I just watched Robert Redford’s critically derided ‘Lions for Lambs‘, just to check it out and make up my own mind. I just couldn’t believe the critics that tore this film apart in mid air. There had to be some redeeming feature? I mean, this is a movie critical of the U.S. invasion in Iran and Afghanistan, mocking neocons and tearing into the complacent liberal establishment for letting it all happen. What could be wrong with it?
So much.
Sigh.
I don’t even know where to start. I was expecting a dialogue -centred movie on the level of a good West Wing episode, but everything was so clichee ridden that it hurt. Tom Cruise’s neocon Republican Senator was sprouting so many ridiculous soundbites and Bushism’s that he just as well could have a been a youtube collection of the worst Bush/Rumsfeld/Cheney quotes ever. These guys might speak like that in front of the cameras, but hardly in private. And Cruise looked like a pale imitation of TIm Matheson’s Vice President in The West Wing on autopilot.
Meryl Streep, as a liberal, formerly brillant journalist who had sold her soul to her shallow network looked just bored, and Robert Redford, as a liberal Californian political science professor who got his favourite student in to discuss political activism was plainly embarassing.
So, we have a well meaning movie from a previously impressive director with a bundle of some of the most bankable actors ever that tanked because its scriptwriter dropped the ball and its director was too bored to properly engaged his actors.
Maybe Matthew Michael Carnahan, the scriptwriter, maybe should have watched all seven series of the West Wing (or even Yes, Minister) before turning his attention to ‘Lions for Lambs’.
Unfortunately, as much as I wanted it to work, it didn’t.
The excellent Rainer Bartel – proprietor of some of Germany’s best blogs, successful journalist and author of a German guide to the EEEPC – and myself are currently having an animated discussion on the issue of Duesseldorf and its influence on popular music. Being the staunch defender of his beloved hometown that he is, he cited a long list of more or less influential musicians that for him prove that Duesseldorf is far more important than the footnote status that was I willing to give the place.
The only thing that I can think of is Chris Rea’s comment in ‘Windy Town’, that he comes home with the ‘taste of Duesseldorf’ still on his lips. But I am being facetious.
It nevertheless made me think of a wider issue: forget Duesseldorf: what actually is Germany’s role in contemporary, popular music?
There is no discussion about its influence within the world of non-entertainment music: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Mozart (ok, he was Austrian, but that was almost the same then), Schoenberg and their contemporaries produced the majority of what we listen to on BBC Radio 3. Within the last fifty years Henze and Stockhausen have added themselves to that list, but they are certainly no household names anymore. So, Germany rules among the Italians, French, English and Russians when it comes to the classical stuff.
But within Pop/Rock? Unfortunately these days, when you ask somebody born after 1980, the only examples he/she will probably come up with are Rammstein (who do not deserve a link) and -shudder- the Scorpions (ditto). For people remembering the eighties and the seventies, Krautrock champions Can, Bavarian Balladiers Muenchner Freiheit (who had a Number 1 in the UK with ‘Keeping the Dream alive‘. Don’t ask) and Duesseldorf’s best exports: Propaganda, Kraftwerk and the short lived DAF come to mind. Then there was the ‘School of melodious House’ from Frankfurt, producing such anonymous, producer led projects as Snap! or Culture Beat. These guys went so far to change their name to something vaguely American to remove all associations with THAT country.
As you might have noticed, all the aforementioned groups released their singles in English.
Mostly, everybody not speaking English lives happily ever after, completely ignorant of the wide variety of artists releasing their work in German, which they probably find as accessible as the latest Number One from Kazakhstan.
So, is it all about the language, then? Is the main reason that my fellow scotsmen don’t buy the latest album by Marius Mueller Westernhagen is because neither can pronounce his name nor any of the songtitles, or that singing along to a song called ‘Skandal im Sperrbezirk’ (or even better: ‘Mit Pfefferminz bin ich Dein Prinz‘. Try singing that…) just doesn’t roll of the tongue like, say, ‘Umbrella’? With a language like that, it’s no wonder that New Zealand and Australia, countries who together have a quarter of the German population, had more Number ones.
On the other hand, millions of inebriated Englishmen had no problems singing along to either ‘Bambolero’, ‘Voyage, Voyage’, or ‘Donald, where’s your troosers’ (wait..). So it can’t be the fact that it’s foreign.
It’s just the wrong type of foreign. It’s German. It still conjures up the wrong associations.
With other words, it’s not so much the quality of the German musical output, but the inability of the world to speak the language. Or get over its accociated history.
I leave the rest of this argument to the comment section and leave you in the safe Duesseldorfian hands of Claudia Brueck, Susanne Freytag and, uh, Trevor Horn.
It’s a bank holiday weekend, so I did a little travelling around beautiful Morayshire. I made it successfully to Forres, where Nelson’s Tower was luring me from afar. And what a nice structure it is:
Apparently built to celebrate Lord Nelson’s successful battle at Cape Trafalgar (that of course killed himself), the foundations for the building were laid in 1806 and the structure was finished seven years later. Perched on Cluny Hill and 21 meters high, it gives you gorgeous views over the Moray Firth and the Grampian Mountains.
Now that I had my live music fix and my ears will be ringing for the next two weeks after the acoustic assault on my hair cells in my inner ear by Was (not Was) and an added bout of flu, it was time again to look for some good podcasts that keep my company in my sickbed. Already a happy listener of Steve Curwood’s ‘Living on Earth‘, I tried some of other shows that Public Radio International is serving over teh intarwebs. From what I understand (and please correct me if I’m wrong, because it’s complicated) PRI is a sort of of competitor to that other content provider for Americans with brains, NPR. I don’t particularly understand how they get their funding (my friend Panamaus one day tried to explain, but to no avail) but I think that while NPR gets some federal money, PRI mainly lives off grants and support from charitable organisations.
Anyway, I like ‘living on earth’, and so I tried out some of the other PRI stuff. Their Technology podcast, while more geared towards an younger geographically challenged American Audience, covers a good spectrum of issues and certainly is more informative than the BBC’s rather excruciating ‘Digital Planet’.
Even better is ‘the world‘, which manages to be a quirky, daily show with more unusual stories from around the world, a sort of ‘from our own correspondent’ with bells and whistles.
So, these two go onto the list. If I can believe ‘the West Wing’, democratic white house staffers are more into public radio than those dastardly republicans. So, let’s keep our fingers crossed.
Messaged from the Outhouse 