I remember listening to it. The cassette version because I wasn't allowed to play with the vinyl. I was five. I think I fell in love with "Pretty Young Thing" after listening only once. I wondered why such a great song was buried so deep into the album. But they…
search
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.
I was listening to Radiohead’s new album, In Rainbows. 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 like 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, Day Is Done. I listened through all 10 tracks—which include, besides two…
Lawrence Lanaham goes to Baltimore, Maryland, as well as Bodymore, Murdaland to discover if David Simon's dyspeptic portrait of newspapers in crisis in this season's The Wire is realistic.
Guess what?
The Wire is fiction—and even though Simon was a journalist in Baltimore, his version of what happened then is just one story among many. Not precisely a Stop the presses! moment.
In fact, the biggest reason good fiction like The Wire works so well is that it is selective, sorting through all the facts to give one part of the story its narrative pop.
Good…
Who knows? This might be good.
I suspect that, on a given night, the Stones could still be the greatest rock band in the world. Oh, who am I kidding? Most nights these days, they might not even be the best rock band in town.
But a man can dream, can't he?
Hat tip to George Weber.
John Atkinson sent along this Jay Rosen article about why "the media" gets stuff like primaries so wrong.
Basically, Rosen argues, it's because "the gang of 500" chooses to do things "the way they've been done." Thus, you get the same tropes over and over again—and, if they happen to be spectacularly wrong, it's because the people didn't act logically.
Hmmm. Maybe pundits, like baseball players, should post their stats.
What I find so perplexing about herd journalism is how much it means that every contest has a single, easy-to-follow story line. With 500 people covering…
In bed the night before last, images of large and heavy loudspeakers carefully maneuvered into their old shipping cartons and up the narrow flight of stairs from JA's listening room, around a tight bend made tighter by piles of shoes and other things, and up another flight into a hall separating dining room from living room. One heavy step at a time, carefully.
"One two three up, one two three up, one two three up."
"Good work."
I remembered restless nights after long days at Suntan Lake, somewhere in childhood New Jersey, days spent struggling through the waves…
I'd pay cash money to know how "Some stupid with a flare gun" translates into Japanese.
Hat tip to John Marks, who observes: "What is most wonderful about it is that there are a lot of people in the audience who recognize the tune in three notes—admittedly, though, the three notes are perhaps the most distinctive broken arpeggio in classic-rock history."
I feel a bit remiss about not commenting on Bobby Fischer's passing. As a bookish chess-obssessed kid, I lived for his Boy's Life chess column and, during the "Match of the Century," I was hitchhiking to and from Iowa and the Spassky/Fischer battle of wits was always a safe topic of conversation. (1972 was ground zero for the mainstream born again movement and it seemed like half the people that picked me up wanted a conversion in exchange for the ride. Thank goodness for chess!)
When I moved to New York, I met many chess players who had played Fischer or played in tournaments where…
The great Eliane Elias put on a quite a show last night in NYC. Touring in support of her new album, Something For You, Eliane Elias Sings and Plays Bill Evans, the pianist, singer and longtime Evans admirer lit up Dizzy's at Jazz at Lincoln Center, which is easily one of the best–sounding rooms for live music that I've ever been in. The food in there is fairly tasty and not wildly overpriced, a total rarity on the New York jazz club scene. And that behind the stage, floor to ceiling glass that adds a Central Park West backdrops to every performance is genuinely divine. Say what you…
In her kittenage, before we adopted her, Bagheera was a deli cat. I don't want to psychoanalyze an animal with a brain the size of a walnut, but Bagheera loves cardboard boxes. She will lie on them for hours—unless we do something silly like pet her or notice her. Then she'll go sulk in the corner.