Singles 4/21-4/29

While the score for Courtney Love’s would-be comeback sounds about right, I can’t stop playing it. I’m a sucker for the way Love inhabits a song so thoroughly that she can at the same time step back and delight in the audacity of her performance. “I Need a Dollar” was the other striking song, most

Shercrock.

If Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law had agreed to star in a Sherlock Holmes movie in which they sat over a fine meal and good wine, debating the subtleties of detective work and numerology as if they were André Gregory and Wallace Shawn in My Dinner With André, Guy Ritchie would still have mauled

Portrait of a Bush: Laura Bush’s memoirs

I like Laura Bush. Blame my attraction to self-possessed middle-aged women. Her fashion sense, skin tone, modesty, obvious intelligence, and gravelly tones (which sound as if they’ve been roughened by brandy and lots of cursin’) — all pluses. It’s no intellectual exercise for me to consider her the best First Lady of the last forty

And another thing…

Hearing “Bring’em Out” this afternoon for the first time since 2008, I can’t wait until the inevitable T.I. compilation.

Happy Sunday

A new translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex which, yes, remains unloved, unread, and unfashionable. You’ll have an easier time of it if you treat it as a novel whose narrative voice switches from colorless to unforced empathy depending on whether it’s dealing with recitations of essential facts or the psychosexual maturation of

4/21 Singles!

I wax and wane on the LCD Soundsystem single. After eight years of discussion I don’t want to hear about them anymore. In a more ecumenical state of mind I would have forgiven James Murphy’s tics as examples of how he’s “deepening” his songcraft. All songs ranked on a ten-point scale. Pill – Hear Somebody

35 Shots of Rum: Shot of Love

It took thirty minutes of watching 35 Shots of Rum to figure out that Lionel (Alex Descas) is Josephine’s (Mati Diop) father, not her lover. In the manner of the Taiwanese cinema with which she shares stylistic affinities, Claire Denis places considerable demands on the audience’s patience. What links her work with recent films by

Diane Wood: “Principled convictions,” persuasive powers

Glenn Greenwald makes the case for nominating Diane Wood.

Unspooled: Don’t monkey with my business

Before I knew how Robert Christgau felt (“As public figures and maybe as people, these imperialist wimps are the most deplorable pop stars of the postpunk if not post-Presley era”), I knew how their bass lines and gauche synthesizers felt: slimy, delicious around the edges, lacking nutritive qualities. I’ve said repeatedly that my parents didn’t

Happy Saturday

Obama to Health Secretary: Give visitation rights to partners

Real progress of a sort.