Short review of everything

Waiting for Godot

I´ll start this list of reviews of recent culture activities with one of my favourite plays! I went to see Samuel Beckett´s Waiting for Godot at the Kansallisteatteri (in Helsinki) and my expectations were pretty high. Fortunately this managed to satisfy me almost on every level! I was a little worried in advance since one of the main parts was played by Esko Salminen who, in my opinion, is one of the most over appreciated actors in Finland. He however fit quite well to his part and his, yet again in my opinion, mannerism worked ok as Vladimir´s role. What lifted the play to really excellent level was Hannu-Pekka Björkman who made astonshing job as Pozzo! Every single time he opened his mouth, everything flowed towards more coherent conclusion! The setup was very traditional and I remember seeing quite similar background use in one of the television versions shown in Teema few years ago. It´s good but I think there should have been some modifications for more intense experience, specially in parts when audience was supposed to feel the "boredom" of the cast waiting for something to happen. Over all, this version was very well made and hopefully we´ll see some more Beckett in the future!

Le Havre

Aki Kaurismäki´s latest film is called Le Havre and it is really nice one! Kaurismäki has done lot´s of good films but the quality has been swinging from excellent to annoying. This time he is presenting much more positive future visions! This movie is very much a triumph of humanism and trust and caring of other people. The charachters that are naturally in tight position (ie. the police officer) are shown as people with social consciousness, though there is a distinct line between generations (contemporary world is shown in a bit ugly light). Kaurismäki´s greatest ability is to show us very beautifull scenes of the cities he is using as background, he definitely is fond of urban atmosphere! All the actors do excellent job and the soundtrack suits well to the over all feel. The theme is obviously quite hot topic and his message is clear! I would love to see a little more surreal elements in his future films, since they were the reasons why some of his works are so good!

Crazy Clown Time

Now this was unexpected! Though I knew David Lynch has had his fingers involved in the music production earlier, it was still very odd to hear the first single Good Day Today earlier this autumn. Crazy Clown Time is the first real artist album Lynch has ever made and if you are fond of his soundtracks you will not be disappointed. Some of the songs are in more typical vein, dark rockish atmospheres, but others have strange space disco, or balearic feel to them. Lynch sings himself in most of the tracks, if you can call this kind of vocal performance singing. His voice is esoteric and haunting and it does give the important impact to the end product! The album is also very long, but I think it is essential to get the hypnotic feel he seems to be chasing! I feel that he does achieve the correct vibe and in the end I will give this solid *****! It´s also note worthy that Lynch has opened a club in Paris that is trying to simulate the effect of Club Silencio in his movie Mullholland Drive. Unfortunately you can visit the club only by becoming a member and since I´m not living in Paris it would be somewhat pointless effort.

Religion & Magic in ancient Egypt

Last august I visited the British Museum to see the Egyptian section. After checking all the mummies and hieroglyphs I bought a book from the shop called Religion and Magic in ancient Egypt by Rosalie David. There was plenty of other choices available but this felt most coherent but at the same time enjoiable enough to keep my interest up. Now that I have read it I must say that the amount of information is almost overwhelming. The book is trying to cover the whole spectrum of Egyptian culture from the earliest known examples (some 5000 bce) until the demise of the ancient culture around 500 ace. It´s exhausting task even for the 400 pages it has space to show it´s contents. The book has been critizised of being mixed and incoherent in places, and I must admit that in some cases this is true. But I still think that it gains advantage with sheer volume of knowledge it can offer. Troughout the book you can get yourself sucked into the ordinary life of egyptian inhabitant and lot´s of customs are written open very well. It also works really well as a source material! One point is that some conclusions are controversial and reader must bear in mind that researchers are trying to interpret scattered writings and sources from thousands of years ago. Therefore everything you read is, in the end, only speculation. Anyway, this book is very much worth to read!

Krazy Kat - possibly the greatest comic ever!

It was some time during the early 90´s when I first encountered the translated version of Krazy Kat at the local library. They had suprisingly educated and well curated selection of intelligent comics there. Though I was more into American mainstream and European classics back then. But then again, I had also fallen in love with Calvin & Hobbes (which is by the way really heavy contender for the best comic category) that was also widely available in finnish. I realised the similarities between the philosophical and surreal sides of Krazy Kat and the fast paced but still slow tempo of Calvin & Hobbes later when I had matured a bit.

The other shared quality with these two was the use of landscapes as their narrator. Landscape could create perfect timing and really strong moods for both series. This resulted the themes to be taken into really strong situations where surrealistic and unpredictable events could get proper effects. What also helped was the language. Krazy Kat is one hugely underrated mythical poetry - an epic that should be lifted next upon such masters as Homer.

Ok, so why I am writing this now is that I just bought this a moment ago: Krazy & Ignatz 1919-1921: A Kind, Benevolent and Amiable Bric.  It´s a collection of sunday pages ranging three year period of adventures of Krazy Kat and her (or is it his) arch rival and secretly loved one Ignatz mouse. This is now 8th album of Krazy stories I have. First three were Finnish translations (that are actually very well done, thanks to Soile & Heikki Kaukoranta whom have done great things for Finnish Comic culture by translating so many excellent works of art past 40 years) and the rest are recent English re-publications done by Fantagraphics.

Little something about the basic story line: Krazy Kat tells about the life at Kokonino Kounty located middle of Arizona desert and close by the Mexican border. The inhabitants of said kounty reflect early 20th century American life very precisely but always quite satirically. The main characters are Krazy Kat, who is a warm hearted and naive person strongly in love with Ignatz mouse, the cunning villain who hates Krazy and shows the hatred by throwing bricks to her noodle. The third party is offisa P. Pupp, a dog in the police force that admires Krazy and keeps pushing Ignatz into jail after forementioned brick tossing. These three form the triangular basis for most of the events but they get company from the varied group of essential and interesting side characters. The list is long but here is some of the most important fellows: Joe Stork, the purveyor of progeny to prince and proletariat, ms. Kwak Wakk who delivers rumours along the characters, Bum Bill Bee who comes and goes but is never on the way to nowhere, Walther Sephus Austridge, Kolin Kelly, the baker in bricks and so on... everyone have their own important role in the life in Kokonino and everyone interfere everyones life from time to time.

Here is two examples of 1922 Kat pages:

It´s important to realise that these represent only the early period of Krazy adventures. The works continued without break till middle of 1940´s, almost 40 years. George Herriman, the artist behind all this kept evolving the art and the style through out years and while most of the early works are black & white, the final years were coloured.

Krazy´s world is open for everything. It´s a surreal realm where modern inventions come and go and doesn´t leave a mark, but merely work for the purposes of the ever caring narrator. It´s wonderfull to notice the love of lifes mysterious things and surprising events that may or may not occur. There is always something strange going on. For example, the Mexican Jumping Bean, Willie Mendoza tries to conquest Kokonino from time to time and while mr Austridge may solve the problem by swallowing the intruder, the soon to be laid egg will cause havoc among the local justice system. Background changes basically in every picture that makes the world flexible for the plot to wander into territories that would otherwise be impossible to reach.

There is actually quite a lot of writings about Krazy Kat. These new publications include very well written research about various issues of the comics history and other such things. These include the racial issue of Herrimans heritage, the love of the Mexican life and Indian culture, the problems with the original publisher and their news papers that thought Krazy was too complicated series to most of the American papers (it was Hearst that published the comic and Randolph Hearst was the person who quaranteed Krazy Kats succes by forcing the papers to include it to their pages), tha other cultural phenomenas that followed (i.e. the Jazz Pantomime, etc.) and so on... I highly recommend to read these trough!

I also recommend the Fantagraphs publications for anyone who sometimes wants to indulge themselves with intelligent stories of mindbending graphics! These are extremely well made with much much love and time sacricficed!

James Blake versus Mount Kimbie

I really wish that James Blake´s (self titled) album would have similar qualities than Mount Kimbies Crooks and Lovers did have. I mean if it doesn´t it is going to be one of the biggest disappointments of the year!

Though Mount Kimbies effort was not as good as the previous ep´s had been and I must admit that I was expecting way too much from them it has grown over repeated listening to be quite well composed and interesting experimental organism. Their sound is definitely original and presents sort of tinkered maximalism. On the first listen there was already hints of great arrangements and some of the trax left me wonder how these should be working (and propably thinking about the right environment). Now, after half a year I think this is among the great electronic music albums even though it has some flaws in, say continuity...

Blake´s album however has not started to fly yet. I have listened to it trough few times now and still don´t get it. First problem was the printed lyrics, why are these here. It doesn´t seem to say anything that important and the poetry behind is not that clever. Similar artist such as Burial have left this kind of nonsense away from the covers and concentrated to leave as much as possible to listeners imagination. The songs themselves are much more skeletized than I thought they would be and in most trax the voice of James Blake himself seems to be the only noticeable element available. Of course there is deep bass here and there and some percussions and stuff but it all seems too easy.

One of the big problems with the album is that the compositions feel like old English christmas carrols! I mean it feels somehow cheap and the melodies are repetitive in a manner that gives me this weird impression. I may be alone with this argument but listen to the last track "measurements"! I just can´t get this idea out of my mind when I keep listening to it. Some vocals are very irritating and it seems that Blake is holding something back all the time. It´s like he´s afraid of letting the songs grow and sticking to the minimalism as a safe ground for being intelligent.

In discogs I gave Blake´s album three stars out of five but this is propably going to be lowered to two if I can´t find the clue behind his sound. Mount Kimbie deserves four stars for their set and I really wish they enhance the sound that was present at the ep´s to a full scale album one day.

Cornelius Tacitus - Histories

Roman history has always been one of my areas of interest. "The Histories" written by famous Roman writer Cornelius Tacitus is the latest book I have read about the classic age of Roman Empire (it was a Finnish translation from the original latin source).

This book concentrates in the period of 69-70 ad, the year when four emperors ruled and the empire was driven into civil war. All begins when Emperor Galba (ruler who was risen to power when the emperor Nero was defieted) was getting old and there were discomfort among legions about who should be his successor. Galba had noticed the turmoil and was trying to call his protege to be the next emperor. However this was the final straw for some of the army groups and they shouted Otho to be their ruler and when Otho arrived with his legions to Rome all hell broke lose.

After Otho´s men killed Galba the actual civil war was eventually going to expand since most of the german, gallic and british groups were not going to stand for such a decision. They gave Vitellius their commanderhood and started campaign against Otho´s newly formed regime. And so on until after some misfortuned battles Otho committed suicide. Tacitus describes Vitellius as a lazy person who was more fond of debauchery than actually benefiting the nation. This was also the reason why Vitellius regime was not in unison trough out the empire and soon the southern legions commander Vespasianus decided to take part on the race and challenge Vitellius´s groups.

I shouldn´t go further with the actual events except noticing that in the end Vitellius was defeated and several things followed. The Book ends with a chapter about the Great Jewish Revolt but this has not been preserved. However I want to make some notions about the life and roughness of the ordinary people and military during those times. First of all you have to keep in mind that Romans were at their peak about their Empire´s success then and it is this fact that brings strange light to actual living and prosperity in the empire.

What really buggers me is that the Military troops were so unpredictable about their decisions and the discipline was so hard to maintain. Minor revolts were everyday events and the leaders were all the time in a situation where they were forced to persuade troops to be loyal to their closest leaders and even for the emperor. There seemed to be lots of rumors always circulating about other peoples loyalty and deceit. People were also very superstitious and everything that happened could be interpreted as an omen (ominous or fortunate). These events could in a sudden moment mean that the troops would stand against their commander and even killing of leaders happened.

One of the main motivation behind military troops seemed to be looting instead of securing the empire´s peace. This lead to situations where a legion was relocating and manoeuvering forward the combat zone in their own territory (inside the empire) where they completely destroyed and robbed unfortunate and innocent cities that were on their way. And when they had a battle within a city that was inside the empire some of them were completely burned down, all the inhabitants were killed and raped.

Realising how huge the empire was (even todays standards) it´s also very impressive how they managed to keep up maintenance for such a huge force. The military had at best over a million soldiers (though most of the times the amount of troops was around 400 000). A single legion had about 5000 soldiers and lots of hangaround people (merchants, slaves, etc.) and all of them had to be kept fead and armed.

Rome itself was a city of over a million people and the surrounding areas couldn´t offer enough grain to feed the inhabitants. That´s why they had to ship food from northern Africa! The logistics were really impressive!

Finally I recommend this book very much to read if you have even a little interest about the real life during antique times! It gives a nice overlook about times and describes the turmoil of Roman Empire quite well. It also gives some advice why the Roman Empire was finally divided and demolished a few hundred years later.