Friday Miscellany

Friday night - I'm fighting off a cold, feeling tired and icky... I hope to put up another sort-of-review post soon - real content! a novelty! Having done a certain amount of self-medicating with the good Dr. Macallan (not much better than scotch for this kind of low key, nagging cold), I'm not up for anyting too taxing to the brain or fingers: instead, let's try some links and maybe a Friday Random Ten.

Links? Start with Slacktivis - Fred Clark's weekly Left Behind posts have turned to the movie- a godawful wreck, that manages to improve on the books (though how could it not) - and to catch, every now and then, a moment of near competence - the end of this week's installment is, in fact, The Rapture itself - which is handled with quite surprising grace. We see Captain Rayford Steele about the kiss Mrs. Kirk Cameron - we cut to an old woman, waking up - she turns, doesn't see her husband - chats with Cameron "Buck" Williams, Ace Reporter, and tell him her husband has "gone off naked" - in sum, a quiet, creepy, disorienting little scene, nothing new, but pretty much how you slip into something like that.... The rest of the clip is more the kind of hackwork you expect... Anyway - always a good read...

Elsewhere - a new Girish post, rounding up good online reading.

And at Screengrab, Leonard Pierce promises a 12 Days of Christmas series of Christmas movie posts, starting with the excellent A Nightmare Before Christmas.

And The Bioscope offers a neat post about George Bernard Shaw and the movies.

Roger Ebert let's us know what he thinks of Expelled.

David Bordwell on Douglas Fairbanks.

And Tom the Dancing Bug explains a comic, in great detail.

And I run iTunes:

1. The Beatles - Here Comes the Sun
2. The Melvins - Lizzy
3. Sleater Kinney - Ironclad [not a big fan of this record - still got a great sound, did they, but sounds to me like they were running out of things to say. The last 2 records sort of continued the slow fade...]
4. Erase Errata - C. Rex
5. Keiji Haino/Tatsuya Yoshida - Gheuebhessip [just got this, haven't really listened to it, though a couple songs have come up on the iPod: it sounds like it's pretty good stuff - they're first rate performers, in their very strange way... this one has a flute in it!]
6. Leo Kottke - Embryonic Journey [I keep forgetting I have some Leo Kottke on the machine - I should try tolisten to this more...]
7. Fugazi - Facet Squared [I can't say I love Fugazi, but they are absolutely reliable - anything they do is worth listening to...]
8. The Magnetic Fields - In an Operetta [I haven't warmed to them, as I have to some of the bands they are compared to.... but they are pretty good.]
9. Neil Young - Old Man [well, obviously a great song.]
10. Tragically Hip - At the Hundredth Meridian [I like this song - I like this record,but it's the only Tragically Hip record I ever bothered to buy, not sure why.... get Ry Cooder to say my eulogy...]

And YouTube says: Richard Thompson - the live version of Shoot Out the Lights, from his Austin City Limits record a couple years ago came up on the iPod tonight - ah: I can't get it out of my head. (And really, the whole post is here because I wanted to post a video of it.) I couldn't find any video of it, but this is a decent substitute. There are a few good versions of the song on YouTube - this one has some of the jaggedy guitar playing he really expands on the Austin record...