Category: Longform
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Crucial Track for April 17, 2025
"If I Can't Change Your Mind" by Sugar
The prompt was 'What song do you wish you had written?' So many, of course, especially since I used to play guitar very badly and sing in bands, and I have written a few songs.
But for some reason, the one that popped into my mind was 'If I Can't Change Your Mind' by Sugar. Bob Mould's work after Hüsker Dü was varied, but this track off Sugar's first album is just glorious.
I'm Still Here, 2024 - ★★★★
Outstanding drama based on the true story of a Brazilian family's experiences under the dictatorship in the 70s and beyond. Eunice Paiva's husband, Rubens, is taken in by the military. She, too is detained for several days and questioned, though released. One of her four daughters is also taken, but released after a night.
But Rubens is never seen again, his body, like that of many of his countryfolk, never found.
Sad, yet life-affirming, as it's about the resilience of the family, and Eunice's strength as a mother. She went on to become a human-rights lawyer.
Recommended.
📗 Books 2025, 9: The Interpreter, by Brian Aldiss
I have loads of old SF books that I’ve picked up in various second-hand shops over the years, some of which I’ve read. This year I seem to be working through a few.
I couldn’t honestly tell you whether I’ve ever actually read anything by Aldiss before. I mean, I feel like I must have, if only out of the Balloch library, many, many years ago. But offhand, I couldn’t name any.
And if this were a prime example, I don’t think I’d bother with more, sadly. It’s not a bad idea. The titular interpreter is a human on a far-future Earth that is occupied by a tripedal alien race. Their empire has developed by trade and trickery as much as by military conquest, and it seems that’s how Earth was taken.
It’s a far-flung outpost, one of four million systems in the empire, so there’s bound to be corruption. An emissary is sent from the imperial centre to investigate reports of the Earth administrator abusing its people, which he/she/it (they’re a sexually trimorphic species) is. Our far-from-heroic interpreter might just have a chance to get the truth out.
As I say, not a bad idea, just not that well told. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the writing, except for the dialogue being stilted. Oddly, it’s fine between the interpreter and the aliens — maybe the fact that we know he’s translating lessens the effect. But between the humans, it’s just clunky.
And the plot is just about believable. Just. Luckily it’s only 126 pages; and I did sit up to finish it last night, so I guess it’s got something.
📗 Books 2025, 8: The History of Rock ‘n‘ Roll in Ten Songs, by Greil Marcus
I got this as a Christmas present some several years ago, and read bits of it. It’s episodic, though — a separate essay on each of the songs, plus an ‘Instrumental Break — so I dipped in and out of it. I was encouraged to pick it up again recently because of the name-similarity with a great podcast I’m listening to and keep meaning to write about here: A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, by Andrew Hickey.
Marcus’s title is overconfident to the point of arrogance by calling the book the history. As if there was and could be only one. To say nothing of the idea that it could be encapsulated in ten songs. Hickey’s is more aware, and he makes the point repeatedly that his is only a history.
But Marcus is a terrific writer, and, like Hickey’s, the title is not literal: when discussing any one song he’ll touch on several others, plus various events in the lives of the artists and the goings-on in the world.
I can’t honestly say that I learned much from this, or retained much of what I may have learned, but it’s a joy to read. The pleasure is in the journey more than the destination.
Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat, 2024 - ★★★★½
Absolutely loved this jazz-fueled documentary about the events running up to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, first and short-lived prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1972.
It's a bleak, dark story, but so well told, and with such a great soundtrack, that you rarely feel anything other than pulled along by the narrative.
Which itself is kind of a piece of jazz in the way it's structured. The style has some similarities to Adam Curtis's work in its use of archival footage and the way it lets text, sound, and images overlap and interact. Though Curtis uses a voiceover narrative (or at least did in the one I've seen, while Johan Grimonprez here, does not, simply letting everything speak for itself.
The Ipcress File, 1965 - ★★★★
Great, stylish sixties spy story, with Michael Caine. He's a man who cooks! and makes coffee in — get this — a cafetière (french press to our American friends). Très Moderne!
More to the point, British scientists have been giving up their roles and/or disappearing mysteriously. The word 'defecting' is never used, The USSR is not mentioned explicitly. But this 'brain drain' is harming Britain's defensive capabilities. Harry Palmer joins a team that is investigating the disappearance of latest scientist.
The plot isn't all that good, to be honest, it's a bit bumpy in places, not as coherent as I'd like. But the overall style of the thing, the way it plays to fears of mind control and brainwashing, and the general verve with which it's done, get it a high mark from me.
The Philadelphia Story, 1940 - ★★★★
Really fun romcom from 1940. It cleverly keeps you guessing about who's going to get together with whom till very nearly the end.
📗 Books 2025, 7: The Productions of Time, by John Brunner
I remember seeing Brunner at a convention 30 years ago, or more, talking about ‘the death of the midlist’: how writers who sold their work steadily to publishers, and to readers, used to be able to make a living from doing so, but no longer could. I wonder what he’d make of the publishing scene today.
Anyway, this slim book from 1966 hides its science-fictional nature till almost the very end. Unless you’ve read the blurb. Or indeed, this post, or the wikipedia entry about it. A theatre actor, a recovering alcoholic not long out of a sanatorium, gets the chance to work with a hip writer and director.
They’re going to get a troupe together, coop them up in a house in the country, and work collaboratively to construct a play.
Or at least, that’s what they want the cast members to think.
It’s not bad, if a little inconsequential.
📗 Books 2025, 6: The Pale Horse, by Agatha Christie
An Agatha Christie book from 1961, and set round about then, too. We start in Chelsea espresso bar, where the main narrator, Mark Easterbrook, observes a fight between two beatnik/proto-hippie rich girls, and the first clue is sneaked in.
Easterbrook is no famous detective, though, either professional or amateur. He’s a historian who is trying to finish writing a book. But things happen, and soon the action moves to the English countryside where its author is most comfortable.1
He meets Ginger Corrigan, who the blurb describes as ‘his sidekick’, which suggests to me an ongoing series and many adventures. And maybe that’s what Christie had planned, who knows. But this is standalone.
Anyway, the titular Pale Horse is a former pub where three women live, and perhaps cast spells. Certainly they give seances and such. But are they using magic to murder people remotely? Well that’s what our heroes have to find out, of course.
I really enjoyed it.
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Though to be fair, Poirot was set in London, and moved all over the world. But we’re watching the Miss Marple series at the moment, and she doesn’t travel far. ↩︎
The Severed Floor is not the Black Lodge
I’m finding season 2 of Severance quite annoying. The pacing is glacial. Every episode, I wait for something to happen, and they pile up more mysteries. Very slowly.
Take episode 7, for example, where they filled in Mark & Gemma’s backstory. All very nice, but completely unnecessary. We already knew they’d been a loving couple. We knew she was dead, and that she’s not actually dead. They didn’t need to spell out every little detail. What’s going on with her now is intriguing, but I no longer even care much about what is going on, just why? And when are they going to burn that fucking Lumon cult to the ground?
There’s this idea with modern ‘prestige TV’, that telling a story (or adapting a book) as an eight- or ten-episode series is better than trying to squash the same story into a two-hour film. And there’s a lot to be said for that. Give the story room to breathe.
Severance spends too much time listening to its own breathing.
I wouldn’t mind all this so much if I knew how much more of it there was to go, and that there was a fully-planned story, and that it would actually get made. I’ve not forgotten the deep disappointment of Netflix’s completely random cancelling of The OA. And there we know Brit Marling had the whole thing planned out across five seasons.
Also the reason for my title: it’s trying too hard to be Twin Peaks, and failing. You’re not David Lynch. No one is any more. Stop it, and just tell the story. A bit quicker.