And There Ain't No One Gonna Turn Me Round

I had this idea today. Did any of you poor souls who are (or aren't) reading these missives of the damned read Greil Marcus' book about "Like A Rolling Stone"? No. Well, you probably can guess what the book is about from my telling you what the book is about. It's an entire 286 page (including the index) book about (arguably) the greatest rock song ever written. And so I was thinking about Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", and how if a genius rock writer like Marcus can milk the greatest rock song for an entire book, there is certainly an extended essay that can be wrung out of the different versions of Cohen's masterpiece. Of course, you might wind up talking about the ways that tv and movies have used the song, then you have to talk about Shrek. Which no one wants.

Other songs that I would want to read about include:
"Heard It Through The Grapevine"
"My Mind Playin Tricks On Me"
"Sea Of Love" (If only to try and reconcile the original with Cat Powers and Tom Waits versions of the song)
"A Day In The Life"
"Smells Like Teen Spirit"
and
"Sympathy For The Devil"

The title is from a Big Star song called "The Ballad of El Goodo". I once again mention that Big Star should be everyone's third favorite band of all-time.

I watched Cronenberg's film "Eastern Promises" last night. It stars Viggo Morgentsen, who was Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings movies, and whose name I probably misspelled just now. It's all right though, because the key board has been drinking. The movie is damn good. I'm not sure when Cronenberg switched from mind-fucks like Videodrome and began doing stories that could actually happen in the world we live in, but it's fascinating. The movie is very good. If you need something to see, you could do worse, although it doesn't crack my top five movies from last year. (At last count, the top five are: 1. No Country For Old Men
2. Juno
3. There Will Be Blood
4. Michael Clayton
5. King of Kong, narrowly beating out Ratatouille)

I still haven't seen "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Outlaw Robert Ford" or "The Savages" or "Before The Devil Knows Your Dead" or "Charlie Wilson's War" or "Sweeney Todd" but all of them are on my Netflix que.

I did finally see "Be Kind Rewind" last weekend. It's good, but nowhere near as good as Eternal Sunshine or Science of Sleep. The middle part, in which Mos Def and Jack Black remake Hollywood movies like Ghostbusters and Driving Miss Daisy and 2001 is by far the best part, although the cynic could consider it merely another example of Michel Gondry's obsession with practical special effects. The movie winds up being bogged down in a fairly traditional Hollywood plot, which is unfortunate, given both Gondry's track record and the potential of the cast and filmmaker.

I'm reading the new Rob Neyer book right now. Rob Neyer is a baseball writer, and he's better at writing about baseball than anyone else is at the moment, including Bill James. Which means nothing to most of you who are, for reasons that largely escape me, still reading this.

Right now I'm listening to Tom Waits. Specifically, to the "Brawlers" disc of the "Orphans" collection. I've been listening to a lot of Tom Waits, recently. There are times when I very sincerely believe that all we need to know about life we can learn from Tom's "Rain Dogs" album, along with "Pet Sounds" and "The Office" and "The Great Gatsby" and "Silent Hill 2". But most times, I don't.