R. I. P., Paul Skelton, Austin guitarist extraordinaire. I had the pleasure of conversing with Paul at length one lazy South Austin afternoon. Like most musicians, he had a day job; in his case, designing and making custom guitars. He told me that for a true guitarist, it was all in the hands, and that the best didn't need anything better than a $35-dollar mass produced model. Here he is playing with Jessie Lee Miller:
Black Delta Religion: Check out this amazing footage of services at an African-American church in the Mississippi Delta. Shot in the mid-Sixties, the film shows a woman possessed by the Holy Spirit and includes a baptism and -- near the end -- a terrific performance by a male gospel quartet. Thanks to Cowtown Patty over at Texas Trifles for passing this along...
Friday night, we saw Richie Havens at the Kirkland Performance Center. Incredibly, Havens doesn't sound a whole different than he did 40 years ago: His voice remains deeply resonant and he continues to strum his guitar aggressively. Havens remains among the most gifted interpreters of Bob Dylan: He opened the show with a fiery take on "All Along the Watchtower," and the highlight of the evening's performance was the medley of "Maggie's Farm" and The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again." The performance also included Haven's best new songs, such as the lovely and elegiac "Say It Isn't So" and "We All Know Now" -- both from his fine new album Nobody Left To Crown. If the evening had a drawback, it was the between-song patter, which meandered and was often pointless. (Although Havens scored when he pointed out the oddity of Superman's credo of "truth, justice and...AND?...the American way." Think about it.) But all in all, a fine evening's work by a Sixties legend who continues to persevere along the road to peace and freedom...
Don't miss Clare McLean's photo here of a yellow-rumped warbler in flight. Breathtaking...
Nate Silver explains why the White House calls down right wing pundits and correspondents by name:
the White House is clearly comfortable going after individuals as props, as foils, for its own arguments. It's aligned with the brand of Obama as problem-solver-in-chief, calling out specific instances and individuals to say, hey look, see what I mean about a petty political culture? By keeping examples fresh, the White House is betting that Americans will side with it, and marginalize the "people who rant on cable television" ...
Newsweek's Eleanor Clift thinks that that GOP strategy of saying "no" is a sure loser politically...
Yesterday, I wrote about Roman Polanski's masterpiece, Chinatown. Watch this masterful scene shot in a single take. The camera pans, zooms, and draws back unobtrusively, allowing the movement of the actors (Jack Nicholson and John Huston) to magnetically pull the camera along with them. Polanski heightens the menace of Huston's character by keeping in him the center or leaning into the center while Nicholson comments from the left and looks up at Huston. By positioning the actors as unit slightly off center, he induces a gnawing sense of dislocation in the viewer.
As the scene builds, we become engrossed by Huston's deliberate speech and sinister manner. The subdued peripheral lighting helps illuminate Huston's already bright white shirt; the shirt becomes a means of ensuring that our concentration is complete when he utters the chilling words that "...most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they're capable of...anything." The line, of course, is completely at odds the purity of the color white, unnerving the viewer even more. This is superb filmmaking by a major artist at the height of his powers...
Tonight's Mardi Gras parade schedule (with links to fab pix) here...
Friday's Choice: Big Sam's Funky Nation rocks out Voodoo Fest:
Friday's Choice: What better way to kick off a weekend of NOLA parades than with Ivan Neville's Dumpstaphunk leading the way (and as for all that negative stuff, "Put It In The Dumpsta"!):
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