When I wrote about iPod farming four weeks ago, I meant to tidy up a letter a day on my iTunes, a schedule which would have got me through my entire library by the time term starts again next week. But I didn’t reckon with a three day trip to Derbyshire or the length of certain letters. So, a confession, so far I’ve only go to M. Or, to be precise, ‘Ma’. Yesterday I cleared a few of Madonna’s lesser tracks. At the moment I’m in the middle of deleting one of several Manu Chao albums that I downloaded as research before going to see him last year (he was disappointing and exhausting. Mike and I left independently but at the same time, about 70…
After reading the UK press coverage of David Mamet’s Village Voice article about why he is no longer a liberal, one might assume that he has become a rabid right winger. I just got round to reading the article that inspired the fuss and it turns out that, in writing his enjoyable farce, ‘November’, which I saw on Broadway last month (probably the first and last time I’ll be able to write that), he learnt to appreciate the importance of the marketplace and came to some mild, entirely logical conclusions about the hypocrisy of all politicians and why having a balance of power within government is a good thing. To wit: ‘The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the…
I thought seeing Lou Reed play ‘Berlin’ was excitement enough for June. Now comes news that Leonard Cohen is to tour for the first time in nearly thirty years. Regular readers will remember that I visited his home on Hydra last September. I saw him play Birmingham on the last tour, in ’79, and briefly met him in Liverpool in ’75, after his show at the Empire (I’ll save that story for another time). If his performance with U2 in the recent film is anything to go by, Leonard hasn’t got much voice left, but if he just recites his lyrics (many of which started as poems) as he does in the video below, I’ll be happy. That is, if I can get a ticket…
I somehow managed not to notice that my last entry was the 100th one on this blog, so here we are, well and truly into treble figures, with entry 101. I’m kind of excited about going to see Duffy at the Bodega Social tonight (I’ve decided that her voice is better than Lulu’s, although the latter maybe had a better knack of song choice in her Atco soul days). I’m delighted that I’ve got front row seats for Lou Reed’s Berlin tour when it hits Nottingham in June. But what’s really thrilling me at the moment is the album by Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago which is a haunting, beautiful breakup album, mostly recorded, evidently, while he spent four months in a remote cabin…
I’ve been an American politics junkie since, age 14, I got caught up in George McGovern’s 1972 campaign against Richard Nixon. So I’ll be watching tonight’s results from Texas and Ohio with great interest. As a Brit, it doesn’t behove me to take sides in Obama vs Hillary but my favourite live band, Canada’s Arcade Fire, have been campaigning for Obama in the last week (two of them were born in the US, so I guess they have the right). Here they are in Cleveland, performing a rather apt Sam Cooke classic. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qunFl3syXQ4]