Baby Hedgehogs

Baby hedgehogs are very small. You can hold them in your hand. They look a bit like toys.

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v/a "Deutsche Elektronische Musik"

This is that Soul Jazz compilation of (mostly West) German electronic and avant-garde rock music from the 1970s and thereabouts. It takes great pains not to refer to this stuff by the usual Krautrock moniker, saying that that was just an offensive term invented by the British music press and never really adopted by the German musicians (notwithstanding Julian Cope's claim that kraut is a German slang for marijuana). Anyway, this is deadly stuff, with lots of great tunes from the like of Cluster, Amon Düül II (no Amon Düül I, sadly, or perhaps not), Deuter, Neu!, Can, Faust, and so on.

There is also text situating this experimental music scene in the context of the wider youth revolt occurring in Germany in the late 1960s and 1970s. It maybe does not say anything that a student of that period of German history would not already know, but it is a good way of showing that the scene did not appear out of a void. It also maybe goes some way towards explaining the stories everyone had about the time the RAF were hiding out in their commune.

The music itself runs the gamut from wibbly electronic to the kind of Neu! motorik that to many defines the Krautrock sound. I was struck, though, by the amount of hippy folkie-sounding tunes on this – many of these tracks would not sound out of place on one of those Early Morning Hush style collections of English folk music.

I recommend this record highly to anyone who is not over-familiar with this scene and would like to get an overview of it. I cannot really see how any such person could be disappointed with this collection. I know some of my hipster friends have scoffed at this collection saying that everyone would already have all these tunes; I fear they are not its target audience.

One final thing – this is great music to listen to on headphones while walking around town. A lot of the songs have a strong driving beat to them, so the disc makes you feel like you are some big West German hippy stomping around confronting established bourgeois notions of behaviour.

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Group Doueh "Treeg Salaam"

Another rare Sublime Frequencies single artist release, this time from the Western Saharan sensations. In the vaguest conceptual terms they are not unlike Omar Souleyman, playing a music that manages to take traditional forms and radically update them with modern instrumentation. But the actual music is very different, with Group Doueh being heavily based around the electric guitar.

It has become rather commonplace recently to describe the odder ends of non-Western music as being somehow akin to the more avant garde reaches of our music. In Group Doueh's case, this seems more apt than with some others. The combination of the wacka wacka guitar virtuosity, the slightly random keyboard notes, the blissed out vocals, and the dog-rough production values here lend it all a strangely forward thinking vibe, for all that this is seems to basically be party music for the people of the embattled Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic.

I suppose Group Doueh bear some resemblance, in its guitar orientation, to the likes of Tinariwen from nearby* Mali. But Tinariwen, with their high production values and general slickness, seems almost like bloated prog rockers compared to Group Doueh**. If the Malians are Rush, then Group Doueh are Sonic Youth. But of course, they would not care for the comparison – as far as I can make out, in their own culture, they are not avant garde weirdoes, just people making tunes for parties. Or maybe they are more like the makers of gnaoua music in southern Morocco, making music that is meant to transport the listener into other realms of awareness. It certainly has that effect on me.

* Only a couple of thousand miles away

** That said, it is not acceptable to criticise Tinariwen, as they are awesome in their own way.

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Film: "The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans"

This Werner Herzog directed film features Nicolas Cage playing the titular cop on the edge, a detective with the New Orleans Police Department who, thanks to chronic back pain, has found himself lumbered with a serious addiction to prescription pain killers and anything else he can get his hands on. He also seems quite happy to sexually exploit random members of the public, especially if he can also shake them down for drøgs to fuel his habit.

The film does not just follow the lieutenant as he aimlessly trawls through the crescent city trying to sate his appetites. Instead, he finds himself investigating a rather nasty gang-related murder case. In broad terms, the plot follows a police-procedural trajectory, except that the cop at the centre of the case is a raving lunatic (c.f. when the cops are on a stake-out and he starts complaining about all the iguanas running around them, to quizzical stares from his colleagues, or when he interrupts his high class prostitute girlfriend's work saying "Have you got any coke left? I took what I thought was cocaine but it turned out to be heroin, and I'm due at work in half an hour"; why is my life not more like this?) At the same time, he is conflicted – he seems determined to hunt down the murderers, and away from his struggles with his own dark urges he is capable of real tenderness and warm human interaction. Nicolas Cage's performance here has been justly praised – suddenly we have been given back underground film actor Cage, a man whose presence in a film marked it out as having a certain eccentric quality. Top marks. But Herzog also extracts great performances from the other principals. I was particularly struck by comic genius Jennifer Coolidge in a rare straight rule as the cop's father's drink sodden wife, but they are all great. At the same time, the real star here is Werner Herzog himself.

And finally, what is the link between this film and Abel Ferrara's banned-in-Ireland Bad Lieutenant? From something I read Herzog saying, it seems like the studio had brought out Ferrara's film, owning the name, and they reckoned that throwing a similar title onto Herzog's own film about an out-control-cop would generate a bit of media buzz. Which, I suppose, it has. I find myself wondering now whether there could a series of Bad Lieutenant films, all made by different film auteurs. This could be the future of cinema – I'm really looking forward to the Tarantino, Coen Brothers, and Merchant-Ivory versions.

One final thought – the bad lieutenant's more bestial behaviour is arguably driven by his trouble with back pain. Yet I myself am, as I write, suffering from (admittedly mild) back pain and am self medicating with a dangerous booze cocktail*. Now, is there any danger that I could turn into some kind of crazed maniac? Is there any possibility of Werner Herzog making a film about me called something like Bad Civil Servant – Port of Call Kildare Street?

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* But don't worry guys, I can handle it… I'm not drinking vodka out of saucers yet.

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Hailu Mergia and the Wallias "Hailu Mergia"

At least I think that's what it is called and that's whom it is by. This is a burn of some Ethio-jazz sent to me by [redacted]. I think in a zine written for Frank's APA he might have said that it involved some Mulatu Astatqé action. It certainly sounds not unlike his stuff on Éthiopiques 4, so if you have heard that you will have an idea of what is on here – the kind of appealing music you get at sophisticated Addis Ababa nightclubs where well-dressed people go to dance the night away.

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Film: "A Wednesday"

The other film I saw in the Indian Film Festival of Ireland was A Wednesday. It is a completely different kettle of fish, being a straight thriller with no song and dance routines. Its framing device is Mumbai's retiring police commissioner thinking back on his most difficult case, one so sensitive that it has no file and does not officially exist. Then it is flashback time. The plot involves this mysterious guy who has planted a load of bombs around the city. He is threatening to explode them unless a group Islamic extremist terrorists are brought from jail to a certain disused air base, presumably from there to be flown off to Pakistan (most of the terrorists are former agents of the ISI, Pakistan's notoriously dodgo intelligence service).

The film starts off normally enough, following the usual routes you expect in this kind of film. So you get lots of people running around, lots of shouting down telephones, lots of racing against the clock to track down leads and so on. But then it undergoes a bit of a twisteroo – it turns out that the bomber is not planning to free the terrorists, but to kill them. He reveals himself to be just some ordinary guy who has had enough of these terrorist scum and all that due process crap that allows them lengthy trials and then prison sentences, when everyone knows that what they really need is instant justice. Rather disturbingly, the film endorses this fascistic worldview – to placate the bomber, the police commissioner orders his men to murder a terrorist, and the film ends with him shaking the bomber's hand.

One other lesson this film offers is that you do not ever want to find yourself on the wrong side of the Mumbai police force. Beating the shite out of suspects to extract information seems to be a standard operating procedure.

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North Sound "Jazz Wolf"

What could be better than the sound of wild wolves howling laid over jazz? Sadly, many things are better than this. The wolves pull off their part of the bargain, howling away very atmospherically, but the jazz is pretty poor – tenth rate nicey jazz with a dreadful drum machine accompaniment. Drum machines, with their unbending rhythm, surely have no place in jazz - unless, like the Nazis, you are trying to create a form of jazz to which an army can march.

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Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions "Bavarian Fruit Bread"

Recently I suggested that Hope Sandoval might be better enjoyed in the comfort of your living room, on record, rather than in a concert environment. I think now that maybe what you actually want is for her to come round and play a concert in your living room. If she could bring some smack with her the bob would really be your uncle.

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Film: "Kal Ho Na Ho"

They were having an Indian film festival in the Swan Cinema. I made it to all of two films. First up there was Kal Ho Na Ho, an all-singing all-dancing Bollywooder like mama used to make. This one is set in New York, among the Indian immigrant community. The main character is this young woman called Naina - stunningly attractive, for all that she is presented as being a bit frumpy and over serious. The film follows her as she battles with family and romantic problems – will her evil witch of a grandmother ever stop blaming her daughter-in-law (Naina's mother) for Naina's father's suicide, and will said grandmother ever stop persecuting Naina's adopted younger sister? Will the café that Naina's mother runs with her sporty older lady friend be saved from bankruptcy? Will Naina make the right choice between the two men in her life – her fellow MBA student Rohit or swanky newcomer Amaan?

These questions are all answered, albeit after a lot of singing and dancing. Two of the more striking musical numbers are Amaan singing a Bollywood version of 'Pretty Woman' in a New York street (with everyone joining in, natch) or the much later song-and-dance off between Rohit's Gujarati family and the other Punjabi characters. Gujarati v. Punjabi rivalry seems to be a bit of a theme in this film, albeit one that largely went over my head, as I am not really clued in to the stereotypes. Gujaratis seem to be a bit brash, while Punjabis… er… are not so brash?

Do not think, though, that the film being a musical means that it is all light colours and happiness. It does look early on that it is going to be like a Jane Austen adaptation, in that the resolution comes from pairing off the boys and girls in acceptable happy combinations. Sadly, no. A bit of a transition sets in just before the intermission, where the audience receives a shocking revelation about one of the key characters. Thereafter regret and heartbreak become key aspects of the story, and it turns into a bit of a tearjerker, for all that things end well enough for most of the characters. Maybe I am a big softie, but I found the resolution of the Naina family plotline surprisingly affecting.

Anyway, I recommend this film highly. The song and dance routines are amazing, the comedy stuff is actually funny, and the editing and suchlike is very inventive. I keep expecting Bollywood films to be somewhat amateurish, perhaps out of borderline latent racism on my part, but any I have seen have displayed the highest production values. Watching this film makes me wonder why the West stopped making musicals.

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"The Private Confessions and Memoirs of a Justified Sinner" by James Hogg

In case you have not guessed, I read this book for classic book club.

This 1830 novel is one of many 19th century novels that are hailed as a forerunner to the modern novel. It gives us such modernist delights as a split narrative, an unreliable narrator, a profoundly dislikeable protagonist, and a plot that retains ambiguity right to the end. For all that, the book is also of its time in its gothic nature and sense of religious doom. The book purports to contain the memoirs of one Robert Wringham, a man born in late 17th century Scotland, together with an introduction and commentary by an unnamed editor. The editor begins by telling us some facts about the life of Mr Wringham that can be objectively determined, with Wringham's own narrative casting these events in an entirely new light.

The book hangs heavily on the Calvinist idea of predestination. In the most hard-line version of this doctrine, God chose a small minority of people for salvation, not on the basis that they were righteous and morally upright, but more or less at random. These Elect – the chosen of God – are predestined for Heaven, while the rest of us are damned. Nothing anyone does can change their destiny – no matter how righteously one chosen for damnation behaves, he is still doomed to the fiery pit of Hell, while the Elect will sit at God's right hand no matter what sins they commit.

The editor's narrative reveals Wringham to have been brought up believing in this doctrine by his mother. Convinced that he is one of the Elect, he seems capable of any action as nothing he does can stop him from entering heaven. He murders his brother, and is later overheard plotting the death of his mother.

Wringham's own narrative, though, is where it really kicks off. Although a committed believer in predestination from the off, and a thoroughly nasty piece of work, it is only when he makes friends with an odd individual calling himself Gil-Martin that starts following the doctrine to its extreme conclusions. Gil-Martin persuades him that as he is one of the Elect, he can do anything without compromising his own salvation. Wringham embarks on a series of ever more ghastly crimes.

Gil-Martin's nature is ambiguous, with his precise status arguably being the key to the book. It is easy to see him as the Devil, using scripture and the reformed church's doctrine to lead Wringham to damnation. His seeming ability to change his shape supports the idea of him as some kind of supernatural agent. Yet he seems also to be a projection of Wringham's will, or of the dark side of his nature. Given how much of Wringham's narrative is fragmentary and semi-delusional, one could slip into seeing Gil-Martin as a product of his imagination, a hallucination conjured up to voice his own dark thoughts. Yet that does not fully work, as the editor's narrative has Wringham's familiar seen with him on two occasions (in different form each time).

As the book continues, Wringham's sense of himself starts to break down. At one point, he describes feeling like he has two selves, but that neither of these are his real self. Later on again, he starts suffering from lapses in memory, with terrible crimes (rape, more murder, matricide) having apparently been committed by him during these blackouts. The reader is again at something of a loss as to what exactly is going on here. Is Wringham committing these crimes and then forgetting them? Is he lying to us when he says he cannot remember them? Is he under some kind of demonic possession? Is Gil-Martin taking on Wringham's form to have him take the blame for terrible acts he has not committed? Hogg leaves these and many other questions open.

In its unwillingness to tie up all the loose ends and explain everything clearly, this book reminds me of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's In A Glass Darkly. Like this book, the stories in Sheridan Le Fanu's volume purport to be papers relating to the investigation of actual events. The inconsistencies and things that remain unresolved resemble the untidy descriptions we get of real events, enhancing the power of the works.

Anyway, this is a most enjoyable book, one that has got me thinking about reading some more gothic novels. Melmoth, The Monk, Vathek, The Saragossa Manuscript, The Castle of Otranto - that lot. You will be relieved to hear that if I ever indulge my desires in this area it will probably be away from Classic Book Club.

Have you read The Private Confessions and Memoirs of a Justified Sinner? What did you think of it?

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