I've been planning a post devoted to some of the screamers I've been compiling from the Farber anthology, but first Duncan Shepherd from the San Diego Reader: "It is highly salutary to read what was written about such movies before any ossification of critical orthodoxy. The close-up and in-context view of, let's say, Casablanca from Farber and from Agee will offer a truer perspective than its placement on a pedestal in spot number two on the AFI list of the 100 Greatest American Movies. Observes Farber: "Bogart's humanitarian killer, who was … [Read more...]

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Haven't jotted down the firehose of details I'm still catching listening through the EMI Beatle remasters, but I enjoyed this podcast with Nik Cohn, who was always more of a Stoner, and poses the most reasonable push-back... … [Read more...]

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Lawrence Weschler on David Hockney's iPhone (slideshow). … [Read more...]

Very curious how Gary Wills will weigh in given what he wrote in the NYRB: ...An example of this imperial system is the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.[5] In the 1960s, to secure a military outpost without fear of any interference from indigenous peoples, the two thousand Chagossian inhabitants were forcibly expelled, deprived of their native land, and sent a thousand miles away. (It is the same ploy we had used in removing native peoples from the Bikini and Enewetak atolls and Lib Island, so that we could conduct our sixty-eight … [Read more...]

from Swear I'm Not Paul: This month's Uncut Magazine has a list of their 150 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century so far (i.e. the best ones of the decade or noughties or whatever), and so far I've been unable to locate the full list online. Therefore I'm going to take the time to type them all out for you, and maybe even provide a little review or opinion piece at the end... … [Read more...]