I've had the privilege of speaking with the great raconteur Henry Rollins a few times now. When I interviewed him in 2008
about his plan to play the Birchmere on Election Eve, we spoke in
September, several weeks before the show. He was predicting at that time
John McCain would be elected president. A few days
after our conversation, Lehman Brothers collapsed, the fiscal dominoes
started falling and the dynamic of the race changed dramatically.
Once again, Rollins will be speaking here in DC -- in
DC, where we don't have voting representation in Congress; not the "DC
area" this time, at the 9:30 Club -- the night before America chooses a
president. I'll be there. I was surprised to learn when we spoke the
other week that he hadn't heard of Mike Daisey.
The interview is on Washington City Paper Arts Desk today.
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It’s a death trap! It’s a suicide rap! And so on.
My love of Bruce Springsteen is not exactly news. It may no longer even qualify as infotainment. He played the single best concert I’ve ever seen anyone play, out of hundreds of bands and artists. (This
is merely a partial list.) There is nothing remotely controversial
about the assertion he is the greatest live performer in the history of
rock and roll.
I wrote all of this down three years ago, after I
saw him play his penultimate show of 2009, in Baltimore’s appealingly
small and out-of-date sports area, the end of a busy two-year tour
wherein he also made one of his worst albums. Basking in the glow of
that remarkable show in the days afterward, I knew if I were never to
see Springsteen and the E Street band play again, I’d be fine with that.
I had a Born in the U.S.A. on cassette when I was a little kid, but it wasn’t until college that I became a hardcore Springsteen fan. His Live 1975-85 album (three discs, because I got it in the CD era) and his solo acoustic, recorded-in-his-bedroom Nebraska
album were the documents most directly responsible for my conversion.
At the time I was discovering this music, Springsteen hadn’t toured with
the E Street Band in seven years. Another four would pass before they'd
announced they were reuniting.
Those reunion shows in 1999 and
2000 were remarkable. I saw five concerts on that tour. They were
different from the shows Bruce and the band had played in the 70s and
80s, the ones I had heard only on cherished (and in the pre-broadband
era, expensive) bootlegs. There was no intermission. Bruce’s
meandering, easily parodied, improvised on-stage stories were gone,
replaced by a gospel preacher schtick. The shows tended to be about
two-and-a-half hours long — a generous amount of stage time from anyone
but Springsteen, who had regularly broken the three-hour mark all
through his twenties and thirties.
His twenties and his thirties.
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Formed in Dallas in 1993, the alt-country act Old 97's combines the heart-tugging wordplay of Townes Van Zandt with the attack of The Clash.
After a couple of indie releases in the mid-'90s, the group was the
beneficiary of a bidding war, signing with Elektra Records. Their
major-label debut, 1997's Too Far to Care, remains their best
and best-loved album. Despite retaining a substantial following—Old
97's' show at the 9:30 Club tonight is sold out—the group never reached
the level of stardom its big label demanded. Since 2004, the band has
been recording for the New West label.
Old 97's' current tour supports a 15th anniversary reissue of Too Far to Care, which they're playing in its entirety in sequence, along with a selection of other songs. I spoke with singer-songwriter Rhett Miller
(whose career as a solo artist runs parallel to that of his band) by
phone about the quest for perfect setlist, the excesses of major-label
recording contracts, and the trouble with singing songs you wrote when
you were 25 when you're 42.
This interview appears today on the Washington City Paper's Arts Desk.
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Rachel Manteuffel is a writer of upsetting talent. She's also a good actor. We met when I interviewed her a few years ago for a video I made
about a play she was in. But her writing prowess is what I resent and
feel threatened by. My only consolation is the knowledge -- because
we're friends, you see; we talk -- that her brilliance is not extempore.
She works very, very hard to be this good. She earns it.
...and
then she sends you a dashed off, steam-of-consciousness e-mail that's
funnier than anything you've ever flushed away a weekend sweating over.
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Because I routinely make awful decisions about how to spend my time, I paid $24.99 (50% of MSRP) for the four-disc, 3D Blu-Ray edition of Prometheus, a film I'd harbored huge hopes for but ultimately found disappointing. A Ridley Scott film, in other words.
I don't have the gear or the inclination to watch a 3D movie at home, but the deluxe set that includes the 3D version of Prometheus (along with the plain-Jane 2D in three different formats, because what price piece of mind?) is the only way to get The Furious Gods, a three-hour, 40 minute (!) making-of documentary by Charles de Lauzirika, a nonfiction filmmaker whose substantive, well-edited making-ofs for similarly lavish reissues of Scott's only two great films -- say their names with me now, everybody, Alien and Blade Runner -- have already claimed many irreplaceable hours of my life.
The Furious Gods is long, sure, but actually it's longer, because I've been watching in "enhanced mode," meaning that when an icon appears at the top of the screen I can press a button on my remote and watch an "enhancement pod" -- a video footnote, basically -- containing even more nerdily trivial information about whatever specific aspect of the film's conception and production is being discussed at that moment.
When Scott talks about casting original Dragon Tattoo Girl Noomi Rapace in the movie, you can watch her screen test. When production designer Arthur Max talks about creating the movie's titular spacecraft (which was still called the Magellan for a long time, did you know, even after the Untitled Alien Prequel acquired the name Prometheus), you can click through dozens of drawings and schematics of the ship -- which I think that all of us, regardless of our political affiliation, can agree is fucking rad. You can even watch an enhancement pod about the film's many rejected titles. Alien: Tomb of the Gods, anyone?
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