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11.9.05 September Mixtape: Orpheus In Shoreditch

I had this dream, you see.

No. That's a lie. First, I had insomnia, so I technically wasn't asleep when it happened. Second, it really started with Gillen coming up to London unexpectedly and all of us piling down to the pub and talking shit about music. We also played a game I learned from my film nerd friends, where you propose the worst hypothetical remakes ever. Example: Andrei Tarkovsky's Charlie's Angels 2: Full Throttle. Seymour Butts' Harry Potter. John Woo's My Dinner With Andre. (If you're no good with directors, you can also do it with books and actors. To wit: Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in Oedipus At Stalingrad. Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck in Master and Margarita.) The turn came around to me. I sip my pint and consider. Aha: Michael Bay's Orphee.

You have to understand that Orphee is my favourite film ever. It's a black and white French art film by Jean Cocteau that manages to say more about the nature of art and creativity in 90 short minutes than most people do in their entire lives. Plus, it features the ever-divine Maria Casares as a couture-clad Death in a black Rolls Royce. (It's out on DVD, although the BFI edition is incredibly frustrating if you don't speak French as the subtitles only translate about half the lines. Most gratingly, they omit possibly the best line in the entire film: the end of Heurtebise's "secret des secrets" speech, "...comme des abeilles dans une ruche de verre".) If you're interested in the philosophy and symbolism of Orphee, try to get your hands on a copy of Tom McCarthy's Calling All Agents, a slim 2003 volume in which McCarthy, a man who combines overeducation with an ability to free-associate to a degree which frankly leaves me burning with jealousy, takes on Cocteau's greatest film. Available from the ICA Bookshop or the Necronauts.

Unable to sleep that night, I became obsessed with figuring out what the Michael Bay remake of Orphee would be like. There'd be a Deathmobile, for starters. I mean, really. Orphee is the perfect film for Michael Bay. Nobody gets their kit off, and there's potential for vehicular mayhem galore. I lay in bed and laughed like a fool. What would Orpheus do? He wouldn't be a poet. No, that - as they say - wouldn't play in Peoria.

Gillen, always despairing over the archaic state of my music knowledge, had just that day forced me to listen to LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge". Its lament for a fading hipness brought to mind nothing so much as Orphee talking to his companion in the Cafe des Poetes. That's it, I thought. Orpheus would be a DJ. The whole idea of borrowing and changing bits of old songs fit very nicely in with Cocteau's theme of Orphee finding inspiration from the garbled radio broadcasts of the dead Cegeste. Then somehow the story got transferred to London, and Michael Bay was removed from the equation. Then I sort of lost consciousness for a while, I think.

Or maybe I didn't. The point is that the next morning I had this little story in my head. Now let's have the house lights down please, and the curtains open. Ladies and gentlemen, Orpheus in Shoreditch. Liner notes contain details of the story, as well as my usual rambles about the music.

Please note: I have made this mix as a way of introducing friends to some music I adore and think should be better known. It will be put up for 30 days only. If you enjoy the mix, please purchase these or other tracks by the artists. If you are a rightsholder or the representative of one, and you object to this mixtape, please email me and I will take it down immediately. I am not making money off this, and I do not have lawyers.

( 8:55 PM )

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