Hiatus: 50 songs

Contemplating three years' cultural diet. Secondly, the music.

Returning to Edinburgh has kicked the blog back to life after three years of repose. Having already picked over the best films I've seen during this hiatus, now comes the opportunity to select fifty music tracks I have discovered (belatedly in many cases), and which then took me over and were played again and again.

Many songs have brought fun – those which found me dancing on repeat include Basement Jaxx, Lizzo, Camp Lo and Teena Marie. Some have a more emotional pull and will always, for me, be tied to a time and place; the Mark Kozelek, Francis Harris and Aretha Franklin tracks have each had an impact.

There is music new and old to consider. New music has taken a back seat the past few months whilst I have become thoroughly obsessed with Andy Kellman's excellent and comprehensive R&B blog. It's been a deep and extended dive into this world, only partially reflected below; but I am sure I will resurface at some point soon to try some fresher produce again. These things happen in cycles.

This list might not consistently reflect the very best music I have heard in this time, although much of it is sublime. These grooves and jams are the ones which embedded themselves. This is a more personal list than the films and compiling it a more personal quest. The fifty tracks tell a story of three years of my life.

A Spotify playlist appears after the list, which is presented in High Fidelity-style autobiographical order. Please listen.

Matthew Dear – Her Fantasy
Toy – Heart Skips a Beat
Spoek Mathambo feat. Yolanda – Let Them Talk
John Talabot feat. Pional – Destiny
El-P – Request Denied
Villagers – The Waves
John Grant – Pale Green Ghosts
Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five – Fireworks
Basement Jaxx – Back 2 the Wild
Deerhunter – Dream Captain 

Arctic Monkeys – Crying Lightning
Oneohtrix Point Never – Boring Angel
Tricky – Aftermath
Kelela – Bank Head (Extended)
Lizzo feat. Sophia Eris – Batches & Cookies
Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra – Strange Fruit
Triosk – Lost Broadcast
David Bowie – Jump They Say
Wild Beasts – Wanderlust
Mark Kozelek & Jimmy LaValle – Gustavo

Jimmy Hughes – Steal Away
Jimmy Scott – Sycamore Trees
Kate Bush – Lyra (The Golden Compass)
Ono with The Brother Brothers – Yes, I'm a Witch
Digable Planets – Rebirth of the Slick (Cool Like Dat)
Zebra Katz feat. Njena Reddd Foxxx – Ima Read
Yarbrough & Peoples – Don't Stop the Music
Bonobo – Noctuary
Teena Marie – I Need Your Lovin'
Camp Lo – Luchini AKA This Is It

The Time – 777-9311
Stevie Wonder – Do I Do
Zapp – More Bounce to the Ounce
George Benson – Turn Your Love Around
Cherrelle – I Didn't Mean to Turn You On
Shabazz Palaces – Forerunner Foray
Francis Harris – What She Had
Aretha Franklin – Call Me
The S.O.S. Band – Just Be Good to Me
Michael Jackson – Who Is It

Rick James – Big Time
Donny Hathaway – Giving Up
Herbert – Something Isn't Right
Blackstreet feat. Dr. Dre & Queen Pen – No Diggity
Erykah Badu – On & On
En Vogue – Hold On
Gladys Knight & The Pips – Midnight Train to Georgia
Bobby Womack – Across 110th Street
Ann Peebles – I Can't Stand the Rain
Ólafur Arnalds & Alice Sara Ott – Verses

Note: sadly, Breakdown by Prince and The Screams of Passion by The Family (written and mostly performed by Prince) are not available on Spotify. Happily, this made room for Kate Bush and George Benson. Enjoy!

Hiatus: 30 films

Contemplating three years' cultural diet. First, the films.

As life took a new direction, I all but disappeared from Googleable terrain three years ago, retreating elsewhere. Now I emerge from that hidden place, blinking into the light, into a very different world.

The hidden place was Yorkshire. As I negotiated my new life, God's Own Country cocooned me in an embrace of Northern matter-of-factness and unspeakably good pork pies. Now it's back to Edinburgh and time to reflect on a three-year interruption of normal service.

Here are thirty of the finest films I saw during the Yorkshire hiatus. Every one of them is recommended with a watch-this-now urgency. Admittedly, that is logistically difficult – but I beg you to make the effort.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928, Carl Th. Dreyer)

Trouble in Paradise (1932, Ernst Lubitsch)

Footlight Parade (1933, Lloyd Bacon)

Dodsworth (1936, William Wyler)

Midnight (1939, Mitchell Leisen)

Great Expectations (1946, David Lean)

The Asphalt Jungle (1950, John Huston)

Ace in the Hole (1951, Billy Wilder)

A Streetcar Named Desire (1951, Elia Kazan)

Summertime (1955, David Lean)

Bigger Than Life (1956, Nicholas Ray)

Punishment Park (1971, Peter Watkins)

The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979, Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

Fanny and Alexander (1982, Ingmar Bergman)

Brazil (1985, Terry Gilliam)

Blue Velvet (1986, David Lynch)

Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988, Terence Davies)

Raise the Red Lantern (1991, Zhang Yimou)

Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997, Werner Herzog)

You Can Count on Me (2000, Kenneth Lonergan)

Talk to Her (2002, Pedro Almodóvar)

Tomboy (2011, Céline Sciamma)

Skyfall (2012, Sam Mendes)

Amour (2012, Michael Haneke)

Stories We Tell (2012, Sarah Polley)

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013, Joel & Ethan Coen)

Her (2013, Spike Jonze)

Under the Skin (2013, Jonathan Glazer)

Boyhood (2014, Richard Linklater)

Birdman (2014, Alejandro G. Iñárritu)

Honourable mentions: The Last Laugh (1924); Flesh and the Devil (1926); Love Me Tonight (1932); Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933); a host of Barbara Stanwyck movies; Oliver Twist (1948); Un Chant d'amour (1950); Orphée (1950); A Face in the Crowd (1957); Anatomy of a Murder (1959); The Hustler (1961); Onibaba (1964); The Elephant Man (1980); In the Mood for Love (2000); McCullin (2012); Zero Dark Thirty (2012); Lincoln (2012); 12 Years a Slave (2013); Calvary (2014).

And a final big up to The Lego Movie and the films of Derek Jarman.

Thanks, Yorkshire.

Man Ray Portraits

Photography of a surrealist's friends and lovers

A dominant figure of Dada and Surrealism, Man Ray worked prolifically throughout his career in Paris and Hollywood.  Of the many media and forms in which he worked, the current exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (up from the National Portrait Gallery in London) brings together many of Ray's photographic portraits, illuminating this facet of his art.

The 1930s Parisian portraits are joyfully vivid. The artistic world, where everybody who was anybody was photographed by Ray, is opened up to us – from fellow Dadaist Marcel Duchamp to Gertrude Stein, taking in a heap of writers, composers and filmmakers. This is the Paris for which we yearn. The panoply of celebrity continues throughout the exhibition's chronology, including later portraits of Virginia Woolf, Pablo Picasso and Catherine Deneuve and work for Harper's Bazaar, Vogue and Vanity Fair.

Beyond this voguish set, there are dazzling works depicting Ray's series of muses: Kiki of Montparnasse, Lee Miller and his wife of 37 years, Juliet. There is a hint of a more private world here, as well as some of the exhibition's boldest artistry; it is in these works that the aesthetic capacity of photography is pushed forward. The solarization technique Ray developed with Miller is striking still, also featuring in a wonderful 1955 portrait of Leslie Caron. Meanwhile, the famous, sublime Le Violon d'Ingres from 1924 encapsulates so much of its time and place (the exoticism of the turban, the surreal violin f-holes and the exquisite beauty of Kiki herself) that it shines of its own accord.

In concentrating on photographic portraiture, the exhibition only hints at the breadth of Man Ray's innovation. Through the photographs and magazine spreads, we glimpse other aspects of his prolific and playful work: assemblages, films, a chess set, a preposterous smoking device. The portraits of Stravinsky, James Joyce and Yves Montand are all marvellous to see. But perhaps most interesting of all is how we imagine Man Ray's surrealist conceptions and constructions fitting into his Paris–Hollywood world, as we see it through his portraits.

Amour

These thoughts on Michael Haneke's beautiful study of ageing I left unfinished in January, forgot about and have now rediscovered. Here they are, as a short review.

In their eighties, Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) and Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) live a comfortable life together in Paris. They were music teachers and they are still lovers of the piano and its music. This is Anne and Georges at the start of Amour, both captivating already. Then, Anne suffers a stroke and the film becomes a study of what happens next, as life inevitably unfolds. The relationship she shares with Georges is transformed and shaken, there is daily horror and indignity, difficult family relationships are exposed alongside reminders of past success.

Amour is a masterful film from director Michael Haneke, bleak but intensely emotional. There are moments which are frightening, especially that first attack, and Anne's continual decline is shockingly rapid. And though the film develops gradually, the pace is never slow. This is riveting cinema, and at its centre is the astounding acting of Riva and Trintignant. Meanwhile, dramatic impetus comes unobtrusively from the flash-forward of the opening scene – how did Anne's corpse come to be alone, undiscovered?

Haneke shows us human spirit as both resilient and fragile. The meaning of deepest love is first suggested to be, and then strongly tested as, a duty towards the person to whom we are attached and share our lives. Amour's uncompromising approach is underpinned by a fearless gaze at the response to a natural but unfathomable reality. The question at the root of the film is: what, in the end, does love entail? Instinctive protection perhaps, or an understanding of need. Haneke does not answer the question – in fact, I suspect he believes we can never know. We just have to wait; it is terrifying and wonderful.

9

Django Unchained

Oh hi, blog.

Django Unchained hits us blasting and smirking, bestrewn with Morricone and enormous type. This is unmistakably a Quentin Tarantino concoction. But this time, 'unmistakable' suggests a lack of surprise. Now, Tarantino cannot be boring and Django Unchained is characteristically wild and precise in its execution(s). This is the story of a German bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) and a slave called Django (Jamie Foxx), who travel through the Old South to rescue Django's wife (Kerry Washington) from the control of a plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his sinister house-slave (Samuel L. Jackson). It is entertaining, of course.

However, whilst always funny, brutal or smart, it does not often enough mash all three together with the imagination of Reservoir Dogs or Inglourious Basterds. They still coincide in key scenes, for instance the first appearance of Waltz. He approaches two slavers and their 'property', and what follows is a shock of amusing words ("Last chance, fancy pants") and cleverly plotted mayhem. Waltz is bright and strangely convincing and, although Schultz is not quite a match for Basterds' Col. Landa, he carries much of the film, taking on its humour and human flaws and virtues.

Meanwhile, DiCaprio and Jackson inhabit Tarantino's line between evil and charm. The director knows so well how to seduce us with such characters. That line he paints is thick and lurid, unlike that etched in black by Wilder and Hitchcock, and from it his films get their drive (certainly those of the last decade). Here we have DiCaprio's sickening 'mandingo' fights, dogs and hammer, all surveyed with a grin; the film kicks accordingly. Both characters (DiCaprio's monstrous Calvin Candie and Jackson's monstrous Stephen) get great and gleeful moments.

Tarantino has set out to emulate the spaghetti western in Django Unchained, taking it to the South and piercing it with slavery. Doubt starts to surface. Humour amid the bloodiest of violence, a feature of the genre, does not always work (the bags-as-hoods skit raises a laugh, but feels out of place). There are stylistic quirks and vintage Morricone cuts on the soundtrack – but you had those in your movies already, Quentin. Are we to take them at face value here? Having the spaghetti served up in a real-life, actual, mock spaghetti western breaks the surprise. Then once Jamie Foxx starts to get his Kill Bill on, those quirks seem to dissipate anyway; so by the time we reach the huge set pieces and shoot-outs in the film’s final act, our sense of place – Mississippi and Italy – has been lost.

Foxx is Django. The D is silent (this is a cool character). Django is a sharp shooter and a sharp dresser. He is a man who loves his wife and is bitterly injured by her foul treatment, which is atrociously believable. His initial tussles with Candie are highlights and allow us to believe that at the centre of Tarantino's audacious story is a fresh character capable of real power and justice. But something is lost as he starts to deliver explosive revenge. He is a cool character. He is an icon, a symbol, a Quentin Tarantino concoction. Django is a vessel for violent catharsis – here to talk funny, act brutal and look smart. For justice to be done, for African Americans to be emancipated on the screen, he must be more than that. But it is entertaining, of course.

7.5

Waltraud Meier & Joseph Breinl

After something of a silence I return, boldly reaching into the deeper blogosphere.

Fortunate enough to be part of this year's official blogging team for the Edinburgh International Festival, my first assignment has been posted here. I saw mezzo-soprano Waltraud Meier (dressed in splendid pink) singing Lieder at the Usher Hall, accompanied by Joseph Breinl on piano.  It was all jolly good fun.

In all, I will be seeing seven concerts at the EIF this year (some assigned, others of my own volition). The International Festival has long been my favourite of the patchwork of festivals going on in Edinburgh each summer. Look out for the reviews to see why.

Books: Lively, Chabon, Isherwood

Coming back for more... Thoughts on three novels, each by an author to whom I was returning for a second taste. All are fast becoming favourites.

According to Mark – Penelope Lively
Eighteen months ago, I read Penelope Lively's masterful Moon Tiger, which I adored. Wanting more, I turned to this earlier book, in which married literary biographer Mark Lamming is researching writer Gilbert Strong, and soon becomes infatuated with Strong's granddaughter. Some of the most interesting aspects of According to Mark are its pre-echoes of Moon Tiger. A central chapter adopts a distinctive feature of that book's structure, retelling one vignette from separate viewpoints. The theme of historical perspective is also key, contemplating how one can consider from a distance the multiple stages of one person's life simultaneously. Mark reflects how "Strong he knew over a lifetime and all of him at once".

In Moon Tiger, this is developed even further, as the imperious Claudia Hampton writes a "history of the world as selected by Claudia". Mark struggles with his biography's subject, knowing information is missing ("lies and silences") and his perspective cannot always fit. The title provides a big clue. Penelope Lively's art is in framing all of these complex ideas within a modern, funny love story, the characters vividly etched. Perhaps According to Mark does not match Moon Tiger's perfect balance, its sensual world and elegiac romance. But it is another enjoyable, insightful novel from a completely undervalued author.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union – Michael Chabon

I next decided to revisit Michael Chabon, having read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay some time ago. This later novel inhabits the world of Chandler and Hammett, complete with spiky dialogue and epigrams. Hard-drinking detective Meyer Landsman attempts to solve a pleasingly complex murder plot, taking in his family's past, Jewish lore and chess. Chabon's wild spin is to place the story in an alternative reality, in which the setting is the Jewish homeland, but that homeland is Sitka, Alaska. The realization of this reality is mostly convincing, sometimes contrived; the wondrous writing is riveting.

What Chabon brings to the genre is a sympathetic and complete human story. The characters struggle as much against their past sorrows as against the present criminal underworld of Alaska. The series of conversations between Landsman and his boss/ex-wife Bina are electric and absorbing. Both bantering and mournful, the relationship forms the book's core. Meanwhile, familiar from Kavalier & Clay is Chabon's irresistible technique of separating key lines of dialogue with profound, aching prose. "Sweet God, aren't you ashamed of yourself?" asks Bina. Not until after a rumination on divine intention, chromosomes and faith do we get Landsman's reply: "Only every time I see your face." The writing may be pared down, hard-boiled, but the novel is rich.

Goodbye to Berlin – Christopher Isherwood

A companion novel to Mr Norris Changes Trains, Goodbye to Berlin is also based on Isherwood's real-life experiences in Berlin during the early 1930s. As before, the city backdrop is remarkable and vibrant, from underground clubs to squalid tenements. Hidden within this backdrop, deathly poverty, neighbourly suspicion and the rise of Nazism all hum, as Isherwood presents a sequence of indelible character sketches. As the hum grows louder, so the fractured world of Christopher's circle of misfits seems set to dangerously unravel. That we know what happens next makes this possibly the darkest light read that I have ever come across.

It seems light because Isherwood's smart style is infectious and a joy to read. The portraits are funny and the relationships warm. Squabbles abound in his cramped accommodation, which he shares with his wittering landlady, a prostitute and a barman, among others. The most wonderful character of all is struggling actress Sally Bowles (on whom Cabaret is based), gleaming with make-up but vulnerably waifish. She uses gentleman friends for money and necks a never-ending series of Prairie Oysters (a concoction of raw egg and Worcester sauce – "They're about all I can afford"). Smiling on top of her sadness, Sally is flippant and careless. Painfully, we know that Berlin's smile back is fading.