"...He had a white-labelled 45 rpm test pressing on the turntable and he put it into play. The room was filled with this amazing sound. I had no idea what it was, but it was the most incredible thing I'd ever heard. I slowly and numbly felt my way through the aural maze and discerned what I thought were two black guys singing a very sad, tortured, oh so laboured and stated regret about things 'she' didn't do anymore when they kissed, of eyes no longer closing when they called her name... or was it kissed her lips? "Underneath lay a bed of … [Read more...]

from Ray Connolly in the Daily Mail... … [Read more...]

Greil Marcus on "rock poetry" in last week's Guardian: The June 1966 issue of the youth-oriented American fashion magazine Glamour carried an unusual feature: lyrics from the soon to be released Bob Dylan song Visions of Johanna, which Dylan had been performing onstage, alone, with an acoustic guitar, since late in the previous fall. "Seems like a freeze-out," he'd say to introduce the song before stepping into its slow, languid account of a night of bohemian gloom. Soon the song, recorded in Nashville earlier in the year with the best session … [Read more...]

Your Life Is In Your Foot's Hands. … [Read more...]

David Thomson updates his scabrous, eye-peeling, brain-sizzling Biographical Dictionary of Film with an entry on Angelista, She To Whom Attention Must Be Paid: "...Who knows, the world may last long enough for her to play Dagny Taggart in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, or the mother of apocalypse in some ultimate explosion movie where - finally - her lips are seen floating away in the darkened sky like a Man Ray mouth, the mouth most Americans would like to kiss as the big one goes off..." … [Read more...]

Marc Crispin Miller on HBO's RECOUNT in the Huffington Post: ...However, it is at the very end that Recount cops out most egregiously. The last shot is a great one: a grim Kubrickian view down a long corridor, with floor-to-ceiling shelves on either side, all loaded up with crates of ballots -- ballots that had not been counted at the time. And yet, of course, those ballots were counted eventually, by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, with the help of all the nation's leading media outlets; and what they … [Read more...]

Second half of On Point this morning, at 11:30 EDT, I'll talk about Gnarls Barkley, Erykah Badu, and Beck... will post podcast as soon as it's available. This gets repeated tonight across many public radio stations. … [Read more...]