Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music

This is my last post before going into my usual one-month hibernation. Today I would like to focus my attention (and yours, too) on the books, films and albums which stood out for me in 2013.

This was a bumper year for me in literature, music and cinema. I finally got to read Zadie Smith’s latest novel, NW, Milan Kundera’s earlier works, Life is Elsewhere and Laughable Loves and William Burroughs’ Marmite-like Naked Lunch (either you like or you don’t. I fall in the former camp). I have also finished the year on a high with a re-read of one of my favourite Cuban novels, Memories of the Underdevelopment. Bearing in mind that I am writing this post about ten days before it’s due to come out, there could still be nice surprises ahead.

Unfortunately, because of the high price of cinema tickets, we do not get to go to the pictures a lot, which means we miss out on new releases. That is where Lovefilm comes in. We can tailor our movie time as a family and with a few exceptions most of the films that follow have a 12-certifcate. This year we have seen Badlands, High Fidelity (again!), The Killing Fields, Death of a Salesman (the one with Dustin Hoffman and a very young John Malkovich, who also had a supporting role in The Killing Fields), Ivan’s Childhood (based on a short-story that became my long-lasting companion when I was a child), The 400 Blows, The Truman Show (again!), A Soldier’s Story, Macbeth (Polanski’s version with a superb Francesca Annis playing Lady Macbeth), Gandhi, I am Cuba, Coriolanus (one of my favourite performances by Ralph Fiennes an Vanessa Redgrave. This is the movie that should be shown to presidents and prime ministers everywhere before they decide to invade another country), Pink Floyd-The Wall (again!) and the visually striking The Tree of Life. Funny, isn’t it? I started the year with Malick and ended the year with Malick. I say, who needs the local multiplex with this wealth of movies?

I have left music for the end because you all know how much music gets played on this blog. My most recent purchase was four albums by The Black Keys: The Big Come Up, Attack and Release, Brothers and El Camino. I can’t stop playing them. Theirs is raw, unadulterated blues-rock, with the emphasis on blues. Earlier in the year I got (finally!) Laura Marling’s four albums. I wrote about Laura back in the summer in one of my regular columns, Killer Opening Songs. Another record which I bought this year and which has been growing on me slowly is Mike Ladd’s Negrophilia, an organic synergy of jazz, house and hip-hop. Anoushka Shankar provided me with a beautiful, sensuous and spiritual soundtrack to my summer holidays with Rise, an album that shows off her excellent skills as an arranger, producer and composer. Dutch singer Nynke was the surprise package this year. I bought her album Alter after reading about it in Songlines magazine. I was not disappointed at all. Nynke’s music is hard to classify. I would call her a good, really strong pop artist with a strong folk influence. A serendipitous discovery was Yasmine Hamdan, the Lebanese singer whose debut record Ya Nass, found its way into my CD collection by chance. I was on You Tube, as you do, checking up clips by musicians from here, there and everywhere, when up pops this unknown (to me) artist. I was hooked immediately to her husky voice and electronica-infused arrangements. In this end-of-the-year review I cannot leave out the Brazilian brigade. 2013 was the year when I bought the whole Original Album Series by none other than Elis Regina, Milton Nascimento and Gilberto Gil. Five classic records per CD. A snip at less than a tenner for the whole lot. I also purchased The Definitive Collection by Caetano Veloso and Jorge Ben (the latter of Mas, Que Nada!). 40 tracks per artist, double-CD issue, low price, win-win. Beautiful! Having grown up in Cuba listening to all these great albums, I have been on a trip down memory lane this whole year. The icing on my musical cake was A Curva Da Cintura, a collaboration between two Brazilian singers, Arnaldo Antunes and Edgard Scandurra and the Malian kora player Toumani Diabaté. The only word I have for this album is poetic. That pretty much could describe my year, too.

I will be back on Sunday 12^th January. In the meantime, I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Next Post: “Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music”, to be published on Sunday 12^th January at 10am (GMT)

Pieces of Me, Pieces of Havana

what woke me up at the same time every time in those years was not the sound of the mass being conducted in the flat downstairs no it was not the mix of violins and batá drums led by the elderly gentleman who dedicated this celebrations to his recently departed wife it was as if the world of afrocuban music and the classical one came together for just one night and oshún was more than honey queen sensuous woman feminine oshún and changó was more than lightning and genitals it was a pure symbiotic union but it was not this music that woke me up it was not the screams coming from the next door neighbour the one with the three sons one of whom was around my age the woman who always said within earshot i ain’t looking for no man me no i don’t wanna give my children no stepdad but that did not stop her from landing a different partner almost every year on christmas eve nochebuena was to be spent in company she said even if it was a short lived one she did not wake me up with her passionate screams and commands of así papito aprovéchame toda que los niños no están aquí así mi cielito tócame como tú sabes the x rated material coming out of her mouth was enough to make my mother give her the cold shoulder the next day and grass her up to the chairman of our comité de defensa de la revolución she did not however wake me up nor did the dog campeón was called that lived downstairs a bulldog that looked so much like its owner that you always wondered who led who by the lead the dog was the clue to what woke me up because its owner woke up too at the same time every time in those years and the dog immediately began to bark in the direction of our flat the dog knew and its owner knew that my grandmother had just finished making our christmas eve supper the roast pork that would be served the day after twenty fourth of december with my mum dad cousin auntie and nana presiding over the table the pork that had been killed at my relatives in the countryside a few days before probably killed with one stab because as one of my great uncles used to say you have to know where to plunge the knife if you do not do it right the pig begins to cry like a child and uno se apendeja you get cold feet mi’jo you cannot get cold feet when you kill a pig only once remember just once  he was the one also carrying this beast on his shoulders several miles to our house in havana so that my grandmother could cook her famous pork cracklings now that was what woke me up one minute my bed was my safe sanctuary after a whole day in school and an afternoon playing hide and seek with my friends in and around buildings that had slowly wrinkled up over the years and given up trying to hide their cracks the next minute the smell lured me out of the sheets or duvet if it was nippy as sometimes december was and my bare feet led me to the kitchen and my still somnolent eight year old voice said one mima only one and my grandma with a smile from ear to ear with the big earrings that she wore between seventeen and thirty first of december babalú st lazarus and new years eve bookended her outfits going from sackclothes to bright yellow dresses fished out a crackling in the still hot pot patted it dry on a piece of paper and put it in my mouth my eight year old mouth saying you know pork meat is the gossipiest of the meats mi’jo because it lets the whole neighbourhood know when it is being cooked all this she said to me with my hands rubbing my eyes with my mum behind me making sure that my sleep would not be further interrupted with my dad working that night maybe in a cabaret or nightclub with my auntie and cousin in deep slumber even with the lounge light on sometimes a second pork crackling followed a rarity as the big clocks hands marched slowly toward midnight to turn twenty third into twenty fourth and many a barrio in havana underwent a change of mood not even fifty revolutions would rid cubans of their traditional christmas eve rice and peas plantains roast pork salad consisting of lettuce tomatoes cucumber and raw onion yuca con mojo and the unforgettable chicharrones the pork cracklings that woke up the neighbour and his dog that woke up my eight year old younger self at the same time every time in those years

© 2013

Next Post: “Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music”, to be published on Sunday 15^th December at 10am (GMT)