You are looking at posts that were written in the month of January in the year 2008.
Posted on January 24th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians, Badness, Quotes.
Quoted from Idolator:
The Spice Girls are walking away with "£50 million between them" for their sold-out 17-night stand at London's 02 Arena. "The truth of the matter is, to put on this tour has cost £18.6 million," Ginger sez. "This is not a money-making expedition...Hopefully we will break even but it has never been about that."
I'm soliciting theories on what the Spice Girls reunions shows were really about, since they were never about making money (or breaking even), as pretty much everyone on the planet who isn't a Spice Girl might naturally assume.
Posted on January 20th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Sports.
A gem from the always poorly copy edited espn.com:
Carmelo Anthony saddled up to Allen Iverson late in the fourth quarter and told him they needed to put an end to this game.
Posted on January 15th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Words, Badness.
"The announcement was a surprise (if not an unexpected one)"
--John Bush at Allmusic, reviewing Orbital's Blue Album
Posted on January 14th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums.
M.I.A.'s Kala sounds amazing. Great beats, great sonic textures, big clear production. I'm still getting my head around the songs, but it's consistently engaging, with a large number of arresting passages, and I'm confident this is going to end up in my top ten.
I wouldn't have heard of this album were it not for those awful hipsters (specifically, Pitchfork's best-of-the-year lists solicited from indie musicians). Thank you, hipsters!
Posted on January 10th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs, 70s Survival.
Two more songs missing from these Billboard Hot 100 sets that should certainly be there: The Spinners' "I'll Be Around" (peaked at #3, 1972) and "Games People Play" (peaked at 5, 1975).
Posted on January 5th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Oracles.
I wish I'd had my camera when I passed the garbage-type truck that had, emblazoned on its side:
EMPIRE DISMANTLING
Posted on January 4th, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
I'm doing a new Name That Tune game, the first of what is planned to be a weekly series, over at Jeff Giles and Jason Hare's new website Popdose. I've added a puzzle to this one.
I'll be reviving and moving the Song Project over there as well, again as a weekly item. (I'm going to continue writing here also.)
A lot of writers are doing interesting columns for Popdose, and Jason and Jeff are continuing the terrific series they'd been doing on their own sites. Check it out.
Posted on January 3rd, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
I'd never noticed this till today, but the main theme of "Brazil" -- at least as played by Antonio Carlos Jobim on Stone Flower -- seems to me reminiscent of "Caravan".
Posted on January 3rd, 2008 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Comedy, Books.
I can't remember why Gavin loaned me Donald Westlake's Jimmy the Kid. He probably thought I would find it funny, but there may have been more detailed reasons. Anyway, it was hilarious, and though it's taken me a couple years to get round to reading more of the Dortmunder novels, I am now obsessive about having all of them (there are thirteen so far, plus a novella), and, ideally, reading them in order.
Unfortunately, several of the early ones are incomprehensibly out of print (including Jimmy the Kid, the third one). I gather they're popular books; five of them have been made into movies, although only one of them appears to be good (The Hot Rock, made in 1972 from the first Dortmunder novel and starring Robert Redford. Among the apparently bad ones, alas, is Jimmy the Kid, which starred Gary Coleman).
Anyway, I've now read The Hot Rock, and it was nearly as funny as Jimmy the Kid. Like many first novels in series, it deviates a bit from the model that would later be established. For one thing, Dortmunder more or less wins in the end (by implication, anyway) -- though for all I know that's turned around at the beginning of the second book, Bank Shot (which was made into a movie starring George C. Scott). I may have to skip directly to the fifth book, Why Me? (made into a movie starring Christopher Lambert and Christopher Lloyd), because at least I've been able to find that one.
They're everything-falls-apart capers, a genre I love, and the plots are funny, but the best part is the dialogue. Westlake has perfect rhythm, perfect timing. The action is funny, but the scenes between the action are funnier. Westlake even uses a narrative device I dislike, changing points of view whenever it's convenient for him, and gets away with it because each point of view is eccentric and amusing and still human.
Thanks, Gavin!