Some words on a film we saw on Sunday which is based on the true story of a Frenchman who based his life on pretending being a doctor. For 18 years he mislead his wife and children and when they found out he killed them and tried to kill himself. The guy is now in prison and told his life story to Emmanuel Carrère who transformed it into the book L'Adversaire (the opponent) which has also been filmed by Nicole Garcia featuring Daniel Auteuil as the con man.

Laurent Cantet's movie L'Emploi du Temps (Time Out) (reviews) takes the basic elements of the story and varies it a little. The main character Vincent brilliantly played by Aurélien Recoing is fired from his consultancy firm. Out of shame he decides not to tell his family and tries to continue as if nothing has happened. He spends his days killing time in his car, in hotel lounges and later in an empty farmhouse in Switzerland. In the evening he usually comes back late to give the impression that he has worked hard.

In some way or other most people act and show off in their lives and they know it but Vincent is an extreme. It is a much harder job to lie every day to your family and friends than to follow a normal working life and it takes a lot of energy out of you. You need an amazing memory not to contradict yourself which is only possible if you believe in your own lies. And you also need a lot of fantasy to tell about what you were supposedly doing at work. Vincent has both. His whole life after the sack is built on lies. At the end the only person still believing in his concoction of lies is actually himself. Vincent cannot tell the truth as it would mean admitting that according to his high standards he is a loser. And he would have to give up his identity which has become the identity of an actor. Recoing is most convincing when he smiles. He has the ability to smile in a way that the spectator knows the smile is false.

Summary: A brilliant existentialist film on the dichotomy of what we really are and what we want the others to believe we are which explores all the psychological depths of this theme.

Via Colin Newman's (head of legendary art punks Wire) ten desert island discs at Pitchfork I found out about McLusky, a Welsh band from Cardiff making very raw, powerful and energetic music between punk and emo with a grain of blues. Besides the Pixies (esp. on Medium Is the Message from McLusky's first album) I hear Jesus Lizard and the New Fast Automatic Daffodils. The lyrics are often rather rude and simple but that goes well with the edgy music. I am not sure if they master their instruments very well but this makes their punk sound even more authentic. My only reproach would be that the singer whose voice I rather dig yells a little too much for my liking on their first album. The most exciting of all the new retro rock bands I have heard yet. British Sea Power, Clinic, Gomez and Interpol have their moments though.

Strange that British retro bands seem to appeal more to me than most of the American ones be it The Strokes (not as bad as I made them in my old blog but still not amazing), Black Rebel Motorcycle Club (blatant Jesus & Mary Chain rip-off), The White Stripes (I liked them at first listen but Jon Spencer did this better), The Liars (kind of annoying), The Walkmen (the music would be better without the irritating high-pitch voice of the singer), The French Kicks (boring harmonic post-punk) etc.

Audio: The song To Hell With Good Intentions as mp3 from their new album McLusky Do Dallas. Six songs in real audio from their first album My Pain and Sadness Is More Sad and Painful Than Yours at Vitaminic.

Something which has bothered me about new versions of standard software in the past years has always been that they offer features hardly anybody needs. It is probably a safe guess that 95% of all Word/Excel users never use more than 5% of all the options. They probably don't even know and don't want to know about most of them. And that at the same time the makers of Windows have not yet succeeded in developing a basic useful tool like e.g. a search of your own little hard disk which in terms of speed and relevancy can compete with a Google search covering the whole gigantic internet.

All the new features offered obviously bloat the software and though computers become faster and faster programs usually don't. On the contrary they become slower and more instable. The acceleration of CPU's and hard disks is overcompensated by the increasing complexity of the programs which results in enormous bulky 500+ MB software packages full of bugs.

The worst thing of a switch to a new version usually is the time-wasting adaptation to it (if the installation works properly in the first place) and the recustomization to the old user interface which had proved itself in practice. Take the annoying pop-up paper clip which came with Office 95?, a graphical gadget pretending to help with questions which always was a total waste and time-consuming to get rid of it. Or the shrinking menus in a later version (2000?) only showing those menu items you had used in the last couple of days. I somehow managed to disactivate them but it took me some time and I don't remember how I did it.

All these lame ramblings just serve as an intro to a contribution to a kuro5hin discussion titled An Apology For Simple Software. The post in question offers an interesting explanation for the tendency towards feature overload in recent software:

Using the same categories concerning weblogging software I like to think of Blogger as for the novices, Manila as for the acolytes and antville as for the experts. I must admit though that I don't really know Manila and I neither consider myself an expert in weblogging in general nor in antville specifically. But antville definitely is very simple to use and offers almost endless customization possibilities via those modular little bits of html code called skins and the macros for the pros.

Just a couple of words about the name of this blog.

In my late teenage years I read a book called Das wiedergefundene Licht (English title: And There Was Light) by Jacques Lusseyran. It is an autobiography by a blind. Jacques lost his sight in school by an accident. He writes about a world without light. Slowly he gets accustomed to the situation. During the Vichy regime when he is in a résistance group his job is to do the interviews with the new people who want to join the group. Without listening too much what the people say he chooses the trustful by the tone of their voice, by the way how they say what they say. And he never fails. He sees through them. He can distinguish the honest from the pretenders, the liars, the future traitors. As Lusseyran had lost his most important sense which is responsible for much more than half of our entire perception he concentrated on the other four and intensified them. This book told me something I knew already unconsciously but hadn't fully realized. That with deprivation you can gain much more than you can lose.

This blog is mainly about listening to music and my reaction to it and closing your eyes is a way to intensify the listening experience. Without visual detractions one is much more at the mercy of the music, there is a more direct contact with it. And it is easier to delve into the music, to hear details like instruments, voices and noises.

There is another less hopeful reason for the name. When looking at today's world I am often inclined to close my eyes not to see all the ugliness, degeneration and decline.

This may sound overly emotive and dramatic but I think there are still realms and retreats of beauty like e.g. in some music and I will try to find those and transform my perception of them into words whenever possible.

P.S. I started blogging on June 13th, 2001. Here are the first posts from my old blog sax & sunshine. I began close your eyes on October 7th, 2002.

My answer could be something like this:

I usually neither like music which is too mainstream nor too experimental. I don't like too pure a style as I usually find that too predictable and get bored soon.

If I had to choose between beat and tune I'd always go for the tune.

I like music which is

• challenging and does not necessarily sink in on the first listen
• calm and understated
• balancing between noise and melody
• rhythmically hypnotic and tune-wise addictive
• eclectic with fused styles and new takes on old genres
• made by artists who reinvent themselves from time to time
• full of new never heard sounds (not necessarily)
• lyrically interesting though the lyrics cannot save a musically bad record but bad lyrics can destroy good sounding music

To have a wider public I also started a discussion about this on I Love Music here though I would prefer you to comment in this blog.

From the Matador newsletter:

The lyrics of this song by Laurie Anderson from 1979 still strike me as an amazing startling premonition of 9-11. Just have a look at the middle part:

I think we have reached the age of force, justice is gone already. But what does the last sentence mean? Is Mom = Mother Earth? Or is the end of force the end of the male dominance and the beginning of a new age of matriarchy? Or maybe it refers to the fact that after force, which in practice means war, most men are dead and only widows, old people and kids are left?

Whatever. Laurie Anderson who also made some of the most lucid comments on 9-11 just released a two CD album of her concerts at Town Hall, NYC Sept. 19-20 2001, a little more than a week after the attacks. It was the first time in twenty years she performed O Superman. The atmosphere was rather eery as she explains in an 11'30'' interview for Here and Now broadcast on NPR. You can listen to it here (via planing lakes). She regrets the lack of analysis of what really happened more than a year ago and talks about the song, New York, the current atmosphere there and her next project involving a gigantic violin in the Wintergarden. In between the questions and answers there are bits of songs of her.

Thank you for all the links and welcome wishes I received for the new blog. Here are all the ones I spotted:

[P.S. Two more links I saw a day later. The first description really made me blush and I can assure TMFL that the blog hopefully only changed name, software and layout.]

The Minor Fall, The Major Lift Tuesday, October 15, 2002 CLOSE YOUR EYES. The successor to sax and sunshine, this is the weblog of one of I Love Music's smartest contributors. We're not sure if he's trying to do something different with the new site, so we'll refrain from comment except to say that we really enjoyed the old one and expect nothing less from him now. posted by TMFTML | 3:44 PM | link

No Rock&Roll Fun ~ 15.10.02 SUNSHINE BECOMES EYES: Sex and sunshine has moved home and re-invented itself as close your eyes. Obviously, you already know this. But just in case you didn't... posted by simon b at 3:31 PM

the monkey puzzle October 13, 2002 movements Alex has revitalized and moved to close your eyes. Welcome back ! The Buzzcocks thing made interesting reading... 11:14

Wisdom Goof October 13, 2002 - Sax and Sunshine has transformed itself into Close Your Eyes. posted by graham c | 5:10 PM

Douze Lunes Close your eyes remplace Sax & Sunshine... Thanks Alex! JR (13:04)

Eyes That Can See In The Dark Date: 04:08:51 A.M., October 13, 2002 Name: Phil (from the comments to the Kramnik-Deep Fritz game) Your new site looks nice!

IokanaaN Bookmarking: Close your eyes remplace Sex&Sunshine [10/13/2002 01:35:12 AM - comments(0) ajouter un commentaire]

parallax view Saturday, October 12, 2002 Ah, the autumn. Time to say goodbye to Sax and Sunshine. And then to Close Your Eyes. posted by Dead Kenny @ 1:43 PM

the rub FRI 11 OCT | 22:00 CDT Sex & Sunshine had a long and respected run, but it's now just a memory. Fortunately, Alex has picked up where S&S left off with Close Your Eyes, a rather stylish and much more organized template for his daily blogging. It's hosted by Antville. Is that something new? Looks like a nice operation.

strange fruit Thursday, October 10, 2002 The Sunshine State Reset your links: Alex has folded Sax and Sunshine and started Close Your Eyes at Antville. The page certainly does take less time to load, but even so, I'll miss the yellow screen and the deliriously happy children.

largehearted boy October 10, 2002 Moving To Close Your Eyes Sax and Sunshine closed its doors today, but the wonderful music weblog reopened at Close Your Eyes, so get over there and enjoy Alexander's critical ear! Posted by David at 08:04 PM | Comments (1)

Andrea aus Wien träumt von einem Virus, das Insekten aus Menschen macht, von Desinfektion, die zum den Tod führt nicht aufhalten kann und von Straßen einer Stadt ohne Autos. Zudem gibt es ein modernes Kurzmärchen vom Ritter, der mit seiner Rüstung kämpft. Sollte sich da jemand verliebt haben?

Der Kutter lässt sich von der phantastischen Stimme und Musik von Julie Doiron aus Montreal becircen. Etwas mehr und mp3 link dort.

Herr Hack mausert sich immer mehr zum führenden deutschen Politiksatire-Cartoonisten und beglückt uns mit einem Kreuzworträtsel zur allgemeinen Reformbewegung.

Don erzählt von einem erotischen Erlebnis mit einer Französin im zarten Alter von 15 Jahren.

Andrea aus Frankfurt war auch auf der Buchmesse (wie auch Andreas) und erzählt uns wie man sich dort so durchschlägt und dass man sich vielleicht nicht jede Lesung antun sollte. Fortsetzung ist angedroht. ;-)

Today was the last day of the biggest book fair in the world for the general public and Catherine insisted in going there. So we went.

Actually I never really understood what the point of this book fair was. For the private visitor I mean. There are many books you can flick through like in a bookshop. The disadvantage though is that you usually can't buy them. OK, there are much more books than in probably any bookshop of the world, in all different languages ranging from German, English, French, Arabic, Chinese and God knows which exotic language. But why is this thing called a fair if the private visitor cannot exchange his cash against the books? I guess the more appropriate name for this event would be exhibition but probably out of traditional reasons and the fact that it actually is a market place but only for authors, booksellers and publishing houses it is still called a fair.

Anyways we spent about six hours there and I calculated that if I saw one book cover every ten seconds (which is a reasonable estimate) in total I would have looked at 2,000 of those covers. And I have to admit that I do not remember one of them.

In addition to the books there are readings of them (mostly by the authors), the authors sign their books and there are interviews. You also can get demo CD-ROMs, prospectus, gadgets etc. So in the end I left the fairground with a bag with a selection of those and the ticket price wasn't spend for nothing.

The people working at the stands are usually very helpful but not always competent. In a side alley of the enormous hall 8 which was mainly reserved for English books there was a Croatian stand selling maps for children (I am looking for a birthday present for my seven year old nephew). Rather nice maps with lots of pictures of the sights of the different cities and regions. Obviously there were no maps left to buy when I arrived. And when I asked the guy at the stand where those maps were published in Germany he couldn't tell me. All he knew was that the maps were translated in 24 languages and that the company was absolutely new and still hadn't got a website. Looking at one of those maps in detail I found out about the German publisher. Though the maps were quite original I fear that the company will not survive for very long with a similar marketing policy.

I checked two books about music at the fair. The first one was brand-new and the translation was called Der Beatles Sound. A book by Andy Babiuk, an American musician and consultant of the Rockn & Roll Hall of Fame. A nicely layouted big format hardcover on the Beatles and the instruments and recording techniques they used throughout their career. There were some interesting facts in there. I recall that it was mentioned that Lennon learnt a special guitar picking technique from Donovan when they were in India with the Maharishi. A technique he later used on Across the Universe. For 50 € this book would be a rather nice Christmas present.

I also read a couple of pages of Johnny Rogan's book on The Smiths called Morrissey & Marr: The Severed Alliance. The bits I read were rather underwhelming but I liked the story about Panic, the most popular Smiths song. Morrissey wrote the lyrics after he had heard a BBC radio 1 DJ pass a Wham! song on the radio right after the news on the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 which he found rather inappropriate. The funny thing is that the same DJ who didn't use to play The Smiths really liked the song and apparently passed the record several times on air. Remember the chorus goes Hang the DJ. Hang the DJ. Hang the DJ.

That might be a strange ending of this post but I can't think of a better one.