On The Subject of Amateur Detectives, Musical Genres, Film and Tins

I find Miss Marple somewhat intimidating. Other fictional detectives; Morse, Holmes and Poirot - are professional types, who have private agencies and are asked specifically to solve a case. But Miss Marple just invites herself to suspiciously empty houses, or turns up at a dinner party and pokes her nose into everyone's business. She fulfills the nosy-old lady stereotype of the spinster and looks a little bit like a Victorian-era witch. I've got a theory that she actually uses voodoo spells to cause the deaths - it surprises me that the characters don't react to her in the same way that Denethor reacts to Gandalf - "The old conjuror is a bearer of bad news" et cetera. Considering that 90% of the characters (excluding the Vicar and the Inspector - whose respective territories cover wherever Ms Marple visits) are young and voluptuous, it's a wonder they allow this strange wizened crow to sit in at their "wild" dinner parties. Maybe they tell her all the clues because she reminds them of their grandma, or maybe it's her gyspy charms. One will never know.

Moving on from my fear of Queen Victoria (post-Alfred mourning)-esque visitors, I've been thinking hard about music genres. iTunes, for example, just bangs "alternative" onto anything it can't classify, "hiphop/soul" onto anything with a non-white person and "indie" onto all songs with non-metal guitar riffs. But of course music is infinitely diverse and constantly morphs from form to form by nature - labels mean nothing. Alternative music, really applies only to rock music that leaps off the beaten track, that defines a non-mainstream scene; pre-success Nirvana and the Seattle circuit of the early nineties is the best representation of this definition. Indie, in parrallel, can apply to anything un-commercial and outside of the influence of popular opinion - it shouldn't mean any old band that uses clean guitars and unconventional lyrics.

It is less a genre and more a state of being; the Arctic Monkeys are only "indie" in the sense that they still use the musical style they had when they were writing their first album in Sheffield. It needn't apply to an artist without a record company behind them either; Elbow have produced three albums before they truly hit the mainstream, as did Kings of Leon before they truly stormed the charts. And, did anyone notice how NME adopted them after this phenomenal chart success? Magazines and the media seek to control the idea of independant music in the same way that they control the flow of exposure for other artists; as soon as an artist is featured in such an outlet, their days in the shadowy world of creative nebulae are finished.

Indie music is essentially anti rock-establishment - so I was pleased to see a similar movement evolving within other genre-trees too. Until now, I had my Regina Spektor/Laura Marling/Emmy the Great collection labelled as simply "alternative/folk" for lack of a better word. I was searching for more albums by the aforementioned Regina on Wikipedia when I got linked to "anti-folk". I had no idea about this, being "musically challenged" as my lovely girlfriend put it earlier this week - but this revolution within folk music basically takes the bare bones - the rejection of mainstream music, the politically charged lyrics and the classical influences - and subverts them into fun, happy-go-lucky, senseless songs that sound fantastic. It describes music that celebrates the sunny side of life, and I like it.

But that's enough of me being pretentious about music - I'm not very good at it. I've started to really enjoy black and white films; I don't mean Schindler's List or those post-modern films that use the monochrome to add effect, I mean proper film noir. I went to watch Some Like It Hot at the Cornerhouse on sunday morning and it was genuinely funny. Hilarity did ensue. Plus, I now see what the big deal about Marilyn Monroe was about - she was hot! I watched one this morning about a boxer who dies before his time and goes into a millionaire's body and probably caused the Wall Street Stock Crash single-handedly. I like the pure frivolity of the script - the way that the characters were completely absorbed in their own private dramas - in this way, it retained the exclusivity and interaction that exists in theatre-plays. I'll confess that I have no idea what the film was called because I missed the start and got hungry before the end; I'd make a terrible movie critic. It had a sort of magical watchability about it; that same element of storytelling which enables you to sit down with an old film and just pick up the storyline from any point (they tend to repeat the key themes a lot, so it's made for simple minds). A final note here - go see (500) Days Of Summer. It's out now and is brilliant. My new second-favourite film, it's got Zooey Deschanel and a killer soundtrack (admittedly, my music collection). What more could you want?

I'm going off now to make my last bag of green tea before I start on the real green tea - that is, the tin of loose-leaf stuff that came from Whittards. I like things that come in tins because I can re-use them and keep nice little cluttery things inside them - before I go and buy more nice little cluttery things to put in even more tins. Plus, they always have cool vintage designs on them. I've got a lunchbox with an old Charlie Chaplin film poster on it, and another with an french white absynthe advert. If you want to buy me presents, put it in a tin. It'll make me happy.