newcritics

Pete Townshend is writing his memoirs. Or rather, he’s blogging them.
This differs from a decade ago, when Townshend signed with Little Brown to write his autobiography. Work commenced, but the book wasn’t finished. So now, Pete’s blogging his memoirs - on one of two blogs he’s launched in the last week or so to replace [...]

I realize Kevin Gilbert doesn’t do it for everyone, but some readers here have commented that they liked his remake of “Kashmir.” I’ve decided to post some of his other remakes for your listening pleasure, and to demonstrate that “Kashmir” was no fluke.

The Big Chill generation has high expectations for its rock stars. To satisfy, the greatest of them must at least aspire to the mantel of “spokesmen for a generation” or at least to the kind of social relevance that is the raison d’etre of John Mellencamp’s new album, Freedom’s Road.
The idea that every Elvis [...]

I think this was recorded in 1994. [Links to listen are at the end of this post.] The call had gone out for Led Zeppelin remakes for the planned tribute titled “Encomium.” At the time, Kevin Gilbert was working with Sheryl Crow and the Tuesday Night Music Club. He was respected as a genius by [...]

The festival was over, the boys were all plannin’ for a fall,
The cabaret was quiet except for the drillin’ in the wall.
The curfew had been lifted and the gamblin’ wheel shut down,
Anyone with any sense had already left town.
He was standin’ in the doorway lookin’ like the Jack of Hearts.
OK, the festival is over for [...]

Okay, all you blog stars. According to my watch, it’s 7:57pm, so let’s get this show on the road.
Just wanted to warn you all about a few things. I’m not going to get into all the high-brow, deep thought type stuff behind all the movies tonight. I’m not going to get all hoity [...]

I straightened my skirt, put on my heels, checked my lipstick and rushed to my car. I was supposed to meet him at 4. I couldn’t believe I was doing something like this. I had never done anything like this before! I couldn’t be late!
I found a place to park right [...]

Humphrey Bogart is my personal, all-time favorite “Best Actor.” Before I knew who he was, I heard his name, I saw him depicted in Warner Brothers cartoons, and I heard his voice impersonated on sitcoms, variety shows and TV commercials. Humphrey Bogart was (and still is) the quintessential movie star.

Today we focus on movies by way of a glitzy, Vegas-style revue show that has almost nothing to do with brilliant film-making. It’s Hoillywood celebrating Hollywood with schmaltz, and it’s evolved from a rather subdued black tie dinner at Sid Grauman’s theater to a megcast shown around the world and widely reviled for its length, [...]

“I lost to a fucking actor. And then I lost to another fucking actor.”
Thus, according to the Siren’s source, did Martin Scorsese sum up his decade-bracketing Oscar nominations for Raging Bull and Goodfellas. When he lost the 2004 Oscar, the Siren could only think, oh no, a third actor–although watching Clint Eastwood climb to [...]

…the best movie of the year.
The Oscar almost never goes to the best movie of the year.  The best movie of the year is rarely nominated, and that’s become even more the case over the last decade as more and more of the best picture nominees have been movies released in the late fall and [...]

When I was young, the Academy Awards still retained an unmistakeable aura of glamor and remove. There in one big room for one long evening, we all watched American royalty - the truly big names. The real stars. Cary Grant. Katherine Hepburn. Jimmy Stewart. John Wayne. Bette Davis. Lauren Bacall. Henry Fonda. Burt Lancaster. Bing [...]

Watch the eyes in the opening sequences of Little Miss Sunshine.
This is gratuitous advice because the camera gives us practically nothing else to watch, beginning with the very first shot looking into the eyes of the seven year old Olive widened in hope and wonder and terrible, terrible, fear.
We meet all the main characters by [...]

Question kept going through my head while watching The Queen, particularly during the scenes of the Queen bouncing along in her Land Rover as she drove herself up into the highlands around Balmoral Castle.
Whose job was it to teach the young Princess Elizabeth to drive? Googled up my answer as soon as we got home. [...]

“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.”
So wrote T.E.Lawrence [...]

I had my Oscar acceptance speech all ready. It was gonna be a beaut…funny, touching …something that would appeal to both the heads and hearts of my adoring public. Then I read the review in the Boston Globe, which called The Kiss the worst film of the 2003 Boston Film Festival. The critic in Beantown’s [...]

The best of Steven Cloud’s Boy on a Stick & Slither (BOASAS) comics recall Calvin & Hobbes, and Linus’ existential philosophizing in the glory days of Peanuts.
The strip has reached new heights lately — “Champions of Winning” (at left) is a recent favorite — but it’s always been good.
“Conformity” has hung on my [...]

I have been somewhat out of it this awards season. I missed Golden Globes, Actor’s Guild, Grammys, and I know there were others that were probably telecast on Bravo or something. I only saw one of the Best Pictures (The Departed) and a handful of those with actors up for awards. I [...]

For my birthday this year, The Viscountess bought me the entire Star Trek original series on DVD. We have been watching the episodes in their original broadcast order, averaging about 2 or 3 per week. There are 70-some-odd episodes, and we want the experience to last. It has been perhaps 10 years since the program [...]

I’ve been hooked on the Gasoline Alley comic strip since I was a kid, probably because it was one of the cartoons that my dad used to read to me out of the Daily News when I sat on his lap. Today, sadly, I read it mostly out of habit…only mildly amusing on its best [...]

“In the real dark night of the soul, it is always 3 o’clock in the morning, day after day,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in his 1936 book The Crack-Up.
It’s a poignant, sad, personal expression of his own mental state, when at 39 he comes to realize that somewhere along the line he has [...]

Colin, dear, come sit beside me and take this old woman’s hand. Yes, I know I’m only two years older than you, darling, but for the purposes of this conversation, I am a wise and wizened dame of a noble Southern tradition, and you must fix your dark eyes upon me, still and attentive, while [...]

Tales of Iraqi translators being denied U.S. visas after endangering their lives to aid the American military remind me of a scene — and harrowing moment in history — from Tom Bissell’s The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam.
South Vietnam has fallen. North Vietnamese soldiers [...]

Mario, the postman in the film Il Postino, in an effort to win the heart of Beatrice Russo, steals some poems from Pablo Neruda. Later he justifies his action by telling the poet:
Poems don’t belong to those who write them. They belong to those who need them.
This begs the question of the text with a [...]

“Does anyone know where the love of God goes…?” I’ve had that unattributed lyric in my head for over thirty years. Many times I’ve sat down in attempt to scribe a few words for a riff I’ve come up with, and that lyric has found a way to the surface time and time again. [...]

Keith Lee Morris’ short story, Testimony, in the latest issue of A Public Space (03) is among the best I’ve read, which is saying a lot, since I have been reading mostly short stories for a year. On the surface, it is a straightforward tale in which a first-person narrator, under questioning in court, relates [...]

The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was released in 1963. I was 6. My older brother went off to Viet Nam in 1966 and returned in one piece in 1967. He was a big fan of Dylan. I was a big fan of my big brother. He played the guitar and turned me on to [...]

The voice seems familiar, but the venue’s different. I’m driving down the highway, and there’s a guy on the radio talking about a record he’s about to play. I’m not sure what station’s on, but that voice…the emphasis on the last syllable of each sentence. The late-middle age growl. The cynical humor, a sardonic grin [...]

Said I wasn’t going to, but I did anyway. Saw The Departed the other night.
It’s good. I liked it. Scorsese should finally get his Oscar, though he’s made better. The movie has no real ending. The catastrophe that brings about the violent climax depends on several characters suddenly getting far more [...]

Blink.
Blink.
Eyes wide open in a pool of light. Eyes scrunched shut. Brow furrowed.
Gotta get in the zone.
Get in the zone.
THE ZONE.
And then he was.
The other Tom Watson here, the one from the central bit of England that we locals call The Midlands, reviewing a recent Scott Matthews gig and album, Passing Stranger.
Scott Matthews, [...]

It starts in a dusty border town, two strangers finishing up work in distant parts, see a group of men refuse to bury a drunk indian. The men, professionals, at which it isn’t quite clear, but pros, drive the hearst up to Boot Hill. When a crowd of men try to stop them, a single [...]

Hi, I’m Steve Gilliard of The NewsBlog.net. I’ll be posting here when I have time.
Tomorrow Never Knows from Revolver is like looking at a sonic explorer, ready to cast off into the unknown. The song is trippy, but the album changed what rock could be. It wasn’t pop, it certainly wasn’t the blues fueled [...]

Valentine’s Day summons up memories for me of the time Steed and I spent with the BVS (British Venusian Society) a while back.
It also calls to mind some of the great poetry of the ages.
I always thought Matthew Arnold had the best all round take on love in that exquisite last stanza of Dover Beach. [...]

Paul McCartney’s Every Night has got to be one of my favorite songs from his post-Beatle catalogue. Never mind the the silly lyrics. The beautiful melody, the sparse arrangement (original version found on McCartney,) and the sentiment are all perfect. Matthew Sweet does it some justice. This track appears on the mixed-bag [...]

Once I knew a girl in the hard hard times
She made me a shirt out of fives and dimes
Now she’s gone but when I wear it she crosses my mind
And if the best is for the best than the best is unkind
Josh Ritter opened with “Best is for the Best” last night at Park West. [...]