LATEST ADDITIONS

John Atkinson sent along <A HREF="http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/tomdispatch/2008/01/beast-without… Jay Rosen article</A> about why "the media" gets stuff like primaries so wrong.

It has a fan, it won't work without a monitor, and it contains a 750GB hard drive&mdash;for some audiophiles, that's a trifecta of reasons <I>not</I> to buy the McIntosh MS750 music server ($6000).

Lawrence Lanaham <A HREF="http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/secrets_of_the_city.php">goes to Baltimore, Maryland</A>, as well as <I>Bodymore, Murdaland</I> to discover if David Simon's dyspeptic portrait of newspapers in crisis in this season's <I>The Wire</I> is realistic.

I was listening to Radiohead’s new album, <I>In Rainbows</I>. It’s really as great as all the rock critics say. More than that (from this blog’s angle), it’s as harmonically and rhythmically sophisticated as just about any work of modern jazz. (I’m not saying it’s <I>like</I> jazz; rather, that on any musical level, the purest jazz purist has no grounds for looking down on it.) The album sent me to my music closet to take another listen to Brad Mehldau’s cover of Radiohead’s “Knives Out,” from his trio’s 2005 CD on the Nonesuch label, <I>Day Is Done</I>. I listened through all 10 tracks—which include, besides two Mehldau compositions, Lennon & McCartney’s “Martha My Dear” and “She’s Leaving Home,” Burt Bacharach’s “Alfie,” Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” and the title tune by Nick Drake.

I think it was the only album my parents owned on both cassette and vinyl. So they could listen at home, and in the car. I remember looking at it and thinking I don't know what. This young black man in a gleaming white suit with a look on his face that says what. Looking all confident and comfortable and strange.

Blues movies, movies about the blues, continue to be a treacherous swamp for filmmakers; For some bizarre reason, they just can’t get it right.