Melancholic Mondays!

I'm going to keep on recycling this image...



Otis Redding - I've Got Dreams To Remember.mp3

Spacemen 3 - So Hot (Wash Away All Of My Tears).mp3

Spiritualized - Lay It Down Slow.mp3

Goldfrapp - Deep Honey.mp3

Four melancholic Monday songs for your (dubious) listening pleasure. The last pick reveals me to be a secret trip-hop obsessive, I suppose. Now, I never got into Portishead, I've only own one Tricky album (because I found it on the street), and the last time I heard Massive Attack put me off of them for some time. I was driving up with a friend and his friend to Nanaimo, halfway up the Malahat highway, and me very intoxicated at this point (I had thought a bottle of wine would be a necessary accompaniement to the car-ride earlier in the afternoon), gigantic plumes of smoke began billowing from the hood of his car. We pulled to
the side of the road, had it towed and ended up in some small-town inn, complete with Wings night. My friend ended up getting picked up by a friend, but I opted to carry on. The gentleman's brother picked him up in his sports car, we smoked some intensely strong marijuana and I became paranoid and scared, immersed in the
claustrophobic environment of Massive Attack's 1000th Window album. They dropped me off at a parking lot in Nanaimo that I thought was close to my host's place, and it took me about an hour to cross the parking lot to get to the Dairy Queen on the other side, which seemed a suitable end to the hell that I had just endured.

I had the chance to get out last night and see some of the Fantasia Festival. The film was called One Night In Mongkok (unfortunately the
soundtrack didn't feature a re-working of that Abba/Andrew Lloyd Webber stick o' dynamite from Chess), and was described as a "taut, psychological thriller." I left the theatre pretty shaken - it's been a while since I've been subject to that much misery and violence on the large screen. The characters were well-drawn,
if a little stiff in their roles (this was somewhat of a genre film, I guess) and the thematic concern seemed to be one of conveying a message of "stay put, country bumpkins! The shining island of hope that you think Hong Kong represents is a charade - it's a violent and blood-stained place where grannies rot to death and your good-nature will be perverted by the dark forces of urban existence. Don't overstay your visa!"