I heard a track from Bon Iver for the first time last year but I wasn’t completely blown away. Then today I listened to a recording of him performing live at South by Southwest and I suddenly liked it. So I went and listened again to a few tracks from his album, For Emma, Forever Ago, and I realised why the discrepancy — he sounds much better live than on the CD.
He’s big on the falsettos, so you might not even agree with me on that if you don’t like falsettos. But I think his voice has a raw, gritty and vulnerable quality that makes his live performance quite visceral.
Bon Iver is really just one guy named Justin Vernon. He wrote For Emma, Forever Ago, his debut CD, while holed up in a cabin in Wisconsin trying to exorcise some inner demons. I think the concert recording captures the darkness, misery and anguish really well, while the album sounds too… clean.
The Guardian calls him “quintessentially English”, but that shouldn’t turn you off from John Hegley just yet. He writes very endearing, funny poems about dogs, potatoes and other things that generally make you happy. I first found out about him through The Guardian Unlimited Books podcast, where he read this:
In the embrace of my glasses
I openly accept my vulnerability
And affirm my acceptance of outside help.
As well as providing open acknowledgement
Of the imperfection in my eyesight,
My glasses are a symbolic celebration
Of the wider imperfection
That is the human condition.
In contrast, contact lenses are a hiding of the faults.
They pretend the self-sufficiency of the individual
And minister onto the cult of stultifying normality.
They are that which should be cast out of your vision.
They are a denial of the self.
They are a denial of the other.
They are a betrayal of humanity.
Link time: You can read 22 more poems here, and listen to him perform some more poems here. (As far as I can see none of the poems are duplicated on the two sites.) You can also listen here to the Guardian interview that I mentioned above, in which he also turns a daily news story about the UK education system into a song and sings a poem about two gay bus drivers. That should brighten up your Monday somewhat, I hope!
Listen to Mark Kermode’s rant against The Hottie and the Nottie. It is infinitely more entertaining and insightful than the film.
Ok I can’t believe I just corrupted the sanctity of this website with a still from this film.
Anyway go listen to Kermode here. You have to have Real Audio installed.
Choice quote:
“The way it demonstrates that beauty is on the inside is that the Nottie goes to a plastic surgeon and is eugenically changed into a Hottie. And then the horrible, creepy guy who loved Paris Hilton in the first place, discovers that he might actually fancy the Nottie — but only, only after she’s had intense plastic surgery. So clearly, this is a Nazi tract.”
True story: I listened to Feist’s version of Lover’s Spit in its entirety on Wednesday morning while waiting for the bus … and afterwards I felt really, really bad. Like, want to feign sickness, go home and crawl into bed kind of bad.
Which, of course, means that Lover’s Spit is a very GOOD song. I first heard the Broken Social Scene version a year back, then again when I went for Mosaic. But the Feist version hit me like a fat brick when I watched Half Nelson.
See – one paragraph, three other things you should check out.
An executive producer of Sex and the City talks about how her husband realised he was gay. A writer recounts how he ended up in India, witnessing the love of his life get married to another man. A middle-aged hippie pledges never to sell out — and then takes up a job promoting Phil Collins’ work.
The Moth is a live literary event that has been held regularly in New York
since 1997, where people both famous and unknown go on stage to tell stories without notes. Now the performances are available as podcasts, so it doesn’t (really) matter if you don’t live in New York!
Each podcast is about 15 minutes long, and every story on it so far has been funny and heartbreaking and uplifting. If The American Life is too long for you, this is a good substitute. Storytellers include Malcolm Gladwell, stand-up comic Mike Daisey and my favourite sex columnist, Dan Savage.
You can click here to stream some of the stories, here to subscribe to the podcast. (My preferred way to subscribe to podcasts though, is to open iTunes, go into the iTunes store and search for the podcast I want. I find it much faster than trying to subscribe through the podcast website.)
Although I listened to Illinois quite a bit when it first came out (fuelled by my intrigue for a man whose name incited so many useless pronounciation arguments), I never really bothered with YouTube-ing him to death. Which is weird, as you know, for me.
I always knew that Sufjan’s (Sufyan? Soo-yan? Soppian??) finely-crafted music would be a shame to watch ‘live’, because, well, he’s not Rufus Wainwright now is he. But I don’t mean to rag on Sufjan. Rufus doesn’t use a gazillion instruments. And strictly-piano players always know the right way to scale their songs down for live shows.
Having given you all that useless prelude, I come to the point of my post:
Come on! Feel the Illinoise! -Part I: The World’s Columbian Exposition -Part II: Carl Sandburg Visits Me in a Dream
a.k.a. longest song title ever. But the movements in the song seem to merit that length. My favourite part is Part II. I googled Carl Sandburg: an American poet, historian, novelist, balladeer and folklorist. (prepare to spend a good half an hour or so at wiki)
The second part of this Sufjan Stevens song is like, the best quick promo for a human being ever. I am now going to find myself some Carl Sandburg poems while you listen to the song (part II starts about 3 mins into the song):
The Band’s Visit is one of those rare films that creep up on you and catch you unawares. You were expecting maybe a raucous, slapstick-filled festival that will remind you all about the transcendental power of music to bring warring factions together. Inter-religious dancing, perhaps, between Arabs and Jews that will leave you with a reassurance that there is still hope in the Middle East.
But from the very first shot, it’s clear that you’ve set your expectations way too low.
Stuck in a dead desert town in the middle of Israel, a ceremonial police band from Egypt is taken in by Dina, a restaurant owner, an uber-cool, sexy, strong Jewish woman whose presence as the only female lead overpowers all the men in the film. There are no hotels in the town, so she lets a couple of them stay overnight at her house, and persuades one of her regular patrons to take the rest of the band in.
What follows is a night that most of the characters will likely forget as they move on with their lives, but which will stick with you as one of the most charming, warm and hilarious films you never expected to watch. It’s about love kindled and lost, betrayal, awkward friendships struck for no reason other than boredom, disappointment, regret, music, and yes, hope, with lots of laughs thrown in for good measure.
I don’t know how you’ll manage to procure yourself a screening, but do it.
Rufus Wainwright can do no wrong. Even when his titles make me blush (Between My Legs).
Although I haven’t obsessed over Release The Stars as much as I obsessed over Want One, I still love it dearly, and Rufus’ video for ‘Rules and Regulations’ (below) reminds me of how I used to stay up late to watch the ‘April Fools’ video over and over and wish I could be one of his bitchez.
Yasmine and Joon, and we did this because we wanted to have a place where we could collectively store all the things that make us go ‘Wooooooooooot’ on MSN.
Have anything to recommend back to us? We promise we won’t let lazy interns delete your emails to theportableguide [at] gmail.com.
He’s big on the falsettos, so you might not even agree with me on that if you don’t like falsettos. But I think his voice has a raw, gritty and vulnerable quality that makes his live performance quite visceral.
The Guardian calls him “quintessentially English”, but that shouldn’t turn you off from 
Ok I can’t believe I just corrupted the sanctity of this website with a still from this film.
bad.
Which, of course, means that Lover’s Spit is a very GOOD song. I first heard the Broken Social Scene version a year back, then again when I went for 
An executive producer of Sex and the City talks about how her husband realised he was gay. A writer recounts how he ended up in India, witnessing the love of his life get married to another man. A middle-aged hippie pledges never to sell out — and then takes up a job promoting Phil Collins’ work.
The Band’s Visit
