Saw a wonderful guitar pull over the weekend. For those unfamiliar with the term, guitar pulls involve three of four people, sitting…
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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 The Simpsons 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.
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.
And he knew Robert Johnson! "'He was a nice person,' says Honeyboy of Johnson, who was poisoned in Mississippi in 1938 aged 27. 'He wasn't a hellraiser, but he loved whisky and was…
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 is any reality to the Stones any more. As a student of film, Scorsese knows that when the legend becomes fact, you shoot the legend.
David Gates is grumpy about the hoopla over On the Road's 50th anniversary. Grumpy, but not to the point of ignoring the occasion.
Howard Mandel has written a wonderful essay on Maria Schneider. First Fred Kaplan name-dropped her, now this—I have got to get my tucchus to one of her gigs.
If you bumped into these composers at the Kwick-E-Mart, would you recognize them?
About a week ago, I was feeling pretty happy with myself. I was a proofreading machine. I was marking things in red and sending corrections to our designer. I was as clear as last Saturday, as succinct as a pushpin. I was downloading files, naming folders, and clicking and dragging stuff like nobody's business. I was shipping things to prepress like I knew what I was doing. I was shipping things to prepress like I knew what prepress was!
But that was last week. This week, I'm sick and tired of the October issue. I wish it would die. The Ad Index came in and…