Death of Catherine Ringer, singer of the punk band Les Rita Mistouko, the most original French band of the 80’s!
Archive for punk rock
c’était comme ça
Posted in Kids with tags 1980's, alternative rock, French band, French Music, Les Rita Mitsouko, punk rock on September 28, 2026 by xi'anShane MacGowan (1957-2023)
Posted in Kids, Wines with tags Celtic music, Dirty Old Town, England, Gaelic, Guinness, Ireland, Irish nationalism, NeurIPS, punk rock, Salford, Shane MacGowan, Thomas Bayes, Tunbridge Wells, youtube on December 4, 2023 by xi'an
The punk singer Shane MacGowan has died a few days ago. He formed the fantastic Pogues Celtic punk band in the early 1980’s, mixing punk raw energy with Celtic tunes and instruments, and Irish nationalism. (In true punk fashion, the name of the band come from the Gaelic póg mo thóin that I let readers check for translation! In the same spirit, his earlier band was called the Nips with no connection with the Neural Information Processing Systems conference! However, he could have claimed a connection with Bayes since he was raised in Tunbridge Wells.) His early death is sadly unsurprising given his lifelong issue with alcohol, which started as a young boy when he started drinking Guinness… (As a minor trivia, the Dirty Old Town song was originally written about Salford, near Manchester, England, although adopted by several Irish bnds.)
Spellbound
Posted in Kids with tags New Wave, punk rock, Robert Smith, Siouxie and The Banshees, The Cure on July 12, 2023 by xi'anReading in Le Monde the news that Siouxie had sung at the Eurockéennes de Belfort reminded of her first albums that I played endlessly. With The Banshees and a certain Robert Smith as an occasional guitarist… Highly innovative punk rock announcing the New Wave and mesmerising voice.
a journal of the plague, sword, and famine year
Posted in Books, Kids, Mountains, pictures, Running, Travel, University life with tags Addams family, Alfred Hitchcock, book review, books, COVID-19, Daniel Defoe, fantasy, film review, French literature, Journal of the Plague Year, Korean cinema, Nobel Prize in Litterature, Norge, Normandy, Normans, Norway, pandemics, Park Chan-wook, pogo, punk rock, red cabbage, Rouen, Russian invasion, scallops, squid, The Cramps, The New Yorker, Tim Burton, trolls, Ukraine, Vertigo, wok on January 2, 2023 by xi'an
Read my very first Annie Ernaux piece and it was in English, in The New Yorker! A very short piece on a short visit to her mother. Beautifully written, carrying the bittersweet feeling of the impossibility to reconnect with earlier times and earlier impressions. I was much less impressed, however, by her Nobel discourse and the use of Rimbaud’s race (and Galton’s and Fisher’s…) in such a different context. A constant projection/fixation on her background and class inequalities, supplemented by an ethic of ressentiment, does not sound enticing, the more because auto-fiction has never appealed to me. (Sharing similar social and geographic [Rouen!] backgrounds sounds precisely as the wrong reason to contemplate reading her books.)
Cooked weekly butternut soups, red cabbage stews and squid woks as these are the seasonal best offers at the local market, along with plentiful Norman scallops, not yet impacted by inflation. Also restarted making buckwheat bread, with the side advantages of temporarily heating home (and a pretense to add the rice pudding dish in the oven!).
Watched Trolls, Wednesday (only on Wednesdays), and Decision to Leave. Apart from the Norge exposure, the first is terrible, esp. when compared with the earlier 2010 tongue-in-cheek Troll Hunter (Trolljegeren).Wednesday is a television series that centres on Wednesday Addams, the dead-pan daughter in the Addams family. I found the series hilarious, even though intended for YA audiences. The quality of the episodes varies, those from Tim Burton usually coming on top, but the main character (Wednesday, in case you are not paying attention!) is fantastic. (The fact that, Christina Ricci, the actor playing Wednesday in the 1991 movie is also involved in the series is a great wink to the earlier installments of this series.) And, final argument, a series where the heroin pogoes to a song by The Cramps cannot turn all bad! The Korean Decision to Leave (헤어질 결심) is a masterpiece (except for the ridiculous climbing scenes!) in deception and ambiguity (with a very thin connection to Hitchcock’s Vertigo). Far from his backup role in the stunning Memories of Murder, Park Hae-il is fabulous as a policeman torn between his duty and an inexplicable attraction for the main suspect, brilliantly played by Tang Wei, who manages the ambiguous character till the very end.
A message to you
Posted in Books, Kids, Travel with tags Coventry, Coventry Automatics, Ghost Town, Midlands, punk rock, Ska, The Specials on December 21, 2022 by xi'an
As Terry Hall, the singer of the late 1970’s Coventry-based ska/punk group The Specials passed away on Sunday, a song from their early years. In memoriam.
