Halloween

A pretty autumnal afternoon - I transferred a load of logs from the builders bag to the woodstore, which is always a curiously satisfying job, made a big pot of caldo verde (the Italian sounds so much better that 'potato and cabbage soup...') and then helped Katie with the pumpkin for tomorrow. She's obsessed with Halloween, bless her, and has already spent an inordinate amount of time perfecting her trick or treat outfit! This evening I went to a showing of 'Bitter Cane', an 80's documentary about Haiti, at the Contemporary. It's one of the events based around this big exhibition of Haitian art that they've got on the moment called 'Kafou', so I went early and checked that out first - pretty interesting stuff, with lots of bold colour, somewhere between European 'naive' art and religious icons. Looking forward to next weeks double bill of zombie movies!

Been listening to the new Godspeed You! Black Emperor album again - pretty awesome stuff, particularly the opener 'Mladic'. There's a great bit about six minutes in where they lock into this almost krautrock groove and start dropping big industrial sheets of guitar onto the top of it. You presume that it'll just keep building for another ten minutes or so, twisting up and increasing the tension, and indeed it starts to, though with an added dervish twist of eastern modal weirdness, but then it drops right out and down to a crawl instead and just starts back up again. I always think that logically this is how Fugazi should have ended up: there's so much about Godspeed - and I mean musically, that is, above and beyond the attitude, politics and aesthetic - that is really just a new level of hardcore punk. Given the complexity and apparent 'difficulty', it has an amazing level of raw intensity - and yet you can still listen to it on the bus!