It's a lugubrious world on Monday mornings

Had a weekend and now it's over. Fuck. Last night we went to see the new Ken Loach film, It's A Free World, and found it rather chilling. Good, but chilling. The central character, Angie, was an awful girl; her back against a middle class wall, and therefore feeling a sort of desperation that would let her screw over people whose backs were against a real wall. It would have been nice to get more exposition on the other characters, like her roommate Rose, the graduate working in a call centre; would have been nice if Angie's dad had been more than a sole point of coherence in a cast of otherwise largely (and realistically) inarticulate characters - but then the film would have been less focused, I suppose, since as it stood Awful Angie was wonderfully explored, and there'd have been no easy way to bring up the historical commie theory subtext if her father hadn't strung words together like, well, Ken Loach would.

On Friday night we went to a concert called Babel which was quite fucked up and interesting, though I was in a blue funk so I was less appreciative than I might have been. 22 fused pieces by a range of composers, range of styles, range of instruments - gamut of chamber orchestra to mouth organ to MacBook. Only real commonality was the peacableness and Indo-Europeanness of it all - actually found it excessively lugubrious, and I don't think it was just because of my shitty mood that night. Practically an extended lullaby. That's fine, I guess. But I was hoping for more international range based on what I'd read on the linked flyer up there - for example ever since going to the Musical Instruments Museum I've had a thing for one-note west African horns and I can't figure out why anything billing itself as musically diverse wouldn't get those in too, because they're so awesome. But then it's hard to imagine them being lugubrious or lullaby-ish.

Anyways, that notwithstanding, I was a little enchanted to see that the show managed to fill such a big concert hall. Because it was at least half new compositions from people I'd never heard of before, and I tend to hear about people; because the instruments were so odd, et cetera. There are similar events in Toronto musically speaking, but they don't fill such big venues, especially with such a cross-hatch of ages, so many young-ish people. Pop culture hasn't quite drowned in the lights of cable television here.