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December 2010
The Archives
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12.29.10The dust blows forward and the dust blows backThe great Captain Beefheart, aka Don Van Vliet, passed away on December 17 at the age of 69. Said Tom Waits to the LA Times: "He was like the scout on a wagon train. He was the one who goes ahead and shows the way. He was a demanding bandleader, a transcendental composer (with emphasis on the dental), up there with Ornette, Sun Ra and Miles. He drew in the air with a burnt stick. He described the indescribable." http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-captain-beefheart-20101218,0,232335.story [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/hCSPf5Viwd0" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
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12.19.10It was 20 years ago today…Or thereabouts. David Lynch, Mark Frost, Angelo Badalamenti, Julee Cruise and Jennifer Lynch created an entire universe: Twin Peaks, the Twin Peaks soundtrack, The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer and Floating Into the Night. [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/srqIymNRVYc" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
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12.19.10This Tornado Loves You“Growing up, my family was very, very into animals. Animals were treated like other people; they slept in the bed with you. I come from an agrarian background. That's how my family's fairy tales are structured, where animals have a lot of power. It gets into people's psyche.” - Neko Case [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/_FhVbyeWFvo" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
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12.18.10Arvo Part’s prayer"I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me." [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/uuURRRHBdBA" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/2pDjT1UNT3s" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
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12.16.10Pollock"My main goal in painting over the years prior to making the film was to experience what it must be like to be a painter in one's life. You know? The need to do it, the way you think about it, dream about it, go down there and spend hours where you're doing nothing but concentrating on painting. It made me feel like it was really important to the film to see the man work because that's what he did." - Ed Harris [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/Z2HN9G4Lx_w" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
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12.14.10Now that’s what I call steampunk Vol 1“Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we’ve all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds. But in 1922 it was still a new thing to be a machine.” – Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/lSiVWkk5zaQ" ...
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12.13.10Fill your hand, you sonofabitch"True Grit, in short, begins where chivalry meets the frontier - where the old Confederacy starts to merge and shade away into the Wild West. And without giving anything away, I can say the book ends at a travelling Wild West show in Memphis in the early 1900s: which is to say, at once in the 20th century and firmly enshrined in myth and legend." - Donna Tartt http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/movies/12grit.html [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/5GkAH7IUWOE" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
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12.11.10Perfect sound forever"The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel." [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/9I5OtlKjzJo" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
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12.07.10Seditious, you hit me with a flower"What is robbing a bank compared with founding a bank?" - Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/nmP0tWMNgJk" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/jnyXoFlyB1Q" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
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12.07.10Notes of a Rolling StoneThere's been no shortage of Rolling Stones tomes over the years, but when the band's A Bigger Bang tour came to a halt in 2007 and Keith Richards decided to at last write his memoirs, the man he chose as his collaborator was not Stanley Booth or Robert Greenfield, but White Mischief author James Fox. "The reason I became friends with Keith really was I wrote about him when I was on the Sunday Times in the early 70s," Fox explains. "I play the guitar so I was curious -- I just wanted to work out how he played the guitar, ...