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After releasing her debut album under the moniker Broken Girl, Julie Doiron has put out her latest record under her own name. And while it's a brave step to come out from behind a band name, Doiron has crafted an album drenched in feelings of exposure, of being unsure of oneself. Her spare guitar is augmented by bits of piano, percussion, and mellotron, courtesy of producer Dave Shouse of the Grifters.
Shepard, best known for his plays, has also published several collections of monologues, poems, and short autobiographical fiction. Motel Chronicles, the second such collection, is a quick, breezy, fun read.
"Me and Tim Ford stole a car once in San Bernadino. One of those early Austin Healeys with red leather tuck
and roll and wire wheels. It was just sitting there with the keys in it behind an A and W Root Beer Stand.
At first we were just going to drive it around for a while then leave it on the other side of town
but we ended up heading for Mexico instead. Tim had this idea that we needed to get some false ID so we could
drink in bars and buy beer in liquor stores without getting hassled. He said he knew about this guy in Tijuana
who forged the date of birth on your driver's license and that there was no way of telling it from the real
thing. He said it was cheap too."
Already known as a great Internet search engine, Alta Vista recently expanded its offerings to include free email and translation services. The latter allows you to convert text or entire web pages from English to French, German, Italian, Portugese, Spanish, and vice versa. Not only are the translation capabilities something of a marvel, they can also be downright entertaining. Try translating your favorite web page into a foreign language and then back into English; the results are inevitably strewn with bits of found poetry.
Seventeen Years
They are here again,
the locusts I baited my line with
in the summer we married.
The light is filled
with the song the ground exhales
once in seventeen years.
And we are here with the wear
and the knowledge of those years,
understanding the song
of locusts no better than then,
knowing the future no more than they
who give themselves so long
to the dark. What can we say,
who grow older in love?
Marriage is not made
but in dark time, in the rhymes,
the returns of song,
that mark time's losses.
They open our eyes
to the dark, and we marry again.
Written by Shel Silverstein and David Mamet, this little comedy followed on the heels of Mamet's darker House of Games. The cast includes several performers from that earlier film, including Mantegna, Bill Macy, Ricky Jay, the late J.T. Walsh, and several other Mamet stand-bys. The story follows a humble shoe-shine man (Ameche) who agrees to take a murder rap and ends up enjoying his last weekend of freedom in Lake Tahoe under the watchful eye of a sentimental mobster (Mantegna). Perhaps the best part is that the movie maneuvers deftly around the usual gangster cliches.
From Birmingham to Cairo and many points in between, the artist formerly known as Herman Blount blazed a trail through the jazz world, enchanting and confounding audiences and critics all over the planet. In Space is the Place, Yale professor Szwed details Sun Ra's development both as a musician and as a resident of the planet Earth. And while the book slows down occasionally, particularly when Szwed details some of Ra's more oblique philosophies, in the end it's a fine companion to the rapturous music of Sun Ra and his Arkestra.
This is a supergroup record from Chicago's rock/dub/experimental underground: Tortoise founder/engineering whiz Bundy K. Brown, all four Red Red Meat members, and the three guys in Rex. The hybrid-group exercise is an unqualified success: the very place where hardcore blues-based sound, contemporary cut-and-paste and lo-fi sampling techniques, exploratory jamming, and subtle songcraft collide. The two bands generally reign each other's most addled, wankful tendencies in, while not denying a mutual love for experimentation that's listenable, playful, highly enjoyable.
Coach remembered a fall night, a Friday-night game night, long ago, when he had put Daphne on the playing field. It was during the ceremonies before his unbeaten squad had taken on Ignatius South. High School. Parents' Night. He had laced shoulder pads on Daphne and draped the trainer's gag jersey--number 1/2--over her, and balanced Tim-somebody's helmet on her eight-year-old head. She was lost in the getup, a small pile of equipment out on the fifty-yard line. She had applauded when the loudspeaker announced her name, when the p.a. voice, garbled by amplification and echo, had rung out, "Daughter of our coach, Harry Noonan, and his wife--number one-half, Daphne Noonan!" She had stood in the bath of floodlights, shaking as the players and their folks strolled by--the players grim in their war gear, the parents tiny and apologetic-seeming in civilian clothes. The co-captain of the team, awesome in his pads and cleats and steaming from warm-up running, had palmed Daphne's big helmet and twisted it sideways. From behind, from the home stands, Coach had heard, "Haaa!" as Daphne turned circles of happy confusion, trying to right the helmet. Through the ear hole her left eye had twinkled, Coach remembered. He had heard, "God, that's funny," and "Coach's kid."
--from "Coach"
The two-dimensional user interface has been with us for about 15 years, and ever since Windows 95 banished the DOS prompt to obscurity, most users have taken the "desktop" metaphor to heart. Of course, it's unlikely that the evolution will stop there. And as the march from punch cards to immersive virtual reality continues, a probable next step is 2-D representations of 3-D space. The folks at Plumb Design have begun that step by providing Thinkmap, a kinetic 3-D interface for databases. The first two examples, a Visual Thesaurus and the Smithsonian's Revealing Things exhibit, are not only well-engineered online resources, but very possibly a glimpse into the future of UI.
While the often overwhelming violence of his films is not for everyone, John Woo remains a consistent innovator in the otherwise stale genre of action movies. His American-made offerings (Face/Off, Broken Arrow) are tame in comparison to his Hong Kong masterpieces, which often elevate kinetic sequences of carnage and mayhem to something similar to ballet. Check out Hard Boiled and The Killer to see the best that this artist has to offer.
