Riding OTR
David Gates is grumpy about the hoopla over <I>On the Road</I>'s 50<SUP>th</SUP> anniversary. Grumpy, but not to the point of ignoring the occasion.
David Gates is grumpy about the hoopla over <I>On the Road</I>'s 50<SUP>th</SUP> anniversary. Grumpy, but not to the point of ignoring the occasion.
Has Scorsese made the ultimate up-close-and-personal documentary about the Rolling Stones? While I'm sure it's a good concert movie, I'm not sure there <I>is</I> any reality to the Stones any more. As a student of film, Scorsese knows that when the legend becomes fact, you shoot the legend.
A Flickr photoset.
Garth Cartwright profiles David "Honeyboy" Edwards on the eve of his European tour. He heard Charley Patton and Tommy Johnson, the musicians regarded as Delta blues founders, play when he worked on a plantation. Big Joe Williams taught him music and how to hobo. He busked with the Memphis Jug Band, hung out with a teenaged Howlin' Wolf, and recorded for Alan Lomax. And in 1945 he took Little Walter to Chicago.
For good measure alone, Critics, particularly the cranky ones like I've recently become, all deserve a well–placed boot up the arse once in awhile and so, much to my delight I too loved much of <I>The Simpsons</I> movie I prematurely sniffed at last week on this forum. I even get to add this delicious addendum: The critics are wrong! It's pretty wonderful. Many great bits. Much self-deprecation. Maggie emerging as a full–blown character. Okay, okay: I was wrong.
We have a few for sale.
As Jeff Wong and I took our daily constitutional along Brooklyn's Greenbelt this morning, we spotted these colorful boulders along the shore. You never know who you're going to run across in this borough.
How <I>The Simpsons</I> has embiggened the English language.
Now that the dust has settled on <I>The Deathly Hallows</I>, Stephen King weighs in on the series and on J. K. Rowling. King, of course, is one of the few fiction authors who can write about Rowling's success without bitterness, and his thoughts on Rowling's craft are sharp. He also knows just a little bit about toiling in the genre-novel wilderness.
Sometimes less is more, but then again, maybe not when it comes to audio. Do you connect your loudspeaker cables to your amp and loudspeaker with bare wire at the ends or with connectors such as pins, spade lugs, or banana plugs? If you use connectors, what kind do you use?