Summer!

Gah!

Unlike those fools around me, I hate summer. I can’t sleep, so I’m always tired and down. It’s sunny, but I’m a poor prole scum so my eyes are always squinting. I want winter. I want cold and 3 hours of daylight. At least I can be depressed in the dark. Embrace your inner goth!

Sigh… It´s not been a good week to be honest. endorphins and serotonin are flashing “empty” in my brain, and everything and everyone just leaves me cold emotionally. I need something to make me goo “Woo!,” or at least that can be used as a shield against the fools.

What’s this? “Ameratsu” A single from the writer and musician USCHI-NO-MICHI? This could work. Some Bristolized bass heavy electronica allied with chiming  percussive coil-like chimes. And  delicate breathy vocals. Betwitching!

But wait! What’s THIS? There’s more! Uschi-No-Mishi has also released a free EP of remixes for the single. And there are some truly awesome sounds contained within. Of noteworthy listening is the creeping dub remix by Adrian Carter, and the gloriously cracked and chunky remix by Hacker Farm. But it’s the opening track, a sprawling epic reworking by Production Unit that’s worth your time this evening.  In doing a remix in the classic form, he’s completely broken apart the track into little pieces, thrown away the parts that don’t interest him, and stitched the essence of the remaining pieces back together into a new mutated form as well as clipping and stretching her vocals till all that’s left is a heavy breathing mantra stating “I want to FffffFFFFfffFFF!” Haunting and moody. Go and listen.

Goodnight..

“I gather — for those lucky enough to be there — it was all a brief period of illumination, elation, etc.. “Heady times,” as they say. And it was a sense of zeitgeist that didn’t just involve music, but also seemed swept the cultural board as a whole — art, design, advertising, fashion, film, even restauranteering. A new sense of assurance, vitality — of relevance — brought about and bolstered by a number of concurrent phenomena. Acid house and Madchester and the rave scene that followed, the emergence of a new generation of visual artists in the form of the YBA, etc. Add to all this the ascendence of so-called New Labour and all the ambiguity that surrounded it — the speculative uncertainty about where its ideological core fell in relation to traditional Labour and conservatism, and just what (and who) was included under the newly-opened umbrella of Tony Blair and New Labour’s “New Britain.”

Our God Is Speed - Sensations

“Far from radically reconfiguring the relationship between high and low, argued Simon Ford and Anthony Davies in their essay “Art Capital” (Art Monthly, Feb. 1998), YBA had been unwittingly hijacked by big business and government as a means to build brand through lifestyle marketing. Tony Blair, and before him John Major, set out to relaunch Britain as youthful, entrepreneurial, cool, and creative: a desirable destination for tourists, wealth creators, and decision makers. YBA, along with Britpop, was a key marketing device in the construction of that image. At the same time, the British economy was experiencing a booming consumer culture in the wake of the 1989-91 recession. The press, chasing advertisers, began to fill its pages with “lifestyle” journalism rather than consumer-unfriendly news-and natural self-publicists like Hirst and Emin were close at hand. Hirst`s multifarious activities-his music videos, his restaurants, his record covers, his product design-appeared, for a moment, to signal a radical disruption of art`s specialized terrain. But when stores like Habitat and Selfridges recognized the consumer advantage in affiliating themselves with the new British art, the symbiosis between commerce and culture deepened until, as Simon Ford concluded, “the art becomes inseparable from the products it is helping to sell-the floor coverings and furnishings, the restaurants and clubs.” Rather than reflect on consumer society, as Pop art did, YBA became an aspect of it.

As journalism embraced YBA, criticism abandoned it: Britart has no Bergers or Burgins to call its own. The art historian Julian Stallabrass, whose courageous book High Art Lite of 1999 remains the only detailed critical excavation of the period, argues that YBA itself is inimical to criticism because it refuses any cultural or intellectual responsibility. “Instead,” he writes of Sarah Lucas`s Sunday Sport pieces, “a pervasive and disabling irony becalms the work in a manner that is supposed, in conventional wisdom, to challenge the viewer but which in fact conveniently opens up demotic material to safe aesthetic delectation.”

KATE BUSH ON THE YBA SENSATION – Mutualart.com

“But the weird thing about it is that I either have never thought about it at all – making art popular — or else I’ve positively hated the popularisation of contemporary art. When I’m being extreme, I’m capable of thinking that frankly the whole art scene is made up of a bunch of idiots. And I have no desire to get millions of ordinary people to queue up to look at that stuff. Why should they? It’s got nothing much to do with them. To suddenly expect it to be popular is asking the impossible. There really is very little in it for a mass audience and I think this mass audience it’s suddenly now got, knows that really. And they’re not really interested; they’re just along for the ride, for the nonsense. The mandarin people in charge of the Turner Prize, and the media people at Channel 4, and middle-class people who run the art columns on the broadsheets, all assume ordinary people must have this stuff explained to them — but the motivations for doing that are completely bullshit. It’s for commercial reasons, to get the ratings up.

“You could have said 50 years ago that the equivalent people in charge of modern and contemporary art packaged it for the masses because they thought it was good for them, or it would save society, or it was against fascism, or something. But now they don’t even pretend it’s out of decent motivations. It’s just for commercial reasons. In any case, I don’t care about any of that. But as I said, I only think those types of things when I’m being extreme.”

Richard Marshall Interviews Matthew Collings – 3AM Magazine

“Up until the crisis many of the financial institutions in Iceland played Medici-like patrons to artists—and used the artists’ image to promote their loans, overdrafts, savings and pension-plans in national ad-campaigns and carefully orchestrated media events, complete with oversized cheques, handshakes and photo-ops. Everybody (more or less) played along. There were sponsored squats for artists and a rubbing of shoulders with European jet-set elites—including the president’s wife, Dorrit Moussaieff and the Baroness Francesca von Habsburg—a considerable portion of the young art scene in Reykjavík had in this way direct access to some of the most powerful people in the European art scene. And the financial institutions—mainly Landsbanki Íslands—would throw petty alms at the starving artists, who proved more than willing to prostitute themselves (including me and my friends) for what was in all honesty a mere pittance.”

Literature In The Land Of The Inherently Cute - Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl – Reykjavik Grapevine. 

Hmm…

The rise of a new positivity and vitality in the arts and culture that’s riding on a cool Zeitgeist. The melding of art, literature, music, design and other forms of culture with politics, along with the embracing of musicians, artists, directors, novelists, other wonks, into political parties, or party representation (Björt Framtið = New Labour for example). The embracing of commercialised cultural lifestyles. The marketing of a nation’s cultural capital abroad by both the state and private interests. The lack of any decent cultural appraisal/criticism, etc, etc.

I know Iceland is the most post-modernist country in the world, but some of the parallels between “Inspired By Iceland” and “Cool Britannia” are so uncanny, I honestly think they’re trying to completely recreate the ’90s up here!

Well after the last post was sent to the masses, a chat started with a friend about our formative film viewing experiences. With Sævar he talked about his love of Giallo films and soundtracks, as well as films such as ‘The Andromeda Strain,’ ‘Gregory Girl,’ and ‘I Start Counting.’

For me it was the world cinema seasons late night on channel 4 on Sundays (Lots of dodgy rench art house, plus existential pain form Eastern Europe). And Moviedrome. Possibly one of the greatest film series every produced for TV, Moviedrome was shown on Sunday nights on BBC2 running from 1988 till 2000. Presented by Alex Cox, and later by Mark Cousins they were responsible for introducing an unsuspecting British audience to the wonders of the cult film. And they showed an impressive range from ’70s political blockbusters to no-budget art house. Horror to gangster films. Spaghetti westerns to zombie epics.

What marked Moviedrome out from other film series were the introductions by Cox & Cousins. Not only were they informative, they also showed the insight of two men who were deeply in love with the medium they worked with whether it was Cox waxing lyrical on the talents of David Cronenberg and John Carpenter, or Counsins sharply taking apart the canon or Robert Altman.

There is a fantastic piece about the series here, as well as a complete list of the films here. But for YOU the trusty RSF reader, I have compiled a special YouTube playlist of all the available intros done by Cox & Counsins. Despite the slightly dodgy sound quality, these are fun to watch and a great way to spend the last few hours of your evening tonight…

Awww man. It’s been a long ass bank holiday weekend and I have done NOTHING. Nothing of any note whatsoever  OK, I live-tweeted the multiple car pile up that was Eurovision, but that doesn’t really count as a masturbating monkey could do the same job. And better.

I’ve also been rather lazy on the blog front. Been finishing up a couple of pieces for the paper along with some IRL issues has meant that this corner of cyberspace has been a little fallow for a few days. There are a few topics that have been sloshing in my brain cavity for quite a few days now and I need to get them on some kind of print, lest I go completely mad. Watch this space.

But that is for tomorrow. Tonight is Sunday night and that means it’s time to partake in some digital celluloid delights. And for this week’s episode of the THE SUNDAY CULT FILM CORNER is a film that is a truly powerful allegory of the destructive nature of modern society that overloads the senses by showing the world in bleeding close up. Ladies and gentlemen I give to you WALKABOUT.

Made in 1971 and the directorial debut of film legend Nicolas Roeg, it’s loosely based on the novel “Walkabout” by James Vance Marshall. It stars Jenny Agutter and Luc Roeg as a teenage girl and her younger brother living with their family in Australia. They lead a cosseted modern lifestyle, with all the mod con you would expect from a well to do family. The film then cuts to the harsh Australian outback where they are with their father, a geologist. Suddenly, for no reason, the father goes berserk and tries to kill the children with a gun before setting fire to the car and killing himself. Stranded in a hostile environment with no skills to fend for themselves things look grim, until they come across a teenage aboriginal boy (Played by David Gulpilil) who is on a Walkabout, a ceremonial rite of passage that involves him living and fending for himself away from his tribe for up to 6 months. Despite haring no common language the aboriginal boy uses his bush skills to help take care of the brother and sister. However the cultural and societal strains between the boy and the sister lead to tragic consequences that affect everyone forever.

WALKABOUT  is simply a stunning film, both to see and to listen to. The cinematography by Roeg and Tony Richmond is so vivid to be almost hallucinatory. The reds of the desert sand shimmer in the oppressive heat of the sun. There are amazing panoramic takes of the Australian outback that contain numerous cuts to the various wildlife that seem to be watching the children from afar, as if to show that even in this harsh terrain, the place is teeming with life. It shows the Australian outback as a dangerous, yet mysterious and almost mystical place where strange things happen. It’s where the waking world and the “dreamtime” blend into one. This is allied with the sounds of the outback that are allied with ethnic aboriginal sounds and a stirring score from John Barry. It’s definitely a film that invites you to both look and listen for the messages that are contained within itself.

There are two main themes that run throughout WALKABOUT. The first is the how our modern way of live seems to have stripped society of being able to connect with out surroundings. The opening scenes show our modern world bursting onto the screen. Harassed workers commute to and form work. People cooped up in blocks of flats surrounded by technology. Radio programmes that tell us what knife to use with what food. But despite all this everyone leads neurotic quiet lives of desperation. The film shows the clash between two alien cultures, that of the white settlers, in the form of the brother and sister and the indigenous population, in the form of the boy. Both the brother and sister look clean and pressed in their school uniforms and speak interestingly with English accents (To further press the point of the clash between the European settlers and the aboriginal people). The film has a cutaway scene showing, in a microcosm of the oppressive relationship between the two cultures, a white man roughly orders around a group of aboriginal people into making kitsch souvenirs of Australian culture. There is also an interesting moment the killing of bush animals is cut with a butchers carving up an animal carcass, further showing the distance between nature and modern civilization.

The second one is that of sexuality and coming of age. Both the boy and the sister are reaching the age of sexual awakening. Indeed the conservative, slightly prudish sister is an unworldly girl who is unaware of her blossoming sexuality of that she shows this when she swims naked or walks in a short school skirt. As the film progresses we see the boy becoming aware of his own sexuality and his feelings toward the sister. His attempts to initiate a closer bond is one of the main turning point s in the film’s defining moments. Amongst this is another cutaway scene the displays the sexual tension between a female meteorologist and her colleagues whoa are out in the outback.

While WALKABOUT tells of the plight and issues between white settlers and the Aborigines in Australia (which is still as relevant today as ever), the deeper messages of man’s strained relationship with his environment is a deeper one that affects all of us who live in the modern world. Sometimes it’s worth reminding us of how far we are removed from the world, yet all it takes is a little push for us to realise that our modern way of living shields us from living in harmony with our environment.

So last month, local technical death metal band OPHIDIAN I won the annual WACKEN METAL Battle at Harpa Concert Hall.

Of course myself and GV intern John (Random Quote. “Oh Maaaaaan! I so fucking stoked for this! METAL!!”) went along to check out the proceedings.

You can read about it all HERE. And while you’re reading it you can also hear the madness that comes from their brains below….

Awww man, sometimes on a Sunday you just feel absolutely drained after a long weekend of party and swapping spit with the lower rungs of society. Sometimes all you want to do is shield yourself from direct sunlight, as you hiss at the sight of fresh fruit. Essentially you have become a weekend hungover vampire, although in this case you can only subsist on diet coke instead of blood.

So with that in mind, for this week’s edition of The Sunday Cult Film Corner we have a psychological black comedy that contains one of the most bizarre scene chewing acting displays ever put to celluloid.as a quintessential ’80s yuppie spectacularly falls apart. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you VAMPIRE’S KISS.

The film stars Nicolas Cage as Peter Loew, an aggressive New York literary agent and total sleazeball. Despite a seemingly good life on the surface his life is an empty procession of barhopping and one night stands, which cause him to start fraying at the edges. He is abusive to his secretary Alva, tormenting her to find a lost contract that allows him to browbeat and treat her like dirt. He starts seeing a therapist to deal with his issues.

One night at a club, he meets Rachel (Jennifer Beals). Taking her back to his flat, she reveals herself to be a vampire who bites him and draws blood from his neck. As she bites him again and again, he comes under the impression that he too is turning into a vampire. His mind and life begin to spiral out of control as he starts wearing sunglasses, hides from sunlight and crosses, and believes his reflection is disappearing. Even when his “fangs” don’t appear, he buys a fake pair to complete his transformation. As he and the film approach breaking point, he embarks on a murderous spree, as he find himself unable to tell reality from fantasy.

OK, let’s get the negatives out of the way, Vampire’s Kiss suffers from a painfully slow beginning, and some lacklustre cinematography. It feels and looks more like an elongated episode of ‘The Outer Limits.’ Which is a shame as VAMPIRE’S KISS, is not about vampires, but instead is an interesting takedown of the male ego. The character of Loew swings from strutting overconfidence, to pathetic bitterness as he is unable to connect with the women in his empty life, which are a vampire, his therapist and his put upon secretary.

But to be honest, the poor pacing of VAMPIRE’S KISS is more than made up for the true grand guignol style excess contained in the acting of Nicolas Cage. Oh maaaaaan. With some films you have good acting. Then there’s bad acting. Then there’s NICOLAS CAGE ACTING!! He just goes into supersonic lunacy on this one. Any kind of subtlety is thrown out of the window as nothing is off-limits. His character is a thoroughly unpleasant misogynist, yet he is completely mesmerizing as he screams, moans, and eyeballs his own shadow. In fact, if you look at YouTube and type in the phrase “Nicolas Cage Losing His Shit,” a lot of the material comes from VAMPIRE’S KISS.

Some people have criticised the film and the acting as confusing, especially the end section were the film splits into imagined reality and grotty reality. But if you actually watch it closely, then there are moments when it’s actually very satirical in the style of other big city films such as ‘American Psycho,’ the way it shows that city and the people within as sucked out, shallow husks.

So get your shades on and watch a films that is completely over the top in the best possible way…

Weekender – weekender
Go out, have a good time
Weekender – weekender
Go out have a good, good – good, good time

What you say weekender, we can work it out
We’ll work it all out
Don’t you hate, hate what you are
I’ll give it up, I’ll give it to you, you
Come on weekender, we’ll go out,
We’ll have a good, the best times

Right weekender, hows about we work it out
Weekender we could have such a good time
Show you, help you, a better way, a better day
A better way, A better life – weekender
Right, weekender we’re going out
You wash, blow dry your hair
New shoes, new suit
Oh, I say you look so super
Weekender you’re looking good

Don’t you hate, don’t you hate what you are
Weekender
Don’t you hate what you are I ask, I ask you
Weekender
Look around, don’t you feel a clown
Weekender,
fuck Off, Fuck off and die – I’m hating you
I hate you – goodbye
I’m slipping, weekender – weekender
Slipping down – down
Weekender weekender
Go out have a good time – the best time
Go away – away away away – sit back
Let it flow
Just like a little (have a good time)
Have a good time, have a good – good time
No work just party – party!
You got a new skirt, you got a new suit
Saved your life for a two day flirt boy
You pay the price coz Monday sure does hurt
Tell at work your weekend tale
Still need the pleasure of dirty sale
Monday’s back – what can you do?

Been away. Been away. You’ve seen a lot wow, wow
Weekender whatever you do – just make sure what
ya doing makes you happy

Because some of us need a reason to escape “The Long Silence” of a shit, grinding, dead-end job that does its best to drag us down….

“At the same time, it’s rather striking how “rock’n’roll” — not in any musical sense but as an abstract spirit (“rockstar”-ness: heedless hedonism, hard partying, not giving a fuck about the cost or consequences, inordinate self-regard) is draped all over current pop.(Hence the various songs referring to “Jagger”). Particularly with the endless stream of songs that espouse a kind of apocalyptic hedonism, hit after hit about how this could be my last night my last cup, gonna drink like it’s my last night, baby we don’t have tomorrow, Britney’s “Till the World Ends” (co-written by Ke$ha)… and then you think of Rihanna’s cheerless “Cheers” – Dionysian Keith Richards/Guns N’Roses darkside thrillseeking with some recession precarity desperation chucked in (max out those credit cards, live like there’s no tomorrow just like those fuckers in Wall Street). After a few drinks too many myself I tweeted that Ke$ha is our Jim Morrison but I kind of meant it–she is responsible for a lot of the new reckless get-wrecked spirit in music. (The word “fight” appears obsessively in her songs, a deliberate echo of her heroes the Beastie Boys and “fight for your right to party”). There were moments last year when most of the Top 40 seemed to be singing variations on: “well, I woke up this morning, I got myself a beer/the future’s uncertain, and the end is always near.”

Simon Reynolds – “End of year Faves 2011″

“In the 21st century, there’s an increasingly sad and desperate quality to pop culture hedonism. Oddly, this is perhaps most evident in the way that R&B has given way to club music. When former R&B producers and performers embraced dance music, you might have expected an increase in euphoria, an influx of ecstasy. Yet the digitally-enhanced uplift in the records by producers such as Flo-Rida, Pitbull and will.i.am has a strangely unconvincing quality, like a poorly photoshopped image or a drug that we’ve hammered so much we’ve become immune to its effects. It’s hard not to hear these records’ demands that we enjoy ourselves as thin attempts to distract from a depression that they can only mask, never dissipate.

“A secret sadness lurks behind the 21st century’s forced smile. This sadness concerns hedonism itself, and it’s perhaps in hip-hop—the genre that has been most oriented to pleasure over the past 20-odd years—where this melancholy has registered most deeply. Drake and Kanye West are both morbidly fixated on exploring the miserable hollowness at the core of super-affluent hedonism. No longer motivated by hip-hop’s drive to conspicuously consume—they long ago acquired anything they could have wanted—Drake and West instead dissolutely cycle through easily available pleasures, feeling a combination of frustration, anger, and self-disgust, aware that something is missing, but unsure exactly what it is. This hedonist’s sadness—a sadness as widespread as it is disavowed—was nowhere better captured than in the doleful way that Drake sings, “we threw a party/yeah, we threw a party,” on Take Care’s “Marvin’s Room”.”

Mark Fisher - The Secret Sadness of the 21st Century: Mark Fisher recommends James Blake’s Overgrown

Perhaps It’s my non-stop march to middle-aged decrepitude. but when reading at the above pieces, I can’t help but get a similar nagging feeling from listening to ‘Tracing Echoes,’ the current album from Bloodgroup. A review of the album is done and will be forthcoming (This review here is also worth reading), but one aspect that was only touched upon is the overwhelming sense of melancholy that pervades throughout the album. Gone is the sprightly, brash exuberance that marked their earlier work, and in its place is an identity that’s more sombre, introspective and, at times, sadder. It makes you wonder what it is that has sparked such a drastic change in them, both musically and aesthetically.

Compared to the music of their first and second albums, the music in ‘Tracing Echoes’ isn’t really suited for the dance floor. It’s heavy, oppressive and like James Blake’s ‘Overgrown,’ looks inward and experiences something of an existential crisis. It’s as if the band are looking at the environment around them and asking, albeit at times implicitly, “Is this all there is?” Tracks like “A Kings Woe” and “Disquiet” are overladen with an emotional weariness, displaying an uncertainty of themselves, that’s there something wrong with the state that we are in, but not really sure what to do about it. 

It’s a feeling I too have been experiencing for some time when I  now look around me in Reykjavik. Famed for the legendary “101 party spirit” immortalised in such places as Hallgrimur Helgason’s “101 Reykjavik” and god knows how any Iceland Airwaves docs, these days with Iceland being pimped as the cool capital of the world, it should be an occasion to celebrate. But there seems to be a rictus grin papered over our unabashed party times, almost as if we’re going through the motions. Painfully trendy, painfully style-obsessed and materialistic to a fault, it all reeks of an emptiness that few people are willing to admit to themselves, let alone everyone else. Obviously there is a bit of the hedonism paradox at play here, but for me ‘Tracing Echoes’ seems to capture a cultural society that’s trying to do its best to convince itself that we’re entering a new dawn and that everything will be fine with another night out, another bottle all that is needed. But it’s not working out as well as hoped.

WooooOOOooooo….

The latest instalment of NORDIC INTERSTITIAL THRESHOLD is now up and oozing through your speakers…

The weather may be nice outside, but inside, it’s hot and dark as hell….

Like what you hear? the you can download a high quality copy of the mix right HERE…

Another article focuses on the Viking rhetoric before the crisis, when Iceland experienced an unparalelled economic boom:

“Prominent business persons were trying to explain the boom before the crash in terms of the psychology of an Icelander as a descendent of the medieval Vikings who took immense risks, ventured into distant lands to pillage and profit, and then returned to Iceland as public heroes.”

A racialised neoliberal discourse?

“Yes, it was assumed that there was something essential and almost genetic in the successes of these Business Vikings. Embarrassingly, professional scholars at the main universities also engaged in intensive ideological work that highlighted the “uniqueness of the Business Vikings of Iceland”.

“At the University of Iceland they even designed specific research projects to explore, draw upon, and advance these so called “unique characteristics of the Business Vikings”. Critique was suppressed, and those who felt they had objections, gave up and became silent. Some of these projects were, by the way, financially supported by some of the banks and companies that were heavily implicated in the meltdown.”

Anthropologist Gisli Pálsson – Academics, speak out against neoliberalism!

I wonder how long it will be before we start seeing (If we haven’t already), such sentiments being declared about the cultural scene in Iceland…

But again i should point out to wide eye Icelandophreaks, the wise words of my boss The Mandarin Haukur SM