Are you sitting comfortably?

High above Athens stands the Church of Agios Isidorou. From here, sitting on benches that form a horseshoe of seating around the diminutive church, you can look down on the breathtaking spread of the city, born of the unfortunate union of reinforced concrete with laissez-faire urban planning.

As you sit, you can also enjoy amusingly phrased signs like this one, attached to the back of the pole that holds up the strings of fairy lights that illuminate the church at night. It says: "Peak hours may necessitate that you let other people sit on your lap."
Get set for peace, love and understanding.

Two suns fail to dazzle

Is it just me? All over the web people are blogging the praises of the second Bat for Lashes record, Two Suns. I rather like it too, but I feel that reviewers are going a bit overboard with their praise (e.g. Pitchfork).
It's a very pleasant record with some strong songs, and Natasha Khan has a great voice. Everything here is going in the right direction. But overall I find it rather too slight, rather too conventional for all the praise it's getting. It's good, yes. But not great.

A comparison with one of my favourite recent albums, Under Byen's 2007 LP Samme Stof Som Stof, is perhaps instructive. Here we see a band that have truly mastered their medium (through 15 years of hard work), and for whom conventions are not restrictions but toys to be played with or ignored as required. Natasha Khan is on the right track and definitely a talent to watch for the future. And that's the good news: this album might be good, but the next one can only be better.

Bat for Lashes will play at the Kulturkirche in Cologne on 18 May
View event info on last.fm

The real Ras Tafari

The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuściński

Rating: 3 of 5 stars
I suppose that I have been spoilt by Ryszard Kapuściński in the past, but while The Emperor is certainly a fine piece of writing it doesn't reach his usually high standards.

Perhaps it's in the very nature of the exercise, for The Emperor is a book of reminiscences, retelling the last days of Haile Selaisse's rule in Ethiopia, from the perspective of mainly minor officials and servants.

The result is a book of peculiarly matt surfaces and vague description. For me the palace, with its lackeys, its fawning "notables" and horrid, grabbing dignitaries never really comes alive, mediated as it is by the memories of feeble, defeated men.

So while I can't recommend the book unconditionally in terms of style or as a good example of Kapuściński's art (he simply isn't present enough here), I can certainly recommend it as a study in the morally degenerative effects of power. So if you're looking for a good primer on how to become morally degenerate once you have attained absolute power, this might be a good place to start.

View all my reviews on goodreads.

No guns, no dogs - them's the rules

Bulgaria may be part of the EU, but there are still things about the country that distinguish it from most others in Europe. One of them is the "No Guns" stickers that are found on the doors of bars, clubs and even shopping centres.
And indeed Sofia, the country's capital, does have a higher level of gun crime than many other comparable cities. But do you think that the Sofia gangstas will see the signs and leave their shooters (and hopefully their pit bulls) in their SUVs? Somehow I doubt it...

What we did on our holidays: Part 1 - Serbia

It might seem a little eccentric to take the train from Cologne to Sofia in Bulgaria, but then again, maybe I am a little eccentric. En route plenty of interesting things happened, including random bag searches by obstreperous border guards and thievery in the small hours (I'll tell you about it later). There was also plenty to see. I was particularly impressed with the mysterious and beautiful Serbian countryside and the affecting state of disrepair of the railway stations. The pictures below come from my Sony-Ericsson mobile phone, by the way.

A day at the races

Having grown up in England, racing is a pastime that I associate with the Derby, the Grand National and ladies in funny hats. Basically an experience for the elite and the addicted.

Going to the races in Germany is, in comparison, a pleasantly democratic experience, involving everything that you would expect from a Volksfest, including sausages, beer, fried fish and red-faced gentlemen mopping brows warmed by indulgence in the aforementioned foodstuffs.



As well as offering relaxing atmosphere, our local racecourse in Cologne also provides a gently-paced racing schedule which allows racegoers to flow from track to paddock and back to the track like a gentle human tide.

But I think I'm beginning to overreach myself on the metaphors. Whatever - I'll be there again a few more times before the season is out.

A dog's Dina

I am Dina (Norway, 2002)

Faced with the prospect of a Norwegian film in English with a plethora of international actors, I should have seen the warning signs. For one, people speaking accented English to convey the sense of a foreign language has always annoyed me ("Zose are ze fekts, mein fuhrer!").

This film isn't perhaps quite that awful, but the plot appears to have been written by the committee for Silly Twists together with the Fjord Tourist Board.

Equally, the style of the film is all over the place: a smörgåsbord of genre-dipping ranging from horror and ghost-tale to melodrama, costume drama, sub-Ibsenesque family saga, Bergman-lite and god knows what else.

Together these result in an utterly confusing accretion of episodes that usually end in death, or haunting, or both, but no clear directorial stance on how see either.

What I'm missing is any kind of moral, aesthetic or conceptual centre. We must remember that the woman upon whom the film centres is responsible for several deaths, at least one of the premeditated. But is she mad? Is she hallucinating? Is she simply dreaming?

Which brings us to the central character. Dina is played by the lovely Maria Bonnevie, who gives everything to make the role (strong, headstrong, creative and unconventional woman in a small, backward community) work. Personally I'm all in favour of strong female roles but the one that this film serves up is a completely anachronistic, projecting modern modes of behaviour onto a time where a woman would not have been able to do what Dina does without getting shut up in a nunnery or a madhouse at the very least.

Shouldn't a film that shows a woman overcome adversity and male prejudice at least show some pretty effective adversity and male prejudice? For most of this film Dina rides roughshod over men and women alike (or unshod, depending upon the stable boy in question). It's as if her initial trauma is so overwhelming that the world simply makes way for her for the rest of her life. Fat chance.

Therefore I'd have to recommend any discerning viewer to give this portentous, confused example of the international co-production a miss.