Mark Higginson

My musical listening history is dotted with artists who went from being the next great inspiration to just having one early album as the defining moment in their career. The mark of the true artist is not one of a discrete act of creation, but of development and ascendency. The Kleptones had that one great album, A Night at the Hip-Hopera, an exercise at once both thematically complete and diversely eclectic. This was an album so popular it was stolen from the hi-fi while it was playing at our house parties. What marks them out is that they have built on this success with each subsequent release.

Their latest work, Uptime / Downtime, scoops up a great armful of my most favourite tunes for a hug that delights as much as it surprises with a continuation of the double album concept of 24 Hours. As my friend Joe would say, so retro, so future... to a point where the vital feeling I had when I first listened to these old friends is recaptured in these multi-layered self-referential slices of pop (culture). The Kleptones are successful at recycling the inherently disposable into something greater than the sum of their parts; making the tunes that really meant something into genre and time-spanning dancefloor fillers, whether that floor is a club or your own front room.

I was playing the beautiful looking Mirror's Edge the other day and was struck by the way in which the first person perspective was very similar to that used in the Kathryn Bigelow directed Strange Days. I haven't seen this film since it came out so don't clearly recall it. Has anyone else made that link? While on the subject of Kathryn Bigelow I notice, having been quiet for a few years, she has a new film coming out called 'The Hurt Locker'. I think this gives credence to the theory that Hollywood is running out of film titles. Hmm. Thinking about Directors I haven't heard from for a while but whose films I liked I noticed on the credits of the last Battlestar Galactica episode The Oath that John Dahl took the credit. Surely not the Director of The Last Seduction and other contemporary noir films?

We've been reading the further adventures of Sally Lockhart to each other and liked this gem from Philip Pullman:

"Already the words were becoming transparent: he could see through them into the text, like a lot of little windows into a house. And day by day more light got in, so the the big words were beginning to look familiar too, and he felt more able to guess what they might be, and got more of his guesses right. It wouldn't be long now before he'd be able to go straight to The Communist Manifesto."

This should be interesting. The BBC are tracking an individual shipping container as it travels round the world transporting cargo for a year. Hopefully this will also include the type of goods it carries as it's put to work. I didn't realise until a couple of years ago how something seemingly mundane was the main component in a complex system that has had a profound impact on our world. I haven't read this yet but it's on my list: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. Thing is, when something becomes a standard it can start to influence other areas of innovation such as the  datacentre-in-a-box concept that has done the rounds. The latest version of this is Google's patent on stacking a load of these at sea to be cooled and powered by the waves. I've read how when Google started they piled bare bones systems in plastic desk drawers and just left them, it being cheaper to add more capacity than spend time swapping out faulty units. This idea has now been scaled-up  to the size of entire containers that are only swapped out when a certain number of modules fail. As our demand for additional capacity increases so the solutions for answering that demand scale accordingly.

This post over on BoingBoing reminds of a conversation I had a while back about the notion of music copyright. Music in the form of, say, digital information on a disc is protected by copyright yet it only has value to me as sound coming out of my loudspeakers. Is that protected by copyright laws too? Does this mean that if I have friends round to my house I should check with each of them that they all own the music I'm about to play? I'm assuming that if they own that music in some form then they have a 'licence' to hear it round at my house. Anyone else will be issued with bright yellow ear defenders and a guide to lip-reading. Perhaps we could converse using sign-language or maybe just not listen to music at all ever for fear of breaking some aspect of laws whose meaning we are only vaguely aware of. I mean, if I play music off a CD and it turns out one of my friends has it on vinyl is that format-shifting their 'licence' and hence breaking the law? I just don't know. Perhaps the music industry could sell a licence that permits the enjoyment of their product from wherever the sound may be being emitted? Sadly we would all have to rely on people's honesty to not enjoy music they had not purchased the appropriate licence for. Obviously such a scheme is patently ridiculous because it is unenforcable but is surely the ideal the music industry would would wish for as no one would ever hear anything without the copyright owner being remunerated. It can't work because you  can't apply such rules to the environment that we live in. Being able to make digital copies of music and share them at no cost is a change to the environment music inhabits and the rules the industry would like to enforce simply can't work.

Update: U2 tracks leak after Bono plays stereo too loudly

It took a lot of persuasion by Cindy for me to come round to the idea but I'm really glad we went to WOMAD which was on in Wiltshire this past weekend. It was pretty much the perfect music festival having both artists of a high quality and a friendly atmosphere. Perhaps I'm showing my age but I really liked the fact that by Sunday drug-addled teenagers weren't falling over me every thirty seconds as they staggered round like zombies attracted by the brightest / loudest stimulation in the vicinity. The weather was beautiful and I had the privilege of seeing the following highlights:

Altaikai: being a fan of Huun-Huur-Tu made me really keen to see more throat-singing, even more so as these people were from Altai, a country I'd never heard of (another one to add to the list), which is also reportedly where Shambala is believed to exist.

Sa Dingding: I'm not sure I'd sit and listen to one of her albums but the live show was pretty incredible. Best described as frock-tastic with dancers.

GOCOO + GoRo: I love Taiko drumming having seen Yamato earlier this year. GOCOO were a different style and performed with GoRo, a chap playing the didgeridoo, which is usually somthing I wouldn't be able to stand but fitted perfectly in this contest. It was like techno with instruments; a thoroughly physical experience that the crowd responded to with an enthusiasm I've rarely ever seen.

Tashi Lhunpo Monks

From the WOMAD website: Altaikai, Sa Dingding, GOCOO + GoRo

From 19.20.21:

"The rise of supercities is the defining megatrend of the 21st century. In 1800 less than 3% of the world lived in cities. In 1900 150 million people lived in the world's cities. More than half the people on Earth now live in cities."

We all know rapid changes are occurring in the way people live and interact with their environment and each other. What fascinates me is the little details. This post on The Year in Pictures blog has photos of people in Shanghai wearing pyjamas as outdoor clothing. Here's the book in which the photos appear over on Amazon, it's called Planet Shanghai by Justin Guariglia.

I saw this trailer over on the Apple site for the upcoming film War Inc. with the always watchable John Cusack. I'm guessing this is his character (or similar) from Grosse Pointe Blank, as it's teaming him up with Joan Cusack and Dan Aykroyd again. The trailer reminds me a little of Wag the Dog; must go and watch that again and see if it's as good as I remember. The Lewinsky scandal broke after that film's release as did the bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. From Grosse Pointe Blank:

"It's irrelevant, really. The idea of governments, nations, it's mostly a public relations theory at this point, anyway."

Update: Oops. War Inc. is a pretty cack-handed effort. Watch Grosse Pointe Blank instead.

I recently finished reading The Rebel Sell by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter. In the book the authors attack the notion that there is a counterculture that exists in opposition to the machinery of capitalism. I remember reading No Logo a few years ago and not being able to meaningfully resolve the way I was both indignant at the stories of exploitation while simultaneously being one of those individuals purchasing the consumer goods produced in those conditions. The Rebel Sell did a good job of putting this in perspective so is well worth a look. I particularly liked the notion of conspicuous consumption coined by Thorstein Veblen back at the turn of the 19th century. Rather than dribble on about the book I thought this photo I took of a shop window in Brighton's North Laines summed it all up rather neatly:

Presuambly it hasn't been killing slogan-bearing t-shirt printing capitalists nor the running dogs who purchase such merchandise or this rubbish wouldn't be assaulting my eyeballs. It could be a massively ironic statement on the part of the window-dresser, but I very much doubt it.

Sometimes the hardest job of all when given something of brilliance to work with is not screwing it up. If you happen to be enthusiastic about it too then I imagine politely leaving well alone and encouraging those more talented than yourself to take up the reins is equally hard. Sadly Chris Weitz couldn’t manage either and so The Golden Compass appeared on cinema screens this week. Adapted from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials this was a film Cindy and I had been waiting for with trepidation.

The initial exposition about Dust made my heart sink. If a film needs a voiceover to explain itself before it’s properly started I usually know that the work has been fatally compromised. And so it has. The cast was great, the effects weren’t bad, the problem lay entirely at the feet of the screenwriter and director who just simply wasn’t capable of getting the source material onto the screen. Ploughing through the major plot points of the book at speed is not a film adaptation. Some critics have referred to it as being complicated, they actually mean it is confusing, as an over-simplification of a dense plot can easily become.

Weitz’s version is very much like a mate of yours trying to explain the story-line of a really good book to you they read about six months ago. They’ve remembered who the main characters are and it’s pretty much in the right order but as far as eloquence and flair goes you’d be best reading it for yourself.

In an interview in 2004 Weitz said: “I knew I wanted to mount a large-scale film... something... more complex in terms of scope and meaning”. This was obviously a challenge as he later went to visit Peter Jackson in New Zealand and said: “... it scared the wits out of me... I really didn’t understand the logistical and technical aspects of that (digital effects) world... I said to New Line ‘I don’t think I’m capable of executing this’”.

Is it gumption or arrogance that lies at the heart of Weitz’s ambition? While he was with Jackson he might have sought advice on how to get an epic up on the screen. Jackson succeeded with Lord of the Rings, a monumental achievement and the kind of effort required for Pullman’s work. Weitz’ problem seems to have been that he thought the directing was his major problem and not the writing, he certainly felt competent enough to throw out Tom Stoppard’s version of the script, which I would dearly love to read.

I imagine Stoppard’s script did not skimp on the religious aspects of the novel and that the studio felt they required a treatment that would not offend and play well with their assumed target audience of children. That may explain why Weitz got to write and direct and why we ended up with a de-clawed version that couldn’t even bring itself to end at the same point as the book. Philip Pullman has made supportive noises but ultimately what we have is a heart-breaking disappointment. I hope Weitz stays well away from the next two. Give Stoppard and Chris Cunningham a call and let’s start over.

Update: Maybe, given I know nothing about what actually happened during filming, I'm completely wrong. Oops. Highly likely really. I read this article by someone who claims to have looked at the Stoppard script and Weitz's original script and they're saying that Stoppard's version was "ponderous" whereas Weitz's was "actually great... it vividly and more clearly creates the various worlds Lyra inhabits". What prevented this version from being the one that was made? Perhaps I've let personal prejudice cloud my entirely speculative opinion and mundane requirements such as the available budget restricted what could be accomplished.