January 2010
24 posts
“Boy, when you’re dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do...”
– J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
“He woke all night with the cold. He’d rise and mend back the fire and she...”
– Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
“[H]e was quivering. And why? Because he let the entire world press upon him. For...”
– Saul Bellow, Herzog
WatchMondo Monda: Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach talk about The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
“Instead of shooting arrows at someone else’s target, which I’ve...”
– Brian Eno - On gospel, Abba and the death of the record: an audience with Brian Eno | Interview | Music | The Observer
“Instruments sound interesting not because of their sound but because of the...”
– Brian Eno on the synthesiser - On gospel, Abba and the death of the record: an audience with Brian Eno | Interview | Music | The Observer
1 tag
1 tag
2 tags
ENO ON MILES DAVIS: Thinking about Miles Davis in...
When you listen to Miles Davis, how much of what you hear is music, and how much is context? Another way of saying that is, ‘What would you be hearing if you didn’t know you were listening to Miles Davis?’ I think of context as everything that isn’t physically contained in the grooves of the record, and in his case that seems quite a lot. It includes your knowledge, first...
Warren Beatty slept with 12,775 women, claims... →
Biskind writes in his book, Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, that he arrived at the figure by “simple arithmetic”. He appears to have worked out the number of days between Beatty losing his virginity at 19 and the date in 1991 when he met Annette Bening on the set of Bugsy and fell into monogamy, and applied the questionable logic that during that entire period Beatty slept...
Tuning back in to Don DeLillo's 'White Noise' -... →
Don DeLillo’s “White Noise” (Penguin, 336 pp., $16 paper), newly reissued in a 25th anniversary edition with superb jacket art by Michael Cho, is many different types of novel: a campus novel; the soap opera of a hilariously dysfunctional family; a disaster story; a murder story; a meditation on America’s nervousness around (and obsession with) fear and dying; and a satire...
On Avatar
CHARLIE ROSE: It also has political messages.
A. O. SCOTT: Oh, yes. And I think that, you know, in some ways they might be, the politics you might say are a little naive, perhaps.
CHARLIE ROSE: It’s straightforward.
A. O. SCOTT: The Na’Vi are kind of noble savages in the classical sense. They have so in tune with nature and they have this holistic life, and the humans are these alienated, greedy, rapacious, militaristic, racist people.
DAVID DENBY: But what a comedy that this pro-ecology, anti-technology message is being delivered though in a package that is the piece of the advanced technology, costing $250 million plugs and further. It’s definitely aimed at the Bush administration because there’s talk about shock and awe, we’re going to hit those monkeys.
CHARLIE ROSE: Fight terror with terror.
DAVID DENBY: Yes. And it’s being distributed and partially paid for by FOX, by Rupert Murdoch, a right wing press baron who one imagines supported the war in Iraq.
A. O. SCOTT: Plus, quite provocative -- if that’s the analogy, then what happens to this character is quite provocative and even...
DAVID DENBY: It’s more than go native, in other words. He leads the revolt.
A. O. SCOTT: But that’s the fun of it. I think that entertainment like this at its best has always had kind of an allegorical top lead, has always been able to read in sort of some kind of political message. And part of the fun of going to movies like this is it simplifies and clarifies and makes emphatic something that in the real world is of course much more complicated and nuanced and difficult. So it has -- it’s also not ironic. There’s no sort of winks and nudges. This is not a movie that’s kind of self-conscious and playful and showing you how smart it is. It’s a very sincere piece of storytelling.