Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Bossa nova starman

Tonight I watched Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and adored its quirky, oddball, deadpan humour, "terminal whimsy", technicolour overload, jaded lead protagonist, even its self-conscious and obtuse plot.

But what delighted me the most was the bossa nova reworkings of David Bowie songs. 11 songs, including Queen Bitch, Ziggy Stardust, Lady Stardust, Rock 'n' Roll Suicide, Five Years, Changes, Space Oddity and even When I Live My Dream, are reworked into lo-fi Portuguese acoustic versions sung by Brazilian samba star Seu Jorge.

Anderson is a huge Bowie fan, but Jorge thought that reworking 11 Bowie songs would be overkill. "I thought it might be like drowning your food in ketchup, with me being the ketchup -- too much," Jorge said. The Brazilian didn't even know any of the Bowie songs that he was asked to sing. "It's a different culture in Brazil. We only know Let's Dance. "

With the addition of Devo's Gut Feeling, Iggy's Search and Destroy, and Scott Walker's 30th Century Man in their original versions, I definitely need to get a hold of the soundtrack.

Other links today:

+ Cows hold grudges. Once they were a byword for mindless docility. But cows have a complex mental life in which they bear grudges, nurture friendships and become excited by intellectual challenges, researchers have found.

+ Canine suicides. A spate of what appear to be canine suicides has animal psychologists in Scotland baffled.

More strange stories

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