Cereality, the bountiful cereal eatery of my dreams, is opening a franchise this spring in your city, somewhere in the financial district. Please patronize this establishment enough for the company to open a D.C. franchise. Philadelphians, the same still holds for you.
Casey and I have agreed in the past — I'd link if I could remember where — that Pitchfork's Most Pitchfork Moment Ever likely was the site's review of William Basinski's Disintegration Loops, which awarded a 9.4/10 to the sound of music loop tapes physically disintegrating.
Thankfully, we learned this past week, the Basinski bandwagon was still rolling along. Pitchfork gave a 7.7 to his new Silent Night, "an ambient excursion built of soft, humming drones that swell and recede under and over a hissing, bug-like drone," and an 8.0 to Variations: A Movement in Chrome Primitive, "piano loops played against each other in endless variations."
This music is not my music, but I wish these reviewers all the more power they have coming to them. My music is more Remastered Hits: The Best of Bachman-Turner Overdrive, which Pitchfork gave a 0.0.
Bonus BTO content
Roommate Mark's August 2001 review of a free BTO street concert.
"Anyway, first, the concert rocked because it was free. Second, I've never seen so many old people cheer since the opening scene of Matlock. Straight up, BTO can play. And they did the typical format: Play the obscure and old stuff first to keep everyone around for the big famous-song finale, much like the 11:00 news waits to do sports and weather last, so you have to sit through the boring story about the little boy and the dog sodomized by Congressmen. Anyway, you would have thought that at one point, Coop, myself or any of the other 1000 people crammed onto G street munching on free Ben and Jerrys would have taken a page out of Homer's book and simply screamed: 'Play Takin Care of Business!' And then when they did, scream: 'Get to the good part!'
But we didn't. We didn't need to. They played a solid hour of their work, most of it I've never heard but got into as much as the standard, Taking Care of Business and You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet, which they finished with after a rousing drum solo. Then, after the encore, they delivered Roll on Down the Highway, which got the crowd into a frenzy reminiscent of Matthew Broderick going ape on Twist and Shout during the parade in Ferris Bueller."
Bonus BTO content: Expanded edition
A Roll on Down the Highway moment.
Disney is making a movie of C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. "Sequels may follow. But films are only the spearhead of a corporate initiative that is likely to include a theme park presence, toys, clothing, video games and whatever other tchotchkes the infinitely resourceful Disney team can devise."
But this time, the pros at Disney are wrestling with a special challenge: how to sell a screen hero who was conceived as a forthright symbol of Jesus Christ, a redeemer who is tortured and killed in place of a young human sinner and who returns in a glorious resurrection that transforms the snowy landscape of Narnia into a verdant paradise.
Directing the movie is Andrew Adamson, who previously helmed Shrek and Shrek 2. The New York Times has more.
But what the newspaper doesn't share with you is the author's own take on the matter. Lewis is of course long passed, but in the Times book section in 1956, he has an essay, "Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's to be Said." Keeping a modest tone, he explains the complementary urges to write an imaginative story to children and to write out his heart — a religious one — to the world.
A PDF of the article is available for $2.95 on the Times site, but it also turns up in a Lewis compendium, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature. With Amazon's full text search engine, the whole essay is readable in two chunks, pages one through three and page four.
A middle excerpt is vivid on his creative process.
Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairytale as an instrument; then collected information about child-psychology and decided what age-group I'd write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out "allegories" to embody them. This is all pure moonshine. I couldn't write in that way at all. Everything began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn't even anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord. It was part of the bubbling.
Then came the Form. As these images sorted themselves into events (i.e., became a story) they seemed to demand no love interest and no close psychology. But the Form which excludes these things is the fairy tale. And the moment I thought of that I fell in love with the Form itself: its brevity, its severe restraints on description, its flexible traditionalism, its inflexible hostility to all analysis, digression, reflections and "gas". I was now enamoured of it. Its very limitations of vocabulary became an attraction; as the hardness of the stone pleases the sculptor or the difficulty of the sonnet delights the sonneteer.
On that side (as Author) I wrote fairy tales because the Fairy Tale seemed the best ideal Form for the stuff I had to say.
Then of course the Man in me began to have its turn. I thought I could see how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.
That was the Man's motive. But of course he could have done nothing if the Author had not been on the boil first.
Something to think about with your Happy Meal.
You should read this column from the San Francisco Chronicle. Basically, if you don't buy anything from the service for a year, its proprietors can delete your photos. Not Recycle Bin deleting, but permanent deleting. Same type of deal with Snapfish.
I now have some prints, and Ofoto now has some money.
I've seen his name before, but I sure can't you where or why. No matter. Amazon has recommended his latest to me on the basis of Ghost Is Born buying, and I like the sound some.
Nashville isn't available until Tuesday, but the first European single, Winter in the Hamptons, is online. While I usually don't like upscale Northeast references (sorry Ryan Adams, sorry James Taylor, the rest of your catalogs are fine), Rouse has an airier take, almost to the point of Garden State filtration, and makes me glad winter is more than halfway past. You can visit his official site for some information, but you have to visit his label to hear the song.
Season check
Winter began December 21, 2004.
Winter will end March 20, 2005.
Ryan Adams check
His Web site now has a picture of worms and nothing else. If you click on various worms, they make squealing noises. On fan site AnsweringBell.com, there are lyrics to Magnolia Mountain (previously streamed on his site and noted here).
And considers the industry's most audacious warranty.
Except for war with Iran (or North Korea, or France), trillion-dollar deficits, melting icecaps and drug-resistant syphilis, the future looks very promising. Buy a new Hyundai today and, a decade hence, the Korean automaker promises to honor your powertrain warranty.
I have grave doubts about even this afternoon, so in the face of such optimism, I'm a little flummoxed. A 10-year powertrain warranty? This is the sort of guarantee that comes with new roofs and prosthetic heart valves. Is this like those "lifetime warranty" pitches for steak knives sold on TV — has anyone ever returned a broken Ginsu?
Read more. Bonus references include Vans shoes, Marion Barry, NASCAR Nation, The Graduate, and Bananarama, among others.
Weeks ago, from a source I don't remember, I was tipped off the musical qualities of the Deep Throat soundtracks. Now, I was no Jackie O in the 1970s. I didn't exist in that decade, and even if I had, I wouldn't have been Jackie O. So I was unfamiliar with the movies (beyond common knowledge) and their soundtracks, and decided to follow up the tip.
The source I can't remember pointed to me to Light in the Attic Records and the company's newly remastered editions of the soundtracks. That page was here, PG-rated and nothing more, and I got to listening.
Review? Mixed. The track that had been touted, Run Linda Run, was great. The song wouldn't have been out of place in Saturday Night Fever sequel or an indoor Rocky IV training montage. There was wide instrumentation, moments of fearless minimalism, and string experimentation among the usual guitar, bongos and piano.
Such an approach would've worked well on every other track. The CD sequenced Deep Throat II's music before the original's, apparently due to improved production values after the first box office success. She's Got to Have It kicked off the affair with strung-out vocals and porn-ish lyrics, which of course proved a mistake. It was surprising to realize how much a writing mantra probably applied: show, don't tell. The title track sounded like Shirley Bassey's Goldfinger, but turned out to be sung by someone named Laura Greene. She had more success in that song than in her other offering, La La La. With lyrics like "la la la la la Linda Lovelace," stealing the backing of Classic IV's Spooky ("Love is kinda crazy with a spooky little girl like you") wasn't nearly enough to save the song or the disc. By the time the MP3 samples wound around to the original's music, I'd lost all interest.
You remember Category 6: Day on Destruction, this CBS movie in December where killer tornadoes, hurricanes and a blizzard met over Chicago. I wrote about the first night here, and then forgot to write about the second night's conclusion.
Coming across a bookmark this afternoon, I decided we should rectify things and finish the story, as best as I could recall it. Not entirely in order:
Randy Quaid got sucked into the sky. The weather intern got hired (and respect), thanks to Brian Dennehy's thoughfulness and his replacement's eventual acceptance. Greg of Dharma and Greg got the power back online, but then the overly righteous reporter helped screw it up again. (She realized the hacker was her source and turned him to good, only to have him ignorantly blow out the system. He ran outside of the exploding substation and was promptly zapped by lightning. Or something.) Greg's son realized his mom and sister were stuck in the mall and found them trapped in the bank. Luckily for him, the power went on at the same time, unlocking the bank. Unluckily, the punk boyfriend had already shot his sister by accident. Then the storm hit. After implying to his mistress that their affair was over, Greg raced to the bank in his super-Suburban. The apparently very forgiving family evacuated as tornadoes destroyed the mall, sending metal beams crashing down on the punk boyfriend. Despite having forgiven him earlier, they left him to die. Meanwhile, the reporter and her cameraman were trying to free her sister (in labor) and her sister's neighbor from their old school elevator cage. The cameraman hauled them out but then was hit by falling debris. Greg and family picked up the laboring sister there and raced to a nearby airfield, where her husband used a tiny window of opportunity to land his military hurricane plane on the airstrip of an abandoned but poorly secured base within a short drive of the North side. They flew to safety as the evil energy company executives tried their own escape in a corporate helicopter. High winds flipped the chopper, sending it into the executives on the roof. The secretary of energy and her adoring assistant monitored these events and were powerless to stop them. The weather was not turned away, but the human spirit endured. The end.
The bookmark that led me back to these thoughts today was a David Letterman list from the time of the Category 6 airing: "Top Ten Signs You're Watching A Bad Disaster Movie."
ChicagoTribune.com has a gallery full of reader-submitted photos for you. Consider this your warning. Even the Coz would not approve.
Or is it Devils & Dust? Or is the title going to be something different altogether? Even with Mr. Springsteen opening up this week to his AP buddy, Larry McShane, a solid message board source suggests large parts of the new album are still up in the air.
What to think … the official information is limited so far, but the "Western" feel Bruce mentions draws up a variety of connections. The most obvious is the Ghost of Tom Joad leftovers in the new track list: Long Time Coming (lyrics) and The Hitter (lyrics). Both are rough-hewn acoustic songs that Bruce performed on the Joad tour, and tape-knowledgable fans are glad to see them. They've got harsher twists than most songs on Joad, and neither uses the newspaper sourcing common on that album. The articles about border crossings and meth binges make for compelling narratives, but the sparse retellings never reach the creative thunder of Nebraska's paper-inspired title track. These two coming songs are originals. Not new, but originals and probably new to you.
The other major influence is a guess on my part, but it sits with me to a point where I can't ignore it. It is widely assumed within the fan community that sitting in Bruce's vaults are three unreleased album projects from the early 1990s: urban-influenced, relationship-based … and country swing. That third styling seems primed to raise its head here, especially after Bruce added Soozie Tyrell's fiddle and Nashville strings to The Rising. If he wants to vary the new sound, he could look country swing for the fuller numbers.
Then, of course, with great leaps and bound away, there is the Iraq war. The title track dates to a soundcheck in Vancouver on April 11, 2003, just after the war's start, with Bruce reportedly referencing "a world of earth and oil." Other lyrics from that version are said to be "Fear's a powerful thing/turns hard steel to rust" and "Got my finger on the trigger/I don't know who to trust/When I look into your eyes/There's just devils and dust."
Such a song leading into a series of plains and range meditations seems a reachable stretch. The wild card influence here could be The Searchers. The film is a John Ford, like the great Joad adaption, and Bruce has cited it at points throughout his career. As Dave Marsh writes in Glory Days, the second half of his Springsteen biography:
In that film, John Wayne spends five years tracking his young niece, who has been kidnapped by Indian raiders who massacred the rest of her family. Wayne doesn't play an uncomplicated good guy; he is an unconstructed Confederate soldier, there are indications that he may be a highwayman, he is a racist, and although he initially intends to rescue his niece, he decides to kill her when he finds that she's been taken as a wife by the Indian chief. But when he finally does catch up to her, after a long ride across the desert, he sweeps her up in his arms and brings her home.
In the film's final scene, all the other characters enter a house, but Wayne is left standing outside, framed in the doorway (scenes viewed through the dark side of the such portals are the film's recurring motif). He adopts a noble posture, holding his left arm with his right, but the film ends with the door swinging shut on him, forever barring him from what's inside the house.
The album drops April 26.
