I've been listening to some Steve Reich lately. Conditioned to expect extended melodic and harmonic development and a diversity of themes in the music I like best (apart from blues, where the stuff I like best is basically the same 12-bar boogie going on and on and on) I find myself grappling with this music a lot. It substitutes layering and slow, phased variations for the qualities I'm more used to listening for. In a sense it has links to the drones of Carnatic music, without the virtuoso improv layered over those drones, and I can begin to trace how this music has had an impact on people whose music I do like and respect, like Robert Fripp or the drone metal movement. It's very krautrock, too, although that seems to have been more a parallel development. This interview with Reich is a really good ear-opener as well.

Christopher Hitchens is waterboarded.

Also see this: knowledge (and morality) can skip a generation or two, I hear

I got Zot!

insert gee-whiz clever quip re: superheroes and fascism here

Batman is ... Dubya?

Thomas Mann may have been self-important and arrogant - qualities for which he is given short shrift in Javier Marias' excellent, opinionated collection of literary thumbnail sketches, Written Lives - and perhaps entirely too aware of the character of certain of his books as 'important novels'. As far as I know none of these qualities preclude him from having actually produced work worthy of his sense of importance.

It is tempting to call The Magic Mountain an allegory. The characters seem to depict clear-cut schools of thought - Settembrini, the revolution-mongering, humane, austere humanist, Naphta, the reason-denying, reactionary, voluptuary mystic, Clavdia Chauchat, the apposite, alluring feminine sprite, Joachim, the duty-bound honourable, one-dimensional soldier, Meinheer Peeperkorn, the charismatic, conservative, romantic man of action, to say nothing of Hans Castorp, the willing pupil, the tabula rasa on which time and history will write their testaments of conflict and doom.

Mann himself notes with approval a comparison made in the critical literature to the grail legend. And indeed, Castorp is in many ways the archetypal holy fool on a quest perilous. But it is also a portrait of a specific moment in time, peopled with realistic characters and settings. So this is not the never-never land allegory of the fabulist. Instead, it is a novel which dares to make the claim that its characters and its little incidents are not just themselves but indicative of larger themes and currents as well.

The events of The Magic Mountain take place in a world on the brink. There is a struggle between 18th century humanist values and an ages-old yet brand-new radical retreat to the familiar fundamentals of a pre-Enlightenment hegemony of febrile mysticism. Europe stands at a crossroads, worked upon by opposing forces, clinging to opposing views of the past, torn between opposing views of the future, and it only takes one act of violence to signal the plunge into decades of world war, interrupted by uneasy peace in the 20s and 30s, and ended only when new, non-European forces were to take control of matters and shape a world that would bear little resemblance to the verities of imperial Europe.

It's not an unrelievedly serious book though. Mann initially planned it as a satire on life in the many sanatoria of pre-world war Europe, and there are scenes where a certain antic humour intrudes. And while, much of it is dominated by discussions between Castorp and his many would-be mentors and advisors, there is also a sequence of action that has great symbolic consequence, as Castorp wanders lost in a snowstorm and falls into a dream that may well contain the central philosophical message of the book. Even if much of the book is talk and exposition, there are, in addition to this sequence, perhaps another three or four memorable scenes in the usual sense that mark important beats in the story and phases in the argument.

It is almost impossible to summarise this book in any but the most rudimentary way. I won't even try. And while it might seem that the conflicts epitomised here belonged to a specific period of time, the fact remains that in a world where the forces of reaction and retreat still strive for the upper hand over humanity, nothing contained herein is in any real sense outdated. And yes, pompous though Mann may or may not have been, his characterisation of his novel as one that needs to be read at least twice seems justified. That's certainly what I intend to .

Seems like a good site. Art, music, literature, film, theatre reviewed reasonably responsibly.

Shostakovich's 5th is thought to be his symphonic masterpiece by many - but, listening to it with apocalyptic gyrations and final dystopian slumber of the 4th resounding in my mind's ear, it seems like a step backward. On further consideration though, it isn't. It's a step sideways, which is why it dissapoints at first, but not a step backwards at all, which is why it eventually wins me over. The opening has a solemn sense of purpose that doesn't suggest cringing populism so much as a wiser, veiled sense of purpose that has a stength of its own.

Art finding its own voice within strict limits is always fascinating - hence the appeal of sonnets, haiku, miniatures, black and white photography, silent film, 12-bar blues songs. How much more fascinating when these limits are imposed by politics not form or technology and enforcable by pain of death or disgrace.

I watched Ed Wood Razor Hands. I mean Sweeney Wonka and Cannibal Pie Factory. Er, that is to say Sweeney Todd. There is much gleeful slitting of throats, but neither Polyhymnia nor her defunct sister Aoide have visited their blessings on the lead actors, which makes the whole point of a musical somewhat moot. Depp's singing is weak and not even particularly enthusiastic, despite which he doesn't even manage to reach Oasis levels. Tim Burton's Corpse Bride is a little better, but her constant look of vague unease made me want to offer her a good laxative and a joke book to read whilst perched on the bog. Things all look very intricately gothy in trademark Burton fashion. It's a wicked story about sad, mad people and Burton is finally unable to relish the ghastliness of it all enough, trying to fit in his usual premise that the weird, morbid, gloomy people are in some way better, even when, as in this case, they are total psychopaths. Next he will officiate at the canonisation of the Sawney Bean clan. Lookitup, won't ya.