Saturday, February 28, 2004

Aragorn vs. Gimli
"For that matter, the invasion of Iraq makes a poor match with the War of the Ring. It only works if we can imagine Gandalf as having cut business deals with Sauron back in the Second Age, even providing him with the seed cultures for breeding his legions of orcs. There is no question of imminent threat in "The Lord of the Rings" -- the armies of Mordor come looking for trouble. Had Gondor marshaled its troops only to find Mordor bare of weapons, and Barad-dur ready to crumble at a touch, then we might find parallels with George W. Bush's grand venture."

Wednesday, February 25, 2004

THE HIGH HAT | POPS&CLICKS: Modern Lovers: "(While recording their demos in Los Angeles, Jonathan Richman befriended Gram Parsons, a hippie Johnny for the ages. After his overdose, The Modern Lovers played his wake. Just imagine it: Don Henley, Linda Ronstadt, hell, maybe even Keith Richards if he wasn't getting his blood replaced that day, all those cocaine cowboys gathered to mourn the passing of the man who invented country rock then pissed his life away just as the zeitgeist was catching up with him. Who takes the stage? A goofy naif named Jo Jo and his blaring proto-punk band, spitting out, "If these guys are really that great, why can't they take this world, and take it straight?" Everyone has their dream concert, the gig they'd give anything to have attended: Ornette Coleman at the Five Spot, Dylan at Newport. This one's mine.)"
via Laurable an interesting review of new Clare bio:
"Clare's work might be understood best, in fact, by those who can hear in it the sort of deceptively simple music we know from the likes of A. P. Carter, Jimmie Rodgers, Skip James, Robert Johnson and Johnny Cash, all of them in thrall to their rural muse. Clare was, at heart, a ballad singer, the practitioner of a mournful and ecstatic art. "
Smile

Monday, February 23, 2004

new Drunken Boat features Gothamite welterweights Norman Mailer and Brian Kim Stefans
Shrink Rap by Joy Press: "'Skinner was able to systematically evoke and explain much of human folly, why we do dumb things even when we're not consistently rewarded,' she writes admiringly. 'Why perfectly normal people empty their coffers in smoky casinos' or women wait by the phone for a guy to call. Skinner may have deciphered the mechanisms of compulsion, but that doesn't stop Slater from being driven by her own compulsive curiosity. She pursues Skinner beyond normal scholarly limits, hoping to unravel the creepy rumors about him�that he was a sadist who imprisoned his own infant daughter in one of his boxes and drove her to suicide. By chapter's end, she has infiltrated his family homestead and is nibbling on a stale piece of chocolate that Skinner was consuming when he died a decade ago. "
John Ashcroft scary shit
Parking Spots thanks Antti
Jacket 25 - Tony Towle in conversation with Leo Edelstein
thanks Bifurcated Rivets for Southern Mosaic: The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip--numerous MP3's here

Sunday, February 22, 2004

blissblog:
"(i went through a phase recently of feeling nostalgic for boredom, the kind you felt as a suburban child in the uk in the 70s -- the utter sense of privation experienced on a Sunday around 6 PM when it was just religious programmes... the dearth of stimuli... tv used to go off in the afternoons, there was just a testcard... no night time tv... no web, none of the surfeit distractions kids today have... it was almost spiritual, the sense of oppression weighing on the soul, nothing to relieve the tedium... it was enriching in the sense that you were forced to develop an imagination to survive it)"
from Plep---Prehistoric Jersey
Happy Birthday Morley Callaghan!:
"At a later session, F. Scott Fitzgerald was volunteered as timekeeper, charged with regulating one-minute rounds with two-minute rests between. Fitzgerald became so enthralled with the boxing that he forgot the clock -- until the out-of-gas Hemingway made a desperate lunge at Callaghan, and got knocked on his back by a hard cross to the jaw. When Fitzgerald cried out, 'Oh, my God! I let the round go four minutes!' Hemingway spat his bullfighter's contempt in a new direction: 'All right, Scott...if you want to see me getting the shit kicked out of me, just say so. Only don't say you made a mistake.' "
Baudelaire, Dumas and cannabis: "His 'due', of course, was his potion of dawamesk. 'The doctor stood by a buffet on which lay a platter filled with small Japanese saucers. He spooned a morsel of paste or greenish jam about as large as a thumb from a crystal vase, and placed it next to the silver spoon on each saucer. The doctor's face radiated enthusiasm; his eyes glittered, his purple cheeks were aglow, the veins in his temples stood out strongly, and he breathed heavily through dilated nostrils. 'This will be deducted from your share in Paradise,' he said as he handed me my portion...'
There follows a banquet. By the time the meal ends, the hashish is beginning to take effect. His neighbours begin to appear 'somewhat strange. Their pupils became big as a screech owl's; their noses stretched into elongated probosces; their mouths expanded like bell bottoms. Faces were shaded in supernatural light'. Meanwhile 'a deadening warmth pervaded my limbs, and dementia, like a wave which breaks foaming on to a rock, then withdraws to break again, invaded and left my brain, finally enveloping it altogether. That strange visitor, hallucination, had come to dwell within me.'"
lots of stuff on Ikue Mori and other No New Yorkers as well as a Young Marble Giants mp3 @ gmtPlus9
Mott the Hoople Reissues:
"Which brings us to Brain Capers. By Autumn '71, Mott was in a funk. The calculated effort that went into Wildlife had netted no measurable improvement in sales. In a wonderful move (not for Mott's career, for sure, but definitely for us fans), they reinstalled madcap Guy Stevens as their producer.

The result was Brain Capers, featuring an intoxicated 'n' ornery Mott the Hoople presenting the most aggressive grooves of their career ('Death May Be Your Santa Claus,' 'The Moon Upstairs,' and destructo snippet 'The Wheel Of The Quivering Meat Conception'). Led by Ian Hunter's most sneering delivery and nihilistic rants, these tracks sounds like punk rock five years ahead of itself."