Infantjoy - Where The Night Goes (2005)

Infantjoy is the creation of James Banbury (of The Auteurs) and British music journalist Paul Morley. Where The Night Goes is definitely a cerebral album, but one which is never pretentious, and which is also eminently listenable. These qualities echo those of its inspiration (whose work is heard 'haunting' the album), Erik Satie.

Musically, the album is - well - I'd say downbeat electronica if that didn't sound like something you'd play in a trendy cafe, which this work is emphatically not. There are glitch influences, occasional elements of a harsher, semi-industrial sound, and also, among the other non-vocal tracks, a cover of Japan's Ghosts (a song which also makes an appearance on another favourite album of mine, Tricky's Maxinquaye). Atmospherically, the music is reminiscent of Japan - dark (or, perhaps, 'grey' in the very bet sense) and understated without being melodramatic or angst-ridden. Satie is here, too, in the nature of the music, in its complexity and elements of the experimental without being 'difficult'; with a concern for form, for loops, repetition and return, for motifs and themes; and in the way in which it lends itself equally to close listening or to being played as 'incidental' or 'ambient' music. A soundtrack to late afternoon, on a rainy day, reading snatches of theory in between drifting in and out of sleep...

Grace Jones - Private Life: The Compass Point Sessions (1998)

I've been familiar with Pull Up To The Bumper and Warm Leatherette for a long time, but it had somehow escaped my notice that the fabulous Ms. Jones (star of such films as Conan The Destroyer and the chronically under-recognised eighties bloodsucker flick Vamp) had an entire art-pop oeuvre which placed her well apart from her contemporaries.

Private Life, a double-disc set, encompasses most of the tracks from the three definitive albums that Jones recorded with the legendary Sly and Robbie at the Compass Point Studio in the Bahamas - namely, Warm Leatherette (1980), Nightclubbing (1981) and Living My Life (1982) (for those who aren't familiar with Jones' oeuvre, the first two consist chiefly of covers, from The Normal to Roxy Music to the Pretenders and Iggy Pop). I'm a big roots reggae fan (if you can stomach the dancehall homophobia), and also a fan of what we might term alt-disco and of eighties synth beats and eighties electrominimalism. So this album, on which the three combine, had me salivating from the first time I played it.

The tracks range through the above genres, adding some soul and funk ; the emotional palette ranges from cold and disconnected, the epitome of knowing, sexualised eighties veneer, to quietly intense, to joyfully psychotic. All of the three albums mentioned above are great, although I prefer the first two, but for some reason this album comes together in a way that none of them do.

The tracks are mostly extended versions and/or dub versions (apparently these are all played live, rather than extended remixes), which really bring something out of the tracks which extends and deepens them and allows them to create an overall soundscape of fragment and repetition, running tracks into each other in a way, unusual for a compilation, which makes the album an experience as a whole rather than a bunch of songs that stand or fall on their individual merits. Even the tracks that I'm not quite so enamoured of fit perfectly into the aesthetic and the listening experience. The mastering itself is crystal clear (necessary for this kind of beaty, extended endeavour where the sound quality is make or break) and foregrounds the breathtaking art of Sly & Robbie.

Particular highlights are the long and dub versions of The Pretenders' Private Life, and of Joy Division's She's Lost Control; long version of Roxy Music's Love Is The Drug; a demo of the Cash classic Ring of Fire; and a soul-inflected cover of the Motown hit The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game (which i'm also, incidentally enamoured of in the version by the underappreciated Mary Wells). Overall, though, the album is an experience which drags you into Grace Jones' twisted, genrebending world and doesn't let go 'til you're grooving your art out.

Arthur Russell - Calling Out of Context

Arthur Russell is one of those musicians who I came across only recently, and couldn't imagine why I hadn't encountered years ago. Frequently name-checked in lists of music by eccentrics and outsiders, Russell (1952-1992) was known as a disco musician and also a cellist who collaborated with such countercultural giants as Philip Glass, David Byrne and Allen Ginsberg. In February, a documentary film on Russell, Wild Combination, was released.

Calling Out Of Context, a 2004 compilation of Russell's more dance-oriented work, is the first of his albums that I've come across, and I'm absolutely addicted to it. I was surprised to find that it was a compilation, given the way in which it hangs together perfectly as an album, both musically and in terms of emotional palette.

The album consist of synthy, dance-beat-oriented, reverb-drenched eighties art-pop melancholia. A reviewer's description, 'New Order meets Nick Drake,' isn't too far off the mark (given the general inadequacy of shorthand description by comparison). Though there's a definite pop flavour, and echoes of more pop-oriented eighties acts like New Order or even the more introspective moments of Jimmy Somerville's work, the songs are not pop songs as such; rather than traditional verse-chorus structures the listener is presented with sometimes-inaudible, haunting phrases drifting in and out of a musical landscape. Indeed, rather than a collection of songs, it's a landscape that's created here, or perhaps a marine-scape (given the frequent references to water and the feeling of the liminal, of surface and depth); a place in which one finds oneself adrift...

Michael Pollan - In Defence of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasure of Eating (2008)

Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

This advice is the gist of Michael Pollan's new book. Pollan argues that the Western diet - concerned with quantity and speed (both of production and consumption) above any other values - exemplified in the United States but fast being adopted everywhere else, brings with it a huge host of lethal diseases, including cancer and diabetes (among many others), which Westerners have come to accept as an inevitable lottery.

Pollan argues, essentially, that the scientific response to nutritional health has been what he terms 'nutritionism' - the reductivist view, related both to capitalism and to the methods of scientific enquiry, that we can isolate particular nutrients, rather than particular foods or particular diets, which promote wellbeing or cause illness. The calling into question of the Western diet itself, or even of any particular food (with its associated lobby group) has become entirely verboten. Meanwhile, the scientifically-proven 'good' and 'bad' nutrients shift constantly, and in the entire period of scientific nutritionism the population has become healthier only in the sense that medical science has become better at prolonging life; but by any other measure, health has declined.

In the modern era, supermarkets are stocked, not with food, but with 'foodlike substances'. Meanwhile, there doesn't seem to be any common denominator, in terms of foodstuffs or nutrition, between traditional diets which kept people healthy, ranging from diets based only on blood and milk, to those entirely based on vegetables, to the well-known 'paradoxes' of the health of the French and Mediterranean peoples whose diets contradict received science.

Given the state of things, it's easy to throw one's hands up and say, all the advice is contradictory and untrustworthy - I give up. In response, Pollan gives some simple, and at times amusing, guidelines as to how to eat, expanded from those mentioned above. For example: don't eat anything your grandmother wouldn't recognise. Avoid food products containing ingredients that are unfamiliar, unpronounceable, or more than five in number. Eat meals, slowly, at a table.

The overall picture is not necessarily original news to those of us interested in contemporary diet and health; but Pollan's style is easy and captivating, while not being didactic or 'dumbing down' his subject matter, and even for those of us who've put some thought into this issue it reveals (or at least it did for me) areas where I still wasn't questioning my assumptions. Ultimately, this book is not so much condemnatory as an impassioned plea for Westerners to re-enjoy food; to invest an effort, and reap the many rewards, of the whole communal process of growing, shopping, cooking and eating.

Patricia Wentworth - The Gazebo (1958)

I had this novel sitting on my shelf for quite a while, having not read any Wentworth and being unsure that the writing would be up to scratch - but once I opened it up, I enjoyed it a lot as a straightforward little whodunnit of the English old school. Wentworth's 'detective' is Miss Maud Silver, who bears a more than passing resemblance to Miss Marple (Marple's first appearance was in 1927 and Silver's in 1928; so I won't draw any conclusions about the coincidence or otherwise of this resemblance).

The story has all the ingredients of which I'm very fond in crime: an English village setting, a strong period atmosphere (contemporary, of course, at the time of writing), a heavy lashing of understated but cutting manners and cultural elitism, and a little old lady who's a lot sharper than she seems. The story begins with the unexpected return of Nicholas Carey, Althea's old beau; Althea's controlling, hypochondriac mother prevented their marriage five years previously, and Nicholas is determined not to let it happen again. At the same time, there are two mysteriously high offers on the house Althea's father left to her, where she lives with her mother... The murder itself doesn't occur until about a third of the way into the book, and I also appreciated the establishment of setting and character in the intervening period.

The writing itself is by no means outstanding, but Wentworth's modest style sits nicely with her modest ambitions and carries us along into her lace-curtain-concealed intrigues. The gender and class politics are, as they tend to be in this type of work, problematic, but certainly not to an extent which caused me personally any irritation or difficulty with the work overall. Characterisation, again, tended to the shallow at times, particularly in regard to the characters' emotional responses to the events of the story, but no-one expects deep psychological characterisation to be a strength of this type of work.

To a certain extent, I'd see this as a sub-Marple work, but nonetheless as a piece of classic English crime escapism I very much enjoyed it, and I'll definitely be reading more of Wentworth's Miss Silver stories.

John Carpenter - Big Trouble In Little China (1986)

So I was in the mood for something undemanding and escapist, and boy did I get it... in a good way, that is. Carpenter has made some excellent, highly original films (They Live, In The Mouth Of Madness), some which, whatever you think of them, have earned their place in the genre hall of fame (Halloween) and many absolute shockers of the I-want-that-90-minutes-of-my-life-back variety.

The plot follows truck driver Jack Burton (Kurt Russell) as, in pursuit of a gambling debt, he helps his buddy Wang Chi (Dennis Dun) try to rescue his kidnapped girlfriend (with the help of Gracie Law [Kim Cattrall of Sex and the City fame]) and, in the process, gets mixed up in an ancient, supernatural turf war in Chinatown, in which he and his motley gang must face down Lo Pan (James Hong), an ancient and evil sorcerer.

To get the criticisms out of the way: the dialogue is atrocious and at times absurd. The set-up of the plot doesn't really make any sense. Most obviously, the story is highly orientalist, even racist, in the way it trades in Fu Manchu stereotypes of the ancient mysticism and evil of the Orient - although at least there are many positively portrayed Asian characters as well as Lo Pan and his evil hordes.

Having said that, I enjoyed this movie a lot. It's full of a raucous energy which I found irresistible - indeed, in that aspect, as well as the orientalism, it reminded me a lot of another fun 80s action/horror/comedy, Gremlins. I'd tie these and other eighties movies with similar subject matter (The Karate Kid and so forth) to a climate in which, on the one hand, there was a lot of fear around the rising Japanese economy, while at the same time there was a growing but shallow interest in manifestations of Asian culture (and the movie does attempt to link the film in to Chinese religions and mythologies with a sprinkling of names and concepts taken from these narratives, naturally completely out of context) - the fear/fascination combination typical of orientalism.

The action is nice but there are no interminable action sequences, the soundtrack is gorgeously classic eighties synth cheese, the costumes have a similar overblown charm, and the near-ubiquitous special effects (this was a big-budget Hollywood production) stand up well considering that the film is now twenty years old. Russell himself plays the typical macho, misogynistic, smart-guy action hero, which is a thing that usually irritates me no end; but here this is balanced by various moments of parody of that figure, played out in the misadventures Russell experiences as he plays the tough guy. The humour is mostly fairly low-grade, but there were a few hilarious moments which actually had me chuckling out loud, a fairly rare occurrence.

Overall, well, if you're the type of person who goes for this kind of thing you know who you are. On the other hand, if you can't overlook the typical flaws of commercial films, particularly action films (and I should add that personally I'm not at all a fan of the 'action' genre as such), or the orientalist character of the work, this is definitely not for you. But considering that I approach Carpenter movies with some trepidation, I had a lot of fun with this film - and it's definitely one for the classics-of-eighties-fantasy-cheese collection.

Evelyn Waugh - Black Mischief (1932)

This isn't the first Waugh I've read, but I was drawn to it not for the author as such, but from an interest in the history of Ethiopia. Of the two works I've previously read, I very much enjoyed The Loved One, with its macabre humour, but I wasn't such a fan of Decline and Fall - and though I haven't read Vile Bodies I've seen the film based on it, Bright Young Things, and though the twenties ambience was fantastic, the moral message, that sensual enjoyment leads to downfall, was unpalatable. Although I'm very much a fan of work dealing with the dark side of the human condition, I've found the underlying bleak anti-humanism of Waugh's work difficult (and this novel was no exception). So I approached the work with both interest and trepidation.

Waugh was a correspondent in Ethiopia, known at the time as Abyssinia (I've yet to read Waugh In Abyssinia or Scoop which also draw on and deal with his experiences there) and, I tracked down this novel after hearing that it was closely based on Ethiopian history. Anyone familiar with that history, though, will find that it's not a close fit, though there are a few resemblances - and Waugh himself claims as much in his foreword (written in 1962, thirty years after the novel itself was published). The plot takes place in the fictional island kingdom of Azania, off the coast of northern Africa, with the ascent to the throne of the modernizing but hopelessly naive Seth, and follows the machinations of the island's inhabitants, particularly the consular officials and court, around the shifting balance of power.

Neither Westerners nor Africans are spared Waugh's caustic satire, but the racism in this book is palpable. In his foreword, Waugh writes that 'thirty years ago it seemed an anachronism that any part of Africa should be independent of European administration. History has not followed what then seemed its natural course'. Seth himself is a figure demonstrating the ridiculousness of Westernised Africans attempting to ape Western ways, and other stereotypes, such as the oily, untrustworthy Armenian who'll sell his wife for a profit, are not lacking. The casual racism of the characters, though also at times making for unpleasant reading, is, however, realistic, I'd say. At the same time, the exploitation of the colonised, and failure to comprehend the suffering of others, on the part of the colonisers is very much in evidence.

Having made the above criticisms, however, I enjoyed the novel, certainly more than Decline and Fall - a contemporary satirical perspective on colonialism in Africa, written by someone with experience of the subject, is fascinating in itself, giving the work a great deal of interest as an historical document, and the black satire is very well done, working nicely in Waugh's spare style. The plot itself is compelling, and anyone who goes gaga over Anglophilic period pieces and comedies of manners, a category in which I very much include myself, will find it a treat on that basis. In sum, a problematic but definitely rewarding novel.