Lucky Three is a mini profile of the singer-songwriter Elliott Smith. Directed by Jem Cohen it was shot between October 17-20th in Portland, Oregon and released in 1997. The film shows footage of Portland with performances from Smith shot in a bedroom. Track listing:
Instrumental version based on what became "Baby Britain", at the beginning and between the “Thirteen” and “Angeles,” studio version appears on the album XO (1998).
"Between the Bars" (take 3), studio version appears the album Either/Or (1997)
"Thirteen" (Big Star cover), a version appears on the posthumous compilation album New Moon (2007).
"Angeles" (take 1), studio version appears on Either/Or (1997)
Elliott Smith died on this day in 2003 at the age of 34.
On this day in 1985, Kate Bush released 'Cloudbusting', the second release from her finest and most successful album: Hounds of Love. The song concerns the relationship between psychologist and philosopher Wilhelm Reich and his son Peter (whose perspective the song is told from).
The single, which peaked at number 20 in the UK singles charts was backed by the track 'Burning Bridge' - a startling piece of music that wonderfully encapsulates a women’s plea to her lover to intensify his level of commitment to their relationship. Rhythmically akin to most of side A of Hounds of Love, 'Burning Bridge' is the perfect companion to the magnificent 'Cloudbusting', with which it also shares a similar layered vocal effect.
Listening to the song it seems odd that 'Burning Bridge' was left off Hounds of Love - it would've made a great ending to the first side of the album (Hounds of Love is split into two suites - side A: 'Hounds of Love' and side B: 'The Ninth Wave', a seven song conceptual piece). That it was omitted simply demonstrates the rich vein of creativity Bush had struck.
Hard to imagine then that earlier in that year the music press was awash with rumours about Bush - who seemed to be languishing almost in pop obscurity. Speculations touted about her situation were that she had possibly gone mad, ballooned in weight while others suggested she'd even retired from music altogether.
Her previous album, 1982’s The Dreaming left many fans baffled, “It’s my she’s gone mad album,” Bush remarked years later. In hindsight however, this has just gone to prove how much ahead of the game she really was.
In fact in the August 1985 issue of the NME Bush was mentioned in the ‘Where Are They Now’ section of the magazine. This may have been in part due to her previously prolific output, in the fact that between 1979-1982, she had released four albums.
A mere two days later after the NME article was published Bush made an appearance on Terry Wogan’s talk show to perform 'Running Up That Hill' - the first single from the album which peaking at #3, turned out to be her second best selling single (after #1 debut release 'Wurthering Heights').
Actually Bush had been working from her home studio in Kent and as such was able to work at her own pace experimenting with new sounds and instruments. She was also afforded complete creative control over the project. Indeed synths, drum machines and driving bass lines were incorporated with traditional Celtic music that coloured much of her first three albums. It turned out to be the perfect marriage of Bush’s unique lyrical delivery and epic sonic soundscapes.
Though she has continued to release music of outstanding originality and quality, Bush has so far been unable to scale the dizzying heights of 1985.
Furthermore, the song also represents a quainter time in mainstream music history when a B-side was quite often worth flipping the single for while remixes were saved for the 12-inch.
London - the Modern Babylon is a two-hour history lesson of this famous metropolis through a collage of meticulously edited archive footage and music.
Opening with a blistering montage of historical moments as the Clash’s 'London Calling' plays, the sheer volume of imagery bombarding the screen becomes almost overwhelming. And there’s plenty more to come.
Compiled by legendary documentary maker Julien Temple, the epic voyage begins in Victorian London at the height of British colonialism.The journey ends in 2012 as London is preparing to host the Olympics - waiting to welcome the world.
It’s the skilful juxtaposition of sound and image that really colours the film. In one of the most energetic scenes the news footage of Suffragettes rioting is set to the X-Ray Spex’s 'Oh Bondage, Up Yours!'Temple follows this scene with the siege of Sidney Street in 1911, giving a clear indication of the film’s main theme: oppression.
Though the footage of Edwardian London is fascinating, the first half an hour or so of the Modern Babylon does feel rather slow.However, it soon gathers pace after the WWII, when the first influx of Caribbean migrants arrive in London when the City’s racial tensions begin.
These musical archive sequences are broken up with talking heads, some archive, some newly shot.These moments also provide a chance for the viewer to catch their breath.
Interviewees include, among others, Malcolm McLaren, Molly Parkin, Tony Benn, Ray Davies, Suggs and Barbara Cartland.Though it’s 106-year-old lifelong Hackney resident Hetty Bower’s contribution that really brings the film to life, giving a first-hand account of how London has evolved over her lifetime.
Julien Temple
The city’s iconic landmarks are largely ignored; instead London is shaped through the eyes of its people and their individual experiences.Though Michael Gambon’s familiar voice gets the film underway, the absence of a main narrator allows London to take centre stage.
Temple selects clips that show both the best and worst of the city simultaneously. He uses Michael Powell’s 1960 film Peeping Tom to accuse London of being a voyeur, while Tony Hancock in The Rebel mirrors the burgeoning cultural freedom and experimentation of swinging London.
London is shown almost as a living creature - with a life cycle.But it’s a fragile life, occasionally brought to the brink as a result of strained relationships between conflicting groups.Often these are racially motivated, but there are also class tensions – and these usually boil over into rioting. Yet, each time London emerges wiser and stronger.
Continual links between times of unrest are constantly hinted at, while the film concludes that London is a richer place with its wealth of cultures, detached from the rest of Britain, almost a country in its own right.
In the end Temple shows London as an ever-evolving city, constantly re-inventing itself, while the film concludes that the Londoners themselves - well, they never really existed.
Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas is the semi-autobiographical account of Hunter S Thompson and his friend, the political-activist and attorney, Oscar Zeta Acosta. It chronicles the two's drug induced visits to Nevada in March and April of 1971. Originally published over two parts in Rolling Stone magazine, Fear and Loathing has rightly come to be regarded as the author’s pinnacle achievement as well as a vital document that helped jump-start Thompson's gonzo journalism legacy.
With the Republicans in the White House, and as Thompson points out, it's no surprise The 1970s began with Heroin as the drug of choice. The radical sub-cultures that coloured the 1960s are now a distant memory. That once optimistic decade burnt out alongside LSD crazed hippie enthusiasm: “It is worth noting, historically,” Thompson dryly remarks, “that downers came in with Nixon.”
Working for Sports Illustrated magazine Raoul Duke (Thompson), is summoned to Las Vegas to cover the Mint 500, a free-for-all dirt-bike race. Armed with a boot-load of narcotics, booze and a .357 magnum they soon abandon the race and are gorging on cocktails of mind-bending substances. Insteaf Duke and his Samoan attorney Dr Gonzo begin a drink and drug fuelled trip to Vegas, now in the vague hope of uncovering the ‘American Dream’ – whatever that may be.
Las Vegas is the perfect location for the book: a symbol of American vulgarity and consumerism - loud and brash and repulsive: “This is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.”
Throughout the mayhem they terrify a young hitch-hiker and become embroiled with the police, tourists, casino and hotel employees. More carnage ensues when a drugged-up Duke is called to cover a Cop convention on narcotics, observing first hand the police's hysteria and delusion when the book boils over into some bizarre psychedelic farce.
Throughout Fear and Loathing as the reader you're never wholly certain on what events are real and what events are hallucinations. Artist Ralph Steadman provides - a now iconic, harrowing accompaniment to the proceedings with his unique monochrome illustrations that capture the nausea and despair of Duke and his attorney’s twisted visions.
“It was dangerous lunacy, but it was also the kind of thing a real connoisseur of edge-work could make an argument for. Where, for instance, was the last place the Las Vegas police would look for a drug-addled fraud-fugitive who just ripped off a downtown hotel? Right in the middle of a National District Attorneys’ Drug Conference at an elegant hotel on the strip…”
Personally acknowledged by the author himself as one of his finest achievements, Kurt Vonnegut's semi-autobiographical Slaughterhouse-Five tells of the fire bombing of Dresden, Germany just before the end of the Second World War.
Chaplain’s assistant (and eventually optician) Billy Pilgrim is captured by the Germans during The Battle Of The Bulge and is transported as a POW to Dresden. It is on that slow trip to Dresden where Billy first becomes “unstuck” in time.
Narrating through various time periods, Vonnegut employs a mosaic of genres, particularly science fiction and realism to preach of the futility and absurdity of war. By using sci-fi as a device he's is able to chronicle the protagonist’s life via a non-linear time plot yet keep the suspense the traditional linear narrative - no, this is not a typical war novel.
Billy neither a war hero nor soldier lives various parts of his life randomly, so in one paragraph Billy will be in Dresden, then Chicago twenty years later – occasionally several times on a single page. An author without the requisite literary skill risks bamboozling the reader, but this is Vonnegut at his mercurial peak.
Jumping from one time place to another, the memories of Dresden never leave Billy (and probably Vonnegut), he is forced to re-live them for eternity. But this guarantees Billy a certain, if albeit, bittersweet immortality.
In an extraordinary twist Billy is abducted by a race of aliens, known as Tralfamadorians – as he always known he would be. He is taken away to the planet Tralfamadoria and placed in a sort of intergalactic zoo. It is there where he is placed with pornographic model Montana Wildhack and “forced” to mate. During a conversation with the Tralfamadorians, Billy challenges the notion that all events are preconceived but is rebuffed with the response that everything has happened and will continue to happen.
Exploring the concept of fatalism, that is that no man has power to influence the future and therefore his own actions, the Tralfamadorians explain to Billy that events - specifically war, is an inevitability (just as the end of the universe is, and always will be, caused by a calamitous Tralfamadorian).
Vonnegut cunningly uses the Tralfamadorians to give an outside perspective of the human race, while the idea of ‘free will’ is exclusive to earth – “only on earth is there ever talk of free will.”
Though the novel sounds confusing, Vonnegut manages the consistent time-travelling jumps skillfully, without the reader becoming disoriented - a real achievement for a unique concept.
Despite Slaughterhouse-Five depictions of horrific atrocities it's a deeply satirical and humorous black comedy (as his books tend to be) resulting in a wholly satisfying read. Very few books deserve the hype surrounding them – this one does.
So it goes.
“All time is time. It does not change. It does not warm itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.”
Note: Vonnegut uses David Irving’s inaccurate claim in The Destruction Of Dresden that 135,000 people were killed in the fire bombing – actually the figure was somewhere between 24,000- 40,000.
