December 2004 Archives

Stephanie Zacharek, a critic I admire, went ballistic on David Thomson's new book in the NYTimes Book Review. It struck me as unnecessarily mean-spirited:

Thomson's dismissiveness of silents makes him seem like a fogy who's trying to be jazzy -- as if he were overly concerned to reassure us he's not one of those film scholars who's hung up on the deeper meaning of Griffith's tinting techniques. But if the real test of our modernity is how we feel about the past, Thomson's view of Hollywood's earliest products -- and its earliest art -- suggests he's not as with it as he professes to be. Then again, silent film probably wouldn't be popular with a writer who likes words -- lots of them -- as much as Thomson does. To show a world of heartbreak in a single, silent frame is the kind of economy that's lost on him. Maybe that's why, when you reach the last page of ''The Whole Equation'' and close its cover, the silence seems so golden.

Here's Michiko Kakutani in those same pages: far more fair-minded, even if she uses the word "tiresome" to describe Thomson's intricate business data:

In Mr. Thomson's view, a younger generation (which has grown up with television, video games and computers) now tends to take moving imagery for granted and will never respond to movies with the same sort of seriousness and awe that his generation did. In the past two decades, he argues, ''it has been evident that the essential young audience flinches from being moved at the movies'': ''they prefer motion, spectacle, novelty and a readiness for the visible to exceed reality'' to the ''stealthy rapture'' viewers once felt at being drawn into a place that, however illusionary and heightened, was at the same time, palpable and recognizable as a real world.

JK writes in with this link: the Beastles (which should have been called the "Beastlies") but it's worth a click. So, is it the birth of a new "fab sampling" genre? Is it "better" than Danger Mouse? JK thinks so.

And I forgot:

CNN's Greatest Hits Guide
Listology
Columnists
Technorati
Search Engine Watch

For those titles not linked to the iTunes store, contact support to let them know you'd buy it if they carried it.

1. Rocket From The Tombs ROCKET REDUX (Smog Veil)
2. Danger Mouse GREY ALBUM (download)
3. Reigning Sound TOO MUCH GUITAR (In the Red)
4. Sam Phillips A BOOT AND A SHOE (Nonesuch)
5. Bottle Rockets BRAND NEW YEAR (New West)
6. Los Lobos THE RIDE (Hollywood)
7. Courtney Love AMERICA'S SWEETHEART (Virgin)
8. Alison Kraus LONELY RUNS BOTH WAYS (Rounder)
9. Aveo BATTERY (Barsuk)
10. Eliza Gilkyson LAND OF MILK AND HONEY (Red House)

11. Nick Drake MADE TO LOVE MAGIC (Island Chronicles)
12. Mission of Burma ONOFFON (Matador)
13. Sloan ACTION PACT (Koch)
14. Fiery Furnaces BLUEBERRY BOAT (Rough Trade)
15. Youssou N'Dour EGYPT (Nonesuch)
16. Downtown DOWNTOWN (Coup De Grace)
17. Dan Zanes PARADES AND PANORAMAS (Festival Five)
18. Velvet Crush STEREO BLUES (Action Musik)
19. Rokia Traore BOWNBOI (Nonesuch)
20. Sun Kil Moon GHOSTS OF THE GREAT HIGHWAY (Jetset)

CLASSICAL:

Leon Fleisher TWO HANDS (Vanguard Classics)
Miklos Perenyi, Andras Schiff BEETHOVEN CELLO SONATAS (ECM)
Leif Ove Andsnes MOZART CONCERTOS 9 & 18 (EMI)
Till Fellner Bach DAS WOHLTEMPERIERTE KLAVIER (ECM)
Christian Tetzlaff BRAHMS VIOLIN SONATAS (EMI)
Christian Tetzlaff BARTOK VIOLIN SONATAS (Virgin)

LIST LINKS:

Rock List.net
Fast'n'Bulbous
Rate Your Music
Modern Rock Lists
List of Bests
Complicated Fun (lotsa rock links)
Largehearted Boy
Fimocoluous
Acclaimed Music
Top Labels of 2004
Ken Tucker
donewaiting

Random samplings from Ian Van Tuyl's ticklingly insightful POPSTROLOGY: THE ART AND SCIENCE OF READING THE POP STARS (Bloomsbury USA):

MARY WELLS
You can rage against the machine, or you can walk away before your arms get caught in the gears.
...No matter how much you serve the institution, and no matter how much it seems to serve you, institutions will serves themselves first, even if it costs them your loyalty.

JAN AND DEAN
Yours is a voice that may yet change history, as long as someone else tells you what to say with it.

WHAM!
There may be no I in "team," but there's definitely an "m" and an "e."

YES
You are the smooth little acorn that falls from an old and twisted oak.
...And so, though it would be going too far to call you the simple-minded product of an intellectual bloodline, it is true that unpretentiousness and accessibility are not entirely out of your reach.

JOAN JETT AND THE BLACKHEARTS
Beneath your tough exterior lies, well, an even tougher interior.

Milo Miles in WBUR's Arts pages:

1) Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History" by Devin McKinney (Harvard University Press). This looks to be the standard-setting meditation on the Beatles by a devoted, visionary fan too young to have known Beatlemania first-hand (McKinney was born in 1966). Nobody has chronicled missing out on the '60s - and yearning for them - more vividly, or demonstrated how international superstars can become part of your personal history even if they were already history when you discovered them. McKinney's analyses and reflections are never sober and reliable - which is the only way they can be so Fab.

I swear I showed my fesity Airhead unit to Milo at least five years back at Rock.com:

5) HeadRoom AirHead. Not enough people know about what is the finest music product around. You don't think you need an amp for your headphones? Initially, the enriched depth of sound you get from this device is hard to accept - unreal. And, best of all, for the first time you never get tired listening to headphones.

The sign of "live"-ness in a live recording doesn't come from the performers but from the audience—the sound of their applause. Mission of Burma's 1985 live album, The Horrible Truth About Burma, in its original configuration, ends with an apocalyptic cover of Pere Ubu's "Heart of Darkness," followed by the sound of an enthusiastic but tiny crowd cheering and clapping into a silence that's much bigger than they are; they're cheering Burma on, encouraging them, almost apologizing for the rest of the world that's not there to clap.

The reunited Burma have just released Snapshot (available only as an iTunes download), a roaring eight-song live EP recorded in front of what sounds like an even smaller invited audience. It's almost all old Burma standards, except for drummer Peter Prescott's halfway-to-free-form outburst "Absent Mind" and a barn-burning cover of "Youth of America," by pioneering Portland punks the Wipers. The applause and cheers are just as vigorous this time as they were on Horrible Truth but somehow less desperate and more grateful. Burma took a couple of decades off, and weirdly enough improved while they were away—they're playing better, individually and collectively. The instrumental "Tremelo" opens both live albums: On Horrible Truth, it's a sharp little idea, a simple riff built around a trick from a guitar pedal; and on Snapshot, it's eight minutes of the sky being torn open. Bassist Clint Conley lets a little laugh escape as the applause starts—the band's been spotted making that amazing noise...

--Douglas Wolk in the Seattle Weekly

Snapshot, exclusively from iTunes.

These great faces in the movie dark, these moons of becoming, are they one of the few benevolent invasions of the twentieth century, meant to offset all the other images of slaughter, torture, and humiliation? Or is their intense allure just another danger, cunningly disguised? Or is it that the riddles of acting fascinate us at this moment in our history, especially the one in which we discover that we are not simply ourselves?

In other words, in a hundred years or so of marketed movie entertainment and its frequent flirtations with business glory and even artistic distinction, is it possible that the most profound thing that has been going on is the way in which so many of us have been led to think less of reality and more of dream, and the manner in which acting has carried us over that hump? Suppose the whole thing has been designed to make us politely disordered? Or more elastic?

--from THE WHOLE EQUATION, by David Thomson (Knopf).

I don't know how to say this without sounding like an old geezer, but James Taylor just has no right to sing "A Change Is Gonna Come," it swallows him up, and it's too big a song for most of his audience. It was certainly too big a song for the West Wing episode it tried to cap: were we supposed to take it EXTRA-literally, that Prez. Bartlett is about to face another WHOPPER of a dilemma with his MS? Geez, talk about cheapening a great idea, one of the great idea songs and among the few with as much heart as political avidity. Wedging it into a phony plot about a "rare posthumous" medal to Sam Cooke just so CJ's secretary can make lame Taylor song references was just so damn WHITEY.

NP: Various BACK FROM THE GRAVE VOLUME 1 (Crypt)
Jeff Beck JEFF BECK GROUP (Epic)
Superdrag LAST CALL FOR VITRIOL (Arrco)