DOGG's profile

Life as they know it....., 12 April 2009

Sweeping tunes,big piano and yelping lyrics, it could be the Waterboys but its not, its a very interesting indie classic from Red Light Company.
The melodies of "Arts and Crafts" are irresitible,. the feel good flannel of "Meccano" burns a little sun through the wintry clouds and "Scheme Eugene" awakens the heart to something else.
No new ground is trodden here and we are not dealing with the big questions of life,the universe etc but something in the vibrant feelings transmitted by this album have enlivened my springtime and i recommend a little of the RLC experience....buy it now.

A glimpse into a forgotten colonial experience..., 12 April 2009

The British Empire has been covered from all angles in literature, the tales of Kipling,the travels of livingstone and burton,the soldiering that defined the empire and a whole wealth of novels in the dying days from 1900-1945 but what do we know about another great empire...the dutch...very little indeed.

Well this novel by Louis Couperus is a dutch classic,written in 1900,set in the vast archipeligo of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), fifty odd years before it fell apart.

Couperus writes well of the colonial boredom and shadowy fear of the natives, the heat and the lifestyle, very subtly the local story mirrors the national one as the dutch are starting to… Read more

A city of wintry decay....., 17 Feb 2009

An atmospheric novel that tickled my nose and innards with its winter city streets,gloom and tension. I am not familiar with Madrid as a visitor but it seemed so darkly a part of my world, this large central metropolis of a country so recently torn apart by violence,fraternal violence. Then ghost of a the stocky dictator Franco hovers in every scene but so very,very at the edge of the stage.
Whilst Sartre told a similar tale in "The Reprieve", Cela makes this a somewhat bleaker tribute to the lost citizens of the spanish capital,with the nation settling into uneasy peace,as the world war rages to the north. The city life that we all know is here,the masses of people,the… Read more