Lotus, Blanket

Sat on a blanket
Playing with my Scalextric
Black Lotus F1

Marquee Moon by Television

For some reason, Television got classified as punk. This is because it was 1977, they were playing a residency at CBGBs and they looked a bit like punks, so it was probably easier for record shops to stick them in alongside the Ramones and New York Dolls. However, listening to the album shows that they were something else entirely. Sure, lead singer Tom Verlaine has a flat and slightly quirky delivery (reminiscent of fellow CGBG alumnus David Byrne), but it doesn’t take long before you notice that these songs have a lot going on.

For starters, there are counter melodies, extended solos and then you get to the title track which is a ten minute epic full of unexpected touches and sounding more like King Crimson than a typical two minute punk song. Were they post-punk before punk had even kicked off? Is this math rock or art rock? Perhaps this should be filed in its own category under prog-punk?

Regardless of what you call it, this is a great album and you can hear the influences on bands that were to follow a couple of years later in the 80s.

Telly-tastic!

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

Inspector Alan Grant is stuck in hospital with a broken leg, so his friend Marta, knowing his interest in physiognomy, brings him a some pictures of historical characters to see if any of them suggest a mystery for him to unravel. The picture of King Richard III catches his eye - everyone knows that Richard III was a BAD KING who murdered the princes in the tower? It's there in the history books that we all studied at school, in black and white.

He starts his investigation with a school textbook, helpfully provided by one of the nurses looking after him, which confirms his memory, before moving on to more scholarly tomes including the supposedly definitive History of King Richard III written by the saintly Thomas More which all seem to support the accepted narrative. Case closed, until he realises that More was writing during the reign of Henry VII and had only been a child during the brief period that Richard was on the throne. His account could therefore not have been first hand, and was certainly written with the approval of the current monarch in mind, who would have been flattered to have his claim to the throne strengthened and his predecessor rubbished.

Everything in that history had been hearsay. And if there was one word that a policeman loathed more than another it was hearsay. Especially when applied to evidence.

Grant enlists the help of Brent Carradine, an American researcher at the British museum, to uncover contemporary accounts and references. Grant approaches the case as a policeman, asking the crucial question - who benefits from the crime? He examines the means, motives and opportunities to see how they stand up to the evidence, such as it is, before making his conclusion.

This was was an interesting book, digging into an area of history that I had only dimly been aware of. It contrasts the case of Richard III with more recent historical events such as the Tonypandy riot in 1910 where the commonly accepted narrative - in that case that Winston Churchill had ordered the army to open fire on striking Welsh miners - does not match the actual historical record. As the title of the book paraphrases the quote, "Truth is the daughter of time, not authority"

It is a truism that history is written by the victors, even more so in our current era of fake news and alternative facts, so being able to look beyond clickbait headlines and AI summaries is more important than ever. I wonder if this book might have been better as a straightforward non-fiction documentary account (or even a contemporary true crime style podcast) given that some of the sources that our fictional detective calls on (including a romantic historical novel called The Rose of Raby) are themselves fictional. It does allow the author to present her case at one remove. The theory that Richard III was innocent was not original, even in 1951 when this was written, but still controversial enough to earn a slap down from Winston Churchill (him again) in his History of the English Speaking Peoples.

Underwater

Near future sci-fi, set on a drilling rig at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, that pretty much does what it says on the tin. There is no exposition, other than the title sequence, and the action is relentless all the way through the commendably lean 90 minute running time.

Within the first five minutes, the station is rocked by an earthquake and starts flooding, leading to a desperate race to escape before the reactor melts down. The production design draws heavily on the grubby industrial aesthetic of films like Alien, from the satisfyingly chunky pressure suits to the motion tracker and the tense scene of watching other characters in peril via multiple helmet camera feeds.

The final act takes a nice twist into a very different genre (to say more would be to spoil things), but I just wish there had been a little more time to establish the characters before killing them off (spoiler - the black guy gets it first).

The overall effect was a little bit like the game Still Wakes the Deep and its DLC Siren’s Rest, although that was set on a 1970s North Sea oil rig. I really wanted to see the characters in Underwater find some files or audio logs that explained a little of what was going on, rather than the infuriatingly brief hints and the dialogue that was hard to follow in places.

Worth a watch if you have Disney.

Fireworks, Carrot

Fireworks exploding
Showering orange sparks like
An angry carrot

Apocalypse 91… The Enemy Strikes Black by Public Enemy

Necessity is often the mother of invention. Just before Public Enemy started work on this album, all of their hard drives full of samples and work in progress were stolen from the studio. As a result, this album has fewer samples and more original music, giving a funkier and punchier sound.

Lyrically, it’s as angry as ever, and justifiably so, tackling things like the legacy of slavery, the effects of alcohol addiction on the black community and the dehumanising casual use of the N word. Not an easy listen, but at least there were no uses of the B or H words that I spotted.

Sand Castle, Rage

Careful construction
Turrets, ramparts and a moat
Stomped by big brother