paper wraps stone

I would like to bring to your attention a stylish demolition of Primal Scream's new album in excellent on line music magazine The Quietus by Chris Roberts. "The Scream" are not the most unlikely of targets perhaps and they are certainly ripe for it but Roberts manages the task with flair and elan. The line about putting a damp cloth over your intellect is particularly fine. As is his dismissal of CSS, although I actually quite like them. I'll find it more difficult to do so now though, which is the kind of perversity I take much pleasure in.

Worryingly, I haven't enjoyed reading any music criticism so much for ages. Worrying, because along with Taylor Parkes' new Fall album review, The Quietus seems to have resuscitated the entire staff of Melody Maker from 1990. They all disappeared and now they have returned en masse like veterans from a twenty year tour of duty in the Astoria. Where have they been? How did they survive? Did they all live together, like The Monkees?*

What does this say about me? That I have atrophied into the kind of man who has no sense of curiosity about the world? That I'm looking in the wrong places? Well, there is Wire and, indeed, Mire**, but I'm not sure I enjoy them in quite the same way. I feel improved, educated, more in the know, sometimes invigorated, often inspired to go and buy something. But not quite as thrilled and not quite as uplifted as by Chris Robert's delightfully rude review of Primal Scream. I had to go back and re-read it. It's still very good.

Is the enjoyment of music linked to the enjoyment of criticism? It is for me. Somehow the critical discourse around gives it meaning and a way in that I know many people would find oddy slavish to some over intellectualised form of predetermination. Actually, it's the same with architecture. In here, a great deal of what we do stems from outrage at what everyone else is doing. That is from a primarily critical impulse (the results of which probably have a similar reaction on everyone else). For me personally words and criticism precedes creativity (horrible self aggrandising word I know). But, words, perversely, are somehow important in forming things. In the anti-intellectual climate of contemporary architecture, criticism is mostly seen as a destructive thing, a necessary evil at best. Too much theory is supposed to limit creativity. In as much as I can lay claim to any creativity, I would say that, for me, the opposite has always been true

*Apart from Simon Price, who I see at every concert I ever go to. He's a very noticeable sort of fellow that Simon Price, although it might also have something to do with my wife dragging me to an awful lot of Brett Anderson concerts.

** Actually, while writing this I have been reading the Mire again and it's actually very good.

Museums of the World – No 1 In An Occasional Series

The Cuban Museum of the Revolution weaves its way in and around the former Presidential Palace in downtown Havana. It is a curious mixture of hectoring monument and modest local museum. The exhibits are a little forlorn: slightly dog eared wax works, patchy Hornby style models illustrating strategic military campaigns, curling photographs, assorted memorabilia.

Every conceivable detail of the revolutionary struggle (Che Guevara’s pyjamas, avacado production statistics from 1976) is included almost without discrimination, certainly without regard for entertainment value. The text is bracingly partisan and inscrutably detailed. All of it is contained in utilitarian vitrines within the beaux arts interiors of the palace which, ironically, dominates the exhibit it houses.

The friendship between Che Guevara and Fidel Castro is sentimentally told and retold throughout the museum, the bonhomie and mutual respect built up to saccharine proportions. The two are endlessly photographed embracing, sharing a joke on the ramparts, leaning over battle strategy diagrams, chomping cigars.

Outside the palace a 1960’s honeycomb structure shelters various revolutionary vehicles: an armoured car made from agricultural equipment, the fuselage of a US U2 plane shot down (allegedly by Castro himself of course) during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Inside a glass box at the centre of the pavilion is Granma, the famous boat in which Fidel and 100 others travelled from Mexico to Cuba to kickstart the revolution in 1956.

I love museums. The more down at heel the better too. I've no time for sophisticated animatronics or interactive screens. I prefer musty exhibits mouldering under glass. The Museum of the Revolution’s incomprehensible diagrams of long forgotten battles and modest mementos have an eerie poignancy. In its own indifference to entertainment and its belligerant self-belief it is an exhibit in itself.

Life in a Northern Town

There's an oddly homemade quality to this video which nicely combines thoroughly quotidian imagery with some outrageously foppish clothing. Not sure of the provenance as the footage seems to mix American imagery in with a sort of English road trip (taking in Salford's Boys Club on the way), both of which avoid the It's Grim Ooop North potential of the song. It's ace though.