Part of 'Screamadelica's critical acclaim may have more to do with its cultural impact rather than it's musical one. It's fusion of a traditional rock 'outlaw' image with the then contemporary dance scene was bound to attract critical enthusiasm. Dance music by its very nature is mostly non-image based, the stationary DJ playing their lyric-free records. Bands like Primal Scream and the Stone Roses helped to bring dance music to an alternative rock/indie audience. In the late 1980's rock in the U.K. was increasingly becoming marginalised, beaten back by the all-consuming rise of pop creators such as Stock, Aitken and Waterman. In contrast dance music was at the cutting edge of youth culture and if British guitar bands wanted to retain some sort of street-cred, they'd have to jump from the sinking ship on to the bandwagon pretty quickly.

On 'Screamadelica' this fusion of styles can be seen in the band's choice of producers, Jimmy Miller and Andrew Weatherall. Most of the album sounds like 12-inch remixes of the original guitar based songs. A process which has become standard for a lot of British guitar bands' C.D. singles. For anyone who's ever been at a rave most of the tracks on 'Screamadelica' make perfect sense as an aid to an ecstacy high, the slow long drawn-out build up adds to the sense of euphoria that occurs at the track's zenith.

As an all-out fusion of rock and dance I think 2000's XTRMNTR was a more inspired effort, but 'Screamadelica' was the beginning of Primal Scream's music experimentation. 'Screamadelica' is frequently listed on British music mags top 100 lists. However in the cold light of day 100 years from now, without cultural reference to the time it was created, pop music historians maybe slightly bemused as to why an album built around repetitive riffs should be lauded in the same way as the expressive, original song structures of 'Revolver' and 'Pet Sounds'.

A second collaborative experimental album by both Brian Eno and Robert Fripp, 'Evening Star' proved to be a little more varied than it's predecessor 'No Pussyfooting'. Both musicians seemed to have got a tighter grip on the mechanics of the endless decaying tape loop system they used on the first album and as a consequence 'Evening Star' is more expressive.

'Evening Star' begins however where 'No Pussyfooting' left off with the heavy layered harmonics of 'Wind on Water' fading in and up to greater and greater intensity. We then reach Fripp & Eno's most radical departure, the title track itself. 'Evening Star' contrasts with the rest of the album as it contains some semblance of a melody (no matter how sparse and repetitive). The contrast between the melodic backing and Fripp's stark improvisations work to great effect. Fripp almost sounds like he's playing a small string quartet all by himself. 'Evensong' comes and goes with nothing to recommend it while ironically the next track, Eno's 'Wind on Wind' seems to create more than the previous one with even less instrumentation.

What's so pleasing about the final 20 minute 'Index of Metals' is that it disrupts the notion that this album is wallpaper music. I don't see how anyone could find peace and sustainence in something as menacing sounding as this. The whole track jars intensely like the soundtrack for some sinister dystopia run by machines.

Both Fripp and Eno reached the limits of their experimental collaboration with 'Evening Star', which is a shame as this album was an improvement on the previous one and it would have been interesting to see where they could have taken it from here.

A second collaborative experimental album by both Brian Eno and Robert Fripp, 'Evening Star' proved to be a little more varied than it's predecessor 'No Pussyfooting'. Both musicians seemed to have got a tighter grip on the mechanics of the endless decaying tape loop system they used on the first album and as a consequence 'Evening Star' is more expressive.

'Evening Star' begins however where 'No Pussyfooting' left off with the heavy layered harmonics of 'Wind on Water' fading in and up to greater and greater intensity. We then reach Fripp & Eno's most radical departure, the title track itself. 'Evening Star' contrasts with the rest of the album as it contains some semblance of a melody (no matter how sparse and repetitive). The contrast between the melodic backing and Fripp's stark improvisations work to great effect. Fripp almost sounds like he's playing a small string quartet all by himself. 'Evensong' comes and goes with nothing to recommend it while ironically the next track, Eno's 'Wind on Wind' seems to create more than the previous one with even less instrumentation.

What's so pleasing about the final 20 minute 'Index of Metals' is that it disrupts the notion that this album is wallpaper music. I don't see how anyone could find peace and sustainence in something as menacing sounding as this. The whole track jars intensely like the soundtrack for some sinister dystopia run by machines.

Both Fripp and Eno reached the limits of their experimental collaboration with 'Evening Star', which is a shame as this album was an improvement on the previous one and it would have been interesting to see where they could have taken it from here.

Although I have to say I'm not a big fan of Robert Fripp's, Brian Eno's eclectic career as a producer, composer and arranger always throws up something different. 'No Pussyfooting' was his first real attempt at a pseudo-solo album. As can be seen from the photo on the cover, he was still a member of Roxy Music at the time, but obviously felt limited by their 'pop' image in terms of his music making. Ironically Eno was probably the most outrageous looking member of Roxy Music (which maybe one of the reasons Brian Ferry wanted him to leave). But since beginning his solo career his music has become the very epitome of the "non-image". Music that never speaks to the emotions or the intellect but simply floats in and around your environment or situation.

On the 'Heavenly Music Corporation' most of this ambience is created by Fripp, developing a technique that would later be described as 'Frippertronics'. Track after track is layered on top of each other as Fripp plays dense harmonies in tune with each other. In fact most of the background track is just a dense layer of protracted harmony, dispensing with any notion of melody altogether. But when Fripp starts to improvise his pseudo-stadium rock solos, the effect can be mildly soothing. At the end of the piece Fripp's dive-bombing effects are quite startling, endlessly looping a false ending. 'Swatika Girls' sounds mostly like the work of Eno but unfortunately is not as inventive as the first track. Too many instruments vie for attention and when Fripp's improvisations come in at the end, they sound like the cry of something uncontrollable trying to break free from a repetitive 'Groundhog Day' backing track.

'Spider' is a deftly drawn character study of a schizophrenic who relives his past when he returns to the area where he grew up. Like Christopher Walken in 'The Dead Zone' and Peter Weller in 'Naked Lunch', Ralph Fiennes lives inside his visions and memories. Cronenberg is careful to set us inside Spider's point of view, never overtly mentioning mental illness. The starkness of the set design and Spider's tattered wardrobe evoke the plays of Samuel Beckett more than anything else and indeed the bleakness of the story isn't far removed from Beckett's own dramatic outlook.

Cronenberg's movies always focus on different aspects of sexual psychology and in 'Spider' Ralph Fiennes's character suffers from jealousy of his father's role in the family. Spider's love for his mother eventually makes him see her in all women, his father's mistress, his landlady, even a pair of photos featuring a pair of topless models. As a consequence Miranda Richardson plays a number of roles within the film, ever present in most of the female characters. Cronenberg also intensifies Spider's isolation on screen by having him walk London streets that are almost totally empty of people and automobiles. Howard Shore once again provides an eerie and evocative soundtrack.

Unfortunately the main difference between 'Spider' and a Samuel Beckett play is the former's lack of humour. At the beginning of the film one of Ralph Fiennes boarding house companions, John Neville, welcomes the central character to his new abode and in the course of their initial companionship Neville is rewarded with some laugh-out-loud lines. We don't see much of him again after the first 30 minutes, which is a shame as it would have been wonderful to see more this charming character.

Kalle Lasn's 'Culture Jam' is indeed a call to arms for a 21st century generation that seems more distracted than ever by the pervasive power of mindless consumption. Adbusters magazine has been at the forefront of consumer critique, developing a manifesto that obviously strikes a chord with a growing readership, given its current circulation of over 120,000.

In the opening introduction Lasn makes some rather remarkable statements: "For us feminism has run out of steam" p.xii; he then goes on to state "The old political battles......- black versus white, Left versus Right, male versus female - will fade into the background" p.xvi. This is an ignorantly optimistic conjecture in a world where aparthied still existed in Africa's largest economy less than a generation ago, a world where the vast majority of women are denied the same political rights as men and in the U.S. where they don't even have a universal healthcare system. Lasn seems to suffer from the same illusions as his heros the situationists, that somehow, in the West at least, basic human needs have all been satisfied i.e. freedom from poverty, hunger and homelessness. This may not be a wild idea in Canada where Lasn and Adbusters are based. Consistently touted by the U.N. as the best country in the world in which to live, Canada's reputation for higher standards of living is in part due to the pioneering campaigns of noted left-wingers like Tommy Douglas. Douglas, a former premier of Saskatchewan brought in a cheap and affordable healthcare system for his province in the 1960's, which soon spread throughout the rest of Canada thereafter.

It is true to say that much of the time identity politics operates in a postmodern culture obsessed with diversity in and of itself, rather than any notion of universal revolution. A position which plays into the hands of largely right-wing libertarians who see greater diversity as an opportunity to develop new markets. But to believe that gender, race and class are no longer issues that affect the first world gives those on the right too much comfort.

Other dubious assertions include Lasn's belief that daily exposure to media violence shapes the way we feel about crime and punishment "even though I can't prove it with hard facts" p.18

On the more postive side of the book, there's an interesting piece on how we in the West are increasingly finding it more difficult to appreciate our immediate surroundings without framing it with a camera viewfinder. Lasn also uses the example of a poet who read his poems at parties and no one listened to him, but when he played recordings of himself, everyone listened (shades of David Cronenberg's 1982 film 'Videodrome').

Where Lasn is at his strongest is in his study of the development of corporate power under American law. The 1886 ruling by the Supreme Court in the U.S. which granted the private corporation the rights of a 'natural person' under the U.S. Constitution, has had profound effects on American political and economic culture since then. Unlike most individuals, corporations have huge financial resources and as a consequence have a much greater say in the running of the economy, greater stamina in the courts and greater access to the media (which they probably own anyway) than any individual could hope to have. Globalization is the effective spread of this corporate disease throughout the rest of the world.

Another important area that Lasn tackles is how we measure prosperity. Classical economists seem to believe that there is no shortage to the Earth's natural resources and even if we did deplete all of them we should still be able to develop the technology to provide for everyone on the planet. The problem with classical economics is that it is not a science i.e. it is not concerned with an understanding of nature, but simply with an understanding of models. The best example of which is the concept of GDP, which increases everytime money is put into the economy for whatever reason; war, illness, cleaning up environmental damage and so on. A better way of measuring prosperity would be the ISEW (Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare) which takes into account factors such as pollution, depletion of nonrenewable resources and industrial related health costs.

Despite his attacks on the traditional Left, Lasn seems perfectly happy to hold true to explicitly Marxist sentiments such as living not as an object of history but as a subject: "That's about as good a working definition of the culture jammers ethos as you'll ever hope to find" p.100. Lasn also makes a welcome attack on the Slacker generation whose disdain for any kind of earnestness in politics has become the apathetic norm. We should use our irreverance pointedly but a surfeit of irony contributes to social corrosion and a general malaise in putting the effort in.

It is in the media world where corporate power has its most obvious influence, especially in the U.S. It's almost impossible to find objective news on American commercial T.V. The only reason that CNN runs Adbusters' commercials for Buy Nothing Day is that Ted Turner likes to think of himself as a bit of a liberal in comparison to his arch-nemesis Rupert Murdoch. Lasn's difficulty in getting airtime elsewhere for his Adbustes' commercials shows an open ideological bias at work within media conglomerates, whose primary function is not to provide news but to sell advertising space.

Lasn's tract is useful in highlighting the increasing hegemony of corporate power in America. Although his lefty-bashing has less impact for many of us in Europe where left-wing governments can still initiate large and meaningful changes. However, American foreign policy influences the whole world and 'Culture Jam' makes us more aware of the forces that shape it.

I didn't know what to expect from previous reviews of this film, but I was pleasantly surprised. I was most impressed by the daring of the actors involved. In fact I think fans of James Spader won't be disappointed. This is a typical James Spader movie in which he plays a stereotypical cold and aloof James Spader (but that's why we like him). How many recognizable male Hollywood actors would put their carefully constructed image on the line by engaging in an erotic scene with another male actor? Not many. But fortunatley for us Spader doesn't put commercial limits on the parts he chooses to take.

Bisexuality seems to be a recurrent theme amongst Cronrnberg's most recent movies i.e. 'Dead Ringers', 'Naked Lunch' and 'Madame Butterfly'. It's an acknowledgement of that perennial Cronenberg theme, the dominance of the physical over the mental. The characters give free rein to their desires unburdened of society's restrictive mores and conventions. Their criteria for indulging in these rather eccentric pleasures is whether it excites them or not, society's prejudiced definitions of right and wrong don't enter the equation.

As for the idea that [adult relations] and cars go together, this has always been prevelant in our culture, "fast cars, fast women" as the saying goes. The thrill of stepping on the gas has conveyed an orgasmic high in countless films, books and songs. The auto industry readily endorses it if it can sell more cars.

I didn't know what to expect from previous reviews of this film, but I was pleasantly surprised. I was most impressed by the daring of the actors involved. In fact I think fans of James Spader won't be disappointed. This is a typical James Spader movie in which he plays a stereotypical cold and aloof James Spader (but that's why we like him). How many recognizable male Hollywood actors would put their carefully constructed image on the line by engaging in an erotic scene with another male actor? Not many. But fortunatley for us Spader doesn't put commercial limits on the parts he chooses to take.

Bisexuality seems to be a recurrent theme amongst Cronrnberg's most recent movies i.e. 'Dead Ringers', 'Naked Lunch' and 'Madame Butterfly'. It's an acknowledgement of that perennial Cronenberg theme, the dominance of the physical over the mental. The characters give free rein to their desires unburdened of society's restrictive mores and conventions. Their criteria for indulging in these rather eccentric pleasures is whether it excites them or not, society's prejudiced definitions of right and wrong don't enter the equation.

As for the idea that sex and cars go together, this has always been prevelant in our culture, "fast cars, fast women" as the saying goes. The thrill of stepping on the gas has conveyed an orgasmic high in countless films, books and songs. The auto industry readily endorses it if it can sell more cars.

Despite all the furor created by this film, it's still less nauseating than the latest Adam Sandler 'comedy'.

Like many previous Cronenberg outings 'Naked Lunch' deals with ideas on how by affecting the body, you alter your reality. In fact there probably wasn't a better director around who could so accurately evoke Burroughs visions.

Although 'Interzone' is set in Tangiers, the film crew had to shoot all the interiors in Toronto as North Africa was off limits during the first Gulf War. Films about writers usually involve a static quality where the writer spends a lot of their time in front of the typewriter. Cronenberg has made his writer live the hallucinatory situations that made him put pen to paper. 'Interzone' becomes William Lee's hallucinatory state of mind, where his writings are not just musings on past events, but 'reports' on everything he sees and experiences around him at that moment. Like Max Renn in 'Videodrome', Cronenberg sees Lee's imagination as a disease, as a mind constantly 'on', unable to turn off the constant stream of images that prevades his reality.

Cronenberg totally reshaped the original book for the screen, most noticably in playing down the homosexual aspects of the original novel. The 'bug powder' and the black stuff given to Lee by Dr. Benway were used as a euphamism for drugs. Obvious references to coke, heroin and crack weren't used so that there wouldn't be a 'Just Say No' campaign against the film. Although even if named drugs were overtly mentioned, it's difficult to see a mainstream audience coming to a movie like this. 'Naked Lunch' is unlike any movie you've seen before or anyone you're likely to see hence and for that reason alone, it's worth the admission price.

Like many previous Cronenberg outings 'Naked Lunch' deals with ideas on how by affecting the body, you alter your reality. In fact there probably wasn't a better director around who could so accurately evoke Burroughs visions.

Although 'Interzone' is set in Tangiers, the film crew had to shoot all the interiors in Toronto as North Africa was off limits during the first Gulf War. Films about writers usually involve a static quality where the writer spends a lot of their time in front of the typewriter. Cronenberg has made his writer live the hallucinatory situations that made him put pen to paper. 'Interzone' becomes William Lee's hallucinatory state of mind, where his writings are not just musings on past events, but 'reports' on everything he sees and experiences around him at that moment. Like Max Renn in 'Videodrome', Cronenberg sees Lee's imagination as a disease, as a mind constantly 'on', unable to turn off the constant stream of images that prevades his reality.

Cronenberg totally reshaped the original book for the screen, most noticably in playing down the homosexual aspects of the original novel. The 'bug powder' and the black stuff given to Lee by Dr. Benway were used as a euphamism for drugs. Obvious references to coke, heroin and crack weren't used so that there wouldn't be a 'Just Say No' campaign against the film. Although even if named drugs were overtly mentioned, it's difficult to see a mainstream audience coming to a movie like this. 'Naked Lunch' is unlike any movie you've seen before or anyone you're likely to see hence and for that reason alone, it's worth the admission price.