selenodyssey

‹MUSIC› So the discovery of The Smile continued with their second album Wall of Eyes. A more tender and accessible record but with less surprises. All songs are rich in details on this one to, but sometimes I zoned out. Nevertheless I found quite a lot to enjoy on the album: the clever, somewhat uncanny undertones in the album opener Wall of Eyes, the soft flirtiness of Teleharmonic, the pulsing fragments of I Quit, the laid-back, bit oblivious Read the Room, or the way Friend of a Friend dissolves from its bland beginning to an exciting cacophony. Seems I most appreciate uncanny twists and turns like on Bending Hectic as the title suggests. All in all, the first album is better.

‹MOVIE› I watched the The Phoenician Scheme, and I hope this is just a rushed opinion which I will revise later, but for now: no matter the praise Wes Anderson gets I’m over with him. Not because the film was bad, I only feel that I’d become full of the aesthetic, narrative structures. The films cannot give me anything other than stylistic maximalism (isn’t it l’art pour l’art?). I appreciate the meticulous production and the vision, but it cannot move me anymore, it’s expected, overdone, and I cannot come to terms anymore with the blasé and clichéd performance of the actors.

‹BOOK› I finished The Luzhin Defense by Nabokov. Luzhin is an expatriate Russian chess prodigy, but similarly pitiable as Nabokov’s other character, Pnin. Well, it was a fun and fast read, enjoyed its humor (Nabokov quite regularly showed a middle-finger to class politics, and took every chance to speak up against Freudian psychoanalysis). The book obviously revolves around the loss of Russian roots, immigrant life and ultimately how defenseless one can be against others and what we may call the ‘normal way of life’. I especially liked how Nabokov edits the story and cuts his scenes, jumps to different times, and state of minds. To better breakdown the book I need to sit down and check how it fits Nabokov’s ouevre and how/where he wrote it. (The novel was written still in Russian as I gather).