chris caines

What do you think of Treme so far? We’ve been enjoying it, a change of pace from The Wire certainly (and strewn with Wire references if you care to trainspot). I found it hard to believe someone wasn’t about to get killed in the first couple of eps. Used to the slow character building now, only 4 eps in but looking forward to it each week. Doesn’t have the air of a series made by some people given a blank cheque after the success of a hit, though on the other hand you can’t imagine anyone being given the opportunity to make something like this in many other circumstances.

Saw that movie from last year “Gamer” last night rugged up on the couch supping herbal tea treating my cold with hearty chicken stew and TV time. I didn’t think they made B movie scifi flicks like this anymore, films like Escape From New York and Videodrome. Usually a collection of earnest alternate scifi ideas cribbed from literary scifi of the previous decades and done with trashy intensity and a sense of fun. I for one am glad these films are still around and Gamer is a pretty decent example helped along by the Gladiatoresque looks and performance of its star Gerard Butler and the first person shooter aesthetics of the camera and cgi work.

The novelty of having a Hollywood film deal with social networks and gaming as a setting alone makes it worth a look. But there are also good performances and pyrotechnic pacing to enjoy amongst the schlock. Trailer:

The wealth of music making apps being launched all around the place for the iPad this week has reminded me to post the next in my most beloved apps series. This one being about songwriting tools, I’m not talking about actual audio creation tools or instruments, but more tools for coming up with chord progression ideas. The best of these is called ProChords and whichever starting chord you choose to begin with it gives you a series of chord choices to continue with based on a huge song database ranging from the most common to least common following chords from your starting point.

You can then save combinations and sequences for refining later on the keyboard or fretboard of your choice. Unfortunately all of the samples used to play the chords are of big acoustic piano sounds so it can feel like you are writing a 90s house anthem. Nonetheless it is a great way to tinker around with sequences you might not come up with otherwise. Simple Songwriter uses the same idea but restricted to a smaller pool of chords, the LE version is however free.

The only instrument I have enough fluency on to then start fleshing something out is the guitar, and I’ve found this Chordmaster app invaluable as a chord lookup dictionary. Again there is a free LE version, I eventually moved on to the pay one for the wide range of different voicings up and down the fretboard for trying out the progressions I’d made.

Down here in the beach shack we do a lot of laying about on the couch. And when the weather and sunspots align right we can pick up 4 snowy channels on the old TV, we’ll watch whatever is most visible as a rule. So it came to be last night that we saw the first of a BBC doco series, “The Seven Ages of Rock”.

I realise that once having a great civilization or empire and then having it no longer can be hard for a society to process no matter how much time passes. Often you’ll see the more nationalist elements using the great legacy as a rallying call for a return to supremacy, Italy during the Mussolini years or Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge years for instance.

For Britain this tendency gets acted out most noticeably through the BBC, its world spanning ubiquity an echo of empire. The documentary productions especially follow the intrepid British explorer model bringing insight and a civilising influence to the world. Always the authoritative voice pronouncing whatever is before them as the biggest, oldest, deepest, hungriest, most dangerous thing in the known world.

And so it was with the 7 Ages program which proclaimed Rock to have started in 1965 and to be invented by English people by combining an African American legacy unknown to clueless Yanks with native British ingenuity. As well as ignoring every other part of the world, the only American featured as a bit player in the Rock story was Dylan, portrayed as a minor folkie until being galvanised by the electric sound of the British invasion.

It continued on with the Boomer history of the 60s we’ve seen thousands of times, intercutting Vietnam, etc. While trotting out the usual suspects as talking heads (though I’m always entertained by Keith Richards). I wonder where they go now from here constructing a British history of popular music, the next episode previews with Pink Floyd & Bowie featured heavily point the way forward, the sun never sets on the BBC.

The other night I finished reading “The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll”, the book of recent collected criticism by Robert Forster of the Go-Betweens. I know the Go-Betweens are no more after Grant McLennan died so suddenly and unexpectedly a few years ago, but because they spent so long in hiatus as a band after they dissolved in the early 90s and reformed ten years later I’d already grown used to thinking of both of them as members of the band whether it was active or not.

The book is mostly a collection of music columns for The Monthly, I heard Robert talking at the Brisbane Writers Festival about how trepidatious he was about becoming a critic after one of the editors of the magazine called him out of the blue with the offer to write about whatever caught his fancy. He’d had one piece published ten years earlier and that was it. He described at the festival how he’d started writing no less than thirteen opening pages for a novel over the years, but now thought the short form of these collected pieces suited him much better and he’d finally come to a form of writing he could embrace.

I’ve been a fan of Robert & The Go-Betweens since starting high school so not being a regular Monthly reader I would have sought out this book no matter the quality. But the reviews are good and as a musician he brings something to the table you don’t read much of in cultural criticism, a sympathy for the creative drives and impulses, compromises and failures that rule musical production and a sense of the strength of feeling artists can have about each other’s work. Some of the more unlikely pieces are the best. The reading of the career of Delta Goodrem, the appreciation of The Monkees, the review of the most recent AC-DC album and the evocation of Brisbane in the live review of the reformation of the original Saints.

There are two pieces that are kind of eulogies for Grant that end the collection and are quite moving if you’ve followed them both over the years. If are interested in the band and the relationship of these two seek out the live DVD from a few years back called That Striped Sunlight Sound, the extra disc is a long loungeroom interview with the both of them and the dynamic between them is revealing and entertaining to watch.

I just finished reading the Peter Carey novel that came out 18 mths or so ago “His Illegal Self”. Probably the 8th or 9th of his I’ve read, a perennial holiday reading favourite.

One thing that strikes me is how often Bellingen and that nsw north coast area comes up in his writing. I know he lived in the area for a while in a 70s style alternative community & it seems to be a rich touchstone that he returns to again & again. Some of his earlier books like Bliss & Oscar + Lucinda were partly set there (that great opening scene from O + L with the church floating down the Bellinger river) & in the years since he has been living in the US American characters increasingly visit Bellinger Valley. Memorably in the 80s artworld setting of “Theft, A Love Story” & in Illegal Self a setting very like Bellingen in the 70s is transposed up to the hinterland behind Noosa Heads.
Increasingly his view of the area and the people is harsh and flinty eyed (particularly toward the more feral hippies), but as always with Carey vital and energetic. Perhaps I should go back and read the earlier ones again but my sense is that he gets better with each book. He has this great ability to obscure details from the viewpoint of different characters forcing you to join the dots when you see the same situation partially from the viewpoint of another character. It’s a masterful trick one of the things I enjoy most reading him.

I now have the new one “Parrot & Oliver in America” in the pile to read after Roberto Bolan “The Savage Detectives” (which is an astonishingly good novel set in mid 70s Mexico City), one of his historical novels which are not usually as successful for me, but nonetheless looking forward to it.

We watched Moon last night down here in the holiday shack, the surf a constant pounding white noise and the moths flying into the projector beam up onto the fibro wall. It was directed by Duncan Jones, famously the son of David Bowie & is his first feature. It is a weird collection of 70s sci-fi riffs joined together into what feels like an elegant though unadventurous cover version.

The look and feel is equal parts Silent Running, Dark Star, Solaris, 2001, Alien and the TV series Space 1999 and the later Star Trek series. It is also owes a lot to the stories of Phillip K Dick and Thomas Disch, even early Arthur C Clarke. It doesn’t do much with these ingredients except join them together and re-present them, though it does so with conviction and heart. One thing you can see them going for that doesn’t quite work is the tone of mystery and horror contained in some of these source films. Finding out what happens (which I won’t reveal in case you haven’t seen it) feels quite procedural, though gripping in a low key way.

Still, it is great to see someone trying to do something psychologically challenging with science fiction as it is rarely attempted in cinema post Star Wars with any of the depth you find in the written form. Clint Mansell did a fairly over the top score, heavy on complex synth textures which I enjoyed and was prominent in the mix filling lot of the space left by tracking shots across empty moonscapes.