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August 2010
The Archives
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08.31.10Ellis In WonderlandBefore he's even taken his seat in the Merrion Hotel lounge in Dublin, Bret Easton Ellis is demanding to know what we could possibly ask that he hasn't already been asked a thousand times before. He's certainly changed from our last encounter five years ago, when he was still recovering from the deaths of his father and sometime lover Michael Wade Kaplan. If 2005's Lunar Park suggested the writer was adopting a more compassionate tone in his work, the new book Imperial Bedrooms signals a return to numbed brutalism. It's also a sequel to his celebrated debut Less Than Zero ...
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08.30.10The Dark Side of SunIt has sometimes occurred to your correspondent, after one too many cups of tea, that Sun Studios was a hell door or a portal to another dimension, and its proprietor Sam Phillips a necromancer summoning dark spirits upon the earth through the wizardry of slap-back echo. Never have so many dark and electrifying sounds emanated from one postal address, namely 706 Union Avenue, Memphis, Tennessee. Maybe all great rock 'n' roll, from the Sex Pistols to Public Enemy to Godspeed, sounds like the end of the world. A few years back in a Rolling Stone interview, Bob Dylan spoke about the ...
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08.30.10More notes from dirty old menGrinderman Grinderman 2 (Mute) Welcome back to Grinderman's 21st century stucco fuck-pad, and this time it's bestial: our titular hero has been reincarnated as an anthro-pomo-morphised sci-fi Brundlefly dressed in Fedora, feather boa and leather coat. Be warned, this set is not what you'd call a showcase for Nick Cave's ballad-writing chops. 'Palaces of Montezuma', a lovely soul devotional somewhere between Bowie, Blake and Bob, is about the most conventional tune here. Grinderman 2 might best be described as an recombinant sonic machine that blenders electric funk, prog rock, free jazz, punk and musique concrete. It's only when you've got someone like ...
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08.30.10The Island of the Day BeforeIt was our own private episode of Lost. Within minutes of disembarking there was talk about the strange electromagnetic pull of the island, the eerie absence of ambient 21st century noise, the pronounced pull of gravity, the way the soil's aura canceled all thoughts of the outside world. We had risen early on that Sunday morning, paid our fare, boarded a boat from Kilmore Quay, and motored five kilometres out into St George's Channel before transferring to a motor dinghy which deposited us on the shores of the Greater Saltee Island. A ten-minute hike brought us to a rocky promontory where ...
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08.29.10Ellroy ConfidentialNormal blog service is resumed. Just back from ten days in the province of Limousin, south-west France. Templar chapels, lizards, crickets, pipe organs, an intense moon and heat. On the plane back, hungrily read a Times of London excerpt from James Ellroy's new memoir The Hilliker Curse, a sequel of sorts to the dark and beautiful My Dark Places. Here's last year's culture show interview with Miranda Sawyer. [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/li2KugL-3Q4" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] And here's a clip from an interview conducted by his girlfriend, writer Erika Schickel. [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/l8JpmZJ1baU" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] And here, speaking about how reading aloud is imperative to ...
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08.13.10Dirty Boulevard"I'm not joking around when I've said occasionally, trying to learn how to play a D chord properly has been a very big thing for me." Lou Reed, a minimalist to the last. [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/31n-8ffVFVg" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
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08.12.10The Sunset LimitedCormac McCarthy's play 'The Sunset Limited' is out now in hardback. Here's the blurb: "A startling encounter on a New York subway platform leads two strangers to a run-down tenement where a life-or-death decision must be made. In that small apartment, 'Black' and 'White', as the two men are known, begin a conversation that leads each back through his own history mining the origins of two diametrically opposing world views, they begin a dialectic redolent of the best of Beckett. White is a professor whose seemingly enviable existence of relative ease has left him nonetheless in despair. Black, an ex-con and ...
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08.11.10Different kinds of chroniclesBob Dylan on the dark prince of pop, Roy Orbison, from Sean Penn's reading of Chronicles. [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/9OZEorR4FVs" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] Sam Shepard on Nina Simone, from Motel Chronicles. [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/BCCABIqz8bw" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
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08.09.10Houston, We Have A FungusMary Roach's new book Packing For Mars examines some of the gnarlier aspects of life in a capsule. Pigs in spaaaaaace.... http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/books/review/Lord-t.html? http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/books/09book.html?hpw [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/bDE91G8TmfQ" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
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08.08.10Sweet nauseas"The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death." Jack Kerouac, On the Road. [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/BMEacD_4VdI" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]