Tim Riley's Blog, page 16

EAT THE PLUTOCRATS

English: Anthony Kennedy, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Garry Wills keeps turning in piercing entries on his NYRB blo g: # #

Republican operatives describe this year’s presidential election in apocalyptic terms. It will determine our future. It will seal our national fate. Well, they are probably right, but not for the reason they give. They tell Republican voters that President Obama, in a second term where he does not have to face re-election, will reveal and follow the full socialist agenda he has been trying to hide. #

Only the gullible will swallow that. But the right does know that the future is at stake. That is because this election year gives Republicans one of their last chances—perhaps the very last one—to put the seal on their plutocracy. They are in a race against time. A Democratic wave is rising fast, to wash away the plutocracy before it sets its features in concrete, with future help from the full (not just frequent) cooperation of the Supreme Court. #

View more on Tim Riley's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on June 13, 2012 08:52

AIN’T IT FONK-AY: RJ SMITH ON JAMES BROWN

via truthdig: #

Mythic and imperious, ranks as one of the last century’s most important acts, defying musical gravity along with Louis Armstrong, Jimi Hendrix and perhaps . Since his death in 2006, Brown looms over soul, funk and rap more as symbol than musician, a simplification and oversight that RJ Smith corrects on nearly every page of his radiant new biography. #

Smith, a former Village Voice music critic and author of “The Great Black Way,” a nuanced history of the Los Angeles R&B scene, argues that Brown’s nasty shouts atop even nastier rhythmic turns made descriptors like “soul,” “funk” and “jive” vastly inadequate. Smith reaches beyond superlatives for evocative descriptions like this: “Other artists made things, but Brown made experience—he was a verb, and his true medium was us…” #

View more on Tim Riley's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on June 11, 2012 04:59

STEVE WASSERMAN’S AMAZON EFFECT

Steve Wasserman in The Nation: #

…The inability of most traditional publishers to successfully adapt to technological change may be rooted in the retrograde editorial and marketing culture that has long characterized the publishing industry. As one prominent literary agent told me, “This is a business run by English majors, not business majors.” A surpassing irony: for years many of us worried that the increasing conglomeration of publishers would reduce diversity. (We were wrong.) We also feared bloated overheads would hold editors hostage to an unsustainable commercial imperative. (We were right.) But little did we imagine that the blunderbuss for change would arrive in the form of an avaricious imperium called Amazon. It is something of a surprise to see so many now defending the practices of corporate publishers who, just yesterday, were excoriated as philistines out to coarsen the general culture. #

[Jason] Epstein, for one, doesn’t fear Amazon, writing recently that the company’s “strategy, if successful, might force publishers to shrink or even abandon their old infrastructure.” Thus will publishing collapse into the cottage industry it was “in the glory days before conglomeration.” Epstein insists that the dialectic Amazon exemplifies is irreversible, “a vivid expression of how the logic of a radical new and more efficient technology impels institutional change.” #

Not very long ago it was thought no one would read a book on a computer screen. That assumption is now demonstrably wrong. Today, whether writers will continue to publish the old-fashioned way or go over to direct online publishing is an open question. How it will be answered is at the heart of the struggle taking place between Amazon and traditional publishers… #

via The Amazon Effect | The Nation. #

#

View more on Tim Riley's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on June 06, 2012 05:41

DIE CONCERT TICKETS DIE

Infographic by: authoritytickets.com #

via Is it the Death of the Concert Ticket? Concert Ticket InfoGraphic. #

View more on Tim Riley's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on June 04, 2012 07:42

RAM DELUXE OXYMORON

#

Amid all the tripe written about this Ram deluxe reissue, Jayson Green’s pitchfork review struck me as d escriptively modest. Always had a curious soft spot for Ram, seeing as it was among my earliest headphone slabs. I keep dismissing and returning to it. The vocals: AMAZING. The tone: elaborately controlled ABSURDIST WHIMSY. “Halsey” earns itself that xgau “major annoyance” lament, and yet still a secret cousin to epics like “Hey Jude,” “You Know My Name,” and an early fluttering precursor 1975′s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” McCartney had cheek, stood next to Plastic Ono Band like a giant Jeff Koons marshmellow man. Ram twisted the knife, “Smile Away.” Horribly now. #

You have to give him credit: he couldn’t raise the bar any on Pepper or Abbey Road‘s finales, so he simply inverted his target: why polish the chrome when you can overstuff the couch? Even the closers reek of self-conscious disdain: let’s go spin codas off a cliff (“Long-Haired Lady”)! And again (“Back Seat of My Car”)! #

Always been fond of his “Another Day” b-side (itself a marvel of misdirection), “Oh Woman Oh Why,” about a man bleeding out from his lover’s gunshot wounds. “Comic” screams. “What have you done?!?!” Here’s the real McCartney “break-up” track; it’s enough to make Plastic Ono Band sound literal. Almost worth investigating: Richard Hewson’s Percy Thrillington orchestral arrangement of the entire album, where bassist Herbie Flowers and drummer Clem Cattini play Impress the Man. Standout track: “Eat at Home” as a reggae two-step. The first muzak reduction of a muzak album? #

Thrillington (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

# #

View more on Tim Riley's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on June 03, 2012 06:01

CRAIG MOD HACKS THE DIGITAL COVER

Mod’s essay on how book covers evolve on new platforms: #

…my platonic goal was to evoke a classic sense of cover. Functional covers. Unrippable covers. Covers for books you can toss in a bag and not worry about. Simple covers that bleed into the bodies of books. #

Example: Cardon Webb’s series for Oliver Sacks:

#

View more on Tim Riley's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on May 30, 2012 05:52

John Peels Record Archive

#

John Peel’s record collection #

#

John Peel’s Record Collection to Be Preserved in Online Archive

John Peel’s record archive opens to music fans online

John Peel: the legacy goes live (doctordolittle.wordpress.com)
John Peel’s Record Collection (wnyc.org)
Explore John Peel’s Record Collection (adverblog.com)

#

#

View more on Tim Riley's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on May 29, 2012 07:07

TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS

OR, MODERNITY’S ELEVATOR SHAFT #

Pynchon's Lot 49

Chiming on all the chatter about use of the Beatles in the “Lady Lazarus” episode of Mad Men last week. Most of the speculation circles around the cost of using the track, the first on a major American TV show ($250k, big whoop). But few seem interested in tying it in to the show’s themes, or teasing out the implications. (Unlike SKL, I don’t think the show has yet jumped the shark.) For starters, I find the whole being-checked-out-about-the-Beatles riff a bit implausible, especially after Don gets backstage at a Stones concert earlier in the season. Mad Men keeps circlcing back to how these top 1-percenters of the cultural world, advertising execs, were sublimely checked out about the era they were living in. Why has this period piece captured our fascination? Because we’re navigating another era of tremendous cultural and technological upheaval, and we find ourselves clueless even though we’re dimly aware that the future has sped up considerably. # #

Less implausible is Don’s young wife handing him a copy of the current Beatles album, Revolver, and telling him to take a listen to help get him a clue. But she actually instructs him to “start with this one,” and we see him put the needle down on the first track, and hear “Tomorrow Never Knows.” For a show so fetishistic about detail, why screw up such a basic? “TMK” is the final track on side two, it takes the album out. She would have had to cue it up for him at the very least. Or explained why she was choosing the most experimental track. She could have simply started him out with “Taxman,” and he would have gotten that one. Did anybody ever turn on an old fuddy-duddy to the band with “TNK” when they could have chosen “Eleanor Rigby,” “Good Day Sunshine” or “Here, There and Everywhere” off the same album? Is such a notion at all believable to the character of Don’s trophy wife, who’s emerging as smarter, savvier, and more true to herself? #

Tim Goodman notes how the title references a Sylvia Plath poem, and how Pete reads Pynchon’s “Crying of Lot 49″ on the train, but we strained to see the title of his book and couldn’t make it out even in hi-def. This kind of thing grates. There’s all kinds of interpretive cherries to nibble, between that yawping elevator shaft right after he kisses his wife goodbye from the firm to the suicide insurance coverage Pete’s friend teases him with. Ann Powers maintains that Draper would have certainly been a Beatle hound — perhaps the idea is that he’s so alienated from himself he drifts in a non-Beatle universe even as they conquer every known world, including advertising. The overriding idea I took, which I really liked, was how “TMK” sounds just as confoundingly enticingly today as it did nearly fifty years ago. #

Will Roger dose Don’s coffee? #

VATICAN TO NUNS: DROP DEAD, PART LCMMMXXVII

Copyright expired drawing of participants of Vatican One Council during pontificate of Pius IX (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My friend Julia Lieblich (author of the new book Wounded I Am More Awake) wrote a story about the Vatican that ran in the Washington Post: # #

So when I heard that the Vatican had ordered a crackdown on the largest umbrella group of U.S. sisters, accusing them of spending too much time “promoting issues of social justice,” I was stunned. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been, given Rome’s historic failure to support its best and brightest… #

And Garry Wills chimed in via the NYRB: #

…Nuns have always had a different set of priorities from that of bishops. The bishops are interested in power. The nuns are interested in the powerless. Nuns have preserved Gospel values while bishops have been perverting them. The priests drive their own new cars, while nuns ride the bus (always in pairs). The priests specialize in arrogance, the nuns in humility… #

It is typical of the pope’s sense of priorities that, at the very time when he is quashing an independent spirit in the church’s women, he is negotiating a welcome back to priests who left the church in protest at the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. These men, with their own dissident bishop, Marcel Lefebvre, formed the Society of Saint Pius X—the Pius whose Secretariat of State had a monsignor (Umberto Benigni) who promoted the Protocols of the Elder of Zion. Pope Benedict has already lifted the excommunication of four bishops in the Society of Saint Pius X, including that of Richard Williamson, who is a holocaust denier. Now a return of the whole body is being negotiated. #

None of the anti-Semitic ties of the Pius X crew matter to Rome, since that crew holds to the hard line against women priests, gay marriage, and contraception. They have also retained the Latin Mass, which Rome has been inching back toward. All these things, you see, are the work solely of male hierarchs, distrustful of the People of God—who are the church, as defined by the Second Vatican Council. Those Lefebvre defiers of the Council are all the things the nuns are not, and all the things Rome wants to restore. The real Gospel must be quashed in the name of the pseudo-Gospel of papal monarchs. Poor Anne O’Connor—she thought caring for the poor was what Jesus wanted. She did not live to see that what Rome wants is all that matters. #

Related articles

Nuns And The Vatican: A Clash Decades In Making(wnyc.org)

Andrew Sullivan on the Nun Who Cared(seniorsforademocraticsociety.wordpress.com)

Letter: Listen to the nuns(naplesnews.com)

Vatican Nun Crackdown Targets Freewheeling, Rule Breaking US Nuns(inquisitr.com)

Vatican freezes out nuns and warms to traditionalists (mumbailaity.wordpress.com)

#