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Worthy of Mention

  • Spoon -

    Spoon: Girls Can Tell
    This is a great, understated album that merits repeated plays. Spoon have made a literate, rocking, breakthrough record that occupies a funny place--the songs are not unconventional, per se, yet they're somehow really special. Girls Can Tell displays the emotional resonance and big rock power of, say, Thin Lizzy and Mott the Hoople; the sonically referential, indie-rock smarts of a band like Versus; and amazing hooks that recall Colin Blunstone of the Zombies. Like Jennyanykind, Moviola, and the Lilys, this Austin, Texas, trio has chosen to work on perfecting their craft without paying much heed to mainstream or trends. In spite of (but mostly because of) wrenching breakup-centered lyrical material delivered in a very real, matter-of-fact way, Girls Can Tell is one of those life-affirming pop albums you know you'll return to in years to come. --Mike McGonigal (*****)

Books

  • Michael Hardt: Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

    Michael Hardt: Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire
    Empire (2000)—the surprise hit that made its term for U.S global hegemony stick and presciently set the agenda for post–9/11 political theory on the left—was written by this same somewhat unlikely duo: Hardt, an American political scientist at Duke University, and Negri, a former Italian parliament member and political exile, trained political scientist and sometime inmate of Rome's Rebibbia prison. This book follows up on Empire's promise of imagining a full-blown global democracy. Though the authors admit that they can't provide the final means for bringing that entity about (or the forms for maintaining it), the book is rich in ideas and agitational ends. The "multitude" is Hardt and Negri's term for the earth's six billion increasingly networked citizens, an enormous potential force for "the destruction of sovereignty in favor of democracy." The middle section on the nature of that multitude is bookended by two others. The first describes the situation in which the multitude finds itself: "permanent war." The last grounds demands for and historical precursors of global democracy. Written for activists to provide a solid goal (with digressions into history and theory) toward which protest actions might move, this timely book brings together myriad loose strands of far left thinking with clarity, measured reasoning and humor, major accomplishments in and of themselves. (****)

Recommended Elswhere On The Web

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Thursday, March 08, 2007

The Bald Ego Has Landed

Bald_ego_1Wit has just published a short story entitled "Topographers" in Glenn O'Brien's literary magazine, Bald Ego.

This fillip of historical fiction concerns a seance conducted by Mina Crandon, a sexy young female psychic in Boston; Harry Houdini, who has arrived in a Model T Ford to debunk her; hooded Masons kneeling at a black altar in Detroit's Palestine Lodge #613 while planning a secret satanic shopping society--and far across the country in California, a wild night begins for impresario Abbott Kinney, who has stepped into a gondola for a boat ride around his masterwork, Venice Of California...

"The new issue is the best yet, 64 pages longer than the last, with a great group of contributors. We decided that the literary magazine for an illiterate age should have a lot of pictures in it, so this one features pictures from ... Phillip Taaffe, Don Van Vliet, Richard Prince, Jeremy Blake, John Lurie, Duncan Hannah, Elizabeth Peyton, Jane Dickson, Jimmy Gilroy, Fred Tomaselli, Charlene von Heyl, Keith Sonnier, Jack Pierson, Steven Mueller, Mel Kendrick, and Tom Sachs, and photographs, many of them sexy, from the likes of Santé D'Orazio, Stephen Frailey, Lloyd Ziff, Andrew Brucker, Jahmani Perry, Justen Ladda, Sam Matamoros, McDermott & McGough, and Todd Eberle, among others.

The writers include Gary Indiana, James Salter, Elias Khoury, Linda St.John, Julie King, Gerard Malanga, John Stravinsky, Theresa Duncan, Adrian Dannatt, August Kleinzahler, Hooman Majd, and Davitt Sigerson, who gave us a piece of his new novel. Not to mention the editors, who selflessly included their own work. The writing is all fiction and poetry—our motto is, 'No journalism or criticism since 2002'."

Anyway, I highly recommend this historic journal. You can pick it up in better bookstores and magazine stores everywhere. That would include, in New York, St. Mark's Bookshop, Hudson News at Grand Central, and the Union Square Magazine Shop; in Boston, Trident Bookseller; in Chicago, City Newstand and Quimby's Books; in Washington, Newsroom; in Hollywood, Daily Planet Books; and in Berkeley, Cody's Books. Plus many more distinguished locations and, of course, Amazon.com."

Link: men.style.com: Fashion and Lifestyle News from the Online Home of GQ and Details.

Thursday, March 08, 2007 in Books |

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Comments

alisonctuck

Well done and congratulations Mlle. Duncan! I shall be purchasing une de la Amazon! Oui!

Posted by: alisonctuck | Friday, March 09, 2007 at 06:41 AM

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