Swell Marketa and the June Fool

I ordered the CD that the two people from the "Once" movie had made (Marketa Irglova, pictured above, and Glen Hansard), it's called "The Swell Season". I was not hugely taken with it the first time I heard it, but that was in the car heading up to San Francisco. Now I've had a chance to hear it again tonight on the proper CD it is really rather good. Musically it is really beautiful, really pretty, relaxing music. Shame Marketa only gets to sing one song on her own, she has a great voice. There are loads of lovely harmonies she does with Glen Hansard. Marketa sang about three songs in the "Once" movie that are featured on the CD, I wonder why not.


The next CD that I almost grabbed at random made me smile after I put it on. Considering we are only now three hours away from next month (and it's next month already back in Europe) how strange that it's the late great "Madder Rose"'s "Hello June Fool" CD I just put on. I wonder who the June fool I am subconciously thinking about is?

When I left the UK I transfered all my CD's, and some vinyl, to Apple's equivalent of MP3, AAC. I then sold all the CD's on eBay, as I was not sure I wanted to cart mountains of CDs here to the USA. What I've discovered since is how much quality you use when you compress the audio files to make them fit onto iPods. Hearing the original Madder Rose CD again, it sounds great. I hope all the exponents of downloading from iTunes are realising that they are not really downloading music that is really CD quality, but a rather flat sounding compressed file. The audio compression technology is really clever to compress all that data into a 3meg file for a three minute song, but there is no such thing as a free lunch and I've found that you lose a lot of sound quality in the process. Maybe the compressed files are OK on an iPod, but if you play them back on a computer connected to a decent hifi system, the difference between the compressed file and the original is obvious.

Having realised this, I went on a second hand CD shopping spree back in December of last year, and re-bought Madder Rose's finer moments as well as a lot of other old friends. So I feel a bit stupid now, having gotten rid of so many CDs, just to buy them back again 18 months later. So maybe I am the June fool? Problem is that I think I sold the CDs in March.....

The end of Talk Cinema, we had a good time at Once

It was the last Talk Cinema of the season today. Despite the minor struggle of getting to the cinema in Palo Alto for 930am on a Saturday morning, it's been good. They do Talk Cinema at the Aquarius in Palo Alto, which is pictured above.

We have seen a wide variety of movies: Botat (wouldn't have gone to see it myself, but good in parts, bit over the top in other parts, Venus (good old Leslie Phillips, some of the Americans found the lingo difficult to understand), Painted Veil (beautifully shot, first twenty minutes were very boring, stuffy old English mannerisms, etc., but satisfying in the end, Toby Jones was great), Into Great Silence (why would ANYONE sit through a 2 hour 45 minute movie about a silent order of Monks, walked out of that one), Black Books (pretty bad, Paul Verhoven is too lightweight for the subject matter) and lastly and leastly, Miss Potter (please, please burn the negative. I love Bill Paterson, and Ewan McGregor went to the same college as me, but this was an utterly irredeemable piece of shit, I felt physically sick throughout most of this movie).

The movie today was GREAT. It is called "Once". It was made in Ireland and centers around the music and relationship of two musicians, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova. These guys are real musicians and have a CD, The Swell Season, I just ordered it off Amazon.


It was a really moving story, beautiful music, and very well made. Seemingly, it was made on a shoestring, but I think it is all the better for that. A real antedote for Hollywood. No stars, musicians as actors, no predictable cliche story - great stuff, makes you glad to be alive.


Talk Cinema is called Talk Cinema, as you are able to share your views with others in the audience after. I couldn't shut up at this one, as it was set in Ireland and it was about music. At least I can talk at Talk Cinema about a movie I really liked, you can imagine the views I shared about Miss Potter!

We also went to the Chinese - yum. I fell asleep in the afternoon, when the replay of "A week in Westminster" was on my iBook, imagine that. I missed all the advice on the confusing election result in Scotland. And, not a completely good day, Rangers beat Celtic AGAIN, in the last old firm match of the season. That's the first time they have won two in a row for years.

More information on the various things I've been going on about can be found at -

The band the two stars of the movie today are in - www.myspace.com/theswellseason

The movie, highly recommended - www.oncethemovie.com

Talk Cinema - www.talkcinema.com