June 2008 Archives
"...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 sustained everything -- drones of echo'd majestic hurt that lasted forever, the only movement provided by a La Bamba-thick bass on quinalbarbitone. Come the chorus, the track, as one, started a stop-start tymphflayed, ricochet'd beat as voices, angels and strings strained in Wagnerian, classical ache, followed by another verse of high pain. On the altar of middle eight the rhythm got down on its knees, pulling the symphonic sustain along to the next corner -- and just 'babys' and 'please.' The two voices' gospel shrieks and wails were then propelled by a bass-end Latin suggestion of rhythm and hope through the last heaven's gate of the final, telling chorus.
"That last chorus was as if Jesus had risen, as if Moses had come down with the Ten Commandments of sound.... There was so much sound that I wouldn't not have been surprised if I'd just heard three different recordings playing different parts of the whole. The audio fidelity was that awe-inspiring..." -- Andrew Loog Oldham in 2STONED (Vintage 2003), p. 76-77.

from Ray Connolly in the Daily Mail...
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 players in town, would make a black hole on the first side of Dylan's double album Blonde on Blonde... (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..."
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 ultimately found was that, by every standard, Al Gore won. Again: If all the ballots in the state of Florida were counted, Al Gore won -- a fact that goes unmentioned at that final moment, as that great shot fades to black without an epilogue.
See also: Miller's blog, with reprints of first-person accounts from Florida.
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.
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AJBlogCentral | rssculture
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Andrew Taylor on the business of arts & culture
rock culture approximately
Rebuilding Gulf Culture after Katrina
Richard Kessler on arts education
Douglas McLennan's blog
Art from the American Outback
For immediate release: the arts are marketable
No genre is the new genre
John Rockwell on the arts
Jan Herman - arts, media & culture with 'tude
dance
Apollinaire Scherr talks about dance
Tobi Tobias on dance et al...
jazz
Howard Mandel's freelance Urban Improvisation
Focus on New Orleans. Jazz and Other Sounds
Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...
media
Jeff Weinstein's Cultural Mixology
Martha Bayles on Film...
classical music
Greg Sandow performs a book-in-progress
Exploring Orchestras w/ Henry Fogel
Harvey Sachs on music, and various digressions
Kyle Gann on music after the fact
Greg Sandow on the future of Classical Music
Norman Lebrecht on Shifting Sound Worlds
publishing
Jerome Weeks on Books
Scott McLemee on books, ideas & trash-culture ephemera
theatre
Wendy Rosenfield: covering drama, onstage and off
Chloe Veltman on how culture will save the world
Elizabeth Zimmer on time-based art forms
visual
Public Art, Public Space
John Perreault's art diary
Lee Rosenbaum's Cultural Commentary
Tyler Green's modern & contemporary art blog
Your Life Is In Your Foot's Hands.
