February 2010
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TSFTW: January Links
One month into my foolhardy experiment with reading, listening to, and watching all kinds of stuff I should have read, listened to and watched much earlier, here’s what I’ve got so far:
Books
Denis Mackail, Greenery Street
Tove Jansson, The Summer Book
W. B. Yeats, The Tower
George MacDonald Fraser, The Pyrates
Langston Hughes, Not Without Laughter
Guido Morselli, Divertimento...
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Raymond Briggs, GENTLEMAN JIM →
The Comics Journal saved my life.
Okay, that’s too melodramatic. And even if, in retrospect, I’m sure I would have found my way out of the aesthetic and moral dead zone which comic books at the close of 1998 had become for me, theJournal’s list of the hundred best comics of the twentieth century (officious, elitist, and pugnacious as theJournal always was) blew in air from a...
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Friday Film Festival: Réalisme Poétique →
As far as French film movements go, Poetic Realism lags far behind the New Wave of the late 50s and early 60s in terms of popular recognition and critical interest, but the loose collection of films that have been grouped together under its heading constitute probably the first great film movement of the sound era. Without the inventiveness, patience, and lyricism of its great directors (Renoir,...
January 2010
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Walter Mosley, DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS →
Oh, man, is that more like it.
Look, I’m an English major lit nerd who loves soaking in the quiet backwaters of Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian (V) literature, where the surfaces are but rarely ruptured by a fleck of life however lazy … but I’m also a genre reader who will blow through a crime paperback in an afternoon and count it time well spent….
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JULIO IGLESIAS, “LO MEJOR DE TU VIDA” →
There are three emotional cycles I went through on encountering this song, over the several listens it has taken me to assimilate it. As best as I can reconstruct them, they are:
1. Goodness, you can tell without looking that whoever sings this is a Star.
2. Nevertheless it is like the most boring drippy ballad evar.
3. Holy shit these lyrics are amazing….
Alejandro Sanz ft. Alicia Keys, “Looking For...
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Curve, DOPPELGÄNGER →
About halfway through the album I found myself asking myself grumpily why I had it in the first place; surely I couldn’t have thought that anything this monochrome and repetitive would be a priority in my listening life someday. Glancing through the factoids a single search gleans, I realized why: because this is the band that people always say Garbage ripped off.
I don’t like Garbage...
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Fela Ransome Kuti & The Afrika 70, GENTLEMAN →
I’m afraid there’s going to be a lot of “OH OF COURSE NOW I FINALLY GET IT” in the course of this blog; especially since I’m limiting my music talk to stuff I haven’t heard/paid attention to previously, I’m mostly going to be featuring stuff I haven’t previously gotten, and my self-image as a perceptive, sensitive, and thoughtful music-absorber...
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Ronald Firbank, CAPRICE →
One of the most vertiginous kinds of reading experiences is when a writer makes you work hard to understand what’s going on (like say a modernist), but what’s going on is so frivolous and silly that it doesn’t matter (like say a humorist). Ronald Firbank has that quality; and apart from Max Beerbohm in certain moods and maybe Oscar Wilde at his most delirious I can’t think...
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BRAULIO, “EN BANCARROTA” →
As is no doubt dishearteningly obvious, I’ve been relying on Wikipedia and half-assed Google searches for my information about the performers that have so far marched down this particular side-street Colonnade of Fame. The trouble with that kind of overreliance is obvious: when Wikipedia fails you, you fail….
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Topics I am not qualified to talk about:
1. Vampire Weekend
2. J. D. Salinger
iPad, whether you like it or not
rocketsandrayguns:
Used to be that to drive a car, you, the driver, needed to operate a clutch pedal and gear shifter and manually change gears for the transmission as you accelerated and decelerated. Then came the automatic transmission. With an automatic, the transmission is entirely abstracted away. The clutch is gone. To go faster, you just press harder on the gas pedal.
That’s where Apple...
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John Stanley, THIRTEEN GOING ON EIGHTEEN →
I’m not ordinarily a big fan of repeating names like this — when shuffling a playlist I get annoyed if two songs by the same artist show up twice in ten songs — but this arrived in the mail two days after I turned in my thoughts on Melvin Monster, and I devoured it immediately, so I might as well talk about it….
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Friday Film Festival: Shakespeare Noir →
Over the past ten years, I’ve become the kind of person who will say, with a weary, condescending sigh, that he doesn’t really like movies. I say this for two reasons: first, as a sort of low-level guerilla warfare against the wholesale dominance of our cultural discourse by film. If I have to read one more person justifying their interest in a song/band/genre by talking about how...
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-1-24) →
Claude François (22)
Pink (12)
Nina Simone (12)
Sui Generis (11)
The Doobie Brothers (10)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web →
veraville:
pocketmonsterd:
Today I can’t imagine living in a world where I don’t filter, collect and share.
Sharing has become a reflex action when people find an interesting video, link or story. Great content going viral isn’t new. But the sharing mentality is no longer confined to the occasional gems. It’s for everything we consume online, large or small.
Bits Blog - NYTimes.com...
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Guido Morselli, DIVERTIMENTO 1889 →
I don’t remember what I was looking for when I came across this slim paperback in one of the used-book chain stores that dot the state (and I know the location of every one by heart, more fool me). Something in the M’s, obviously; Moore? Montgomery? Morley? Morris? But I might not have been looking for anything in particular, when the bright silver spine with Art Deco lettering caught...
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EMMANUEL, “ES MI MUJER” →
Why do I put “pop idol” in the categories field when Emmanuel comes up in the draw? This song illustrates why: it’s the first song we’ve had here at the top of the Billboard Latin chart that sounds like the 1980s of myth and snark: completely synthesized, airbrushed, and blow-dried….
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Claude François, COMME D'HABITUDE →
I might as well say before this goes any further that I have a lot of old French and Brazilian and Italian pop records and I know that in the 60s it was fashionable for every non-Anglophone pop album to merely bear the name of its singer on the spine, but I’m going to be following the long-established convention of calling these records by the title of their first track. Led Zeppelin can get...
“The night was clear and frosty, all ebony of shadow and silver of snowy slope;...”
– L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Guys, Anne Shirley is the most emo little girl ever.
(via screwrocknroll)
Wait, emo’s twee now? Have I been doing it wrong this whole time?
(That said, you’re not wrong. That whole extravagant adolescent...
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Parliament, MOTHERSHIP CONNECTION →
It begins in a very familiar way. “Good evening, do not attempt to adjust your radio, we have taken control as to bring you this special show.” I wonder how many albums have started out with some variation on that old Outer Limits riff. It’s a convenient way to try to create an “experience,” demarcate your album as being in some way more singular, weirder, and more...
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Langston Hughes, NOT WITHOUT LAUGHTER →
A couple months back I went on a book-buying spree. I knew I was going to do this blog come the new year, so I haunted bookstores and bought recklessly, grabbing armfuls at a time, going back three or four times in a week, carrying little lists of titles and author names and scurrying back and forth on the fiction and poetry and genre shelves….
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-1-17) →
Tony Scott (34)
Miranda! (9)
Juana Molina (3)
Doug Benson (1)
Gilda (1)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
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DANIELA ROMO, “DE MÍ ENAMÓRATE” →
This is an epochal moment in Hot Latin history: the first time that a song associated with a telenovela has topped the chart. The telenovela in question, El Camino Secreto, starred Daniela Romo in her breakout role as — well, the details hardly matter….
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John Stanley, MELVIN MONSTER →
John Stanley is one of the greatest pure cartoonists in history, a man who could both draw funny things and draw things funny, with a loose, bold line that was perfect for the squalid, ugly reproduction of comic books in the days when they cost a dime and their natural state was rolled up and sticking out of some kid’s back pocket….
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Friday Film Festival: Lubitsch's Second Tier →
Ernst Lubitsch is no longer in the first rank of directors that spring to mind when people talk about the classic Hollywood era. Even though he was revered as a master by many of the (now) more famous directors in the generation after his (Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger), the usual center of gravity in Hollywood — the stars — tended not to congregate in Lubitsch pictures, which were...
rocketsandrayguns (re: tomewing and desnoise):
Personally I prefer reviews where the reviewer expresses something personal about themselves and/or the world, or at least the music/art/pop world beyond just the album being reviewed. I guess I like music thought pieces and essays disguised as reviews. Maybe that’s pretentious and goes against the point of reviews, but I need something more...
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JOSÉ JOSÉ, “¿Y QUIÉN PUEDE SER?” →
One thing that tends to throw a lot of people off about Latin Pop is that we Anglophones don’t necessarily always get the flow of the stuff’s history. We usually know the US/UK history by heart (jazz to swing to rock & roll to soul to rock to disco to hip-hop to electronic to now) but the generational signifiers of Spanish-language pop, not to mention the immense variety of source musics...
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George MacDonald Fraser, THE PYRATES →
I bought it because the Flashman novels caught my youthful attention (though I never read one, I was too much of a prig) and because when I glanced down the first page in the used-book store I read the most magnificent opening run-on sentence in comic literature, reproduced in full here because why the hell not it’s my blog….