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Continue reading →: Yummy surfaces: On “The Last Emperor”
One of the more forgotten Best Picture winners of the last thirty years, The Last Emperor got the Criterion treatment in 2008. Four discs of goodies, one of which includes the superfluous “TV cut” and the other a decent interview with the film’s white-haired, coy co-composer David Byrne. I would…
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Continue reading →: Singles 5/12
A week later, I’m ready to upgrade my grade for “Born Free,” whereas I haven’t to “Everything to Me” since I reviewed it at the beginning of May (it’s still one of the best R&B singles of a boring year). All scores are based on a ten-point system. Monica –…
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Continue reading →: Oh dear.
We haven’t paid such a low percentage of our income in state and federal taxes since the days of Harry Truman, according to USA Today. Socialists like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are responsible. What will Barack Obama do?
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Continue reading →: “Sadness without cause”
Four albums into a career that garners more raves and higher sales, The National have set the standard for caffeinated melancholy. They write songs with lots of rolling drums, judiciously deployed guitars and strings, and Matt Berninger’s rumbling baritone rumbling sadly about sad things. Every album boasts at least three…
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Continue reading →: A tip
Don’t wait until your stereo’s almost kaput to replay Second Edition. I think I blew a speaker. What do I blame — the bass in “Careering” or Lydon in “Chant”?
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Continue reading →: “The whole thing felt pornographic”
While I’m delighted that another anti-gay crusader bites the dust, I was uneasy with how Miami New Times approached the story like ninth graders writing their first book report on sex. By the time I read last Thursday’s update I was really pissed off. After meeting Jo-Vanni Roman in a…
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Continue reading →: Singles 4/6
Misunderstanding an email sent by our editor (I thought he was yanking “Fembot”) accounts for the repetition in the Robyn blurbs, but the sentiment’s the same: I don’t understand the tolerance for Robyn at the expense of other members of the One Name Brigade who’ve mixed R&B, a slight skank,…
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Continue reading →: Little things I should have said and done
Another superb piece by Tom at FreakyTrigger on the Pet Shop Boys’ “Always On My Mind,” the Christmas Number One of 1987 in England, where these things matter. What struck me most about Willie Nelson’s version, which I heard years after the PSB’s, was its guilelessness, humility. Nelson’s courtly delivery…
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Continue reading →: Tetro: It’s not Francis Ford Coppola’s newest wine
Written and acted like a musical without song, Tetro is the work of an old artist recreating the follies, turpitudes, and half-formed fantasies that he would have embalmed and buried in his first film or novel (like Bernardo Bertulucci’s Before The Revolution or star Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo 66, say). In…
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Continue reading →: Lynn Redgrave: RIP
I never saw Georgy Girl, but as the more workaday Redgrave she graced purgatorial stuff from my childhood like “Murder, She Wrote.” She made a minor comeback in the late nineties with roles in Shine and Gods & Monsters (the kind of overacting that Oscar loves). My favorite performance was…
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Continue reading →: Happy Sunday
I love how she gulps on syllables like the whiskey she’s supposedly drinking (I believe her). The loosest she’s ever been.
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Humanizing The Vacuum 