The Descendants

Whilst a decent enough film, this is not an Oscar award winning performance by Clooney, good though it is. Recently Cloony's films have always been watchable, from Syriana to Up in the Air (we can forget the Oceans franchise) and this film follows in that rather rich vein, but lets not get too excited. It's the sort of story the BBC does well at although without the exotic locations.
What did strike me about the film and the book it was based on, is that someone, whether it was the author in the first place, or the director, knew Joni Mitchell's song Big Yellow Taxi.
She said back in 1970 (before the book author was born)
'I wrote 'Big Yellow Taxi' on my first trip to Hawaii. I took a taxi to the hotel and when I woke up the next morning, I threw back the curtains and saw these beautiful green mountains in the distance. Then, I looked down and there was a parking lot as far as the eye could see, and it broke my heart... this blight on paradise'
For that is the back story, the opening shot is of a multi laned highway crammed with cars going through urban sprawl with a hint of the sea beyond, and Cloony's character is having to decide what he is going to do with an unspoilt piece of coastline his family have held in trust with property developers offering vast sums for the rights to redevelop.
Then to compound the link, his wife comatose in a hospital bed looks like Joni Mitchell in the long shots, high pronounced cheekbones and long golden hair.
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel *, a boutique
And a swinging hot spot

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

They took all the trees
Put 'em in a tree museum *
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to see 'em

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

Hey farmer farmer
Put away that DDT * now
Give me spots on my apples
But leave me the birds and the bees
Please!

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

Late last night
I heard the screen door slam
And a big yellow taxi
Took away my old man

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

7.9 / 10 

Ani DiFranco @ Union Chapel, Islington

Our first visit to the Union Chapel and what a wonderful venue, but real star was Ani DiFranco. Bought her cd Dilate a couple of years ago but it has received only sporadic playing but a chance to see her and the venue proved irresistible.
Already slightly late we found seats up in the balcony which offered a good view but one more focussed on the pulpit and not the performer. Enjoyed the last couple of numbers by the support act Ruth Theodore especially her guitar playing, but it was when Ani hit those first guitar notes did the hairs on the neck stand up. I went hunting for different location for photographing from and discovered some empty pews to stage right and spent the majority of her set from there.
A couple of real highlights for me were the 'unloved happier' discarded track from her latest 'Which Side Are You On?' cd and the very impromptu duet with a member of the audience who joined her on stage and played one of her guitars. It turns out that he is Declan Bennett, an Ani fan, singer songwriter back over from New York. A magic moment indeed.
A great 90minute solo performance receiving a well deserved standing ovation, and a great gig.

The Heart of Robin Hood @ RSC Stratford upon Avon

Panto is always different in the hands of the RSC and this production keeps up their tradition of offering us something different, last years Matilda now a hit in the West End, and the equally stunning Beauty and the Beast a few years back bear testimony to the fact. We bought some restricted view tickets late and whilst I had a narrow metal cruciform post in front of me it only detracted a fraction from the stage only a few metres away.
9 / 10

Below is Paul Taylor's review from the Independent who gave it 4/5 and I won't argue with that.

The greensward is a massive 40-foot high slope in The Heart of Robin Hood, the RSC's captivating new Christmas show.

The characters enter by sliding down the near-vertical back wall of Borkur Jonsson's set with an elating whoosh. Their other main route into the proceedings is by insertion upside down on ropes lowered from a lofty canopy of oak branches. Since the Company started performing on high-altitude thrust-stages, niftiness at dangling in a harness must have become virtually an audition requirement for actors at the RSC. And there's no one better at choreographing this form of suspense than Gisli Orn Gardarrson of Iceland's celebrated Vesturport outfit. Ending with a lyrical aerial twirl by the now-entwined hero and heroine, his is a Christmas production that, in the best possible sense, keeps things above the heads of young and old alike.

If the dominating slope approaches a 1:1 gradient, Robin Hood is on an equivalently stiff learning curve in David Farr's wittily revisionist new version. Looking a bit like a Joe Orton fantasy with his bare chest and laced-up leather trousers, James McArdle's blunt, Yorkshire Robin starts off as an emotionally arrested boy who heads a gang of ullulating thugs dedicated to self-interest. Then along comes Iris Roberts's winningly spirited, blonde-bobbed Marion who (shades of Rosalind in As You Like It) is forced to lead a double life. In the castle, she feigns betrothal to Martin Hutson's pervily psychotic Prince John. In the forest, she masquerades as Martin of Sherwood, spearhead of a rival, more caring-and-sharing bunch of thieves.
 
A bit too politically correct? Actually no, because there's lashings of irreverence (Little John is played a drily philosophical dwarf); some good gruesome gags (such as playing for time by playing puppets with the corpse of Guy of Gisborne) and a lovely fool in the burly shape of Olafur Darri Olafson's Pierre, a self-involved French fop (“”Green is not my colour”) who later quite gets off on faking “butch”. And there's a frizzy-haired dog who parps on a clarinet and wild boar who saws on a cello before it is removed as his innards during a ritual disembowelling.
 
There are also disturbing elements in the central story of the traumatising dangers facing the two children of a man who was hanged as a subversive for refusing to pay Prince John's fraudulent Holy Contribution Tax. For this reason, I think it would be safer to take children a little older than the 7 upwards suggested by the RSC. Otherwise, warmly recommended.

Great Tracks No 5, Facelift by Soft Machine

Recorded in 1970, this the opening track on their album titled 'Third' is made up from two live recordings, primarily from Fairfield Hall, Croydon but some from the Mothers Club in Birmingham a week later
"Facelift" is the most radical track of the four on the double LP being some 19 minutes long. A majority of the finished product is essentially a live recording, involving tape collage, speeding up, slowing down, looping and backwards playing of tapes, the ending being the most memorable part, where two different treatments of the same basic riff (one from the live concert, the other, at double speed, from their Spaced project) are heard simultaneously, backwards. Facelift is bassist Hugh Hopper's composition and is an extended rock-jazz improvisation of the basic rift. Use of tapes in an live situation was ahead of its time, now a band would have a couple of laptops and an array of Boss loop pedals. Hopper did in fact employ a fuzz pedal. Saw them twice, once at the UCL student union in a large room with a very low ceiling, then when they made history by becoming the first 'rock band' invited to play at London's Proms in August 1970, a show which was broadcast live and subsequently released as a cd.
Very influential, and could have easily chosen any of the three other tracks, so a brief note for 'Slightly All The Time' and Robert Wyatt's 'Moon in June'
.

Great Tracks No 4, Sweetest Decline by Beth Orton

One of current favourite tracks at the moment, a very simple gentle ballad in fact that just oozes laid back calmness. The string background just lulls you into a great sense of well being and then over the top a simple repeating melody on piano (Dr John The Night Tripper???) and Beth's glorious vocals over the top.
Wonderful chill out music, you could loop it forever.

Great tracks No3: Astral Weeks by Van Morrison

Released in 1968, such a great opener on such a great album. Beautifully scored with the minimum of instrumentation, acoustic (rytham) guitar, upright bass, flute, maracas, and a slewing string section. Lyrically said to be going head to head with Dylan at the time but criticallt reviewed as 'impressionistic' and even 'stream of conciousness' this 43 years later sounds as contemporary as the come. Within a five to six years and after the release of St Dominic's Preview it was all downhill for Van the Man.
A must for anybodies album collection.

First open fire of the year

A taste of winter to come maybe, but this afternoon lit the first open fire of the year.
Listening to Nick Cave's 'Dig, Lazarus Dig' to be followed by John Martyn's 'Solid Air' a classic indeed.