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The Times has put its reviews of twelve Katharine Hepburn movies online. Also check out the trailers from four of them, on the same page.

recap

Today is my last day at work. It is, of course, weird.

My finger seems to be mostly recovered, although I need to follow up on something from the X-ray. The mysterious pain in my chest is gone today.

Procrastination and preoccupation have me woefully behind on my music plans; many of the places I was hoping to play have already booked September. I will still make the trip, because I want to.

I have nothing much to say, it just seemed like a good time to take stock.

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Here's another quote from a Liz Phair review:

When the Supremes released "Love Child," Diana Ross had no conceivable justification for singing that she started her life in an old, cold, run-down tenement slum, other than that Motown's songwriters presumably believed that potential record-buyers liked to think she had. You can hardly get more cynical than that.

Here's a justification for singing it: Because that's how the song goes. Elvis didn't record "Jailhouse Rock" in prison. Johnny Cash never had "25 Minutes to Go". And the walrus, as we now know, was not John but Paul. They're songs, not memoirs.

But the over-the-top drama with which Ross sings it sold the song, both figuratively and literally; it sounds as lovely, as exhilarating, and as cathartic as if she really meant it.

She did mean it. It just wasn't about her.

sad is mad without the energy

Fifteen 50-word reviews of the new Radiohead record.

Thom Yorke sounds like he's falling down a well on nearly every track. I wish he'd hit the bottom and crack his skull so that Michael Jackson could join the group and help create a paranoid, alienated album that might genuinely be fascinating, involving, coherent and catchy. But he won't.

William Gibson on George Orwell.

A Slate article about two books about L.A. literature:

Last year, the Library of America published the excellent Writing Los Angeles, a massive anthology of a century of writing about the city. But if you are a native of Los Angeles, paging through all the travel notes and memoirs and short stories is a strange sensation. Where you expect to find the city itself, there is only a carnival of metaphors.

MP3s from the latest M. Ward record. "Oh but if you're gonna leave, better call the undertaker, take me under, undertaker, take me home."

Cool photos from the Aran Islands. You know what I like? Representational photographs that look abstract.

Most of the above links came from a session with The Minor Fall, The Major Lift, so enjoy that too.

tv obsession

Newsradio is back on the air in my local market. I did not love this show when it first came on. I liked it toward the middle of its run, then didn't like it after Phil Hartman died. Then it went into syndication and now I love every single episode.

So this time--in case it stops being rerun again--I'm going to try to tape it all. Which is why, earlier tonight, I was going through my small stack of mislabelled videotapes trying to find one that I could stand to erase completely. One of them had the Ellen coming-out episode, so I watched that. I still like it a lot. I wish that show had made it to syndication.

Eventually I went to the supermarket to buy some groceries and a blank tape. It wasn't until I got back that I noticed I'd forgotten the tape. I went to the other supermarket to buy a blank tape. This time I succeeded.

Tonight's broadcast of the pilot episode was preceded by a long ad they must have run before the show went on the air or something, about the new show and all the wacky hijinks it would contain. This promo included the moment where Beth, after some sparring between Dave and Lisa, says dryly, "Wow, it's like watching Tracy and Hepburn." Sigh.

Supposedly the first season is going to come out on DVD later this year. I sure hope it does.