Spent sometime getting into imovie on the train to my parents on friday-it’s really simple to use, but not quite as precise a thing as I (being a little OCD) would like. I put a soundtrack to this awesome video of a star with a comet’s tail (via bb)- the track is the ’still going theme’ by dfa record’s latest still going btw.
Over at basilika we’ve started a new feature guiding lights which puts together the best bits of the hundreds of mp3 blogs we listen to into a bite-sized 30 min mix. Check it out.
The big news of the weekend was the birth of mika charlotte to hl alumnia jez -congrats to the family proctor (expect lots of gentle, uplifting piano music on innersounds for the next few weeks)
Speaking of gentle and uplifting the weekend also saw the death oh Jon Lucien, who’s music has touched and inspired me for many, many years.
R.I.P.
Here’s something to remember him by and to celebrate the birth of the youngest M.C.
The biggest problem with a quixotic life is the distance.
Closing your eyes and dreaming of that perfect place is one thing-getting there is something else entirely.
And as much as your destination leads you on, it also acts as constant reminder of how far you have to go, of the battles you’ve yet to fight, the mountains still to climb.
In the end it all gets too unbearable to face, the reality of it all grinding you down, day by day.
So you walk with your head down.
Keeping in the direction you were headed, dealing with things as they come but too fearful to look at where you are headed.
You learn to forget about the dreams you once had and get used to living a life of functional, gloomy necessity.
Then one day, the rains subside.
You find yourself walking with the sun on your back, with love at your side, the place you’ve been trying so hard to get too, close enough to taste.
And, though all of you is tired-you’ve come such a long way.
(image taken from hmsneptune.com)
I spent a day last week attending my great Uncle’s Martin’s funeral. At the wake I got chatting to his best mate ‘Tom’, they’d been friends for over seventy years; meeting in primary school age ten, growing up through adolescent adventures and then sent off to War in 1943.
Martin joined the Royal Marines, Tom the Navy.
What struck me most was the fun they’d had, the jokes and stories, some 50, 60 years old that had come to represent a snapshot of their lives together. When I think about the dangers they must have been exposed to and the horror they must have seen, that’s quite a thing.
And then these car bombs and attempted terror attacks, trying to make us fearful (all amplified out of all proportion by newspapers and tv shows )
It’s all nothing. It’s less than that, it’s attempted, botched laughable nothing.
They don’t deserve my fear.
They’re laughable men, cowardly and manipulated, robbed of all honour, following a ghastly and perverted code.
Men like my Uncle wouldn’t give have given them a second thought.
you know, ten days out of the city might be just about right. long enough to get some distance, far enough away to achieve perspective but not soo far gone you lose touch completely.
for me this week just gone was a watershed (and not just because of the torrential rain and plentiful opportunities to wear my brand-new, bright-yellow poncho) much like in a box of that beautifully branded Dorset muesli - if you shake it up enough, once the rattling has subsided and the oatmeal levelled, all the big stuff finally is left on the top. same thing happens in my life (only with fewer raisins) so with a week in the deafening quiet of the Poitou-Charente countryside, the dust seemed to finally settle on the last year and half and the view ahead started to clear. but i won’t bore you with the minutae of my own personal revelations because we’re here to talk about the music/film/culture/miscellania.
over the great glassy sea to my right, j.tillman’s been busy working on his new album, the Territory, and posted another beautiful demo which you might have seen on gorilla vs bear or his myspace, but since we’re always happy to lend him bandwidth on the latitudes and since it’s (somewhat unsurprisingly) achieved the repeat-repeat-repeat-feat on my itunes since i got back, High Enough to Raise is a welcome back track today.
i know i’ve waxed lyrical about josh’s gently effortless talent loads before, but his is a voice which has followed my last eighteen months through the dust storm, the chiming tales in his lyrics ringing truer than is sometimes comfortable but always worth listening to, i’d urge you buy his records so he can record more and finally get the bits of cement out of his beard.
Something about that freaky attitude that makes the music sound so eternally vital (and just a little scary). Maybe it’s just what the seventies did to people- brought out all these edges. And that’s what we hunger for, the stuff you can’t fake, the stuff that even if it’s 90% persona-only that someone could pull it off.
People talk star quality like it’s something we see on saturday night tv shows.
This is Betty Davis-she married miles (and was too much for him) got him into rock and funk (the birth of fusion baby!!), wrote songs that went places few have dared to go since, pulled off that ‘difficult’ seventies space amazon look and was never the victim.
Well almost never.
Her music’s just been re-issued and there are somegreatarticles about her around and this time she will be getting proper royalties for the first time, you should buy it.
Ps special thanks to moistworks, firstly for being generally wonderful, but also for being specifically wonderful in making me want to find out more about the gal.
Gotta say jez’s post will be keeping me going for most of the weekend.
Damn! indeed.
Just incase you’re still in need of some weekend loving, here is a brief (but heavy) piece from marc mac’s criminally under-appreciated epic ‘It’s Right to be Civil‘ . Heaven knows what they are putting up in the water in Dollis Hill to keep North (of) London’s most prolific beat maker so inspired, but when the sun starts shining here in London (as it has this week) suddenly a nice dilla-esque two minute beat heavy jam is all I need to take my mind off all the ’summer heat’ that’s been just so, so distracting.
Some friends of ours have just come back from a trip to Liberia and the Central African Republic. Simon and Laura are involved in setting up the London branch of hl’s favourite charity charity:water so they took the opportunity to get a firsthand feel for the situation themselves and to bring back a record of what they had seen.
One of the great things about charity:water and specifically it’s founder scott is the way it manages to make incredible cultural leaps seem natural and easy. That a former nyc party promoter has gone and set up a really practical way to help thousands of people somehow makes it possible to be involved in engaging with people in a completely alien environment without your cultural identity being a massive obstacle-it just seems like a natural, obvious response.
Anyway Laura tells a great story and there is an unpretentious honesty that comes through in her blogging that makes you think, firstly ‘damn that sounds crazy’ and then ‘maybe that’s the kind of crazy I could do with a bit more of’.
Check out the first 8 parts of her blog on the links below.
I couldn’t find any Liberian music to post . (I’m sure that’s more a reflection on my lack of knowledge more than anything else) But here is an incredible track from another West African nation (Mali), which I absolutely love. (and am tempted to get my re-edit on with)
So it was quite a heavy weekend (one way or another) and it took a massive cocktail of stimulants (caffeine/sugar/exercise*) to get my brain out of it’s semi-catatonic state this morning.
A couple of obvious life lessons became more and more apparent as the day progressed-
1-’have a good time all the time’ isn’t a motto that pays long term dividends
2-you can never get ‘too much’ sleep
If I’d had the full ‘hard 8′ hours last night I would be writing anincredibly well crafted post which would somehow incorporate peak oil, tuscan sausage, the increase in under-16 smokers, 70’s brasilian cinema into somekind of wonderfully telling meta-narrative.
As it is all I can think about is how comfy that dog looks.
i’ve been a mite distracted for the past few weeks, too busy and preoccupied to unleash my rambling monologues on the latitudes and slightly bereft of thrilling new music to send your way, but its the freaking weekend (as i believe r. kelly once put it) and though the weather seems set to take a turn for the wetter here in the megalopolis, this bank holiday has a birthday party per day ratio which is making my liver wince.
so a word about the fantastic picture of chinese new year above.
as part of our limited and new editions, a very good, though very distant friend of the latitudes, oak (yep, that’s really his name, kids) will be posting occasional shots from his stomping ground, beijing. a much missed friend of mine, he’s a supertalented photographer and london/norfolk native who relocated to china and is enjoying the life of a creative ex-pat amongst the hysterical expansion and terrific velocity of China’s most happening city.
wallpaper* magazine recently commissioned him to capture the city’s must-see sites for their terrific city guides series and his beautiful prints are in demand amongst the best arti-stocracy, which is why we’re awful pleased that the great firewall of china’ll grant him leave to send some of his stunning images our way every once in a while. keep watching our skies for regular posts of great beauty.
and for the rest of your weekend, here’s a song which i’m posting for no other reason than that i’ve had it on repeat all day, just the ticket for any kind of weather (or hemisphere) it’s got the catchiest choruses and makes me dance in my swivel chair. oddly becoming one of our most blogged bands, and once more displaying david byrne’s genius (see below for the jezzy endorsement and here for jaksoul’s kudos) its talking heads - and she was.
Hell I love the stuff. In fact that whole seventies cosmic/sci-fi reference thing is where I choose to live. I understand the importance of creating a hyper-real persona (although it has to be handled carefully not to piss people off- *cough* clutchy hypkins *cough*), especially in the super-bland world of contemporary american black music-I guess you’ve got to overcompensate a little to differentiate yourself.
So you’re SA-RA, you are making some really good music-It’s left enough to get the jazzy dudes and the fashion-heads interested, but straight enough to sell to those (still) musically curious soul folks-you’re doing so much right and then you go ruin it. You start getting so into you’re own image you start saying stuff like;
“Honestly, when we first started this collective, I swear I got a message from the creator. I asked ‘Is this gonna be worth my time, my energy and my effort?’ A message from the universe came down and said ‘This is gonna be bigger than anything you could have ever imagined.’ And, I think very big, you know what I’m sayin’? All of us do. So, to hear that message come from the universe, it could be nothing less than something that’s gonna affect the whole universe…and this whole planet, definitely. I think we’ll be a part of turning this planet and changing the world for the better, permanently. I think Sa-Ra and the individuals will definitely play a role in what’s gonna happen in the world’s history.â€
And maybe it’s just you being funny (or in character)-but it just makes you sound like a bit of a dick and it taints the music, makes it harder to get into-cause everytime I start really feeling it I have to actively try and disconnect what I’m hearing from the image I have of the band who have made it.
And, as it often does, eventually it comes back to that eternal constant-you can’t disconnect the music from the person who’s singing it. So the best policy (if you are ever in doubt) is either to really think about what you’re gonna say before you say it or keep it like Prince in the 80’s and don’t say anything at all.
Just let the music do the talking.
(it’s pretty enough for you not to have to talk at all)
