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QUOTE OF THE MONTH: Leonard Cohen in Montreal: "I haven't been on a stage here in 14 or 15 years... I was 60 years old -- a kid with a crazy dream."

"...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)

Your Life Is In Your Foot's Hands.

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.

Web Habits, Effectively

A juicy sampling of writerly links from Granta.

Quote of the Year

'If you fight terror with terror,' the authors ask, 'how can you tell which is which?'

For tragic albeit fortuitous reasons I find myself in London teaching a Beatle class, put up and well-paid only homesick for my family beyond words. For solace I seek out culture, and last week I caught Andras Schiff playing Schubert at the Wigmore Hall. (The link goes to the Guardian excellent podcast series on Schiff's Beethoven sonatas.) The hall is warm and cozy, the pianist among my favorites, and the repertoire was Impromptus, Moments Musiceaux and a few short pieces. And much to my surprise, especially given the thriving state of culture over here, there was no review, at least that I could find the day after or since. So here goes. (Much later, I found one here.)

Schiff had an uneven night. He was playing a Bosendorfer, which sounded lovely, but there were voicing problems throughout. When things went well, he had a silky singing line atop feather bedding -- he has one of the most breathtaking pianissimos known to mortals. But there were some tricky passages which the lines didn't get handed off between hands very well, or when inner voices, carved to perfection, suddenly stepped on the upper lines; it was subtle enough to be entirely forgiveable but noticeable enough to ears like mine that the evening was smudged. I've heard him play much better. And in the E-flat impromptu, he had a couple bars that simply got away from him. It made me wonder whether he was confronting an unfamiliar piano, or whether some voicing work had been done on the hammers since he played it last. The program was also too long by about twenty minutes, and Schiff tends to spoon out just a tad more than his audience can readily take in. He's clearly a long-distance runner, but this taxes the ear when it comes to so many miniatures all done in a row. In Boston a few years back, he lost most of us on a varied program by playing about forty minutes of Scarlatti at the start -- it was like starting a meal with too many bon-bons.

I just hope that the early slips and the unwieldy keys didn't give him too much bother... when I opened my eyes to watch him, it seemed as if he was using way too much arm control and not nearly enough body weight. They say the pianissimo is all in the flesh around the finger bones -- but it has to exist within larger contrasts, right? The crowd was enthusiastic, but not leaping to their feet the way some UK audiences are prone to do. This reserved British character gives way when they really love a performer and standing ovations are far more typical over here than in the states, ironically.