Jack Rose died suddenly in December, leaving behind a nice body of work including Kensington Blues, Raag Manifestos, and Two Originals. Noted mostly for his American Primitive solo guitar music, Rose’s previous two records Dr. Ragtime and Pals and Jack Rose and the Black Twig Pickers present a shift to a full-bodied sound featuring other players. Luck in the Valley, released last month as his last album, continues this progression. It is tempting to read the pathos of his death into songs like the excellent “Blues For Percy Danforth”, which sounds closer to his earlier Takoma-inspired work. And in a way, it would be nice to hear more “serious” tracks that can be linked up into some kind of meaning-of-death constellation. For fans with this mindset, Luck in the Valley might be disappointingly happy. But it would be unfair to begrudge Rose’s last album for emphasizing fun and enjoyment over theoretical depth. John Fahey infamously dismissed his earlier work as “cosmic sentimentalism,” a criticism that seems to strike more at the expectations of listeners than the quality of his music. If we move beyond considering Rose’s songs as spiritual mood enhancers, there is a lot of good music to enjoy on Luck. Rose sounds like he was having a good time at the end. -- Scott Coomes
Described by its creator — talented illustrator Neill Cameron — as "a martial arts rom-com slice of life soap opera," this webcomic is about the lives of the people who run and participate in an alternate universe fight club known as "The Thump." The story, at least the first part of it, aligns itself with the perspective of Catriona, a down-on-her-luck paramedic whose life turns around when she responds to an ad that leads to her becoming The Thump's resident nurse. I like her, because she's spunky and doesn't have inhumanly pneumatic bodily proportions. Equally charming is Alex, who videotapes the fights to later sell on the internet to "a certain kind of teenager that'll lap that shit up." Read the comic, cry when you hit the last page and realize you're all caught up and now have to wait for future installments which might not ever come due to Cameron's being a kickass illustrator who now gets paid for his awesome skills, and then check out Cameron's personal site, which offers a nice peek into his process. -- Erin Price
All the President's Men is rightfully known as the best movie about journalism ever made, but it's most notable for not focusing its paranoia in the form of several nefarious people. The last film in director Alan Pakula's "paranoia trilogy" (which includes Klute and The Parallax View), All the President's Men is notable in the genre for never depicting the agents of paranoia that torments reporters Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman). Yes, we know them to be agents of the Nixon Administration, but because they're never seen in the movie, it's never clear exactly what constitutes a victory in the fight against corruption. We know that the reporters' lives are in danger, but from whom? The CIA? FBI? Deep Throat says "everybody is involved," after all. Woodward and Bernstein's reports eventually result in the imprisonment and resignation of Nixon and his cronies, yet Pakula downplays it with the perfunctory rattling off of punishments on The Washington Post's press in a manner fitting the lack of closure of lenient punishments for a few solitary figures. The institutional rot went deeper and will persist as long as culprits remain identified. You may not see anyone over your shoulder, but that doesn't mean they're not somewhere. -- Eric Freeman
Dec 2, 2009
Ed Kilgore on The Brooks Maneuver, which “involves framing a complicated public policy issue in terms of abstract and conflicting principles that the columnist sympathizes with but deems tragically incompatible, before concluding that any resolution will require a brave new kind of politics that just doesn’t exist”—or won’t until Republicans are in charge, anyway. As we often say, David Brooks is a doofus.
