blog riley

Wordle, here's a wee glimpse:




Bonus rounds: lyrics to A Day in the Life, and guess the poem.

Having watched the pilot for Mary MacCormack's risibly noxious new USA series, In Plain Site, all the ads woven into the Closer's return only underline the lack of decent material for actresses coming into their own. A couple seasons back MM had recurring roles on both ER and The West Wing. Now she's a Federal marshall overseeing protection spivs with a dysfunctional sister who's forced to... BEND THE RULES. And now HBO, high on its Wire fumes, lets Simon perform the ultimate act of genre glorification: Generation Kill. I gave up after one episode -- it needed more of the Dickensian aspect.

The contraption is one thing -- the announcer is a club mix in waiting.

Out of commission until 7/14, so go nuts.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH: Leonard Cohen in Montreal: "I haven't been on a stage here in 14 or 15 years... I was 60 years old -- a kid with a crazy dream."

"...He had a white-labelled 45 rpm test pressing on the turntable and he put it into play. The room was filled with this amazing sound. I had no idea what it was, but it was the most incredible thing I'd ever heard. I slowly and numbly felt my way through the aural maze and discerned what I thought were two black guys singing a very sad, tortured, oh so laboured and stated regret about things 'she' didn't do anymore when they kissed, of eyes no longer closing when they called her name... or was it kissed her lips?

"Underneath lay a bed of sustained everything -- drones of echo'd majestic hurt that lasted forever, the only movement provided by a La Bamba-thick bass on quinalbarbitone. Come the chorus, the track, as one, started a stop-start tymphflayed, ricochet'd beat as voices, angels and strings strained in Wagnerian, classical ache, followed by another verse of high pain. On the altar of middle eight the rhythm got down on its knees, pulling the symphonic sustain along to the next corner -- and just 'babys' and 'please.' The two voices' gospel shrieks and wails were then propelled by a bass-end Latin suggestion of rhythm and hope through the last heaven's gate of the final, telling chorus.

"That last chorus was as if Jesus had risen, as if Moses had come down with the Ten Commandments of sound.... There was so much sound that I wouldn't not have been surprised if I'd just heard three different recordings playing different parts of the whole. The audio fidelity was that awe-inspiring..." -- Andrew Loog Oldham in 2STONED (Vintage 2003), p. 76-77.

from Ray Connolly in the Daily Mail...

Greil Marcus on "rock poetry" in last week's Guardian:
The June 1966 issue of the youth-oriented American fashion magazine Glamour carried an unusual feature: lyrics from the soon to be released Bob Dylan song Visions of Johanna, which Dylan had been performing onstage, alone, with an acoustic guitar, since late in the previous fall. "Seems like a freeze-out," he'd say to introduce the song before stepping into its slow, languid account of a night of bohemian gloom. Soon the song, recorded in Nashville earlier in the year with the best session players in town, would make a black hole on the first side of Dylan's double album Blonde on Blonde... (more)

Your Life Is In Your Foot's Hands.