When the legend becomes fact, print the legend...

Spotlight is the kind of film you feel obliged to see fearing pangs of enjoyment denial. Well: director Tom McCarthy, on his credits, makes films very simply about very complex individuals and events. Spotlight is no exception. Great about McCarthy is that he never seems interested in taking a moral stance, though morality and hypocrisy of story every which way are thrust in your face. Inevitably. Just never by this director. No need. The story of Spotlight is everywhere to be found. What’s worth stressing about this movie is its humanity. No-one/where is ever a saint. Interesting that Spotlight and The Club (March 25) are released in the same year. It isn’t a wet liberal minded conscious we are talking about here. It is the hypocrisy of the moral high ground in a world where almost no-one can make claim to that territory. Even when you map read at some time you too will falter.

A controversial double-bill (did Mubi steal my double-billing-great minds/hommage think alike;) with Jim Loach's Oranges and Sunshine?

Don’t bother to explain…

does Descartes need a reason...? on a sunday..

posting a couple of songs, for no real reason (except listening to loads of Châteauneuf-du-Pape 'plinkety-plonk' as fab as it gets ...) and then there's Bowie...lordy lordy: one forgets the Beaux Ameriques Song Book:

I Have Dreamed

Something Wonderful

a (the) song sung my someone who was someone before they became someone (as an e.g.) ......

                                                   so many possibilities...

R.I.P Alan Rickman         an interview                               a little chaos and a lot of love

This Tortoise Could Save a Life

A couple of exciting musical encounters (no reason except they were encountered..). Composer Erkki-Sven Tüür and conductor Paavo Järvi met at Estonian music school and both were deep into ‘art rock’ music.

Vítězslav Novák knew that the new was the Czech way forward but often struggled quelle surprise with rejection and thence depression. He wrote some gorgeous music even if a little in the romantic tradition.

David Bowie died

David Bowie passed away peacefully yesterday (Sunday, Jan 10) after a battle with cancer. Another innovator in music gone.

Baal (1982)                                      Hymn

Bowie would not like to be remembered for promulgating anti-social behaviour. Rather: challenging what is the seemly conventional wisdom of social behaviour in a world that so often screams social hypocrisy.

BBC: A career that shaped modern pop

BBC: Live reporting

Alabama Song                                                                        *

Pierre Boulez

Pierre Boulez one of the C20's most influential conductor/composers died yesterday aged 90.

He even embraced Frank Zappa- The Perfect Stranger
Cellist Caroline Stinson recounts working with the maestro (20.30 minutes in)

Admittedly there is a fair amount of unintentionally 'plinkety-plonk' contemporary music. If you are not necessarily a fan of contemporary classical music, what is remarkable- if not extra-ordinary, is just how mesmerizing a sound world is sculpted by many Boulez compositions. “Inspiring the young about the music of the future,” according to one young conductor. It may not always be breakfast music but Boulez sure makes your brain lively and/or meditative late at night.

BBC Radio 3 page devoted to Boulez

As a perverse final thought: what if a highly musical ‘alien’ who knew nothing of earth’s musical history were going though his/her ‘Dad’s earthly library of compositions (as if an Amy Schumer film;). It would be hard to imagine our ‘alien’ wouldn’t put to one side (even only to sell on interstellar ebay) Boulez alongside the works from the 40s/50s of Messian, Varese, Ligeti and Stockhausen (Gesang der Jünglinge). Boulez wrote many of his influential works by the age of 30! An he still had 60 years to go.

Nothing anal or enem-atic about Boulez. More ginseng.

Hasta la vista...maestro

a segue if ever there was one (and if you wish there to be one): The Danish Girl is on general cinema release- for the first 20 minutes or so it seems like a regular costume drama but there's a very long sting in a short tail.

the world, perhaps, really: is beautiful...if very,very,very,very strange.

Conductor Sir Simon Rattle and director Peter Sellars collaborate on Debussy's Pelleas and Melisande (Sellars speaks passionately on BBC's In Tune)