SOUNDTRACK: CHVRCHES-“The Mother We Share” (SXSW, March 23, 2013).
This year NPR doesn’t seem to be offering many full shows from SXSW for download. But they do have a number of streaming songs. And since I have recently reduced the amount of time I can dedicate to posts, I’m going to talk about a few songs rather than albums for a bit.
I’ve never heard of Chvrches although NPR leads me to believe they have a buzz around them. They’re from Glasgow (I like the Glasgow scene), but this song is really way too poppy for me. At least in this live incarnation, it’s so spare and keyboardy. The lead singer has a great voice but it is firmly placed in the pop realm (especially with the Oh Oh Ohs).
The band is good though, and I enjoyed the synth guy making most of the sounds of the song. I’d be curious to hear more (especially t hat cover of “Purple Rain.” Watch it here.
[READ: March 18, 2013] “A Delicate Truth”
I have never read John Le Carré before. Indeed, I don’t typically read any kind of spy/thriller type books. I realized recently that I like mysteries but I don’t have a lot of time for hard spy novels (if I may use the language of sci-fi to describe a spy novel–perhaps spy-fi?).
We recently watched some of Skyfall (the Redbox had to go back so we didn’t finish it–I think I’m not down with the Redbox, it’s just as inconvenient as a video store), so this British spy-fi story seemed nicely timed.
This was an excerpt from Le Carré’s forthcoming book. And regardless of the story itself, I’m delighted that it was a self-contained excerpt. It is a mission and the mission ends by the end of the chapter Obviously there is a lot more to the book, but I was pleased that the excerpt didn’t having any kind of cliffhanger. And now I don’t feel like I have to read anymore of the story.
So this is the story of Paul Anderson or, “Paul Anderson,” a “middle-ranking British civil servant hauled from his desk in one of the more prosaic departments of Her Majesty’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office to be dispatched on a top-secret mission of acute sensitivity.” That pretty much sums up the story and you can tell from that sentence whether or not you’ll like the book. I have no idea if this sort of thing happens in real life at all. And maybe that’s not the point. In the Afterword, Le Carré talks about The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, his first novel, which everyone assumed was all true (he says you know it’s not true because they printed it). And he;s always been annoyed that people think of his as a spy who started writing rather than an author who did some spy work.
So I guess that means he knows of what he speaks. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 