Kazhes pierakstu burtnīca

Mr. Miller, according to "Space" (not the French but the American band) is "our local vicar and a serial killer". According to Latvia Mr. Miller is either an editor of a magazine of private dirty clothes and a person representing a sexual minority. According to the local tradition Mr. Miller is some guy who happens to like driving fast cars without a licence and who is a young architect. According to American literature Henry Miller is one of the writers that first introduced explicit sexuality in American literature. He and his woman that is, forgot her name. In this book though you don`t encounter a single appearance of words like `penis`, `vagina`, `pussy`, `cunt`, `boner`, `cock` or even `Peter Tool` (I only used these words so you can find this record of the factoid by using the search option on the site), oh no, this book tells the story of Henry Miller going to Greece from his native States. In there he undergoes a treatment of life that`s just like he always wanted it to be - poor and unambitios (not that he was a rich man before going to Greece). That`s one weird thing - I always thought of this fellow being a brat that doesn`t give a damn about anything. But it proved that in fact he was just a nice and mellow fellow that despised the American dream more than anything. Oh, and he didn`t like the French because of them being too pretentious about themselves. Not that this autobiographic tale is particulary entertaining, but at least it gets more and more interesting towards the ending thus leaving a positive impression upon your humble servant.

Since in the past few weeks I`ve relistened to some of the records I enjoyed when I was younger (it`s the 75 year old me talking right now) I couldn`t skip HIM (his infernal majesty). Back in high school when I was a sad, sad person I used to listen to this album quite a lot. Not in the past few years though. HIM are a finnish band that plays its music in the style of goth rock relying on two subjects - love and death. For most of the time these two things are considered to be one. After those years these songs don`t even seem that overplayed to me, even "Poison Girl". The album doesn`t offer much more than its four singles, so I`ll rate them according to what I think of those songs. 1)"Poison Girl", 2) "Join Me", 3) "Right here in my arms", 4) "Gone with the sin". Actually back in school I thought of "RHimA" as the best cut but today the rocking track seems a bit too forced to me. The other three songs are a bit too similar to each other, of course, and cliches override this record but who cares - as music for pokemon people this ain`t bad at all. Oh yeah, and all the non-single songs apart from the opening "Prelude to tragedy" proudly suck. This still is music for depressed high school losers, even if you think it ain`t.

Some people call this band Abba of the nineties. This thing doesn`t happen to have no reasons behind it all - after all "AoB" just like Abba comes from Sweden, does poppy music in the Europop manner, relies heavily upon synthesizers (as a matter of fact, there seem to be no other instruments upon this record), the band also became popular on both sides of the Atlantic, the band contains two singing chicks and two dudes who don`t sing. I can probably find some more similarities but I find myself too lazy for that. Yet there`s one difference between these two bands that proves to be a significant one - while "Abba" surely had some fillers on even the best albums they at least weren`t offensively bad. It`s clearly not the case with AoB though. Apart from "All that she wants", "The Sign" and other three singles there`s very little this album can offer. And even the singles don`t offer that much - the vocal melody and the girls voices are ok, but generally there ain`t anything more than it. Music is generic dance pop, so cliched that at worst moments it sounds being created by using some cheap "Dance eJay". The non-singles tracks are just bad enough to be considered very bad. I won`t say that I haven`t heard anything worse than this record but there`s no real reason why I would ever listen to it again.

This is the novel that gave the world the name of the writer Iris Murdoch. But it isn`t the novel that gave the name of Iris Murdoch to me. Having already read "The black prince" and "A severed head" I had my restrains before even opening this book. Having really enjoyed the one about the prince, I didn`t have an exceptionally great time whilst reading the one about the head. Don`t really remember why, but it had its problems. In this book you get a slightly similar story to the one about the head with the noticable difference that this book is rather shy. Yes, a love quadriangle exists in this book between the main hero, a woman named Anne, her sister and a German dude named Hugo. But in this novel you won`t encounter a single sex scene between any of those four characters (as a matter of fact, there won`t be even a slightest sign of a relationship in the bonds of one sex, unlike what Murdoch wrote in the "head" book). The hero is an unsuccessful writer/translator who goes around acting strange after his girlfriend has kicked him out (which also resembles the severed head in some aspects). What`s weird is the world the heroes live in. It`s strange and untrivial.

What do you think - does Alice mean "balls" by saying diamonds? Well if he does, he`s a really twisted old fart at the age of sixty who can name his album "dirty balls". On the other hand, if he doesn`t mean that he`s still a twisted old fart. On his latest album Alice doesn`t sound particulary good, which is no wonder to me, since no album of his since "Brutal Planet" has had me particulary impressed. On this album he goes a bit retro, leaving the agression of late ninenties/millenium behind, choosing a more straightforward rock sound. On the opening "Woman of mass destruction" Mr. Fournier sounds like a man of around seventy who still tries to sound like a fifty year old. "Pretty ballerina" is a weird exception on the record (not in terms of singing, that`s a style Alice has mastered at manu stages of his carreer) but the whole romantic thingy does surprise me a little. Among other songs there`s nothing really outstanding (if only "Stand" with the stupid hip hop part). You can surely listen to this album but if you totally dig it you got to be out of your mind.

If you watch this film expecting it to be sharp and witty, if you`re in for a sense making plot, character development, memorable camera work, a perfect soundtrack and whatelse, you probably are a dumbass. Why such a conclusion? Since Brad Pitt is considered the sexiest male actor in Hollywood and Angelina Jolie who plays alongside with him - the sexiest actress in Hollywood, you`d probably watch this film from a different point of view than the latest Peter Greenaways work. And it`s no problem with me. If a film doesn`t have pretentious of being a flick for the intellectuals I don`t mind it being silly. Ok, the whole thing with two assassins living under the same roof as a married couple without actually knowing that the other one has a secret life, is a bit similar to chopping the tallest tree with a herring, but never mind that. It`s an adventure/comedy film we`re discussing and no smart ass director by the name of Woody Allen has been around for making this film. In terms of a quite sexy film about a man and a woman chasing each other with big guns and then making big love it`s a pretty good film. Unmemorable, of course, yet it has some quite sharp (for a film like this) jokes, a bit too little nudity (hey! way too little nudity!), but that`s ok, I think.

This is the first time I encounter the fellow with the name of Rybczynski. Since my Internet connection is down at the moment I have no way of checking who he is/was and how much fame he has. This film, "The orchestra", is more of a music video than an actual film. It doesn`t have a real plot, it has no text and it doesn`t come off as trivial. The film contains several parts revolving around several pieces of classical music. There`s a part of old people waking up and being harrassed by a butler; there`s a part in front of a church with a whole lot of people playing the march of death, there`s a segment of boy/girl aging while walking along a long piano; there`s dancing in the Louvre; there`s a butler walking in the sky; there`s a couple flying in a cathedral and there are people going up a ladder to communism (probably I forgot to mention something but that`s not that important). The favourites of mine are the boy/girl sequence and the Louvre part. But the others aren`t half-bad either. This film is mostly for your eyes, of course, but it is done beautifuly without a doubt. The minimalistic camera work that rarely switches from one camera to another, but chooses sliding the same camera for quite a long time thus creating an illusion of a sequence being shot in one scene (which probably applies only to some layers of the sequence while others were added later on). The last part with the stairway is a bit overlong, that`s a thing I can`t deny, but otherwise I have no complaints at all. Watch it if you can! And if you can`t borrow it from me and watch it anyhow!

By reading this I continued my acquaintance with the genre of memoirs. I gotta admit that reading diaries and letters of a person that you don`t already know by its work seems a bit weird. I haven`t read a single poem by Byron, that`s for sure. On the other hand I`ve read a few books about people interested in Byron ("Arcadia" by Stoppard and "The luxury of exile" by L.Bass are the first two works to come to my mind). As for this book it can probably by described as a novel in letters although it surely ain`t no fiction. Lord Byron himself can be seen this way without all those exterragations historians have put upon him. Basically he was a fine young upper class fellow without much money and with his mind set on women and adventures. In his letters to his friends he`s quite honest and sarcastic, his letters to his lovers don`t come off as particulary honest but probably he meant what he wrote (at least during the writing and probably some ten minutes afterwards). Byron`s travels and the self-chosen exile for the most of his adult life can be understood pretty well. Without a doubt I don`t claim that this book is particulary interesting to read - the witty passages where Byron pokes fun at some of his contemporaries or the times when he tells funny stories in his diaries are a treat but some of the stuff only for biographers isn`t particulary what I want from a book.

Captain Beyond has absolutely nothing to do with Captain Beefheart, in case you wonder. No, it was a hard rock/prog rock outfit from LA which had Rod Evans of Deep Purple for the vocals (ok, he left "Purple" before they became really huge, but he did sing on "Hush"!), a guy who had played with Johnny Winter (so what? is Winter that much of a hero for me to know every ballsucking dickwad he used to play with? ok, probably I was a bit harsh about him but who cares), Lee Dorman who played the bass for "Iron Butterfly" on "In-da-gadda-da-vida" and one more fellow who seems to be an average loser not even capable of being tossed out from a band like "The secondhand Beatles". So, they all got together and recorded an album of jolly molly rock music, which is somehow marketed as progressive rock. To me it`s just your basically hard rock of "Deep Purple" without Ritchie Blackmore but with more emphasis on more complicated sound and a concept for the record. I`m not particulary interested in the concept, of course, since to me the record is an inoffensive collection of hard rock songs, sometimes spoiled by some silly sounding crap like the talking on "As the moon speaks the sea". Oh, I figured - this band is a mixture of "Deep Purple" and "Cactus". Listenable, but not memorable at all.

This release surely ain`t targeted at the average Joe who knows "Pink Floyd" by the title "Another Brick in the Wall" and probably has heard "Money" on his FM radio. It`s not targeted at the fan of "modern" Pink Floyd - a guy who knows his "Division Bell" by heart. And it isn`t even targeted at the regular Roger Waters era Pink Floyd fan who considers "Dark Side of the Moon" the most important piece of music created in the post-Beethoven world. No, Sir, this is a bootleg video of Pink Floyd in 1970 - the days when Syd Barrett was long gone and mad as a hatter but Roger still didn`t have his "vision" for the band. On this video we hear and watch the performances of 6 songs - "Set the Controls for the heart of the sun", "Cymbaline", "Atom heart mother", "Granchester Meadows", "Green is the colour" and "Careful with that axe, Eugene". The performances are lenghty and some of them are even interesting. Yet the quality of both video and sound is dissapointing, and only braindead people in the psychedelic years could consider showing boring landscapes to the sound of some of those songs instead of the musicians a sensible idea. Man, it reminded me of Latvian television when it didn`t have enough clips of "Coca Cola" and "Always" to fill the gaps between programs and showed some rubbish landscapes accompanied with elevator muzak instead.