Monday Pleasures: New Names for Sziget 2016

I will be frank and admit I had two main hopes for the new Sziget line up announcement, which seemed to be pretty much in the cards based on the traditional beginning of year festival/concert schedule watch, namely The Last Shadow Puppets and LCD Soundsystem.  Both are returning after a long(ish) hiatus and kept filling their calendar with juicy spring/summer dates.

So my hopes were half fulfilled, though that’s not a completely correct assessment, because the prospect of Alex Turner and Miles Kane on the island is tantalizing enough in itself and has caused a case of whole day Cheshire cat grin unintelligible to the uninitiated. Miles Kane has of course graced the island before and gave one of the best concerts of the festival in 2014, whereas the Arctic Monkeys have sadly only made it to VOLT in the same year- because they were quite ridiculously in Japan during Sziget, which is something they should really avoid in the future.

The other big name for the indie crowd are Muse- technically of course Muse should be the number one name, but one cannot help but get the feeling that they are a bit past their peak of coolness, and the new album just falls on the wrong side of the paranoia/anthemic songs ratio. They should nevertheless still be a pretty spectacular headliner and an antidote to one of the yearly unmentionables- this time, the majesty of David Guetta is back to thump  minds and souls into numbness. Though I cannot refrain from the slightly evil thought that if you keep going to David Guetta concerts your mind and soul were most likely numb to begin with.

Róisín Murphy is a repeat offender on the island, but one cannot feel but delighted to have someone wrapped in shiny clothes and exciting accents to entertain us- plus her kids have the improbable names of Clodagh and Tadhg- yes I plead guilty to random perusal of Wikipedia, but the main point is that  Róisín is never boring. Bullet for My Valentine and Parkway Drive fall a bit off my map of interest, but I am always open to as many genres as possible being present on Sziget- the island is big enough for everyone to have their bit of well deserved entertainment.

The rest of the new names sounded a bit esoteric to me- there’s just too many bands out there these days and too little space in a lifetime to listen to people who are not Arctic Monkeys or ALT-J, so I decided to give them all a quick listen and come up with a first verdict as a result.

The Lumineers look like friendly local baristas and made me google The Courteneers, who are decidedly livelier, but the Lumineers should be able to pull off better heartfelt singalongs. I therefore pass them. Years and Years sound like an average British electro act with a slightly squeaky lead singer, probably because that’s exactly what they are. Borderline, at best.

I then discovered that I do know Jess Glynne, for her song Hold My Hand is often played as youthful shopping music in H&Ms, which is exactly where she belongs. To the borderline pack she goes with Years and Years. K.I.Z. is the yearly compulsory German acquired taste, but at least the rapping puts my language skills to test, so I pass them on grounds both of intriguing oddity and first chorus that actually stays with me after the one listen.

The Neighbourhood sound exactly like another band I can’t quite put my finger on, mostly because I don’t want to, plus the writing your name as a consonant cluster gimmick is really tiring by now. However, as a reward for spelling the complete version of their name the right way I might consider them if no other options are available and the beer queue is not too long, but a fail for the time being. (The Youtube autoplay sensed my despair, and after a couple of Neighbourhood songs, promptly jumped to Arctic Monkeys. Big Brother is listening and has good musical taste.)

Datsik has a song that features Snoop Dogg, but it’s not half as good as Snoop narrating nature documentaries, and he drops the base about a million times too often. Either he plays clips of Snoop explaining the feeding habits of the honey badger, or I mercilessly fail him.

Kovacs and Rico and Sticks are Dutch, and since everyone who is not Belgian on Sziget is Dutch, it is most natural that the organizers would cater to their needs. Kovacs is a bit of a mind-bend for a Hungarian speaker, for she’s a young lady with a rather classical jazz voice, which could go anywhere in the long run, she therefore receives a pass on the already invoked oddity grounds. Rico and Sticks on the other hand rap in Dutch. And here I rest my case. There is only one band in the world who can rap efficiently in a language originating from the Netherlands, and they are Die Antwoord.

To end the post on a high, do revel in some Miles Kane and Alex Turner being awesome separately pictures, as a warm up to this summer’s Miles Kane and Alex Turner being awesome together action.

When February Thinks It's March

I have always been at odds with February, and, judging by past events, February was often at odds with me. Looking back, I can recall two types of February, or more precisely one: bloody awful Februaries. The other type would be Februaries I really can't remember, odd brackets of time between January and long awaited March when something must have definitely happened, like I probably ordered pizza, watched some football and forgot the most important item on a shopping list. 

This year, however, I have a strange feeling that February is trying to mend our relationship. Mainly, by pretending to be March. At which it will fail, because the holiday planted in its middle is not the sublime Guinness drinking fest of Saint Patrick's day, but the 'let's recycle unused red wrapping paper' and 'let's bridge the marketing no man's land between Christmas and Easter' monstrosity that is Valentine's Day. I pity poor Saint Valentine for all the slack he gets, but he really could have chosen something wiser to be the patron saint of, like maybe trade a country with Saint George or something. This being said, the mild weather (which I am mentioning here only as context, you see) means many usually March timed flowers have already started to pop up at the florists, and I have duly purchased my first daffodils of the season and then ran into gerberas and roses during my coffee shop rounds, in Budapest Baristas and Espresso Embassy respectively.

I have also managed to finally stray off the beaten track and made it to The Goat Herder's- which is actually only a twenty minutes walk from Oktogon, so my only excuse for not having gone there is being both lazy and a slave to my habits. The twenty minutes of jolly walk in the balmy February sun (note more efforts to be March, or straightaway April) were rewarded with coffee, which was excellent, but even more so with tea, as in real English five o'clock tea with milk and cake and a touch of Mad Hatter's tea party about it. While pottering about the same area, and getting just a bit lost for a few minutes, I also wandered into the lobby of the Bethlen theatre, to discover a dazzling array of retro stuff complete with chintz and dubious china and stumbled upon a building with decidedly pleasant stained glass windows, which happens to be the Bethlen square synagogue. 

Returning to the Művész coffee house on Andrássy was however a letdown- the drinks are ridiculously expensive and there's about a gazillion plastic flowers too many for comfort. It's outright painful to see that a place that could focus on keeping the old coffee house culture of the city alive chooses to stray into murky tourist trap territory instead. I shall therefore stick to the safe haven of places such as Massolit, where you can have both coffee and a great cake at the most decent of prices, and indulge in a peaceful read or conversation on the side.

February's final flurry will be the premiere of the Coen brothers' Hail Caesar, which I look forward to with the most giddy of excitements, but until then I shall indulge in some recommendations I found beside a table in Castro Bistro- a table I was grumpy about at first, due to it's not so strategic positioning close to the door-further evidence that fate so very often simply knows better.

The Almost Timely January Random

Well, it must be said, to my defense, that I had all the pictures ready on January 31st. And then I stared at the computer screen for a while and fazed out, because it was Sunday, no, actually, because I tend to do that every now and then.

I also swore this wouldn’t be a post about the weather, and really, I might as well not mention the weather ever again in written form, since the photos will be kind of revealing as to what happened in the heavens above any place I found myself in.

However, I should mention the fact that I managed to stick to one of my new year’s non-resolutions, and checked out a new coffee place- yes, I am painfully aware of how essential my non-resolutions are. My Green Cup proved to be a great choice because, uhm, they have green cups- my mind has been poisoned enough by Instagram to crave that shade of teal that sneaks on you every now and then from the shots of someone immortalizing their latte in Shoreditch.

Besides the fundamental excitement of what shade their cups are, the place is also quite ideal for reading- at least in my case, as I do not insist on comfy chairs, but I do expect proper light, especially during wintertime, and My Green Cup has some pretty amazing spotlights- which also allow for great Instagrams of your coffee indeed.

And here I might as well sum up my reading exploits for this month, which include two books I started a while ago and somehow didn’t get the hang of at the first try. They were peering at me a bit accusingly from the stack of unread books by my bed, so I decided it was high time I gave it another go.

The first one was Hannu Rajaniemi’s Causal Angel, which I bought in a flurry of excitement in a Malmö Sci-Fi store -where I felt just as out of place as the book’s hero on Mars. I generally don’t consider myself a Sci-Fi fiend, although I have read and mostly enjoyed the usual Asimovs and Arthur C.Clarkes, but there’s something utterly mesmerizing in Rajaniemi’s writing- concepts that would otherwise be totally alien to my not overly scientific mind come alive and suddenly seem utterly believable and almost tangible. And I must also give some extra brownie points to someone writing in such spectacular English without being a native speaker. There’s always hope, it seems, at least for some of us.

I’m even more distanced from the world of fantasy than from that of Sci-Fi, but I pick the occasional nugget from there as well, and Neil Gaiman happens to be that nugget most of the time. I’d previously enjoyed both American Gods and Neverwhere a great deal, so Anansi Boys spinning off the American Gods universe and being set mostly in London just tickled me pink- I simply can’t resist someone being almost as fascinated by useless British trivia as I am.

I had no problems with reading The Infatuations by Javier Marías at the first go, yet I probably liked it considerably less than either the Causal Angel or Anansi Boys. Although there are undeniably good things in there, the man is just trying too hard most of the time, and I was particularly enraged by his assumptions about how his female hero would feel and act in certain circumstances. Which brings me to the book I basically started the year with, and, horror of all horrors, failed to photograph. William Boyd’s Sweet Caress succeeds in having a believable female lead and is most interesting in the way the author weaves a story out of actual random shots, which become the oeuvre of his fictional photographer.