Dublin International Film Festival: films about cops and prison officers battering people, problematic church-state relations, and druggy film directors

The Dublin International Film Festival recently finished. I always think it would be a great idea to take the week and a half it runs for off work and to spend the time going to film after film, but I never actually do this, instead just squeezing in a film here and there, usually only managing to look properly at the programme to pick films after the festival has started. Still, this year I managed to make four films, which by my standards is pretty good going. I did my usual thing of avoiding films that are about to receive a general release and aiming towards ones that are unlikely to ever darken the multiplexes, though I think at least one of the ones I saw could well become a surefire hit on the foreign language circuit.

The first film I saw was Cairo Conspiracy (also known as Boy From Heaven), a recent film directed by Tarek Saleh, a Swedish filmmaker of Egyptian extraction. It is set in Egypt but was not filmed there; Saleh was expelled from Egypt when trying to shoot his previous film there, and the subject of Cairo Conspiracy is so sensitive that anyone trying to make it in the country would probably find themselves chucked in jail. So what's it about? Some explanatory text at the start quickly explains to whitey that in Cairo there is the Al-Azhar Mosque, which is the pre-eminent centre of Sunni Muslim scholarship and jurisprudence; the Al-Azhar's Grand Imam is the closest thing the Sunni world has to a Pope (but still not that close). Adam (played by Tawfeek Barhom), the son of a fisherman, wins a scholarship to study at the Al-Azhar, clearly a great opportunity for him. But then after he has commenced his studies, the Grand Imam dies. Egypt's security apparatus start manoeuvring to ensure that a pro-regime figure becomes the new Grand Imam. Adam finds himself recruited as a pawn by the secret police, initially to infiltrate an extremist clique of students and then to help elect the regime's candidate. His handler, played by Fares Fares, emerges as the film's other main character.

It is an intriguing film of plot twists and morally compromised people. I read in an interview that Saleh was very influenced by John le Carré and thought, "of course". What I found particularly fascinating was the way religion is portrayed positively in the film, something one sees quite rarely these days. Islam is presented as a source of wisdom and comfort, with Islamic study a self-evidently worthwhile activity (it is telling that when Adam wins his scholarship to study Muslim theology, his father's does not say, "Would you not consider studying a proper subject?"). None of the three leading candidates for the Grand Imam's position are presented as villains, not even the pro-regime candidate who would be the most obvious one to portray as the embodiment of cynical corruption. The most flawed of the three turns out to have a skeleton in his cupboard that does mark him out as someone guilty of not-great behaviour, but even here it felt a bit "hey, nobody's perfect" rather than an exposure of rank hypocrisy (other viewers might take a harder line).

The film is pretty blokey, which goes with the homosocial nature of the world in which it is set. Women only really figure as plot devices or the most thinly sketched of background figures. I think maybe a more fully Western filmmaker might have interrogated this a bit more, bringing up the question of why there only seem to be male imams. To me though, the taking of the way things are for granted seemed to situate the film more fully in its world.

The best line in the film is probably that uttered by one of the secret policemen at a meeting: "They made a big mistake when they started electing the Grand Imam for life. No one should ever hold a position for life. Apart from the President."

Apart from that all the films I saw in the festival were in Spanish (or maybe Catalan). First up was Patricio Guzmán's My Imaginary Country (originally Mi País Imaginario). The programme said that this was a documentary about protests that convulsed Chile during the repressive rule of Pinochet, whose reign ended in 1990. The film was actually about the protests that erupted in Chile in 2019, initially as a campaign by students against fare increases in the Santiago metro but eventually assuming a broader character, leading to mass protests, various campaigns of civil disobedience, and prolonged street battles between heavily armed riot police and stone throwing protesters. The film mixes footage of the protests and riots (some of it pretty full-on) with interviews with protesters (there were no interviews with cops, who remained a shadowy Other clad in body armour, hiding behind shields and occasionally emerging to fire tear gas canisters or to batter someone unlucky enough to fall into their clutches).

The film was mesmerising and engaging, but I did feel it could have engaged a bit more critically with the protest movement. I was struck by the repetition of protesters that they didn't want anything to do with politicians, which to me felt like a weakness and an indication that they were locked into a protest rather than transformative mindset (I'm using "politicians" broadly here to encompass anyone who seeks to actually accomplish things rather than just protest against things other people are doing, so it would run the gamut from people currently in the electoral system, people who might enter that milieu, and also revolutionary groups outside the system but with concrete plans to restructure society). It was interesting also that the film made such a big deal about the convening of a constituent assembly to write a new basic law for Chile (to replace the one bequeathed by the Pinochet regime). The film must have been made before Chile's landslide rejection of the proposed new constitution (a bloated monstrosity of some 388 articles (Ireland's constitution has just 50)), an event that makes for an anticlimactic coda to the film's message.

I was also struck by what an ugly looking city Santiago seemed to be, a collection of nondescript high-rise buildings that seem to have missed all of the interesting and controversial trends of 20th century architecture. But maybe that is unfair as the film may have avoided the good bits. And I was also left wondering about how it is that in some countries you have heavily armed cops using tear gas and water cannon against protesters when this never happens here (at least not on this side of the Border).

My Imaginary Country featured a lot of drone footage, something that is fast becoming a documentary cliche. Guzmán does at least have the excuse that drone footage makes it less likely that cameramen will be battered by the cops or lose an eye after being shot in the face with a tear gas canister, as happened to some of the people the film interviews.

Iván Zulueta's Arrebato (The Rapture) is a 1979 Spanish film that was shown in late night screening. I was wondering before going into this whether I would have enough wakefulness to be able to fully appreciate it. Truth be told I did not, struggling at times to stay awake and feeling like I missed some key plot details. But I still liked it a lot, finding it intriguingly enigmatic. It is one of those films about people who make films, with one of the main characters being a director of horror films and another a weirdo kid who shoots films on Super 8 format. The two met twice in the past (scenes presented in flashback) and then the horror director receives a package with footage shot by the kid and a key to an apartment, with a note saying that the kid suspects he will not be able to send the last part of his film. And it turns out to be a film about… a haunted camera or celluloid vampires or something like that, but it's more about the atmosphere than the plot.

While billed as an art house horror film, Arrebato felt more like a series of character studies. The film maker and his sometime girlfriend's slide from casual narcotic use to full addiction nicely mirrors the actual horror stuff (which is pretty low key and oblique, at no point features any of that "they jump at you face" shite). The sound design and ominous electronic soundtrack also work very well together. It might be one to watch again when I am not falling asleep, although my narcotic state worked well with a film where the bad thing happens when the kids sets his camera to record him while he sleeps.

The last film I saw was Modelo 77 (listed in the programme under the English title Prison 77). Directed by Alberto Rodríguez, this is set in Spain at around the same time period in which Arrebato was made. However, it might is effectively set in a different world, as this is a prison film whose action almost entirely takes place within the walls of the Carcel Modelo in Barcelona (where it was filmed, the prison having closed in 2017). The film is inspired by real events that occurred during the Transition period following the death of Franco in 1975, specifically an outbreak of radicalism and escape attempts from Spanish jails. However, the characters in the film are fictional and do not correspond to real people. The main protagonist is Manuel (Miguel Herrán), a young accountant, who has been arrested for embezzling money from his employer and is being held in jail pending his trial, which could be years away and is likely to see him given a long sentence.

The film does not really delve into whether Manuel is innocent or not (at one point he makes a somewhat feeble claim about the money being an advance on his wages, but it does seem to be the case that his employer is greatly exaggerating how much he took, for insurance fraud reasons, which in turn means that Manuel will receive a longer sentence when his case eventually goes to court). But whether innocent or guilty, Manuel finds himself facing an inhumane regime of casual brutality, in which thuggish guards dish out violence to anyone they take a dislike to. Manuel falls in with some of the more radical prisoners, and together they start agitating for improved conditions and even a general amnesty. In the context of the times, amnesty does not seem like a completely insane thing to aim for. Early on we see the political prisoners amnestied ("They stay in their separate groups, arguing with each other", another prisoner notes of them before that), which makes the general prisoners think that they must be next. The non-political prisoners were after all convicted by Franco's mickey mouse courts or, like Manuel, have not actually been convicted of anything; some of the others are inside for sexual crimes of a victimless nature.

The claustrophobic setting of the jail mean that a film like this stands or falls on its performances, and Modelo 77 does well with Herrán as Manuel, Jesús Carroza as El Negro (an old lag who takes him under his wing), and Javier Gutiérrez as Pino (Manuel's science fiction reading lifer cellmate), who all put in strong performances, as does Xavi Sáez as an imprisoned doctor who provides the initial impetus for the prisoners' organising. But the film also benefits from a plot that twists and turns as the prisoners and the authorities struggle against each other, and from some stunning action sequences and scenes of visceral violence. It also looks amazing, with Alex Calalán's cinematography giving the film an appealingly bleached out appearance.

If you only go to films that pass the Bechdel test then a film set in a men's prison is probably not for you. Modelo 77 has precisely one female character, a woman called Lucía, played by Catalina Sopelana. At the start of the film she is visiting Manuel as the sister of his girlfriend, or rather ex-girlfriend, as Lucía's sister decides she can't handle the idea of being a prisoner's girl. Lucía keeps visiting Manuel out of compassion and provides the film's main link between the world of the prison and the outside world (for all that we only ever see her behind a glass screen in the visiting room). The film is not about her, so I don't think it needs to delve too deeply into the why of her continuing to visit Manuel or her life outside the jail. Nevertheless I still felt that the character managed to rise above being Token Female Character, but your mileage may vary.

Anyway, I can't really praise Modelo 77 enough. It is a long film, but it uses its length well. If it ever shows up in your local cinema I encourage you to see it on the big screen, but it would probably still hold its own on the small screen in your home.

images:

Istanbul's Süleymaniye Mosques stands in for Al-Azhar (Le Monde: "Boy from Heaven: Dissecting contemporary Egypt in the guise of a spy thriller")

Feminist protesters: the rapist is YOU (Filmkrant: "Mi país imaginario: Blauwdruk voor de revolutie")

Will More in Arrebato (FilmAffinity: "Rapture 1979")

Miguel Herrán, Javier Gutiérrez, & Xavi Sáez meet the big bad prisoner (filmAnd: "Modelo 77 de Alberto Rodríguez llega a los cines el 23 de septiembre")

The Bigger Picture: "Lone Star" (1996) and "Return to Oz" (1985)

The Bigger Picture is a programming strand they have in the Irish Film Institute, in which they invite someone (usually someone involved in the film industry, broadly defined) to select a film to show and then to introduce a screening of it. Local filmmaker Luke McManus had his turn on the Bigger Picture wheel back in September. He picked Lone Star, John Sayles's 1996 film, in which Chris Cooper plays Sam Deeds, the sheriff of a border county in 1990s Texas. I had not seen it since its original release. but I eagerly took the opportunity to see it again in the cinema, as I remembered it very fondly and regard it as one of the very best films I have ever seen. And it is as good as I remembered.

The basic plot is a murder mystery (Sam's search for the killer of Charlie Wade, the psychopathic old sheriff who disappeared in the late 1950s but whose skeletal remains show up at the start of the film) but it manages to bring in all kinds of other themes, including forbidden love, race and immigration, how historical events are recorded, difficult family dynamics, and even the nature of evil. There's also a gothic tinge to this tale of dark secrets emerging from the past, for all that this is a film set in sunny Texas rather than darkest Transylvania.

Having subsequently seen a few of Sayles's films, including 2008's Honeydripper, I think that his thing is eliciting strong performances from ensemble casts, with this film being no exception to that. There are so many good performances in Lone Star that it feels like I am letting the side down by singling individuals out, but Chris Cooper's understated sheriff, Elizabeth Peña as Pilar, his old flame who was kept away from him by cruel circumstances and disapproving adults, and Kris Kristofferson (in terrifying form in flashback scenes as Wade) are particularly striking.

The other Big Picture film I saw recently was Disney's 1985 film Return to Oz. Directed by Walter Murch, this is based on two of L. Frank Baum's novels. It was introduced by director Aislinn Clarke, who talked about how back in days of yore Walt Disney had always wanted to make a film of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but MGM got the rights ahead of him. Eventually Disney acquired rights to some of the other Oz books but it was only after Walt died that his company made this film. And it tanked at the box office, which might explain why Murch never directed anything else (though he remained in demand as an editor and sound designer, winning awards for his work in these areas).

Clarke talked a bit about how the film is quite dark and a bit too edgy for a kiddy film audience (though let's face it, the more famous 1939 film has scenes that are absolutely terrifying to small people). And the beginning scenes are no fun, with a young Dorothy (played by Fairuza Balk, unlike Judy Garland an actual child when she played the role) being sent to some sinister quack psychiatrist by her guardians after she won't stop going on about her previous visit to the imaginary realm of Oz. Then of course she does find herself back in Oz, but everything has somehow gone to shit, with the Emerald City in ruins, its inhabitants mostly turned to stone, her old friends either missing or also turned to stone, and the streets patrolled by the sinister Wheelers. Fortunately she makes a series of new friends (a talking chicken, a wind-up mechanical man, Jack Pumpkinhead and eventually a flying sofa with a moose's head). It all comes good at the end but not without some moments of strange danger.

And it is pretty good, maybe even very good. I think Return to Oz suffers from not being as iconic as the 1939 film, but that's like saying it impresses less because it was less successful. It feels a bit like it is cut from the same cloth as Dark Crystal - a fantasy film for kids who can take something a bit on the scary side, with enough going on that it might actually have a stronger appeal to adults of a more discerning nature.

I am now thinking of what film I will pick when my turn arrives to choose one for the Bigger Picture.

images:

Matthew McConaughey & Kris Kristofferson in Lone Star (IFC Center: "Lone Star")

Kris Kristofferson in Lone Star (Austin Chronicle: "Lone Star")

Chris Cooper and Elizabeth Peña in Lone Star (Warner Bros: "Lone Star")

Dorothy in the asylum (Ranker: "The Eeriest Thing About Return to Oz")

Beware the Wheelers (Ranker: "The Eeriest Thing About Return to Oz")

Fairuza Balk as Dorothy, and friends, in Return to Oz (D23: "Return to Oz (film)")

As Gaeilge, le do thóil: "An Cailín Ciúin", "Róise agus Frank"

Is maith liom dul go dtí an phictuirlann. Tá mé freisin ag foghlaim Gaeilge san obair. Mar sin de, chuaigh me chuig na dhá scannáin Gaeilge An Cailín Ciúin agus Róise & Frank. If you don't live in Ireland then An Cailín Ciúin is the one of these you are most likely to have heard of, though you will probably have heard of it under its English title, The Quiet Girl. Written and directed by Colm Bairéad, it is a finalist in this year's Academy Awards in the Best International Film category and is based on Foster, a novella by Claire Keegan. The eponymous girl is a child of neglect, her father a deadbeat piece of shit from central casting (so well played by Michael Patric that I can imagine the actor having to wear a paper bag over his head to prevent random strangers hurling abuse at him when he is out in public) and her mother completely ground down and mired in the slough of despond.

But then she goes on an extended stay with distant relatives (an older and apparently childless couple, the woman warm and affectionate, the man initially more gruff and reserved) and experiences the kind of parental affection hitherto denied to her. We learn things and so do the characters, but not in a "And you have learned how to make a good bagel!" kind of way. It's all pretty subtle, with many things remaining unspoken or implied. But it puts you through the emotional wringer, not least because there is no Hollywood transformation in the film's end; he viewer left wondering how the poor girl's childhood and life pans out, with various non-ideal outcomes looking entirely possible. The three central actors (Catherine Clinch as the girl and Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennett as the fosters) give incredible performances and it is hard not to recommend this film. My beloved did however feel that the girl is a bit talkative for someone supposedly defined by her quietness.

Rachael Moriarty and Peter Murphy's Róise & Frank meanwhile is about a widow who is struggling to deal with her grief when a mysterious dog shows up at her house and refuses to go away. Soon she realises (or concludes) that the dog is in fact the reincarnation of Frank, her late husband. Frank was a keen hurler in his human life and the dog too shows an affinity for the noble sport, soon helping a local school team to advance to the finals (he does not actually play in the games, because that would be insane, but he helps with coaching). Róise's son is less convinced that the dog is his late father returned, but he cannot deny the positive transformation "Frank" has wrought on his mother.

It would be easy to dismiss Róise & Frank as a kitsch feelgood film, but I think there is more to it than that. There are some deeply moving scenes in it and I think the film will resonate with anyone who has ever lost a loved one or suspects that they may do so at some point in the future. It is also worth reporting that "Frank" is a very good dog. He is played by Barley, an English dog who had to learn Irish for the film. He appears to have greatly enjoyed making Róise & Frank, as he got to eat a lot of sausages and even some steak (I can imagine him deliberately fluffing some of the dining scenes as a way of getting more sausages in the re-take). The human actors (Bríd ní Neachtain as Róise and Ruadhán de Faoite as the main kid hurler are also pretty memorable, as is Lorcan Cranitch as the neighbour who resents the arrival of "Frank" as a blocker on his making moves on Róise).

Interestingly, both of these films are (mostly) set in the same part of the country, the Ring Gaeltacht in County Waterford. In both cases I think the choice is fairly deliberate. When most people in Ireland think of Irish speaking parts of the country they imagine bleak windswept places in the west of Ireland, but setting films there means the landscape takes over the story and you start having to deal with themes of isolation and remoteness, together with an association of the Irish language with being far away from modernity. Ring is a mostly rural area but in neither of these films does it look like a land that time forgot or somewhere that remained Irish-speaking because it was too far away from the centre of imperial power and too poor to be worth bothering with. So that lets the stories of the films speak for themselves: these are films in which the characters speak Irish but they are not really films about the Irish language.

íomhanna

Catherine Clinch agus Carrie Crowley san Cailín Ciúin (Meath Chronicle: "An Cailín Ciúin breaks box office records")

Andrew Bennett agus Catherine Clinch san Cailín Ciúin (BBC News: "An Cailín Ciúin: Irish language film shortlisted for an Oscar")

Barley agus Bríd ní Neachtain san Róise & Frank (Entertainment.ie: "Róise & Frank is anything but a dog's dinner")

Barley agus Bríd ní Neachtain san Róise & Frank (The Guardian: "Róise & Frank review – a shaggy-dog story with easy Irish charm")

Barley ag foghlaim a línte Facebook: Róise & Frank)

David Bowie: Films and Festival

I've been on a bit of a David Bowie roll lately, largely thanks to Brett Morgen's brilliant Moonage Daydream film. I went to see it again and enjoyed the experience much more the second time. Partly I was fortunate in that the screen was not hurting my eyes (I'm not sure if previously the awkwardness came from my eyes being shit or the particular combination of the Moonage Daydream montage and the IFI's screen 2 combining to downpress me, but I certainly got nothing like the same disturbance from the screening in the IFI's screen 3) but also I was approaching the film in a more relaxed manner, letting it wash over me without trying to identify the various bits of funny German expressionist footage they kept throwing into the mix. It's a great piece of work, submerging the viewer in Bowie's work while avoiding the standard music documentary thing of wheeling in Bongo to tell us all why Bowie was quite so important as someone who paved the way to the music of U2. I continue to be struck by the contrast between the audiences shown for his early 1970s Ziggy Stardust concerts and the Serious Moonlight tour of the 1980s, with the former audience being made up an excitable bunch of freaks and weirdos while the 1980s audience looked pretty square, even by 1980s standards. More generally I found myself wondering when Bowie's audience shifted from being primarily girls to primarily boys. Or did it? My beloved noted that there were always a lot of both, and one might perhaps overestimate the number of girls in the early years where the boys are all dressing like girls.

With Moonage Daydream pushing my buttons it seemed only natural that this year I make some kind of engagement with the Dublin Bowie Festival. This takes place in January of each year, around the anniversaries of Bowie's birth and death. I've never bothered with it before so I can't say whether this year's programme was typical, but I can confirm that the line-up featured musical performances (by Bowie tribute acts and Bowie-linked musicians), a photographic exhibition, talks, and film screenings in the Light House cinema.

The film screenings included another showing of Moonage Daydream, which I skipped on the basis that i) it was only a week or two after my last viewing of it and ii) it was on very late. But I did go and see The Hunger, Tony Scott's film adaptation of Whitley Streiber's novel. Truth be told even if I was not on a Bowie kick I would have crawled out of the grave to see this, as it is a film I have long been fascinated by without ever actually seeing, ever since I read the book and found its evocation of immortal sadness intriguing. And the film is an interesting one to show as part of a Bowie festival, as he only really plays a supporting role. It is a prominent supporting role, but Bowie is very much playing third fiddle to Catherine Deneuve and Sarah Sarandon.

The basic plot is simple enough. Deneuve and Bowie are an immortal vampire couple, except something is going wrong with Bowie's character, who starts to rapidly age, his hundreds of years of undead life rapidly catching up with him. Deneuve's character is sad, but there's nothing really she can do about it. And hating being alone she starts lining up the Sarandon character as Bowie's replacement.

Plotwise I kept finding myself comparing it with the book, or my memories of it (it was thirty years ago, your honour), and at certain key points I found the film wanting in this department. But the look and feel of the film is incredible, with its dark lighting, shadows and close-ups making it like the bastard child of German expressionist cinema and film noir. There is some great fractured time stuff too, with edits jumping backwards and forwards between the vampires on the hunt and then laying into their victims. It also does a good job of communicating the idea that maybe the life of an immortal vampire isn't really all that, even if your centuries do not start suddenly catching up with you. I did find myself wondering if this might be the first screen depiction of a sad and sympathetic vampire. The film also seems to have largely established the idea that if vampires existed they would hang out in goth clubs (as featured in the memorable opening sequence with Bauhaus playing in a New York club while the two vampires stalk their victims), something that would eventually become something of a cliche.

It also features doves, which seem to have been a bit of a thing in films of the era. In The Hunger they hang around in a loft but seem to never deposit their droppings on the floor.

Plus the film features Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon getting it on. This may have been the elevator pitch.

Aside from the cinema I attended a couple of the festival's talks. One of these was billed as a listening party for the album Aladdin Sane. David Bowie has a lot of albums and Aladdin Sane is one of the ones I've never heard. For the listening party they had Hot Press journalist Pat Carty chairing a discussion with Gerry Leonard (guitarist on Bowie's last albums), Leah Kardos (an academic), and B. P. Fallon (famous Irish music biz character whose actual link to Bowie is not entirely clear to me but he did provide a certain "I was there man" vibe to proceedings). But billing this as a listening party was a think necessarily false advertising. With the likes of Tim Burgess and his Twitter listening parties participants could listen to the records while reading the tweets (and possibly posting their own), but you can't simultaneously listen to a record while also listening to some guys yap away about it. So for this event they started off by playing bits of the songs and then having a bit of yap, but as the yap started going on and on they gave up on the music as otherwise we would have been there all night. For me this made for an odd experience, listening to people talking about a record I had not heard, but it was interesting to hear the general view of the panelists regarding pianist Mike Garson, whose playing was deemed a bit plinky plonky. Actually it was B. P. who introduced the plinky plonky criticism (the phrase "plinky plonky vibe" may have been uttered) but there was no real pushback against him. Leonard, who had played with Garson on late Bowie records said something about how Garson was now a good friend of his but then admitted that the pianist definitely loved the plinky plonky.

More generally the tacit subtext to the Aladdin Sane discussion was that the album is not really that good. Maybe not bad as such but certainly not front rank Bowie. I was nevertheless sufficiently intrigued by the discussion to pick up a copy afterwards and yes indeed, it is inessential. Definitely some good tracks (notably the title track and the hit) and some rofflesome lines (the one about how time falls wanking to the floor) but a good few of the tracks feel like Bowie by numbers (save where he is trying to evoke the Rolling Stones). Maybe it is not too surprising he broke up the Spiders soon after it was released. But it's not actually that plinky plonky.

That said, I am wary of going all in on dissing Aladdin Sane for fear that at some point in the future the penny will drop and I will realise that actually it is amazing. This has happened before.

There were two interesting and almost in-passing references to money in the Aladdin Sane discussions. Leah Kardos mentioned that around the time the album came out Bowie began to experience financial problems. Ziggy Stardust had pushed him up a level but he was now finding that his outlays had gone up considerably (with a large entourage and touring machine to support plus a sudden need to take limousines everywhere as well as a mammoth coke habit) but his income had not increased proportionately. She suggested that the eventual decision to rake in the cash with Let's Dance and the Serious Moonlight tour was largely driven by a need to get himself out of this financial hole. The other money thing was a "probably shouldn't be saying this" comment from one of the participants that I think it would be inappropriate to reproduce.

The following day, a Sunday, I went out to Rathfarnham Castle to see an exhibition entitled Bowie: Icon, which was a collection of photographs of David Bowie by one Philippe Auliac. The pictures were worth seeing but I am not sure they were worth going to see, though I did like what I saw of Rathfarnham Castle itself and may well make a return visit sometime. On returning back into town I returned to Whelan's where Leah Kardos (academic, Wire writer, stylophonist) was treating us to an audiovisual exploration of themes in and influences on Bowie's last works, the albums The Next Day and Black Star and the musical Lazarus. This touched on a lot of stuff, but one thing I found interesting was the way Bowie kept referencing The Man Who Fell To Earth in his work. I was also intrigued by the stuff about a young Bowie appearing in a mime/dance troupe with the pub landlord from The Wicker Man (the actor, dancer and choreographer Lindsay Kemp), dressed as a similar kind of clown to the one he plays in the "Ashes to Ashes" video. The influences meanwhile pushed a lot of my buttons, with Kardos showing long clips from various Derek Potter dramas (reminding me that I have long been a Derek Potter fan without actually having ever watched any of his dramas all the way through). Some of this stuff was interesting to me in terms of what it said about Kardos herself, in terms of her age and background: she's from Australia and a good bit younger than me, and she seems to have come to Derek Potter through his being referenced by David Bowie rather than his being someone whose TV programme were always on when you were growing up.

I was also intrigued by Kardos's discussion of the Lazarus musical and the clips she showed from it. This had completely passed me by and I was barely aware of its existence. It is a jukebox musical (and so is suspect) but it seems to have not done a Mamma Mia and used the songs to piss on Bowie's legacy, instead having a plot based on recurring themes in his work, with Bowie himself being involved in its creation for all that popular Irish playwright Enda Walsh did the actual writing. Wikipedia lists it as being a straightforward adaptation of The Man Who Fell To Earth, but that was not really the impression I got from Kardos's presentation, though she did suggest that it certainly referenced that work (as does a lot of late Bowie material). It came across as being quite multi-layered and almost enigmatic, not something that just gives us a simple story that allows the cast to belt out the Bowie hits in a manner that might appeal to the casual Bowie fan. This may explain why it did not do that well.

I was also interested by the in-passing assertion that the second Tin Machine album is actually great; the Tin Machine reappraisal starts now!

I probably would have bought the big brainy book about late Bowie that Leah Kardos has written but she didn't have very many copies with her so that was that. I might look out for it.

And that was it for the 2023 Bowie Festival. Maybe next year I will go to some of the gigs.

images:

Moonage Daydream still (Irish Independent: "Moonage Daydream review: Bowie documentary as zany and brilliant as the man himself")

Catherine Deneuve & David Bowie (Roger Ebert: "The Hunger")

Susan Sarandon & Catherine Deneuve (Catherine Deneuve Source (Tumblr))

Aladdin Sane (Wikipedia: Aladdin Sane)

Blackstar Theory (Bloomsbury: Blackstar Theory: the Last Works of David Bowie)

Tin Machine II (Wikipedia: Tin Machine II)

Le Guess Who 2022: Sunday

This is the final part of my account of the 2022 Le Guess Who festival. See part one here, part two here, and part three here

On Sunday morning we did in fact partake of our hotel's breakfast cava, but overall we adopted a more restrained approach to breakfast because we had signed up for Le Feast. This is a Le Guess Who thing that had been abeyance for Covid last year. It basically involves sees those who sign up for it going to some random Utrechter for brunch. We did it the first time we went to LGW and we were looking forward to doing Le Feast again, albeit with that mild trepidation that faces the socially anxious when they have to interact with new people.

This year our brunch host lived just south of the moat canal that envelopes Utrecht. The other guests were two Dutch women, one younger than us and one older. Our host's son also helped his mother serve us and made for entertaining company, as did her friendly cat (her other cat hid upstairs). The food was appealingly homely. Interestingly, none of the other brunchers had full LGW tickets (the event was sold out by the time they thought of buying ones), so they were just dipping their toes into the free daytime events (which we largely ignored because they were on in out of the way places or, let's face it, because they didn't appear in the LGW scheduling app and so were off our radar).

Anyway, Le Feast is great and I recommend it to all Le Guess Who attendees. You can't beat second breakfast.

The first musical act we saw was Marina Herlop, a Catalan artist described in the programme as being inspired by Carnatic music from India. My first reaction when she came onstage was "Jesus Christ what is she wearing", showing how conservative I am with matters of attire. And I must admit I struggled with this set, mainly because I was by now incredibly tired (last day of a festival, etc.), spending most of it hovering between sleep and wakefulness. Herlop's set saw her doing electronic stuff and vocals accompanied by two backing singers and a drummer. I did not hear an obvious Indian influence, but then what would I know about Carnatic music? Overall though I was struck by how the set was simultaneously very avant-garde (in terms of its rejection of normal song structures etc.) but also clearly very composed and focussed. Whether I actually liked it was not something I could determine, at least partially thanks to my fatigue, but my beloved thought it was great.

We could at this stage have caught sets by Supersilent or Abdullah Ibrahim but then we realised that i) we had had no chips from Frietwinkel over the weekend and ii) friend Eamonn had NEVER been to Frietwinkel on any of his trips to Utrecht. So chips it was. Nom nom nom.

We did go to see Panda Bear & Sonic Boom playing electronic stuff with vocals in the Ronda. I liked the visuals but, unfortunately, the music was not really doing it for me, so we slipped off to the Pandora to see Gnod. Gnod, as you know, are a bunch of freak out types from Greater Manchester. Every time you see them they are different and have different people in the band. This time they had lost the singer and the quietly competent non-bloke member of the band but now have two drummers and a keyboardist as well as two guitarists and a bass player. They rocked hard in an interesting but impossible to photograph manner and were one of the highlights of the festival.

And that was almost it. But not quite. After some post Gnod refreshments we popped in to see Mr The Bug who was playing in the Ronda. At least, we think he was playing there: the stage was so wreathed in dry ice that it might well be that someone had just plugged a Spotify playlist of Bug classics into the PA. There seemed to be MCs lurking behind the dry ice too and they kept importuning us to "Give it up for The Bug!" which had me thinking what it must be like to keep encouraging people to give it up for someone else. The music meanwhile was of the crunchy bassy variety. I even danced a bit, though truth be told I was kind of hoping it would finish so I could go to bed.

But it did eventually finish. Some tried to keep the party going but I opted for sleep.

The next day we flew home (don't tell Greta) on stinky Ryanair, where the passenger in front of me in the boarding queue had a distinct odour of having been to several Gnod concerts without an intervening shower. Soon after arriving home we booked tickets for next year (too late for the early bird) and booked ourselves into the same hotel.

In previous years, I found it difficult to move from one gig to the next at Le Guess Who, with it generally being necessary to head to a venue a half hour early to be sure of getting in. This year though it seems much easier to move from venue to venue, with the result that I saw more performances than I had expected to. That said, I was a bit lazy about going beyond the Tivoli venues. Apart from Noori And His Dorpa Band and Sote and Tarik Barri in the Staadsschouwburg, I saw nothing outside the environs of the Tivoli. And I completely ignored the daytime U programme, which typically features smaller scale local acts, though in my defence I cite the festival's not including U acts in the timetable app.

All in all the festival was a lot of fun and a great way to catch up with buds and see weirdo music that I wouldn't otherwise have come across. See you next year.

More of my pictures

Le Guess Who 2022: Saturday

My account of the amazing 2022 Le Guess Who festival enters its third day. See part one here and part two here.

It was this morning that we registered that our hotel was offering unlimited quantities of cava with breakfast (in particular we noticed the Swedish rockers at a nearby table who were consuming unlimited quantities of cava with or instead of breakfast). However we decided to set a good example to the world and chose for now to abstain. What we did do after our post breakfast nap was head back to the Centraal Museum to catch a screening of Everybody in the Place: an Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992. This is a documentary by artist Jeremy Deller, possibly best known for his re-enactment of the Battle of Orgreave from the 1984 Miners' Strike and We're Here Because We're Here, a commemoration of the 19,240 British soldiers killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Everybody in the Place is a film about acid house and early rave culture in Britain, situated in the context of the social changes taking place in the country at the time. It features plenty of archival footage but its real stroke of genius is its framing device, which sees Deller delivering a lecture about acid house to a bunch of students in a London secondary school. Now, I understood from the introduction to the film by the museum's artistic director Bart Rutten that the school scenes were a reconstruction of an actual lecture to school kids that Deller had previously delivered: i.e. that what we were watching was essentially scripted even if it was in some sense based on real events. However, no one else I talked to appears to have taken that inference from the director, so maybe we were watching footage of a live event and the unscripted response of bemused kids to a cultural phenomenon long predating their birth.

Some of the film follows the usual trajectory followed by discussions of house music's history, with the music's origins in Detroit and Chicago receiving some interesting attention. One insight I hadn't heard before was that in the 1980s the local radio stations in Detroit were used to test audience reaction to a wider range of material than was generally the case in the USA, with the result that the locals had been exposed to a lot more weirdo European music than was the case elsewhere; he felt this factored into the mindsets of the people there who went on to make hard electronic music. It's also good on the influence Kraftwerk had on black American musicians, on the face of it one of the more bizarre features of historical cross-pollination.

When the narrative moves to the UK Deller positions acid house as a reaction to the Thatcherite crushing of working class power, as epitomised by the defeat of the miners' strike. There is also some interesting footage relating to new age travellers, where he deliberately confounds expectations by playing news footage of pensioners, who instead of saying "lock up the crusties!" are complaining about how Britain is becoming too authoritarian. Deller sees it as significant that they are of the generation that went through the Second World War, which ties into something I remember reading about the 2019 Brexit referendum: although pensioners generally voted for Brexit, the oldest pensioners (i.e. the ones who would have actually remembered the horrors of the mid 20th century) voted strongly against it.

When it came to acid house and rave itself, I was struck by how Deller underplayed the London-centric narrative that normally dominates here. Shoom and Spectrum were only mentioned in passing and he talked a good bit about how warehouse parties in the north of England had paved the way for mass acceptance of a new mode of musical enjoyment. But it does hop back to the south east when he gets into talking about the orbital raves. He is generally not hostile to the entrepreneurial types who took acid house from tiny clubs to huge rave sites, though he does pretty much state that Paul Staines (later the founder of the Guido Fawkes website) is a cunt from central casting. Sadly there was no mention of my own favourite of the rave-entrepreneurs, Tony Colston-Hayter, who went from professional gambler to rave promoter, to more recently serving stints in jail for a electronic fraud offences.

What I was struck by was how coy the film was about drugs. I'm not sure Ecstasy was even mentioned by name, even when we were being shown footage of obviously mashed ravers gurning away. I can see why Deller might have wanted to focus on the community aspects of rave culture, but it did seem like an odd lacuna to ignore the role played by MDMA in binding that community. In fact I think he only really mentioned drugs late in the day as fundamentally a bad thing, on the basis that they brought the attention of criminals and the cops onto the rave scene.

Anyway, at time of writing the film is available in full on YouTube. I recommend checking it out. If you want to get a taste, here is a trailer:

After a return visit to Double Act (see previous post) I think we may have sourced sustenance of some kind (perhaps a pizza) and then it was time for more music, in particular Colombian electronic music sensation Lucrecia Dalt, who was playing in the Ronda as a surprise late addition to the bill. Last year her set had been relatively austere but this time round we were treated to something a bit more all-singing and dancing, probably based on her recent album, on which she draws from the Colombian song-based music of her youth. As well as treating us to her singing she also had a bemulleted live drummer who really gave it socks. All pretty enjoyable but perhaps foolishly I left early to head to the Grote Zaal for another act.

Who was I going to see? Why none other than Cate Le Bon. When it comes to the popular Welsh singer I feel like I am suffering badly from the sunk cost fallacy, gripped by the idea that because she did one great album years ago I should keep listening to her in the hope that she will return to that kind of music. I've largely given up on her on record as she has moved away from what I liked about her, but I keep being drawn to her concerts in the hope that the old magic will return (sometimes it does). Anyway, with this concert I was struck by how full the Grote Zaal was: it's a big venue and I thought maybe her appeal was a bit selective so there would be just me and some rolling tumble-weed there, but no, there were loads of people. Moving away from the key Ian demographic has obviously paid dividends.And the set started well, with "Miami", the opener from 2019's Reward. After that though it all got a bit ploddy, with the unimaginative and overly high in the mix drumming causing me particular annoyance. Cate Le Bon's big strength is her voice but since Me Oh My she has continued to not give it free rein.

Now, the big thing I wanted to see this evening was Goat, but there was a bit of time before they came on so to kill it we went up the mysterious Pandora venue to see Cheikha Rabia & Esraa Warda. These are two Algerian women, Rabia a veteran singer of the 200 cigarettes a day variety and Warda a younger dancer. Warda also was the one with enough English to talk to the crowd (no one ever addresses LGW audiences in Dutch), and they were joined by two musicians (an older guy on some kind of small drum and a young lad on keyboards). The show saw Rabia sing while Warda shook her stuff, all very impressive, but sadly we had to leave early for Goat.

Now you know the way at festivals when there is one act you really really want to see properly, you resolve to make sure to get in early enough to where they are playing so that you get a good spot? Well Goat were like this for me. They were basically the LGW act I most wanted to see over the weekend. And we did leave Cheikha Rabia & Esraa Warda in reasonably good time. But then we fell in with some of our buds, which necessitated some quick toilet breaks and then suddenly it seemed like a good idea to queue for drinks which then of course took ages to arrive, and with the hares and the hounds by the time we made our way into the Ronda it was only a few minutes before Goat were due to come on, plus the venue was completely rammed. A clever ruse saw us leap towards the front but way over on one side, and it was still unpleasantly crowded, but we had to make the best of our bad lot.

But who you may ask are Goat? Well, that is a good question. They appear to be from Sweden, though doubts have been raised on this front. What we can say for definite is that they play live wearing robes and masks. Their music is of a broadly psychedelic nature, with some suggesting that it incorporates "tribal" elements (with further people wondering if this makes them problematic). They have two singers, both of them apparently women, with these two also working as dancers and crowd molesters. As spectacle they are unbeatable. The music is pretty hot too.

I was struck by how the two singer-dancers were relatively uncoordinated with each other — while they were both wearing masks and crowns, they were not wearing matching masks and crowns, while the rest of their clothes shared an aesthetic without being in any way identical. They did not seem to have jointly coordinated dance moves either. Yet their dancing was not completely random. I noticed that a couple of times they exchanged places on the stage, swapping which microphone they were basing themselves at when resuming their vocals; and they managed to do this without bumping into each other or getting into scuffles over who was going to be using a mic. Fascinating.

So yeah, Goat deliver. They are GOAT.

And thence to the Grote Zaal, where África Negra were doing their thing. They are from Sao Tome and Príncipe, one of those countries Europeans dread coming up in Worldle. They played good time uptempo music drawing on various influences, and their frontman is known as The General and dresses accordingly (his precise military status has not been confirmed). I had originally planned to relax through their set, being a bit worn out by Goat, but even I ended up dancing away to them.

We then thought of sticking our heads into the Ronda then to see what Kokoko!, an electronic fellow from Kinshasa was up to, but everyone else had the same idea, so we decided that enough was enough. And so to bed.

The next post will conclude my account of the 2022 Le Guess Who festival.

images:

Typical ravers (Mixmag: "Jeremy Deller explores '80s UK rave culture in new documentary")

Jeremy Deller warns the kids to be wary of Paul Staines (Four Four: "Watch: Jeremy Deller's documentary on Acid House in 1980s Britain")

Kids making their own acid house music (Cast: "Jeremy Deller - Everybody in the Place")

Other images

Le Guess Who 2022: Friday

My account of the amazing 2022 Le Guess Who festival continues. See part one here.

On Friday we tried to go to a screening of a film about the Chelsea Hotel. Unfortunately so did everyone else, as this was one of very few festival events taking place during the day, and we were unable to squeeze into the small cinema auditorium. I hope the more organised people enjoyed themselves. So instead we trekked down to the Centraal Museum to catch a LGW-associated exhibition called Double Act, which combined video art stuff with paintings from the 17th century. Video art is a bit hit and miss and, truth be told even some of that 17th century stuff is not all that, so there was no guarantee that this was going to deliver the goods. It turned out however that there were some real corkers here. The video of the guy scooting around Puerto Rico on a moped with a trumpet attached to the exhaust pipe (there was parping) was amusing, even if I did not really buy it as a commentary on how imperialism is bad. I was also struck by how quite a few of the other video pieces just featured people walking purposefully.

The actual hit of the show for me though was Irish artist Richard Mosse's The Enclave, which presented footage shot in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo during one of their wars there. This was shot on some kind of infrared sensitive film that renders green colours as pink, giving the landscape a strangely alien look. And the way the images were projected was deliberately disorienting, with this exhibit using six screens, four arranged in a rectangle and two diagonally outside. Sometimes the same images were projected on screens facing each other, and sometimes not, with the viewer always having the sense that they are missing something. The images themselves showed soldiers moving around, people in a small town or refugee camp, and sometimes the aftermath of violence (dead soldiers triggering the mild curiosity of their former comrades and/or non-combatants). But there was no narration or explanatory text, indeed no soundtrack of any kind, leaving the actions of the people in the footage (and indeed the choices of the filmmakers) largely inscrutable.

A key sequence for me was the long section inside some kind of village hall, where initially it seems like a large group of civilians have gathered for entertainment, until you realise that the event seems to be mainly taking place for the bunch of guys in military fatigues sitting at the front. First we have music and dancing, then kids jumping through flaming hoops of burning petrol, and then a woman with the most amazing presence strides in from the back of the hall and marches up to the stage, only before we get any sense of what she is about the lead army guy gets up and leaves, with the camera following him out. This to me embodied the whole baffling incomprehensibility of the piece and, by extension, the confusion that must come with living in a conflict zone.

We also popped in to the Speelklok Museum, where they had some things available for LGW attendees. As you will recall, the Speelklok is a museum for mechanical musical instruments, and the big thing they had for us this year was the Klappermobile. This was like what you would get if John Carpenter's The Thing ate a load of bicycles and then turned them into a musical instrument. It required at least two people to operate: one person to wind a handle and keep the contraption going and then another to press keys that depressed baffles against spinning bicylce wheels designed to rotate at different speeds and so create noises of different pitches. My beloved was able to make it play something approximating to "Raglan Road".

The first musical performance I saw on the Friday was Noori and His Derpa Band, who were playing in Janskerk (which is a church). They had played previously in the Grote Zaal and I think that might have been a better place for them, as this was uptempo good time music (albeit with something of an edge, as Mr Noori is from Sudan's downtrodden Beja community).

Back in the Tivoli's very comfortable Hertz venue we then saw Alison Cotton, a spooky folky gothy lady. She played violin, did stuff with electronics, and used her voice to create a distinctly eerie atmosphere, to the extent that friend Brian was afraid that she might accidentally summon something from another plane of existence. I was struck by how she covered Syd Barrett's "Golden Hair", but it was the tunes where her vocals were almost completely non-verbal that sent shivers down my spine.

We were then faced by a dilemma. Dry Cleaning were playing in the Ronda, and while I am unfamiliar with their work I have heard of them and was interested in checking out this big name band. Also my friend Mr B—'s repeated comments about how the Dry Cleaning singer is great while the rest of the band's music is rather plodding had me curious as to how bad it could really be, especially when you consider the eccentric nature of Mr B—'s tastes. But they were playing at the same time as Širom, whose programme description as weirdo avant folkies from Slovenia made them sound like a hard to resist option. And we could not resist, climbing up to Cloud Nine (and successfully accessing it) to see most of their set.

And basically Širom, gave good weirdo avant folk, with an added side order of drone. They played a variety of strange acoustic instruments while also providing us with some vocals, though whether these were of the Slovenian or non-verbal variety remains an unsolved mystery. They also had a carpet on stage and I understand from other reports that they might have thrown lentils at people. It all sounded a bit like those Finnish Fonal people (who may or may not still be going). And they appear to be from the Karfeit and Carso areas (possibly called something else in Slovenian), sites of the famous 11 battles of the Isonzo in the First World War.

But then we did go to the Ronda to see Clipping (who may actually call themselves "clipping." but it's not my fault if they don't understand punctuation and capitalisation). You have heard of this trio: two blokes on productiony stuff and one on rappy vocals. The music is pretty glitchy and the overall effect is a bit like if you had someone rapping over a record by Squarepusher. I think a lot of the appeal here comes from Daveed Diggs's rapping, with his quickfire vocals carrying the music along. Great as it was though, I did find myself wondering if this might be hip hop for white people (though as a white person myself maybe this is not a problem).

And thence to Hertz to see Nancy Mounir's Nozhet El Nofous. She is an Egyptian musician and like Nadah El Shazly her work involves a certain interrogation of the musical past of her country. As a performance, Nozhet El Nofous was an odd beast. Mounir herself played both violin and theremin, but she was joined by a gang of local classical musicians. And she had a man and a woman projecting photographs of Egyptian singers of yore (less famous ones than Um Kalthoum) and explanatory text. The musical also combined samples of the old singers with the music being played live, to create a sound that might be described as hauntological. It was all rather fascinating and strange, with the frequency with which the olde singers seem to have played against gender roles being an intriguing aspect of their biographies. I found myself thinking that this could do with being released as a nicely packaged CD set with an accompanying book containing all the details of the singers, as there was too much to otherwise remember.

As with the first night I was by now too tired to go on to BASIS so I made my way instead to BED.

Images from Richard Mosse's The Enclave (National Gallery of Victoria)

More terrible Le Guess Who photos

More Le Guess Who action real soon.

Le Guess Who 2022: Thursday

You know the drill. Le Guess Who is that festival of Wire-reader music that takes place each November in the picturesque Dutch town of Utrecht, with most concerts taking place in the Tivoli Vredenburg complex but many also happening in various satellite locations. I previously attended in 2021 and 2018. This year for crazy person reasons my beloved and I decided that rather than fly over we would travel by a combination of boat and train, so you'll have to put up with some yap about our travel arrangements before reaching the music festival chat.

The ferry and train journey to London were uneventful, notwithstanding the intermittent industrial action that had been taking place on the trains. Rather than risking a missed connection. we broke our journey in London. The check-in queue for the Eurostar in the morning seemed a bit more chaotic than I remembered but moved quickly enough, and soon we were on our way. The Eurostar itself is a weird combination of VERY EXCITING ("OMG we are going under the ocean!") and pretty mundane (it is just a train). I was nevertheless struck by how big and full it was. I've very little sense of how much human traffic there is between England and the near continent, but being able to zip in to the centre of a continental city makes this a far more attractive means of travel than flying. I was irked though by the fact that the catering car seemed to shut for an age before and after a staff changeover at Brussels, which was basically prime time for when you would want to be sourcing wine to drink at your seat like some kind of debauched plutocrat. By the time the bar was open again we were so close to our destination that it didn't seem worth it.

We left the Eurostar in Rotterdam rather than Amsterdam, as we thought it might be interesting to have a quick snoop through that famous town. It did not quite conform to expectations. Firstly, there was no gabba blaring non-stop over the loudspeakers in the station, with no loud voices shouting "FUUUUCK YOUUUUUUUU" to be heard either. Also the city centre had far less of the completely rebuilt after being bombed to shit look than I was expecting (the city was heavily bombed by both sides in the Second World War but they seemed to have missed a surprisingly large number of old buildings). However it did feel a good bit less shi-shi or dinky than Amsterdam and Utrecht, and the walk down to the river (a mouth of the Rhine, I think) gave good nautical feels. The hour or two we spent there might be enough, but I'm sure if circumstances brought you back (say for their film or jazz festivals, or the < href="https://www.erasmuscon.nl">2024 Eurocon) you would find things to amuse yourself.

From Rotterdam it was a short journey on a double-decker train to Utrecht, where we checked into our hotel (conveniently located right beside the station with a view of the platforms, while also being five minutes away from the Tivoli), ate our dinner in a branch of the famous Dutch restaurant Wagamama (where I saw a couple that I then kept seeing again and again over the weekend) and repaired to bed.

The festival started the next day, which was a Thursday. Following the crowd I found myself catching the very first performance of the festival, Sote and Tarik Barri performing together not in one of the Tivoli Vredenburg spaces but in the Stadsschouburg, a theatre space I had not previously made it to. Sote is an Iranian electronic musician while Barri is a Dutch visual artist. For this Barri was doing visuals live in response to Sote's plinky music, which made for a wonderfully immersive introduction to the festival.

After a quick beer and burger break we made our way to the Tivoli's Grote Zaal for a performance by the Master Musicians of Jajouka led by Bachir Attar (who split from the Master Musicians of Joujouka in the 1990s, for reasons). Hailing from Morocco, their music draws from Sufi traditions and would probably have originally been played at events where people were going into trances and getting close to the divine and stuff, as opposed to music festivals for whitey. Quite a few of their tunes began with long piercing blasts from their wind instruments, before the percussion instruments came in and a bit of to-and-fro ensued. I did find myself thinking that maybe the percussion instruments were a bit quieter than they should be, but that might be because the master musicians kept moving away from their microphones. My beloved meanwhile was amused by how the various master musicians were like a bunch of crotchety auld lads who seemed to spend their time grumbling about stuff.

In previous years it has been hard to move from gig to gig at Le Guess Who, with venues filling up to the extent that you needed to get to them half an hour or more before an act was scheduled to start in them. But I was nevertheless able to go straight from the Master Musicians to the Ronda (second largest Tivoli venue), where Divide and Dissolve were playing. They had played support to Low earlier this year but I arrived too late to see them on their Dublin date, so this was my first time catching them. They are a two-woman outfit, one on drums (Olivia, filling in for the usual drummer) and the other playing sax, guitars, and keyboards (Takiaya Reed). There were no vocals, though Reed did a lot of between song chat. Some of the chat was about the late Mimi Parker of Low, who Reed reported being very supportive of Divide and Dissolve's work. Colonialism, imperialism, racism, patriarchy, etc. were also discussed (the band are broadly against all of these things). The music meanwhile was quite in-your-face and in some ways contrasted considerably with Reed's vocal style, which was quite soft spoken and almost like what you might get from someone fronting an indie band. I liked her and sympathised with her struggle, but after not too long I felt like I had got the idea with D&D and did not really need to hear too much more of their music.

Leaving the Ronda I decided to make my way up to Cloud Nine to see OKI. The venue was pretty crowded, but I made my way up to the balcony and had a pretty good view of proceedings from there. But who or what is OKI? It turns out that he is this guy called Oki Kano and he is a member of the Ainu community (an indigenous people hailing from the north of Japan). He was playing with his wife and son as well as some other guy on bass. Kano and his family wore what looked like some kind of traditional garb, while the drummer was less traditionally attired. The instruments meanwhile hovered between tradition and modernity: as well as the bassist, there was Kano's son on a standard Western drum-kit, while Mr & Mrs Kano played the tonkori, the five-stringed harp of the Ainu, which they played almost like a guitar.

From reading about Oki Kano, I gather he is all about preserving the embattled culture of the Ainu, yet he is also surprisingly un-precious about it. His band's performance was not like some kind of stuck in amber reconstruction of a true well of Ainu music of yore but instead pulled in influences from all over the place, with dub and western pop being obvious points of reference (I read that he has also collaborated with Ireland's Kila, but then hasn't everyone). All in all this was a big pile of fun and one of the most enjoyable sets of the festival.

I made arrangements to rendezvous with my beloved in the Grote Zaal where she was planning to catch Alabaster DePlume but I arrived early and the previous ensemble of Mr Sarathy Korwar was still playing, joined by special guest star… Mr Alabaster DePlume! Confused? Not as much as I was when they all went offstage and I thought that the Alabaster DePlume concert was over before it had started.

But it was not too long before Mr DePlume returned with his band. Basically he is a jazz saxophonist but when he isn't playing his sax he treated us to either his wise sayings about the world (generally of the upbeat positivity variety) or else his beat poetry. It's the kind of thing that should be terrible but it all somehow worked. I particularly liked his "I Was Gonna Fight Fascism" poem, which was all about how he was going to fight fascism but for a variety of reasons he was unable to do so (he was a bit tired, he had a lot on, he got a bit annoyed with the other people fighting fascism, etc.); and then it was too late. We've all been there.

And that was that for me. Some of my buds went on to BASIS, Le Guess Who's late night club venue, but you don't want to wreck yourself on the first night of a festival.

More terrible Le Guess Who photos

More Le Guess Who action real soon.

Octocon 2022: two months on

Octocon is the Irish national science fiction convention, which takes place each year in October. After an interlude as an online con, Octocon resumed as an in-person event this year, with fans of science fiction and related genres gathering in a Croke Park conference facility. Others joined us online, as this was a hybrid convention. I have already written about some of the programme items that I unfortunately missed, so now it is time to look back at some things that I was lucky enough to witness or even in some cases take part in.

After a brief stint on the Octocon information desk (where I fear that every piece of information I gave out was incorrect), I found myself moderating a panel entitled Crafting Non-Human Worlds and Societies, with the panelists all being people who had created non-human societies in their own works. This was my first time moderating an in-person panel, so obviously there was the fear that angry attendees would take a dislike to the way in which discussion progressed, blame me for their disappointment, and then chase me from the venue with threats of violence. Fortunately the panelists (Máire Brophy, Michael Carroll, Peadar Ó Guilín, and Jo Zebedee) were all dream programme participants: the kind of people who could talk knowledgeably on the subject, illustrating points both from their own works and those of other writers (including Jack Vance, Piers Anthony, R. Scott Bakker, Adrian Tchaikovsky, & Ted Chiang (in particular for "Story of Your Life", which was adapted into the film Arrival). Discussion of animals that a writer might usefully adapt into an alien civilisation naturally turned to cats but also to the octopus and rabbits (with Richard Adams' Watership Down receiving a favourable mention).

Subsequently I sat in the audience for Movie Monster Mash, which looked at cinematatic monsters. I liked the discussion of how some monsters go through cycles of being seen as irredeemably terrifying before shifts present them as either sympathetic or comical before they go back to being terrifying again, with vampires being an obvious example here. I also agreed with those panelists who argued that the 1992 Bram Stoker's Dracula is an absolutely terrible film. I was not sure what to make of the revelation that there is now a revival of interest in werewolves, those most rubbish of monsters.

I missed the start of Fictional Words to Live By, a panel on the way in which fictional works of science fiction and fantasy can contain philosophical nuggets that gestate in our brains. I was interested by the point that much of SFF has now become contemporary myths, with superhero comics & films and Trek Wars being specifically referenced here; given that all of these have gone on far too long and fallen into cosy self-plagiarism I'm not entirely convinced of the quality of myth we are bequeathing to future generations.

And then two readings, firstly by RB Kelly and Jonny Nexus. Kelly's was from the recently published On the Brink, in which the characters are on a Dutch space station. Science fiction usually imagines US or sometimes Chinese controlled space programmes, so it was nice to see some of the smaller nations getting their go (I feel like I should go away and cobble together a series in which some technological breakthrough leads to Ireland colonising the moons of Jupiter). Nexus's first reading also gave us the space programme of a small-ish nation, in this case the United Kingdom in an alternate history where it somehow managed to get an exciting space programme going much earlier than anyone else did in the real world. The setting reminded me of Ministry of Space (by Warren Ellis & Chris Weston), though it felt tonally different, as befits his description of the setting as Dan Dare meets James Bond. The excerpt had an appealing retro-future ambience. Nexus also read a snippet from a work about the Olympian gods playing a table top roleplaying game, which was every bit as bizarre as that sounds.

That took me to the end of Octocon's first day. There was a social event in the evening sponsored by the 2024 Glasgow Worldcon, but I couldn't face the prospect of trying to socialise while wearing a mask (unlike the rest of society, Octocon sees the Covid pandemic as very much still with us). Also I had a cat to feed. And I had to get up early in the morning, as I was appearing on a 10.00 A.M. online panel Monarchy and Nepotism in Fact and Fiction, looking at the fondness of SFF for narratives based around monarchy. Ably moderated by Cheryl Morgan, this saw Jean Bürlesk, Aliette de Bodard, Gillian Polack and myself grumbling that creators all too often misunderstand what they are bringing from the real world into their history, in this case tending to present absolute monarchies and never considering the kind of constitutional or constrained monarchy seen in Europe past and present (to say nothing of monarchies further afield). And while the panel generally felt that the absolute monarchies of SFF are generally not great, it didn't really turn into republics-are-best panel either, for all that I lean that way myself. Jean Bürlesk even went so far as to argue the case for constitutional monarchies, though maybe if I lived in the world's only grand duchy I might do similar.

After that I made the relatively short journey from my home to Croke Park, and somehow managed to miss all programme items until a post-lunch panel entitled A History of Irish Fandom. This to some extent turned into a history of Irish SFF cons, with zines and the like receiving relatively short shrift. There was a bit of talk about the now moribund Irish Science Fiction Association and how it performed a useful role, with Philippa Ryder suggesting that it would be great if someone were to revive it. Having an organisation for science fiction fans sounds amazing — I am imagining membership books, badges, secret codes, possibly uniforms — but I didn't really get much sense from the panel of what ISFA actually did. I should perhaps have a look at FANAC and see if there are any scans of ISFA publications there.

It was fun hearing about the cons of yore though, with the mention of the 1992 Trincon being a particular highlight for me as that was my first (and for a long time only) experience of organised science fiction fandom. One thing I don't think the panelists really touched on is that there was a definite arrogant Trinity student aspect to Trincon, which might have jarred with the wider SF community. It's been a long time but I remember there being panels at Trincon that you would never get at Octocon today (I can't imagine Octocon ever running panels on how Star Trek is stupid or how film science fiction is mostly just a facile dumbed down version of what appears in print). But the Trinity students got their comeuppance in 1997 with Trincon 2, which attracted so few attendees that there was one guest of honour for every five paying punter.

I arrived slightly late to Comics Is Literature, discovering subsequently that the cavalier approach to subject-verb agreement in the panel's title references an internet controversy. This explored the recurring SFF question: "why don't the squares in the literary establishment take our genre stuff seriously?" One thing I did like was the mention of how comics have always been a somewhat disposable medium, with the transition from print to online distribution not necessarily changing this: previously people bought monthly comics that had a tendency to fall apart, now they often view them on a website that might well disappear in the morning. There was also discussion of how comics have long been seen as primarily a medium for children, which undermines their acceptance as something adults can unproblematically enjoy or take seriously.

I was struck though by how the comics panel only really talked about comics in the anglophone world, as my understanding has long been that on the European continent and in Japan it is far less the case that comics are seen as things exclusively for the kids. It would be interesting to look at why there might be that divergence. Also, given that the kids' comic market has now largely disappeared (apart from The Beano), the idea that the problem with comics is their association with children might be something that will no longer hold in the future.

One other point made by the panelists interested me, the idea that comics are a form, not a genre. That is obviously true, with comics covering a range of subject matters, even if ones about guys in funny costumes punching each other are still rather dominant. But I think there is still an extent to which people who like comics and people who create them do kind of see them as effectively a genre. Even the fact that you can have a comics is literature panel without panelists saying "I've nothing in common with you guys because I write romance comics while you are writing crime comics" suggests a certain collective appreciation. There is something a bit circular here of course: regardless of genre, comics are sold in comics shops or in the comics section of bookshops, which reinforces the idea that they are a thing apart from true literary works like the latest Andy McNab tome.

For me though a gap in the comics panel was any discussion of what constitutes literature. Is literature anything with written text? Or is literature a qualitative term (something only becomes literature if it is… literary)? If you take the first approach then any comics that have text are literature, but there is a certain so-what quality to this as the same would be true of a shopping list. If you go down the second road then it becomes possible to argue that some comics are literary enough to be classed as literature, but this also implies that there will be some comics that will not make the grade.

The panel also has me thinking that it is really time I got back into buying monthly comics. It further reminded me that I should be checking out IrishComics.ie on a more regular basis.

I then took a break from panels to attend Half a Man in a Trenchcoat: Network Theory and Storytelling. This was a talk by Harun Šiljak, who took ways of modelling real-life human interaction and then applied them to works of fiction. He began with such mythic works as Beowulf and the Táin Bó Cúailgne, noting that the networks between the characters are statistically similar to those observed in real life networks, once the main characters are excluded (this had me wondering if real life social networks might look a bit unrealistic if mapped from one person's point of view). He then went on to the core of his talk, applying network theory to the first season of Twin Peaks. There was a lot to unpack here — the change in the way the character interactions work once Dale Cooper appears in the first episode (which in turn sees about half of the main characters appearing before and after Cooper first hits the screen), and then the way Cooper and Sherif Truman frequently appearing together skews the network in a way that can be resolved by treating them as one person. The thing I found myself wondering was whether in a show with a whodunnit element like Twin Peaks do the character networks provide clues to the killer's identity.

And then the closing ceremony saw the announcement that Sakura is stepping down as chair, with the new occupant of the hot seat being Paul Carroll. Onward and upward. I should also mention the trade hall at this year's Octocon, which was perhaps in a smaller space than the last in-person con but which felt like it was completely jam-packed with product. I came home with a pile of stuff. And I should note that I missed the non-appearance of the Golden Blasters and the Vault of Horror. The Golden Blasters was a short film competition and festival that always featured some amazing stuff, while the Vault of Horror saw John Vaughan playing clips from terrible films while drawing attention to their awfulness (this was way more entertaining than I am making it sound). Good things cannot last forever.

One great thing that was back at Octocon was the Lally Wall. This a wall featuring hand-drawn posters by Dave Lally outlining ways people can travel to other conventions happening in Britain and Ireland (and sometimes further afield). No online con has ever managed to replicate these successfully.

So that was that. It was great being back at an in-person science fiction con. Croke Park felt like the nicest venue I've experienced Octocon in (the right size, useful layout, convenient location), with the one caveat about the pretty terrible catering options (for vegetarians: the options were cakes of various kind (all of which ran out by Sunday afternoon), chocolate bars, crisps, manky pre-made sandwiches, and potato wedges (which rapidly ran out); I don't think the meat people did much better.

If you've got this far you might have noticed another thing about Octocon: everyone was wearing masks. This was mandated by the conrunners as an anti-Covid measure, to protect vulnerable attendees. That it was enforced for programme participants was non-ideal for attendees with hearing impairments. The mask requirement seemed a bit strange to me, as by the time Octocon took place almost nothing else in society was enforcing a mask mandate. Was Octocon being excessively cautious, or is the rest of society insanely reckless? I'm not sure how we could answer this question.

For another view of Octocon, check out this report on File 770 by James Bacon: Octocon 2022

More of my Octocon pictures (inessential)