Endure, Rainbow

We weather the storm
Waiting for sunshine through rain
Colours of love and pride

Duck Rock by Malcolm McLaren

Punk Svengali Malcolm McClaren once described himself as “the most evil man in pop music”. I wouldn’t go that far (at least compared to some of the vile bigots and predators that I won’t mention here), but it’s fair to say that he was a thief, a plagiarist and an exploiter of other people’s talents. For this album he plundered from South African township bands, New York Hip Hop artists and traditional American folk music with not a credit or royalty to be seen (until he was sued and settled out of court for an undisclosed sum).

This is also a wildly uneven album with the two hits (clumsy yet catchy takes on line dancing and skipping) bookended by samples from a Hip Hop radio show and odd little electronic and ambient pieces. The latter pieces were from producer Trevor Horn and musicians Anne Dudley and JJ Jeckzalik who would later form the much more interesting group The Art of Noise.

Two stars for the original work on this and zero for Mr McClaren himself.

Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell

A classic Nordic noir thriller, featuring the archetypal hangdog detective. Kurt Wallander is middle aged, recently divorced, overweight and suffering from an irritable bowel exacerbated by a diet of greasy junk food. He is called on to take charge of investigating a brutal and apparently motiveless crime - an elderly couple in a remote farmhouse have been attacked, with the husband slaughtered and the wife in a critical condition with a noose around her neck. She dies a few days later after saying just one word "foreign"

The book is set in the late 80s in Sweden, which was a time of much social and political upheaval, with an asylum seeker crisis stoked by far right parties and lurking neo-nazi groups. The fateful final words are leaked to the press, leading to racially motivated attacks, including the shocking random murder of an innocent Somali refugee.

The investigation is a painstaking one, with Wallander having to tread a tricky line in establishing the identity of the killer or killers. There are several lines of investigation into why the farmer was a target for murder, but each one peters out in a frustrating dead end. He struggles with self doubt as he tries to understand what has happened and why.

Maybe the times require another kind of policeman, he thought. Policemen who aren’t distressed when they’re forced to go into a human slaughterhouse in the Swedish countryside early on a January morning. Policemen who don’t suffer from my uncertainty and anguish.

As this is happening, Wallender must deal with his elderly father who is suffering from the onset of dementia, as well as trying to rebuild his relationship with his daughter who is now a university student in Stockholm. He also has something of an obsession with the new Public Prosecutor Annette Brolin who will decide when to bring charges, and he makes a clumsy and boorish pass at her when drunk one night. His drinking also nearly sees him being arrested for driving under the influence, but he somehow gets away it, although shamefully embarrassed by what could have happened.

The secondary case of the racist murder is concluded with some almost farcical moments with Wallander almost falling to his doom from scaffolding whilst trying to surveil a suspect followed by a risky high speed pursuit in a horse box.

Just when it seems that the original case has gone cold, Wallander is struck with an idea whilst waiting in a queue at the bank, leading to a breakthrough and a breathless conclusion. I'll definitely be reading more of these.

Zodiac

The Zodiac Killer was probably one of the most notorious US serial killers of the 70s, mainly for his habit of sending cryptic coded messages with threats of further atrocities and demands that they be printed on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. This case has been the basis of several movies, both documentaries and fictionalised accounts, and David Fincher's take is a good one.

The film opens with a brutal murder, followed by the first of the coded messages that catches the eye of Robert Graysmith, political cartoonist on the Chronicle. It starts an obsession with the case that persists for years, as well as showing the effects that it has on the detectives in charge of the investigation. Fincher's direction is stylish, with good use of music to set the scene in the early 70s. There are a couple of distracting CGI shots of San Francisco of the period that haven't held up particularly well, but on the whole it's a good crime thriller. 

The film does develop a convincing theory for the identity of the killer, but as is well known the truth is still ambiguous even to this day. My money's on Ted Cruz. 

New Tea

Pop the kettle on

While I try to remove this darned
Plastic packaging

Koi

Why is your goldfish

Hiding under a lily pad?
Just a little koi

Stew, Thunder

A hard day's smiting
Then back home to Valhalla
For a bowl of stew