Best of 2011 - Music

As with my list of my favourite books that I posted last week, here are the albums that particularly caught my attention over the past twelve months. I start with some jazz followed by some rock.

Art Pepper – Blues for the Fisherman: Unreleased Art Vol. VI – Live at Ronnie Scott’s, London, 1980 – 4 CDs (2011)

Keith Jarrett – Rio - 2 CDs (2011)

Brad Mehldau - Places (2000); Largo (2002); Day is Done (2005); Highway Rider - 2 CDs (2010)

Julio Resende – Assim Falava Jazzatustra (2009); You Taste Like a Song (2011)

Earlier this year I wrote on my blog about my all-time favourite jazz musician, Art Pepper, the legendary alto sax player, and the release by his wife of a wonderful four CD recording of concerts he played over two nights at Ronnie Scott’s in London in 1980.

http://douglascuba.blogspot.com/2011/07/art-pepper-blues-for-fisherman.html

Art Pepper released a mountain of albums of studio and live concerts during his life but few, if any, are better than the tracks recorded on Blues for the Fisherman. If you don’t know his music this is perhaps not the best place to start because of the length of the recording but it's certainly one to come back to. It’s a pity that the album has such an awful cover.

The other three jazz musicians on my list are all pianists. Keith Jarrett has been making albums since the mid-sixties and is perhaps best known for his improvisational solo concerts in Köln, Bremen, Lausanne, Vienna and other cities. Two years ago he brought out an excellent triple CD album from concerts he played in Paris and London. This year he topped that with Rio, a double CD recording of a concert in Rio de Janeiro in April. While he truncates his songs these days into shorter pieces, the range and dexterity of his playing is arguably more emotional and expressive than ever. Jazz improvisation at its very best.

Although Brad Mehldau, the US jazz pianist, has been playing since the mid-nineties I only discovered his music this year. I’ve listed four of his albums which I particularly like. Largo, his moody, atmospheric 2002 album, is my favourite but not far ahead of the others listed. He plays his own compositions but also adapts songs by other musicians, such as Lennon and McCartney, Radiohead and Paul Simon, to marvellous effect. I managed to see him in a magnificent concert with Joshua Redman during the Madrid Jazz Festival. A musical highlight of my year.

Finally, Júlio Resende, a Portuguese pianist, who I only came across in the last few months. He’s not unlike Brad Mehldau in some ways but perhaps reminds me more of Esbjörn Svensson, the Norwegian Jazz pianist, who I wrote about at the end of last year. Júlio Resende has only made two albums as far as I know. His 2009 release, Assim Falava Jazzatustra, is largely a live concert recorded in Lisbon and includes a superb adaptation of Pink Floyd’s Shine On You Crazy Diamond. This year’s studio recording, You Taste Like a Song, builds on that success and, like Brad Mehldau, he does a version of Radiohead song. Júlio Resende’s innovative piano playing is a pure delight.

Lucinda Williams - Blessed (2011)

Wilco – The Whole Love (2011)

Cowboy Junkies – Sing in My Meadow: The Nomad Series Volume 3 (2011)

The Decemberists – The King is Dead (2011)

Peter Bruntnell – Black Mountain UFO (2011)

Dropkick – Time Cuts the Ties (2011)

Gerry Rafferty – Gerry Rafferty (1971?)

When I looked back at the rock music I’d been listening to over the year, I was surprised to find more good albums than in recent years.

Lucinda Williams has made some of my favourite albums of all time, especially her 1998 CD Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. Since that time I’ve found her music variable, although rarely poor. This year’s Blessed is her best in a long time. She turned up the volume and surrounded herself with a great, hard-rocking, bluesy band. This is probably the album I’ve been listening to most in the car.

Another year and another great album by Wilco. On first listening I found The Whole Love a little flat and uninteresting, making me think that perhaps Jeff Tweedy was trying too many different styles. However, on repeated listenings the album grew on me and I realised that he had succeeded once again. I doubt if there’s a better rock band around today.

The Canadian band Cowboy Junkies have long been a favourite of mine, with their dreamy, country and folk influenced sound. This year, however, like Lucinda Williams, they turned up the volume and brought out an album, Sing in My Meadow, which sounds like something from the 1970s – a jam session of loud, pounding, distorted guitars, with Margo Timmins’ vocals floating over the top. I suspect many of their usual fans won’t like it, but I love it.

The Decemberists are a band from Portland, Oregon and have been making albums for a number of years. I only came across them this year and found The King is Dead full of rousing, melodic, strangely English sounding songs. They’ve been described as sounding like a mix of Fairport Convention and REM and that’s not too far from the truth (Peter Buck plays guitar on one track), although they manage to maintain their own style.

Peter Bruntnell, an English singer-songwriter, has had little commercial success and is hardly known outside of a small group of diehard fans. Allmusic.com, for example, the online music encyclopedia, doesn’t even have his biography and only lists his last two albums without reviews. For someone of such clear musical and lyrical talent this is nothing short of criminal. This year’s release, Black Mountain UFO, may not be his best (that honour goes to Ends of the Earth and Normal for Bridgwater) but it’s still way ahead of most other new releases that I listened to during the year.

Another group who have yet to receive significant commercial success and popular acclaim is the Glasgow band Dropkick. They too fail to feature on allmusic.com despite having released a number of great albums. If you like Teenage Fanclub’s music from the 1990s, you’ll love Time Cuts the Ties. Great melodic, electric guitar-based rock music.

Finally, with the sad death of the Scottish singer-songwriter Gerry Rafferty at the beginning of the year, I went back to listen to his early albums, before he had his huge hit Baker Street in 1978 from the album City to City. I already had Can I Have My Money Back? from my years growing up in Scotland in the 1970s, but by chance I came across a previous eponymously-named album which is apparently a compilation of songs he recorded at the very beginning of the seventies with The Humblebums. This could be the missing Beatles album. Not only does Gerry Rafferty sound like John Lennon but his perfectly crafted songs are just as catchy and well-written as anything produced by The Beatles. Gerry Rafferty was a hugely gifted singer-songwriter.

Best of 2011 - Books

It’s almost the end of another year so once again a post on my favourite books of the past twelve months. As with my previous best of the year books, these are not books that were necessarily published during the past year (I think only four were), just those I read for the first time and which I think deserve recognition.

Fiction
For no particular reason the novels I’ve read have been overwhelmingly dominated by female writers – Anita Brookner, Iris Murdoch, Siri Hustvedt, Rose Tremain, Emma Donoghue, Margaret Drabble, A.S. Byatt, M.J. Hyland and Maggie O’Farrell – with Alan Hollinghurst the only male author getting on to my list of fiction.

Anita Brookner – Latecomers; A Start in Life; A Family Romance; Incidents in the Rue Laugier
The fact that I read four novels by the English novelist Anita Brookner in one year clearly suggests that the author made a big impression on me. I wouldn’t like to choose between the novels, but they tend to share certain characteristics - detailed portraits of generally middle-, if not upper-, class individuals, often having a mid-life crisis of sorts and who are lonely or rather alienated. Coming to terms with some emotional blow that has taken place in their lives is frequently a key theme. While the characters can sometimes be drawn in almost too much detail, their stories are always captivating and written in a deeply sensitive manner. Anita Brookner’s writing style is exquisite.

Iris Murdoch – The Sandcastle; A Severed Head; The Bell; The Sea, The Sea
When I was younger I remember always meaning to read something by the Irish-born writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch but I never seemed to get round to it. I suspect it was because I expected her novels to be rather heavy-going and full of philosophical reflections given her academic background. However, as I found out this year, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Her varied narratives race along and make for deeply enjoyable reading. Strangely, I found that what is often argued to be her most highly regarded novel, The Sea, The Sea, is for me her weakest, if only because I found it so difficult to relate, in any positive way, to a range of fairly obnoxious main characters and the story itself lacks credibility. The Bell, another award-winning novel, again brings together a motley crew of characters, but this time works better. A theme which seems to underlie many of Iris Murdoch’s novels is what’s going on under the surface of what appears to be the “normal” behaviour of people. This is drawn to great effect in both The Bell and The Sandcastle where secrets of a sexual nature abound. A Severed Head reads at times like a farce, and presumably intentionally so, as Iris Murdoch presents a sequence of hardly believable romantic occurrences to highlight the mendacious nature of upper-class English society at the start of the 1960s when the novel was written.

Siri Hustvedt – The Summer Without Men
Over the past few years the US writer Siri Hustvedt has become a favourite of mine, especially her novels What I Loved and The Sorrows of an American. This year she brought out The Summer Without Men, which I consider to be her best yet. I was so taken by the novel on first reading it that I posted a short piece earlier this year in August:

http://douglascuba.blogspot.com/2011/08/siri-hustvedt-summer-without-men.html

Sir Hustvedt is a truly intellectual writer who’s able to communicate emotion, passion and personal turmoil in an uplifting and perceptive manner.

Alan Hollinghurst – The Line of Beauty
The English writer Alan Hollinghurst has now published five novels and The Line of Beauty, which came out in 2004, was the first I’d read and it won’t be the last. Written through the eyes of a young gay man in the Thatcher years of the 1980s, the novel is both a withering social commentary on those greed-infested, bigoted years and an enthralling narrative.

Non-fiction
Much of my non-fiction reading this year was taken up by travel writers such as Peter Matthiessen, Bill Bryson and, best of all, Colin Thubron, in particular his excellent book In Siberia. However, in a year in which los indignados changed utterly the very nature of politics in Spain, the country where I live, two books stood out.

José Saramago – The Notebook
The Portuguese Nobel Prize winning author, Jose Saramago, never lived to see the young people of Spain rise up and challenge the Spanish state and society, but there’s no doubt that he would have been delighted with what they did and stood for. The Notebook is a compilation of the posts that José Saramago wrote on his blog in the last years of his life (he died in 2010) and is essentially his astute comments and observations on a broad range of political, social and cultural matters. It makes for fascinating reading and, as the quotes I posted in English and Spanish in August, overflows with indignation and anger at what passes for politics and society today.

http://douglascuba.blogspot.com/2011/08/jose-saramago-notebook.html

http://douglascuba.blogspot.com/2011/08/jose-saramago-el-cuaderno.html

José Luis Sampedro, entre otros - Reacciona
Los indignados in Spain are well known to have been deeply influenced by the thinking of Stéphane Hessel and he provides a prologue to Reacciona, a collection of essays written in Spanish by a number of intellectuals headed by José Luis Sampedro. The essays are centred on the political, economic and social crisis that the world faces today and provide many ideas, solutions and truly democratic forms of participation that have already seeped into the thinking and forms of action of los indignados. This is essential reading for those who want to go beyond the superficial interpretations that most of the mainstream media in Spain and elsewhere have given to the revolution in social and political consciousness that many Spanish young people have belatedly experienced over the past year.

Nick Kent – Apathy for the Devil: A 1970s Memoir
Nick Kent was an English journalist with the New Musical Express, a weekly publication that I used to devour in the 1970s when I first became enthralled by rock music, a passion that has remained with me till now. Together with Charles Shaar Murray, Paul Morley, Tony Parsons, Mick Farren and Julie Birchill, I lived on what Nick Kent wrote about music in his singular style and would go off and buy records purely on his recommendations, and almost always without regret. His compelling memoirs took me back to that era, one which now I feel blessed to have lived through as a teenager. Nick Kent conceals nothing and writes with alarming honesty and self-deprecating humour about his rampant addiction to heroin over much of the 1970s, and how it ravaged his own life and that of so many others in the music industry. What remains, however, is the quality of the music that came out of that much maligned decade and about which he writes with such zest – Neil Young arguably at his peak; The Rolling Stones when they still made great music; Rod Stewart before he got lost in the US; the West Coast sound of Jackson Browne and Crosby, Stills and Nash; the glam rock of David Bowie, Mott the Hoople and Roxy Music; and then halfway through the decade punk and new wave with The Sex Pistols, The Clash, Television, Talking Heads, Elvis Costello; and at the decade’s end Bruce Springsteen.

London Review of Books
Finally, I couldn’t let my end of year literary review pass by without mentioning the London Review of Books. For me it remains far and away the best periodical currently being published in the English language. Every two weeks I relish its diverse contents and superbly written articles on almost any possible topic you could think of. A cursory look at the contents page of the current edition shows the sheer breadth of its coverage – fascinating reviews of books on themes including the letters of Samuel Beckett, medicinal cannibalism, Iran’s nuclear programme and the music of Shostakovich. The LRB is a refreshing and necessary journal of our dire times.

Astrid Kirchherr - The Beatles in Black and White

I recently saw the fascinating Martin Scorcese documentary Living in the Material World about the life of George Harrison. One of the people interviewed in the film is Astrid Kirchherr, the German photographer, who got to know The Beatles in the early 1960s when they were starting off in Hamburg. Watching the documentary on the cinema screen I was greatly struck by her black and white portrait photos of the group. Knowing now that just a few months later the group would receive international fame and their faces would be plastered all over the world, the photos manage to combine a wonderful mixture of poignancy, intensity and innocence. I’ve posted a few above.

Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

The Summer Without Men is Siri Hustvedt’s fifth novel and deals with how a middle-aged woman responds when she finds out her husband of thirty years is cheating on her. This may sound like familiar literary territory, but Siri Hustvedt takes the reader through such a broad gamut of emotions – loss, despair, love, anger, persecution, depression, hate – that she manages to make the whole experience deeply positive and life-enhancing. She does this with sensitivity, elegance, a sense of down-to-earthness and an appealing playfulness. She ably avoids the trap of falling into self-indulgence and writes without a trace of elitism or arrogance. Her writing is full of intelligence, sagacity and a willingness to learn about the vagaries of our lives today. It’s heartening to know that writing and literature can still be so uplifting during a time of intellectual condescension and mind-numbing consumerism. Mediocrity and conformism need not reign. I feel I’m not alone.

José Saramago - El cuaderno

El blog maravilloso de José Saramago está disponible en el portugués y el español aquí:

http://cuaderno.josesaramago.org/

Y hay un libro del blog:

http://www.alfaguara.com/es/libro/el-cuaderno/

Abajo he elegido algunas de las citas que para mi son las más estimulantes, refrescantes y intransigentes de su blog. Son las mismas citas que puse en mi blog en inglés:

http://douglascuba.blogspot.com/2011/08/jose-saramago-notebook.html


2008
15 de septiembre
Físicamente habitamos un espacio, pero, sentimentalmente, somos habitados por una memoria. Memoria de un espacio y de un tiempo, memoria en cuyo interior vivimos, como una isla entre dos mares: a uno le llamamos pasado, a otro le llamamos futuro. Podemos navegar en el mar del pasado próximo gracias a la memoria personal que retuvo el recuerdo de sus rutas, pero para navegar en el mar del pasado remoto tendremos que usar las memorias acumuladas en el tiempo, las memorias de un espacio continuamente en transformación, tan huidizo como el propio tiempo.

Lo que sabemos de los lugares es lo que compartimos con ellos durante un cierto tiempo en el espacio que son. El lugar esta ahí, la persona aparece, luego la persona se va, el lugar continúa, el lugar hace a la persona, la persona transforma el lugar.

18 de septiembre
Me pregunto cómo y porqué Estados Unidos, un país en todo grande, ha tenido, tantas veces, presidentes tan pequeños. George Bush es tal vez el más pequeño de todos. Inteligencia mediocre, ignorancia abisal, expresión verbal confusa y permanentemente atraída por la irresistible tentación del puro disparate, este hombre se presenta ante la humanidad con la pose grotesca de un cowboy que ha heredado el mundo y lo confunde con una manada de ganado.

George Bush expulsó la verdad del mundo para, en su lugar, hacer fructificar la edad de la mentira.

Para Bush la política es, simplemente, una de las palancas del negocio, y quizá la mejor de todas, la mentira como arma, la mentira como avanzadilla de los tanques y de los cañones, la mentira sobre las ruinas, sobre los muertos, sobre las míseras y siempre frustradas esperanzas de la humanidad.

30 de septiembre
Obviamente, no tengo nada personal contra la esperanza, pero prefiero la impaciencia.

2 de octubre
Vivimos en una sociedad que parece haber hecho de la violencia un sistema de relaciones.

8 de octubre
Aprendemos de las lecciones de la vida que de poco nos puede servir una democracia política, por más equilibrada que parezca presentarse en sus estructuras internas y en su funcionamiento institucional, si no está constituida de raíz por una efectiva y concreta democracia económica y por una no menos concreta y efectiva democracia cultural.

Hoy ... la idea de democracia económica dio lugar a un mercado obscenamente triunfante, que al final se dio de bruces con una gravísima crisis en su vertiente financiera, mientras que la idea de democracia cultural fue substituida por una alienante masificación industrial de las culturas. No progresamos, retrocedemos.

Me niego a admitir que solo sea posible gobernar y desear ser gobernado de acuerdo con los modelos supuestamente democráticos en uso, a mi ver, pervertidos e incoherentes, que no siempre con buena fe cierta especie de políticos intentan convertir en universales, con promesas falsas de desarrollo social que apenas consiguen disimular las egoístas e implacables ambiciones que las mueven.

9 de octubre
Dios es el silencio del universo y el hombre el grito que da sentido a ese silencio.

Que Dios es eterno, dicen, y tiene tiempo para todo. Eterno será, lo admitimos para no contrariar al papa, pero su eternidad es sólo la de un eterno no ser.

17 de octubre
Permítaseme, por tanto, que vuelva a decir que Dios, habiendo sido siempre un problema, es ahora el problema.

Por tanto, se quiera o no se quiera, Dios como problema, Dios como piedra en medio del camino, Dios como pretexto para el odio, Dios como agente de desunión. Pero de esta evidencia palmaria no se osa hablar en ninguno de los múltiples análisis de la cuestión, tanto si son de tipo político, económico, sociológico, psicológico o utilitariamente estratégico.

20 de octubre
Crimen contra la humanidad es el que los poderes financieros y económicos de Estados Unidos, con la complicidad efectiva o tácita do su gobierno, fríamente han perpetrado contra millones de personas en todo el mundo, amenazadas de perder el dinero que les queda después de, en muchísimos casos (no dudo de que sean millones), haber perdido su única y cuántas veces escasa fuente de rendimiento, es decir, su trabajo.

Los criminales son conocidos, tienen nombre y apellidos, se trasladan en limusinas cuando van a jugar al golf, y tan seguros están de sí mismos que ni siquiera piensan en esconderse.

24 de octubre
José Luis Sampedro … nos preguntaba el maestro, también a él mismo, cómo se explica que haya aflorado tan rápidamente el dinero para rescatar los bancos y, sin necesidad de calificativos, si ese dinero habría aparecido con la misma rapidez de haberse solicitado para solucionar una emergencia en África, o para combatir el sida

7 de noviembre
La caridad es lo que resta cuando no hay ni bondad ni justicia.

16 de noviembre
Me abrazo a las palabras que he escrito, les deseo larga vida y recomienzo la escritura en el punto en que la había dejado. No hay otra respuesta.

15 de diciembre
Jorge Luis Borges ... a quien continúo considerando el inventor de la literatura virtual, esa literatura suya que parece haberse desprendido de la realidad para revelar mejor sus invisibles misterios.

22 de diciembre
Si el ridículo matara no quedaría de pie ni un solo político o un solo soldado israelí, esos especialistas en crueldad, esos doctorados en desprecio que miran el mundo desde lo alto de la insolencia que es la base de su educación.

31 de diciembre
Ya sabemos qué es una relación especial, se llama complicidad en el crimen.

2009
11 de febrero
El planeta sería mucho más pacífico si todos fuésemos ateos. Claro que, siendo la naturaleza humana lo que es, no nos faltarían otros motivos para todos los desacuerdos posibles e imaginables, pero nos libertaríamos de esa idea infantil y ridícula de creer que nuestro dios es el mejor de los demás dioses que andan por ahí y de que el paraíso que nos espera es un hotel de cinco estrellas. Es más, creo que reinventaríamos la filosofía.

24 de febrero
Que, pese a lo que está pasando en el mundo, sigue sin levantar la cabeza, como si no tuviera razón.

12 de marzo
Lo bello no es solo una categoría de lo estético, podemos encontrarlo también en la acción moral.

28 de abril
Somos la memoria que tenemos, sin memoria no sabríamos quienes somos.

7 de mayo
Culturalmente, es más fácil movilizar a los hombres para la guerra que para la paz.

8 de mayo
Y pienso que los libros son buenos para la salud, y también para el espíritu, y que nos permiten ser poetas o ser cientistas, y entender de estrellas o encontrarlas en el interior de la voluntad de ciertos personajes, ésas que a veces, algunas tardes, se escapan de las páginas y se pasean entre los humanos, tal vez más humanos ellos.

14 de mayo
La única y auténtica libertad del ser humano es la del espíritu, un espíritu no contaminado por creencias irracionales y por supersticiones tal vez poéticas en algún caso, pero que deforman la percepción de la realidad y deberían ofender la razón más elemental.

26 de mayo
Por todas partes, aquí, allí, los sin trabajo se cuenta por millones, todos los días millares de empresas se declaran en quiebra y cierran las puertas, pero no consta que ni un sólo obrero de una fábrica de armas haya sido despedido. Trabajar en una fábrica de armas es un seguro de vida.

27 de mayo
La felicidad es una cosa muy seria.

29 de mayo
Cada día hay una minoría que sabe más y una minoría que sabe menos. La ignorancia se expande de forma aterradora.

El neoliberalismo, en mi opinión, es un nuevo totalitarismo disfrazado de democracia, de la que no se mantienen nada más que las apariencias. El centro comercial es el símbolo de ese nuevo mundo.

9 de junio
No es posible votar a la izquierda si la izquierda ha dejado de existir.

26 de junio
Democracia. … Hay que buscar el modo de reinventarla, de arrancarla del inmovilismo de la rutina y de la descreencia, bien ayudadas, una y otra, por los poderes económico y político a los que le conviene mantener la decorativa fachada del edificio democrático, aunque nos vienen impidiendo verificar si por detrás de esa fachada subsiste todavía algo. En mi opinión, lo que queda, se usa, casi siempre, más para armar eficazmente las mentiras que para defender las verdades. Lo que llamamos democracia comienza a parecerse tristemente al paño solemne que cubre el féretro donde ya está descomponiéndose el cadáver.

2 de julio
Escribir es traducir. Siempre lo será. Incluso cuando estamos utilizando nuestra propia lengua.

6 de julio
Me refiero a mis alegados excesos de indignación. … ¿hay limites para la indignación? Y más: ¿cómo se puede hablar de excesos de indignación en un país en que precisamente, con las consecuencia que están a la vista, es lo que está faltando?

7 de julio
Como escritor, creo que no me he separado jamás de mi conciencia de ciudadano. Considero que donde va uno, debe ir otro. No recuerdo haber escrito una sola palabra que estuviera en contradicción con las convicciones políticas que defiendo, pero eso no significa que haya puesto alguna vez la literatura al servicio directo de la ideología que es la mía. Por supuesto, eso sí, al escribir procuro, en cada palabra, expresar la totalidad del hombre que soy.

El escritor, si es persona de su tiempo, si no se quedó anclado en el pasado, tiene que conocer los problemas de tiempo en que le tocó vivir. ¿Y qué problemas son los de hoy? Que no estamos construyendo un mundo aceptable, bien por el contrario, vivemos en un mundo que va de mal en peor y que humanamente no sirve.

8 de julio
Algunas personas se pasan la vida buscando la infancia que perdieron. Creo que soy una de ellas.

16 de julio
El arte abstracta, ya sea directa, ya sea de opción tendencial, “resguarda” y “liberta”, en principio, la independencia relativa del color, no lo “estrangula” en la apretura constringente de configuraciones más o menos previsibles o de modelos social y consensualmente correctos.

31 de julio
Envejecer es no ser necesario.

11 de agosto
Una insurrección de las conciencia libres es lo que necesitaríamos.

27 de agosto
Dignidad, eso que no se vende ni se deja comprar, y que es para el ser humano el grado supremo.

28 de septiembre
Disentir es uno de los dos derechos que le faltan a la Declaración de Derechos Humanos. El otro es el derecho a la herejía.

José Saramago - The Notebook

In his late eighties and near the end of his life, José Saramago, the Portuguese Nobel Prize winning writer and political activist, wrote a blog in which he made comments and observations on a broad range of political, economic, social, cultural and philosophical topics. These were interspersed with personal recollections and elegant eulogies for those he most respected. Whether writing on religion, the US presidency, democracy, the financial crisis or neo-liberalism, his words simply drip with indignation and anger. When I read his words I felt he was writing for me. Although his writings predated them by just a few years, he was also clearly writing for the young indignados in Spain and elsewhere who are now wakening up to the barbarity of the world we live in today.

José Saramago’s blog is available in Portuguese and Spanish at:

http://cuaderno.josesaramago.org/

The blog is also now available in English as a book entitled The Notebook, published by Verso, with a fine translation by Amanda Hopkinson and Daniel Hahn.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/184467701X/ref=s9_simh_gw_p14_d0_i1?pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=192CCMVXYQ44BJVD03B0&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=467128533&pf_rd_i=468294

Below I’ve picked out just some of the stimulating, refreshing and uncompromising words he wrote.

2008
15 September
In physical terms we inhabit space, but in emotional terms we are inhabited, by memory. A memory composed of a space and a time, a memory inside which we live, like an island between two oceans – one for the past, the other the future. We can navigate the ocean of the recent past thanks to a personal memory, which retains the recollection of the routes it has travelled, but to navigate the distant past we have to use memories that time has accumulated, memories of a space that is continually changing, as fleeting as time itself.

What we know of places is how we coincide with them over a certain period of time in the spaces they occupy. The place was there, the person appeared, then the person left, the place continued, the place having made the person, the person having transformed the place.

18 September
I wonder why it is that the United States, a country so great in all things, has so often had such small presidents. George W Bush is perhaps the smallest of them all. This man, with his mediocre intelligence, abysmal ignorance, confused communication skills and constant succumbing to the irresistible temptation of pure nonsense, has presented himself to humanity in the grotesque pose of a cowboy who has inherited the world and mistaken it for a herd of cattle.

George Bush expelled truth from the world, establishing the age of lies that now flourishes in its place.

For Bush, politics is simply one of the levers of business, and perhaps the best one of all - the lie as a weapon, the lie as the advance guard of tanks and cannons, the lie told over the ruins, over the corpses, over humanity’s wretched and perpetually frustrated hopes.

30 September
I have nothing against hope, obviously, but I prefer impatience.

2 October
We live in a society that seems to have made violence a way of social interaction.

8 October
The lessons of life have taught us how little use a political democracy will be, however well-balanced it may appear in its internal structures and institutional functioning, if it not constituted as the basis for an effective and real economic democracy and for a no less real and effective cultural democracy.

Today ... the idea of economic democracy has given way to a market that is obscenely triumphant, even at the moment of an extremely serious crisis on its financial axis, whilst the idea of a cultural democracy has ended up being replaced by an alienating industrialised mass marketing of culture. We are not progressing, we are regressing.

I just refuse to accept that it is only possible to govern and wish to be governed according to the supposedly democratic models currently in use, which to my mind are distorted and incoherent, and which certain politicians (not always in good faith) want to make universal, along with the false promises of social development that barely manage to disguise the egotistical and relentless ambitions of that really motivate them.

9 October
God is the silence of the universe and man is the cry that gives meaning to that silence.

God, they say, is eternal, and he has time for everything. Eternal he may be; we can allow that much so as not to contradict the pope, but his eternity is only that of eternal not-being.

17 October
Allow me therefore to say now that God, who has always been a problem, is now the problem.

Hence, whether you like it or not, we have God as a problem, God as a rock in the middle of the road, God as a pretext for hatred, God as an agent of disunity. But no one dares mention this most prima facie evidence in any of the many analyses of the question, be they political, economic, sociological, psychological or strategically utilitarian in nature.

20 October
A crime against humanity is what the financial and economic powers of the United States, with the actual of tacit complicity of their government, have been perpetrating in cold blood against millions of people all over the world, who are threatened with losing whatever money they have left, after many of them – I don’t doubt there are millions – have already lost their only, often inadequate, source of income: work.

The criminals are known, they have names and surnames, yet they take limousines to the golf course, so sure of themselves that they do not even think of hiding.

24 October
José Luis Sampedro ... asked us and himself, how to explain why the money used to rescue the banks appeared so quickly and was given unconditionally, and whether this money would have appeared with the same speed had it been solicited to help with an emergency in Africa or to fight AIDS.

7 November
Charity is what is left when there is neither kindness nor justice.

16 November
I embrace the words I have written, I wish them long life and resume my writing where I left off. There can be no other response.

15 December
Jorge Luis Borges ... whom I still consider the inventor of virtual literature, that literature of his that seems to have detached itself from reality in order better to reveal its invisible mysteries.

22 December
If ridicule could kill, there wouldn’t be a single Israeli politician left standing, nor a single Israeli soldier, those specialists in cruelty, those graduates in hatred who look down at the world from the height of insolence that is at the root of their education.

31 December
We already know what a special relationship is: it means being partners in crime.

2009
11 February
The planet would be a far more peaceful place if we were all atheists. Of course, human nature being the way it is, there is no lack of motives for every kind of disagreement, but at least we would be free of the infantile and ridiculous notion of believing that our god is the best of any number of others on offer, and the Heaven awaits us in a five-star hotel. More even than this, I believe we would start reinventing philosophy.

24 February
Despite what the world is going through, the left continues not to raise its head. As if it had no right to.

12 March
Beauty doesn’t merely belong to the category of what we call aesthetic, it can equally be found in moral undertakings.

28 April
We are the memory we retain; without memory, we would not know who we are.

7 May
Culturally, it is easier to mobilise men for war than for peace.

8 May
I consider books to be good for our health, and also our spirits, and they help us to become poets or scientists, to understand the stars or else to discover them deep within the aspirations of certain characters, those who sometimes, on certain evenings, escape from the pages and walk among us humans, perhaps the most human of us all.

12 May
A suffering man courts attention; a suffering woman avoids it.

14 May
The unique authentic freedom of a human being resides in the spirit, a spirit uncontaminated by irrational beliefs and superstitions, which, however poetic they may sometimes be, deform our perception of reality and offend the most elementary sense of reason.

26 May
Around the globe, the unemployed can be counted in millions, thousands of businesses declare themselves bankrupt and close their doors on a daily basis, but there is still no sign that even one armaments factory has closed down. To work in an arms factory is a life insurance policy.

27 May
Happiness is an extremely serious matter.

29 May
Each day there is a minority that knows more, and another that knows less. Ignorance is expanding in a truly terrifying manner.

Neo-liberalism is a new form of totalitarianism disguised as democracy, of which it remains almost nothing but a semblance. The shopping mall is the symbol of our times.

9 June
It is no longer possible to vote for the left if the left has ceased to exist.

26 June
Democracy. … We have to find a way to reinvent this concept, to drag it out from the paralysis into which routine and disbelief have sunk it, both amply assisted by the economic and political powers that find it convenient to maintain the decorative façade of the democratic edifice without allowing the rest of us to check whether there is actually anything still behind it. In my opinion, whatever remains is almost always more heavily employed in bolstering lies than in defending the truth. What we call democracy is beginning, sadly, to resemble the funeral cloth covering the urn in which rest the remains of a putrefying corpse.

2 July
To write is always to translate, even when we are using our own language.

6 July
I refer to my alleged excesses of indignation. … Does indignation have limits? And further, how can one talk of excesses of indignation in a country where it is specifically lacking, with consequences for all to see?

7 July
I don’t think that I have ever divided my identity as a writer from my conscience as a citizen. I believe that where one goes, the other should go too. I don’t recall ever having written a single word that contradicted the political convictions I uphold, but that does not mean that I have ever placed literature at the service of my ideology. What it doesn’t mean, however, is that in every word I write I seek to express the totality of the man I am.

If he is a person of his time, if he is not chained to the past, a writer must know the problems of the age in which he happens to live. And what are these problems today? That we do not live in an acceptable world; on the contrary, we live in a world that is going from bad to worse and that does not function humanely.

8 July
Some people spend their lives looking for the childhood they have lost. I think I am one of them.

16 July
Abstract art – either directly or at least with a tendency that way – “protects” and generally “liberates” the relative independence of colour; it does not “strangle” it in a squeezing constraint of compositions that are more or less predictable or of what are generally agreed to be correct social models.

31 July
To grow old is to be imprecise.

11 August
What we need is an insurrection of liberated consciences.

27 August
Dignity, a thing one can neither sell nor permit others to buy, and which is the greatest thing a human being can possess.

28 September
The right to dissent is one of two rights missing from the Declaration of Human Rights. The other is the right to heresy.

Art Pepper - Blues for the Fisherman

In the pantheon of jazz music the alto saxophonist Art Pepper may not be as well known or as highly respected as Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker or many of the other great jazz musicians, but some like myself believe he should be. Unfortunately, his tempestuous life, involving heavy drug abuse, alcoholism, crime and recurrent prison sentences - and no better and more candidly documented than by Art Pepper himself in his autobiography Straight Life - has often overshadowed the greatness and consistently high quality of his music.

Art Pepper released his first albums at the beginning of the 1950s and over the following thirty years released more than fifty records. His most acclaimed albums include: Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section in 1957; Gettin’ Together, Intensity and Smack Up in the early 1960s; after a long break the live recordings of his concerts in New York’s Village Vanguard in 1977; and two albums, Goin' Home and Tête-à-Tète, that were released posthumously and that he'd made with his favourite pianist George Cables. Art Pepper died from a stroke in 1982, aged 56.

For me Art Pepper’s music is best heard on his live recordings. It’s on these that you hear the sheer emotional intensity of his sax playing – melodic, lyrical, passionate and innovative - with his solos, at times, interspersed with characteristic and alarmingly distorted notes sounding more like burps as he pushes his alto sax to its limits.

Art Pepper’s third wife Laurie has done much to keep Art Pepper’s music alive, including the publication of a number of previously unreleased recordings. The latest was released in June of this year on her Widow’s Taste label and is entitled Blues for the Fisherman, a wonderful four CD set of Art Pepper performing live at Ronnie Scott’s Club in London in 1980. These high quality recordings show Art Pepper at his very best. It's already become my favourite album of the year so far.

The Poetic Sensibility of Quique González

As I’ve written before here, one of the great things about living in a foreign country is that you discover and learn about new artists, writers, musicians, etc., who you wouldn’t normally come across in your own country. One such person during my time in Spain has been the thirty-seven year-old, Madrid born, singer-songwriter Quique González. Because he writes and sings in Spanish, Quique González is largely unknown outside Spanish speaking countries. A quick search in Google, for example, comes up with next to no references to him in English, suggesting that this may be the first article about Quique González written in English. Indeed, even within his native Spain his talents are arguably insufficiently recognised. However, after fourteen years performing extensively in Spain and Latin America, and eight albums, including Salitre 48, Kamikazes enamorados, La noche americana, the live Ajuste de cuentas, and his most recent Daiquirí Blues, he now has a strong following, though far below the popularity of other Spanish and Latin American rock stars.

Most of Quique González’s acoustic and more rocky electric sound is clearly influenced by a range of North American musicians such as Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Jackson Browne, but Spanish and Latin American influences can also be heard such as Enrique Urquijo, Joaquín Sabina, Antonio Vega and Fito Páez. His lyrics are full of wonderful imagery and acute observations of contemporary life. The poetic and melancholic sensibility of his lyrics touch on love, loss, solitude, memory and regret, and are complemented by his soft and enduring melodies. This makes for deeply sensitive song-writing.

Having toured extensively with various electric bands over the years and having had in 2009 his biggest success with his Nashville recorded album Daiquirí Blues, Quique González recently began an acoustic tour in Spain entitled Desbandados, Gira Acústica.

In the small and intimate Teatro de Bellas Artes in Madrid I had the privilege this week of seeing Quique González play almost two hours of entrancing music before an appreciative audience. His softly spoken and ironic introductions were often difficult to hear, but this seemed merely to add to the intimacy of the concert. He explained at the beginning of the concert that he would be playing many songs from his past, which would hopefully be given a new life in an acoustic arrangement. As a result the beautiful lyrical nature of his songs, often lost in more rocky electric settings, was given more prominence. This was helped immensely by the subtle and immaculate double bass and cello accompaniment of Jacob Reguilón. His inclusion of Jackson Browne’s These Days (with Spanish lyrics) and Downtown Train by Tom Waits were a particular joy. This was music in its most intimate, sensitive and poetic form.

The official website of Quique González is:

http://www.quiquegonzalez.com/web/

The photo at the top of this posting is courtesy of Antxon Castresana and the other was taken by myself.

“de repente brie” – una mirada peculiar del mundo rutinario. The photography of Linda Donofrio

A peculiar look at the routine world.

This blog http://lindadonofrio.wordpress.com/ shows the wonderful photographic work of Linda Donofrio. Many of her photos are images of the most mundane. The beauty of the smallest details of everyday life which many of us pass by as we walk through a city. An abstraction of form and colour which you find on almost any street corner. Her photos resemble paintings or collages seen through an urban microscope, transmitting simplicity and enduring art. Her photos show how beauty can be found where it is perhaps least expected.

Linda Donofrio is an Argentinean living in Madrid.

http://lindadonofrio.wordpress.com/

Jason Webster - Or the Bull Kills You

Jason Webster is a writer who was born in California, brought up in England and since 1993 has been living in Spain. He’s written a number of non-fiction books including: Duende - A Journey in Search of Flamenco; Andalus - Unlocking the Secrets of Moorish Spain; and Guerra – Living in the Shadows of the Spanish Civil War. This is a review I wrote of his recently published first novel Or the Bull Kills You. The review was published on Amazon.co.uk in March 2011 under the title “Room for improvement ...”

Jason Webster has written some fine, well-written, quasi-travel books about Spain – Duende, Andalus and Guerra. These are books, which as someone who lives in Spain, I’ve often recommended to English speakers who want to learn more about Spanish society beyond what the Lonely Planet Guide offers. This is Webster’s first novel, although some have suggested that his non-fiction books are sometimes overly embellished by his clearly fertile imagination. Set in Valencia, Or the Bulls Kills You adds to the ever growing number of crime novels coming out of Europe these days. The difference this time is that the author writes in his adopted city of Valencia, in contrast to those who centre their books in their own countries, such as Henning Mankell in Ystad, Jo Nesbø in Oslo, Manuel Montalbán Vázquez in Barcelona and Ian Rankin in Edinburgh. Webster has come up with an intriguing detective Max Cámara and the story is set against bullfighting and the Fallas celebrations in Valencia. As an introduction to what is apparently going to be a series of novels featuring the detective Max Cámara, the plot unfolds in a fairly erratic fashion - at one crucial point a significant event is inexcusably ignored until the very end of the book – and the storyline is frequently broken by unnecessary background detail about Valencia and the organisational structure of the Spanish police. Hopefully, future plots will be more tightly composed and Webster will cut back on his deeply irritating use of Spanish in the text – sometimes translated and sometimes not – which simply detracts from the flow and impact of the narrative. Better editing would improve the book immensely and also get rid of a number of typos.