Uncanny voices

This is my blog, and I'll fill it with embedded YouTube videos if I want to. In more news from the internet of the recent past, here is a recentish Hot Chip video. Now, I was feeling a bit, as it were, "over" Hot Chip, but I've decided I like them again on the strength of this. Well done Peter Serafinowicz! It does exactly what a video should do: make you listen to the song enough that you get to like it; and draw out some quality of the song that you would have liked anyway. (In this case, the uncanniness of the man's voice.) It's a bit like the way that good literary criticism leaves you with a greater appreciation of the work itself. I never got Antony and Cleopatra when we did it for A-level until I read an excellent essay saying it was all about gaps in communication, but ever since then I've actually been quite fond of it as a play. (I think that's why I don't like a lot of Theory-style criticism much, because it adds too much. It's like if someone said, Look at that tree! and then pointed out to you some of the beautiful things about the tree, you could look at the tree and enjoy those things which you might not have noticed immediately; whereas lots of modern criticism is more about painting the tree in bright colours and hanging exciting things off its branches, and yes the result looks great and very interesting, but I'm more interested in the tree itself, and frankly I think you're a bit wierd.)


And in news from my ipod's shuffle facility, here is one of my favourite Handel arias. My version is sung by Sarah Connolly, who is truly brilliant, and takes it a bit more slowly, which I think suits it better; but there's nothing so uncanny as a counter-tenor's voice. (Myself I'm still croaking from my endless sore throat *sigh of self-pity*.)