Popgun

Country of the Mind

Inspired by a series of traumatic acid trips that led to a bout of psychosis, Sara Soininen’s ‘Transcendent Country of the Mind’ is a a strange and appropriately trippy series of photos. She doesn’t attempt to recreate what she went though. Instead she questioned the nature of the reality around her by making images that turn our perceptions of existence upside down.

You don’t often see a television program based in a part of the country you know well about an incident you remember. Such a program for me is ‘Sherwood.’It concerns a series of murders committed in a Nottinghamshire mining town or, as we would say, Pit Village. The murders are assumed to be connected with the NUM( National Union of Miners) strike of the 1980s. Part of its membership in…

British artist Chip Wickham is from Brighton but is part of the Manchester jazz scene that includes such luminaries as Matthew Halsall. His new album ‘Cloud 10’ is one of my favorites of the year and represents something progressive yet accessible. The track ‘Winter’ is perhaps the album’s centerpiece and is a good introduction to the man and his work

A Brazilian style album courtesy of Detroit? Yup, courtesy of the collective Sol Set. It has a beautifully mellow jazz vibe, while still having those samba rhythms that are like a burst of sunshine on aplomb fringed beach. There are multiple vocalists and a range of styles that somehow still fit together perfectly.

Brazilian music is justifiably famous for bossa nova and Tropicalia in the sixties and seventies. But even today they are still producing excellent musicians such as Fabiano do Nascimento, a guitarist who has captured my imagination with his paired back sound. On his 2015 album ‘Danca Dos Tempos’ he teams up with the legendary Airto Moreira to create a work of rare beauty.

A man walks out of the Mojave Desert to reclaim a relationship with his son, Hunter, and the wife he abandoned.The fact that his son has been brought up by his childless brother and his wife only adds to the emotional drama. Such is the basic outline of Wim Wenders ‘Paris, Texas.’ This is my fifth viewing of the film since I first watched it in 1985. At that time, I was slightly underwhelmed,…

In the heart of rural Ireland at the time of the IRA hunger strikes, Claire Keegan sets her tale of a girl fostered by a family in a neighboring village when her mother is about to give birth.Over a scant 90 pages, the story weaves its spell revealing little by little the pain at the heart of this simple act of kindness. Told from the foster child’s perspective, Keegan is brilliant at making us…

Will we have alive in a time when Marilyn Monroe is totally forgotten? I’d venture to say that no other film actress from any period has the enduring power of Monroe. And it’s almost entirely, in my opinion, based on image, which perhaps explains the reissue of the Bert Stern photography book, which features the last images ever taken of Monroe. Compared with either Katherine or Audrey Hepburn,…

Walter Sickert was German-born but lived his life in Britain, creating realist/impressionist paintings. Influenced by the likes of Degas, he was obsessed with what was considered low culture; the bars, shops, and musical theatre of London. Maybe it was the sombreness of some of his work that led some time to believe Sickert was, in fact, Jack the Ripper. Whatever the truth of Sickert, there is…

I’ve seen Robert Eggers’s The Northman three times now. An everyday tale of marauding Vikings, it features Alexander Saarsgard as Amleth, a man hell-bent on revenge after his father is slain by his brother. Clearly, forgiveness was not a big thing in Viking society because Amleth goes through the world slaughtering anything that comes across his path. In the wrong hands, this saga could have…

Robert Adam spent a lifetime recording the vast open spaces of the American west and the slow steady encroachment of humanity. The homes and signs and gas stations seem like unwelcome interlopers in the desert landscape, which always appears to be deeper and more permanent than anything mankind can conjure up.

In the 1950s, three young actors were considered part of a new breed challenging the orthodox masculine stereotypes portrayed by the likes of John Wayne.James Dean and Marlon Brando are known to many, but the third, Montgomery Clift, considered by many to be the best of the three, is starting to fade into history. Luckily, Film Forum still believes in his genius, and last month had a season of…

Keats: A Brief Life

Wearing school uniforms, eating semolina, and being force-fed romantic poets are all familiar to anyone who attended a high school in England any time in the last fifty years.The sight of pimply adolescents stupefied with boredom as someone read out sections of Christabel by Coleridge or ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ by Wordsworth is as English as losing by penalties in a major…

French musician Wally Badarou is not a name familiar to many. But as part of the Compass Point All-Stars band, he played on incredible records with the likes of Grace Jones, Level 42, Tom Tom Club, Gregory Isaacs, and Mick Jagger.He also produced some fantastic music under his own name. My favorite is the ‘Echoes,’ an instrumental album sampled in the nineties by Massive Attack.Its mellow groove…

Probably my favorite record, if forced to choose, is Grace Jones ‘Living My Life.’ Her backing band includes the likes of Wally Badarou, Sly Dunbar, and Robbie Shakespeare, who were all part of the Compass Point All-Stars band put together by Island Records impresario Chris Blackwell.Blackwell and his label are responsible for some of the most iconic sounds of the sixties, seventies, and…

One of the side effects of attending school in England back in the day was a tendency to remember several lines of poetry that had been drummed into you for the -purpose of answering exam questions.Usually, that meant it was romantic poetry; Coleridge, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Keats. Consequently, I can still to this day write down the opening few lines of To Autumn by KeatsSeasons of mist and…

Running up that Hill

Some years ago, I was driving from Seattle to new york in the dead of winter. I was passing through Southern Idaho on an empty road with only the occasional farmhouse to let you know there were any humans around.On the car stereo, I played a recently released album by Kate Bush called ’50 words for Snow’. The music became the perfect soundtrack as I passed by frozen lakes and white blanketed…