// Category Archive for: Culture Shock

Ancient Traditions: A Krampus Primer

By Less Lee Moore

Image from Krampus.com,
courtesy of Monte Beauchamp’s
Krampus: The Devil of Christmas

You might have the word “Krampus” around the Internet lately and wondered what it meant. It’s something I only discovered last December and have always meant to investigate further. Luckily, dear readers, you can now benefit from my research into this ancient tradition!

Wikipedia has a brief, but helpful description: “Krampus is a beast-like creature from the folklore of Alpine countries thought to punish bad children during the Christmas season, in contrast with Saint Nicholas, who rewards nice ones with gifts. Krampus is said to capture particularly naughty children in his sack and carry them away to his lair.”

This sounds absolutely amazing to me. The website Krampus.com has an even more detailed and frankly disturbing description which details that the creature is “the dark companion of St. Nicholas” and often depicted as a devil-like beast with “horns, cloven hooves, and a monstrous tongue.” Not only does Krampus punish bad children, he also “swat[s] them with switches and rusty chains before dragging them in baskets to a fiery place below.” This actually reminds me of the demon figure in Insidious, which, Darth Maul jokes aside, scared the crap out of me for months.

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Assemblog: September 28, 2012

The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, 1970

New on Popshifter this week: I strongly recommend Richard Crouse’s new book Raising Hell: Ken Russell and the Unmaking of The Devils; a concerned citizen lays down some rules on proper Facebook etiquette; Julie can’t find a song to dislike on Gemma Ray’s Island Fire; Emily deems The Very Best Of Vince Guaraldi and The Very Best Of The Bill Evans Trio as “essential” and praises Timi Yuro’s The Complete Liberty Singles as a “wonderful collection”; Paul explains why only hipsters hate hipsters; and Jemiah has good news for people who don’t know the difference between “grisly” and “grizzly” in her review of The Wrong Word Dictionary.

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Gillian Welch: Dark Turn Of Mind

By Paul Casey

Out of hospital a few days. Nighttime seizures cause strange dreams. Out of place. A rare, complete family notion: Let’s rent a movie. A dividing line between a childish reality and a childish regression.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?, 2000

The Coen Brothers did it. O Brother, Where Art Thou? Sympathy for the American story. Great Plains or Skyscrapers; didn’t matter. If you had a touch for music in the 20th Century, pretensions of nonplussed rural plods struck as backwards affect. America was serious business. Real things happened there.

The soundtrack, produced by T-Bone Burnett—a sort who has been responsible for a whole lotta good “produced by” outings, and not too many originals—collected the Alan Lomax perspective with covers by those living. Gillian Welch was the one who took me at two moments. First, flight over fields in prison wear, with Alison Krauss. The Kossoy Sisters were used in the picture, but the soundtrack version stuck as definition.

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Battle Royale: The Complete Collection

By Less Lee Moore

For those (like me) who have not yet been seduced by the legendary Japanese film Battle Royale, this new Anchor Bay collection—featuring the theatrical cut, the 2001 special edition, Battle Royale: Requiem, plus a disc of featurettes and extras—is nothing short of jaw-dropping. The four-disc set comes in a beautifully packaged booklet and is available in both DVD and Blu-Ray formats.

Battle Royale was originally released in 2000, and was adapted from Koushun Takami’s controversial 1999 novel of the same name. The film exploded into the new millennium, riveting audiences, breaking box office records, outraging censors, and transfixing a generation of film nerds like Quentin Tarantino. Its synopsis is straightforward:

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Various Artists, Meet Me At Mardi Gras

By Melissa B.

How fortunate the New Orleanians are: Once Christmas and New Year’s are over, they get to move straight into Carnival season. Parades, food, music, revelry, and the finest of these things, I’d wager, is the music.

I’ve often wondered how New Orleans can have so many obscenely talented, homegrown musicians. Is it the food, the humidity, the heritage, the proximity to water? Is there a great funk reservoir that all of the drinking water comes from? Do they put it in babies’ bottles at birth? Whatever causes it, there is a bumper crop of amazing New Orleans music out there and Meet Me At Mardi Gras puts it all in one convenient disc, making a party in your living room, or car, or ears. What have you.

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Erland and The Carnival: Best Of 2011

Reissues: Roy Harper, Songs of Love and Loss

Listened to a lot: Kurt Vile, Smoke Ring For My Halo

Concert: Josh T. Pearson at Union Chapel in London on May 11

Movies: Benda Bilili! (watched on the tour bus), Michael Powell’s The Edge of the World (1937), and The Monk with Vincent Cassel

DVD: Brimstone and Treacle (the BBC TV version, not the Sting film!)

Film festivals: Screening of Ken Russell’s The Boy Friend at the BFI on December 9

Books: Oliver Twist, started reading Michael Horovitz

Art: Grayson Perry, “The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman” at The British Museum

Comic books: Anything by Alan Moore

Favorite cities: Dresden, Berlin, and started to enjoy London

Coolest thing found at a vintage or thrift store: A WWI officer’s compass

Best restaurant: The Golden Dragon in London’s Chinatown

Erland and The Carnival‘s latest album, Nightingale, was released on March 29. The band will be playing in Vienna at The Maifield Derby Festival on May 19 and again at The Orange Blossom Festival on May 26. For more on the band, please check out their website, Facebook, and Twitter.

Shonen Knife, Osaka Ramones: Tribute To The Ramones

By Matt Keeley

Sometimes the redundant can be awesome. Shonen Knife‘s own music is quite Ramonesy, so some out there might not see the point of them doing a full album of Ramones covers. Those people who I may have just made up are stupid. Shonen Knife are awesome, as are the Ramones. How can you go wrong with an album of Shonen Knife—a band that was dubbed the “Osaka Ramones” by a Ramone himself—doing Ramones covers? You can’t. QED.
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Fantastic Planet: La Planète Sauvage

By Less Lee Moore

Like Rock & Rule , Fantastic Planet (1973) was an outstanding animated film introduced to me by USA’s Night Flight. For those who do not recognize this film by its English or French name (La Planète Sauvage), certainly you have seen images from it over the years; they aren’t ones you can easily forget.

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The Choir Indivisible: Scala & Kolacny Brothers Live

By Christian Lipski

Roseland Theater, Portland OR
March 9, 2011

Click for larger image.

Scala & Kolacny Brothers, a Belgian girls’ choir directed by Stijn Kolacny and accompanied on piano by brother Steven, has made its name by performing haunting covers of popular songs including Radiohead’s “Creep” from The Social Network‘s soundtrack. At the Wonder Ballroom last night, they gave Portland a taste of their European direction.

Even if you’ve heard their self-titled CD, which was recently reviewed in Popshifter, you can’t know what it’s like to hear these songs coming from 23 young women in an enclosed space. It gives the modern listener a glimpse into what early devotional music must have been like for medieval worshipers. Hearing so many human voices at once is incredibly moving, especially when paired with the right songs.
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I Slept With Joey Ramone: A Punk Rock Family Memoir

By Less Lee Moore

The Ramones have infiltrated pop culture to the point where one can hardly imagine a world without them. Yet out of the original lineup, all have passed away except for Tommy. Dee Dee died in 2002; Johnny died in 2004. Joey died from lymphatic cancer in 2001. His brother Mickey Leigh started writing I Slept With Joey Ramone not long afterwards, with the help of longtime friend and punk writer Legs McNeil.
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