In 2012 a book called Beyond the Darkness : Cult, Horror and Extreme Cinema was published. The author was Phil Russell and it was 438 pages long. I goIn 2012 a book called Beyond the Darkness : Cult, Horror and Extreme Cinema was published. The author was Phil Russell and it was 438 pages long. I got it and was alternately charmed and grossed out by Phil’s rollicking relish for all these gorefests.*
In 2020 this book 1001 Movies that Shocked the World : A Chronology of Cult, Horror and Banned Films 1895-2018 was published. The author was Vincent Kapner and it was 626 pages long. I got it and was alternately charmed and grossed out by Vincent’s rollicking relish for all these gorefests…. Wait a minute! It’s the same book as Beyond the Darkness but with 200 more pages! But no mention anywhere, on the copyright page or the author’s introduction, of its first version. Strange!
Never mind!
I was a bit conflicted about Beyond the Darkness but the mists have cleared about 1001 Shocking Movies – it might have a terrible cover and a catchpenny title but it’s brilliant, like an encyclopedia of not just horror but wild, weird and crazy movies (Emperor Tomato Ketchup, Wild Boys of the Road, Meshes of the Afternoon, The Melancholy of Angels, Nekromantik, they’re all here) and all in such great and glorious detail, a whole lifetime of obsessive ferreting out of obscure information is here displayed for all to revel in.
For fans of horror and unusual movies, this is recommended! It's like the unholy grail!
This is a great readable history of the attempt by the Nazis to kill every single Jewish person in Europe. There was a conference in 1942 where one SSThis is a great readable history of the attempt by the Nazis to kill every single Jewish person in Europe. There was a conference in 1942 where one SS guy presented his colleagues with a list of estimated numbers of Jews in each country – the countries listed included the ones the Nazis hadn’t conquered yet, like Britain and Ireland. They were going to get round to every Jew, once the war was won. You can’t do everything immediately, much as you might want to.
I’ve quoted this before but it’s always worth quoting again. It’s by Primo Levi and he is imagining a conversation between an SS guard and a Jewish camp prisoner. The guard explains :
However this war may end, we have won the war against you. None of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world would not believe him. There will be perhaps suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed – they will say they are the exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you.
A QUICK SUMMARY
The Nazis murdered between 5 and 6 million Jews which was one third of the total global Jewish population and two thirds of all European Jews.
75% of the murdered Jews were from Poland and the Soviet Union. 50% of all victims died in the 6 extermination camps Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau 25% died in shootings by the Einsatzgruppen 25% died in ghettos, and in concentration camps 50% of victims died in the year between March 1942 and March 1943.
Treblinka was the second biggest extermination camp. It was about an hour away from Warsaw and operated between July 1942 and October 1943. During that period between 700,000 and 900,000 people were killed there. A steady 50,000 per month. Hard to believe.
Not all victims of the Nazis were Jewish. The largest group of victims after the Jews were Soviet prisoners of war, around 3 million of those died. Another group that’s often mentioned is the Roma and Sinti (called Gypsies by the Nazis). They were hated too, and haphazardly shoved into camps here and there, but only in the case of the Jews was the idea that they would all be physically liquidated. Around 250,000 Roma and Sinti died.
WAS THERE A PLAN RIGHT FROM THE START? NO
People read Mein Kampf and listened to Hitler’s raving raging speeches promising the total destruction of the Jews and they concluded that he always intended to exterminate them physically, but this was not the case. At first he wanted to get rid of all Jews from Germany. And a lot of Jews agreed with him – once he came along, Germany was the last place they wanted to be. So there was a clamour, and in March 1938 Roosevelt proposed an international conference, to be held in Evian-le-Bains, a town on Lake Geneva in France. A committee was formed – the Intergovernmental Committee for Political Refugees. Quite right. Goodly hearted diplomats all turned up to the grand hotel there. But alas, not too much got done. Let Mackenzie King, PM of Canada, speak for them :
A very difficult question has presented itself in Roosevelt’s appeal to different countries to unite with the USA in admitting refugees from Austria, Germany etc. That means, in a word, admitting numbers of Jews. My own feeling is that nothing is to be gained by creating an internal problem in an effort to meet an international one.
There was a general feeling that well, if we admit these German and Austrian Jews, a lot of Eastern European countries will turn up the heat on their Jews and make a fuss for us to accept those too. And there are millions of these Jews.
Rees adds :
The British authorities must take responsibility for not allowing “the immense possibilities of Palestine as an outlet for Jewish immigration” to be discussed. But by the time of the Evian conference the British must have believed they had enough problems controlling Palestine without adding more potential conflict to the existing mix.
Hitler was very disappointed in the attitude of the democracies, and called them some rude names, like hypocrite. So now what were the Nazis to do? They decided to round up the Jews and put them all in ghettos. And then deport them to distant lands, once they’d conquered those lands.
There was a hot debate between members of the SS when the Jews were stuffed into the ghettos – some said why should we keep feeding them? Let them starve. And there was starvation in the ghettos. But some SS said no, we’ll keep them alive and make them work for us. So some SS did one thing, and some SS did another.
After the invasion of Poland and then Russia, the Einsatzgruppen squads started shooting large numbers of Jews in occupied territory, but there was still not a plan to actually physically liquidate every Jewish man woman and child. It was just too outrageoud an idea, even for the likes of Himmler. But the Nazi regime was radically improvisational. When faced with a problem, you were not supposed to wait for orders, you were supposed to think “what would Hitler want me to do”. Think like a Fuhrer. So the Holocaust evolved – an initiative here, a bold move there, until finally, a plan did crystallise in late 1941, or early 1942, take your pick, historians argue about the details.
USELESS MOUTHS
The Nazis also wanted to eradicate all mentally and physically disabled people, they said why should we be keeping these “useless mouths” alive, they don’t deserve to live, and they set up six “euthanasia” centres. This is where they first experimented with gas (another local initiative), beginning with carbon monoxide, using the famous fake shower method. Rees gives the details of one of them, located in the grounds of Sonnenstein Castle, south of Dresden.
From June 1940 to August 1941 an estimated 14,751 people were murdered in this way
That’s just over 1000 disabled people per month being killed, and there were five other places doing the same thing. In total 70,273 disabled people were gassed at these six centres in 1940 and 1941.
The euthanasia programme came to an end when the personnel were all transferred to various concentration camps to bring their expertise to bear there.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
This is the one stop book for anyone wanting to know about this dreadful period. I can understand why not everyone would want to read it....more
A short and mostly absurd book by HG Wells which has been mercifully forgotten by everyone. If there are still one or two Wells fans who have this on A short and mostly absurd book by HG Wells which has been mercifully forgotten by everyone. If there are still one or two Wells fans who have this on their to-read list they should cross it off with some mighty thrusts from a sharpie. HG was a brilliant author, of course, I love his five early science fiction novels, but man alive, the ego on this guy, he thought he was one of the great sages of the world.
The first section of this torrent of Pure Wellsian Thinking contains chapters called The Necessity for Metaphysics, Current Metaphysical Teaching Absurd, Planes and Dialects of Thought and What is a Being? HG says that yes, philosophy is very important, but, sadly, everyone has got it wrong until at last HG himself arrived to set them straight. He is painfully waffly but also very blunt – a winning combination. He says 1) there are such things as facts but 2) you can’t rely on your senses to perceive any of them. As for things (not to be confused with facts)
they pass into one another by insensible gradations. Take the word “Chair.” When one says chair, one thinks vaguely of an average chair. But collect individual instances; think of armchairs and reading-chairs and dining-room chairs, and kitchen chairs, chairs that pass into benches, chairs that cross the boundary and become settees, dentist’s chairs, thrones, opera stalls, seats of all sorts, those miraculous fungoid growths that cumber the floor of the Arts and Crafts exhibition, and you will perceive what a lax bundle in fact is this simple straightforward term.
(Didn't Plato say something along these lines?)
He could have used the example of dogs – I myself have often wondered if a chihuahua and a Great Dane are both correctly described as dogs.
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You decide.
But then he adroitly challenges his own argument by considering the humble atom. Here I present another fine example of the Thought of Wells.
You will think perhaps of atoms of the elements as instances of identically similar things, but these are things not of experience but of theory, and there is not a phenomenon in chemistry that is not equally well explained on the supposition that it is merely the immense quantities of atoms necessarily taken in any experiment that masks by the operation of the law of averages the fact that each atom also has its unique quality, its special individual difference.
THE FLY DROWNING IN MILK
Having chewed up philosophy he progresses on to the question of Belief, that is, what does HG believe? This is the important question. Not religion, for a start.
To me the Christian Christ seems not so much a humanized God as an incomprehensibly sinless being neither God nor man. His sinlessness wears his incarnation like a fancy dress… The Christian’s Christ is too fine for me, not incarnate enough, not flesh enough, not earth enough. He was never foolish and hot-eared and inarticulate, never vain, he never forgot things, nor tangled his miracles. I could love him I think more easily if the dead had not risen and if he had lain in peace in his sepulchre instead of coming back more enhaloed and whiter than ever, as a postscript to his own tragedy.
HG believes that the world is not chaos, everything in it is important, all part of a scheme, the wheel-smashed frog in the road, the fly drowning in milk, not to mention HG himself, all important. Bad news is that our tiny brains cannot comprehend what the Scheme is. Shame he never got to watch The Matrix. HG’s scheme, curiously, does not imply a Schemer. He says he would never use the word God as there are way too may assumptions attached to it. But if there is a God it is not a personality. His act of faith is to boldly state that the Scheme is ultimately right so don’t worry. Well, that’s easy for you to say, Mr I’ve-met-Stalin-and-Roosevelt Wells. I don’t suppose you asked the drowning fly though.
SUDDEN BLAST OF COMPASSION
This weird farrago is at times brushed aside and HG’s clear compassion shines through when he gets on to the subject of Women, the oppression of marriage, and so forth. Here is a great paragraph which almost justifies the rest of the book.
All women who desire children do not want to be entrusted with their upbringing. Some women are sexual and philoprogenitive without being sedulously maternal, and some are maternal without much or any sexual passion. There are men and women in the world now, great allies, fond and passionate lovers who do not live nor want to live constantly together. It is at least conceivable that there are women who, while desiring offspring, do not want to abandon great careers for the work of maternity, women again who would be happiest managing and rearing children in manless households that they might even share with other women friends, and men to correspond with these who do not wish to live in a household with wife and children. I submit, these temperaments exist and have a right to exist in their own way.
THESE DAYS HE WOULD DO A PODCAST
He would invite all the great and the dastardly on, from Laura Ingraham and Ben Shapiro to Jordan Peterson all the way over to Jeremy Corbyn and Kim Jong Un and they would not be able to resist his twinkly-eyed charm and he would ladle his great thoughts over their paltry ideas and the Grand Scheme would turn another notch towards fulfilment.
I have a mania for classifying novels – there are so many microgenres –
Novels that are really memoirs Novels that are a bundle of short stories looselI have a mania for classifying novels – there are so many microgenres –
Novels that are really memoirs Novels that are a bundle of short stories loosely tied together Novels featuring whales Novels where most of the characters wear hats Novels where nothing happens until page 88 and then the roof falls in Novels where nothing happens until page 88 and even then it’s nothing to write home about Novels that make you want to hurl yourself from a window Novels where people have conversations about a person they thought was dead but is actually alive Novels that make you suspect that loving your spouse intensely is just a desperate version of not wanting to be alone Novels about intelligent starfish
Many many categories. Olive Kitteridge fits into two of these - Novels that are a bundle of short stories loosely tied together and Novels about ordinary life in the USA – other writers in this last category include Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Garrison Keillor, Anne Tyler, Raymond Carver and around ten billion others. R K Narayan and Rohinton Mistry wrote the Indian version. You don’t have to have kidnappings and gallons of blood and zombie apocalypses to make a strong novel. Elizabeth Strout is a new name for me and she writes loving stories about small town folks that live in Maine. Her main character, around which things revolve like lazy planets, is a tall bulky 72 year old woman with a sharp-to-vicious tongue, hardly a good word to say about anyone, and living a borderline-miserable life with an annoying husband and an uncaring son who has the nerve to get married and vamoose to the other side of the country.
She’s the kind of person who blames everyone for everything and when someone points out she never blames herself for anything immediately complains that they’re blaming her for everything.
By the end of the book has Olive unbended at all, do we like her any more? No spoilers!
Elizabeth Strout has a few quirks – she is constantly describing people as tall (maybe all her characters really are all tall or maybe Elizabeth Strout is a very short person and ordinary sized people therefore appear tall to her) and she very often says that her characters built their own house. This comes up frequently but I don’t think they really did. I think they bought a plot of land and hired a builder who gave them a few basic designs and they picked out one of them and made a few additional suggestions. I don’t think they were up and down ladders hammering nails themselves. I could be wrong but I couldn’t see Olive doing that.
This was a Good Read ! Bodies fell quite often, people had arguments. I cannot refrain from recommending Olive Kitteridge!
An ordinary evening. The quiet, shy girl. The contents of the dustbin. The fading light. The careful search. A glove. The reassembled skull. The simplAn ordinary evening. The quiet, shy girl. The contents of the dustbin. The fading light. The careful search. A glove. The reassembled skull. The simple question. The ghosts of a thousand childhoods. The uneasy clock. This ruined place. The heart-shaped blade. The missing left ring finger. Ordinary domestic troubles. The final six months. The love and hate still here in my heart. The last straw. The first straw. The wrong time to ask. An arm was visible. We thought. We didn’t think. No one liked him. He was well-liked. So close to home, so far from help. Hurry back, dear! I will, I will. Don’t worry.
This gently gripping book (once I started I had to finish it in a day) takes five completely obscure British murders from the 1968 to 1973 period and peels back the layers. Most of this is a careful orchestration of investigations of facts along with the lives of the murderers and the victims but occasionally the sorrow of these crimes inspires the author’s eloquence :
Murder delivers silence. When one human life has been taken by another, that heavy, noisy silence which endures is usually a silence of despair. Mourners long for it to be broken by some explanation, some small consolation, some blanket with which to swaddle their grief. But very occasionally, a different silence follows a murder. It is the silence of indifference…the silence of a victim for whom no one weeps. Perhaps the only person who ever mourned Nora was the man who killed her.
For true crime readers this is definitely recommended....more
This one was not for me. After a while I found myself skim skim skimming to see if there would ever come a time when Caroline Fraser would stop with tThis one was not for me. After a while I found myself skim skim skimming to see if there would ever come a time when Caroline Fraser would stop with this dense thickety intertwining of murder, memoir, industrial history and her incessant Theory of Lead And Arsenic Poisoning, which is, that it infects the brains of certain men and helps to turn them into serial killers, and since the North West of the USA was awash with the stuff in the 60s to 80s, this accounts for the extraordinary number of serial killers operating in that part of the world, in that time.. And for all I know that might be true but the Big Theory was hammered so much it was a case of enough with the lead poisoning, alright, I believe you, stop….
Other factors were in play, of course. The liberalisation of ordinary social behaviour gave these horrible men a limitless supply of victims – hitch-hikers, sex workers, free spirited young people out past their bedtimes.
And the lack of the Big Three innovations in detection which have shut down contemporary would-be serial killers : CCTV, mobile phones and their attendant cell towers (ever vigilant, ever smiling) and of course DNA DNA DNA.
You don’t have to write true crime books in a plain no-frills just-the-facts style – others that don’t include As If by Blake Morrison, Ghettoside by Jill Leovy, Going Postal by Mark Ames and the amazing Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burns. I see most of the reviews of Murderland love it, so you may too, but I didn’t.
Three stars for the obvious enormous work that went into this big book....more
I know, what was I thinking, this dense 600 page history of the popes was going to be a ripsnorting laughaminute festival of fun? Well, kind of. BecauI know, what was I thinking, this dense 600 page history of the popes was going to be a ripsnorting laughaminute festival of fun? Well, kind of. Because you have to admit that the popes were throughout all of the turbulent history of Europe in the thick of it. For instance, for many years there were two of them, a pope and an antipope, both slagging each other off and excommunicating each other. That’s entertaining, surely? It would be like two Taylor Swifts each claiming to be the real Taylor Swift and each going on a world tour to prove it. Then there was the big knockdown dragouts with the Eastern Orthodox mob and the Protestants – the gangs of Christianity. Bound to be some strong street fighting action ! And there was, too.
But well, none of it really came to life, not like, say, I Claudius. I think if you took all the material in this worthy book and gave it to some screenwriters and then HBO made a 12 part Popes drama then suddenly it would spring to life and we would all be goggling at those devilish Arians and their vile idea that since the Father begat the Son then the Son had a beginning of existence and hence there was a time when the Son was not; and we would be binge watching furiously to find out of they really did elect a female pope who (oopsy!) gave birth to a baby one day whilst mounting a horse; and there would be great scenes where Galileo and Pope Paul V had a tremendous staredown about heliocentricity, and there would be some wicked crosscutting between Pope Leo X and his crew selling indulgences and Martin Luther banging up his 95 Theses on the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg – there’s loads of drama in all of this.
But not in this (worthy) book. Eventually it became an unending parade of names and events and it was like watching an ants’ nest from a long way away, you just couldn’t tell one ant from another.
Note : indulgences were certificates that a particular sin had been forgiven - so, you paid your ducats and you got a certificate saying that you didn't have to spend 15000 years in purgatory for accidentally murdering your brother. You were forgiven. It turns out that the system was expanded, due to its popularity, and they started selling indulgences for future sins too. So you might think you could accidentally commit adultery at some point in the future. Maybe you were thinking about your new sexy neighbour. No problem, you could buy an indulgence for that too....more
COMPARTMENTALIZATION : the act of separating something into parts and not allowing those parts to mix together
We do it all the time. It allows us to hCOMPARTMENTALIZATION : the act of separating something into parts and not allowing those parts to mix together
We do it all the time. It allows us to have some control, and stop our lives descending into chaos. And it seems the human mind – some of them anyhow – can take this to a very extreme degree.
THREE EXAMPLES OF EXTREME COMPARTMENTALIZATION
ONE : RUDOLF HESS
After participating in the slaughter of hundreds of prisoners during his working day in Auschwitz, he would return home in the evening to his sweet family (one wife, five children, various dogs) and slip right in to his normal German family life, in his house and garden right there next to the camp itself. And it was no problem at all. And this happened day in day out from 1940 to 1943. You can see this dramatized very compellingly in the film The Zone of Interest (2023).
TWO : DOMINIQUE PELICOT
You remember that this guy drugged his wife and filmed at least 50 different men raping her many times between 2011 and 2020 when he was found out and arrested. The morning after the horrible crime he would, I assume, just be his usual self. They had been married for over 35 years. Pass me another croissant, dear. That kind of thing.
THREE : TED BUNDY
On 14 July 1974 he abducted a woman in broad daylight from a park at Lake Sammamish in Washington state, and murdered her, then tried to abduct a second woman (she wouldn’t get into his car), then successfully abducted a third woman and murdered her, also in broad daylight, and then, in the early evening, he took his girlfriend Liz and her daughter out for hamburgers and ice cream. Liz never noticed anything was amiss. He was his usual charming self.
Oh, one more thing. This Liz was his long time girlfriend but when he moved to Utah he got himself another girlfriend and she really liked him at first but then when he started drinking too much she ditched him. Did he attack her in a homicidal rage? Not at all. He didn’t stalk her, he accepted her decision. Later when she found out who he really was she said their relationship had been quite normal.
What can you say about the human mind?
A QUESTION OF BALANCE
Writing about Bundy requires great balance. The horror of his actions is too many times eclipsed by his barefaced arrogance, roguish cheek, smarminess and resourcefulness, to the extent that writers can topple over into a fascination with almost an undercurrent of admiration. How could he live this life? The young Republican go-getter with a bright future! He worked at a suicide helpline! He was talking female students out of self harm on one evening and murdering them on the next….. And how did he spirit these women away like that, and never leave any clues behind? And the extraordinary drama of the incidents ! How could he escape not once but twice from prison? And then acting as his own defence attorney. And then the judge, right after handing Bundy his death sentence, says
Take care of yourself, young man. I say that to you sincerely; take care of yourself. It is an utter tragedy for this court to see such a total waste of humanity, I think, as I've experienced in this courtroom. You're a bright young man. You’d have made a good lawyer. I’d have loved to have you practice in front of me. But you went another way, partner. I don’t have any animosity to you. I want you to know that.
I think Kevin Sullivan gets it right in this short, succinct account. BUT he does himself absolutely no favours to begin with, however. In the introduction he tells how he met with Detective Jerry Thompson who investigated the Utah murders. And Jerry brought the bag.
”What bag?” I asked. “The bag Bundy carried… I have it with me now in my truck!”…. “You’ve got Ted Bundy’s bag!” I said, my voice rising with excitement. “Yes, I’m holding it right now.”
Later, Kevin’s friend fishes the stuff out of the bag.
First, the woolen ski mask, and then a red-handled ice pick. Next, he retrieved a flashlight, then, a long piece of clothesline rope…
Etc etc. Kevin even gets to keep one of the plastic trash bags in the bag. We can only guess what Ted would have used them for.
And whilst I’m being a little critical, Kevin sometimes coughs up some truly orotund sentences :
Like all the women before her, Laura Aime would soon be immortalised in that heartbreaking litany of those who succumbed to the deviant desires of the serial killer known as Theodore Robert Bundy.
Fortunately there’s not too much of that kind of thing here…
There are quite a few books on Bundy and the ones I’ve seen always scramble up the chronology for effect and make it confusing. This short book doesn’t do that.
A FINAL QUOTE
Guilt. It's this mechanism we use to control people. It's an illusion. It's a kind of social control mechanism and it's very unhealthy. It does terrible things to our body.
What's one less person on the face of the Earth, anyways?...more
A vapid colourless girl from a nice family falls in love at the age of 18 with a boy called Vesey who can’t be bothered with anything, life is such a A vapid colourless girl from a nice family falls in love at the age of 18 with a boy called Vesey who can’t be bothered with anything, life is such a bore. He has the charisma of a dead water vole, but for Harriet he is the mid 1930s version of Ryan Gosling even though clearly he is destined for a life of mooching about aimlessly. Eventually after some months of bloodless cheek pecking he saunters off stage and becomes a third rate provincial actor and is not seen or heard from for 150 pages. That is the good news but the bad news is we now have to spend all our time with Harriet and the guy she ended up marrying because getting married to the first man that implies you might possibly consider it (they would never do anything as forthright as to ask somebody in this novel) is the very acme of a girl’s aspirations.
So the pallid tedious girl becomes a model Stepford wife and produced a 15 year old daughter who is also something of a drip. Then Vesey the Tiresome oozes back into the plot. He has acquired a turn of phrase, and now says stuff like
"Keep nothing, my dear one. Don’t be a sentimental woman. Have now. This evening. All the rest is a dust laden with threats."
And a page later:
"You justify everything, hallow everything. It doesn’t any longer matter if I cannot pay the rent."
Will Harriet and Vesey finally get together, this is the question. Not something to set you on the edge of your chair. It is like wanting to know the winner of a slug race.
Such a shame! This was the third Elizabeth Tayor novel I read and the first one Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont was brilliant, and the second one Angel was a great hoot, and both are highly recommended.
Everyone except me seems to love this one though. It’s a mystery....more
Required reading for anyone who has anything whatsoever to do with operating or approving the use of the Nuclear Deterrent – and there must be many maRequired reading for anyone who has anything whatsoever to do with operating or approving the use of the Nuclear Deterrent – and there must be many many such people who get up in the morning and go to work and as part of their work contemplate the apocalypse – imagine that….
This fantastic graphic novel can be read in under an hour for maximum impact, so that maybe – maybe – it will flash through these person’s brains if ever there comes a time when for the tiniest nanosecond the possibility of serious consideration of the actual real world not a test use of tactical nuclear weapons becomes an actual thing….an actual thing….
Also essential :
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Available on youtube. If The Road doesn’t do the trick, Threads should. ...more
Love never enters these pages and the prose seems precious. Here is a display of my worst characteristicsCheever wrote in his journal about this one :
Love never enters these pages and the prose seems precious. Here is a display of my worst characteristics and a devastating self-portrait of a man in decline.
It’s nice that we have a little book about the wonderful Cocteau Twins and Chris Tapley’s heart is in the right place and he inspired me to listen to It’s nice that we have a little book about the wonderful Cocteau Twins and Chris Tapley’s heart is in the right place and he inspired me to listen to all of the Cocteaus’ albums in order but boy oh boy he makes heavy weather out of it all. He is obsessed with the words of the songs. Well, there really aren’t any words on this album, there are beautiful melodious vocal sounds by Elizabeth Fraser which she drapes over all these vast crashing oceanic guitar constructions – but Chris Tapley worries constantly about what they mean or he worries about other people worrying about what they mean as if he’s never heard of anything being abstract or has ever heard anything sung in a language he has no knowledge of. Anyway, entire genres, like death metal, completely abandon the idea of understandable lyrics. It’s possible some listeners would be put off by it, and others might be appalled by the icky babytalk of the song titles –
The Itchy Glowbo Blow Suckling the Mender Spooning Good Singing Gum Ella Megalast Burls Forever
But I advise overlooking such minor considerations. It’s a great album. ...more