Cool Water, Cool Wind

Since their album release this summer, I've been sort of obsessed with The Dead Weather (Jack White, Alison Mosshart and company), and especially the song Will There Be Enough Water?. And what a great live recording! "When I set sail, will there be enough wind?" It has this irresistible touch of blues to it that makes me float a bit. All the songs on the album are great and have a lot of energy to them, but this one is a masterpiece. Watch this and be transported!

C'est ça que ça fait la pression sociale!

La première page du livre que je suis présentement en train de lire, intitulé Ferdydurke, est vraiment venue me chercher. Je voulais en partager quelques phrases. On vit tous un peu cette angoisse je crois, à un moment ou à un autre.

"Réveillé en sursaut, je voulais filer en taxi à la gare, il me semblait que je devais partir, mais à la dernière minute je compris avec douleur qu'il n'y avait en gare aucun train pour moi, qu'aucune heure n'avait sonné. Je restai couché dans une lueur trouble, mon corps avait une peur insupportable et accablait mon esprit, et mon esprit accablait mon corps et chacune de mes fibres se contractait à la pensée qu'il ne se passerait plus rien, que rien de changerait, rien n'arriverait jamais et, quel que soit le projet, il n'en sortirait rien de rien. C'était la crainte du néant, la panique devant le vide, l'inquiétude devant l'existence, le recul devant l'irréalité, un cri biologique de toutes mes cellules devant le déchirement, la dispersion, l'éparpillement intérieurs. Peur d'une médiocrité, d'une petitesse honteuses, terreur de la dissolution et de la fragmentation, frayeur devant la violence que je sentais en moi."

-- Witold Gombrowicz, 1937

Bon je suis rendue à la page 80 et c'est pas aussi bon que je pensais, mais possiblement une bonne introduction à la littérature polonaise.

They Call Me the Wild Rose

I've been slowly trying to write a book lately, hoping that this time, I won't stop until it's completed. I could be quite the professionnal giver-upper when I put my mind to it. So I've been reading a lot of old things I wrote during the past few years to get some inspiration, and it brought back a lot of painful and wonderful memories. Then I thought of the song Where the Wild Roses Grow, which helped me through a lot of difficult moments because it's so powerful and it expresses so much. There I go again, folky me getting all emotionnal. I smell a white night. Ok here's Nick Cave (ha!) with Kylie Minogue.



Night.

A Tender History in Rust

Ohhhh my oh my oh my! I saw Do Make Say Think live at Sala Rossa Thursday night, and I'm still trying to find words to describe how amazing it was. What a show! I didn't have time to write about it before now, but that refreshing, revitalizing feeling of running towards victory I had during and after the show is still present, so I can tell it like it is.

They were nine on stage, all so full of energy and sense of performance. Their music is very instrumental and loaded, yet they managed to play with perfect synchronicity, leaving the whole crowd in awe. I had no control over my body; it was moving by itself. When they played The Universe!, I might very well have been possessed. And what was the first tune of their comeback? The very title that gave its name to my blog EXECUTIONER BLUES. That was it. At that moment I knew it was the best show I've seen in 2009. Everything was perfect: I was close to the stage, I was actually able to see (which is not always easy considering my height), the sound was a triumph (which is not always the case for post-rock bands), the Sala Rossa is intimate enough, and the two opening bands, Years and Happiness Project, were excellent (and all composed of members of Do Make Say Think). So it was sort of like a 4 hour Do Make Say Think show.

Happiness project was quite interesting, for Charles Spearin's approch is conceptual and thus experimental. He bases his music on the vocals of people interviewed by him on subjects such as happiness, life and experience. He seeks the musicality in their voices and tones, and uses that to create melodies.

http://www.myspace.com/domakesay

Lay Your Blouse Across the Chair

I'm having very nostalgic dreams lately for reasons that are unknown to me. Last night I had a dream that made me think of this song. My mind was overflowing with memories in the morning as I woke up, memories of the night I discovered this song. The first time I heard it, I was completely mesmorized by it, in that small mobile home filled with wine, music, and new friends somewhere in the far depths of Ile d'Orléans. I don't think all of Ray Lamontagne's songs are absolutely amazing and worthwhile, but Empty is definitely his masterpiece; very naïve, natural and full of passion. I can be such a folky sometimes.



Enjoy!

Michael Powell's Red Shoes

I saw the film The Red Shoes last week, and since, I've sat in admiration through five other of Michael Powell's films. I've quickly become a Powell addict. He's explored so many facets of film and so many different genres and subjets, the first more fascinating, daring and avant-garde than the next. I find myself living through his characters, using their emotions as my own.

In The Red Shoes (1948), Powell and Pressburger explore the coming together of the three elements needed to give life to a ballet (music, direction and dance), and their doomed leaders: the music composer, the tyrannical director, and the lead dancer in between. This forms a chaotic triangle; not quite one of love, but of obsession for the art, in which the dancer is forced to choose between her love for the musician and her utter devotion to ballet and to her director. Tragically torn in two, she chooses death instead. The choreography of The Red Shoes seen in the film is breathtaking, beautifully filmed, and paralleled with the dancer's own melodramatic trials. The ballet itself tells the tale of a dancer who slides on diabolical red shoes that dance on and on forever. The dancer eventually tires, but the shoes never do, until death do them part.

In A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven), Powell and Pressburger give us their invented image of after-life, a subject that is completely avant-garde in 1946, and yet quite relevant considering the post-war period during which so many deaths were mourned. An intellectual WWII soldier jumps from his burning plane without a parachute, and miraculously wakes up on a beach, alive and well. It was his time to die, but an error up there was made. The soldier meets the woman he was talking with through the radio right before his jump, and they fall madly in love. Now the "angel", portrayed as a dandy frenchman, can't take him away without a trial in which the soldier tries to win rights to his life through the argument of newfound love and responsibilities. The "other world", shown in black and white in contrast to life on Earth's technicolor, is represented with such precision and imagination, and the directors' vision of each detail is surprising and refeshing.

Peeping Tom is another amazing feature, and extremely daring for the year 1959. Many critics trashed it, and many theaters refused to show it on their screens. Powell explores violent subjects of psychological, sexual and homocidal nature. Peeping Tom is about a man who gets off on filming his murders, not because he's a bad man, but because he can't help his obsession; he feeds on fear, more precisely the fear that one expresses while watching their death as it happens. A sick voyeurist is murdering young women, and yet we feel pity for the protagonist, on the grounds that he's suffering through this mental illness that can't be helped. But when he falls for a girl, he must go to extreme mesures to keep himself from turning his camera towards her. What's revolutionary about this film is that the violence isn't bluntly shown: we know what's going on, but we don't quite see it all, which makes our imagination go in frightning directions. Here, the combination of brutality and subtlety is key.

Age of Consent, A Canterbury Tale, I Know Where I'm Going (which I especially like because it takes place on a small Scottish island)... I can't talk about all of them, but one thing Powell's films have in common, besides the fact that they're works of a genius, is that love is always the strongest force, whether it compels the film to end with a kiss, or to conclude in bloodshed.

And now, I'm going to go watch another one.

Lay Down In the Tall Grass...

... until the night is over.

Here's a Toronto band I discovered recently called Timber Timbre. I love the way they combine folk, blues, rock and other subtle influences. They're playing at Casa des Popolo on November 25th and it's going to be very pleasant. Check out their myspace to see what I mean: http://www.myspace.com/timbertimbre

This is their song Demon Host.



À plus.

One Boy, One Balloon: A Recipe For Disaster

Ever dream your toys were trying to kill you? I'm guessing this is what the nightmare would be like. A short animation film about a small boy who gets the crap beat out of him by his little red balloon on a nice summer day in the park.... might not be everyone's idea of humor, but it works. Repetition, minimalism and long awkward sequences: Don Hertzfeldt understands the efficiency of these comic elements. I never get sick of the first 3 minutes. Here's Billy's Balloon.



Peace out.

Blogs are for geeks...

...but they say I'm a geek, so it must be legal. So I felt free to name my blog after a song by Do Make Say Think, which further confirms my case. So here's the deal. I solumly swear that this page will not contain intimate thoughts of any kind, and no updates on my upcoming trip that I'm annoying my friends with these days (another blog, another day). I'm just in the mood for sharing some good music, videos, films, photographs and art (obviously not mine), that I feel is worth spreading around.

It's only logical that I start off this blog by a song that's been playing on and on in my head for weeks (years?). God I love this video. Ladies and gents, I give you THE WIDOW by THE MARS VOLTA.

Night night.