Teresa wanted to watch a vintage movie, so we plumped for this. Starring a youthful James Mason, with some oddly comic support, and a very young Herbert Lom as the villain. Made in ‘44, but set in 38, it’s an oddball thing. It seems to want to be both a thriller and a comedy. And in the end it’s not that great at being either.
A young and handsome James Mason.
Mason is Peter Vadassy, half French and half Austrian, looking to move to France and become a doctor, and escape Hitler’s regime. A mix up of cameras with another guest at the titular Hotel Reserve lands Vadassy in the embrace of the French police, who ask him to do a bit of sleuthing or espionage type work on their behalf.
A young and suave Herbert Lom.
Essentially the movie is about how Mason’s Vadassy character struggles, in a rather paranoid yet also playful environment – folk holidaying in southern France, on the edge of war – teetering between appearing too nefarious himself, whilst trying to smoke out the real villain.
Southern France on a studio lot.
Mostly filmed on a pretty unconvincing set, and with a rather oddball cast, some darkly serious, others bizarrely comical, it’s not a classic. But it is a silly slice of period fun. And by the end it felt kind of lame but enjoyable. Weird!
I followed up phase one of my tool caddy build, with the second step: adding a back panel/spacer strips, for taller and thinner stuff.
Much to my surprise and delight, since my most recent major tidy up and reshuffle, whilst things are far from complete or ideal, I can at least work in the shed workshop space now.
This ‘instant access’ tool caddy should help increase efficiency.
Cutting and gluing spacer strips for the back panel.
I used marine ply for the spacers, busking the dimensions completely. It would later transpire, rather miraculously, that these spacers turned out to be near enough the exact same thickness as a piece of random ply I bought from West End DIY. How unlikely must that be!?
Cutting spacer strips with the super basic sled.
Cutting stuff on the Kity is going well at present. Although I think the blade – the same one that was in the machine when I bought it – needs either sharpening or replacing. And the very basic cross cut sled I made/adapted is doing sterling service.
Gluing the base strip on the rear of the tall segment.
The strip that runs along the bottom at rear is there to stop certain things, such as rulers, dropping straight through. I chiselled a few little bits away here and there; not all the way through. Just sufficiently to add more depth for some of the tallest ‘tall boys’.
The back panel gluing up, clamped and weighted.
After gluing the back panel in place I also screwed it in position. After which I planed some of the faces a little, to smooth and square things up a bit. Like Patrick Sullivan’s version of this idea, which is my inspiration for this project, mine will have two more sections, or tiers.
The single most satisfying part of todays work on this project arose out of a real pain in the ass: when I went to glue my spacer strips to the rear of the tall segment, I discovered there was a hump down the central axis of the chopped/glued board.
I have a planer-thicknesser for exactly this job, but I’ve still not got it hooked up to a motor, and running. I must attend to this ASAP! So I had to go old school, and simply plane the mother flat. That entailed sharpening my smoothing plane.
Time was, not that long ago, when I hated doing this, as I’d spend ages getting nowhere. But I now have the right tools – a plane-iron guide, a whole range of abrasives, etc. – and a few planes in basically good shape, that just need fine-tuning type maintenance. So it was pretty quick and easy restoring a keen edge. And once done, planing the rear face of this block proved easy as pie!
I started making a tool caddy today, along the lines of the Patrick Sullivan one I mentioned in another recent post. I actually tried before, earlier in the week. My first attempt was a disaster!
But I learned from my mistakes, and approached the task a little differently second time around. But before I get to that, pictured above are most of the tools I’m planning to accommodate in my tool caddy, laid out, so I can think and plan things.
I set up my Kity table-saw; everything’s square!
After clearing the crap off my table saw, I checked it, to ensure both blade and fence are totally square. And they are! Cool. I also cleaned as much crud and sawdust from inside it as I could. And I dug out an old table-saw sled I made ages ago, for a different saw, which needed some adjusting to fit this more recently acquired Kity table saw.
I needed the table saw to cut the back block of wood in half, as trying to drill deep holes in the uncut block was where I went wrong before. Not having long enough drill bits, or drill press type tools that would reach deep enough, the first attempts at drilling holes for certain items went very badly.
With the back block cut in half, the wood was much more manageable, and I was able to drill the holes I wanted much more easily and neatly. Once holes were drilled – some of which had to be drilled from opposite ends – I also had to cut channels for rectangular recesses, to take certain other items.
Doing this with the table-saw sled was great. I felt like a proper YouTube type maker! Next I glued the upper and lower halves of the back block back together, having drilled some of the holes and recesses all the way through the second half of the block as well.
The tools that go in this section loaded in place.
Step two will be putting a back on this first section, for stuff like the rulers, saws, and other taller and flatter bits and bats. I’m hoping I can do that tomorrow. But for now, I’m very happy to have got stage one done successfully.
Steps three and four will be adding similar but progressively shorter blocks, in front of this back block. But that’s for later this week…
This is a weird mish-mash of a movie. Certain aspects, such as the core idea of AI-enabled military robots, used for nefarious ends, are quite good (if not exactly unique nowadays). Others, well…
Six holidaying US do-gooder doctors get lost in the forests of the Golden Triangle, where they run the gauntlet of drug gangs and their jungle booby-traps. Unfortunately for them they wind up in a village where a rogue US/CIA military-tech op’ is just getting underway. They rapidly become accidental eyewitnesses the dirty ops guys are keen to eradicate.
The CIA and Cyborg ‘baddies’ air-drop four ultra ‘hi-grade’ military kill-bots into the forest, as a real world test of the hardware/software capabilities. One of the bots is damaged during deployment, losing a key part of its ‘brain’ or control unit. The other three butcher almost the entire village, where the docs have wound up. Fortunately for the latter, ex Navy SEAL ‘Mason’ is also there.
Mason gets them out. But they start haemorrhaging lives. The three fully functional kill-bots hunt down the survivors of the massacre, whilst the fourth goes on a bizarre journey of cyber self discovery. All through this a trio of tech-nerds, flown in to ‘mastermind’ what rapidly becomes an appalling debacle, is having a crisis of conscience, as they realise they’re not simply ‘training’, but doing a fully lethal ‘black op’, with (mostly) innocent civilians as the guinea pigs and collateral damage.
This is a very, very, very uneven affair. Certain aspects are quite good, even emotively powerful, or reasonably clever. Others, such as the typical and arbitrary ‘some get away some don’t’, and non-stop action vs long hiatus, are weaker. A lot of the issues may be consequences of the fact that the whole film is probably about 20-30 mins too long.
There are some brilliant and/or beautiful locations (Cambodia, I think?), quite a bit of no holds barred brutality, and an interesting if convoluted plot. Very patchy and uneven, but quite an enjoyable watch.
Many years ago I was in a short lived group with some friends at sixth-form who were into Sonic Youth, The Pixies, Dinosaur Jr, Einsturzende Neubauten, and all sorts of other stuff similar to or connected with such bands. What’s often (or is that just sometimes?) called the post-punk/no wave scene. I must admit that, whilst I liked some of these bands and their music enough to stick with the group for the brief period in which it existed, it wasn’t really my scene, man.
Some of the recordings that really reached me in the truly primal unmediated way I like best – and ordinarily at that time that might have been anything from a sweet bossa nova, like let’s say ‘Quite Nights Of Quiet Stars’, by Jobim, to ‘Pachuco Cadaver’ by Beefheart, Joni Mitchell’s ‘Little Green’ or ‘Criminally Insane’ by Slayer – were the early records by Swans. I think that was for several reasons, some of which I’ll go into in a mo’, but possibly chiefly because, as numerous critics and fans have pointed out, this is simply music like no other.
The sheer raw power of the music, and the brutal darkness of Gira’s lyrics, are frequently alluded to in descriptions of this music. But there are a few other things that I particularly like that I don’t feel are usually mentioned. One of these is that – and ok, granted, the lyrics are pretty horrifying – quite a lot of the music has a bizarrely beautiful quality, at least for me, deriving from two factors: its sheer intensity, and the fact it is so unique. Another element is that, for all that it is unrelenting, dark, and brutally minimal, yet there’s a note of looseness and improvisation. Jazz seems hardly the right word, but those are qualities that jazz prides itself on having at its heart.
The loose improv element is most apparent in the incredible drumming of Roli Mosimann, probably the best drummer The Swans ever had, in my view. Also the production has an incredible clarity that stops it dating. Comparing the brutally raw and unprocessed sound here to the compressed and reverb drenched drums of ’80’s Sonic Youth, for example, makes the latter sounds far more dated. Easy-listening this ain’t, and I can generally only take it in little doses these days.
Opening track Half-Life and closing track Thug (opening and closing the original Cop LP*) are, I think, the moments I dig the most. Slow grinding repetitive riffs, bass and guitar locking into huge but minimal slabs of raw distorted sound, and the drums crunching away, but just occasionally showing an inventively syncopated edge, and all moving in an intense slow-motion. Most so-called heavy music sounds like the froth on a weak lager compared with these numbers. And lyrically heavy metal and associated dark/intense genres tend to be utter garbage, kind of prurient teen horror movie type stuff. The darkness of the lyrics here is of an entirely different order.
But Holy $**t, Cop is an amazing and intense ride for the ears, the mind, and the emotions! There really is nothing quite like it. Turn it up loud, and prepare to be terrified, mesmerised, but perhaps also moved, and maybe even awestruck. Definitely not music for all occasions. Cop isn’t uniformly brilliant. But the best is, thanks to its uniqueness, astonishing.
* These days Cop is usually most easily found as part of a variety of ‘early Swans’ type compilations.
Set on board the ISS crewed with an international team, some time in the unspecified near future, a Martian soil sample, brought back by the Pilgrim 7 probe, yields a dormant life-form. The ISS boffins bring it back to life, only to wish they hadn’t.
Life is very clearly and obviously heavily indebted to the Aliens series. But it doesn’t have the same high drama of the ‘original’. Nor do the characters have the charisma of the older films’ cast.
But that said, there’s enough that’s original here, and it’s all somewhat more ‘realistic’ – the super-evil-kelp-demon-alien aside – in terms of the basics of life aboard the ISS (as opposed to the whole Alien Nostromo trip), and how things might go wrong, making it fairly watchable.
My wife is the one that usually suggests we try a sci-fi movie, and so it was on this occasion. I’m the sci-fi sceptic, who finds the whole genre big on promise but small on delivery. With a few exceptions. Life is okay, neither great, nor awful.
As with all the Aliens movies, and many a horror film (or classic western, for that matter), this is essentially a siege, with malevolent evil vs plucky humanity. Perhaps the best and the worst thing about this film is the final twist.
Rather amazingly, this is the same year as the previous Police gig, also recorded for the German Rockpalast TV show, as covered in my last post. But The Police are evolving, rapidly ascending the heights of Pop Olympus. They come onstage to a backing of Voices Inside My Head*, from their follow up to Regatta de Blanc, ZenyattaMondatta.
Sting wears a Regatta de Blanc T-shirt, and plays an upright stick bass. Summers looks smarter, in a snazzy striped ‘sports jacket’ and white T-shirt. Stewart Copeland is striped and very sporty, and now has a more plush drum throne, with back support! The venue is waaay bigger. Hamburg was a medium sized theatre, Essen looks like a stadium.
Sting on ‘bull fiddle’.
After Don’t Stand So Close To Me, from their new album, Zenyatta Mondatta, and Walking On The Moon, from Regatta de Blanc, Sting swaps back to his normal electric bass, and they kind of go punk Bo-Diddley, on Deathwish. They’re definitely looking and sounding that much more like pop stars. And it’s the same year as the previous neo-punk-jazz onslaught!
Copeland still drives the band with the same ferocious energy. They still jam out a lot, but it feels slightly more restrained. At least at first. They’re still playing one or two non-album oddities, like Fall Out, and Sting is adding synth touches via what might be a Moog, and what look like Taurus pedals.
Man In A Suitcase is the next live workout for a number from Zenyatta, their latest release that they were touring to promote at this time. Whilst this still has some of the upbeat energy of their earlier era, it’s also more brightly melodic.
When they get to Bring On The Night the change from the previous performance seems more pronounced. This time it’s not quite as manic nor intense. I think this is partly due to the scale of the venue; the sound is more diffuse in a bigger space. But the performance also differs, being more restrained, less wild. It’s interesting to see how they work at building the tension under Andy’s guitar solo, in a way that differs massively from the album version.
They go into the double-time frenzy, as they did previously, on the Hamburg gig, but it works a little less well. This is partly due to the muddy wash of delay on Copeland’s kit, and partly, again, because it’s made more woolly and diffuse by the sheer scale of the venue. I’ve always preferred theatres and smaller venues to stadiums, for gigs. Stadium concerts are more about money than music, as far as I’m concerned.
Things come into a sharper focus again for De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da (memorably desscribed by Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge as their ‘nonsense anthem’!). The newer, slicker, more pop Police sound and style are coming to the fore now. It’s still intense, but smoother and decidedly less spiky. Any punky rough edges are gradually being worn away.
Sting’s bass once again is noticeable at times for the very approximate tuning. It being live things are a bit more forgiving. In the studio they’d never have let such sloppiness pass.
The Truth Hits Everybody is a track from debut, Outlandos d’Amour, and a brief and energised nod to their roots. After which the upright bass comes out for another Zenyatta track, the spooky and much more mellow and moody Shadows In The Rain (which is apparently about hard drug use!). This song would be totally reworked for Sting’s solo debut, Dream of the Blue Turtles. But here it presages the type of soundscapes that would eventually come to dominate The Police’s final album, Synchronicity (Tea In The Sahara, Walking In Your Footsteps, King of Pain, etc).
When The World Is Running Down was and still is a favourite of mine from Zenyatta. The weird juxtaposition of rather joyful music with the maudlin post-apocalyptic ruminations of the lyrics are, well… unusual! Sting gets a bit funky at one point in the jam section/guitar solo, playing a high register lick on the bass, and supplying the low-register via his pedals.
The Bed’s Too Big, rather like Bring On The Night, suffers a little, to my ears, from the translation into a much bigger venue. I think the band’s performance is very similar to earlier in the year, in the main. But the larger space soaks up and dissipates the intensity. I think if you were at the gigs, these numbers may well have retained their magic, or even intensified it, with the extended jam or improv sections. These are two of my definite favourites in their album versions.
Driven To Tears is a monster track on Zenyatta, partly cause it’s a great song, but also because Copeland’s drumming gives it an added edge. Here the most striking thing about it might be the sudden appearance of overtly socially-conscious lyrics from Sting. It’s not the first instance of this, just the most overt and strident. The trio give it a real powerhouse workout on stage.
The Police then neatly segue into, and play their way out, on a string of what, by then, were the hits that had turned them, and were continuing to turn them, into mega-stars: Message In a Bottle, Roxanne, Can’t Stand Losing You (with a bit of Regatta de Blanc by way of intro), before closing with a spirited medley of Next To You/So Lonely.
The contrast in the two concerts of the same year is quite striking. In Hamburg they’re a slightly punky band, excited at their ascent, and blasting their music through the more intimate venue with astonishing power. By the time they arrive in Essen they’re fully fledged pop stars, and the big ‘production’ in a huge venue, whilst superb, and undoubtedly more ‘mature’, also loses a whisker in the intensity stakes. This is partly due to the evolution of their songs and overall sound, and partly the scale of the gig.
This DVD contains both concerts.
Both concerts are excellent, and they are (or were?) available together on a combined DVD package (see accompanying pics). Hearing these concerts sends me back to the original albums. What a band! These two terrific films capture The Police scaling the heights.
PS – Thanks to a pal, who gave us tickets to see The Police when he couldn’t go – thanks buddy! – Teresa and I saw them during their 2007 reunion tour. It was a good gig. But the old intensity wasn’t quite there. Andy Summers in particular was showing his age (and of course he has passed away now). And it was in a bigger venue than I like. We were actually behind the main stage, and quite high up.
* The background intro version sounds like a synth n drum machine demo? It’s certainly not the studio/band version, which benefits from a terrific drum performance from Copeland.
For stuff like this YouTube is great. I wonder how long it’ll stay this way?
This gig finds the Police in their high-octane early incarnation, quite neo-punk, in terms of energy. It’s more confusing than appearances might suggest though, as they are, essentially, a power-trio. Quite a rock-mongous beast! But whereas most power trios would have an axe-wielding guitar-hero, Any Summers is more art-rock weirdo, and the instrumental star is really Copeland.
Sting is, well… Sting, bankably good looking and charismatic (as Andy Summers wryly observed from the get go), with a brilliant voice, song writing skills to die for, and seemingly born to the role of frontman. Not in an Elvis or Ozzy way, but just by being himself. Fantastic!
Sting rocks his incipient mullet.
Personally I love their mellower side, the first real sign of which is the mesmeric Bring On The Night. It’s still way more pumped than the Regatta de Blanc album version. But the ethereality and the melancholy of the Sting aspect of the group is allowed to simmer and come to the boil wonderfully.
Also very notable is the jazz-prog side of the group, not in overt ‘genre’ terms, but in the fact that songs are frequently allowed to breath in extended passages of improvisation. For example, in Bring On The Night they go into a totally intense double time blast variant that I’ve not heard on any other performances.
Also very intriguing are tracks like Fall Out and Visions of the Night, which are not part of The Police’s album canon. But when they return to the more familiar material, with Bed’s Too Big Without You, they go into a blinding cosmic über-jam that finally resolves back into the song. And the go waaay out! Astonishing!
Copeland at work/play.
One of them, Sting, I think, is triggering some synth effects, and Copeland’s drums often get treated to washes of dubby delay. so they generate a massive sound. And this despite not having a conventional lead spanner of a guitarist. Summers can cut loose with the blues rock style thing, as he briefly does on a Bullet train from Japan version of Peanuts.
This is a young band, riding the crest of their burgeoning stardom; btheir energy is super intense. I think Stewart Copeland is a very large part of this. And what a monstrous driving drummer he is! His kit, like his his playing is unique. His use of hi-hat and tide so much more expressive than the average rock/pop drummer. And his fills and use of odd accents, literal splashes of sound, and the octobans and roto-toms, all add up to a unique voice in driving seat.
Roxanne is also put through the extended-improv wringer. The German crowd are wigging out. And who could blame them. What a performance. Even the rather approximate tuning of Sting’s bass can’t put a dampener on proceedings.
Joe Morello studied with George Lawrence Stone. That alone is recommendation enough!
I’ve been dipping into this for over two decades now. Although, to my everlasting shame, I’ve not completed it yet. I use it in my drum teaching all the time.
Morello was Stone’s star pupil. And thanks to Morello’s precocious work on Stick Control, we also have Stone’s follw-up, the snappily titled Accents and Rebounds.
A great tool for developing better reading, and – of course – stick control. Starting with such simple building block as singles, doubles, and grouping of three or four, per hand, the numbered exercises take you though a huge variety of combinations, leading with both right and left.
Stone says play everything 20 times. And play with a metronome at various different speeds. This is terrific conditioning practice on a pad, and fun to transfer to snare. Of course one can then take it to the kit, and orchestrate it there.
Used regularly and with a bit of discipline this book can impart strength, stamina, speed, control of dynamics, and much more. Definitely an essential piece of kit in the drummer’s training arsenal.
As a kid I had a few T-shirts – only a very few, mind – that proclaimed something.
One such was a Blackfoot one. They were a US ‘Native American’ rock group, most famous (I think?) for a track called Morning Dew (‘Mourning Jew!?’ says my inner Woody Allen!).
A bit weird, that one. Acquired primarily for the colourful design, at a time when being a rocker/hippy, of sorts, was my intent! I did like the group, or at least the few songs of theirs I’d heard. But in truth, a Thin Lizzy T-shirt, something I now have, but didn’t back then, would’ve been a better representation of my tastes and listening preferences!
I then went through a very long and, retrospectively, rather bleak ‘no logo/label’ phase. A combo of anti-advertising sentiment and a semi (pseudo?) political stance.
Nowadays I’ve relaxed back into a childish glee in using my chest as a communications platform. And I’ve slowly but surely been amassing a collection of T-shirts whose sole porpoise – aside from temperature regulation and public decency – is to let the world know a little about me, without I have to open my yap.
There are still a number of things the puritanical politico-moralist in me eschews; I don’t like brand labels, nor am I fan of slogans. Maybe it’s a legacy of the artist-illustrator-designer part of me? But I prefer T-shirts that are primarily visual. Sometimes, as in the Moog or Lizzy tees, this design is textual. But mostly I prefer pictures or ‘designs’.
Some of these purchases have been happier than others. I’m quite disappointed with how my Mr Natural Robert Crumb T-shirt is fading with each wash. And a couple of Herbie Hancock designs I got (from China, most likely?) are kind of great, design/image wise, but are made from hideous synthetic material (the sort often used for football shirts). I definitely prefer good ol’ plain cotton!
Pics: Herbie tees…
My most recent acquisition – whilst pictured at the top of this post, it hadn’t actually arrived when I started drafting it – is an Impulse record label logo job. I really wanted the maroon variant, with cream disc, etc, the above of the two pictured below. But that wasn’t available. So I went instead for the brown and orange variant below that. Still nice!
My preferred but unavailable choice.The variant I eventually ordered.
This whole trend towards forlornly broadcasting one’s interests, perhaps esp’ so since I turned 50 (Jan’ this year… gulps!), might seem a bit pathetic. But I reckon I’m past caring!
Here’s a mini gallery of some of the designs I have. What does this little collection say about me, I wonder? I’d like to think it’s just a bit of harmless fun. But Teresa seems to be more of the ‘what are you wasting money on those for?’
