Charles Shaar Murray's Guide to the Blues Parts 1 & 2 on Madam Miaow at Resonance 104.4FM NOW ONLINE

We did it! The fabulous launch of the second season of Madam Miaow on Resonance 104.4FM (now named Madam Miaow's Culture Lounge) kicked off with parts 1 and 2 of Charles Shaar Murray's fabulous Guide to the Blues with guitarist and songwriter Stephen Dale Petit adding his expertise and good taste.

You can now hear the entire set of Madam Miaow on Resonance 104.4FM. Or … How to listen to Resonance FM.

Now online, Charles Shaar Murray's Guide to the Blues Part 1 and Charles Shaar Murray's Guide to the Blues Part 2.

Six more programmes in the series coming up, all with my lovely assistant in spangles, latex and leather, Charles Shaar Murray:

18th March 2014 — ANNA MAY WONG
Anna Chen

25th March 2014 — CHINESE ARTS
Guests: Daniel York, Jingan Young, Wondermare

1st April 2014 — THE BLOSSOMING OF ALTERNATIVE THEATRE IN THE POST-WAR YEARS
Guests: Dr Susan Croft, Neil Hornick

8th April 2014 — SLAM AND PERFORMANCE POETRY IN THE UK
Guests: John Paul O'Neill, John Crow

15 April 2014 — MUSIC CONCRETE
Guests: John Bowers

22nd April 2014 — WOMEN OF THE BLUES
Guests: Charles Shaar Murray and Stephen Dale Petit. (Also hoping to have either Bex Marshall or Sarah Gillespie depending on availability.)

Frontiers woman, survivalist and chair repairer.

I'm exactly the sort of woman you lads need come the apocalypse.

This morning I murdered a hedge. Or at least I cut an overgrown privet down to knee level on the understanding that said shrub and cockroaches will be the only organisms to survive the coming cataclysm if Nato has its way.

This afternoon I repaired the cane seat of the Marcus Breuer chair through which I fall every time I wish to do any work. It's been driving me crazy so I sent away for the bits, watched a How To video on You Tube, et voila. My lovely stylish yet comfortable chair restored to former glory and ready for the Chen butt.

Next week on Madam Miaow, how to skin a goat with your teeth.

The problem ...

Clear out the splining (wooden beading).

Soak your cane webbing for 20 minutes and then line it up.

Use halves of wooden pegs as wedges to drive the soaked and softened cane into the groove.

Apply wood glue to groove, hammer in new spline, and here it is!

Listen to Charles Shaar Murray's Guide to the Blues Pt 1 launch Madam Miaow's Culture Lounge season 2 on Resonance 104.4FM

Listen to Charles Shaar Murray's Guide to the Blues Part 1 on Madam Miaow's Culture Lounge, Resonance 104.4FM, last night. With special guest Stephen Dale Petit.

Charles Shaar Murray's Guide to the Blues Pt 1 on Madam Miaow's Culture Lounge, Resonance FM

I'm back with a bang! To be precise, a new eight-week radio series of Madam Miaow's Culture Lounge on Resonance 104.4FM on Tuesdays 5-6pm starting this week, 4th March.

To kick off, Charles Shaar Murray gives us his Guide to the Blues, Parts 1 and 2, Ancient and Modern: the 1920s to the early 1960s when the Blues was almost entirely African-American, and the mid-1960s to the present when the white kids got it and joined in (Part 2 follows on Tuesday 11th March).

In brief, pre- and post- Stones.

With guest Stephen Dale Petit. There will be a listen-again opportunity to hear it after broadcast on Soundcloud which I'll post here.

The new radio series of Madam Miaow's Culture Lounge kicks off on Resonance 104.4FM with CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY'S Guide to the Blues tomorrow (Tuesday) 5-6pm. Listen to previous programmes on Soundcloud. Or LISTEN LIVE here.

Shots From the Hip by Charles Shaar Murray now an e-book

At last, the new long-overdue edition of Charles Shaar Murray's coruscating collection of journalism — Shots From the Hip (I told him his next one should be called Shots From the Hip Replacement) — first published in 1991, with a new introduction by Joel Nathan Rosen and a new afterword by CSM himself.

It puts together Murray’s writing on music and much, much more from the 1970s and 1980s in New Musical Express and elsewhere, edited and introduced by Neil Spencer. It shows just why Murray acquired the reputation of being the most intelligent and acerbic popular music critic of his generation.

His witty and beautifully crafted pieces – a mix of reviews, interviews and extended critical essays – are as readable today as when they were first written. He was always ahead of the game, noticing up-and-coming artists (and recording sad declines of the once-great) before anyone else. And, almost without exception, his judgments stand the test of time remarkably well.

Shots From the Hip is a classic of its genre, essential reading for anyone with an interest in popular culture, funny, perceptive and energetic.

WHAT THEY SAY

‘One of the best British writers on pop music, and this is a compilation of HIS best.’
SIMON NAPIER-BELL, GUARDIAN

The reason I write is Charles Shaar Murray - collected NME works available again. The R Newman, P Smith & Macca truly great.
DANNY BAKER

‘Charles Shaar Murray was always the best read’
TONY VISCONTI

‘The New Musical Express was one of the big things in my life … there was outrageous writing by Charles Shaar Murray, Nick Kent and, later, Julie Burchill — what they were writing was unbelievable! The NME was so important for lonely suburban kids. It was a lifeline.’
DANNY BOYLE

‘This is an extremely intelligent man who happens to find expression and pleasure in a genre that many comparable intellects dismiss as worthless. For those whose love of rock music has survived their apprehension of its partial absurdity, this book is there to be savoured, to be read slowly and with a great deal of relevant musical accompaniment.’
THE TIMES

‘Murray’s work is particularly impressive because it was written at the time. Murray ragged on Blondie and the Clash, for example, before anyone had heard of them.’
MICHIGAN DAILY

‘“Some people are born dull,” starts a piece on George Harrison and his 1974 ballad Ding Dong, which the author calls a “hideous piece of garf”. Madonna is “Our lady of hard work”, whose 1990 Blonde Ambition tour was a “Broadway musical in all essentials except for its lack of plot”. This irreverent and colloquial collection of British pop-music criticism spans 20 years and tosses in hundreds of musicians, insights and insults.’
ST PETERSBURG TIMES (FLORIDA)

Published by Aaaargh! Press.

Charles Shaar Murray starts a summer course of his Hothouse Project "Journalism as Craft And Art" writing masterclasses in West Hampstead — eight Thursday evenings from 29th May. 

Feng Xiaogang in conversation at the BFI: holding a mirror up to Chinese society

Last night's pre-screening gala talk at the BFI by film director Feng Xiaogang climaxed the Spectacular China season of his films while launching the year-long Electric Shadows collaboration between the BFI and China.

After a start as slow as wet cement, it livened up considerably once Feng and his adroit translator bypassed a disappointingly dull interviewer and some stunningly tedious questions such as, "What inspired you?" "Who were your mentors?" elicited a dry, "I'm sure I had mentors but I can't recall who."

Feng covered the basics of his early career, which began over 20 years ago in the 1990s. His realisation that his contemporaries — the Beijing Film Academy "Fifth Generation" filmmakers like Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou and their focus on the deeper meaning of life, humanity, and the whole philosophical shebang — were leaving audiences cold, led him to make films that reflected people's lives. People hadn't fully recovered from the Cultural Revolution and were still suffering, he reckoned, and needed a lighter tone. Working his way up via the hard route as an army set-designer, followed by a spell in TV, Feng's escapist bent and outright commercial considerations, facilitated by a sensitivity to the needs of the market, helped the Chinese film industry grow from mere tens of millions into the $3.5 billion behemoth it is today.

Finding it safer to play with comedy in the post-Tiananmen Square political climate, he helmed the New Year films (hesui pian) trilogy Party A, Party B (1997), Be There or Be Square (1998) and Sorry Baby (1999), light, frothy comedies that took a swipe at authority figures without ever really challenging authority. The huge success of Cell Phone, his 2003 exploration of extra-martial affairs, launched his career into the stratosphere.

Staying apolitical but now confident enough to expand his subject matter, he made the politically neutral but visually dazzling Assembly (2007) about the civil war between the nationalist Kuomintang and Communist forces in the late 1940s, which led to the foundation of the People's Republic of China in 1949. He admits to being influenced by Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, rather than any of cinema's intellectual heavyweights: no Tarkovsky or Fassbinder here. (He's said to be the "Chinese Spielberg", so make of that what you will.) There was also a Korean movie which inspired him. As the cost of Korean talent was a fifth of Hollywood's, he was soon employing them to make his film.

Aftershock (2010), looking at the devastation of the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, is another blockbuster, albeit one which critiques the state of the collective Chinese mindset. At the centre is the Sophie's Choice dilemma facing the mother: which of her twins, son or daughter, should she drag from the rubble?

Feng is ruthless when it comes to actors. He'll have none of that nurturing nonsense and he's happy to sack those who can't cut the wasabi. He says that one way he directs is to use Toms Hanks and Cruise as reference points for the opposite ends of the acting scale he requires. "Can you be like Tom Hanks?", he'll say to his poor thesps; really confusing them when he adds the further refinement that they should pitch their performance "halfway between."

Well into his stride by now, Feng enlarges on what drives him to create film. Talking about Back to 1942 (completed in 2012, China's official entry for this year's Academy Awards, and screened after the talk), an epic tragedy about the Henan famine under Kuomintang rule and Japanese invasion that killed three million, he says he doesn't just want to depict darkness and misery for the sake of it; rather, he wants to draw a connection between contemporary China and what was happening in 1942.

His passionate insistence that he mirrors Chinese society, reflecting back its imperfections in order that they may be corrected, is an indication that, having passed through its Gilded Age, China is entering an introspective phase examining the implications of China's new-found wealth. He detects a spiritual impoverishment, but locates its cause in a lack of religion, castigating hypocritical Buddhists and Taoists whose prayers and sacrifices at the altar of their beliefs are in fact only "doing a deal" in return for health and wealth. He reviles the destruction of the environment for quick cash, and the theft of intellectual property. When the audience laughs at the inclusion of football match rigging in his list of crimes, he chastises them: it's no laughing matter. These are all symptoms of what's going wrong with the Chinese. "You can't be a great people if you only care about short-term values."

The Chinese people having been tortured by misery and wars for a century, Feng says things have been getting better for the past 30 years, and he concludes that the Chinese are now ready to look at themselves. A frisson of discomfort ripples around the room when he compares the Chinese unfavourably with the Israelis, whom he sees as having endured misery and developed courage: "Chinese are less than the Israelis." Your humble correspondent wondered exactly which lessons China was supposed to learn from 'plucky little Israel' but our intrepid interviewer crushed the life out of any possible enquiry by immediately blurting, "I'm not going there."

Feng also took the opportunity to announce his forthcoming remake of A World Without Thieves with British producer Duncan Kenworthy (Four Weddings and a Funeral), and that they already have a first draft of the script.

David Cameron's visit to China last year resulted in a year-long Electric Shadows season of Chinese movies, exhibition and education at the BFI, of which Spectacular China is a part. There's a Chinese-British co-production treaty imminent, and a summer season of Chinese films en route to the BFI. Stay tuned for further updates.