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
Jul 28, 2010 0
At the beginning of the fourth season, every character on Mad Men finds himself in a new situation, but with little indication that there has been substantive emotional change in their lives. As befits a show about advertising, the packaging is different, but it’s the same product.
Nov 17, 2009 0
Conventional wisdom on Mad Men is that there are two sides of the main character: 1) Don, the smooth-talker who sleeps around and plays it cool, and 2) Dick, the defenseless country boy who shies away during confrontations and altogether seems weak. I reject the distinction.
Nov 13, 2009 0
Season 3 was about Destruction, but the quiet kind of destruction. We saw JFK die, an event which Weiner once claimed he didn’t feel like showing, because what was left to say? Well, Weiner managed to be the first person in years, maybe decades, to say something new about the JFK assassination: far from changing everything and spoiling everyone’s fun and destroying Camelot, it was the best thing to happen to the characters all season. It opened their eyes.
Nov 11, 2009 1
There’s a risk of expecting too much from the fourth season — there are so many possibilities that whatever path Weiner ends up taking will be disappointing. I’ll leave the specific possibilities for later in the discussion. Right now, I just want to commend Matthew Weiner for taking the leap and recognizing that this show was in danger of becoming too static for its own good.
Oct 13, 2009 0
Don’s unhappy at work and typically uninterested by everything happening on Bullet Park Rd. We all know what that means: time to have an affair! At this point, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Don wants to cheat or that he’d be attracted to a hot, independent brunette interested in things other than puppy dogs and ice cream. It’s also tough to say it’s about the thrill of the chase, because he doesn’t seduce Miss Farrell so much as bed her by sheer force of will. There’s no logic — it’s all about satisfaction, the one thing that he can’t get at work.
