LINE OF THE MONTH "Crime watch on the braid..." Marjene reluctantly agrees with her neighbor to keep an eye on her own polygamist wife. SONG TITLES TO LIVE BY from Willie Nelson on Imus in the Morning: "I Hate Every Bone In Your Body Except Mine." … [Read more...]
“COOK, SEW, MAKE FLOWERS GROW…
CAN YOU UNDERSTAND MY PAIN?"* Despite some SHAMELESS name-dropping (never a good sign), Goldstein's "Satellite Dylan" piece in The Nation (nice cover!) steers things back to the bard's misogyny, which he usually skates on: I don't claim that Dylan is determined by machismo -- there's much more … [Read more...]
DUMMY
Time was when a set of Chopin Nocturnes didn't really make waves... everybody does'em, and recently the fad has centered more around the Preludes. Both can be mistaken for student pieces, but like everything else by our beloved Freddie, they're all student pieces and every pianist is gonna play them … [Read more...]
WICKED MESSENGER
THE BOB DYLAN ENCYCLOPEDIA by Michael Gray (832 pp, Continuum) While not the David Thomson of rock, Gray aims pretty high, and hits enough marks to keep you going back for more (see Marcus, Greil, and Lee, CP). Without ever describing his tone or solo style, his incisive entry on Robbie Robertson … [Read more...]
PAUL FORD:
THE MOST RADICAL WRITER IN AMERICA If I were lucky enough to be teaching a Freshman expos-lit course, I'd bring this in (from 5/02/06): Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, released a video in which he showed his face and claimed that the Bush Administration had lied about its … [Read more...]
ASKED AND ANSWERED
On May 4, 2006, at 2:07 PM, JB wrote: Dear fellow music lovers: As you know, I collect lists. Over the years, I have assembled a list of the top records of all time, as identified by various critics and publications. These lists usually focus on rock, pop and r&b, with very little attention to … [Read more...]
CINCO DE MAYO
blog of the week What Would Jesus Blog? LOVE LIKE A TRUCK On two new releases, the Bottle Rockets make like special prosecutor's on the country's warrantless wire-tapping WMD-lying ass: Zoysia and Live in Heilbronn Germanny July 17, 2005 on which they make Neil Young's "Cortez" lie down and beg … [Read more...]
STILL NO “QUAGMIRE”… PYRRHIC, ANYONE?
FINISH THAT THOUGHT [DEPT OF FISH IN A BARREL] "I think people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English and they ought to learn to sing the national anthem in English..." and all those Texas towns should all be English and the Latin on our judicial buildings should be in … [Read more...]
TIE GOES TO THE MORTAL
Just do it. … [Read more...]
FIGHT THE REAL ENEMY
AHEAD-OF-HER-TIME SINEAD, NOW WORSE... FLAILING IN A NETHERWORLD OF POST-CONSTITUTIONAL DENIAL... PILLAGING A SEEMINGLY MORE INNOCENT PAST TO MAKE EVEN LESS SENSE OF AN INCOMPREHENSIBLE PRESENT... TOM LEHRER DROPS SATIRE WHEN REALITY SURPASES HIS ABILITY TO MAKE FUN OF IT... OVER FORTY YEARS AND … [Read more...]
DON’T STOP
'TIL YOU GET ENOUGH In retrospect, the crotch clutch seems at once desperate and abstract. It is as if he were telling us, "Fine, you need to know I'm a man, a black man? Here's my dick: I'll thrust my dick at you! Isn't that what a black man's supposed to do? But I'm Michael Jackson, so just … [Read more...]
THE GOOD PEOPLE OF VERMONT
WILL NOT APOLOGIZE "Billy Joel is no Leonard Bernstein..." FOR ITS CHEESE [WAIT! THERE'S MORE...] MORE CATHOLIC RECRUITMENT SLOGANS: "I think for myself not to come up with my own teaching," he writes, "but to make the Church's teaching my own." … [Read more...]
TRAMP THE DIRT DOWN
DIED. CASPAR WEINBERGER, 88, wry, intellectual public servant whose long record of toil in the White Houses of Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan was marred by a late, rare blemish: a 1992 indictment for allegedly covering up facts in the Iran-contra scandal, which he vigorously denied and for which … [Read more...]
FOR EVERYTHING ELSE THERE’S ELVIS
Gasbag cranium duty on History Channel's 10 DAY-WORLD -SHAKE series, the Elvis installment, airs Tuesday, April 11, at 9/8pm. Brought to you by MasterCard: the freaky-deeky credit card with the curiously pre-Wiki CompoundName. … [Read more...]