Material Sensible - Joan Manuel Serrat

En términos musicales, los cantantes catalanes están, para ponerlos en términos llanos, cagados. Si cantan en catalán, el resto de España los acusa de "nacionatas". Si lo hacen en español, los catalanes los acusan de hacer concesiones al (det)Estado Español (o Espanyol, según el lado de la frontera en la que uno se encuentre). La politización de la música catalana es una lástima para los que intentamos escribir sobre música. Cualquier crítica que se haga a la música catalana terminará derivando en politiquería o, en los pocos casos en que se evalúe a una obra de música en catalán por sus méritos artísticos, o la falta de ellos, se acusa al autor de hacer concesiones a los nacionatas o a los panegiristas del Estado Espanyol según las filias y las fobias del lector.

En 1989, Serrat sacó Material Sensible. La mayoría de los discos que Serrat sacó en los 80, los 90, y la primera década del siglo XXI, son malísimos, y algunos son solamente mediocres. Creo que el propio Serrat lo reconoce. En sus giras más recientes, incluyendo la que hizo con Sabina, por lo general sólo incluye sus canciones más viejas, algunas de las que hizo con Benedetti, y pocas de las nuevas.  El problema con los discos de Serrat son los arreglos que, o abusan de los instrumentos de viento, o parecen sacados de un anuncio de Bacardí, o son una copia de mala calidad de una producción anglosajona. Como ejemplo de lo primero está "Barcelona i jo". Está científicamente comprobado que el ser humano promedio empieza a detestar el tible después de oir esta canción más de 5 veces consecutivas; lástima, porque el tible es el instrumento musical típico de Cataluña. De hecho, en inglés, y según Wikipedia, tible se llama Catalan shawm. "Si no fos per tu" es la canción de este disco para la que Serrat hizo un outsourcing de los arreglos musicales a Bacardí. Finalmente, "Malson per entregues" tiene el inconfundible teclado ochentero y Ana Belén hace los coros, así que ya se podrán imaginar qué tipo de canción es. 

No quiero dar la impresión de que Material Sensible es un fracaso absoluto. El catalán ofrece posibilidades musicales con las que el español apenas puede soñar, y Serrat las aprovecha al máximo. "En paus" es uno de los experimentos musicales más interesantes que he oído y es, desde mi perspectiva, la mejor canción del disco; "Salam Rashid" cuenta con la participación de Paco de Lucía, lo cual debería de ser, en sí mismo, garantía de calidad. "Kubala" también es un experimento interesante, aunque me parece que no salió bien: abusa del carácter pueril y chabacano del fútbol. 

Material Sensible es, en resumen un disco con algunos momentos memorables y otros para olvidar. En todo caso, es mucho mejor que, por ejemplo, Sombras de la China, cuyos arreglos sí parecen hechos en un teclado Yamaha en la sala de Serrat un domingo por la mañana.

Obviamente, con esta crónica espero que, al haber sido crítico de Material Sensible me gane la simpatía de los anticatalanistas y que, al haber dicho que es menos malo que Sombras de la China, disco totalmente en español, los catalanes me consideren uno de los suyos. Así es la política regional española: irresolvible.

Hiroshima Mon Amour - Alain Resnais

Hiroshima mon amour is one of the most famous French films, at least in Europe. The movie has not had a lot of success in the United States, first of all because it is not an American movie, but also because the first 15 minutes presented images showing the casualties caused by the atomic bombed dropped by the American army in Hiroshima. The organizers of the Cannes Festival refused to screen Hiroshima mon amour. At the time, movies presented in Cannes were preceded by an image of the producers flag. Since Hiroshima mon amour was a French-Japanese production, and the organizers thought that the scenes of the aftermath of the bombing were too un-American (the movie was filmed in 1959, right in the middle of the Cold War), they simply did not allow Alain Resnais to present it in the festival.

In any case, Hiroshima mon amour has been praised since its release mainly because of its photography, its "fragmentation of time" (i.e., the mixing of flashbacks with current reality) techniques, its soundtrack (composed by Giovanni Fusco), and the fact that its plot was written by Marguerite Duras. Hiroshima mon amour inspired the French nouvelle vague. My American and younger readers might want to know that Memento would not exist without Hiroshima mon amour.

You can read more technical and sophisticated comments about Hiroshima mon amour here, here, and here. I would like to mention just three general reflections that came to my mind after seeing Hiroshima mon amour twice:

1. Silence in itself does not provide any information to the viewer. Silence is (must be) used to make pauses and create tension, expectations. More silence = more expectations to fulfill. That is why nouvelle vague movies became a caricature of themselves: they abused of silence instead of enjoying it.
2. Emmanuellle Riva was not a particularly attractive woman. In fact, Duras specified that the actress had to be "more seductive than beautiful." But we do not remember Riva for here physical appearance. The fact that the movie is in black and white allows us to focus on her acting and on the feelings she is trying to convey. Black and white enhance the theatrical character of movies, forcing the viewer to focus on performances instead of appereances. You can reach a similar conclusion after seeing Marlene Dietrichs Blue Angel.

I was able to find a full version of Hiroshima mon amour on Youtube, pasted below. This video has been viewed only 10,500 times. At the moment I'm writing these lines, though, Amazon has only 3 dvds of Hiroshima mon amour in stock. Probably people are finally willing to pay for movies (NOT).

Binaural - Pearl Jam

You know a rock band is consolidated when its fans are split in the following two groups:

a) The first one are the ones who say: "everything band X has done since album Y sucks."
b) The second group says: "the band is experimenting with new sounds and techniques, but their new stuff is good."

You can call groups a) and b) "nostalgic" and "believer", respectively. Both groups, however, are composed of adults who have not been able to grow old with dignity: neither group can deal with the fact that people, including rock stars, change: that's a fact of life, and either criticizing somebody for changing, or staying with him regardless of that person's transformations is equally immature.

Pearl Jam became a consolidated band with Binaural. Its fan base split between people who said that the band had decayed since Ten, Vitalogy and Vs., and those who said that the band had become more mature from an artistic perspective, etc...

The band obviously didn't care. Since Binaural, they have released three studio albums, several live albums, and a couple of collections. They have also toured around the World extensively and have supported several liberal causes.

Crossing the Line - Daniel Gordon

Crossing the Line is the third and final installment of Daniel Gordon's trilogy on North Korea. After gaining the confidence of the North Korean government with The Game of Their Lives (to be reviewed soon) and A State of Mind, Daniel Gordon requested permission to film a documentary about the four American soldiers who defected to North Korea in the early sixties. Only two of the four soldiers were still alive at that time: Joe Dresnok and Charles Jenkins, who hated each other for reasons that are explained in the film. Jenkins defected back to Japan while the movie was being filmed and spend 30 days in an American military prison after being judged by a military court. Dresnok decided to stay and spend the rest of his life in North Korea, so the movie focuses on him: his personal story as a member of America's Southern underclass (he came from a dysfunctional family, didn't finish high school, and his first wife cheated on him while he was in the army), his role as a movie star in North Korea, and his daily life as an elderly.

When I reviewed A State of Mind, the second movie of Gordon's trilogy, I said that it had become useless since the funerals of Kim Jong Il. The death of Kim Jong Il and the media show that the North Korean government presented to the World served only to reinforce preconceptions about the country: people who thought that the North Korean regime is composed of lunatics would carry on with that idea, while people who had admiration for the North Korean Communist Party (most notably, Mexico's Labor Party), would share the grief of the North Koreans who appeared on TV.

Crossing the Line, on the contrary, is a movie that transcends Kim Jong Il, or even North Korea. This is a movie about America's soldiers and the environment the grow in, but also about totalitarian regimes and their legitimacy. After watching this movie, you will spend a couple of hours trying to disentangle Dresnok's puzzle to no avail. Like all North Koreans, he was obviously brainwashed by the government (he admits having spent several years in "reeducation" after trying to ask political asylum in the Soviet Union's embassy), but the troubling thing is that he looks sincerely happy when he talks about his life in North Korea. His smile and his eyes don't betray him, as they do with people in other totalitarian regimes like China or Syria. Dresnok did well for himself in North Korea: his account of "The Arduous March", in which he acknowledges that the received his rations regularly while other people starved are meaningful, just like the scene when he appears drinking Jack Daniel's.

The great thing about this film is that it doesn't provide a clear answer to the primary question any person interested in this movie would like to answer: why did Dresnok (or Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, if you start considering civilians) defect? In the case of Dresnok, the answer has to do, I guess, with the desire to escape from a sad reality; in other cases, ideology plays the most important part, and so on. 

Last but not least, Gordon deserves praise for presenting the opinions of the South and North Korean and Japanese governments, and the American army in an balanced way fashion. Doing so guaranteed not only the survival of the film, but also enables the viewer to form his own opinion about Dresnok. The multiplicity of views also makes the movie look like a regular drama. This is one of the best documentaries I've seen in my life. The story could be made a Hollywood movie, but no studio would put money in a movie likely to be pointed out as North Korean propaganda.

You can start watching Crossing the Line for free in Youtube, here:

Yield - Pearl Jam

Yield is a great album, not only because the music is really good, but also because it is the quintessential example of how music used to be done in the late 1990s. Internet was on its infancy, so the idea of issuing one single song and sell millions of copies on your website or Itunes was unthinkable. Music companies had a great leverage on artists, which was probably a bad deal for the bands as far as profit-sharing is concerned, but guaranteed some quality in terms of production: companies used to invest millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours in studio recording and in creating an art concept around the album, because they knew that profits would come from record sales. Few bands considered going to markets like Mexico or Brazil on a regular basis, partly because these countries lacked the infrastructure to hold decent concerts, but mainly because the so-called emerging markets lacked a sizable middle class, so going tho these countries was not profitable.

The "traditional" way to do music back then was to spend months in a fancy studio recording between 10 and 13 tracks, issue a video of track number 7 (or 3), have your company distribute your album around the World, and tour the United States, Europe, and sometimes Japan. An album was considered average if three tracks were distinguishable from the rest, and was considered a success if each song brought something different and new to the public. Compare that to today: an average guy can record his song in his studio, mix it on his Ipad, upload it on his website (sometimes for sale), and tour in your state. A musician is considered successful if he can charge any money on his music.

For Yield, Pearl Jam spent around one year in studio. The art of the album is decent (all the pages of the booklet have a Yield sign hidden, kind of like Wheres Wally), and the video of "Do the Evolution" was co-directed by Kevin Altieri and Todd McFarlane, a hero in the world of comic books.

The way popular music is created has become more democratic, but we have definitely lost in terms of quality assurance and we might be exposed to an over-supply of music: music companies used to filter bands for us; now, we have to do that ourselves.

Its just evolution, babes!

The Mortal Storm - Frank Borzage

During the Cold War, it was easy for movie studios to produce movies bashing the USSR or China: their movies were forbidden there anyway, so any viewers in those countries were seen as potential consumers. During the years of McCarthyism, producing an anti-Communist film also represented not being in the black list and having government subsidies. A similar logic applies today with movies praising the heroism of American soldiers or anything that presents Iranians or Middle-Eastern Muslims like a bunch of fanatics: by producing movies like the Iron Man saga, or Charlie Wilson's War, Hollywood studios aren't taking a stance, but making profits and creating fertile soil for prospect markets -because, of course, the Middle East eventually become a region full of American-style democracy where everybody will love Hollywood movies.

Hollywood is not very good at going against mainstream political opinions. Back in the 1930s, once political persecution and concentration camps became common in Germany, Hollywood remained silent. Germany was the second largest market for American movies in the World, so too much money was at stake. Also, political repression affected only communists, or so thought people back in the day. Charles Chaplin was one of the first persons to take a clear stance against Nazism with The Great Dictator (which he produced with his money, by the way), but the only studio that took an official position against Hitler before anti-Nazism was profitable was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer with The Mortal Storm. This is a movie worth watching, if nothing else because it shows that corporations can do the right thing for moral reasons rather than for accounting profits (here is the IRS' list of authorized charities, in case you got to this post by mistake). 

This is a movie about a family breaking apart after Hitler's raise to power. The family is composed by Professor Roth, a "non-Aryan", his Junker wife, the two sons of her previous marriage, and the two children of the couple: Freya (played by Margaret Sullavan), and a boy. The two sons and Freya's fiancé join the Nazi Party after Hindenburg appoints Hitler as Chancellor, changing the dynamics of the family. A once calm and nice German town next to the Alps suddenly becomes enthralled with Nazism and its promise to restore Germany's greatness, which is funny when you think that modern Germans claim that "nobody knew" what was really going on in the concentration camps. 

This is an anti-Nazi propaganda film and has no intention to show anything close to objectivity. With the exception of Professor Roth, his wife, and Freya, Germans are shown as relentless machines of destruction, a view that is somewhat vindicated today (2012) given the attitude of average Germans towards their Greek fellows. In the movie, Germans are shown beating a Jewish elder man en masse, burning books, boycotting science classes, and willing to shoot their beloved ones for the sake of the Führer. As it happens, all of this turned out to be true, but in the 1930s only the communists and the Jewish established in the United States said it.

The end is probably the most interesting part of the movie. (SPOILER FOLLOWS) There is a non-written rule in Hollywood that endings must be happy. The obvious Hollywood-style end of the movie is that the family to move to The Land of The Free and The Home of The Brave. Alas, Professor Roth dies in a concentration camp, Freya is shot under the orders of his fiancé, and the two Nazi brothers have a shivering dialogue. One can only guess to what extent MGM was against Nazism that it was willing to break the convention and having a sad (and therefore more impacting) end.

The trailer of The Mortal Storm is here:

Still Night, Still Light - Au Revoir Simone

Before issuing their first album, Au Revoir Simone submitted the following song to be the theme of the newest Mega Man.



They didn't succeed, so they put the song in the shelf for a while, added some lyrics, and released it in the pop music market. Some people think it's an awesome theme.

A State of Mind - Daniel Gordon

I put A State of Mind in my list a couple of months ago, but was not able to watch it until today. The movie follows two preteen girls preparing to participate for the Mass Games, a gymnastics performance held in honor of Kim Jong Il. Daniel Gordon had unprecedented access to the daily life of two North Koreans families (both of which belong to the country's elite), so the movie was widely discussed in the West after its release. CNN even presented an abridged version of it. This movie was the first glimpse that the West had of North Korea since the end of the war, at the moment when the Kim regime was about to finalize its first nuclear weapon.

A State of Mind is remarkably neutral, the only criticism of North Korea coming at the end of the movie, when a subtitle informs that Kim did not attend the Games, and we get to see a bored group of high-level military staff seeing the performances (one of them is actually looking at his watch constantly). Having said that, the movie won two prices in North Korea's International Film Festival, which means either that what I have described as "criticism" is subconscious Western North Korea bashing, or that the censors didn't get the message.

Sadly, its neutrality makes A State of Mind a dated movie. North Korea has constantly been in the news for the last 8 years, the number of defectors is increasing, so the novelty is fading away. As usual, over the last 8 years, some people have condemned the abuses of the Kim dynasty, while others praised their resistance to capitalism, the US, and all that. There was room for neutrality 8 years ago, when North Korea was the big thing in the news, but not anymore.  The funerals of Kim Jong Il were useful, if nothing else, to allow Westerners to reinforce their preconceptions about North Korea. Most people confirmed that the North Korean government is composed of lunatics; others, like Mexico's Labor Party, saw in it the opportunity to praise an anti-imperialist leader who fought for the welfare of his country.

I've seen a number of posts criticizing Gordon for not presenting the harsh of the North Korea regime and not being upfront about its violations to human rights. By being neutral, the argument goes, Gordon is actually an accomplice of the North Korean dictatorship. Gordon had an unprecedented opportunity to ask real North Koreans what they think about their beloved leader and he wasted it, either unintentionally or because he's a double agent. I think this opens an interesting debate.

For some reason, Gordon gained the confidence of the North Korean government. The fact that he was allowed to talk to people is, in itself, a testimony of that. Gordon could have pushed the interviewees to talk about politics, with two different and exclusive results: 1) the interviewees decide to stop participating in the movie; or, 2) the interviewees decide to talk about politics, which means that they would probably be dead or in a reeducation camp by now. Scenario 1) leaves us with no movie, and scenario 2) would destroy even more lives just to confirm what we already know.

No matter how you cut it, the approach followed by Gordon (i.e., letting North Koreans express themselves freely about whatever they want) is the best one. Hearing two children referring sincerely to Kim Jong Il as a demi-god is enlightening enough.

A State of Mind is available for free here, via youtube.

Verses of Comfort, Assurance & Salvation - Au Revoir Simone

Female American college students dream of going to Mexico in spring break to get wasted and bang guys like him:

In Verses of Comfort, Assurance & Salvation, Au Revoir Simone wrote an anthem for those girls once they run out of cocaine and get back to Iowa, Nebraska, California, or wherever they came from (I'm serious; if you don't believe me, read the lyrics):



This is ridiculously depressing. I still prefer to have this picture in mind when I think about spring break:

Photos:
Hot Mexican guy: Juan Francisco Palencia, taken from Milenio
Spring breakers: taken from bigtrabelweb.com. Their recommendation #1 is -surprise, surprise- Cancun.

Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh

I've never watched the movie Trainspotting, even though most people of my generation did. I'm not in a position to make a comparison between the book and the movie, but Wikipedia does. I have heard the soundtrack (the two volumes) which I think is awesome, even if its music is not the same the book mentions. This makes complete commercial sense: the movie is oriented towards the generation that came of age in the second half of the 1990's, so people like Blur and Underworld had to be there instead of bands like Status Quo, T'Pau, or Pogues, which are constantly mentioned in the book, set in the late years of Margaret Thatcher's government (there's a mention of the poll tax). I think Iggy Pop is the only guy who is mentioned in the book and appears in the soundtrack too.

I did read, however, Welsh's Marabou Stork Nightmares in Spanish (I'll be reading it again in English and posting about it soon) and I thought it was one of the best of my teenage years. I wanted to read Trainspotting for a long time, but I had never found the time to do it until recently.

I have mixed feelings about this book. Two things weigh against it: first, it is written phonetically in order to make it sound "Scottish" enough. This makes the first 50 pages (out of 345) almost impossible to read, at least for a non-native English speaker. The fact that different parts of the book are narrated by different characters with different "accents" compounds this problem. For 50 pages, I thought that the main character had contracted HIV, only to realize that he had been safe and alive in London, thank goodness. Second, most of the book is written using stream-of-consciousness, the technique created (according to the Irish) or popularized (according to the rest of the World) by James Joyce. Stream-of-consciousness, no matter who created it, destroyed literature, which takes some elements of reality and simplifies it to make it digestible. By trying to replicate thoughts verbatim, stream-of-consciousness defeats that purpose.

On the other hand, the parts of this book that I was able to understand are really good: it made me cry at one point, which had not happened since I read Vargas Llosa's Aventuras de la niña mala, and it made me promise to never live in the UK, particularly Scotland. I think, though, that the book works better as a collection of short stories than as a novel given the multiplicity of narrating voices and the fact that the book is not supposed to follow a chronological order.

I guess that my recommendation is to read this book in one's native language, or spend a couple of months in Leith to realize that "ah" actually means "I" since the beginning of the book. But then, on the other hand, a translated version of Trainspotting would be like a new book. You can't really replicate a cockney accent in other language than English.

I would say that the optimal solution would be to watch the movie with subtitles, but then you would miss scenes like this one, apparently absent of the film, where a character gets a shot of heroin through his penis:

Probably the comprehension of the book is no problem at all. The book was very successful across the English-speaking countries and so was the movie across the World. From a statistic and demographic point of view, the people who are reading this blog (or any blog) have either read the book or seen the movie.