"The cool, the crazy - the Flaming Lips!"

"I've never been a fan of alturnative music, but these guys rocked the house!"

Listening to BBC radio 1's The Flaming Lips Experiments I was gobsmacked to find out that the Lips played on wonderfully dated Beverly Hills 90210.

What is even more remarkable is that it is a pretty darn good performance of "She don't use Jelly", making the whole thing an abject lesson in how to sell out whilst still maintaining your integrity. The trick is to embrace the ridiculous and express yourself regardless.

Rock energy & good old-time mountain soul.

Seeing as this track - which my Dad recommended to me - conforms to "Iain's Second Rule of Music" (viz. If it has a banjo in it, it rocks!), I thought I would post this delightful interpretation of Gillian Welch's gorgeous "Orphan girl" by Crooked Still. Enjoy:

Blistering banjo solo around the 40 secs mark huh?

Told you banjo's rocked.

If...

Monsieur Fortin ran the London marathon...

Grindhouse

Quentin Tarintino and Robert Rodriguez speak to Elvis Mitchell on KCRW's excellent podcast "The Treatment", which is always worth checking out.

Surprisingly, there was also a very cool interview with yer man Quentin in the Financial Times (of all places) yesterday.

"A kiss on the hand can be quite continental"

Finally someone feels the same way about Richard Gere I do...

First Jade, now Richard -this is fantastic! Shilpa Shetty is single handedly discrediting the public reputations of all the "celebrities" that annoy me. If only she did contract work, we could rid ourselves of all reality tv stars and obnoxious hollywood types.

universal tribal beat

"I mean, the human race, we are a tribe, let's face it, and let's stop all this religious bullshit. I think everybody, or at least a lot of my friends, are just so exhausted with this whole self-importance of religious people. Just drop it. We're all fucking animals, so let's just make some universal tribal beat. We're pagan. Let's just march."

- Bjork in pitchfork

>>>Bjork's new album "Volta" will be released on May 7th<<<

Dreamy and ambiguous

"The highway is for gamblers,
better use your sense.
Take what you have gathered
from coincidence."
- It's All over Now Baby Blue, Bob Dylan

As the original ragged-hobo-troubadour, Dylan (much like the archivist of the Serpentine Slagheap) appreciates that if you're gonna survive in this rough ole world and make sense of the everyday chaos that surrounds you, you have to be open to every possibility that life throws your way.

If there was some underlying theme to this erratic and somewhat slapdash blog, it would be driven by this impulse to make sense of connections between seemingly disparate things, which crop up in the course of your average day. To literally "take what you have gathered from coincidence", unpack it and see if you can make sense of it. Carl Jung called this all too human impulse to attribute significance to random events, or "meaningful coincidences", as the "acausal connecting principal". However, this phenomenon is more commonly known as the synchronicity.

Case in point: earlier this week I bought "Oh Mercy", which is a woefully under appreciated Dylan album; not least by me who was given a vinyl copy of the album by my dearest friend shortly before he decided to end his own life.

For whatever reason, I never actually listened to the album and it has lain in the attic ever since.

Then, the other day, I decided to get it and listen to it. I've been listening to it all week, it's a beautifully produced floor-stompin' record. One track in particular with its mournful harmonica and percussive beat, crawled under my skin - the gorgeous "What was it Wanted?" Despite not consciously knowing anything about the album itself, I seemed to have a nagging recollection of reading something about its creation in Chronicles. So I picked up my copy and, sure enough, I found a wonderfully evocative account of the creative process that went into making Oh Mercy, which singled out the very song that had been pulsating in my head all week and making me play 'air-harmonica' like a possessed fool:

There aren't any lyrics in the interludes, but there probably should have been. At the time it was more important to get the theme of the lyrics across and to keep the rhythmic pulse going.. I'd cut stranger songs. The way the microphones are placed makes the atmosphere seem to be texturally rich, jet lagged and loaded - Quaaludes, misty. It starts mixed and cooked in a pot like gumbo, right from the downbeat, dreamy and ambiguous. We had to keep the song level and right-side up. Danny's sonic atmosphere makes it sound like it's coming out of some mysterious, silent land.

Aside from Dylan's evocative use of words, the rhythm of his hipster slang, the thing that interested me about this passage was the way in which it depicts the messy collaborative process, which is often at the heart of most acts of artistic creativity.

Impressed, but thinking nothing more of it, I decided to put another CD on. Reaching out I picked - at random I hasten to add - U2's The Joshua Tree. An album which, although I love, I haven't listened to for years. Stretching out on the floor, letting the swirling melodies wash over me, I was struck by the the same dreamy atmosphere that Dylan describes in Chronicles. Curious, I flipped the album over and discovered that the same guy produced both albums. A Quebeccan called Daniel Lanois.

Coincidence or merely a manifestation of my subconscious mind at work?

In truth I don't know, and I don't give a fuck.

But I do love it when those connections creep up on you. Aside from the delicious sense that you have ordered another piece of the puzzle which we call life, there is something eminently satisfying, not to mention human, about making connections between the seemingly random. And in that single moment my friend who gave the album to me, the echo of my father singing Dylan to me as a child, the memories and sensations I associated with Joshua Tree, images of my Quebecois friend Francis in Japan, not to mention the new found knowledge - all merged into one.

What's my point?

Nothing except to say keep your eyes open and join the dots. Who knows, maybe a pattern will emerge will emerge from the Serpentine slagheap.

My Blueberry Nights

According to Variety the Weinstein brothers have secured the American distribution rights to Wong Kar Wai's upcoming movie "Blueberry Nights".

The film is to be the director's first English language film and will star Grammy award winning singer Norah Jones who takes a road trip across the U.S. in search for answers "about love and finding comedic adventures along the way." During her travels she meets a cast of eccentric characters, played by Jude Law, Rachael Weisz David Strathaine and Natalie Portman.

Based on a short film that Wong shot in Hong Kong, it sees a shopkeeper fall for a mysterious female client who eats blueberry pies. Apparently, the script (though this is always a rather loose concept with Kar Wai) for "Blueberry Nights" was written with the assistance of acclaimed crime writer Lawrence Block.

So far, so intriguing...

At first glance, it appears to have all the ingredients to make it classic Wong Kar Wai movie: smoky interiors, transient romantic encounters, food and sex. Add a luscious dreamy soundtrack, cook for 30 minutes and, "bang", your done.

That said, I am a little bit wary about this new cinematic treat for several reasons: a) it is described as a romantic comedy, a description I do not normally associate with a Kar Wai movie; b) the choice of actors, which could prove to be either inspired or painfully insipid; and finally c) Christopher Doyle is not on board as cinematographer for this movie, which means his trademark dreamy visuals will be absent from Blueberry Nights.

All of which is not to say that he could not pull this off. After all, the last "road movie" Wong Kar Wai made was the gorgeous Happy Together. A film that no matter how many times I watch it I always discover something new and touching. Blueberry Night might also offer up such a treat, either way I will be first in line to take a slice of that pie.

Dreamreading Murakami

Scrabbling amongst the detritus of the slagheap the other day I discovered what can only be described as an unexpected, but welcomed discovery: four unicorn skulls lying under the tarpaulin of an old ford mustang. Dusty, to be sure, but serviceable. After a few cobweb-clearing-blows, I was to able to see inside the dark interior of the majestic animal's cranium. Cradling one of these relics in my calloused hands, I could feel the delicious tingle of anticipation as I contemplated the stories rich with mystery and meaning, which they contained. But try as I might, I was unable to dreamread their contents. This never used to be a problem whilst the village librarian was around to help me out. However, ever since she lost her mind, she has been somewhat forgetful and has taken to wondering the woods looking for her shadow. What good that will do her, I have no idea. It my experience that shadows only hold you back.

No matter, for in the the librarian's absence I have discovered that Naxos has recently produced audio book renditions of four of Murakmi Haruki's most evocative novels:

A Wild Sheep Chase
The Elephant Vanishes
Norwegian Wood
Kafka on the Shore
The Wind Up Bird Chronicle

Lavishly packaged and beautifully read (from the extracts I listened to on the Murakmi podcast), they are a delicious treat to anyone who wants to dreamread and explore the noocks and crannies of the subconscious, but does not have the wherewithal to unlock the secrets of a unicorn's dusty skull.

Bagpipes Jazz

Jazz is all about pushing boundaries, connecting the dots between styles and ideas in order to express yourself creativly. It was therefore with great sadness that I read of the death of the inspirational jazz bagpiper, Rufus Harley:

Exploiting the bagpipes' power to sustain drones while cultivating a considerable jazzy agility, Harley also drew on the funky soul-jazz style popular in the mid-60s, which made his approach accessible yet surprising, and much more than a mere novelty.

From Rufus' obituary in the Guardian.

Against the Day

Blurb: 'Against the Day'

Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after the First World War, Against the Day moves from the labour troubles in Colorado, to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, to Venice and Vienna, to the Balkans and Central Asia, to Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tungska event, to Mexico during the revolution, Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

The sizeable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi and Groucho Marx.

As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it is their lives that pursue them.

Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it's not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

Let the reader decide; let the reader beware.

Good luck.

What I love about this self penned blurb is the imaginative irreverence of the whole thing; it literally bursts off of the page. In my mind I am already making connections, searching for correspondences, making paranoid narratives... Which is precisely what you do when you read a novel by Thomas Ruggles Pynchon. I love the fact that this aging hipsters still has the capacity to explode the landscape of the imagination in an effort to mine the subconscious memory of the twentieth century. We need authors like Pynchon, now, more than ever.

Like many others out there, I can't wait until this book is published.

If you don't have the fainted idea who I am blathering on about you could do worse than reading the Independent's take on the life and times of Mr. Pynchon.