Falling Sky

This Week, I Have Been Mostly...

WATCHING: Hairy Bikers' Bakeation (BBC2/BBCHD/iPlayer). Normally I really dislike cookery programmes.  With cooking (like sport, or sex) it's usually much more fun to be an active participant than a passive observer - and after watching someone prepare some delicious food on such shows, you don't even get to taste it! Oddly, the rare few I have actually enjoyed enough to watch all the way through have all been focused on baking. I'm not entirely sure why that is - perhaps because I'm already comfortable with basic bread making, perhaps the relatively messy aspect of baking helps avoid the soft-focus tweeness of other shows?  Dunno.  Whatever it is, while I really enjoyed Rachel Allen's Bake! series (her visit to Falko led directly to our choice of wedding cake), I quickly lost interest with her Home Cooking series despite following a near-identical format. And while I normally wouldn't bother watching the Hairy Bikers cooking their merry away through a series & tie-in book, I've found myself cheerfully tuning in to the Hairy Bikers' Bakeation this month.

Two episodes in, it's an odd but generally endearing mix of a) yon Hairy Bikers baking a recipe available on the BBC website (and the tie-in book), b) a baker from whatever country they're in demonstrating how they make their own particular specialities, and c) general travelogue malarkey as they make their way around Europe. The first episode was cracking, focused on Norway, complete with oodles of beautiful vistas, quietly polite people, a jaw-dropping hotel and gorgeous bakeries, culminating in a bread that looked so good the inability to taste it was infuriating (where's my Wonkavision?). The cooking highlight was probably 95-year-old Nikka, a lovely old lady who looked like she'd been drawn by Sylvain Chomet, and her decades-old waffle iron - good luck getting one of those in Lakeland. The mix of travel show and cookery show isn't the smoothest, and the second episode (cramming in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg) was very much travel show first, cookery second. Still, hopefully upcoming ones will spend a bit more time back in the bakery, particularly the episodes in Germany and Austria. And while the Hairy Bikers' schtick is laid on thicker the stodgiest wholemeal ever, somehow it's on just the very edge of the right side of cheery-daftness/downright-annoyingness. Now if only they didn't have such a propensity towards nudity... 

Anyway, you can get recipes from the show up on the BBC Food site, while the trans-European nature of the show has been picked up by the Open University who've produced a fascinating interactive map on the language of baking across Europe. And while there are clips available to view, there don't seem to be any embeddable ones - silly Beeb! - so we'll just have to make do with this not-safe-for-work spot of re-editing by Cassetteboy instead.

 

READING: For fans of all things Moominage and Moominish, I'd highly recommend this article that caught my eye, The Moomins, and their gift for tolerance written by Gordon Campbell over two years ago. It's a lovely piece of writing that captures the joy of the Moomins, the emotional heart, the depths, the things that have made the Moomins ring true for so many people over the last 60+ years.

What makes the Moomin stories so enjoyable – and so popular with parents as well as children – is the wit, compassion and energy present in such abundance. Adults and children respond alike to the same elements in these books, which is quite a rare event.

[...] One English boy wrote to her : ‘I enjoy the Moomins so much because they are so unreal in form, and so real in person.’ No author, Jansson wryly responded, could ask for a higher compliment.

It also links to this equally beautiful obituary for Tove Jansson by Shelley Jackson from 2002.

Melancholy, ambivalence, loss and disillusionment, yearning and disappointment are Tove Jansson's great themes; she is also really, really funny. The unnameable may be no farther away than the bottom of the garden, but it is also no closer. Moominland has floods, comets and tornadoes, but it also has Moominmamma, who can banish most terrors with weapons no stronger than a cup of coffee and a good spring cleaning. 

LISTENING: Just getting into the latest album from School of Seven Bells, Ghostory. It carries on the lovely jangly wall of sound from their previous records with a great pulsing relentlessness, like Cocteau Twins doing krautrock. The standout so far for me is the first track, which is rather scuppering the rest of the album because as soon as The Night finishes, more often than not I'll press |< and play it again (it's great for getting a fast walking pace going, particularly for marching up Leith Walk after work). 

BEING IMPRESSED BY: I'm at least a week behind the rest of the Internet on this, but stuff it - if you've not had the pleasure yet, do watch this five minute video of the Wrecking Crew Orchestra from Japan. It's thrilling stuff, using electro-techno like Daft Punk and Justice to soundtrack dancing in 'neon suits', said suits being turned on & off to give the boggling impression of video editing cuts happening in reality. Definitely one for watching in as HD as possible.

This Week, I Have Been Mostly...

SNIFFLING: After a sick-leave-free Winter, the first in recent memory, this week saw me drifting into the realm of the unwell thanks to a cold-carrying Wifey and a couple of hours shopping of Edinburgh, before which I felt fine, after which I felt blocked-up and boggin'. Head colds are no fun, especially with a nose as, er, striking as mine, but my main concern is to try and get shot of the bugger before it gets chesty, since that's kicked off asthma nastiness in the past. While it's not gone yet, I think the cold is on the way out and I should be back at work next week without fear of being labelled a walking talking piece of germ warfare.

LISTENING: More great new music shoved in my general direction by BBC 6Music - this time it's Sharon Van Etten's latest album, Tramp. It's a fantastic album, full of confidence and fire, somewhere between singer-songwriter, country and indie-rock. While there's a sadness in the lyrics, this isn't broken, desolate music - think somewhere between Laura Marling, the National and Beirut. Give Out is sparse, mainly voice and acoustic guitar, yet electric guitars play along in echoey reverb, while Serpents punches hard and urgent with a chorus of "serpents in my mind... everything changes," spitting out lyrics like "you enjoyed sucking on dreams" while relentless drums keep a sense of thrilling urgency while guitars keen and howl. It's already shaping up to be one of the songs of the year, and I'd expect to see the album on many an end-of-year list too, especially as it grows on you with every listen. Excellent stuff.

WATCHING: BBC4 celebrated its tenth birthday with a disco-themed weekend, complete with a hour-long documentary on The Joy Of Disco. Well worth a watch on the iPlayer (until Friday evening), it's an enjoyable and eye-opening potted history from 1969 to 1979, from the Stonewall riots to (this was news to me) the Disco Sucks riot, with lots inbetween. The soundtrack was, inevitably, absolutely wonderful, but there was plenty more to it - even though you wouldn't think of it as a niche subject, I still felt like I learned plenty from the documentary, while enjoying every minute (dig the surprise appearance from Truman Capote!). There's a couple of good short clips over here.

THIS WEEK'S TUMBLR OF CHOICE: Batman Running Away From Shit.

Plus du Meades

I've been getting a fair number of page referrals from the BBC after writing about the recent three-part Jonathan Meades on France, and feeling a bit guilty because I didn't really write all that much - this interview from The Dabbler was far more deserving of attention, even if it was a bit too combative for my tastes. Anyway, the series is currently being repeated on BBC HD, and for a show so visually inventive and beautifully shot that can only be a good thing.

The first part, Fragments of an Arbitrary Encyclopedia, has already had its HD outing and is up on the iPlayer for the next fortnight. The second, A Biased Anthology of Parisian Peripheries, is up on BBC HD tonight, after which expect a similar appearance on iPlayer. It's a superb hour of television, eschewing the usual depiction of Paris for something altogether more nuanced, more complex - there's no Amélie here - with the focus on France's colonial history, by force and by culture. I felt like I learned an awful lot from this, or perhaps more accurately became aware just how little I knew when it came to France's position in the world, particularly the inclusiveness (of a sort) offered up to colonials willing to become 'French' in a way the British Empire never did, and how Parisian homes seem to have become de rigeur for dictators and tyrants.

The third part, Just A Few Debts France Owes To America, gets HDified next Monday. To be honest I didn't connect with this, it felt too over the place compared to the previous episodes - but I'm half convinced this is more a fault on my part, that I wasn't paying attention enough. I'll give it another spin in its hi-def form and hide all distractions in the shed.

ANYWAY, the point of writing this follow-up post is to direct anyone who comes a-looking from the BBC site to check out Jonathan Meades' upcoming book. Yes! It's true! It's happening via the crowd-sourcing publishing site Unbound, and will be (according to yonder site)...

 a handsome volume (heavy on the handfeel) containing five full scripts of his most important TV films (illustrated with stills) and about forty pieces, including ten longer essays. Very little of this material will have been read by a general audience; the scripts, in particular, have never appeared in print before and offer an extraordinary insight into Meades meticulous working methods and his subversive visual style.

Wifey & I signed up to this as soon as we heard about it - being crowdsourced, there's different levels of 'support' (ie money) you can give, from a straight up tenner for the e-book version to £250 for (among other things) lunch with the man himself, a prospect I am neither wealthy nor interesting enough to consider. If we were a) London-types and b) not on the verge of parenthood, the launch party option might have been the way to go, but as it was we committed to the hardback at £20.

The project managed to meet its target by the deadline late last year, but you can still sign up for the book ahead of publication which, according to an email from Unbound last week, will become available to subscribers in the week before 31st May, with the text fully delivered to the publishers. The book is called Museum Without Walls and sounds like the perfect written companion to the totally-bloody-essential-even-if-you-can-see-them-all-on-YouTube* The Jonathan Meades Collection DVD.

 

*see MeadesShrine for much, much more.

This Week I Have Been Mostly...

WATCHING: Sherlock (BBC1) January is a beastly, beastly month and ought to be banned. Given this is unlikely for the foreseeable future, god bless the BBC for sweetening the bitter pill of these cold long winter nights with the return of Sherlock. Well up to the standard of the first series, this was a joy to watch and, as with Doctor Who, had the confidence, wit and imagination of British television at its best. While the plots were necessarily complex, the characters kept you hooked even when all seemed opaque. The performances were superb across the board, but the Holmes/Watson interplay is so perfectly nailed by Cumberbatch and Freeman, counterbalanced by the unhinged darkness of Andrew Scott's Moriaty, far more unpredictable and creepy than the sophisticated moustache-twirling villain the name usually conjures up. The final scene of The Reichenbach Fall was classic television, so thrilling you barely blinked, driven by nothing but dialogue. And that, that, is a cliffhanger.

Jonathan Meades on France (BBC4) I've written before about why Jonathan Meades is on the Falling Sky National Treasure list, so we were very happy bunnies indeed when last Saturday's TV listings revealed a brand new three-part series from the man himself on BBC4 (where else?) devoted to France - that is, "the 95 per cent of France that Brits drive through and don't notice en route to the 5 per cent that conforms to their expectation." The first part, focused on the region of Lorraine, was prime Meades - inventive, evocative, intelligent, opinionated, angry and wry, often all at once. You can watch part 1 on the iPlayer until 10pm, 8 February - part 2 is this Wednesday at 9pm on BBC4 and promises "A Biased Anthology of Parisian Peripheries". (UPDATE: for more Meadesness see Plus du Meades)

 

LISTENING: Ironically, my first brand new album of the year turned out to be music from twenty years ago. Following positive reviews in The Quietus and Pitchfork, I thought I'd give Drexciya's Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller I a go - and I'm very glad I did. This is Detroit-based techno/electro from the 1990's (see this Wire essay for more background), intense electronica that reminded me at points of Kraftwerk circa The Robots and early Orbital, yet doesn't sound dated despite the age. There's some wonderfully menacing bass here, like deep ocean rumbles, while beats rattle furiously - this is music that would be equally at home on a subterranean dance floor or the soundtrack to a breathlessly exciting sci-fi action scene. The below is a real treat, one of the best tracks from the album accompanied with clips from the BBC's Blue Planet documentary series, those deep sounds perfectly placed in an underwater world of squid and whales.

READING: Still in the middle of a book - internet-wise, there was a good article on The Daily Beast with the self-explanatory headline Consumption Makes Us Sad? Science Says We Can Be Happy With Less. It basically covers the same ground as books like Affluenza and Enough, but when the message of over-consumption is being hammered through on a daily basis, any dissenting voice is to be welcomed. The article makes a particularly good point on the importance of doing as opposed to having.

There are several possible reasons why doing does more for us than having. First, though doing is just an episode in life, we continue to “consume” the things we do by remembering them, and sharing our memories with others. Second, doing is almost always social, and I’ve already indicated how important social relations are to well being. Doing things together with others may actually strengthen social ties, and because our social relations are much less predictable than our relations with stuff (the Mercedes doesn’t change from day to day, or behave weirdly as we drive to work), we are less likely to adapt to our activities. [...]  Third, doing seems to constitute a more meaningful part of our personal identity than having does. Now, we all know people who “are what they own.” But there is reliable research indicating that people who are like that—people who have what we might call materialist values—are less satisfied with their lives than people who don’t. 

This Week I Have Been Mostly...

Let's try doing this again! Yes, let's!

WATCHING: The Mystery of Edwin Drood / Horizon Special (both BBC2/BBC HD). The BBC has done some stirling work these last few weeks marking Charles Dickens' 200th birthday. The biggie was a three-part adaptation of Great Expectations between Christmas and New Year, and excellent it was too, but to my surprise it was bested by The Mystery of Edwin Drood - all the more surprising given the source material is famously unfinished.

It was an absolute pleasure to watch, with some superb acting - Matthew Rhys' performance as John Jasper was remarkable - some exceedingly Dickensian characters played at just the right level of theatricality (take a bow, third-person-referring Durdles, the office-loathing Bazzard and Deputy, best urchin ever) balancing out the brooding fevered darkness at the heart of the central character, the whole thing beautifully filmed and scored. All that, and a genuinely satisfying ending, so bravo to Gwyneth Hughes for pulling that off - I'd like to think Mr Dickens would have been quite delighted. An excellent start to the year for BBC Drama - if you missed it, do catch both parts on iPlayer until 10pm 18 January. A Blu-Ray release wouldn't go amiss...

Also excellent, also on BBC2, though pretty much the polar opposite of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was The Hunt for Higgs - the Higgs bosun, that is. This was a Horizon special, presented by Falling Sky favourite Jim Al-Khalili, essentially getting into what they're up to over at CERN and why 2012 is going to be so exciting. It was fascinating stuff, pitched at just the right level of complexity - no mean feat given the science involved. Catch it on the iPlayer until 10pm 24 January.

LISTENING: We've been indulging in unabashed clichéd French music thanks to Putumayo's French Café compilation. It's the soundtrack to the perfect imagined French café, and while there are contemporary artists on there it's not a reflection of the modern French music scene. It is, nevertheless, a real pleasure to listen to. There's 13 tracks, not a duff one among them, though I particularly like the fun that Jane Birkin has with each syllable of Elaeudania Teiteia, and the beautiful melancholy of Un Jour Comme Un Autre by Brigitte Bardot (both touched by the hand of Gainsbourg, who also makes an appearance on this album). Tres belle.

READING: The coverage this week concerning the eventual referendum on Scottish independence has been of wildly varying quality. Obviously, given my employer, I'm not going to start sounding off my own opinions on this here site, and recommendations of articles should not be taken as endorsements of either side. Proviso in place, I very much enjoyed this refreshingly long post by the Economist's Bagehot columnist recounting an interview with Alex Salmond earlier this week. The comments, inevitably, get into the usual ranting territory that any online article about Scottish independence does, but the piece itself is a fine one. Too often, particularly south of the border, the issue (and individuals involved) are painted far too simplistically, hysterically, all pantomime, indignation and stroppiness. The issue, the considerations and the consequences for those both north and south of the Tweed deserve much better than that. Whether you support Salmond's policies or not, he is unquestionably one of, if not the, most interesting and charismatic politicians in British politics right now, and the Bagehot post gives a real flavour of that - plus the delicious line "It felt a bit like interviewing a teddy bear driving a bulldozer."