Saturday, March 26, 2011
First Lines: Russell Hoban - Riddley Walker
On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.
New stuff: The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart
I saw them recently live in Berlin, good concert, although a bit low in volume. This is their second album, released a few days ago.
Wise Blood (1979)
A Southerner--young, poor, ambitious but uneducated--determines to become something in the world and decides that the best way to do that is to become a preacher and start up his own church.
Quite loyal adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's novel with some good performances which brings the grotesqueness of plot and characters with full power.
William S. Burroughs: The Cat Inside
The cry I heard through Ruski was not only his signal of distress. It was a sad, plaintive voice of lost spirits, the grief that comes from knowing you are the last of your kind. There can be no witness to this grief. No witnesses remain. It must have happened many times in the past. It is happening now. Endangered species. Not just those that actually exist, or existed at one time and died, but all the creatures that might have existed.
A hope. A chance. The chance lost. The hope dying. A cry following the only one who could hear it when he is already too far away to hear, an aching, wrenching sadness. This is grief without witness. "You are the last. Last human crying." The cry is very old. Very few can hear it. Very painful. The chance was there for an enchanted moment. The chance was lost. Wrong turn. Wrong time. Too soon. Too late. To invoke all-out magic is to risk the terrible price of failure. To know that chance was lost because you failed. This grief can kill.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
From my vaults: Ed Bell
Bio:
http://www.alamhof.org/edwardbell.html
and especially
http://www.allmusic.com/artist/ed-bell-p33670/biography
First Lines: Rose Macaulay - The Towers of Trebizond
"Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
First lines: L. P. Hartley - The Go-Between
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
New Stuff: Aerial M
Aerial M is actually David Pajo, post-rock legend formerly with Slint and Tortoise.
10th & Wolf (2006)
A former street tough returns to his Philadelphia home after a stint in the military and once again finds himself tangling with the mob boss who was instrumental in his going off to be a soldier.
Bleak gangster character drama, nothing really new, but a well-told story.
Rooster Cogburn (1975)
Marshal Rooster Cogburn unwillingly teams up with a pious old lady to track down the killers of her father.
Formulaic sequel to True Grit, enjoyable mostly for the two great central performances.
