Author: rachel

Rachel, half-girl, half-robot.

Life Truth #234: The music you listen to as a teenager is what you will always listen to.

I was reading an interview with Keiron Gillen, the writer of Phonogram* and something was mentioned that I thought about and realised was probably one of those things that is true for nearly everyone. A life truth as it were. So… I have stolen it and made a new category for just these.

Of course, I’m not numbering them sequentially. That would be ridiculous.

Anyway, back to the point.

Chris Arrant: On a great tangent, one thing I found particularly interesting that happens both in comics and music is how a majority of people’s music and comic tastes in their older years is latched into the music of their teenage years. As with comics where we see a majority of the audience still holding out for the superheroics of the comics of their younger days, in music a large percentage of the average consumer-base continues to follow the musical acts of their teenage years. While people might veer outside their particular genre choices for the biggest hits of the day, they still call the tastes of their teenage years as their evergreen stomping grounds.

Kieron Gillen: God, there’s a lot of that in Phonogram. One things which pleased me – as it wasn’t something I was actively trying to write, as I think comics-as-commentary-on-comics-culture is so painfully overdone now – was how the whole defining yourself by your teenage loves is something that’s just as true in music and comic circles. Which is absolutely true – in fact, of all the pop art-forms, they’re the two which are most strongly polarised in that way. Films, TV, Games… you may have some of your tastes defined in terms of genre or whatever, but there’s always a constant consumption for new things which you may not always get in some people in Music or Comics.

On the topic of films and tv – I have always been a fan of science fiction. I probably always will be. It’s something I got into when I was about 3 or 4 and it’s something that will be difficult to shake off. Even before I was born, my cousins were trying to convince my parents to name me “Princess Leia”.

Music, however, is a bit different. While I will watch pretty much ANY sci-fi, I will not listen (and enjoy) ANY rock music. Or indie. Or hardcore. Or pop. Or whatever. I liked Blur AND Oasis, but never really got into Pulp back in the day. I was probably too young to really appreciate Pulp as a commentary on life at the time of BritPop, so all I was left with was the sound of the songs and… I just didn’t get into Pulp.

Ben Folds Five, I loved, I still love and will love for years to come. I heard one song by them when I was about 12 on Capital Radio and loved it, but didn’t know who the band were. Three months later, I heard a different song by them but this time managed to catch the band’s name and then proceeded to buy their back-catalogue. (I have a weird memory for stuff like that.) I can remember all the times I have heard them on the radio. I remember the heady heights of them hitting somewhere in the region of the Top 20 in the UK singles chart and then their subsequent appearance on Top of the Pops. Ben Folds on his own though, has never inspired the same devotion as Ben Folds with the other two guys, even though it is essentially exactly the same music. There is just something missing.

AFI are a big big love of mine and it makes me glad to think that there are now legions of teenagers who love them too and that they’re finally getting some of the attention that I thought they deserved back when I first got into them. And it only took them 15 years to get somewhere. 🙂

Silverchair, Feeder and Idlewild are probably the other three bands who I will listen to anything by. I may not have sat down and listened to them purposely for a long long time, but I know that if I fancy going to a gig (like I did back in April and then bought tickets for last week’s Silverchair gig) I can go and see them and I will enjoy the music.

While all my friends were beavering away at their GCSE art exams and I had two days off (being a scientist of course :)), I listened to the Manics entire repetoire of the time – on cassettes lent to me by one of my art GCSE-studying friends. In fact, I listened to it all on repeat for the entire two days while I mostly played minesweeper and solitaire on our old PC and marvelled that I hadn’t really listened to them before.

That one Cure song on the soundtrack to The Crow infected me with a love for the darker side of The Cure. Their less upbeat-sounding (regardless of the mood of the lyrics) songs.

I have a soft spot for 80s/early 90s pop music. Mostly Kylie, Jason Donovan, Rick Astley…anything I remember from TV when I was in primary school, as I didn’t listen to the radio then.

And finally “Echo Beach” by Martha and the Muffins. From the first album I bought which was a Best Summer Hits compilation.

And now? I like the Editors, but only really because they sound like Idlewild at the REM end of their spectrum. I don’t get the Arctic Monkeys or Lily Allen or Amy Winehouse or Fall Out Boy or the Klaxons. I got into NIN late in the day from listening to AFI and the Cure and getting curious about AFI’s influences. I started dabbling in Soundgarden a bit from my listening to Silverchair.

Electric Six somehow combined the dark bits of AFI with a slightly seedy version of “Echo Beach”‘s otherwordliness. Or at least they did with “Switzerland”.

It’s all music that reminds me of when I didn’t worry about anything. Not that I worry about anything now, but now I know that there are things that I could be worrying about, responsibilities, the future, stuff. Life was just easier. I was younger. I didn’t get tired like I do now. Life was golden and peppered with blissful ignorance.

“But before all that, before I spoke the way I do, thought the way I do, before I had all my scars, I was a child too. Hard to believe, but true.

Do you remember that? Do you remember being a child?

The answer is no, I’m afraid. You may think you can. But you can’t. All you can remember of those dim intense days are the bits that have helped to make you what you are now. Your remember the times when you felt alive, a few snapshots of special days and chance impressions, but those are a part of you anyway. You can’t remember the rest. You can’t remember actually being a child, when that was all you knew.

Except in Jeamland.

In Jeamland you can remember what it was like to be stupidly happy, when happiness wasn’t something you had to search for, when it knew where to find you by itself. ”
– Only Forward Michael Marshall Smith

That, in a way, is something of what the music from your early life and teenage years captures. The music you listened to then brings back the feeling of how easy it was to be happy then. And even if you were mopey and angsty and listened to the Smiths, listening to them again now gives the satisfying feeling that someone understands you on some level. In some way, it made you more content with life.

And memory brings back that feeling of contentment when you listen to that same music.

Of course now, I’m just waffling and babbling. Thinking about it, I doubt I’ve explained myself very well, but it’s late, I’ve had a busy weekend, training it around the country and I am exhausted, so that’s as good as it’s going to get.

*BTW. Phonogram is AWESOME. Magically deliciously awesome. I even yoinked some of the artwork for my “gone fishing” note on my other journal when I went on holiday in a bout of Manics nostalgia.

Phonogram artwork

Go and buy it. Do it now. The rest of the internet can wait.

Silverchair, Friday 10th August 2007

Silverchair are awesome on a stick. I saw them live last Friday and they were great. The music was great, the banter was great and I really really enjoyed the show.

PLUS they even played a grand total of 4 songs from the albums I do have. 😀 Must track down more recent albums.

Wrath of Gods

When Canadian director Sturla Gunnarsson and his cast and crew, including Gerard Butler and Stellan Skarsgård, set upon Iceland to film Beowulf & Grendel in 2004, they expected the usual complications involved in making a major motion picture.

What they encountered was a ruthless Icelandic winter on a foreboding landscape, financing complications and a bizarre run of bad luck that led some of them to believe they were in an epic battle with the Norse gods themselves. Filmmaker Jon Gustafsson was along for the ride. Hired to play one of Beowulf’s warriors, he’s one set with his camera as the crew battles hurricane force winds and he’s in the backroom as the producers scramble to shore up a collapsing deal, creating an intimate portrait of filmmakers fighting the odds in pursuit of a vision.

I really enjoyed Wrath of Gods. Not only is it good value for money (it has hours and hours of stuff to watch), but watching all the problems that they had making the film Beowulf & Grendel was bizarrely interesting, as was seeing what kind of sort of “normal” things go on behind the scenes. Like stuff to do with cashflow and accounting and health and safety and mud. And it make makes me want to see Beowulf & Grendel even more, because the little bits you get to see to do with the film look wicked cool.

Plus Iceland is a beautiful place.

Number of cinema-goers drops

The number of people going to the cinema in the UK fell for the second consecutive year in 2006, despite an increase in the number of films shown.

…going to the cinema is bloomin’ expensive and there seems to be some surprise that less people are going?

For one adult ticket at my local cinema it’s about £7.50. Now on orange Wednesdays, I bring my mum along and then it’s two for £7.50. Which is tolerable, except I like going to the cinema on my own.

In Birmingham however, one adult ticket is about £3.50 and then with Orange Wednesdays again, it’s two for £3.50. Far more tolerable.

So why is there the huge variation in ticket price? For the cost of one ticket to my local cinema, I could WAIT until the film comes out on DVD and then buy that. It’d probably end up cheaper.

A for Andromeda

Went a bit mad last week and ordered a bunch of DVDs, most of which arrived yesterday. Last night I watched A for Andromeda, which was really good. It’s a remake of a sixties tv series of the same name condensed down into one episode/tvmovie. I’ve not seen the original and I know that a number of changes have been made from the original, but I enjoyed this production.

The idea of an alien civilisation sending us the instructions to build a computer which is then found to be able to potentially save lives and bring us everything we could dream of is an interesting one and the question of whether we should blindly do what we are told and not question why they might be doing it is something that is addressed in the film. Although, of course, we never find out in “A for Andromeda” why (other than to destroy humanity) the computer design is sent – it’s suggested that it might be because this alien intelligence is looking for a new place to live as their current home is under some kind of threat.

The characters, especially John Fleming, all undergo some sort of transformation – with Professor Dawney and Dr Fleming swapping viewpoints. Initially Dr Fleming wants to keep working on his quantum computer and deciphering the message that they are being sent and Prof Dawney tells him to stop (or at least, passes on instructions from the powers that be). Then, when Prof Dawney is building Andromeda according to the instructions from the alien civilisation’s computer, Dr Fleming voices his doubts and misgivings and says that she should stop.

All in all, a good film. 🙂

Shooter

The other day I went to see Shooter. It’s a fun action film with a dash of conspiracy. Also, nice to see that the easy romantic set-up between Swagger and Sarah wasn’t taken – the slight tension from her being the widow of his partner and him feeling responsible for his partner’s death was a nice touch and certainly the single-minded focus on revenge on Swagger’s part shouldn’t have allowed time for romance!

Another small point that I liked was Swagger always standing to attention when faced with any kind of authority – even vague authority, which he kind of mentions later on, saying something about being trained to follow orders.

I think I will probably go and see Next or Spiderman 3 next, but I’ve not really heard anything good about Spiderman and at least if Next is bad, it’ll be hilariously bad. Whereas Spiderman will be just… meh. I don’t remember seeing the other two films in the cinema. In fact, I don’t remember seeing the second film at all. I’ll probably just wait until it is on tv.

Walsingham

Every year, ever since I was born, my parents and I make a pilgrimage to Walsingham, in Norfolk.

Which is where we went today and while I was there, among other things, it occurred to me that I should make some kind of video tour of Walsingham and the shrines there. Partly to share with my family, who mostly live in other countries, but mostly to share with my friends – most of whom will probably never step foot in a church, let alone visit a Marian shrine!

Randomly, I seem to be unintentionally named after the woman who built the Holy House at Walsingham and my parents would take me there and make the pilgrimage in thanksgiving for my birth. And really, they still do. It’s just that I’m old enough to conciously appreciate going there and everything that goes on there.

So, I guess next year I shall be writing to the various people in charge of maintaining the Anglican and Catholic shrines there and asking if it’d be ok for me to video stuff there and if there are any areas that they would rather not have a camera poking around – certainly it’s a bit rude to be filming in the middle of Mass or while the sprinkling services is going on by the well and I wouldn’t dream of intruding while people are deep in prayer.

It’s certainly something to plan for and to do well in advance of my next trip there.

Brick

Brick is a really really great film. Yesterday I watched it twice in a row, the second time with the director and cast commentary, and today I’m watching it again.
It’s basically a detective story that happens to be smushed into an American high school setting; although I don’t remember there being much of the actual school showing up aside from a few hallways and the vice-principal’s office a couple of times. And while it hardly uses the kind of language that a typical teenager would use, it revolves entirely around the things that teenagers are taken up by; who hangs out with who, the cliques and circles that spring up in a community, love, lust, drugs, popularity, wanting to belong, the kind of single-minded obsession with someone that you can only get when you’re young.

In some ways, this films reminds me of 8mm. Maybe it’s the way that it’s shot more than the general investigating a death theme. Although Nicholas Cage’s character in that film has more to lose than Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character, Brendan, does in this one – he has no friends, no family that you ever see (though they must be there) and in fact, I think all he does have is his dead ex-girlfriend. Who’s dead, of course.

Incidentally, while the way that this film is shot reminds me of 8mm, Brick is shot really beautifully. I could just watch this with the sound off and enjoy the composition of the scenes. I could watch single frames in random orders and I would still enjoy it. I could take screencaps and put the stills in a frame and hang them on my wall and it would work well. I would love to see this turned into a sketchy animated film too, because I think that visually that would look cool too. With a stick-figure Brendan mooching about and angry stick-figure Tug beating him occassionally. That kind of thing.

This next bit really goes after that last part of this entry, but that bit kinda spoilers things and well, this doesn’t really. Mmm coherency. Anyway, one of the other things I noticed when I first watched this film is that, at any point during it, there barely more than two speaking characters in a scene. That and the entire film follows Brendan, the main character, and his point of view – though without being able to hear his thoughts, like you might in a book, he always knows more than the viewer. Or at least, more than I do about how everything interconnects and works out. Then all is revealed with the exposition at the end, like he’s Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes. But I guess that’s just the nature of the genre really.

Also, the glasses & glasses case thing kind of works like the cigarette and cigerette packet seems to in a traditional detective film.

What follows may spoil the film for you (even though it doesn’t entirely have much to do with the actual film), so I’ve cut it from the main blog page. Click below to see it.
Continue reading “Brick”

He’s a part-time punk

So at some point, I should really expand on the static pages on the blog (rather than the blog entries that flow out onto the keyboard fairly well).

Then there’s drawing a list of all the bits and pieces on the other various sites I have that I want to update or alter. And then there’s making little notes like this to trying and get me to remember to do it when I have a moment that isn’t bedtime.

First thing to do I guess, is a big fat masterlist of the things I want to do on each of my sites in no particular order. Then I can just work down the list one thing at a time and add new things on to the bottom. 🙂

Here’s to getting around to updating and not forgetting Web 1.0 when drowning in Web 2.0. 😉