Saturday, January 19, 2013

The Go-Between's Twin Layers Of Lightning

I think I'd trade everything Pulp ever did for this one track. Forster and McClennan were that good.

Friday, January 11, 2013

An Interesting Comment

As part of the avclub's 'What we're rooting for at the Oscars' rundown, one Phil Dyess-Nugent (not an avclub regular as far as I'm aware) remarks as follows:

The only legitimate reason to care about the Oscars is the effect they can have on the careers of the people involved... For that reason, I’m very happy to see Jennifer Lawrence’s Best Actress nomination for Silver Linings Playbook. There’s not a chance in hell she’ll win; young actress[es] don’t win Oscars for being that funny and sexy and insanely alive, unless (like Marisa Tomei and Mira Sorvino) they can be squeezed into the Best Supporting Actress category, and even then they can expect to spend the rest of their lives being expected to apologize for it. [My italics]
The suggestion that there's a kind of vengefulness against youth and beauty associated with Academy Awards to young actresses is as intriguing as it is chilling. I'm not sure that the suggestion is correct, indeed I suspect that much of the evidence for anything like Dyess-Nugent's thesis is also evidence of the Academy's larger aversion to comedy, hence can't differentially establish what Dyess-Nugent needs. But the point deserves further study.

Thursday, January 10, 2013

Les Rhythmes Digitales Live(?)

They sound utterly terrific (esp. 'Soft Machine') in these clips:

Lots of backing tapes surely but enough live stuff to be impressive. On this evidence, LRD and Stuart Prices's projects more generally need to play live a lot more than they do. In general, too, a new LRD album would be very welcome.