Lather me up

Facial hair. I have too much of it. From the top of my cheekbones to the base of my Adam’s apple - it’s solid beard. Whisker to whisker it never lets up, with some follicles sprouting two, three, even four whiskers. I shave in the morning and by evening there’s a shadow any spaghetti western bad guy could light a match off.

I’ve experimented with growing it – mutton chop sideburns, goatees, Bollywood moustaches – with varying comedic results. People say “that looks great” modulated by chuckles as they say it, as though they’re commenting on a fancy dress outfit. I grew a beard once. That didn’t work either. I was told I looked like I was homeless or a terrorist. Or was it a homeless terrorist? The kindest taunt was courtesy of the inimitable Guy Champney “Matty K, you look like the New York based financier for Al Qaeda, the respectable face of terrorism.” And the look I was going for was ‘sea faring philosopher’. With the reality way off the mark from my perception (and a persistent campaign from Cheryl stating that kissing me was like kissing a ball of steel wool), I eventually shaved it off. Fact is (as cruel as it may be), with all of this facial hair at my disposal, growing it simply isn’t an option.

So I revert back to the standard procedure of shave it, let it grow until itchy, then shave again. I can’t shave daily as it kills the skin on my neck. Well that’s my excuse anyway. With a beard like mine shaving is a hassle and it’s painful. Even though I invest in the latest shaving technology (currently Gillette Fusion), the blades grate and tug against those iron filing whiskers and makes for quite an unpleasant experience.

The only time I can be at peace with my beard, is when I’m traveling in the third world – where a proper barber’s shave is always cheap and readily available. This relic of by-gone era is alive and well in the developing world. And with a beard like mine the shaving experience and final result are both heaven sent.

Here in India the barber shop is a hub of social activity, with all the blokes seemingly queuing up for a turn at the seat, but actually just hanging around for a chat. Whenever a foreigner stops by it creates a stir and people get up and out of the way to ensure a clear path to the hallowed chair. For a shaver of the Gillette Mach 3 kind – it’s still slightly nerve wracking to have a shirtless Indian man dressed in only a Lunghi wield a cut-throat razor across my bare and vulnerable neck. I allay these irrational fears and relax into it as he softens the skin with a hot wet towel and lathers me up, using the brush to apply layers of foam at differing consistencies. He poises with the blade like a conductor with his baton before making one large sweep with the blade from my sideburn all the way to the bottom of my neck, cutting through that week old dense forest as though he’s sweeping lint from a linoleum floor. He’s considerate enough to stop what he is doing as he gloms a good look of the two girls walking by his shop, or when India takes another wicket against Pakistan, only resuming once he has regained total concentration. He meticulously sweeps my face clean, wiping the blade after each stroke on to a torn piece of newspaper, then lathers my face again for another round, repeating the process to clear any errant patches. He wipes my face clean, before applying pure alcohol (the sting strangely satisfying), then a dab of old spice after shave, then some multi- vitamin face cream and finally some talc. He finishes off with an Indian head, neck and shoulder massage.

It is impossible to find a closer shave (regardless of what Gillette and Phillips will tell you). Even with my beard I can’t detect any stubble running my finger against the grain. It’s also the only truly masculine way for a bloke to be pampered by another bloke. The tenderness with which they move your head around, massage it and apply the creams and lotions doesn’t jar in the slightest when you’re in a barbers chair surrounded by other guys reading the sports pages and listening to the cricket. And all this for the ridiculous cost of 40 Euro Cents. In India the impossible happens to you everyday, I just never thought it could include me enjoying a shave.

Reading Naked Lunch in the depths of India can skew your perspective

Serenaded by a classical Carnatic trio in the Old Portuguese Courtyard in Kochi. Cheryl framed by a great decaying wall - black with mold and perforated at its base by mood-lit alcoves thick with moss of ectoplasm green...One of which on her right doubles as a pen for a bronze four-headed elephant. The humid air breathes musty as we inhale our forbidden meals of Spanish Beef and Baked Mussels, all washed down with a strange concoction of buttermilk, ginger, honey, curry leaves and onions sucked through alabaster straws.

We are flanked by odd refugees from foreign climes. To our right are an incestuous father/daughter twosome furtively reading Aztec adventure comics to each other in French. While to our left sit three fugitive Burmese monks disguised as Japanese tourists.

We make our excuses and slip past the scowling lesbian Maitre'd unnoticed.

Wildlife

We've been in Munnar in Kerala's Western Ghats these last few days. A bucolic idyll and home to the world's highest tea plantations, it's been a more than welcome welcome break from the oppressive heat and chaos of the coast. We'd been living pretty cheap of late and decided we'd splash out on a one day tour of the local area with our own private driver - getting the local knowledge on our surrounds.

We started first thing in the morning - taking in tea factories, cardamom, pepper, sandle wood and tea plantations, waterfalls and breathtaking scenery. Beautiful, but pretty standard stuff for these parts. After lunch our driver dropped us off to commence our 5 hour trek in the Chinnar Wildlife Sanctuary.

Maybe it's my Aussie upbringing, but the term 'Wildlife Sanctuary' conjures images of migrating water birds and a few furry creatures scampering about the place if you're lucky. And if there are any dangerous creatures present, measures are taken to keep any visitors out of harms way. So I thought nothing of signing the declaration they handed me. It mentioned stuff about trekking being 'highly' dangerous and that while 'all care is taken', they won't be liable for any accident occasioning death or injury. Pretty standard cover your arse stuff.

It slipped my mind that we were in India. It slipped my mind that the owner of the farmhouse we were staying in insists we only take auto rickshaws home after 7:30 and not walk back through the surrounding tea plantations as wild animals some times creep in during the night (for 'wild animals' read: tigers, elephants, panthers, leopards and boars). Maybe it's the genteel surroundings - a strange cross between Australian Tablelands, South Coast England and the Swiss Alps - that never allows this threat to really sink in.

Anyway, our driver secured our tracker and guide and introduced us, he was a young local guy from an indigenous tribe that (among others) had been entrusted as caretakers of the land. He smelled of last night's campfire on a dewy morning and looked more like a Koori (an Australian Aboriginal) than Indian. As the four of us (tracker, driver, Cheryl and myself) commenced our trek, it became more apparent just how much he had in common with the Koori trackers. At one with his land, his movements and sensory perceptions took on animal-like characteristics and sensitivity. He had this piercing gaze that seemed to scan his whole field of vision with hunter precision, his ears twitch at the slightest sound and our driver mentioned he could smell animals from across the valley.

We begin to track some elephants - which is not so hard given they leave behind great steaming piles of shit and knock over any trees that may be in the way - when a sound stops him in his tracks. He holds his hand to quiet and still us, his animal senses working over time. I watch his face intently to see if it will betray anything. He looks concerned then relieved before muttering something in Malayalam.

"Tiger. But not too close." our driver translates

Tiger?

I had no idea there had been sightings of Tigers here. There are a few select places you go to increase your chances of seeing one and this wasn't one of them. I'm at once incredibly excited and a little concerned.

On the excited trip - I love tigers. They're my favourite land animal (for reasons I won't bore you with here) and laying my eyes on one in the wild is one of those boxes I must tick - if not on this trip, then at least in this lifetime.

On the concerned trip - This love of tigers also involves a deep respect for their ability as the most stealthy, ferocious and single minded land hunter on the planet. Their their paws can break its quarry's back with a single blow, the jaws crush wind-pipes and neck vertebrae for good measure and it will stalk it's prey for days (giving up earlier opportunities) just for the fun of it.

With all this in mind, I'd kinda been banking on seeing one within the confines of a 4WD (Big Cat Diaries style)...or at the very least on top of an Elephant. Only a few days ago we'd met a French couple who had encountered wild elephants and their guides had taken rifles along in case anything went wrong. Ours was armed with a half sized machete and we were on foot (flip-flops to be precise). We ploughed on, never really realising how vulnerable we were. At the time, we were still bird watching as far as I was concerned and I thought this little tiger show was something they put on for hapless tourists.

Back to the story. So, after several hours of walking around examining piles of shit and animal tracks and a distant Bison sighting, our tracker spots a lone elephant across the river on the opposite slope. We scramble up to higher ground only to see it disappear over the other side. Perched atop an overhang with an incredible view of the Western Ghats out of Kerala and in to Tamil Nadu, I pour my backpack's contents on to the rock and we hang out and eat, drink, take in the view and hope the elephant wanders back in to view some time soon.

After a while some tribesmen appear at the clearing where we'd spotted the elephant. We assume they must have been tracking him too. They seem apprehensive about following him down that same slope, but eventually conjure the courage and disappear from view. Soon after, two of them re-appear. Running at speed - like 'run for your fucking life' speed. I never thought it possible for a human to run so fast, down so steep an incline. Then we see another two. One is running too fast and he takes a really bad spill, tumbling head over heels a few times before miraculously regaining his footing and keeps on going...never letting up.

Their reaction seemed all so out of proportion. No elephant could have followed them down such an incline, yet they just kept running and running and running - at literal break-neck speed. The final two soon follow in similar fashion and by now the four of us are in hysterics (fed by that universal humour of witnessing other people's misfortune, whilst safe in the knowledge that they're gonna be OK). The distance and the river between us rendered their terror silent and the spectacle took on a farcical nature that was a cross between Benny Hill and The Gods Must Be Crazy. We waited for that elephant and I tell you, if an elephant had bumbled over that hill in slow pursuit I would have suffered a fit of such rock slapping laughter that it would have required a Heimlich Manouvre just to get me breathing again. But alas, the bumbling elephant never made his entrance and the hysterics died down to absent chuckles.

The hilarity over, I began to stuff the regurgitated contents of my backpack back in to its belly (careful to leave not a scrap of rubbish behind), when our tracker's eyes bugged out of his sockets like tongues. He shot up pointing and shouting the only English word in his vocabulary:

"TIGER!"

A tiger bounded over the top of the hill and with feline dexterity gracefully bolted down the exact same slope as the tribesmen - making a beeline straight for the trees they had taken shelter in. When at the very last second something scared him and it changed its tack and veered right, leaping off a considerable drop in to a clump of trees below - never to re-appear.

Full disclosure: I didn't see that last bit ^^^^. I'm afraid that brief, yet crucial paragraph has been constructed using the eye witness accounts of Cheryl and our driver with some flourishes courtesy of my minds eye reconstruction. Where was I? I was there, packing my pack. And from the angle I spun round on, the guide's finger seemed to pointing to a rather bland rocky outcrop. Cheryl described everything to me and was kind enough to say that it was all so quick and far away that it could have been a large dog, that it didn't really count as a sighting. But the fact is that I missed out on the punchline that made what we had witnessed less of a joke and more a playing out of a real life and death drama, of two top-of-the-food-chain dominant life forms scaring the bejeesus out of each other. I had been thwarted yet again at seeing a tiger in the wild (first time: Sumatra) and my first close encounter with one lacked the teeth of actually seeing it.

The fact is, they are so rare now and are fighting a losing battle against extinction. Even where they are protected, their habitat isn't. Being located largely in the third world it only takes a small payment for officials to turn a blind eye to poachers and loggers. Sadly, unless conservation efforts miraculously manage to turn things around, the days of this magnificent creature ruling the Asian wild lands are numbered. Those that are left are understandably shy of humans and are notoriously difficult and dangerous to encounter - with that camouflage they are only seen when they want to be seen.

We make our way back to the car without event. Part of me wanting to catch a glimpse, the other (much louder) part hoping he stays on the other side of the river. Still, I won't give up until I see one in the wild, with my own eyes.

Only in India

The things you read in Indian newspapers. This one is courtesy of Indian broadsheet The Hindu:

Priest drowns during yogic feat

GUNTUR: A 33-year-old priest in Medikonduru mandal drowned in a well while performing ‘Jala Stambanam’ (a yogic practice by which a person can stay inside water for a long period).

Purnam Rama Sastri jumped into the well on Wednesday around midnight, after assuring his family members that he would come back the next morning. However, the man got drowned and his body was fished out in the morning.

According to Sub Inspector of Police Md. Osman the priest had been practising various meditation practices in Guntur. On Wednesday night, he jumped from a two-storeyed building and sustained only minor injuries.

Indian Spirituality

It pervades everything. I don't know why, but anything that would pass as cultish or faddish in the west comes across as genuine and sincere here. Yoga instructors radiate serenity rather than smugness and it doesn't seem strange that somebody, whom you've just met, suddenly starts reading your palms (I'm gonna be minted and have three kids). Conversations with people about their daily routine of yoga, oil massage and going to the temple are of great interest in comparison to my: have a coffee, make a resolve and boost it with extra paracetamol and hope I wake up sufficiently before I make it to work. If it was a blonde with an LA accent telling me their body is a temple and what routine is responsible for that crazed look in their eyes...I would have lost interest before they'd mentioned their morning wheatgrass shot.

Maybe I'm prejudiced, but maybe it's because Indians are the true original New Agers and us Westerners just come across as cheap counterfeits when we try and jump on the enlightenment bandwagon.

What got me on this riff was an unsolicited text message that I received from my mobile provider this morning:

"Every bad situation will have something positive. Even a stopped clock shows correct time twice a day. Think of this and lead ur life. Good Morning. Regards Airtel."

If this had happened in the west, I'd be sure I'd joined a cult not a mobile network. But here in India (the largest cult of them all), some spiritual guidance to start the day is all part of the service.

Masala Rider

When researching the riding of motorbikes in India I had a web-based nemesis, a portent of doom that followed me wherever I went. Everytime I posted a query on a message board, his dark log-in would emerge from the ether and proclaim that if I were to ride a bike in India, I would surely meet my demise. I dismissed it as a classic case of keyboard-hero fear-mongering or just some clown with a dark sense of humour (as clowns have). Strangely, I never thought his comments might have been based in truth.

After riding only 35kms from Varkala to Kolam yesterday, I may not have met my demise, but I was certainly sailing close to the edge of existence. After only one day on the road I don’t exactly qualify as an expert - but in the interest of traveler health and safety (and from the comfort of a stationary chair with four legs), I have managed to collate these unofficial, yet essential top-ten guidelines to negotiating Indian roads for your perusal:

1. When riding at any speed you will need to keep one eye on the road watching out for potholes and the other for oncoming traffic. Vehicles will regularly and unexpectedly veer on to your side of the road to avoid one of the numerous wheel-destroying potholes. You will end up doing this also.

2. Use hand signals when making turns or when coming to a stop. Other drivers will only notice your vehicle’s indicators once you have done this.

3. Use your horn…a lot! There is a constant barrage of horns around you. Use this cacophony as a bat uses sonar. Each horn is a vehicle telling you where it is amidst the chaos. Use your horn on corners, when overtaking, when approaching vehicles, pedestrians and livestock or when you see something funny. It’ serves a language that says “do you see me?” with the reply being “yeah I see you”. It can also say many other things like “Get the fuck out of my way sisterfucker” or “Hey check me out! I’m a dude on a bike with some cool Bollywood shades and a hot girl on the back”.

4. If you are unfortunate enough be on the apex of a bend at the same time as a bus coming in the opposite direction - close your eyes, breathe in to reduce your body-mass and hope for the best. If there is a shoulder on the road, use it, as the bus will use his lane, your lane and then some.

5. When being overtaken by a bus, let them get ¾ of the way past you then apply your breaks. They will cut you off. In fact – try and steer clear of buses altogether.

6. Don’t speed. Period. Apart from the above, there is always a multitude of reasons for having to stop on a dime. You will have to share the roads with people who cannot drive for shit, have a death wish & officials that tear down the roads sitting on their horns maintaining a beeline down the middle of the road regardless of what’s ahead. There is no emergency; they’re just propelled by self-importance and the official sanction to put everyone’s lives at risk so they can make lunch in time. You will also have to share the road with cows, goats, water buffalo, playing children, farmers drying grain across the road and using vehicles’ wheels to do the threshing for them and men pushing hand carts stacked impossibly high with goods ranging from coconut husks to metal girders.

7. Try and not get too distracted by what you see by the side of the road. Whether it’s breath taking scenery, village life, people screaming hello or any one of the forever surprising elements of India…keep at least one eye on the road.

8. If riding in the late afternoon, pay extra attention while answering all the questions being shouted at you from the school bus in front. Just because the kids are asking your name and where you’re from, doesn’t mean that Mr. Deathwish driving the school bus will drive any less erratically. He will stop suddenly - just as the pot holes will keep coming. Again, keep at least one eye on the road.

9.When the smell of Cardamom and Tea hits your nostrils – slow down, pull over and refresh yourself at a marsala tea stall.

10. And finally, when you eventually make it to the next town in one piece, the taste of adrenalin has subsided and the feeling has come back to your numb butt cheeks – you will want to get straight back on and do it all again.

A sting in the fairytale

You think there’s no room for magic anymore. You’ve grown up and the time for child-like wonder has passed. Some try to re-capture it with drugs or even Harry Potter books – but these are more exercises in escapism. The land where fairytales might exist has been submerged under weightier issues such as mortgages, careers, mistakes and possibly a few regrets.

Then one day you find yourself in Kerala, slowly drifting down the backwaters with a boatman and his long bamboo stick the only mechanism to get you anywhere. The people, their superstitions and the land itself has conspired with your imagination to suggest that maybe there is more to this place than meets the eye.

You round a bend in the river and see before you an island bathed in sunshine. As you approach, music seems to draw you in - a siren song. You gesture to the boatman that you would like to alight and explore the island and with an almost imperceptible head wobble, he changes the direction of the boat. As you alight, music emits from the forest like an echo from heaven. Sunlight dances on the leaves and the palm trees dip and sway in the breeze as if in time to the music.

As you negotiate the narrow paths in to the interior, you have step aside for the fairies – little girls moving to and fro wearing brightly coloured princess dresses. There are thatched houses with vegetable patches, enchanted gardens and swings garlanded with flowers. You move on through into a forest dense with columns of Coconut Palm trunks. The forest floor is carpeted in soft grass and decorated with ferns as another swarm of giggling fairies pass you by – the music still filling your ears.

In the middle of the island is its heart. You stumble across it in a clearing, a church whitewashed in sun-faded pastels. It is from here that the girls come running from, where the wires that feed the speakers in the tree tops throughout the island are powered at their source.

Though the curtain has been pulled on the great Oz pulling his levers, the island still maintains its fairytale quality. Inside the church, through the open walls, you see the matriarchs praying as a girl with the voice of a cherub coos her hymn into a taped-up microphone – piping her blessings out into the trees. Behind her is an altar festooned with flowers and disco lights and a kitsch portrait of Jesus Christ at its centre. The sight seems out of place until you remember that in India, there are many paths to God.

You move past the church where the sun (now low in the sky) warms your face and silhouettes the palm trees and boys playing cricket on the beach – the breakers behind them all thunderous and kicking up mist. Hidden by the glare are the fishermen at your feet, dressed in Lungis and Sunday-best shirts, staring at you with lines etched in to their faces as deep as the wells of their eyes.

Having walked the breadth of the island, it is here that you realize the precariousness of their existence, of this unique and enchanting paradise. It is no more than 1km long and a few hundred metres across. On one side the temperamental Arabian Sea, on the other the monsoon-prone backwaters. It is a thin green line between two powerful ecosystems that wax and wane at will and (at times) without warning. On this knife edge a community exists in a bubble, a haven of tranquility between the wilderness of the ocean and the chaos of mainland India.

The island cannot be higher than ten feet at its highest point - one storm surge, one monsoon deluge or even one melted iceberg away from obliteration. Only recently, a fishing community (just a few kilometers to the south) was decimated by the encroachment of large seas. Like anything of beauty, the island is fragile and possibly fleeting.

You slowly make your way back, leaving the same way you came. You try and etch it all in to your mind and don't even dare to take a memory tainting photo. As you leave the island and step back on to your boat you hope - for the sake of the girls in princess dresses, the praying matriarchs, the girl with the taped up microphone, the boys playing cricket and the fishermen in their Sunday bests - that this fairytale doesn’t have an ending any time soon.

It's not just cricket

I woke up in a daze and walked out on to the wall to watch the fisherman again. Cheryl suggested we walk through the village behind us and out on to the point to get a closer look.

There was a huge surf this morning and the men out in the sea guiding the nets in were experiencing some trouble. Nets were getting tangled and a double effort had to be put in by all. The process is more a tribal dance or ritual with up to thirty men chanting as they’re engaged in a mighty tug-o-war with the sea - hauling in the net from way out back beyond the breakers. The net finally lands on shore. There aren’t many fish this morning and the usual ecstatic dance and cheers are replaced by flat disappointment.

By this time Cheryl and I had attracted a fan base of five tenacious boys wanting money, a pen – but ultimately a game of cricket.

Cricket in India is like football in Brazil. Everybody plays it. From Brahmin to Dalit, Prime Ministers to Fishing Village kids – they are positively fanatical about it. Coming from the only nation that comes close to this across-the-board fanaticism means that the moment kids find out I’m Australian, a cricket bat is produced.

I am no cricket fan. I was no good at it as a kid, my idea of spending a whole day standing in a field never appealed to me and I certainly don’t keep abreast of the game on the international stage. Some have called this un-Australian. I call it having a life.

This unfortunately means that when an Indian discovers my nationality, the conversation inevitably turns toward cricket. I have to make do with polite yet uncomfortable vagaries about the current state of the game and its various teams until they realize I have no idea what I’m talking about - and eventually drop the subject.

I do, however, have an entirely different viewpoint of the knock-about version of the game. I grew up with backyard cricket. It’s a great leveler (skill-wise) and a fun way to pass to the time with a bunch of people you’ve never met. The most important difference between this and the real thing is that you can walk away the moment boredom sets in.

The boys beckon us back and set up the wicket in the middle of their village. The village is back from the beach and set amongst a dense forest of coconut palms that is also home to hundreds of Keralan Crows (whose squawks are only slightly less ominous than those of your garden variety).

With the ritual of the stumps being hammered in to the sand signaling that a game is about to commence, about fifteen kids come running out from nowhere. All of them are boys, no girls are to be seen anywhere and all the men are still hauling in nets. So it’s Australia V India. Fifteen kids against one overgrown one.

I win the toss and elect to bat. I can swing a bat OK and put in a decent effort. I kick off with a few singles and manage several slogs that get picked up just short of the boundary. I’m on a roll until I’m declared run-out by a very dodgy call. It’s fifteen against one and I’m not going to argue.

I hand over the bat to the ringleader whose swagger tells he’s something of a maestro with the bat. This is where my game goes to shit.

I can’t bowl for anyone’s money and I throw in a few wides for a very average start. Just as I get my eye in on the stumps, I send in a few plumb sitters, which this pint sized ten year old slogs for six – on several occasions. I haven’t had breakfast yet and my stomach rumbles from hunger (or is it embarrassment) so I call it time to pull stumps.

India 1
Australia 0

I tell them there’s gonna be a re-match tomorrow and they swarm, several of them holding on to each hand. We struggle back to the gate of our hotel holding five conversations at once until something has them leaping around even more than they already were. They’re jumping up and down screaming and pointing at a huge six-foot pale yellow snake making a break for it across the path (no doubt freaked out by all the commotion). We follow suit, using the distraction to slip in the gate promising a re-match tomorrow.

I’d better brush up on my game. Something tells me I’m gonna be playing a lot of it.

Delhi

If a director needed inspiration for a post apocalyptic vision of the future, he need go no further than Delhi. No imagination could conjure nor capture the essence of this city. I have never seen anything more alien. It felt like I missed my stop and ended up on the wrong planet.

Weaving our way through the medieval back alleys of the Chandni Chowk Bazaars I am a stranger in another world. The alleys are impossibly narrow instilling nighttime on to daylight. The merchants ply their wares virtually on top of one another and once the day’s trading is finished they scramble up a makeshift ladder on to the roof of their 2sqm shop and huddle under the shelters they’ve built from corrugated iron sheets, gunnysacks and tarpaulins. We constantly had to flatten our backs against the wall to let through loads fit for a mule with only two small brown legs visible beneath – deftly propelling it along through the claustrophobic space.

If a director were to go to Delhi, sure, he would find inspiration. But anything that made it up on screen would be a pale imitation – a mere symbol of the real thing. My even writing this is an act of futility. You have to go there yourself to breathe that air and see those unbelievable situations that happen every millisecond on every street.

Even if the director had the kind of budget necessary to attempt this, he would need a set designer that could create the kind of architectural chaos that would send a Bauhaus fanatic into a fit, with each building being a palimpsest of several – from Ancient to recent, from blackened cement to cardboard.

The art department would have to add centuries of grime to the structure as the Animal Trainers brought in mules that could sit out a mortar bombardment without so much as a flinch.

The casting department would have to seek out thousands of extras ranging from the heartbreakingly beautiful to the tragically deformed and everything in-between – all of them with their life story etched on their faces.

The Gaffers would have to abandon every Health & Safety measure they’ve learned and rig up kilometers of tangled electrical wire and suspend it just above head height above every alley, with each wire sprouting new branches – splicing off to power yet another light bulb, another TV set. The Gaffers must pay no heed to what might happen to this set-up if it rained.

The wardrobe department would have to source Saris of the most brilliant colours and delicate fabric and sew on little pieces of glass that dazzle the eye when they hit the light. The 1st assistant director would need the help of a choreographer to train the extras so they can move through the dirt and grime without so much as a mark on their clothing.

The Sound Engineer could record the din of an actual Delhi street – with horns, revving unmufflered motors, screeching breaks and shouting hawkers layering upon themselves exponentially until you have an impenetrable wall of sound – but the sound system to deliver such an assault in the required 3D doesn’t exist yet.

Even if the director were to succeed in capturing all of these approximations with the aid of a killer Director of Photography – what would appear on screen would be a disappointment. For no director (or writer) can capture the feel of that dirty air soup that lines the inside of your mouth, clings to your skin and seeps in to you pores or that combination of sewage, spice and incense that once it hits your nose stays in your sensorial memory forever. Not only are these impossible to capture, it is simply untenable that anybody could (through any medium) convey the fractal-like depth of what is going on around you. The deeper you look the more you’ll see - and the more you’ll miss out on seeing.

Delhi is like the universe. Indefinable, it never stops. Never stops creating, never stops dying and whatever you witness through the tunnel of your senses is at once everything and nothing at all.

Hairybones is going travelling

Hadn't had much to post of late due to some serious wrapping up for our trip to India.

With me trekking through the Indian Subcontinent, there won't be much in the way of video clips and car chases, but there'll be the occasional update and missive from the road.

Check in after October 20 for Hairybones' Indian Adventures.

30th Anniversary of Punk

"Making mayhem seem really, really cool"

Interpol: Mammoth

You have to love the simplicity of Interpol. Spectacular clips created by music video auteurs are not necessary - just film them on a stage in their suits and let the music do the rest.

Simple.

Shine A Light

Scorsese does a docco on The Stones.

Release date April 2008.

Can't wait.

No End in Sight

I know this blog doesn't normally cover politics, but this film is essential viewing. This is no Michael Moore polemic, it's damning a indictment of the arrogance, incompetence, deceit and downright betrayal of the Western ideal of Freedom - all told by political and military insiders.

Website here

It's like...sunny

And that makes you want to break out some summer tunes before they go musty.

After the jump you'll find the Trailmix remix of Fleetwood Mac's "You Make Lovin' Fun". They shun the chorus and focus on intro, verse and classic disco synth instead - bubbling up some seriously languid robo-house.

One for an Amsterdam rooftop sunset.

Mash-up

Mash-ups can be a little hit and miss. But this effort conflating some Bob Fosse dance moves to the hip-hop of 'Walk It Out' shows that can it can be an art form...and that there's still some life in the (now) old dog of creative democratisation.

Nu-Gazing?

As covered already in this blog, the previously maligned (in the UK at least) shoegazing sound has been making something of a comeback this year. With the likes of Asobi Seksu and Deerhunter (among others) sending a wash of feedbacked and fuzzed-out melodies our way, it's hard to deny there isn't something afoot.

It seems the Guardian have cottoned on to this and written a whole article on this straw in the wind. All in all it's not a bad read, but then they go and label this burgeoning scene 'Nu-Gazing'.

Yeah. Nu-gazing.

Have the Music Press listened to other people's ideas, imaginations and descriptions so often that they can't conjure original thoughts anymore?

Nu-Gazing.

It can serve a purpose to emulate the scientific descriptions of flora and fauna, indicating cross pollinations of genres and to give immediate indication of the music's DNA - see Heavy Metal, Hair Metal, Death Metal etc. But any Nu-(insert previously existing genre here) does a disservice to both genres. It robs the original of relevance and the newcomer of its originality (see Nu-Metal and Nu-Rave). Above all, it is just plain lazy.

It's kind of redundant anyway to put something as widescreen as music in to a draw as constraining as a one or two word description, even my fave yet for the genre (Dreampop) robs the sound of its depth and meatiness. But lets face it, we do it for the sake of expedience, a kind of short-hand script for something much, much larger.

If this new trend is substantial enough, it will have to be given a moniker. The Guardian throws a few other naff names about such as 'stargaze' and 'shoetronica', but they chose to lead with the woeful Nu-Gaze.

So, now that the Guardian has taken the lead and labeled it Nu-Gazing, does this make it official? Idolator doesn't think so. But I fear, in the UK at least, it's likely to stick - just as NME's complacent 'Nu-Rave' label stuck for the likes of The Klaxons.

Shame.

Should you smoke hash, drink booze and talk sex, religion and politics?

Anthony Bourdain: The Chefin' Ramone

Anthony Bourdain is up there with Nick Cave, Stephen Fry and James Ellroy as a regular on my fantasy dinner party of living greats.

He is a man after my own heart, whose undying passions include good food (naturally), good booze, rock n roll, literature, writing and travel. He is the punk-rocker of celebrity chefs. He is notrious for his love of what he calls 'nasty bits' - bladder and trotter and brains and guts. He even ate bugs off a windshield with Marky Ramone once.

His book Kitchen Confidential re-ignited my passion for cooking and reiterated the cowboy image of life in the kitchen that my chefin' mates talk of. His Les Halles Cookbook is an essential if you want to take your cooking above the basic Jamie Oliver whip-something-up-on-a-Sunday level. There you'll learn how to make proper stock, demi-glace and a raft of dishes that will take a whole weekend to make and have you sweating in your saute pan with their complexity. Anthony's tone throughout the book is that you're basically a shmuck and you have no fucking idea. He is the only chef I know of that has managed to get this attitude across in a Cookbook rather than expletitive-filled rants on the telly (and get away with it). It works though, in a drill-sergeant kinda way and it also provided me with the best recipe for a Steak Au Poivre et Frites you'll ever get anywhere.

I have recently discovered his new television series called 'No Reservations' on YouTube and I'm loving it. The show consists of 'Tony' travelling around the globe eating, drinking, philosphising and discovering (and quite often eating) some really weird shit - and he has John Spencer Blues Explosion doing the intro music.

Check below for a 'tube of Tony eating the beating heart of a cobra in Thailand .

Jailhouse Rock

These Phillipino prisoners have come up with a novel way of relieving the tedium of hard jail time. 1,500 jump suited prisoners (and one in drag) perform Thriller as the director of the prison films them and uploads to youtube. The whole series can be seen here.

It's...ah...surreal

Facebook could become the new Microsoft

Here I was thinking that Facebook was going to be the next Google. Duncan Riley puts across a decent argument that it could be the next Microsoft. Money Quote:

"Although Web Operating Systems lack wide user uptake to date, the amount of venture capital flooding into Web OS startups is a clear indicator that smart people believe that Web Operating Systems will eventually be a huge hit. Facebook knows this; what buying Parakey does is provide Facebook with a base from which it can not only become a Web OS provider, but leverage it’s user base to become THE Web OS provider."

If Facebook decides to float, they've got my money.

Luxury Sub

Keeping up the theme of hybrid vehicles, I couldn't go past this Luxury Sub concept. What better way to blow away all those tacky Russian oligarchs and their Super Yachts on the French Riviera? It has a surface-cruising capacity with plenty of deck-space for your bikini clad call-girls/models - yet at the flick of the switch you're in a sub-aquatic wonderworld.

They say money can't buy you happiness, but with the Seattle 1000 I'm sure you could sail right up beside it and give everyone else the finger.

Lily Watch: Lily's third nip

The adorable Lily Allen has just gone up even further in my already stratospheric estimations. Here she not only only declares, but reveals her third nipple on UK national television.

If she keeps this up, she'll fast-track to national treasure in no time.

They don't do nostalgia like they used to

I won't wax lyrical too long on this one, but allow me a moment of post-rave nostalgia. A few months back when I'd had a listen to LCD Soundsystem's 'Sound Of Silver' and then saw them live here in Amsterdam, there was one stand-out track.

While the hypnotic piano, New Order guitar riff and LCD beat are infectious, it was the lyrical content of 'All My Friends' that caught my viscera. Being a 32yo Aussie ex-rave kid that's been away from home too long and with friends scattered around the globe - I am a perfect target for Murphy's brand of melancholic nostalgia on this track.

From the opening lyric of "That's how it starts, we go back to your house" to when he lifts a little to "You spend the first five years trying to get with the plan and the next five years trying to be with your friends again" right on through to the carthartic crescendo of Murphy shouting "if I could see all my friends tonight", the track has me in the grips of an uncharacteristic wistfulness.

I very much live for the moment and my life is currently on a trajectory that doesn't lend to reminisces of times past, yet every time I listen to this track (a current release no less) I am taken back to the mid-nineties in Sydney and the people I shared those times with.

It conjures those 8am drives from the club back to Bondi via Rose Bay riffing on subjects and rattling around in the glove box for spare sunglasses for my mates; smoking a spliff with Johnno on the North Bondi rocks before diving in to the cleansing blue ocean - the only thing that could wash away the stale sweat and chemical residue of the night's excesses; going back to a stranger's place and discovering the most beautiful girl you've ever seen is actually interested in you and is so easy to talk to; when a mate puts a track on that so perfectly sums up the moment and the feeling among your crew that you get cheers, smiles and hugs all-round...

It gets lost in the telling, but the feeling and the memories are still there. And that for me is the genius of this track - those moments are gone and the people have moved on, yet you're so fucking glad that you were lucky enough to have had them. 'All My Friends'captures that essence.

Below is the shortened radio edit that was used for this beautiful video (replete with facepaint, lizards, mirrors and pyro pay-off) directed by MJZ's Tom Kuntz.

The good die young

I've always believed in books finding me, rather than the other way round. It's a little superstitious sure, yet it keeps happening that I finish a book only to have another jump to my attention without me seeking it out.

Just this week, I had just finished Truman Capote's superbly chilling 'In Cold Blood'. It's the kind of book that sits with you long after you've finished the last page and I was in no hurry to pick up another. Capote's non-fiction novel really makes you delve into the nature of violence and contemplate the indignity of death. In 'In Cold Blood', death was totally devoid of any romance pertaining to it.

The idealism that surrounds the early death of rock n roll stars stands in stark contrast to this. The 'too fast to live, too young to die' ethos that romanticises early death as almost something to aspire to, was a world away from the contemplations Capote had ushered upon me.

When my good friend Kimi passed on to me Deborah Curtis' 'Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division' I was a little aprehensive. Did I want to take on another book in which the major theme was (once again) death? The Joy Division/New Order story and catalogue have always held a huge interest for me and Ian Curtis is at the nucleus of that story. However, this is a rock bio with a different slant. It is Ian Curtis' story - as told by his wife. So it was decided that I would once again dance with death, although this time it would be to the beat of Joy Division's death-disco kick-drum (and all within the comforts of my oversized beanbag of course).

Here is a modern rock and roll hero that many an upcoming band claim as a massive influence. A hero whose death has been mourned and romantcisised as much as any other. I am only half-way through the book, but it seems from Deborah's perspective that Ian Curtis had always been seduced by the idea of an early death.

His heros were Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin - all died young at the peak of their careers, leaving a mythologised legacy behind them. Sure Bowie was a massive influence, but it was Bowie's obsession with death that fascinated him. Ian had always said that he wouldn't live past his early twenties. Deborah thought it was just a stage he was going through - a kind of dark and brooding posturing.

Maybe he always knew that everything in his life was too intense for him to withstand for a whole and complete lifetime. His lyrical content and performances certainly lend to this notion. You can see it in the performance below, where his dancing toward the end emulates the body spasms associated with the epilepsy that he suffered intensly from. In fact, they were so closely linked as to be inextricable. After every gig, Ian would sit up in his living room waiting for his inevitable post-gig fit. Maybe he felt and (thankfully for us) expressed a lifetime's worth of intensity and emotions in his very short life - to only be left spent, exhausted and hopeless. Where the only option left was one final and dramatic performance. Suicide.

While Ian as an icon and a legacy is undoubtedly romantic, can his early death be considered as a major reason for this? While most fans would probably believe so, from what I have glommed from Deborah's book, it left a terrible rupture in the lives of those close to him without a trace of the romantic rock n roll ideal.

Though it was his musical legacy that enabled his legend to attain its longevity and iconic status, you simply can't view this legacy without Ian's death looming large in the shadows.

Was Ian's death romantic? I suppose the only person who could answer that is the man himself.

Simpsons Avatar

If you haven't seen this simple yet genius piece of interactive marketing for the Simpsons Movie, you just have to go the Simpsons Movie site to create your own Simpsons avatar.

Hairybone Simpson.

Twike

Bicycles are the only way to get around Amsterdam - until you encounter rainfall of Biblical proportions, then it gets nasty. Rocking up to work with saturated jeans just isn't cool. It's a bad sensation.

After this morning's downpour, I'd had enough of my damp denim, so I trawled the web looking for some kind of solution that didn't include plastic pantaloons that conjure thoughts of clowns and John Wayne Gacy. And it seems I may have found a stylish alternative.

It looks hot with a kind of contemporary yet retro 80s-Bond-in-American-Apparel feel about it. It is environmentally friendly, has a respectable top speed and above all, provides shelter from summer deluges - leaving your jeans crisp and dry for the morning's meetings.

The name is also suitably ambiguous, like a cross between a young gay dude and a butchy lesbian.

Ladies and gents meet the Twike





Name: Twike ("TW"in b"IKE")
Abstract: human-powered/electric hybrid Light Electric Vehicle (LEV)
Max speed: 85 km/h (53 mph)
Range: 40 -140 kilometers (25–90 miles)
Price: 17.800 € - 32.200 €
Weight: 246 kg (542 lb) unladen
Battery: 3.3 kw/h nickel-cadmium or 6 kw/h nickel-hydride
Charge time: 1.5 to 3 hours
Steering: via single joystick
Country: Switzerland
Release date: 1986

Pete Doherty - The Comeback?

So the headline may be presumptuous - preposterous even to some, but when I caught a repeat of Jonathan Ross Live on Saturday night I saw a Pete Doherty that I hadn't caught sight of in some time.

When the Libertines first staggered on to the scene in London, music in England at the time was a bland and watery soup of over produced pop acts, Oasis wannabes and clapped out beat merchants. We needed a messiah...somebody to take us back to something real, exciting and from the gut. The Libertines fulfilled that role and staked their claim in UK rock n' roll history. Detractor or not, there was no denying the authenticity of the Libertine ethos. This was not posing and posturing or studied cool. This was visceral hedonism meets old-world-Englishness out on the edge of London's urban grot.

But the drugs took hold and it's a well worn story told many a time by tabloids and second rate rockumentaries. The whole notion of death and glory became deathly boring and Pete's music slipped into mediocrity. I still thought that he was one of the finest lyricists of his generation, but there was no escaping the fact that (apart from being Kate Moss' current squeeze) he was becoming redundant.

With this in mind I found Pete's performance (and subsequent interview) on Jonathan Ross something of a surprise. He was looking sharp, he's lost his drug-bloat and his eyes weren't rolling into the back of his head. The track "Lost Art of Murder" is also a definite return to form.

It's a bit early yet to claim it as a come back. We'll have to see how the next Babyshambles album turns out and whether (great or not) it can extend his appeal beyond his loyal fan base to a public who are only familiar with his tabloid caricature. Still...it's encouraging to say the least.



Part 2 of the interview continues here

Car chase fix: Ronin

Car chase scenes in films are a convergence of two major passions of mine. The point at which cars meet films can quite often be the major set-piece, the key tension builder in the story arc and - in most cases - the most expensive element of the production budget.

The cars, the location, the speeds, the crashes, the death-defying choreography, the camera angles, the explosions, the power slides and the sound of engines red-lining to the point where you think the pistons will shoot through the bonnet. All of these elements need to be woven together like the different sections of an orchestra, slowly building in intensity and tension until that final crescendo/release at the end.

When I posted about the car chase in 'Bullitt' a few months back, I possibly gave away my two other favourites - Vanishing Point and Mad Max - a little too early, but the car chase has a rich history in film and it is a deep vein for this blog to plunder.

In this first installment of the Hairybones 'Car Chase Fix' series, I thought I'd offer up a contemporary classic - Ronin. Director John Frankenheimer has serious car chase credentials having been a racing driver himself as well as being director of the 1966 classic 'Grand Prix'. John spoils the viewer with several car chase scenes in this film. One of which features the classic 6.9 litre Mercedes 450 SL and an Audi A8. As much as I love watching these two cars battling it out against the bad guys' Renaults and Citroens, I simply can't go past the final (and lengthy) chase in Paris. It's some of the best stunt driving you'll ever see at Blues Brothers proportions (they reputedly used 150 stunt drivers for this scene). It features a Beemer 5 Series pitched against De Niro in a Renault 406 and is a modern classic with incredible head-on traffic stunt driving action.

Asobi Seksu

Barrington and I went to see the Editors a few weeks back at the Melkweg here in Amsterdam. Always ones to check the support act, we arrived early and were hit by a wall of melodic feedback from the moment we entered the main room. We looked up on stage to find that most of the noise was coming from not only a frantic lead guitar (James Hanna), but also a diminutive Japanese lead singer (Yuki Chikudate) bashing away at her synth while seductively cooing into her microphone in a mixture of Japanese and English. We lit up a spliff and sipped on our beers and let Asobi Seksu (Japanese for Sex Play) take us into their ethereal dreamscape daubed across a shoegazer canvas. It is a truly beautiful noise.

It was the first gig of their first European tour as they do the rounds to promote their excellent album 'Citrus'. Full disclosure - I am an avid shoegazer fan. But Asobi Seksu and their new album amount to more to more than just the shoegazer tag. Sure there is My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive references but there's some Stone Roses and Sonic Youth in there to spice it up - and Yuki's dreamy vocals really make their offering something else entirely. James Hanna's axe work is also incredible (check the seriously intense Red Sea for unadulterated guitar abuse).

Below is the clip to their single 'Thursday' directed by So Yong Kim & Bradley Rust Gray. Buy their album or if you can - see them live.

The Antenna

My favourite design blog Drone Corp died some time back and left something of a void on my daily trawl.

So you can only imagine my excitement when they sent me some spam alerting me to its resurrection in the form of The Antenna.

It's a whole lotta design goodness

Bat For Lashes "What's a girl to do"

Check this one take wonder by Dougal Wilson for some serious Donny Darko spookiness. Dougal just keeps rolling out the genius. Whether it's commercials or video clips he's not only consistent, but oh so versatile.

I love this clip, I love this director, I love this sound and I love this girl.

There's a lot to love

Back online

After a hiatus of a few months due to stupid working hours, Hairybones is back online.

Oh and the site I shamelessly promoted below just won a Bronze Cyberlion at Cannes...so everyone is pretty stoked

Shameless promotion

So I haven't been able to hit my usual posting stride as quickly as I had hoped. I'm still pulling stupid hours, but am so used to it now that I hope to start posting each day regardless.

One of the projects I've worked on has been Ka Rah Shin. I only came in at the end of it, but even then it was a huge experience....much like the site itself.

KAH RA SHIN.

Graff with Gravitas

Check this hairybone: an excellent site called Pictures Of Walls that posts pictures of urban scrawls on walls - a gallery of thinking man's graffiti.

Where is Hairybones?

Burning the midnight oil.

Pulling a string of all nighters for a few weeks at a time goes with the territory of the day job I'm afraid. It takes all my time and energy to the extent that even firing off a 5 minute post would mean taking my eye off the ball for too long.

Having said that, I've come to love posting up all those hairybones that are buried out there in the big backyard we call the internet and I'll be back up to speed within the week - or sooner if I can snatch a moment.

Until then...stay hairy.

The Foals 'Hummer'

What have the Klaxons started? I could just write this off as derivative fluro drenched post-punk-nu-rave drivel, but I won't - even though certain elements of Ollie Evans' clip make me want to. Sure the The Foals are riding the techno-guitar zeitgeist, but this is good pop.

PS - Seems the stylist did a last minute buy-up at American Apparel



QT Music video via Partizan here

Dusty Laptop Interlude #2

Dusty Laptop Interludes is a weekly digression from the usual Hairybones content. Each Sunday will bring a new installment from an offline journal found on an old laptop running a Windows 95 operating system. There is no internal floppy drive and the external jack is shot, so the only way this story can get out is by way of me re-typing it.

It follows a twenty-something’s journey to find himself, truth and true love in a city that can bury all three in a heartbeat.

Episode 2: Firecracker night-shiver

My meeting with the potential flatmate was a let down after the high of Columbia Road. He was a shifty Turkish bloke that ran a dirty local café and lived in an apartment with décor my grandma would have been proud of. I made my excuses and headed back to the Royal Oak in the hope of re-igniting some the emotion from earlier in the day. It didn’t.

I hadn’t felt positive about anything in months and he’d killed it. I blamed him and felt the anger rise up in me before it subsided to give way to the familiar dull ache of disappointment. I ordered a double JD and a beer to soften the fall. I let a few gay guys flirt with me and buy me beers to take my mind off everything. They started talking dirty, so once again I made my excuses and left.

My ipod played Galaxie 500 tracks in random order on the train and I heard explosions during the walk home from Ladbroke Grove station to my apartment.

I‘m home in a home that won’t be mine for long. I have to find a place to live. I write down what happened today and hit the wine rack and hash stash. I polish off two bottles of cheap Australian Shiraz, a few joints and play air sax to Coltrane. I consider going to bed before grabbing another bottle and heading up to my roof-top to investigate the bangs and flashes going on outside. I sit down too heavily on my rotten deckchair as a rocket sweeps up from my left periphery and arcs over my head. The explosion fails to jolt. The way I’m feeling now, nothing could. I’m in a triple bubble of Shiraz, jazz and hashish with a meniscus an inch thick.

Then I get it. Guy Fawkes. Bonfire Night. All of England celebrating a renegade who tried to blow up the British Parliament, while most of them are gripped in fear as another, more intangible force threatens to carry out the same symbolic act – anytime, anywhere. The irony of this vapourises, but there is no escaping that London looks resplendent…if under siege. I suppose this is what the Blitz must have been like. The muffled base-boom thuds both near and far, patches of the vast urban expanse lit up by sporadic flashes, the smoke and its acrid tang hanging heavy in the cold night air.

I’m going to miss this rooftop. I love the view it affords me of this mean but addictive city. Anybody who has lived here knows how it can close in on you, consume you and bear itself down on you so you feel like there is no escape, no room, no air to breathe.

Up here on this rooftop I replenish my take on my existence with a heavy dose of perspective. Up here I am above it all. I can see the city and all of its chaos at arms length. Its topography and its patterns begin to re-emerge and I regain some semblance of understanding and direction. I have air to breathe again and can see the way out…even if, for reasons still beyond me, I never choose to take it.

I open the Shiraz and above the surrounding din still manage to relish the sound of the glig-glig-glug as I pour it into the glass. I slug back half my glass and sling my head back and gargle, savouring the sensation as I let the overflow run down my cheeks and chin and all over my shirt – taking the vampiric pleasure I normally feel driniking such blood-like liquid to some crazed new high.

I sink into my chair feeling the wind cool the spilt wine against my chest. John Cotrane’s sax is wailing out of the speakers behind me and I watch the fireworks dance their graceful dance, their randomness loosely syncopating with Coltrane’s soaring and dipping ramblings.

Looking at things through Shiraz tinted glasses, life isn’t so bad really. This rut I’m in is a mere temporary setback. I mean, this here is a hard city. It takes time, hardwork, conviction and luck to make an impact.

I reach for the bottle and the legs of my chair give way. I land on my side and catch the bottle just before it spills its contents. I look up at the sky and a firework does a lame imitation of a parachute as my lids get heavy…like weighted drapes…

Read Episode 1

Titles :: Napolean Dynamite, Aaron Ruell

With Hairybones having recently covered both type and opening sequences recently, it occurred to us that there is a medium where these two forms collide. And that of course, is Titles.

Title sequences are an art form the majority of the movie going public take for granted - a mere introductory interlude before the real action begins.

It will not be lost on Hairybones readers that there is a whole industry and politic behind them. Not only do they set the mood and tone for the film, they are also an exercise in ego - in those involved having their name up in lights and attaining the recognition for all their hard work and fabulous talent.

Titles are of such cultural significance that they are regularly plundered by inspirationally challenged advertising agencies (how many times have you seen the in-situ type from the Panic Room Titles ripped off in a TV commercial?). Yet with the internet's undying ability to elevate the niche, title sequences are now receiving the recognition they deserve by way of a site that celebrates the medium - a site that asks you to forget the film and watch the titles.

Hairybones will leave the in-depth curatorial of titles to others, but offers up this great example created by Aaron Ruell for Napoleon Dynamite. Aaron played Napoleon’s geeky brother Kip in the film. He is also a director in his own right, being responsible for the Comcast advertising campaign that celebrated the much-maligned concrete idiom.

He’s a talented little fella.

Hairybone pick:: LCD Soundsystem 'Sound of Silver'

"Like Jon Spencer Blues Explosion remixed by Underworld" was the lazy description I gave for LCD Soundsystem once. LCDSS's sound is of course a whole lot more than that. And now that I have listened to James Murphy's sophomore 'Sound of Silver' (released on March 19), the comment is almost redundant.

The album kicks off with the familiar low-fi DFA discopunk and moves into new ground as the album drives ever forward with echoes of New Order, Kraftwerk, Bowie and Talking Heads. Murphy flaunts his influences throughout the album (and if you're familiar with the lyrics of 'Losing My Edge', you'll know he has a few). On "All Of My Friends" James' vocals even venture into early Bono territory. I heard cries of woe as I just typed that, but fear not, it is excellent and his signature nasal and knowing delivery is still the main feature.

While the first album's mood was very much 'missives of an aging hipster', Sound of Silver is more 'on-the-road insights of a self-aware rock star'. James Murphy was never lacking in depth, yet he has ploughed it. His sound didn't need to mature, but it has. This man is a musical polymath with the soul of a hedonistic Buddha...and our ears are so much the better for it.

Buy it from Amazon

PS. My good man Barrington has secured me a ticket to see them live at the Melkweg here in Amsterdam on March 17. To say I'm excited would be a tragic understatement.

Type II

In this second instalment of the Hairybones Type feature (check the first here), we present a movie poster created for Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey'. The fact that it is not an original promotion for the film, but created for a Fine Arts graduation project fails to detract from its genius.

Winner of the Hairybones Gold Bone for Excellence in Typography: Experimental Jetset.

Clark - Herr Bar

The world of music videos throws up yet another surreal excursion exploring human body parts, alien worlds and fantastical creatures. There was Encyclopedia Pictura's Star Trek geo-porn and Motion Theory's 20,000 lengths of electrical cable under the sea. Now we have this NSFW animated fun park ride through a world of human anatomy by Clemens Kogler for Clark. Clark obviously likes his videos on the experimental side and seems to have a penchant for millipedes. 1stAVE Machine featured the more traditional variety, while Clemens Kogler has opted for a chain of...well...I'm not quite sure.

Embedded QT here

L'EST

My post below had me thinking about other motion graphics when Lord Of War sprung to mind. The film itself slipped under the box-office radar with the marketers strangely pitching it as a bad Cage shoot-em up, when actually it was a well produced film with a taught script addressing contoversial (for Hollywood) subject matter. The film must have been a nasty surprise for Hollywood-blockbuster-action junkies, because it was a pleasant surprise for me.

The film kicks off with one of my all time fave opening sequences. It follows the life of a bullet from it's manufacture at the factory all the way to the battle field. The virtually seamless combination of live action and 3D graphics was done by the very talented and very french L'EST.

Modest Mouse - Dashboard

Hot on the heels of Encyclopedia Pictura's surreal clip for Grizzly Bear, comes this psychedelic seafarer extravaganza by Motion Theory. Motion Theory is a motion graphics and production company that up until this point produced excellent yet smaller scale projects. Watching this clip I get a a feeling that these guys are ready to break into the major league.



Embedded QT here

Manga Jesus

Dusty Laptop Interlude #1

Dusty Laptop Interludes is a weekly digression from the usual Hairybones content. Each Sunday will bring a new installment from an offline journal found on an old laptop running a Windows 95 operating system. There is no internal floppy drive and the external jack is shot, so the only way this story can get out is by way of me re-typing it.

It follows a twenty-something’s journey to find himself, truth and true love in a city that can bury all three in a heartbeat.


Episode 1: Love on a street.

Is it possible to fall in love with a place? Is it possible to fall in love with a point on the map as you do with a soul? If so, is that love a mere reflection of what you believe in, of yourself, of your ultimate aspirations and needs? Ask these questions and the question mark will always linger beyond the hypothetical. You can try and breakdown why you love someone, something, somewhere. Beauty, depth, mystery – you can apply any checklist you like and the love itself (being greater than the sum of its parts) will always exceed it.

Poets, artists, scientists, priests, prophets and even Buddhas have tried to explain to themselves and us what love is…and failed. Their efforts have made for some truly astonishing art, started terrible wars and helped us understand ourselves and our place in the universe just a little more. Yet nobody has come close to explaining what love is. We celebrate the dizzying heights of its inception, philosophise about its murky depths and lament its demise. Despite the futility we keep trying to make sense of it. Love is inexplicable. Love is irrational and unpredictable - just like life itself. Maybe the meaning of life and the meaning of love are inextricable. Love exceeds explanation and consciousness. Like life, love just is.

I fell in love with a London street today. And I’m not going to tell you why, I won’t even tell you how - my words would only form bars and eventually a cage. All I can do is give an account of the moment that I first walked down it, through it, amongst it and relay some of the observations and thoughts that stuck around long enough for me to write them down.

I have lived in London for four years and I like to think I have seen and experienced a lot of what it has to offer. But in these four years I have never visited the place that I visited today.

I was meeting up with a potential new flatmate. Here, East, was the only point on London’s compass where I hadn’t lived yet. The East is a vast unknown to me and there I was, AtoZ in hand, trying to find a pub called the Royal Oak (and hopefully someplace to rest my head for a few months). The first hint that piqued my curiosity as I walked along Hackney Road was the odd person laden down with a pot-plant or flowers. Then as I turned onto Columbia Road, several cars with trees jutting out of sunroofs and windows rolled by – with the driver and passengers barely visible amidst the foliage. Several large market trucks flanked the road by The Birdcage pub and once I cleared them, I saw it.

It opened up before me as a river of colour snaking through the brown brick cliffs of the two-up/two-downs on either side of the slightly meandering street. Can you imagine a sight more beautiful in London’s grey-stained and harsh East End than a street chock-full of flowers?

I have always sought out contrasts and I have always lived close to a market. They are cultural hubs that remind me I live amongst a rich and diverse community that (at least in this city) spends most of its time indoors. But Columbia Road, a flower market in deep East London, is something else entirely. It’s a sight and spectacle so inviting that you can’t help but plunge right in. Once in, the slow moving current takes you on a riverboat ride though banks of exotic and fragrant stalls – with each flower vying for your attention as though you were its naturally designated pollinator. The market traders are every bit as colourful as the produce they are touting, as this is after all London’s Cockney heart. The air is dense with their soundtrack of shouty East End market-boy schtick and one-liners peppered with Cockney-accented Latin plant names (for a fiver!)

Being a flower and plant market, Columbia Road escapes the crass materialism of other shopping experiences. People walk down the streets smiling serenely as they clutch on to their new plants. These purchases won’t lift your status or make your life easier. They are living things that brighten your day and remind you that the world isn’t all concrete and machinery. Sure there are flower markets around the world that look a whole lot better on a postcard, but living in London (and particularly the areas surrounding these markets) is an intensely urban and often bleak existence and it is this setting that drives home the magic of this oasis of colour. Its flowers and plants remind you of the natural world from where we once dwelled. They are the flesh we apply to the skeletal bones of our architectural structures. They supply us with oxygen in more than just the scientific sense. People smile as they walk off with their newly acquired plants because it has made them feel more human, more in touch with nature.

I finally found the Royal Oak pub in the middle of all this. An old market pub with a market licence (8am opening time) that had been done up slightly as a gastro pub...maintaining some of its orginal market charm. It was late afternoon and as I sipped on my pint waiting for my prospective flatmate, I looked out on to the market through the large pub window at some of the stalls now being packed up. As the bargain hunters swooped in for last minute steals, I noticed that anyone who bought a large plant had to hug it in order to take it home. It was at this point that I decided I had to live here. Even if it was only like this one day out of seven, I knew it could only be good for the soul to live within strolling distance of Columbia Road, East London.

Bullit

I got talking about car chases today. Several classics were mentioned. There was the excellent Vanishing Point which is virtually one big car chase from beginning to end and featuring the divine 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T. There was also Mad Max (sadly an american dubbed version after the jump) featuring the Aussie muscle cars of my childhood. And of course there is The French Connection - but it's no favourite of mine as it features no muscle.

There really is only one.

And that's Bullit with the inimitable Steve McQueen. In the greatest car chase of all time, Steve did his own stunt driving as he battles it out on the streets of San Francisco in a 68 Mustang GT Fastback against two goons driving a 68 Dodge Charger R/T 440 Magnum (in ominous "Tuxedo Black"). Nothing even comes close.

Trivia for car geeks: The exhaust note of Steve McQueen's mustang is an overdub using a recording of a Ford GT40

Type

When I started out working in print design and advertising twelve years ago, one of the designers took time out to explain to me the power of type as a graphic medium. "A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it has nothing on some perfectly crafted type." he said.

Type has the ability to instantly convey a mood or a message before the reader even has a chance to read the words that it constructs. Below is one of the best examples I have seen in a while...a new twist on some familiar dialogue.

Kasabian :: Live

One of the blessings of living in this city is that you get to see most of your favourite bands up close and personal. Bands always fit a stop in to Amsterdam on the European leg of their tours and there are really only two venues - Paradiso and Melkweg - both of which are small. So whereas in London you'd be struggling for a decent view, here in Amsterdam both venues have wrap around balconies and excellent acoustics to allow for maximum enjoyment (for even the latest of stragglers).

Last night's Kasabian gig at Paradiso was a perfect example. We turned up about 20 minutes before they got on stage and still managed to claim a spot on the 1st floor balcony so close I could have poured my beer on to Chris's bass. We had some friends turn up late and they managed to slot right in behind us...all at a sell-out gig. So good.

Though Kasabian's swagger is something of an anachronism in these days of indy winsome posturing, it is nothing if not infectious. They picked up the place from the moment they belted out Reason is Treason and never let up. They were totally wired and were clearly enjoying themselves whipping up an extremely responsive and largely British crowd. With the chanting echoing throughout the venue, the whole experience was like being at a football match. One skinhead up the front got so amped up he started throttling other gig-goers out of sheer over-excitement. Luckily for his victims, his big breasted girlfriend intervened each time to calm him down.

While Kasabian may not be breaking any new ground, they are the masters of guitar AND synth driven rock. Last night they rocked the venue with flawless workmanship. Leadsinger Tom whipped the crowd into a frenzy with his Mick Jagger swagger and 'come-on-let's-have-it' gestures (like Mick, Tom's stage routine is just the right side of camp for rock n' roll). Serge stayed as still as possible so the girls could get a good look and swoon, Jason looked like he was dressed for a Jesus and Mary Chain convention and Ian and his ever increasing girth bashed the hell out of his tom-toms.

It was an excellent gig that mainlined rock n roll into your veins. Even the most cynical hipster couldn't have stopped his foot from tapping. Kasabian are good and they know it.

They also give good video. See below for their Banksy-esque 'Reason is Treason' clip

Jetman

I want one.

The Rapture 'Pieces of the People We Love'

I am but one of many that has been loving The Rapture's latest album, 'Pieces of the People We Love'.

Their video for their hipster dissin' 'Whoo! Alright-Yeah... Uh Huh'directed by Ben Dickinson was the most fun had on a Brooklyn rooftop since I don't know when.

So what are band and director to do for a follow up?

Change direction it seems. Ben Dickinson shares the directing credits with Jon Watts in this video for album title track 'Pieces of the People We Love'. The boys drop the superhero capes and Beastie-Boy-goofiness to go for a more stylish and paired down vibe. Colour and animation also step aside to allow for desaturated and minimalist photography in a white studio egg - with characters literally emerging from the shadows.

It works.

Oh - and they throw in a glitter suit to let us know they're not taking themselves too seriously.




Streaming Quicktime here

New design

I finally found some time this weekend to have a bash at re-skinning this blog and lose that bland template. My Photoshop skills were a little rusty but I got there in the end.

I also checked in on my analytics this weekend and was happy to see a decent amount of global traffic passing through. There was of course the expected European and Stateside traffic, but also some from China, Argentina, Turkey and Indonesia too. Welcome to all of you and if you have time, please feel free to leave a comment on the blog or Gmail me at hairybones. Let me know what you like about Hairybones Blog, what you dislike, what you'd like see more or of etc. I need the input...it is after all only early days.

Stay hairy.

Bright Eyes 'Four Winds'

The king of performance-based indy music videos, Patrick Daughters, has directed this effort for Bright Eye's 'Four Winds'. Patrick has an enviable reputation for eliciting powerful performances from the artists he works with - most notably for Yeah Yeah Yeahs' 'Maps'. Coner's performance doesn't disappoint in this video and Patrick's photography is typically sharp and captivating (and there's the signature gig-in-an-irregular-venue setting), yet the core concept somehow falls a little flat with me...



...maybe it's the plastic cups. I can appreciate they are the only thing venues will let you drink out of these days, but it's all a bit soft compared to what the Blues Brothers had to put up with:



PS. I'm yet to find a version of Four Winds without a screwed aspect ratio. How do you manage to fuck that up? Did they get their grandmother to capture it on her new widescreen TV? Tsk.

Music

In all the navel-gazing about new genres, breaking acts, what's cool, what's not and general hipster chin-stroking - it's easy to forget what music is really about and how it has the power to break down the boundaries of genres, generations, backgrounds and cultures.

I'd never heard of Naturally 7 until I saw this. They are a New York based a cappella group that only do covers. Watch below as their impromptu performance on the Paris Metro slowly takes effect on some of the glum Parisian commuters around them (regardless of background).

This really isn't my style - yet it made the hair on my bones stand on-end and put a smile on my face.

That's the power of music.

Lilly News

While still being a long way off Pete Doherty levels, Lilly Allen is doing a pretty good job of accruing pop-rag headlines. I've decided I'm going to keep an eye on her progress and post any newsworthy stories. This week's tidbits come courtesy of Popjustice - and it seems Lilly is gaining something of a reputation for being a brawler:

":: Lily Allen has been photographed looking 'teary' (maybe hungover) on the morning after the Brit Awards. She also had some sort of fight with Amy Winehouse at the show.


:: Lily Allen has been fighting in Australia with rubbish rock band Jet and had to be saved from a fight with Mike Skinner by her mates Kasabian."

Bless

Hairybone Pick:: Arcade Fire 'Neon Bible'

This has been leaked on the web for some time, but we finally had a promo copy arrive today. I have had several listens and can safely say this album is an all-conquering masterstroke.

I loved 'Funeral'. It was a new musical language that was warm, chaotic and exciting. And this time around that language seems even more sure-footed and confident. I had a debate with some AF fans that this sophomore effort is a more accomplished album than Funeral. They felt Neon Bible (while excellent) lacked the magic of the debut. I counter that Funeral's magic had more to do with the discovery of something fresh and unique...a ramped up perception conjured by the element of surprise. Neon Bible can't possibly live up to that as there is no mistaking that this is an Arcade Fire creation. This album treats fans to the familiar Arcade sound, but it's a brand new rollercoaster - with newly engineered flips and turns thrown in to really pile on the G's.

The album is also subtly political without getting preachy. The band is really down on religion, war, economics and global warming, yet it's the power of Win's lyrics and vocals (not the issues) that get to you.

I couldn't possibly trivialise this album with a song-by-song review. But for some reason on my first listen, I felt compelled to write a comment down for each song...a kind of word association game...but with tracks. Results below:

Black Mirror - Too much fun to be a nightmare
Keep the Car Running - Win's wail sails the blues
Neon Bible - Nursery Rhyme twisted into a playgorund taunt
Intervention - A hymn for here and now
Black Wave / Bad Vibrations - Orchestral indy's 'Dusk til Dawn'
Ocean of Noise - What it says on the tin (of refried Mexican lovebeans)
The Well and the Lighthouse - Punks on 1990 ecstacy
(Antichrist Television Blues)- Springsteen on slide guitar
Windowstill - It's getting dark out, best come inside
No Cars Go - Hey!
My Body Is a Cage - Bigger than Meatloaf

tpc 'Smoker's Delight'

I'm no fan of your generic hip-hop video, but me here at hairybones has an open-minded approach to music and videos and if it's good, I feel the need to call it. I stumbled across this on Antville. The track has a "somethin somethin" and I found the photography and editing smoothe (last time I promise) on the visual palette.

Apart for a love of Tribe Called Quest, Wu-Tang Clan, Jurassic 5 and Tone Loc's not so popular 'Cool Hand Loc' album (yep)...I'm not really knowledgeable of the Hip-Hop genre. So I decided to call in my resident hip-hop specialist Cherribones. She didn't mind the track and thought that the director was obviously aiming for something Paul Hunter-esque. Cherribones didn't think it was any different from any of the other big hip-hop directors and not much of a stand-out.

I think Cherribones might be a bit harsh - but what would I know. Best you judge for yourself.



High Quality QT here

Update: Cherribones does soften the blow by saying this video is indicative of a welcome trend in the world of hip-hop videos away from ho's shaking their booty just for the boys towards a more minimal aesthetic and artistic use of performance and framing (see Justin Timberlake's 'My Love' by Paul Hunter, Jay Z's '99 problems' by Mark Romanek, Kelis' 'Trick me' by Mr X)

A bicycle wheel of ever increasing spokes

Video.Antville regular 30 Frames has once again posted a considered dissection on the state of the music video industry both here and here. And while I don't necessarily agree with everything he says, it's hard to argue against the facts and figures that clearly point to a music video industry in a critical state.

Checking in on niche outlets such as the UK's MTV2 and sites such as Video.Antville you would be forgiven for thinking the industry as being in rude health. You'll see a panoply of creativity - a medium and industry that is bursting with new ideas, techniques and talent. Yet scratch beneath the surface and you'll see that the dollar is slowly undermining the good fight. MTV doesn't show music videos anymore - and those they do show are overblown, overproduced mainstream monstrosities. Videos at the low to medium end of the spectrum aren't displaying any hard evidence of driving sales and some say this is responsible for ever decreasing video budgets. Video budgets are stupidly low- to the extent that it is virtually impossible to produce a music vid without calling in favours from every single person on the call sheet and many a blind eye turned at the post house. But what is the root cause of this? Is it that vidoes have lost their value added and promotional punch due to the manner in which we access our media? Or is there a higher cause?

This problem is not unique to music videos. It is applicable to any media that is obtainable as a digital file. Print Media and Music felt it first and soon TV and film will receive their wake up call. Even advertising TV budgets are feeling the pinch with clients increasingly expecting web viral campaigns to be produced with budgets that would make a music video director blush (5-10k).

It's all down to a larger problem. We are no longer accessing our media through controlled and confined sources. This means the numbers of people seeking their media, information or entertainment are being dispersed in vastly smaller numbers across a vastly increasing number of outlets - alot of which provide previously paid for content for free. The money available for producing, marketing, buying and selling this media has not increased and this means everyone is getting a smaller piece of the pie - with the pie becoming a bicycle wheel with ever increasing spokes. Spencer Reiss' wired article discusses how the web fragments our media experiences:

"The Net in particular is brutally centrifugal, fragmenting newspapers into articles, movies into clips, and CDs into songs, all dispersed to servers across the earth. It has never been kind to enterprises that try to gather everything under one roof."

The music video industry is just another victim of this phenomenon. You no longer have sure fire platform (such as the MTV of old) where videos are curated to ensure quality music and music videos are being consumed by large numbers. Even Antville is becoming a victim of its own success, with a new 'monthly faves' posting to help cut through the increasing amount of crap being posted. Blogs such as Cliptip and SRO help...but are also indicitve of the above mentioned fragmentation.

While videos aren't showing any evidence of really driving sales with breaking acts, fans and potential fans (those interested in a band due to any buzz or hype surrounding them) are always on the lookout for material to sate that interest. Bands are still looked upon as 'brands' by the record companies - and as a result they will still welcome any exposure or added value provided by music videos. Their larger issue is download and P2P culture and the fact that their product (the music itself) waltzes straight out the back door and on to the black-market the moment it is produced. I think it is more this trickle down effect of less money being pumped into the industry that is effecting music video budgets rather than their lack of effectiveness as a promotional tool.

I've loved music videos from the moment I saw Thriller as a kid. Fans will always want that extra level of engagement with the musicians they're into. Videos give you an extra dimension to the personality of the music and its creators. When I was a kid, I'd sit there for ages going through the album/cassette sleeves of a new purchase to glom any extra possible info about where the music came from. Kids don't have that hands-on, tactile experience in these digital days - and web content and video will be (and is) the new medium to fill that gap. The moment (if ever) the record companies manage to protect their property with watertight security, the cash will flow back into music videos.

It's a brave new world/the wild west/open season/(insert cliché here)...and who knows how it's all going to pan out. Everyone (especially the trailblazers) is making it all up as they go along. Soon enough, somebody is going to come through with a vision and some killer code that numbers the pages churned out by the printing press. Until then - there'll be wunderkinds who keep on creating masterpieces with zilcho money (and people like us who lap them up) to keep the embers glowing.