brainsplotch

On Tuesday, April 29, we saw Johnny Echols perform with the band Baby Lemonade (doing double duty as both themselves and the band Love) at Bell's Eccentric Cafe in Kalamazoo. (Because Lansing apparently isn't allowed to have cool shows like this--we have to drive an hour-and-a-half elsewhere. But I digress). I never saw Arthur Lee perform in his various 1990s/2000s tours and shows, so when I saw that Johnny Echols was venturing on a tour with Baby Lemonade--and that one of the stops was in Kalamazoo--I knew I absolutely had to go, or I might regret it for the rest of my life. A day before the show, I saw a Facebook post about the Echols tour from a "virtual friend" (writer Dan Epstein) who is "real life" friends with Baby Lemonade's guitarist Mike Randle. I mentioned in the post that I'd be at the Kalamazoo show and Mike replied that I should seek him out at the show and say "hello." I wasn't sure what the logistics of that would be, bu...

On April 23, I watched Paul Schrader's most recent film, Oh, Canada. It was the first Schrader movie I'd seen since First Reformed , which I enjoyed (though "enjoy" is a relative term with many Schrader movies, since they tend to be so dark. Maybe the better term is "appreciate"). Richard Gere plays Leo Fife, an aging documentary filmmaker who is dying of cancer, and when I say dying, I mean he's at death's door. Former film students of his are in the process of filming their own documentary about Leo's life. Leo is interviewed on camera and we, the audience, are left to wonder how many of Leo's memories are real or imagined, and whether Leo was a filmmaker with leftist political principles or someone who was only perceived that way by others. We also see that Leo was a man of contradictions, like many of us are. Though the movie is based on a Russell Banks novel--and likely contains some autobiographical elements--it's impossible not to ...

I finally finished The Name of This Band is R.E.M. and I give it a solid four stars out of five. Perhaps even 4 1/2 stars. It was a breezy read. A sign of how consistent R.E.M. was during their recording career is that I found myself constantly thinking, "oh, he's gonna talk about Fables !" "Oh, he's gonna talk about Pageant !" "Oh, he's gonna talk about Document !" ...and on and on. With the exception of Around the Sun , the band never released a sub-par album, and I wanted to read what Peter Ames Carlin had to say about all of them. He's a good insightful writer. R.E.M. were, by and large, well-behaved lads and have rarely let their private lives go public. Consequently, there is little in the way of salaciousness that one would find in a book about, say, the Stones, Led Zeppelin, or--for that matter--R.E.M. contemporaries like--say--Nirvana, Red Hot Chili Peppers, or any number of hair metal bands. The craziest story is the time in 2001...