Everything You Need #5, Friday 23rd July 2010

It's time (and always a pleasure) to plug Everything You Need again, and whilst I'm not fortunate enough to be DJing this time round, I am still quite closely involved: the Everything You Need Twitter account is operated by me. Starting from eleven p.m. this evening, your £2 will get you four hours of the best music you could ever hope to hear at a clubnight. Tonight, above all else, I'm hoping for some Replacements. I've lost count of the number of occasions I've danced around to "I Will Dare." But once more can never hurt. You're encouraged to make your own requests, though, so if there's anything in particular you fancy hearing, write it down, hand it in, and wait on tenterhooks in the hope that it'll get played. And make sure you stick around for the raffle, with the lucky winner getting to take home half of the takings on the door (keep those fingers crossed!). Hope to see you down there.

Mercury Music Prize 2010

So, the nominations for the Mercury Music Prize 2010 have just been announced, meaning everyone can squabble over who was picked and who was left out, whilst arguing about whether the award has any particular relevance these days anyway. I haven't listened to most of these albums, and if I'm honest I probably don't intend to. I've heard good things about the Villagers record; need to spend more time with Wild Beasts; and enjoy the xx's debut quite a bit. Outside of those three, there's nothing here that really convinces me that British music is in particularly rude health. Ah well. There's always next year.

Biffy Clyro - Only Revolutions
Corinne Bailey Rae - The Sea
Dizzee Rascal - Tongue N' Cheek
Kit Downes Trio - Golden
Foals - Total Life Forever
I Am Kloot - Sky At Night
Laura Marling - I Speak Because I Can
Mumford & Sons - Sigh No More
Paul Weller - Wake Up The Nation
Villagers - Becoming A Jackal
Wild Beasts - Two Dancers
the xx - the xx

I've never paid that much attention to Jesca Hoop in the past, but thanks to the good folks over at NPR Music, I'm able to remedy that. They're streaming her second album Hunting My Dress in its entirety ahead of its release (June 26th, if you'd like to mark it in your diaries), and I know I'm going to be taking the opportunity to acquaint myself with her work.

Stream Jesca Hoop's latest album Hunting My Dress over at NPR Music

Somehow, Liars don't seem to get the credit they deserve. Sure, their records are usually released to critical acclaim, but considering that over the last ten years they've knocked out five albums that range from great to stunning, I can't help but feel as though they deserve to be held in higher esteem. Their latest long-player Sisterworld is a reminder of both their talent and their versatility (their constant ability to reinvent themselves is one of their greatest attributes), and they recorded four of the tracks for a new Daytrotter Session which is well worth listening to.

Download the new Liars Daytrotter Session here

"This is what I don't have:

- Plans

- Enthusiasm

- A girlfriend

- The sense that things fit together and that everything will be all right in the end

- A winning personality

- A watch"

When the narrator of Erlend Loe's Naive. Super takes stock of his life, the bad far outweighs the good. Aged twenty-five, he is struggling to find any meaning in his life, and making a list of what he's lacking only draws further attention to his perceived failings. Yet making lists is one of the things he's best at. From a literary perspective, it's a simple device generally employed to quickly convey pertinent information about a character, and in the hands of Loe it is undeniably highly effective. For example, it's hard to read the list the narrator makes of things that used to excite him as a child and not want to write up your own; however, considering his depression causes him to revert to to something akin to a childlike state (his greatest pleasure in life becomes the time he spends playing with a ball and a hammer-and-peg toy), said list becomes incredibly poignant. Halfway through the novel, I'm looking forward to seeing how it develops.

My second contribution to Write In For Writing's Sake was posted this evening, and as always I'd be greatly appreciative if you followed the link to read it. This week's subject was 'Uncomfortable,' and after considering an airline cabin as the setting (and a rather more literal interpretation of the theme), I eventually settled on a house party, with a narrator who is anything but happy to be there. Once again, I didn't find it necessary to draw upon my own real life experiences too much, although I imagine most people can relate to the circumstances depicted within the story. Let's face it, at one time or another we've all found ourselves in a room comprised entirely of total strangers, and all felt the sense of discomfort that stems from struggling to find your place, and your voice, within said room.

I think it'll take me a while to process Inception. My initial (undeniably) hyperbole-laden reaction to the film is that it is nothing less than a ground-up reinvention of the action movie genre. To wit: the bar has been raised to such an extent that the usual underwhelming summer blockbuster mediocrity that just about passes muster will (hopefully) no longer so readily be accepted. It is undoubtedly Christopher Nolan's finest hour, surpassing both the critically adored Dark Knight and The Prestige (my own personal favourite), and is a tremendous piece of cinema that demands multiple viewings in order to fully digest the wonderful-but-labyrinthine plot. Superbly acted and utterly captivating throughout, I cannot wait to see it for a second time.

Ed Cottam performing at Fletcher Moss Gardens

Back in April, a friend of mine had a birthday celebration held in Fletcher Moss Gardens that featured the music of Hungry Ha Ha Ha, Jess Bryant and Ed Cottam. Whilst footage starring the first two acts emerged shortly after the event, it's taken until now for a video showcasing the music of Ed Cottam to be posted online. Having just watched it, I thought I'd share it here for your enjoyment. You can even see me in the background (I'm the guy who's unnecessarily overdressed).



www.myspace.com/edmundcottam

Seeing as how the focus of the blog this month appears to be literature (not something I planned, but let us say that it is a decision intended to celebrate the first meeting of the Everything You Read book club), I would like to share with you a passage that occurs early on in Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections:

"I'm saying the structure of the entire culture is flawed," Chip said. "I'm saying the bureaucracy has arrogated the right to define certain states of mind as 'diseased.' A lack of desire to spend money becomes a symptom of disease that requires expensive medication. Which medication then destroys the libido, in other words destroys the appetite for the one pleasure in life that's free, which means the person has to spend even more money on compensatory pleasures. The very definition of mental 'health' is the ability to participate in the consumer economy. When you buy into therapy, you're buying into buying. And I'm saying that I personally am losing the battle with a commercialized, medicalized, totalitarian modernity right this instant."

It's a wonderful bit of prose from a novel that, twenty pages in, had failed to capture my attention. Now, I find myself one hundred pages along and absolutely enthralled. Having had a conversation earlier this evening centred around what drives the reader to carry on when a novel doesn't immediately grab them, The Corrections has provided me with a rather simple answer: some books are slow starters, and the very nature of literature contains the promise that things may pick up in spectacular fashion at any moment.

Hopefully, I'll be able to find the time to keep reading it at this rate. There's a wealth of stuff to tackle at the moment, though. Vintage Books were kind enough to send me a copy of John Lennon's In His Own Write for review. I'm expecting Naive. Super by Erlend Loe - the first selection of the aforementioned book club - to arrive any day now. And I started Dante's The Divine Comedy the other day. It somehow seems rather fitting that, as soon as my degree ends, I rediscover my passion for books.

Over at City Lifers, you can read my review of The Peters Port Memorial Service, the debut album from Scottish band Mitchell Museum. I found it to be a very enjoyable record, for the most part, and a sure sign of greater things to come in the not too distant future. And "Tiger Heartbeat" will definitely end up being one of my most played tracks of 2010. It's worth getting on board before they become huge. Then you'll be able to say you were there from the start.

www.mitchellmuseum.co.uk

Today, I contributed a short story to Write In For Writing's Sake, the blog that intends to encourage those of us who have held a long-standing desire to express our creativity in the form of the written word, without ever quite knowing how to get the results out into the wider world, where people might read our literary outpourings. I hope it'll be my first submission of many; now that I've finished my degree, I'm keener than ever to do something relevant with it.

Be warned: the story isn't exactly the most positive thing I've ever written. It concerns a married couple, both of whom have reached the age of forty. Told from the perspective of the woman, the two of them are sat across from one another at a wedding, and the tale juxtaposes their unhappiness with their surroundings, which in turn serve to remind her of the happier times they shared together.

As soon as I read that this week's theme was 'Dance, Dance, Dance,' the idea of an unnamed song playing in the background - one that carries a past significance to two lovers - immediately came to mind. From there, I decided to challenge myself as much as possible, writing from a perspective that couldn't be any further removed from my own. Whether that turned out to be a successful move is not for me to decide, but I enjoyed stretching myself, and it represents a much-needed move away from writing only what I know.

If you were to pick only one transcendent moment out of The National's highly impressive, wonderfully emotive oeuvre, it has to be when the otherwise unremarkable "Slow Show" breaks down into one of the most beautiful evocations of the feeling of love you could ever hope to hear, as Matt Berninger delivers the stunning refrain: "you know I dreamed about you / for twenty-nine years before I saw you." The line effortlessly captures that sentiment we all struggle to express sometimes, and to my mind is one of the most perfect encapsulations of how it feels to be in love.

Yet the line first appeared during "29 Years," which stands out as an anachronism on their self-titled debut album due to the lo-fi nature of the recording in contrast to the songs that surround it. If The National (2001) was the sound of a band still finding their feet, then "29 Years" is a drunken late night phone call rescued from the answer phone of an ex-girlfriend in order to be inexplicably included on their debut release. It took them six years to give it the context it deserved, and you cannot help but speculate that Berninger was biding his time until he felt able to do the line justice. That he did so in such spectacular fashion is one of the many, many reasons why people feel such a deep affection for them.

In my opinion, Pixar are head and shoulders above any other film studio in the world at the moment, a title I feel confident bestowing upon them on the strength of their last three movies. The first five minutes of Up were some of the most heart-wrenchingly emotional I have ever experienced, and the narrative that followed was a thing of beauty, as Carl attempted to recapture the spirit of his youthful love whilst struggling to overcome his own curmudgeonly nature. WALL-E, meanwhile, is a laudably ambitious re-imagining of the boy-meets-girl cinematic dynamic that ends up being one of the greatest love stories of the twenty-first century. And, watching it for a second time, I realised how wonderful Ratatouille is. It approaches both cooking and the city of Paris with an unrestrained sense of celebration that is a joy to behold, and Remy the rat's struggle to stay true to both his family and his own ambitions is never less than engaging. As we all eagerly await the release of Toy Story 3, it served as the perfect reminder of the unbelievably high standards Pixar have been setting over the last few years.

Write In for Writing's Sake

One of the members of a book club I'm helping to get off the ground made mention of a website he's just recently started up and, having decided to check it out, I ended up being extremely glad that I did. Entitled Write In For Writing's Sake, its mission statement is to inspire wannabe writers to actually get something written. Considering how easy it is to sit around aspiring towards some kind of literary output without ever actually doing anything about it, I think this is a very noble goal indeed. Every Thursday, a new subject is put forward (past examples include 'Breaking Down' and 'The Big Time') to get the creative juices flowing, and anyone is free to submit something centred around the chosen theme. Submissions can take any form, and should be up to 1000 words. There's already a small number of contributors offering their work for public consumption, and some of the stuff that has been posted is impressive. With all the recent debate concerning the supposed death of literature, it's good to see their are still avenues for burgeoning new talent to express their craft.

Altered Zones launches

"In the last several years, there's been an explosion of small-scale DIY music. Altered Zones is a team of 14 music blogs dedicated to exploring these emerging musical worlds, traversing genres from psych and drone to electronic and underground pop. Our mission is to highlight the most notable and adventurous new artists, and to serve as a focal point for the flood of creativity coming from deep within the musical underground."

So reads the mission statement of the new Pitchfork venture Altered Zones, which is, as the blurb suggests, a collective of fourteen reasonably well-established music blogs united in their desire to showcase the best alternative music that we might be missing out on. Of those blogs, I have to admit to being unfamiliar with the majority of them, although the added exposure they'll no doubt receive by associating themselves with Pitchfork will no doubt be good for traffic on each respective site. This news post outlines the (extremely ambitious) concept in great detail, and I'm interested enough to be on board for the time being.

It really is no stretch to say that Ghosts of the Great Highway is one of the greatest albums ever. At the same time, it isn't unreasonable to say that Mark Kozelek hasn't managed to match those incredibly high standards on any of the Sun Kil Moon releases that followed it. You could charitably argue that the Modest Mouse covers album Tiny Cities was an interesting enough diversion, but April, the follow-up record proper, was something of a disappointment. I definitely think there's an argument to be made that Kozelek produces his best work when his ideas are filtered through other band members. That said, I'm still holding out hope that Admiral Fell Promises will prove me wrong. Released next week, you can stream three of the songs by following the link below.

MP3s: Sun Kil Moon - "You Are My Sun," "Admiral Fell Promises" and "Australian Winter"

"He is the most perfect writer of my generation, he writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm. I would not have changed two words in Breakfast at Tiffany's" - Norman Mailer on Truman Capote

Were I to type up a list of books I know I should've gotten round to reading but somehow haven't, Breakfast at Tiffany's would've figured pretty high. Until this weekend, that is. Having found it for three quid in a charity shop, I ploughed through it very quickly indeed (it is only a novella, after all, and the writing flows in such a way as to make the act of reading it effortless). Part of the reason I'd avoided Truman Capote in the past was his dismissal of Jack Kerouac (he suggested that Kerouac's work "isn't writing at all; it's typing." The comment always stuck in my craw). But having actually sat down to read him, I've inevitably had to revise my opinion. At first, Holly Golightly comes across as either elusive of just plain unlikable, the type of character who isn't so much as eccentric, but schizophrenic. However, once you understand a bit more about her and her upbringing, she becomes a somewhat tragic figure, one who has created a new identity for herself to disguise past hurts. A third of the way in, I had no expectations of Capote being able to turn me around on her, so full credit to him for pulling it off. It's slight (the unnamed narrator is every bit as insignificant as Nick Carraway proves to be in The Great Gatsby), but it's beautifully written, and certainly worth spending a few hours of your time with.

News, albeit unsubstantiated, that James Bond 23 won't be happening is music to my ears. The franchise should have been put to bed years ago, and even the Daniel Craig-starring, supposed ground-up reinvention didn't do enough to reinvigorate the character. Instead, what was offered was an ineffective attempt to mimic the template laid out by the Bourne movies, whilst at the same time stubbornly refusing to shed the more outdated trappings of the series, most strikingly the Bond girls - you cannot successfully affect a more serious tone when you have such an obvious reference point to the "nudge nudge, wink wink" ridiculousness that has always been a staple of the films. Even the combination of Sam Mendes (American Beauty) directing and Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon) writing does little to convince me that we're missing out on something special, seeing as how nothing in their respective oeuvres suggests that they'd know their way around the action blockbuster genre.

If you're looking for a more balanced view, you could do worse than read this Guardian article, although to be honest, by the end of it, Stuart Heritage isn't exactly lamenting the potential end of James Bond, suggesting that "maybe we should just let the character die with dignity while he still can." I couldn't agree more.

So, prominent literary critic Lee Siegel has pronounced the American novel dead. In doing so, he's sparked a wave of controversy, but I for one can certainly see his point.

Most of the novels I've got lined up to read are from the beginning of the twentieth century or earlier (I have The Divine Comedy sat next to me as I type this, and am working my way through an incredibly dense introduction that is leading me to believe that thirteenth century Italy was a lot like Romeo & Juliet - plenty of death centred around love and honour whilst powerful families waged war with one another). It was the recent '20 Under 40' list published in The New Yorker that got Siegel's goat. Outside of Jonathan Safran Foer I'm at a loss as to who any of them are - an indictment of both my own unwillingness to engage with twenty-first century literature and the ever-declining popularity of "proper" fiction that has rendered it as something of a cultural relic - and I don't see myself becoming excited about any of them any time soon. I still haven't read Moby Dick. I still haven't read The Grapes of Wrath. I've been reading Breakfast at Tiffany's for the first time today, and I need some more Truman Capote in my life once I'm done. And I could go on, and on and on... At the same time, the only still-living American novelists I have any interest in reading in the near future are all older than forty (such as Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen and Glen David Gold, who was responsible for Carter Beats The Devil, which deserves to be lauded as one of the best novels of the last decade).

Of course, it should be pointed out that this problem isn't confined to America. It's much more universal than that, and the problem is most likely terminal. It'd be easy to speculate as to the reasons for this, but it'd also be a futile exercise. I'm content knowing that I'll never get the chance to read all the books I'd like to, and that freedom of choice makes the paucity of modern day classics much easier to bear.

Due to a combination of the internet being disconnected at my old house, and moving into a new place, I've been unable to post anything these last few days. To be honest, it doesn't look like I've missed out on much in terms of reportable news, though. Let's see what we do have:

Andrew Garfield will be playing Peter Parker in the upcoming Spider-man reboot. I wasn't blown away by his performance in The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, but I'm willing to reserve judgment for the time being.

If you're into Wavves, you can stream their new album King Of The Beach in its entirety.

Roger Ebert continues to offer his uninformed opinions on computer games, this time conceding that they can be art (whilst refusing to actually play one).

And America is really getting serious about internet piracy, so if you wanted to watch Toy Story 3 illegally on your laptop, you now have fewer sites to choose from.