Hail to the chief

From the advertising department of the Bangkok Post:

Dear Sir,

As you are no doubt aware, President George W. Bush and Mrs. Laura Bush will visit Thailand as guests of the Royal Thai Government on August 6 to 7, an event that will commemorate the 175th Anniversary of Thai-US relations.

On August 6, President Bush will meet with Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej at Government House and the prime minister will host a dinner in the president's honour.

On August 7, President Bush will deliver his last major policy speech on Asia before completing his term in January 2009. Afterward, President Bush will visit the Mercy Center, a non-profit organization working for children in Klong Toey.

To mark this important event for Thai-US bilateral relations, we would like to invite you to post your welcome messages to President Bush in a special section of the Bangkok Post which we are arranging for this purpose. It will be an important and timely sign of your organization's own commitment to friendly and mutually beneficial bilaterial relations between our two countries on all levels.

We look forward to discussing our very favourable rates for this opportunity with you at your earliest convenience.

Your faithfully...

Welcome messages, eh?

That is what it's all about

I've been watching the first episode of Channel 4's Can't Read Can't Write. Can inspirational teacher Phil Beadle teach illiterate adults what years of schooling never managed? You know the deal.

Mr Beadle is a bit of a maverick (not to mention his passing resemblance to the drummer from the Pogues) and clearly has little time for the bureaucracy that tends to stifle the learning experience. It's fair to say that he doesn't see eye to eye with the luckless Diane Hawks, who is in charge of adult literacy at Southwark College. In fact, he describes what he witnesses in a lesson as "horrendous", "depressing" and "incompetent".

We've all learned by now to be deeply wary of anything that smacks of reality TV. So I'll give the benefit of the doubt to Ms Hawks, and leave open the possibility that her words were taken out of context, edited to suit the producers' agenda, or even concocted from sophisticated voice synthesis software and mimed by her android simulacrum. Nevertheless, this is what appeared to come out of her mouth as she defended her staff in the face of Beadle's tongue-lashing:

"My teachers are following the Skills for Life work packs set down by the government and because of doing that we actually get the results at the end of the day because they pass their exams because *that* is what it's all about."

[bangs face slowly and steadily on old school desk, the kind with redundant inkwell, until five decades' worth of compass-scratch graffiti transfers itself to my forehead]

Rainbow chasers

I don't mind cover versions, but I do get pissed off with cover versions of cover versions; when a performer borrows not just the song, but the arrangement, phrasing and instrumentation of a 'definitive' performance. 'Over the Rainbow' is a good example. Judy Garland's performance was etched into the collective consciousness to such an extent that few other people dared attempt it; when they did, it had to be a carbon copy (see Rufus Wainwright for ar ecent example). If anybody had the balls to follow another route, he or she could be guaranteed a pack of feral copycats: so Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's take suffers the indignity of a frontal assault from Cliff Richard; Eva Cassidy gets the Leona Lewis treatment, and a trickledown effect into every karaoke booth on the planet. (An aside, but is there a rule that you have to be safely dead before your version is fair game?)

Fast forward to David McAlmont at the Festival Hall Ballroom on Saturday night. (Yes, I'm on one of my midnight flits to the London fleshpots.) He's doing a selection of songs by Harold Arlen, who's something of a forgotten man in the context of the Great American Songbook, especially when set alongside the Holy Trinity of Porter, Gershwin and Berlin. It's only when you hear his songs all in a row that you realise how good he was: 'Get Happy'; 'It's Only a Paper Moon'; 'Stormy Weather'; 'That Old Black Magic'; 'The Man That Got Away'; 'One For My Baby' as well as the songs for The Wizard of Oz.

And it's in this context that McAlmont finds something new about the song, albeit something that's been staring us in the face for nearly 70 years. Arlen, the son of a Buffalo cantor, had a deep understanding of African-American music; not just the jazz beloved of his songwriting contemporaries, but the sounds of an older, rougher tradition. With his extraordinary range, falsetto swooping down into basso growls, McAlmont could use 'Rainbow' as a showcase for his virtuosity, but he keeps himself in check, and unearths the truth: it's a blues song, as raw and yearning and bitter as anything created by a blind man with a crappy guitar.

Keep an eye out for the cover of the cover at a karaoke night near you.

Weekend 90s revisionism, part 3: Ultrasound

I first saw Ultrasound at a showcase for unsigned bands in about 1997. One of the other outfits on the bill was managed by the drummer from Dodgy, which was enough to recommend the Geordie oddballs by default, even before they'd played a note. They briefly became critical darlings, partly because their singer (Andrew 'Tiny' Wood) was very fat, and nobody wanted to be seen to be sizeist, but eventually their prog tendencies made them uncool, a sin compounded by the immense length (a triple on vinyl) of their sole album, Everything Picture (1999). Maybe they should have gone the Radiohead route, and identified a dance element within their meandering Floydian wibbles.

In this clip, Tiny seems to be auditioning for the lead role in The Sydney Greenstreet Story, although I think they were trying more for a Death In Venice effect. Good tune, though.

All babies want to get borned

Finally got around to seeing Juno. And it's good. Compelling central performance; snappy script, packed with the sort of one-liners that were just born to be the titles of blog posts; and a cracking soundtrack. (Kimya Dawson, Belle & Seb and the Velvets? With this wry indie-folk you are spoiling us!)

And yet (or maybe because of this) it feels ever so slightly hollow. Yeah, it's edgy, if we mean by that that it doesn't spoonfeed the audience, and runs the risk of annoying some of them: pro-choice and pro-life groups alike have attacked it, which I'm sure cost the producers no sleep whatsoever. But it feels like indie-cinema-by-focus-group; it's a Fox Searchlight product (see Little Miss Sunshine, Napoleon Dynamite, Sideways and their ilk) which aims to bring more left-field films to mainstream audiences, but in doing so redefines the precise location of left field. As was the case with 'indie music' after the global success of Nirvana and Radiohead, the critical goalposts aren't so much moved as chopped down for firewood. Which was lovely for a while, but led to all those skinny-trewed 'The' bands playing third on the bill at a festival near you this summer: what Tim Walker identifies as "landfill indie".

A purist argument would be, of course, that there are good films and bad films (records, books, etc) and the removal of any genre distinction is a good thing. Although, for someone to make the decision that this is a Fox Searchlight product, there must still be a mainstream for Juno to be outside. Even if only slightly outside, looking in, chucking out one-liners to a backing track of wry indie-folk.

Nothing will come of nothing

I'm so lazy that I've only just bothered to look at the plans for the 9/11 memorial. And I'm so shallow that the only reason I did that was because I saw a news story informing an awestruck world that Billy Crystal is going to be a director of the fundraising committee, and I thought, crikey, Billy Crystal's 60 years old, I wonder whether Soap has aged better than he has. And I'm so cynical that, when I noticed Robert De Niro was on the same board, I immediately surmised that they're doing it to promote a threequel called Analyze The Other.

Anyway, the memorial will (if Billy and Bob and their slebby pals get their various acts together) go by the name of Reflecting Absence, which is, I suppose, what memorials should do; offer a physical representation not just of those who are no longer around, but of the emptiness and loss that their absence creates. This is the opposite of Baudrillard's analysis of the successive phases of the image; in the third phase, he opines, the image masks the absence of a profound reality. But you knew that. A memorial, by contrast, draws attention to the fact of that absence.

The problem is that nothingness is a difficult thing to represent: you have to create an environment in which one expects presence to make the absence apparent. This is why Cage's 4'33" is not just any old silence; it needs the musicians, the conductor, the audience to remind us what we aren't hearing.

I'm not Stephen Bayley's greatest fan, but I did agree with him that the only way the Millennium Dome might have been redeemed would have been to leave it completely empty (as distinct from vacuous, which is what in the end happened). Coincidentally, of course, the most lasting and successful monument to that great calendrical non-event was a structure that moves but goes precisely nowhere.

Still in London, while I like the various conceptual witticisms that pop up on the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square, I did prefer it in its unadorned state, when you could imagine whatever you liked there, provided it was something that didn't mind getting covered in pigeon shit and Italian exchange students who'd been kicked out of the National Gallery for snogging.

And if you don't mind getting your hands dirty, how's about Kerry Katona's new perfume, Outrageous, as reported in the Liverpool Echo, via No Rock And Roll Fun:

The French-made scent, whose bottle has a spiky black rubber top, aims to reflect the mother-of-four’s personality and the “outrageous” lies about what she has not done.

Untruths about non-events, eh? I'm impressed. Nature, as I vaguely remember from the time before I dropped physics, abhors a vacuum. Art, it would seem, rather likes the idea.

Spare us the cutter

More self-aggrandising nostalgia masquerading as social comment:

And here it comes again. It's senseless, it's depressing, and we all feel powerless to stop it. No, not knife crime; not quite. I mean a far more pervasive social evil; people talking about knife crime, apportioning the blame. It's Thatcher's fault, bark the lefties, because she made everyone selfish and materialistic. No, it's that Roy Jenkins and his damned permissive society, retort the Telegraph readers. Actually, a contrarian declares, it all started when King Arthur took the sword out of the stone, and made blades fashionable. And so on.

But it's not quite that simple. Excuse the apparent digression, but when I was a teenager, I sometimes went on CND marches...

More Greenham commentary here.

Speak and spell

AA Gill on Channel 4's big Islam documentary:

And how annoying to apply the politically correct spelling of Qur’an to show you’re right-on, but still pronounce it Koran because you’re frightened of sounding like a prat.