Charlie Parr

Isn't it cool when you go out with absolutely no expectations and end up turning it on it's head and having a really great night? And there was absolutely no alchohol involved at all (I'm having a brief hiatus).

My friend gently cajoled me into leaving the (relative) comfort of my house, even though I was tired and in a pretty bad mood tonight, to see his friend's band, My Two Toms, play at the 12 Bar club on Denmark Street. I decided this course of action was better than twiddling my thumbs at home and was duly rewarded with some great Banjo/Slide Guitar action.

My Two Toms and the other act, Adrian Crowley, were pretty cool, however the main act, Charlie Parr, was a class apart (no offence chaps). His guitar playing was pretty unbelievable and his songs were heartbreaking but uplifting at the same time in that way that Country and Blues manage so effortlessly. The only minor drawback of the night being that when the Steel guitar came out and the rhythm got going, whoops and yelps started to eminate from the audience in a very peculiar and slightly stifled and embarrassed manner only the British could manage. Not very Country. There is a profile on him here and some sample MP3's on his site here.

Plus, the bus ride home over Waterloo Bridge reminded me how good the Dan Flavin show at the Hayward Gallery is, and that generally experience is a good thing. Dan Flavin's kind of experience is much the same as Charlie Parr's - visceral yet disarmingly beautiful. This led me to muse over the inexorable fact that you should never really let yourself be guided by your preconceptions of what experiences may give you, otherwise you might miss out on some really great stuff. And stuff is good.

Film Weekend

I went to see two new films this weekend as part of different film festivals (there is a festival for every occasion/nationality/good cause these days).

36, Quai Des Orfevres was part of the French Film Festival, which premiered on Friday night at the NFT, was billed as a stylish French crime/gangster thriller in the mould of Heat or Lock, Stock... It was certainly very stylishly filmed (in that the film could have been sponsored by Gauloise, everybody wore black leather coats, it rained all the time and the moody soundtrack was pasted on so thick that you had trouble hearing the dialogue) but was very thin on actual substance. It shocked for the sake of it and the plot meandered so much that by the end of the film (which could have finished several times over) I just didn't care which characters survived or not.

Which contrasts very nicely with In the Shadow of the Palms: Iraq, showing as part of the Australian Film Festival at the Barbican, in which I did care very much whether the protaganists survived. This is a documentary following various people before and 'after' the war. For the most part it conforms to type for this sort of thing but it had it's moments and really brings home the human angle of the conflict (there is one very distressing scene in which a mother holds her son who had just died on camera). What was most revealing was how people's outlooks on the war hadn't really shifted in their criticism of the Americans and British and how they have mis-handled the aftermath of the invasion ('so we have lost our leader' says one man, 'what have we gained?')