Arts & Film

The Daily Telegraph has just published a list of its top 50 cover versions of all time. Assuming we’re sticking to popular music - jazz has lots of great “cover versions”, but the aesthetic of originality is different there - Jimi Hendrix at #1 with his version of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” is a good if safe choice. Aretha’s version of “Respect” would be my #1, and yes, that’s another safe choice.

A chillout song that samples Taana Gardner’s ‘‘Heartbeat" - anyone knows what song this is?

Following on from my thoughts on their talk on 9 Dec 2004, here’s some more of what the two sculptors said during the question-and-answer session, paraphrased rather than quoted verbatim:

Two of my favourite cover versions of 2004: Jimmy Eat World’s “Firestarter” (available on iTunes - I guess it’s technically a 2001 song since it appeared on the Last Christmas 7", but this seems to be the year of general release), which directed the fuck-the-world aggro of the Prodigy’s original inward, turning the tune into a hymn of self-loathing, and Beck’s lovely mellow take on the Korgis’ “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometimes”, from the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind soundtrack.

Dir. Richard Linklater Before Sunset condenses so much into its 80 minutes of real time that the temptation is to just review it in a tumble of breathless pauses, clauses, and run-on sentences. It’s the counterpart to Before Sunrise, the passage of time turning Jessie (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) wiser yet somehow not wizened. As a couple, they’re skirting what that night in Vienna meant to both of them, struggling to reclaim that feeling of possiblity, before infinite possibility became infinite jest, the wizened voice of experience that lets them savour the moment fighting with the forces of nostalgia, saudade, that makes them know that something has been lost, something ineffable. They now know what they had, all those years ago, was something special - that insouciance of youth, the one that leads you to think that magic moments are dime a dozen, has faded.

Okay, the “EP” isn’t in the actual title of Blackpool Deluxe, but anything that preserves the concept of the EP is great. Just picked it up from iTunes ($2.97 - it’s a companion to the pending Under Blackpool Lights live DVD; there’s also a Jolene single that’s from the UK’s XL Recordings, from the same concert). Blackpool Deluxe is just three songs recorded live at the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool in January 2004- nothing too unusual, just “Hotel Yorba”, a cover of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”, and “Seven Nation Army”. Everyone knows Jack and Meg love “Jolene” in that quasi-kitsch-yet-clearly-they-love-it way, and that they play the song at numerous gigs, but this is one of the only other legit recording of the Stripes’ version besides the one on the Hello Operator / Jolene 7" single and some promos floating around, so those bereft of the benefit of hearing Jack sing country might want to consider a purchase. Otherwise, there’re no earthshaking new arrangements on this, it’s basically the same old Stripes with the “woo"s of the crowd. Like it? Of course, all three songs are great. Essential? Not unless you’re a completionist.

Dir. Sam Raimi In Spider-Man 2, Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire continue the geek chic motif of the original. This time Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina, who perhaps needed a break from playing fathers who hit on their daughters), perhaps the greatest Spider-Man villain, tries to get the tritium he needs to build some energy device.

Dir. Audrey Wells Under the Tuscan Sun is a trifle, a fantasia of Italy, where ancient housing and rustic settings heal all wounds, apparently. Italy as Arcadia has been seen in such works as Room With a View; this just adds pretty camerawork. Diane Lane is Frances, a newly-divorced professor who gets tix to Tuscany from sympathetic friends looking to pull her out of post-divorce misery. Of course she stays on in Tuscany on a lark. Of course she bonds with the locals. And of course there’s an Italian charmer with smouldering eyes and the ability to make love in the way only native speakers of Romance languages can. It’s romance porn, rescued from pure hooey only by gorgeous camerawork, Lane’s radiance, and Sandra Oh’s sparky turn as Lane’s pregnant lesbian friend.

Even if you just go by the “popular” songs i.e. songs that were singles rather than album tracks, it’s easy to make a list of songs missing from the Rolling Stone Top 500. Since there was serious discounting of songs from the 80s onwards (80s - 50+ songs, 90s - 20 songs, 00s - 3 songs), it was easy enough to come up with a quick list of some missing tunes:

There’s an interview with Chris Rock over at the Onion A.V. Club (which I admit I tend to forego in favour of the fake news). Lots of fascinating stuff about how hard it is to be a black comedian and get on SNL (nice little jibe at Jay Mohr too). Also, there’s an interesting little snippet on Jim Carrey from their In Living Color days:

A list of cover versions that I’ve been looking for, and that the good blogger at Copy, Right (my favourite blog of obscure covers) don’t seem to have: The Merrymakers, No More Lonely Nights

Something Awful has accurate album covers. Funny thing is how they’re really big dance music in-jokes (“Paul Oakenfold: 80 Minutes of the Same Damn Loop” - how true, how true).

Another MP3 blog, this one beautifully designed: Aurgasm.

Tom Waits is to music what Charles Bukowski is to books. Discuss.

After reading an interview with Bai Ling in Singaporean weekly I-S Magazine, I’ve concluded: she’s either somewhat crazy, or she needs to brush up on her English. No online link, but here’s a sample:

Singapore being bereft of a Berwick Street or any sort of musty old record store with surly clerks, music blogs are the way I learn about new sounds, and MP3 blogs are like my way of virtual crate-digging. Here’s my current list:

Dir. Keenen Ivory Wayans White Chicks is about a pair of ne’er-do-well FBI agents (Shawn and Marlon Wayans) who’re assigned to escort a pair of rich-“rhymes-with-witch” heiresses to the Hamptons and end up having to get into white-girl drag since the women won’t go to the Hamptons themselves (car accident, mild scratch, the horror). That gets the premise out of the way. Actually, for a Wayans brothers film that’s plenty of premise to hang the gags on - Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood and Scary Movie were hardly models of Aristotlean plot unity, but they made you laugh.

Dir. Jill Sprecher If you’ve ever read Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, you’ll know that the book’s description of signs that appear everywhere suggests two opposite poles that are equally terrifying to the human mind: everything either happens according to some grand system or conspiracy, or everything happens out of pure randomness. 13 Conversations About One Thing ponders the horror and hope of the latter scenario. The film is about the intersecting lives of New Yorkers, searching for that elusive “one thing” of the title, happiness, or fulfillment in its various forms. For happiness is the promise of America, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, and therefore the promise of America’s largest city, New York. Yet in 13 Conversations About One Thing, happiness, like the rabbit of a greyhound track, remains visible but just beyond one’s grasp.

I’m reading Q magazine on the “1010 songs you must own”. Yeah, Q has this obsession with lists, but it’s a good list - part Q’s own suggestions, part nominations from musicians - that points out quite a few new tunes to check out. It does end with a top 10 that’s not particularly controversial:

“I was sad because I had no on-board fax until I saw a man who had no mobile phone” - New Yorker cartoon Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety is about one of the fundamental paradoxes of modern capitalism and meritocracy. By making it possible (or at least trying) for anyone to succeed in a society, the corollary must be that those who don’t succeed somehow brought it upon themselves. It’s the troubling flip side of opportunity, perhaps because of the fundamental attribution error: people tend to discount the role of luck and fortune in judging success, and so create these assumptions of morality associated with success.