Argh! My in tray is overflowing.
ITEM! If, like me, you have always wanted to read Robert Hughes on R Crumb, well, now you can.
ITEM! So, Shane Warne has decided to live in England. I guess the long-distance dirty phone calls were getting too expensive.
ITEM! Over in the rest of weblog-world (witness, for example, Simon Reynolds and a loooong Dissensus thread, both links at right), feathers are being ruffled left right and centre as debate rages over the worth or otherwise of M.I.A. It seems that the Sri Lankan-born singer has become the poster child (willing or unwitting? the jury is out) for all kinds of cultural theory-type arguments, pro and con. It's nice to see healthy differences of opinion breaking out, as long as everyone can be friends after the smoke has cleared. Me? Well, when the hype machine starts humming, I usually take a few steps back and wait for some substance to appear. I like some of it, some of it leaves me shrugging my shoulders. Heck, if she wants to put pepper on her mango, that's fine by me. I find that ice cream makes for a much better combination.
ITEM! I recently commenced the daunting but essential task of reading through Marcello Carlin's Church of Me from day one. Strange thing is, it wasn't long before I stumbled on a quote from James Ellroy's "The Cold Six Thousand", which is my current bedtime reading. What would have been really spooky is if he had been quoting a passage I had just read or was just about to read. As it is, he may well have inadvertently given away a significant plot point. But some 500 pages of the tautest prose ever written (longest sentence so far: eight words; use of adjectives: non-existent) still ahead of me (it is probably the equivalent of a couple of thousand pages written by any other writer you can think of), it will likely be many months before I stumble upon the passage for myself, by which time I will have completely forgotten about it.
ITEM! Headed into the centre of Canberra on the weekend to spend a bit of overtime money before the kids steal it from me. I fully intended to buy the new M. Ward album, and perhaps the LCD Soundsystem disc. But I got ambushed by a number of essential pickups at Revolution (Scott Walker's "Boychild: 1967-1970", which I am a bit embarrassed about not already owning, especially given the name of this weblog; Steve Reich's "Drumming", in a 2-CD Deutsche Grammophon package; "The K&D Sessions"; and David Bowie's "Station To Station", which I have always rated as an essential album, thus making my prior disposal of the vinyl even more inexplicable). Then upstairs in the comic shop I "had" to buy Book Four of Alan Moore's "Promethea" series, even though I have some reservations about the somewhat academic tone of some of the discourse about magic(k), because it is obviously the current Moore project that he is taking seriously, unlike the myriad other Moore-related books that seem like he is tossing them off in his sleep (which obviously doesn't make them rubbish, but I'll leave it for others to actually read them). When he is working hard, nobody can twist the comics medium to their own ends as well as Moore can. (Compare and contrast Dennis Potter and television.) So M. Ward will have to await another day.
ITEM! In the New Yorker of 1 February 1958 (price: 25 cents) Whitney Bailliett gives a somewhat lukewarm reception to Miles Davis's "Miles Ahead: Miles Davis + 19". He likes the idea (breathing life into the moribund big-band concept) but is not entirely sold on the execution. His take is that it represents the last gasp of the "cool" school of jazz, which he sees as having run its course. Of course, he doesn't know what is coming next. It will be interesting to see his take on "Porgy and Bess" and, crucially, "Sketches of Spain". What Bailliett sees, through the eyes of 1958, as the end of one thing we know to have been the beginning of something else entirely. There's probably a lesson in there somewhere.
