L' ALLIANCE*

 L'alliance, d. Christian de Chalonge (1971)

INCOMING LACUNA

 

I'm going to take a short break to paint, drink and sit in the sun. See you in July!

FILE UNDER POST PUNK

 

Bee Vamp: Valium Girls / Lucky Grills / With Barry in Bengal 

Monster in Orbit Records (1981) 

'Well tell me, do you ever get headaches?'

One in three of all post punk bands came from Liverpool. Probably. You may not know this, but the city apparently has a rich musical heritage. Bee Vamp won't be getting a statue, a coach tour or a commemorative tin of shortbread biscuits any time soon, but they did leave behind two nice singles, the first of which is the quietly extraordinary Valium Girls.  

Intoxication is a standard subject for popular music in all its forms, particularly the getting high and the coming down. Fewer songs tackle domestic addiction, however, the epidemic of ordinary people in the thrall of prescription or over the counter remedies which now, apparently, affects nearly a million people in the UK alone. This song both parodies and celebrates the public’s obsession with pain killers, sounding like an art rock version of a pharmaceutical ad. The lyrics convey a grim kitchen sink vignette in a few well-chosen words: a young woman, ‘protected by her National Health prescription’ spends her days drifting aimlessly and thoughtlessly from room to room in her flat, numb, blank, drinking endless cups of Nescafe. We’ve all been there.

Like a lot of post punk music, this track features saxophone, but here it is played well rather than merely enthusiastically, much more Eric Dolphy than Eric Morecambe. The sax interpolations are played on the very edge of atonal, squeaky and squawky without quite becoming annoying. The guitars are bitty and intermittent, like somebody absently scratching their arm until it’s raw. There is a clever false ending that never fails to provide mild surprise. The bass and drums are good, too, never quite playing what you expect. It’s an excellent track all round, really, go and listen to it.

      

The b sides are much less interesting, but have verve, edging perhaps ill-advisedly into Pigbag territory, all happy horns, busy bongos and twangy tremolo arms. Bee Vamp were apparently great improvisers, and these tracks perhaps reflect what their live shows may have been like: energetic, chaotic, sweaty.   

As a final note, thinking about pain killers, isn't pain a vital message in bodily terms? I mean, isn’t it actually exceptionally important? Shouldn’t it be cured rather than killed or, rather, temporarily dulled? I don’t blame the addicts, but I do wish they could get more help with it. If this blog has any wisdom to impart (it really doesn’t), it's this: if it hurts, get it looked at it.

DANCE AWAY

The idea of adapting Edgar Allen Poe's short story 'The Black Cat' has occurred to a great many film makers, but very few of them set it in Texas with a cast of amateurs and a budget that was probably less than most movies lunch bills. The results are pretty poor, although some of the more frenetic elements did remind me of the pleasures and pains of an amphetamine based diet.

In the best scene, some youngish people become reasonably animated while listening to the worlds whitest band play a frat boy version of 'Bo Diddley' that doesn't come close to punching the gut and jerking the limbs like the superlative original. 

EVERYDAY ELECTRONICS

   011: Anti-Theft Alarm

DIRK BOGARDE NEARLY EATS A SANDWICH

Dirk Bogarde ultimately became an actor obsessed with making 'important' films that no-one particularly liked apart from the critics. This includes Providence, a film that sets out to be enigmatic and impenetrable but is actually just boring and unengaging. Dirk does virtually nothing with his underwritten character apart from a scene where he picks up a sandwich and runs through his standard range of expressions: exasperated, disappointed, supercilious, appalled...

Does Dirk eventually eat the sandwich? No, he does not.

A DULLISH WHOLE

 

Dead Shadow, d. Andrzej Klimowski (1980)

A fragment of an abstract dream - although this is, by far, the most interesting part of a dull-ish whole. 

FUN ON THE RUN

 

From Planet Of The Apes #101

Highlighting the glib, hip, slightly cringey style of dialogue Marvel persevered with well into the 1980s. On page 2, our hero* Derek says '--it's time to make quick like a BUNNY!!' whilst thinking 'Lord knows where I found the flippancy...' or, indeed, why?

* I've never particularly cared for the human characters. I'm in it for the apes.

HANS (JEAN) ARP / JEAN (HANS) ARP

Die Nabelflasche / The Navel Bottle (1923)

SOLID STATE THERAPY

 

Larry Cuba (b. 1950) is an American computer animator and artist whose films, especially 3/78 (Objects & Transformations) are quietly hypnotic and inordinately soothing, something I'm finding extremely important at the moment. I'll let Larry tell you the rest --

"Sixteen 'objects', each consisting of one hundred points of light, perform a series of precisely choreographed rhythmic transformations. Accompanied by the sound of a Shakuhachi (the Japanese bamboo flute), the film is an exercise in the visual perception of motion and mathematical structure"

Thanks, Larry - much appreciated.