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 -- … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

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. Sam Phillips A BOOT AND A SHOE (Nonesuch) 5. Los Lobos THE RIDE (Hollywood) 7. Alison Kraus LONELY RUNS BOTH WAYS (Rounder) 9. … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]