I speak to my son every day and he says that they're so happy. I'm sure this will be a very successful record.
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Yeah, I know there are issues with the photos in my Steve Jobspost; I will fix them when I get back to Oakland. They are because Blogger evidently prefers real computers to Chromebooks. To warm up for Guns N' Roses'Sunday night show at Minneapolis' U.S. Bank Stadium, Axl Rose joined Billy Joel onstage during Joel's Friday night set at Target Field. The two covered Joel's "Big Shot" and AC/DC's "Highway to Hell." As Rolling Stone notes, the AC/DC classic is a mainstay of Joel's shows, with a roadie
Indigenous artist's songs brought two cultures together and earned him deep respect across Asia, Europe and America The first time Dtjunga Dtjunga Yunupingu heard his nephew sing he thought: That's a good tune, you know. I said: you could be the instrument. You could tour, go somewhere where you can make money. Continue reading...Photo by Phillip Cosores You most likely already know (and love) Dan Harmonas creator of shows likeCommunityand Rick and Morty.Now, he'sadding another notch to his already-stellar belt, with the announcement of a television adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's brilliant and bizarre 1959 novelThe Sirens of Titan. The plot focuses on Malachi Constant, the richest man in a futuristic America. Constant initially attributes his luck and growing wealth to divine intervention, despite finding himself amidst a massive war between Earth and Mars. He then meets a mysterious, similarly wealthy man who essentially travels through, or rather exists among, all of time and space with his dog Kazak, and the story takes off from there. It's a deeply philosophical, poignant, dark and wickedly funny novel predominantly focused on the concept of free will, or lack of. (Read: Every Kurt Vonnegut novel ranked in order of relevance) While other published works by Vonnegut have been adapted into film and TV before, including Slaughterhouse-Five, Mother Night and Breakfast of Champions, this will mark the first timeThe Sirens Of Titanhas been aired onscreen. Interestingly, the rights to a film adaptation were actually sold in 1983 to none other than Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead. Garcia supposedly began working on the film's development shortly after, with a script drafted by 1985. Funnily enough, Garcia would later admithe purchased the rights specifically to prevent others making a bad adaptation, rather than actually wanting to make one himself - so it's unsurprising that by the time he died in 1995, nothing had yet come to fruition. Considering Harmon has long cited Vonnegut as a major influence on his own work - particularly on his understanding of science fiction - we can only hope that he will do the novel (and Garcia's surprising yet heartwarming plight against bad cinema) justice. Harmon is collaborating on the project with Evan Katz, executive producer of 24. Featuring A$AP rocky, Stevie Nicks, Sean Ono Lennon, the Weeknd, and more
Following on from the success of their most recent album, 2016'sStrange Little Birds, and a received string of shows in Australia last year, Garbage have returned once again with a surprise new single, the political 'No Horses'. Released on July 14th, 'No Horses' is a bit of a departure from the usual style that Garbage fans have come to know and love, with the group taking a bit more of an brooding, EDM-styled approach to the track. It's actually a song that's very un-Garbage like, singer Shirley Manson toldVariety recently. I was driving through the Scottish countryside last year and looking at these fields of horses and thinking, what will happen to them when we don't need them as much as we once did? When they're no longer working beasts, what will happen to the horses? So it's an imagining of the future where the authorities destroy anything that doesn't make large amounts of money. Likewise, famed producer and drummer for the band, Butch Vig says that the track came about as a result of a jam session, before Shirley Manson decided to add some Patti Smith influences to the track. [It]started as a jam, hardly any music, like a lot of these weird noise loops, and Shirley sang this amazing line over it, Vig said. It's very Patti Smith stream of consciousness, very pertinent politically to what's going on. All proceeds from the track are set to go to the Red Cross, until the end of next year. So if you're a fan of the group's different style on this track, you'll be doing a good deed by purchasing it. Check out Garbage's 'No Horses' below. Drummer William Goldsmith was only a part of Foo Fighters from 1995 and 1997, and is barely credited on the one record he worked on, The Colour and the Shape, having had his drum parts stripped and re-recorded by Dave Grohl. Now, in a revealing interview with The Daily Mail, Goldsmith has slammed Grohl as a bully, a bit like the kid who is popular but is mean and everyone likes them, and has even gone so far as to say that he felt raped in a creative sense after his experience in the band. What was done to me staying in that band would have made me feel like my soul was destroyed and I would have likely ended up dead, he says of his relationship with Grohl. That feeling might change if we actually sat down and talked, but that hasn't happened yet. I worked 13 hours a day for three weeks. I gave everything I could. I couldn't believe at the end of it everything was done and I had got through it, he adds, But I just knew something wasn't right. This became readily apparent when he realised that Grohl had re-recorded almost all of the drum work on the record, leaving him pretty much a touring drummer. Apparently Dave was going to re-record a few of the songs, Goldsmith says. I don't know if the producer told him to keep going or what, but the next thing you know all of the work I had done was gone except for one or two of the tracks. [I felt creatively] raped, he reveals. It was a way of describing how it felt when you put that much of yourself into something, and then without you even knowing, it is completely destroyed from existence. I would have been cool if it had been half me and half him, or even if there had been some kind of communication about what they were doing. But they basically dragged me through the coals. It was brutal and I think maybe the producer was hoping I would give up but I didn't. The versions Dave did were very similar. I am not saying I am an amazing drummer, but the work that I did was not bad. When he realised he wasn't actually on the album, Goldsmith didn't exactly feel like carrying on with the band as a live ringer. I found out he had redone all the tracks and got rid of everything, and then he still wanted me to be in the band and tour live, he says. I was like, 'Man, there are some people that are hired as session musicians and that's cool. But that's not why I set out to play music. That's not what I did it for. For me, to have that done to you and to continue playing live would have been damaging to my soul. I would have been going against what I believe in. I wanted to create music, not make money. In the full interview, Goldsmith does go on to detail his battles to get the royalties he believes he's entitled too, as well as a single brief meeting with Grohl when they were on the same lineup, but he wishes that there'd been more of an effort on Grohl's part to make amends. I have been given the impression he feels bad about the way things went. If he feels bad about how things went then why hasn't he tried to get a hold of me? All he would have to do is sit down and talk it out with me. There's a moment near the end of the video for Everybody Wants to Love You, one of the singles from Japanese Breakfast's acclaimed 2016 record,Psychopomp, where singer Michelle Zauner shreds a guitar solo on the hood of an 18-wheeler. The video delights in gleeful racial playfulness: Zauner, dressed in traditional Korean garb, pounds out the solo, drinks aggressively, rides on the back of motorcycles, and generally explodes stereotypes of traditional Asian culture and its more recent model minority tropes. Even in the traditional Korean hanbok, Zauner needs be no symbol of politeness, economic success, or upwardly mobile immigrant sensibilities; she just rocks. Zauner often operates in two places at once. Rarely does her universe as Japanese Breakfast make sense in Manichean terms. She deals in both/and instead of either/or. Zauner wrote the sprawling, shoegaze-y, hook-filled Psychopomp in the wake of her mother's death. It doesn't sound like grief, even as her mother stares out at the viewer from the album's cover art. And so, Japanese Breakfast returns with her follow-up to Psychopomp, Soft Sounds from Another Planet, a record supposedly about space that very much takes place here on Earth. The promotional materials for the record and its first single, Machinist, a song about falling in love with a robot, talk about how Zauner began to see the cosmos as an allegorical place of healing. Its icy, Auto-Tuned pop seems to show Japanese Breakfast seeking exactly this escape velocity. Nowhere on Soft Sounds from Another Planet does Zauner try to recapture the specific charms and energies of Psychopomp. Of course, for all the language about escape Zauner apparently found inspiration in the Mars One project of colonizing Mars Soft Sounds from Another Planet vests in the material world. Lead track Diving Women refers to the historically matriarchal structures of the Korean province of Jeju, where women divers came to dominate its fishery. It's an uplifting allegory, Zauner singing: I want it all. It's followed by Road Head, a sultry look at a different type of diving: the unsatisfying blight of a turnpike blow job. Lyrically, the song ends in the cosmos its last lyrics are lightless miles, miles, miles but it begins in the most lurid and banal of American settings, the ugly transactional quality of roadside sex. Zauner doesn't flinch from either the stars or America's cultural pornography. She wants it all and gets it, even when the giving and the getting are the problem. Despite its sprawling philosophical ambitions, most of the arrangements on Soft Sounds from Another Planet begin with simple guitar progressions. In comparison to Psychopomp, Soft Sounds appears more discrete in its shape, with less propulsive mania at its core. If Zauner poured the grief over her mother's death into the Psychopomp's pop, then she grows more existential here. The sadness has a different shape, a different color deep without being maudlin. On the delightful Boyish, Zauner channels a sweeping Roy Orbison arrangement. The lyrics devastate: I can't get you off my mind/ I can't get you off in general, impotence used first as metaphor and then as crippling reality. I want you, and you want something more beautiful, she sings unblinkingly. The duality remains inescapable: You can either handle it, or you can't. Soft Sounds isn't quite as playfully subversive as Zauner's big-rig guitar solo on Everybody Wants to Love You, but her work as Japanese Breakfast continues to draw its energy from transgressing both the expectations of herself and her audience. The rocking 12 Step adopts its title from addiction recovery, but its second line - 12 steps into the smoking bar I found you - leaves the listener heading toward the disaster, not away from it. For a record with its aspirations in the allegorical freedom of the cosmos, Zauner returns over and over to the painful architecture of this world. There's beauty in it, too, this seeing more clearly, this holding of two things in mind at once. There are no bromides or reassuring aphorisms here. Two things: She wants it all, and we get it. Essential Tracks: Boyish, Diving Women, and Till Death $$$ In the wake of the 2017 presidential election, organizations such as the Sierra Club, Southern Poverty Law Center, ACLU, and Planned Parenthood received lots and lots of donations from concerned citizens. (In my opinion, concerned for very good reasons that this year has only borne out.) For example, the ACLU got $24 million in one weekendfollowing the announcement of the original Muslim travel ban. I was among those who scattered some money around immediately after the election, that is, in November, 2016. I somehow thought that I was making an annual donation, and come the 2017 end-of-year donor season I'd get renewal notices from those organizations. Imagine my surprise when I started getting renewal notices early in 2017. It turns out that at least some of the orgs I donated to don't do 12-month memberships. They do calendar year memberships. So my money counted for November X, 2016 to December 31, 2016. I've been informing these organizations that their next donations will come on January 1, 2018 and I've suggested two things to them: 1. When you've got a giant windfall, extend everybody's memberships through December 31, 2017. 2. If you're not going to do that, at least make it perfectly clearon your web site what period of time donations apply to. |
Helen Chilton
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