Elen P. Farkas

3

admin — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 17:01:00 +0000

If there’s one word to describe the works of Nouvelle Vague, it's génial. Generally, I don’t trust cover versions. Many of them are an abomination that spits all over the originals, but somehow, the cover band Nouvelle Vague makes me forget that. Yes, that French band that rehashed “Love Will Tear Us Apart” in pure bossa nova sweetness—a complete turnaround from the original melancholic version by Joy Division that followed more melancholic versions (the Wild Swans among others)—it became the anthem of the brokenhearted. Granted, Ian Curtis would cringe in his grave while hearing Nouvelle Vague’s version, while I, in turn, was amusing myself.

The masterminds of Nouvelle Vague—Marc Collin and Olivier Libaux—lead the pack of chanteuses, including Melanie Pain, and are armed with sixteen new secondhand tunes in their new release, 3. Instead of copying the songs one to one, the boys from Nouvelle Vague stick to the formula: strip the songs off and rework them, sometimes to the point of being mundane and unrecognizable. Hence, Nouvelle Vague, which means new wave in English and bossa nova in Portuguese, has taken on a different meaning altogether. It is French chansons for the twenty-first century gone alternative.

If imitation is a form of flattery, then don’t wonder why Depeche Mode’s Martin Gore decided to join the fray. On the first single “Master and Servant,” Gore serves as a back-up vocal to Pain. Strangely enough, it feels like listening to a dialogue between a man and a woman engaged in BDSM, only they are singing. For a while the song was on the black list of many radio stations in the U.S. due to its theme. While retaining the guitar parts, Nouvelle Vague added a flavour of bluegrass and country. Voilà! The single is set to conquer radioland without any scandal.

Terry Hall (Funboy Three and The Specials) and Ian McCulloch (Echo and the Bunnymen) make a cameo. Hall sings with Marina Celeste on “Our Lips Are Sealed,” which he co-wrote for the girl pop group The Go-Gos; McCulloch renders his voice on the original EATB tune, “All My Colours,” in another duet with Pain.

Nouvelle Vague’s acoustic version of Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” has lost its teeth. However, laid-back this version is, the message is still depressive and amazingly clearer due to its sinister lyrics. “Such a Shame,” an original by Talk Talk, heavily reminds you of Air’s hit single “Playground Love.” The treatment is moody, yet hauntingly pretty. The torch song “Say Hello Wave Goodbye” could even impress Soft Cell’s Marc Almond. The French accent on “Blister in the Sun” accentuates its cuteness, while Plastic Betrand’s original “Ça Plane Pour Moi” is darn upbeat and cheeky—great songs to perk up your day.

Some might find Nouvelle Vague’s repackaging of old New Wave and punk anthems an act of blasphemy, but in truth, this is the group’s testament of paying a tribute to their favourite songs. So music purists, eat your hearts out. Nouvelle Vague is here to stay and 3 is the proof of that.

Written by: Elen P. Farkas, January 13th 2010

Carousel

admin — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:05:00 +0000

By Robin Guthrie

Darla Records

It is hard to imagine Robin Guthrie’s music without the accompanying voice of his former better half, Elizabeth Fraser. Her vocal styling, a combination of mouth music and abstract lyrics, became a trademark of the Cocteau Twins and left a distinctive quality that remains even if she works with other musicians. Case in point was her 2003 collaboration with French avant garde artist Yann Tiersen from the album Les Retrouvailles.

However, it is a shame that many, including yours truly, often overlook Guthrie’s unique genius—not because he is a man overpowering Fraser, who admitted in an interview in 1996 that her over-dependence on Guthrie was her downfall, but simply because his talent overshadows his post-Cocteau efforts. The loquacious Guthrie is a producer (Lush, Wolfgang Press), a collaborator (movie projects), and a music all-arounder (engineering and programming).

After the cult band’s demise in the mid-’90s, the former members are still active in the music scene and their followers still celebrate their music. Every year, fans initiate an event known as the Cocteaufest where they feast on the compositions of Guthrie, Fraser, and Simon Raymonde with the indirect support from the former band members.

Imagine the moment I held Carousel for the first time. Mixed feelings surged in. I was part hesitant, part curious, and part excited. Being a long-time Cocteau Twins fan, would it live up to my expectations? Does Carousel have something new to offer? After listening a few times to Guthrie’s latest instrumental work, I had this strange feeling that Fraser’s vocal parts would suddenly appear only to be disappointed that this is no Cocteau Twins album.

After all these years, Guthrie is still making such atmospheric sounds known as dream pop. Carousel feels so utterly familiar that a tear or two will start coming down on your cheek. Once again, you can hear Guthrie’s guitar shimmer the way it did back then. Once again, here come the rich melodious basses that ruled Cocteau’s past albums—from Treasure to Victorialand to Heaven Or Las Vegas.

The opening track “Some Sort of Paradise” promises a good start. It is so ethereal and pure putting your mind at ease at once. The third song, and my favourite, “Delight,” is a pure delight itself. It recounts of danger and excitement. Perhaps, it is also a testament to adventurous sex. “Mission Dolores” is a poignant song that delivers sadness and urgency. The closest you can get to Guthrie’s well-loved Cocteau are through the songs “The Girl with the Little Wings” and “Waiting by the Carousel.” Images start to emerge from one scene to another—jellyfish, heavenly bodies, oceans, lost young women, innocent children, and faceless naked men. These are the things you associate upon listening to Guthrie’s music.

Don’t get me wrong. Though Carousel oozes with loveliness, it requires your full attention. Mind you, it isn’t intended to be played in the background. In order to appreciate the album you have to slow down, or, better yet, stop what you are doing. But once you decide to sit back, relax, and press the play button of your player to hear the ten operatic ditties, Guthrie’s magic dust that is Carousel never ceases to amaze.

Written by: Elen P. Farkas, November 13th 2009

Twentieth Century Chemical

admin — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 01:01:00 +0000

By Those Bastard Souls

Darla Records

Those Bastard Souls is the side project of The Grifters’ David Shouse. The album Twentieth Century Chemical is a reissue; it was first released in 1996. To be honest, I haven’t heard of Shouse’s main gig. I don’t know anything about his other band either. Relying on the liner notes supplied by Shouse and a small entry from the Wikipedia, the name Those Bastard Souls might pertain to his idea of rotating musicians who helped him put out the project recording it in six different studios in Europe. My last resort was to trust the songs coming out from Twentieth Century Chemical.

Apart from the original twelve tracks, seven songs have been added in this new version, mostly, unreleased stuff. Twentieth Century Chemical is a product of a five-year musical collaboration. Shouse gathered all his musician friends to work on it. It served as his creative pause from The Grifters with no expectations of the album being a commercial success. Among those who gave a helping hand were Joan Wasser of The Dambuilders, Steven Drozd of the Flaming Lips, and a host of other guitarists and drummers, including the ex-band members of the late Jeff Buckley, who, by the way, was a close friend of Shouse and Wasser’s former lover. Of all the musicians who came and went, only Wasser and Matt Fields of God and Texas and Red Red Meat would remain until the end.

I’d like to say forget track one thinking that it was just a “silly” filler. But after spending a few times listening to it, it has become so hilarious that it is the proper way of introducing the band. The honky-tonk melody of “These Things Will Slay You Every Time” packs a good punch. The track “Curious State I’m In” has an infectious chorus you can’t help singing along with at the end. Unfortunately, there’s a part in the album where a few tracks lose a certain momentum leaving the listeners empty.

Shouse is right. Twentieth Century Chemical might not be his ticket to success, but it is a decent record that you can crank up whenever you need some diversion. This is one of those records that grows on you the more you listen to it.

Written by: Elen P. Farkas, November 12th 2009

Dude Manor

admin — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:30:00 +0000

By Living With Lions

Adeline Records

Dude Manor is the first-ever record that reminds me of my age, and tells me that I am no longer in my twenties. Listening to the EP is like hearing dozens of bands you’ve heard before. This sort of familiarity, however, brings you closer to the EP. If Living With Lions is aware of this then it is a marketing strategy that could make or break the group’s career.

Opening with an intro that lasts for fifty seconds, this is a premonition of things to come. Dude Manor is noisy, it is fun, and it is testosterone-heavy—and there’s nothing wrong with that. It evokes memories of punk in the ’70s, shades of ’80s post-punk, and a dash of indie rock and grunge in the ’90s. In the end, labeling doesn’t matter anymore. Matt Postal’s guttural screaming compliments Stu McKillop’s boyish back-up vocals. It is the band’s own testament of All Tomorrow’s Parties: lots of beer and total debauchery. (Dude Manor is the band’s endearing term for the house they shared in Vancouver.)

There are accusations that bands associated with emo have the tendency to be misogynistic wherein they paint women as the guilty party, the ones responsible for their misery. Though the group is made up solely of boys, Dude Manor doesn’t drive away potential female followers. Postal doesn’t blame the object of his affection for his heartache, as is evidenced on the single, “Said and Done”: “I thought that I was different from the boys you see/It turns out that I’m as bad, so don’t take a second look at me.”

The riffs on Dude Manor are decent, many times, infectious, but there’s nothing new or extraordinary. The lyrics are what you expect from a rock band: introspective, aggressive, full of self-loathing. On “Later Is Better” the boys talk about the power of nostalgia, the things they have taken for granted and, finally, a self-analysis on why certain things or actions happen.

A personal favorite is the last song “A Noisy Noise Annoys the Boys.” In it Postal hints that after listening to Dude Manor’s six songs the would-be listeners will be craving for more. “It’s going to pull at you, until you hit the ground/Point your ears at me so you can hear the sound of my voice/Will you listen if I tell you more?”

So will I listen to Dude Manor again and again? The answer is yes. As for some people who would think I am too old for this record, let them blather all day long; I couldn’t care less.

Written by: Elen P. Farkas, August 4th 2009

Be Strong and Curvaceous

admin — Sun, 10 May 2009 23:49:00 +0000

By Shelley Adina

FaithWords, Hachette Book Group

It is not easy to like Be Strong & Curvaceous, especially if you are not a Christian and die-hard fashionista. In this novel, believing in a Christian god is as usual as fancying the latest Chanel dress or a pair of Christian Louboutin shoes. Don’t let the title fool you either. It is some sort of wordplay culled from the Book of Deuteronomy that contains the line “Be strong and courageous.”

It is the story of a bunch of trend-setting young women and their triumphs and travails in an elite boarding school in San Francisco. The girls are quite religious but, hey, they are normal teenagers too. While they are busy with their schooling they go to parties, attend prayer meetings, are well-versed with the latest happenings in the fashion world, and experience boy-troubles.

Okay, okay, if this sounds like a banal storyline, it doesn’t mean that Shelley Adina’s new novel doesn’t have any redeeming qualities. It promotes sisterhood and the attitude of being true to one’s self no matter what. Hence be strong and curvaceous—self-satisfaction. It also discusses the pitfalls of peer pressure and the clique system.

The novel is the third installment of the All About Us YA Series, the tale of four BFFs—the blonde Lissa Mansfield, Asian American Gillian Chang, the Hispanic American Carly Aragon, and the African American Shani Hanna—and their lives in the posh Spencer Academy. If Adina’s first book, It's All About Us, is the story of Lissa and her status as a popular and pretty all-American girl in the middle of the rich and the beautiful, the second book The Fruit of My Lipstick, is Gillian’s tale, who fell for the wrong boy.

This time, it centers on Carly, a young woman who has got into the exclusive academy through scholarship set by the school’s minority quota system, a way to show the diversity of the student population. As she struggles to fit in, her oligarch friends don’t know her bourgeois secrets. They only know that every weekend a limo fetches her on a Sunday night. Truth is, her family used to be rich until her father’s business crashed and her parents got divorced. Carly’s mother realized that she had to find herself, discovered art and left for Mexico, where Carly’s grandparents still live.

Once in Mexico where she spends her spring break, she finally confronts her faith. Excitedly coming back to the academy, she discovers that she has a new roommate, a snooty Scottish noble lady, Lady Lindsay MacPhail, aka Mac. The queen bee-like red-haired daughter of the Earl of Strathcain has everything Carly wants—designer clothes, the guts to face the mean-spirited Heathers in the school headed by Vanessa Talbot, and most of all, the attention of Carly’s crush, the handsome Brett Loyola, Vanessa’s ex-boyfriend.

Apart from dealing with her newly found Christian-ness, she longs to be a part of the “in” crowd ready to conquer with her sewing and designing abilities, her charm and wit. The moment comes in as the nasty Heathers use her as a bridge to commit Mac to the Charity Ball. The twist begins when Mac receives odd threatening email messages coming from a stalker. Determined not to forsake her desperate roommate, she and her friends ask God to help them. Soon enough, everything is resolved with a series of divine intervention.

Sure, Adina wants to send the message: It is okay to be a Christian and have fun. I am afraid it might not sit well with the hardliner Christians, who heavily suspect the use of popular form to spread the word of God. On the other hand, the secular readers might overlook her aim and instead, point out the excess materialism and vanity sending a wrong signal to the young audience that would rather watch MTV.

Perhaps, Adina’s works would entice them into the “cumbersome chore” that is reading. But, then again, the question is: are her novels the right ones to lead the way?

Written by: Elen P. Farkas, May 10th 2009

Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions

admin — Sun, 10 May 2009 16:53:00 +0000

By Michael Snediker

University Of Minnesota Press

“The year I told my parents I was gay was also the year of my first encounter with depression,” writes Michael Snediker in the opening line of his detailed introduction.

This line struck a nerve as I know a few people who, personally, are still on the same boat. I have seen an aunt and an uncle, a lesbian and gay respectively, ostracized by the conservative, über-religious society they live in. They have suffered self-doubt, identity crisis, and depression the moment their secrets have been revealed.

Snediker’s scholarly work Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions aims to counterpoint the negativity that revolves around queer theory, which is often melancholy, self-shattering, shame and death driven, with the help of poetic lyrics coming from Hart Crane, Emily Dickinson, Jack Spicer and Elizabeth Bishop. The author’s queer optimism “doesn’t aspire toward optimism,” rather “to find happiness interesting.”

He chose the aforementioned poets as there is more to their work than their melancholic poetics; that deep inside there hides a smile that has a long-lasting effect on anyone who might want to read beyond their quatrains. It seems to be an ambitious task. By using different theories (from Michel Foucault’s to Judith Butler’s) and other bodies of work from literary critics, Snediker successfully managed to give his readers fresh views on the poets’ selected literary works to search for the ultimate quest for enjoyment and personhood.

For example, when most of the literary critics were convinced that Crane’s last work, "The Broken Tower," suggested his impending death, which they all agreed showed “deeper insight and wisdom” than his earlier poems, Snediker refuted that there was another oeuvre that could be written at the same time of his intended last poem, "The Circumstance," that salvaged the “broken stones” that “were dismantled” in "The Broken Tower." Meaning, behind the sadness of Crane’s there lingered his own optimism. Perhaps. Crane, who committed suicide in April 1932 by jumping into the Gulf of Mexico from the steamship SS Orizaba, regarded himself as a failure, partly literary and partly due to his homosexuality. His critics saw his works as difficult to understand. Yet, in the 1930s America, Crane was one of its victims: misunderstood and gay.

Snediker, an assistant professor of English at Queens’ University in Ontario, Canada, didn’t arrange his chapters chronologically, instead thematically, with each chapter relating to each other. Hence Dickinson went after Crane’s.

As a childhood favorite, I was aware of Dickinson’s masochistic tendencies. Her dedication to producing poems engorged with pain, dying and death always made me smile. This drove Snediker to probe through her works.

He also posed some questions concerning Spicer’s serial poem Billy the Kid could be his own way of struggling with his own identity. Could it be the poet’s “aggression against himself?” or some “internalized homophobia?” Was the poem about the poet’s fascination with multiplicity, the character’s ability to elude death? The famed Billy the Kid who always comes back through the numerous films where he kills and dies again and kills and dies again greatly inspired Spicer. He, by the way, was a reader of Dickinson.

How about a connection, not a spiritual one but in terms of idealization, between Crane and Bishop? Was this a sort of queer love on the part of Bishop, who never mentioned her homosexuality throughout her works unlike her contemporaries’ confessional poetry? Did she think of Crane when she composed some of her works?

These are only tips of the iceberg, if you may call them. I have learned so many things after reading Snediker’s book; it is like a new world opening up with so many perspectives and possibilities. I remember a discussion with a friend years ago about poetry: the beauty of reading poems is that it is open for interpretation. Everyone can draw his or her own conclusion. There are no boundaries.

What’s also good about Snediker’s Queer Optimism is that it is not only the homosexual community that can profit from it, but all of us, who possess different colors and sexual orientations, because pain, love, and happiness are universal.

Written by: Elen P. Farkas, May 10th 2009

Under the Cherry Tree, Japanese Dolls from the Collection of Hatsuko Ohno (11/5/2008 - 2/22/2009)

admin — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 18:16:00 +0000

Hofburg

Vienna, Austria

For the first time a number of Japanese traditional dolls from the collection of Hatsuko Ohno (1915-1982), a renowned doll maker, are touring Vienna, Austria in the exhibit Unter dem Kirschbaum, Japanische Puppen aus der Sammlung Hatsuko Ohno (Under the Cherry Tree, Japanese Dolls from the Collection of Hatsuko Ohno). Her dolls have spent some time in Poland, Hungary, and Italy.

Call it an exhibit within an exhibit. Only a welcoming arch, which is made of hard cardboard painted in soft salmon-pink emblazoned with white silk-screened cherry tree leaves, creates an illusion that one is entering a different zone.

The less than 50 fifty dolls, mostly in female form, are stored in two glass cases located in the last room of the permanent Imperial Silver Collection in the Silberkammer of Hofburg, the former winter palace of the Habsburg monarchs and the present-day office of the president of Austria. The dolls are surrounded by the porcelain wares that were produced in Korea and Japan in the nineteenth century and previously owned by the Duke of Habsburg-Lorraine.

Dolls are called ningyo, which means “human form” in English, and come in different types. According to the information on the wall, they “are associated with numerous meanings and functions, fertility rituals and the cult of dead.” They represent warriors, fairytale figures, children, Kabuki actors, musicians, and the everyday scenes of Japanese life. They have an “apotropaic function at folk festivals and religious ceremonies” and also serve as “amulets and talismans.” No wonder the kamikaze pilots carried masukotto ningyo to protect them from danger.

Ningyos had been produced since the early days of Japanese civilization. During the Edo Period (1603-1868) dollmaking reached its popularity. Yet, it took time till it was considered as an art. Dolls used to be exclusive to aristocracy. Giving them as presents to the imperial court was a common practice until it spread to lower social classes in the latter years. Today one can readily order ningyo off the Internet that fetches from $20 to $4,000 a piece, depending on its age and complexity of work.

Doll makers use different materials. Ohno, for example, carved her sakura dolls (shelf dolls) out of Paulownian wood, a tree native to China, with sawdust, and dressed them in silk and other fabrics. She got her inspiration from her own childhood and the Edo Period. What caught my attention was a tragic barefooted female ningyo ready to trample on the Bible in front of her. Many Christians during this era were forced to renounce their faith, or else, face torture and death.

Hopefully, this is only the beginning of many more exhibits concerning the Japanese traditional dolls to come in Europe. In the U.S. there are several comprehensive seminars about antique and modern ningyos. A genuine interest has established considering the number of workshops available nationwide.

My only complaint: Although the collection is an interesting lot, it is hidden from the public eye. One has to brave the labyrinthine paths in order to find the dolls. A hasty museum visitor might just drop the idea of searching for them except he or she is there for this purpose: the ningyos.

Written by: Elen P. Farkas, December 22nd 2008