Considering how many movies I’ve been able to watch during this semester, this weekend has been a productive movie watchin weekend for me; I’ve seen three movies so far (or maybe two and a half since one was a collection of shorts). On Friday I watched Rataouille and Pixar Short Film Collection, not too much to say, entertaining and typical Disney, I found Ratatouille especially to be quite classic Disney, but I don’t really know what made me feel that way. I needed to balance this entertainment and easyness out with Jim Jarmusch’s 1984 indie film Stranger Than Paradise, a movie about a stiff relationship between Hungarian cousins. The movie is quite theatrical, many of the scenes are long and take place on the same set. The movie starts with a long scene at the main character Willie’s apartment and then turns into a sort of road movie with Willie and his friend Eddie. The two friends and later Willie’s cousin Eva go on a road trip to New York, Cleveland and Florida and the movie presents these places as very similar. It is a pretty stiff film, not too much happens but there is always that tension throughout the movie that Jim Jarmusch is so good at. I can definitely recommend this movie if you are a fan of Jarmusch or independent film.
Today I watched an interesting video from G4TV’s daily Attack of the Show podcast. The segment was called The Loop: Musicians in the Digital Era. A contributor for Wired News, Eliot Van Buskirk and Phil Kay from a Nuclear Free City was invited to discuss the new digital technology of music and how it affects independent musicians. Although interesting, I found the arguments and topic quite obvious, but what I think was the most intriguing point was when they started talking about the physical formats. Van Buskirk argued that people are beginning to go back to vinyl, probably due to that the format is far opposite from digital formats. I think this is a very valid point.
I now recall a conversation I overheard in one of downtown’s record shops. That business is going better due to all the kids that buy frames for record covers, want to buy vinyl because of the ‘cool factor’ of the covers. I like the fact that vinyl starts to get cool again, it’s not just a nerdy collector or a DJ (or a fusion of them both) who gives attention to vinyl, but a broader sense of the public. This will gain the true vinyl nerds because it will probably make less stores go bancrupt.
I was also skimming through a book today by Frank Broughton and Bill Brewster called How to DJ (Properly), I came across an interesting chart of positives and negatives of DJing with CDs compared to spinning vinyl. Although there were many positive notes on why you would want to play CDs the last one said “once you’re bitten by the DJ bug you’ll probably want to get into vinyl as well.” A quote I think signify the physical value of a vinyl record. As a DJ that grew up practicing on vinyl; I find it very hard to accept a strict digital setup. Since all my records are back in Sweden I am forced to stick with a digital setup over here. Playing on a computer is functional, but I honestly find it extremely hard to choose a song to cue up for the next song, since all music is just in a massive library of mp3s, they are all just in a dull list of titles, when playing with vinyl you have a whole crate of large colourful sleeves that you put together for that particular night, you don’t only get the pleasure of sitting home choosing what to bring and imagine what you might play, you also get the sense of where to find them in the crate (an important aspect of DJing, since not finding the song you want to play is one of the biggest nightmares of playing out). So even if more and more DJs play CDs today, understandably to the lower costs and and learning time, acknowledging both formats will definitely make you access a broader variety of music and hopefully that leads you to play better music.
I have been into lounge music for a really long time. I consider that the first song I ever heard of the style is the first track on a mix cd by Thievery Corporation that came with a magazine, many many years ago. The song was ‘Bossa Per Due’ by Nicola Conte. I’m guessing that being a very early James Bond fan made me get into it a lot. The music was modern bossa, with many sixties’ influences. Nicola Conte is an Italian DJ and producer and I love all his stuff: his DJ-sets, acoustic music, electronic music, remixes (they’re amazing). He gets away from one of the things that can bother me very much with lounge music; that it just become trendy background music for decoration stores.
A couple of years ago Conte released a record called Other Directions, the sounds on this album was very traditional, yet somehow very modern.
I have been DJing for many years, mostly Deep House music but I love to play more chilled sets, where I have more space to play things I have discovered, and listening to Nicola Conte’s sounds always make me contemplate to just become a pure Jazz/Bossa DJ. That would be cool.
I have recently stumbled upon quite a few interesting things that can add to the discussion about digital versus analogue/acoustic in music. It seems to me that classical symphonies, instead of looking back in time in a conservative way that might be thought of has instead started to collaborate quite extensively with the electronic/digital music scene. Maybe the most known phenomenon of this is in music today is Detroit techno legend Jeff Mill’s collaboration with Montpelier Philharmonic Orchestra (clip can be seen here). And today I found this on one of my favourite record label’s website. It is a trailer for a DVD and CD by the band Phoneheads and the Düsseldorfer Symphoniker. An interesting collaboration indeed. Another example of this is the popularity different Symphonies around the world have gained with performing nostalgic tunes from video games. I’ll try and deal with this in another post.
Guldbaggen is the name of the Swedish cinema prize, similar to the Academy Awards in a certain way. This is not an event I have ever been interested in to be honest, my opinion of Swedish film lately has been: dull, uninteresting, lack of quality and quite frankly just plain bad in some cases. This is absolutely not something I feel generally of Swedish film, historically we have had great success with many, many great works up until the 21th century. I feel that since the millennium shift there has been a lot of quantity in the business, with a very low rate of quality. The one (of the few) responsible for that little bit of quality in my opinion is Roy Andersson. His latest movie, Du Levande or You, the Living brought home the most prestigious awards, including best movie, best screenplay as well as best directing. I’m extremely happy he got these awards, it is so good that quality film is really being awarded. The honorary prize went to Gösta Ekman who without doubt deserves it. A true entertainer indeed (you probably need to be Swedish to know who he is).
Studying in a creative field, such as film, I find it very important not to forget what kind of work that inspired me and made me choose this field. To keep my interest up I need to go back to these works once in a while. For me, many of Woody Allen’s movies have definitely inspired me to want to make my own movies. This weekend I watched Annie Hall (made in 1977), one of his best, and of course most famous films. Maybe what is most notably about it is his way of storytelling; scenes jump in different directions, we move between his mind and the film’s reality, all of a sudden Alvy (Allen’s character) turns to the camera and asks or complains to the audience. Alvy even manages to make situations maybe all of us has wished to participate in, such as the time he argues with a man in the line to the cinema about Marshall McLuhan; the man obnoxiously claims he knows a lot about McLuhan’s theories because he teaches a course in media, Alvy questions him and then brings out the real McLuhan from behind one of the posters, McLuhan then tells the man he has no idea about his theories (here is a clip of it). It is scenes like these that make this movie such a masterpiece. It shows the extreme control Woody Allen has over the medium. No wonder it won four Oscars, and has been such an important film for comedies, or romantic films, even made today.
If anyone would like, please post a comment about some work that has inspired you to choose your program or field of interest. That would be very interesting.
Posted by Ville 
Posted by Ville 
Posted by Ville 
