The greatest album ever made. Zzzzzzzzz...

Blood And The Ballad: Bob Dylan’s Macabre New Album | The New Republic:

The hero worship of Dylan continues unabated . The poor man is more Living Legend than Artist, who sense of imagery these last few decades has been more a storehouse of tacky stage props than anything quotable, witty or head turning. A generation of critics remains too close to Dylan to give him the rigorous estimation they would an actual poet; John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara receive franker reviews. Even Billy Collins, beloved by millions , gets the occasional Bronx Cheer from reviewers who regard him as a perennial lightweight. Dylan is a songwriter, not a theologian, nor a moral philosopher. He was once a brilliant songwriter and a lyricist with originality and power. That moment is a long time ago. His writing in the last  four decades  don't  come near the genius had once. There is something to be said about an artist's late work in that one can connect a number of themes that have morphed and changed due to age and gathered experience, but Dylan is , again, a songwriter, not a poet, not a novelist, not a playwright, and his writing has been reliably hackneyed and cornball for decades.

Styx were an abomination at best, a wind up toy designed to pop a spring and collapse on itself. I always considered them to be Grand Funk Railroad taken to the next level, which wasn't very far to go, a journey that graduates from a slow lumbering and becomes a club-footed stumble.

 Kansas, though, had chops as instrumentalist and were able to deftly handle quick changes and scatterbrained time signatures with ease.

 Although derivative of their English cousins through out their career, they could play the busy arrangements with the best of them; guitarist Kerry Livgren had a definite talent for this stuff.


 Kansas, though, had awful lyrics, lots of them, but that was mitigated somewhat in the form of vocalist Steve Walsh, a cogent blend of Paul Rodgers and Mark Farner. His bluesy, wailing read of the band's wheat field mysticism was a welcome respite from the Brit habit of being nasal and neutered in their precise pronounciation of utter nonsense.
All told, though, not  much of the progressive rock and prog rock inspired music of the era, the    Seventies, has aged well into the 21st century. If this had been instrumental music, we might have had discussion of the technical aspects of the music; as is, though this genre's congenital habit of needing lyrics that are unwieldy in cadence and top heavy with the arrogant sophistry   only the most isolated first year liberal arts major could manage drag this music to the bottom of the lake. The heaviness these bands sought is rather like a big chain with a profoundly unforgiving anchor .

Freddie Hubbard Oscar Peterson 01 All Blues - YouTube

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Freddie Hubbard Oscar Peterson 01 All Blues - YouTube:





I recently read on an online music forum a conversation regarding the use of speed in an improviser's playing and it seems that there is an element of the audience that is loud and absolutist in their opinion that the capacity to play fast is merely cold technique executed by soul-less show off egotist. There might be something to that idea--too many musicians learn to play with it only in mind to take solos like they were Rambo blow torching a sniper's perch--but these guys, virtuosos all, play fast and furious but most of all swing at all times. 


They do not sound like they are going berserk; their phrases weave and cascade, and build a new section of their solos with quotes and paraphrase of what has gone before. This is the swinging, uplifting acceleration of musicians who happen to be interested in being musical.One can , and several thousand goosed up guitar goons insist upon pointing out that the expansive likes of a Malmsteen is able to  play guitar consistently faster note flurries against stupidly unplayable time time signatures, making those remarks with the implication that Malmsteen's bloviated ersatz fretwork is superior to what Joe Pass could do. 

Speed in itself, though, "does" nothing"; it is merely a result of   concentration in how one practices their craft, it is a facility that pays dividends for the listener only when there is something of melodic and tonal interest involved in the mix. Indeed, the melody is the motivation for how  amazing the soloing will be in a what we think of being the traditional jazz combo, bass, piano, drums, horn, guitar . Rock and roll guitarists of the virtuoso stripe are less musicians in the strictest sense than they are  quick wristed imbeciles. 

Take away the amplification and the effects and you wind up more often than not with another drop out who hasn't finished his studies on the instrument. And put any of these fellas against the likes of  Freddie Hubbard  or John Coltrane , with the emphasis being to discover which set of stylists, rock vs jazzbos, achieve the speed only God can hear, my guess, a safe one, is that FB and JC would leave the angry fretsterbators cringing in their cribs, humiliated,  crying for their mothers.

Morning Eastwood

Video of Clint Eastwood's RNC speech.:

The saddest headline of the morning is what I just saw on the front page of Slate.com for a news video;

"WATCH EASTWOOD TALK TO A CHAIR".

Sometimes you imagine an iconic film maker/actor getting out of their comfort zone and attempting something edgy and avant gard , something steeped in a High Modernist aesthetic.

 Eastwood might   be further around the curve than I might have imagined. Rather than do a Beckett play, he instead morphed into a one man Beckett production, a self contained diorama of babbling alienation. This is the imagination of bad results, testimony to life replaying conversations on broken tape machines. What this had to do with what President Obama has done right or wrong is besides the point; what this reveals about politics is non existent. What this has to do with is staring too long at the intersection thinking that there is a face in the easy chair across the room that is listening to your views and inserting their own remarks,

Is this is a man walking backwards into genius?

Norman Mailer’s movies: Revisiting Maidstone, Wild 90, and Beyond the Law - Slate Magazine

Norman Mailer’s movies: Revisiting Maidstone, Wild 90, and Beyond the Law - Slate Magazine:
Norman Mailer's experimental narratives will remain intriguing curiousities , examples of what happens when a brilliant writer attempts to conquer another medium that he has no natural affinity with. Mailer could talk a good game, to be sure, and he demonstrated skill as a film critic--his essay on "Last Tango in Paris" is especially sharp and eloquant on the task of getting to an existential moment within a developing storyline--but his improvisational forays seemed stoned and foolish. "Tough Guys Don;t Dance", not a film I recommend looking for a satisfying murder mystery, does rise above the rest for having a budget and some professional polish. It is awkward, but it does have wierdness to it that Mailer might have developed, ala David Lynch.Lynch, though,has his own problems , with  dead camera tonality descending , with continued viewing, from strangeness  to mere tedium.  
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History of prog: The Nice, Emerson Lake & Palmer, and other bands of the 1970s. - Slate Magazine

History of prog: The Nice, Emerson Lake & Palmer, and other bands of the 1970s. - Slate Magazine:

This was a genre that had so much instrumental activity for so little music that was genuinely pleasurable. The conceit had been that rock had advanced to the degree that it was indeed an art form, concert music, in both the instrumental and lyric sense. This yielded some nice and clever albums and individual tunes that still endure, but in all the mass result was bloat, pretentiousness, ersatz mysticism or bargain bin despair; it was not fun and it was work to listen to. What is amazing is how much work many of us did trying to convince ourselves that most of this material would last beyond our lifetimes. It hasn't. Slate does a nice series detailing the history of the rise and fall and the contents of the progressive rock we all used to love .

I remember the conversations with Steve Esmedina and David Zielinski and George Varga about this stuff; only Esmo defended progressive rock as a genre, on its own terms. I always thought the style was hit or miss for the most part, with the misses, the extended, busy and aimless constructions that occupied the air more than made it sweeter, becoming the norm, rapidly. There were prog rock bands I liked, those being most of King Crimson's career in all their line ups, Yes up to the Fragile album, and smatterings of Jethro Tull, ELP, and so on. What is missing from the story is anything about the American equivalent of British progressive rock; not Kansas or other bands directly copying the Euro style, but rather the likes of Zappa, Captain Beeheart, Steely Dan, Little Feat--the list could go on, of course--but these personalities and bands had the usual devices going for them, like tricky time signatures, off the wall lyrics, impressive instrumental chops, longish and dense arrangements.

 The key distinction, though, was the American tradition of blues, jazz and rhythm and blues came to merge very heavily into a mixture that included classical music as a matter of course--what resulted, though, is something altogether different and, I think, a damn sight weirder and less same-sounding than what the Brits were, in time, manufacturing like so many widgets. Let us not forget our glory days of rock/fusion : MILES DAVIS, WEATHER REPORT, TONY WILLIAMS LIFETIME,GARY BURTON, MAHAVISHNU ORCHESTRA, RETURN TO FOREVER; love it or hate it, jazz musicians took up rock dynamics and created a sound that was a fleet, dissonant and complex response to the tinker toy music Europe sent to us. Sure enough, the American version   of  progressive rock became another version of slick commercialism ,  resembling  the dissonance and explosive virtuosity of the early days and evolving to ever more simple forms, resulting  at last in that horrid genre called smooth jazz.

'Justice League' #12: DC reveals Super Man's new Woman -- EXCLUSIVE | Shelf Life | EW.com

'Justice League' #12: DC reveals Super Man's new Woman -- EXCLUSIVE | Shelf Life | EW.com

This is a perfect development for the New 52 rebooting of the Superman universe--Lois Lane had been an imperiled paper doll for decades who was busy having her haplass presence rescued by Superman. She was an interesting character, used more as device to impede Superman's ongoing mission to fight for truth, justice and ...Now that she's free of Superman, DC writers can develop her character in ways they couldn't before. And since the new version of Superman emphasises his "otherness", his feeling of feeling apart from the human race he has sworn to protect, it is more realistic and dramatically compelling the he find attraction to some one likewise super-powered and sharing Superman;s alienation. It makes sense as well that he should have a partner who wouldn't be destroyed in the act of love making.