Welcome Guest! Mar 29, 2024 - 05:44 AM  
Homepage  |  Downloads  |  FAQ  |  Forums  |  Gallery  |  WebLinks
Main Menu
Online
There are 144 unlogged users and 0 registered users online.

You can log-in or register for a user account here.
  
Lucinda Williams, Cover Songs, CYHSY, Barktoberfest   Printer-friendly page   Send this story to someone
Monday, October 08, 2007 - 08:00 AM
Posted by: Karl

Karl

SIMON & GARFUNKEL, like Christopher Columbus and the cast of Easy Rider, look for "America."

JOHNNY ROTTEN, on the 30th anniversary reissue of "God Save The Queen," tells London's Sun that Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl and that vinyl is still where it's at.  He concludes with a familiar saying.

LUCINDA WILLIAMS has been playing an album a night in NYC and LA.  The second set each night has featured plenty of guests, including Steve Earle, Fionn Regan, David Johansen on "Jailhouse Tears" (nsfw) and "Looking For A Kiss," David Byrne on "Buck Naked" and Willie Nile on "I Wanna Be Sedated."

COVER ME:  Heather Browne is streaming three tracks from a covers disc released by BBC Radio One -- The Foo Fighters cover "Band On The Run," Stereophonics cover "You Sexy Thing," and Kooks cover "All That She Wants."

BOB DYLAN:  NY magazine's Culture Vulture compiles his ten most incomprehensible interviews, with plenty of embedded video.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN & PATTI SCIALFA are being sued by an Olympic equestrian for allegedly backing out of a contract to buy a horse worth 850K for their daughter.  It really doesn't get any more blue-collar than that.

JOY DIVISION:  Peter Hook, Stephen Morris and Bernard Sumner talk to London's Sun about their late bandmate Ian Curtis after watching the biopic Control.  It appears that director Anton Corbijn and his cast really did their homework, as this mash-up clip of "Transmission" demonstrates.

CLAP YOUR HANDS SAY YEAH stopped by The Current for a chat and mini-set you can stream on demand via MPR.

THE NATIONAL:  A piece in Canada's Gazette suggests that writing songs up to their standard takes as long as it has taken the band to achieve a level of notoriety.

LOUDON WAINRIGHT III played the World Cafe on Friday, so you can stream the whole gig now via NPR.

KATE MOSS & LILY ALLEN reportedly got into a verbal catfight over Courtney Love at London's The Groucho Club.

PETE DOHERTY tried to kill himself in rehab after discovering that his ex love Kate Moss was dating a new man, according to the uber-reliable News of the World.

BRITNEY SPEARS:  The pop tart continues her meltdown.  Her first scheduled visit with her children since being stripped of custody was a disaster, though Life & Style has the Spears spin on the same story.  She has reportedly reunited with her with estranged mom; OK! magazine claims that mama Lynne and little sister Jamie Lynn flew into L.A. to stage an intervention... but that Spears stormed out of her Malibu home afterward.  Her "friends" are worried that the court-ordered parenting counseling and drug-testing will cause an added drain to her rapidly depleting funds.  "Performers make money off touring," a source told Page Six. "And we all know she can't do that."  Ouch!

PAM ANDERSON and French Hotel sex tape co-star Rick Salomon tied the knot Saturday night in Las Vegas at the Mirage Hotel before Anderson's children and members of her family, during the break between between Anderson's two magic shows.  It is the third doomed marriage for both of them.

JENNIFER LOPEZ is knocked up.  Indeed, TMZ reports that J.Lo and Marc Anthony are expecting twins, so eventually there will be gossip about whether artificial insemination was involved.

LINDSAY LOHAN is officially checked out of the exclusive Cirque Lodge Treatment Center in Utah, according to her parents.  Li-Lo plans to start filming her tango-themed move, Dare to Love Me, in L.A. on Oct. 15. A source tells People magazine that Lohan has been insured for the film.

WEEKEND BOX OFFICE:  The Rock's Game Plan scored another upset victory with 16.2 million on a 29% drop, while The Heartbreak Kid remake opened to  a disappointing 14 mil from 3,299 theaters.  The Kingdom fell the normal 45% its second weekend in release, earning 9.3 mil and continuing to disappoint, though it may just be difficult selling war-themed movies this season.  Resident Evil 3 came in 4th place, taking in 4.3 mil.  Rounding out the Top Five, The Seeker flopped, earning a mere 3.7 mil in its debut.  Good Luck Chuck dropped 44% and two spots from last weekend, making 3.5 mil, for a total of 29.1 million.  The J-Lo produced, Reggaeton-themed drama Feel The Noise debuted with just enough over 3.4 mil to edge out 3:10 to Yuma.  The Brave One managed ninth place and 2.3 million -- a comment on the lack of competition.  Mr. Woodcock rounds out the Top Ten with 2.2 million, it has made just over 20 mill on a rumored 80 mil budget.  Overall, box office was down 26% compared to last year's.

THE DARJEELING LIMITED, I'm sad to report, disappointed me.  If The Life Aquatic found Wes Anderson & Co. treading water creatively, The Darjeeling Limited finds them as lost as the Whitman bros. are in the script, and relying on metaphors as obvious as the two I just used.  Though a number of the unfavorable reviews of this movie suggest Anderson has simply reduced the magic of earlier films like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums to formula, the real problem for me was one of the ways in which this movie departs from the Anderson formula.  In his earlier films, Anderson has been very good (his detractors would say too good) at defining the relationships of the characters to each other early in each flick.  In The Darjeeling Limited, the relationship among the members of the Whitman family never get very well-defined, which made me care much less about their struggles.  Moreover, while Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman did well enough with the material they had, Owen Wilson seemed miscast as the most anal-retentive of the three brothers.  The movie has its moments, but they are really only moments.  Hardcore Anderson fans are going to want to see it anyway, but I don't see The Darjeeling Limited as broadening Anderson's audience.  If you do go see it, watch Hotel Chevalier online first, which makes it maddening that it's offered through iTunes (you can see it in two parts via the Tube, but shhh...).

BRADGELINA:  Jolie's estranged dad, Jon Voight, was spotted leaving The Waldorf Astoria hotel where the Jolie-Pitts are staying.

ROSIE O'DONNELL is now claiming that Barbara Walters fired her from The View.  There's also an ambiguous reference to Astroglide in the article and I have no intention of trying to figure it out.

KEIRA KNIGHTLEY was... wait for it... caught canoodling in period attire with boyfriend Rupert Friend between takes on the set of The Duchess.  Photos at the link.

EWAN MacGREGOR has flown to Iraq to meet Britain's only female bomb disposal expert working in the war-torn country and to present her with a bravery award.

BE KIND REWIND director Michel Gondry talks to MTV about the movie and the arc of his career so far: "If this movie is not trashed by people, I will start to feel confident."

COLUMBUS DAY:  I get it as a holiday, so I thought a few words might be in order. Over the course of my life, I have seen the image of Columbus swing from unvarnished hero to genocidal criminal. Locales like Berkeley, CA have renamed the day "Indigenous Peoples Day. The ever-reliable Wikipedia still contains allegations of Genocide from Ward Churchill, though his bogus accounts were o­ne of the reasons he was dismissed from Colorado University. Columbus was certainly no sweetheart, but at the end of the 15th Century, it is fair to say that Europeans often did not treat each other all that well. Moreover, before the furriners showed up, Native North and South Americans engaged in slavery, tribal massacre, infanticide, scalping, human sacrifice, and the ritual skinning of slaves for their priests to wear. It was a far less civilized time all 'round. But the West is civilized today in part because of Columbus. Some four centuries-plus later, we all are still struggling to become more civilized, but focusing criticism o­n the more-civilized while giving the less civilized a pass is not particularly useful to that struggle.

IRAQ:  Powerful Shiite clerics Mudtada al-Sadr and Abdul Aziz Hakim announced a peace agreement Saturday aimed at ending frequent gun battles between their followers.  The agreement was a positive sign for the government of Prime Minister al-Maliki, as support from both is seen as necessary to avoid a vote of no confidence in Parliament.  Al-Sadr's Mahdi Army is being blamed for a bloody attack on two of Shiite Islam's holiest shrines in the southern city of Karbala in late August.  Bill Roggio looks at AQI's Ramadan assassination program as Sunni insurgent groups continue to turn on the terror group.  A militant group leader accused of sectarian violence against Sunnis in the Arab Danan region was detained on Friday.  Bill Ardolino looks at the dramatic changes in the Fallujah Police Department from January 2007 to today.  Iraq's national security adviser says a "big fat no" to any military attack on Iran.

IRAQ and the MEDIA:  Although Time magazine has been slow to report that it's likely that no US soldiers will face murder charges from the Haditha shootings, the NYT blames the delay in investigating the incident for a loss of evidence.  That was a factor, but the NYT doesn't mention that the witness statements were contradictory to each other and contradicted in several cases by the physical evidence in the buildings.  Nor does the NYT report on whether the witnesses were biased, or looking to collect "blood money" from the US for their loss.  Nor does the NYT report that the hearing officer, Lt. Col. Paul Ware, wrote in one report that he recommended dismissing charges because they were based not only on were based on unreliable witness accounts, but also insupportable forensic evidence and questionable legal theories.  What the NYT does report about Lt. Col Ware is that "he felt that the killings should be considered in context - that of a war zone where the enemy ruthlessly employed civilians as cover" and that "He's aggressive, and he seems to make his judgments without regard for anything but the law. He must know that people - civilians, primarily - are going to howl about this, but that doesn't seem to be a concern."  So Ware considered the events in context and judged cases by the law, rather than public outcry for a scapegoat; that's quite an indictment.  BTW, the NYT story also suggests that Haditha had looked to be the "defining atrocity" of the conflict in Iraq... as opposed to the AQI truck-bombing that killed 500 Iraqis in a single day, or the Samarrah mosque bombing that ignited sectarian violence nationwide, or any of the many, many atrocities committed by jihadis in Iraq.  Apparently, the NYT is of the position that only the US commits war atrocities.  BONUS:  Defend Our Marines has a Marine Corps intelligence summary that says the deadly encounter was an intentional propaganda ploy planned and paid for by Al Qaeda foreign fighters.

IRAQ and the MEDIA II:  Yesterday, on CNN's Reliable Sources program, Robin Wright, who covers national security for The Washington Post, and CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr tell Howie Kurtz that that the decline in Iraqi casualties need not have gotten more media attention, but that any increase in US or Iraqi casualties "by any definition, is news."  Wright argues that the casualty count is "tricky," when in fact counts from the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count and Iraq Body Count show the same trend as the numbers used by Gen. Petraeus, and has no explanation for why it was easy to count casualties when they were rising, but suddenly "tricky" now that they are declining.  If you prefer, you can watch the video on the Tube.

BARKTOBERFEST:  Dogs celebrate Halloween early in Pensacola, FL.  Gallery at the link.

THE SQUIRREL THREAT:  The NYT covers factional fighting between red and gray squirrels in the UK.

SNAKE IN A WARDROBE:  No sign of a withch, though.

A RANDY PEACOCK sexually attacked Baronet Sir Benjamin Slade's Lexus,  incidenatlly proving the bird to be gay.  NTTAWWT.

BEETLES caught overdosing on Peruvian cocaine.  Dutch customs feeling their oats after last week's bust of Mr. Potato Head.

3683 Reads

Comments

Display Order
Only logged in users are allowed to comment. register/log in
Home  |  Share Your Story  |  Recommend Us