side of the music and entertainment business back then seems like a real concern of Luke Haines in his songwriting, to such an extent that a lot of the Savile and related stories in the papers seemed like the coming to life of Luke Haines lyrics, and it would have been interesting for the film to touch on all that.

The PoMo deconstructionist elements did not annoy me as much as they might have done - indeed, some of them were actually funny. However, I think this drawing-attention-to-the-artificiality-of-the-documentary is something that documentary makers should stop thinking of as in any way big and clever. I am media-literate enough to be aware that there is a certain amount of artifice involved in making documentaries and it really is not something I need to be reminded of when watching them. Unless I am watching a documentary about documentaries, obv.

One final point - Luke Haines is joining that select band of men who looks better as they get older. The contrast between the shots of Young Haines, with his long indie hair as opposed to the dapper chap that is Old Haines is very striking.

LATER - I wonder if I am being insufficiently enthusiastic here? I came away from the film wanting to re-listen to all my Luke Haines-related records, thinking also that there are still nuggets out there on those of his records that I have yet to acquire and listen to properly. This, surely, is a key sign of a successful music documentary.

That concert in 2007

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Koalas' STD Crisis

Everyone loves Koalas, but what not everyone knows is that the honorary bears are in a lot of trouble. Some of their problems are the result of human activity, with Koalas suffering from habitat loss thanks to urban sprawl. Many of them are also being hit by cars or killed by dogs. But some of the problems Koalas face are their own little furry fault, as the marsupials are suffering from an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases spread by their promiscuous habits and lack of interest in safe sex.

Chlamydia seems to be a particular problem, with up to 90% of Koalas being infected in some areas. The disease can prove fatal, but it also has a tendency to leave its survivors infertile, which is depressing the Koala birthrate. Worse, a new retrovirus, akin to HIV/AIDS in humans, has started to affect the cuddly marsupials.

Fortunately some help is at hand. Koalas infected by Chlamydia are being given courses in antibiotics in special Koala-hospitals, where they can recuperate for a couple of months until they are ready to go back into the wild. Volunteers are also looking after the little baby Koalas (known as Joeys) who are left abandoned when their mother succumbs to disease. These people look after the furry orphans until they are old enough to fend for themselves, bringing them tasty eucalyptus for the little fellows to eat in the meantime.

The hope of scientists, though, is to develop an understanding of why Koalas are so much more susceptible to Chlamydia than other animals. That may lead to a vaccine that would protect the marsupial bears from this ailment, while also possibly leading to a vaccine that would protect humans from our own strain of that disease.

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v/a "American Murder Ballads" (2009)

This is a compilation of old-timey American murder ballads that I picked up in Edinburgh back in January (only to discover that it is available in Tower here in Dublin). You know murder ballads? They are this sub-category of American folk song, where the song is about homicide, with the singer either singing in the persona of a murderer or describing some other occasion of lethal violence. I first became aware of these things when Nick Cave released his 1996 album Murder Ballads, a collection of new songs nestled in among reworked old-timey tunes. I think that set was considered controversial by some people, though the precise grounds for this are not clear to me. Maybe they thought that Nick Cave's middle-class and increasingly middle-aged audience would start committing murders everywhere after listening to their master's voice. Some people may also have thought there was a misogynist strain to the whole murder ballad concept, and, who knows, they may be right on that one.

This compilation does not have the modern production and complicated arrangements of the Nick Cave record. Instead it boasts some very old recordings, often just a voice and an accompaniment on guitar or similar. I would not be surprised if many of them are out of copyright. They range from recordings by well-known people (Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Johnny Cash, Lead Belly) to ones less familiar, to me at least. Some of the songs are quite famous, even if I was hearing them for the first time - 'Where did you sleep last night?', 'Folsom Prison Blues', 'Stackalee', 'Tom Joad'. They also run the gamut from telling stories of fictional killing to describing real-life murder cases, sometimes in rather outlandish terms. The overall effect is to give open a window into a dark corner of the human experience. But the record is not without humour - Woody Guthrie's 'Bad Lee Brown' ends with the wonderful couplet from a jailed killer: "I'll be here for the rest of my life / all I done was kill my wife", surely a classic of "And now I'm the cunt" discourse.

Amazingly, this is my first direct exposure to the music of Woody Guthrie. I love how jauntily he can sail through songs telling a rather fanciful version of the death of Jesse James, or part 1 and part 2 of 'Tom Joad', where John Stenbeck's Grapes of Wrath is cheerily summarised in just under seven minutes. Where further should I go with him, readers? Or is he one of those "All the songs sound the same" artists where the first few you hear are enough? I also think this record may have given my first hearing of anything by Lead Belly, though the tune of 'Where did you sleep last night?' sounds pretty familiar.

So anyway, if you like old-timey music and are not afraid of songs about people killing other people then seek out this readily available record.

image source (to a website from which you can buy this record)

I for one welcome our new robot insect overlords

A UK man has built a giant six-legged robot. "It wasn't built to be efficient and fast. It was built to look cool and insect-like and fun," said Matt Denton of his monstrous robot, before it slew him and began building more replicas of itself.

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Three Films by Paul Thomas Anderson

Boogie Nights (1997)
Punch Drunk Love (2002)
The Master (2012)

In the run up to the release of The Master, the Lighthouse cinema showed some older films by Paul Thomas Anderson. I went to see two that I had previously missed. Boogie Nights tells the story of Dirk Diggler, a man with an enormous penis, who becomes a star of the 1970s porn industry. It is an odd film, in that it is very affectionate towards its characters and shows good and bad things happening to them, but it never really gives any sense of whether it has a fixed opinion towards pornography and the porn industry. There is a lot of music in it, not so much the classic waka-waka-waka music that I am told makes for the standard soundtrack to porn films. Instead we get a lot of scenes of people dancing in nightclubs (actually in the same nightclub repeatedly). I was very struck by a scene where everyone starts doing this amazing formation dance - why does this never happen in real clubs?

There is also a funny scene in the all-gone-to-shit stage of Mr Diggler's life in which he and his even less bright friend try to become 1980s pop stars. And a recurring joke in which an African American character is mad into shit country music.

In the film there is a big chunk of it where it all goes wrong for all the characters and they all become sad, with some of this being triggered by the changing nature of the porn industry as video replaces film. But then by the end they all get it together again and the film ends on an upbeat note… except that if you have any sense of historical events you know that HIV/AIDS is coming at them like a honking juggernaut driven by a blind homicidal maniac. It is odd that the film does not engage with this, though it does remind me of, say, the ending of Tim Burton's Ed Wood, where the film goes out on a big note but you know it will really go bad for at least some of the characters afterwards.

Punch Drunk Love, meanwhile, is one of those films in which a guy who is a bit dysfunctional has his life turned around when a good woman falls for him. Such films are always viewed as heart-warming and uplifting but I have found them problematic ever since I read a piece by someone saying that if you look at these films from the woman's point of view they are a bit of a disaster - basically a successful and competent woman suddenly finds herself shackled to some loser man-child.

But I am only really mentioning this film because of the musical and sound content. It has possibly the most amazing sound design of any film I have ever seen, using strange and disorienting effects to communicate the confused nature of its main character. The music is great too, with Jon Brion apparently composing music on the set and then Anderson adapting dialogue and action to fit the timing of the sounds. The soundtrack frequently uses a harmonium, partly because a physical harmonium appears in the film as something of a plot device.

Anyway, if you have never seen this film I strongly recommend it, particularly if you can see it somewhere with decent sound. Notwithstanding my quibbles about the whole woman-saves-fuckwit genre, Adam Sandler in the lead role is genuinely affecting and the music and so on adeptly conveys his confusion and dysfunction.

The Master - did that have much in the way of music in it? I cannot really remember and did not particularly like it that much. The performance in the lead roles by Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman are very impressive but the film does seem to be one of those plotless ramblers. That said, it did make me weirdly sympathetic to Scientology, as the scenes where the L. Ron Hubbad analogue was auditing or processing or whatever it was the main character made it all look surprisingly impressive.

Image source

A review of Knocked Up, by Joe Queenan.

A is for "After Murder Park" by the Auteurs

In the pages of Frank's APA we have started doing this thing where we go through the letters of the alphabet and talk about something we like beginning with each letter. This is my entry for the letter A.

I am writing about After Murder Park by The Auteurs. This was the third album by this band, released in 1996 when the band's career was on the slide a bit. It was recored by Steve Albini, whose basic approach dovetails nicely with Luke Haines' song-writing. Although the instrumentation is broadly the same as on the previous Auteurs albums (guitar, bass, drums, cello), the sound is rather different, thanks to the live-sounding Albini production with its usual fore-grounded drums.

Haines is I think one of the great under-rated songwriters, someone who has languished in semi-obscurity perhaps because he (by reputation) is such a contrary individual that few people in the biz were willing to do him any favours. His best songs typically see his nasty snarl married to his equally snarling guitars, and you get some songs that really go for that here, with 'Married to a Lazy Lover' and 'Light Aircraft on Fire' being typical examples here. But the songs do not all sound like that, there is also the wonderful 'Unsolved Child Murder', which seems to tell of a community torn apart by a child disappearance, jumping from different points of view including that of the local character who has been popularly tarred with responsibility for the terrible crime. The grim subject is offset by music that is basically late Beatles pastiche. Another fun tune is ' Child Brides', which seems to be from some yokel community with its Own Ways, reacting against city slickers rolling in and taking away their underage wives. Small wonder the album was such a monster hit.

I should have more to say about an album I profess to love, but I was up against time constraints. So I will leave it at that and hope to produce something better for B.

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"The Gathering"

There is this thing called NaNoWriMo, which stands for National Novel Writing Month. The month is November and in it people attempt to write a 50,000 word novel, starting from scratch; pre-plotting and so on is allowed before November, but no actual words of the novel may be written. I have myself had a go at this NaNoWriMo business, twice succeeding and twice failing. You may recall I posted my two successes on this blog before deleting them to deter plagiarists and stop people from mocking me for my meagre literary endeavours.

In 2012 I failed to produce 50,000 words in November. Nevertheless, as a service to the world I have decided to post what I did write on a blog specially dedicated to my bad fiction. Here are links to the first four chapters of The Gathering:

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4

Future chapters will appear every day here until the text runs out. I will not be posting daily links to each new chapter - if this kind of thing interests you, you will need to go to Panda Write Bad yourself to see them. Or you could ask me to e-mail them to you.

Gratuitous Pandas

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Important Panda Pictures

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Heaven Help Us If There's A War

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