Archives for 2004

Stephanie Zacharek, a critic I admire, went ballistic on David Thomson's new book in the NYTimes Book Review. It struck me as unnecessarily mean-spirited: Thomson's dismissiveness of silents makes him seem like a fogy who's trying to be jazzy -- as if he were overly concerned to reassure us he's … [Read more...]

JK writes in with this link: the Beastles (which should have been called the "Beastlies") but it's worth a click. So, is it the birth of a new "fab sampling" genre? Is it "better" than Danger Mouse? JK thinks so. And I forgot: CNN's Greatest Hits Guide Listology Columnists Technorati Search … [Read more...]

For those titles not linked to the iTunes store, contact support to let them know you'd buy it if they carried it. 1. Rocket From The Tombs ROCKET REDUX (Smog Veil) 2. Danger Mouse GREY ALBUM (download) 3. Sam Phillips A BOOT AND A SHOE (Nonesuch) 5. Los Lobos THE RIDE (Hollywood) 7. Alison Kraus … [Read more...]

Random samplings from Ian Van Tuyl's ticklingly insightful POPSTROLOGY: THE ART AND SCIENCE OF READING THE POP STARS (Bloomsbury USA): MARY WELLS You can rage against the machine, or you can walk away before your arms get caught in the gears. ...No matter how much you serve the institution, and no … [Read more...]

Milo Miles in WBUR's Arts pages: 1) Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History" by Devin McKinney (Harvard University Press). This looks to be the standard-setting meditation on the Beatles by a devoted, visionary fan too young to have known Beatlemania first-hand (McKinney was born in 1966). … [Read more...]

The sign of "live"-ness in a live recording doesn't come from the performers but from the audience—the sound of their applause. Mission of Burma's 1985 live album, The Horrible Truth About Burma, in its original configuration, ends with an apocalyptic cover of Pere Ubu's "Heart of Darkness," … [Read more...]

These great faces in the movie dark, these moons of becoming, are they one of the few benevolent invasions of the twentieth century, meant to offset all the other images of slaughter, torture, and humiliation? Or is their intense allure just another danger, cunningly disguised? Or is it that the … [Read more...]

I don't know how to say this without sounding like an old geezer, but James Taylor just has no right to sing "A Change Is Gonna Come," it swallows him up, and it's too big a song for most of his audience. It was certainly too big a song for the West Wing episode it tried to cap: were we supposed to … [Read more...]

YIKES this isn't really my list, it's just some stuff we talked about as we wrapped up. I adore the Beatle box except for the packaging. (Still, this fits in with their longstanding tradition of tanscending Capitol's packaging.) The real find is Reigning Sound, which gets better upon each listening. … [Read more...]

LEAD OF THE WEEK: Kinky Does Parrothead "THERE is a fine line between fiction and nonfiction, and I believe Jimmy Buffett and I snorted it in 1976..." (in the Book Review) And why is this guy a regular on every media outlet? Come again? Don't we have video of Buchanan calling for Trent Lott's … [Read more...]

From Ron Rosenbaum, in the New York Observer: In Ohio, where a switch of some 68,000 votes could have changed the name of the next President, the count deserved maximum scrutiny. Especially when the combination of allegedly "spoiled" invalid ballots (93,000) and the number of "provisional" ballots … [Read more...]

UPDATED 2004 LIST: Dogs Die in Hot Cars PLEASE DESCRIBE YOURSELF (V2) This guy sounds distractingly like XTC's Andy Partridge, waiting for that association to drop away... The Veils THE RUNAWAY FOUND (Rough Trade) This guy sounds like a cross between Neil Diamond and Bono... but in a GOOD … [Read more...]

CULTURE SHOCK: Walking around Harvard Square last week it was like a trap door opening beneath me to discover the hollowed out space where Wordsworth's used to be. 28 years. Where will tomorrow's movie critics come from? Then, on a routine trip to Davis Square, the sign on Disc Diggers announces … [Read more...]

Here's my review of Dylan's Chronicles on WBUR's Arts pages. Here's the passage nobody else seems to have noticed yet: "...In the midst of all this blarney, there are scenes that conjure up dodged bullets. Once, while sitting around Johnny Cash's house after dinner with Graham Nash, Kris … [Read more...]

Nancy Franklin's lead is (as SKL would say) "crashingly banal": "Though there has not yet been a poll to prove the validity of this claim, it’s probably fair to say that most Americans will not be glad to hear that the 2008 campaign started on Wednesday, November 3rd." Versions of that sentiment … [Read more...]