blog riley

Dario Robleto Lion or Lamb, 2007-2008

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:07:29 -0500

WAYNE'S FULL NELSON

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:33:42 -0500

"As far as Harry was concerned, Victor Ramdass Singh was just another Nervous Camera director, who worked tirelessly to make the audience realize at every moment that the picture was indeed being directed." This passage appears in Don Carpenter's 1975 novel The True Life Story of Jody McKeegan. No one who reads the eight other novels or the volume of short stories Carpenter published during his twenty-year career could ever call him just another Nervous Writer. You can comb through his work for flourishes and not find any showing off. Mostly, as John Wayne says of Ricky Nelson in Rio Bravo, he's good enough not to have to prove it.--Charles Taylor in The Nation, reprinted in PowellsBooks.Blog

CROP CIRCLE COP QUOTE

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:24:17 -0500

"A police officer contacted UFO experts after claiming he saw three aliens examining a freshly made crop circle in Wiltshire...."

IYA 2009 Posters

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:34:33 -0500

Soundtrack: Donald Fagen's "IGY"

FARBER, MANNY FILE UNDER

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:35:54 -0500

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 disillusioned apparently at his mother's breast, has to say some silly things and to play God too often to be as believably tough as he was in his last eight pictures." The titles of the articles alone can be priceless: "Blaboteur" for Saboteur, "Tinkle" for For Whom the Bell Tolls, "Hamburger Hell" for The Postman Always Rings Twice..."

DO YOUR SCALES

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:54:32 -0500

MISSION OF BURMA: SOUND SPEED LIGHT (MATADOR)

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 06:09:57 -0500

REMASTERED REVISIONISM

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 08:53:46 -0500

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...

WHITMAN SELLS JEANS MINUS IRONY

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 18:48:19 -0500

HOCKNEY WRIT LARGE

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 10:06:00 -0500

Lawrence Weschler on David Hockney's iPhone (slideshow).

DON'T BOGART THAT NOBEL

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:31:17 -0500

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 atomic and hydrogen bomb tests there.) Though technically Diego Garcia is leased from the British, it is entirely run by the United States. It was the United States that expelled the Chagossians and confiscated their property. Diego Garcia has become a vast armory, as well as a storage and staging area and harbor and launch site, from which supplies and air strikes are fanned out over the Middle East, especially to the Persian Gulf and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. No journalists are allowed to visit it. It was funded on a vast scale by various deceptions of Congress. Even the leasing terms with Great Britain were kept secret, to avoid congressional oversight.

That is just one of the hundreds of holdings in the empire created by the National Security State. A president is greatly pressured to keep all the empire's secrets. He feels he must avoid embarrassing the hordes of agents, military personnel, and diplomatic instruments whose loyalty he must command. Keeping up morale in this vast, shady enterprise is something impressed on him by all manner of commitments. He becomes the prisoner of his own power. As President Truman could not not use the bomb, a modern president cannot not use the huge powers at his disposal. It has all been given him as the legacy of Bomb Power, the thing that makes him not only Commander in Chief but Leader of the Free World. He is a self-entangling giant.

SKL compared Obama's nobel acceptance to Ewan MacGregor's taking the George Lucas role in Star Wars: some phone calls are beyond refusal.

LISTS, CONTINUED

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 11:05:54 -0500

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...

HEARING UNHEARD NUANCES

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:35:27 -0500

"The Beatles remasters have finally hit the street and all across the world, music fans are gorging themselves on the most fabled and revered repertoire in pop music history. This may well prove to be the last hurrah of the CD age and certainly the marketing gurus at Capital have been working overtime to make sure we've all very aware of the Beatles as we approach this holiday season. It's highly likely that the Fab Four will prove to be the best selling artists of this decade, an incredible feat for a group that disbanded nearly 40 years ago. So the question--the only question, for the Beatles are hardly an unknown quantity--is simply are these new versions worth it? Are they that much different? Should people who've already bought these albums umpteen times buy them again? I'll try to answer that question here for those of you who still might be on the fence...."
--Richard Metzger on Dangerous Minds

REVERSE BEATLES TELESCOPE

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 02:28:09 -0500

The Incredible Flying Earpiece
(Fraud's Deviant to Fudd's Law)
Beatles' Digital Remasters
Jim Lehrer Newshour on PBS
September 9, 2009

NOTES FROM ALL OVER

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:10:05 -0500

[cover: Chip Kidd, 1988]
Of the scores of Beatles books I've skimmed over the years, Tell Me Why: The Beatles: Album by Album, Song by Song, the Sixties and After , by Tim Riley, is one of the few I've taken the time to read because of its depth, insight and readability.

Written when the author was only 28, the 423-page book (first published by Random House in 1988) is by a Colorado native who attended the well-regarded Oberlin College and Conservatory and earned degrees in English and piano performance. With those dual degrees, he is able to provide a thoughtful and rarely pedantic look at the Beatles that reveals so much about them through their songs, rather than through personality analysis.

Riley took on the intimidating task of discussing each song the Beatles ever composed or performed. Although he is an unabashed fan, he isn't a fanatic, and is opinionated and frank about songs he thinks are "schmaltz" ("Michelle").

He has an eye for detail. For example, he notes that the Beatles bawdily sing "tit, tit, tit" during the bridge of "Girl," and that John and George sing "Frère Jacques" nonsensically during the second verse of Paul's "Paperback Writer."

At times, Riley can overwhelm the casual fan with verbosity. But his exhaustive research on the songs, including much of the Beatles' solo work, does what every book on the Beatles should do: explain how four boys from Liverpool revolutionized popular music.

- David Burger, Salt Lake City Tribune

Beatles' Remasters coverage in the pipeline...