ImgBox is Down

I’ve been using ImgBox to host my photos for years now. They have been down all week. There is no official word (at least that I’ve seen) on what’s going on. I’ve seen a lot of talk online, and none of it seems good. Maybe it will come back, but my guess is they are just gone. Or if they do come back, I’m betting my photos are lost.

I didn’t store any personal photos on the site, so it isn’t a loss in that sense, but now I have to figure out what to use for the blog. I’ve started using ImgBB and that seems okay, but I’m not sure how much storage they give you. One of the things I loved about ImgBox was that you got unlimited storage and there were no ads or anything you had to deal with.

For now, I’m just gonna move forward. New posts will get images, but I’m not going to mess with the old ones. Eventually, if ImgBox definitely proves to be gone, I’ll try and go back and add in new image links. But that will be a massive project, as there are thousands of photos I’ll have to reupload.

Consider this an FYI.

Show Review: Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Chicago, IL (11/15/76)

Neil Young
1976-11-15
Auditorium Theater, Chicago, Illinois, USA
w/ Crazy Horse

Early Show

Disc 1 (32:01)
01. The Old Laughing Lady>Guilty Train
02. Human Highway
03. After The Gold Rush
04. Pocahontas
05. Too Far Gone
06. The Needle And The Damage Done
07. A Man Needs A Maid
08. Sugar Mountain

Disc 2 (57:01)
09. Country Home
10. Don’t Cry No Tears
11. Bite The Bullet
12. Down By The River
13. Lotta Love
14. Like A Hurricane
15. Drive Back
16. Cinnamon Girl
17. Cortez The Killer(cut)

Late Show

01 Heart of Gold
02 The Old Laughing Lady
03 Journey Through the Past
04 Too Far Gone
05 Give Me Strength
06 The Needle and the Damage Done
07 A Man Needs a Maid
08 Tell Me Why
09 Sugar Mountain

10 Country Home
11 Don’t Cry No Tears
12 Peace of Mind
13 Lotta Love
14 Like a Hurricane
15 After the Gold Rush
16 Are You Ready for the Country?
17 Down by the River
18 Inca Queen
19 Opera Star
20 Eldorado

Tour: 1976 US Tour with Crazy Horse
Band: Crazy Horse, Line Up 3
Neil Young – vocals, guitar, keyboards, banjo, harmonica
Frank Sampedro – guitar, keyboards, vocals
Billy Talbot – bass, vocals
Ralph Molina – drums, vocals

Sources:

Source 1
Early Show Only

Lineage: Audience Master > Unknown generation > DAT > CDR > EAC > xACT 1.5b3 > flac(8)

Source 2
Late Show Only

SBD Recording
Artwork: Front, Back, Front 2

Source 3
Late Show Only

The “Joel Bernstein” 1976 soundboard collection I put up recently was very popular,
so here’s another 1976 soundboard.
I haven’t been at Dime too long, so I don’t know if it was put up recently.
If you missed it before, it’s definitely a keeper.
The sound is really superb.
I beleive this emerged among collectors as a commercial bootleg,
so I don’t know the lineage, but it sounds like it could be straight from the master or very low-generation.
Supposedly several songs were performed after these, but they were not recorded.
This recording was taken from the “Chicago Hurricane” bootleg. There’s a little sound dropout at 2:39 on Disc 1, Track 6, but it’s after the song has ended. This was on my original.

The Midnight Cafe notes:

Out of the four main artists that I used to post about every week, Neil Young is the one I know the least about. Truth be told, I’ve always been more of a Jack of All Trades and an Ace of None than one of those folks who know every last detail of an artist’s career. But I am pretty well versed in Dylan and the Dead and Van Morrison. I love me some Neil Young, but I have to admit I’ve not listened to every record, and I’m pretty hazy about most of his tours.

I mean, I know there was Buffalo Springfield and his tenure with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and of course Crazy Horse. I also know he’s played with lots of different bands with names like The Ducks and the Restless and Promise of the Real, but I’d be hard-pressed to give you dates on any of those or who was in them. But I’ve definitely listened to recordings of all those guys.

The point I’m belaboring to make is that I don’t know how to put this particular show into any type of context. I believe 1976 is a well-regarded year in Neil Young lore. He did a big tour of Japan and Europe with Crazy Horse in the spring, and a tour with them of the US in the Fall. In the summer, he toured with Stephen Stills, with whom he released an album called Long May You Run, but it ended badly.

This show comes from the middle of his American tour with Crazy Horse. He often did two shows a day on this tour. Each performance began with Neil performing solo on acoustic guitar and sometimes piano, and then Crazy Horse came out for a full electric set.

There is a soundboard recording of the late show, which apparently came from Joel Bernstein, a photographer and producer who hung out with Neil around this time. I don’t know all the details of that. Only audience recordings exist of the early show. I tried listening to the early show, but I couldn’t do it. It isn’t a terribly bad recording; I’ve certainly heard worse, but I just wasn’t in the mood. This is partially because I mislabeled it as a soundboard and was really annoyed when it was definitely not that. But the late show is a true soundboard, and it sounds terrific.

Listening to the acoustic set, I realize I don’t know what to say about it. Neil is in fine form, and he plays the songs well, but they sound more or less as they do on the records. For the most part, he’s not doing anything different with them, and he’s not blowing me away with raw emotion. Don’t get me wrong, they are great. I love these songs, and he performs them well; I just don’t know that there is more to say about them.

It opens with a nice version of “Heart of Gold.” My copy has some digital static a couple of times right at the beginning. “The Old Laughing Lady” is really good with a lovely harmonica bit in the middle. At the very end, Neil starts singing what the setlist calls “Guilty Train,” but I can’t find any information about it. It is just a snippet, really, but all the lyrics websites only list the lyrics, “Guilty train
Don’t whistle my way again,” which is repeated. Does anyone know anything about this song? If it even is a song.

“Journey Through the Past” is a lot of fun with this barroom-esque piano work. Neil switches to the piano or an organ during “A Man Needs a Maid,” and he also blows his harmonica, which gives it a really beautiful, haunting quality. The band comes out on “Country Home,” and they rock. About two minutes into the song, Neil seems to get confused, and he repeats the line “Leave myself behind” a few times. For a moment, the band seems like they don’t know what to do, and then they just jump into a great little jam.

“Lotta Love” is very pretty, but at the end it gets really soft for some reason. “Like a Hurricane” starts off kind of weird. Neil does this intro where he plays really fast and just kind of noodles for a minute, and then it kicks off into the actual song. It is loud and ragged and glorious. In the intro to “Are You Ready For the Country,” Neil says it is their first time playing the song. As it was written in 1972, that seems unlikely. Was he just talking about him performing it with Crazy Horse, or was this really the first time he’d played it live? Is there a Neil Young Base out there with listings of all his live performances? Whatever the case, it is a rollicking version.

“Down by the River” is one of my favorite Neil Young songs. It has an excellent groove, and it is a great launching pad for some classic Neil Young jamming. He does not disappoint this night. One of my favorite parts of the song is after the big jam; he comes back to the first verse singing, “Be on my side. I’ll be on your side,” and he just nails that moment here. From the big rowdiness of that song, he transitions to the subtle beauty of “Inca Queen” with this lovely synth keyboard and some very fine guitar picking. “Opera Star” and “El Dorado” finish us out, and they are rocking.

It is a very fine show overall. Well worth grabbing.

I’m a funny man. When talking about a GarciaLive release, I noted that in order to write more of these music reviews, I was just going to give them one good listen (instead of the three I initially was trying to do) and then just jot down my thoughts. These aren’t intended to be in-depth, full-on reviews, but just thoughts on a show. I listened to this show on my way to and from work, and I made notes whenever a song was good or interesting. The plan was to come home that night and write a review. That was Monday. By the time I got home, I was too tired to talk about anything. Then Tuesday came and Wednesday, and to be honest, I just kept forgetting to write. Here it is Thursday, and I’m finally getting this thing out. I could have listened to the show a couple of more times!

Maybe next time.

The Terror: The Devil In Silver: Season 1, Episode 3 – “New York In June”

the devil in silver

Season one of The Terror is one of my favorite seasons of television over the last decade. It is a beautiful piece of historical fiction about a group of 19th-century British sailors trying to find a Northwest Passage and discovering something sinister in the frozen wasteland. I don’t think it was originally intended as an anthology series, but it became one. I have not seen the second season set in a Japanese internment camp during World War II, but they say it is very good.

And now, some seven years later, we are getting Season 3. I didn’t actually know this was part of The Terror until I started watching it. On their main screens, AMC+ just shows it as The Devil in Silver. But the opening credits do say The Terror. I don’t know why. Had I known, I would have watched Season 2 first.

The Devil in Silver follows Pepper (Dan Stevens), a guy who had the great misfortune of getting into a fight with his girlfriend’s ex, with the police nearby who were at the end of their shift. Rather than arrest him and deal with the paperwork, they take him to a mental hospital where he’s put on a 72-hour hold. If he behaves, they say, he’ll be released. As is the way with these things, he gets stuck there indefinitely.

New Hyde Hospital is a rundown, shabby place, and the series hits the state of our mental healthcare with a hammer. Hospitals are underfunded, understaffed, and tend to treat the symptoms with drugs rather than get to the heart of the actual disease. Also, there may be a monster. It might also be a scary patient they keep locked behind a silver door. But probably it is a monster since this series is all about the supernatural.

Our first two episodes introduced the situation and our characters: patients and doctors. It is a great cast, with Aasif Mandvi as the head administrator, CCH Pounder as one of the doctors, Stephen Root as the book club leader, and Judith freaking Light as one of the patients (I haven’t seen her in anything since Who’s the Boss, but one look at her IMDB page shows she’s kept busy – good for her.)

Pepper is angry and belligerent. He’s the McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in this scenario. Episode Three begins with the aftermath of Episode Two, where he was attacked by the monster. He awakes to find that the doctors are telling the story that he became belligerent and violent, and they had to get rough with him – hence his injuries.

He tries asking the patients who this patient is behind the silver door, but they give conflicting answers when they give answers at all. When he’s told that the patients are going to be taken to a pizza parlor for a treat in a few days, he decides that’s where he’ll make his escape. To keep the patients calm (and zoinked out of their minds), the staff gives everybody some heavy downers. Pepper doesn’t swallow it and tells his roommate his plan. The roommate tells someone else, and before you know it, all the patients are not taking their meds. The pizza party is a disaster with everyone acting, well, crazy, and Pepper ultimately decides he needs to stay to try to help them get real help.

He is once again confronted by the monster, who basically tells him if he doesn’t comply, he’ll kill everybody.

Ok, I’m once again rambling for too long. I really don’t want to do full recaps. I just don’t have the patience for it, but I’m struggling talking about single episodes without giving out quite a bit of information.

I’m struggling with this show. It has a great cast, and the story has potential. Though it does lean a little too heavily into the well-worn tropes of mental institutions. It’s lacking something. Maybe a specificity to the characters. The actors, especially Judith Light, give it their all, but I don’t find myself interested in them. And they’ve brought out the monster too soon. It’s not really that scary but keeps lurking about and doing stuff. I’d prefer a bigger mystery about what it is and what it wants.

The cast is good enough that I’m going to keep watching, but I truly hope it gets better.

Now Watching: Deadly Circuit (1983)

deadly circuit poster

Deadly Circuit (1983)
Directed by Claude Miller
Starring Michel Serrault and Isabelle Adjani

Synopsis: A private detective becomes obsessed with a serial killer who he thinks might be his daughter.

Rating: ***1/2

Thoughts: A very French take on the neo-noir. A private detective known as “The Eye” (Serrault) is hired to locate a rich couple’s son and find out more information about the woman he has been seeing. He finds the man and watches the woman, Catherine (Adjani) murder him. The detective doesn’t turn her in, but continues to follow her, where he finds that she regularly seduces rich men and then murders them. He becomes convinced she is his long-lost daughter and begins secretly helping her dispose of the bodies.

This is a weird little film that mostly follows the detective as he follows the girl. Serrault is great as the detective. He’s a guy who was once great at his job but has lost his way. As he’s gotten older, he’s feeling the weight of having never known his daughter (what exactly happened to her is only revealed late in the film). Adjani is lovely as well, but Catherine is someone we mostly just see through his eyes. The plot is strange and quirky and kind of wonderful.

Interview With the Vampire: Season 1, Episode 1 – “In the Throes of Increasing Wonder…”

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I first learned of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire when the movie starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt came out in 1994. I remember there was great controversy over Cruise being cast as Lestat. Anne Rice herself came out against him. Cruise was a major star at the time, but wasn’t considered a great actor yet. My memories here are vague, but once the movie came out, everyone realized Cruise was wonderful.

I didn’t have an opinion. I’d not read the book. I did like Tom Cruise, but didn’t really care if he was in this movie or not. I was a freshman in college when the film finally came out. My girlfriend at the time was a big Anne Rice fan and was super excited about the film. She had opinions on Tom Cruise.

We watched the movie together, and I liked it. I must have liked it quite a bit because my mom bought me a boxed set of the Vampire Chronicles books. I read Interview with the Vampire over Christmas break and loved it. I think I started the next book, The Vampire Lestat, but couldn’t get into it. Partially, this was because that book focused on Lestat and not Louis, who was the protagonist of Interview, and partially it was because Lestat becomes a modern-day rock star, and that seemed ludicrous to me. Much of Interview is set at the turn of the century, so modernizing him felt wrong somehow.

I kept telling myself I should read it anyway, and I kept not doing it. Everyone says Queen of the Damned, the third book in the series, is terrific, and I very much wanted to read it, but I felt like I needed to read Lestat first, and that never did happen. Eventually, I moved completely away from Rice and vampires, and it all seems like a distant memory to me now.

I rewatched the movie a couple of years ago. It’s not great. It has some interesting stuff going on in it. Tom Cruise is quite good. As is Brad Pitt. And a young Kristin Dunst is terrific. But I find chunks of it rather dull, and I don’t find the way that it plays with vampire lore nearly as interesting as I once did.

When they announced AMC was making a TV series out of Interview with the Vampire, I wasn’t particularly interested. It was the sort of thing I thought I might check out at some point, but really, I knew I’d be too interested in other things to bother.

But then the same people adapted The Vampire Lestat, and I got a really good price on an annual subscription to AMC+. Suddenly, Lestat was being advertised to me all the time. Suddenly, I started noticing people in my social media feeds saying good things about it. And now here I am watching it and talking about it.

The original story has a vampire meet with a journalist whom he tells his story to. This adaptation is set in modern times, but it does a neat little trick. The vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Andersen) meets with a journalist, Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian). But the twist is that they previously met decades ago and had the original interview. But it ended badly, and nothing was ever published (I believe in the book Louis winds up killing Molloy). Now Louis wants to try it again. Molloy now has Parkinson’s, is a cynic, but is much tougher than he was the first time. He’s no longer scared and, as such, can push past some of the vampires’ BS.

It is a bit of brilliant casting to put Andersen as Malloy. He brilliantly portrayed a shock jock in Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio. He brings some of that cocky energy here.

This first episode follows Louis from just before the time he meets Lestat (Sam Reid) until he is turned into a vampire. From the start, this series isn’t afraid to mess with the story. For starters, Jacob Andersen is black, and in the book, he is white. The book sets his origin story in 1791. The series moves that up to 1910, so that slavery is a thing of the past. Louis is now a successful brothel owner. He’s rich, and that brings him a certain amount of power, but he’s still a black man living in the very racist South. The white people he hobnobs with never let him forget he is lesser than they are. He never forgets to call them “sir.”

Race becomes a central theme of the episode. When he meets Lestat, the vampire is appalled by how the whites treat him. Part of the appeal of Lestat and his call to become a vampire is how he is treated with respect.

Vampire stories are often laced with eroticism. There is a natural sensuality in the way a vampire bites the neck of their victims and sucks. There is an innate homoeroticism in Anne Rice’s story that was only hinted at in the 1994 adaptation. This series leans hard into that.

I watched the extended cut, which runs about an hour and ten minutes. Honestly, that was a little long. I don’t need my TV episodes to be nearly as long as a movie. It packs an awful lot into those minutes, and it is very well done. Reid and Andersen are both very good. It digs into Louis’ family situation. How they pretend to not know what he does for a living, how they pray he’ll earn enough to get him out of that lifestyle, and how they enjoy the fruits of his labor. There is a religious brother, a sister who is about to get married, and a mother who sees all and knows all.

I loved how the relationship with Lestat builds. It begins with a bit of jealousy as Lestat has better luck with Louis’s girl than he does. But there is also a sense of awe and desire. Louis admits that he both wanted to kill Lestat and be him. Then they become friends, and Lestat shows him some of his power. Lestat can talk to a group of people yet still communicate with Louis telepathically. He moves so fast that time almost seems to stop. This is all really well done.

All of that being said, there is something about the show I didn’t love. Part of it is that this story is too familiar to me. I don’t know that I need another telling of it. I think it feels a little too drawn out as well. There are seven episodes in the first season, eight in the second, and I don’t know that the book has enough in it to make it worth all of that. Obviously, the series is going to add to the story. Hopefully, that will be in interesting ways. There is nothing in this first episode that doesn’t make me think they will be successful. I know I will watch more of it, but I don’t think I’ll be binging this one.

—

Hi, and welcome to my Interview with the Vampire recap. I’ve been thinking a lot about doing some of these. I watch a lot of TV, and it always seems like a good idea to talk about it. At the same time, I don’t know that I have the skills to do it. Or the time. Or patience. Doing recaps takes a lot of time. There is a skill to detail the plots of individual episodes, and I’m not sure that I have that. My idea is to maybe just give the most basic plot summation and then add in a few thoughts on what I liked or didn’t like. I meant to do that with this episode. I thought I’d write a couple of paragraphs and be done with it. But I have a hard time just writing a couple of paragraphs about anything. Which winds up making it exhausting. Which means I have a hard time doing this sort of thing.

So, I have no idea if I’ll write about episode two or three or the entire series. I don’t even know when or if I’ll watch them. But for now, I enjoyed the first episode, and now you know why.

Jerry Garcia Band: GarciaLive, Volume One – Passaic, NJ (03/01/80)

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Since I’m attempting to review all of the Grateful Dead’s Dick’s Picks series, I thought it would be fun to review some of the Jerry Garcia solo releases as well. Ultimately, I’d like to do reviews of officially released live albums from all my favorite artists (plus some unofficially released ones). I’m still trying to figure out how best to do that. I originally thought I needed to give each performance a good listen three different times to properly review them, but that is taking too long. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t listen to music like I used to. It is mostly done in the car, and I don’t spend that much time in the car to be able to listen to a show three times before I review it. Not if I’m going to do more than one review a month anyhow.

These reviews won’t necessarily be proper ones then. More like impressions. I’ll just tell you what songs I enjoyed, and maybe a few that I didn’t.

I more or less randomly picked up After Midnight: Kean College, 2/28/80, a few weeks back, intending it to be the first Garcia review. I listened to it a couple of times – it is a great record – but then my sister came in from South Korea for a visit. I made her a playlist of songs I figured she’d enjoy because I knew I’d be driving her around a bit. To make things easier to play, I removed the Garcia album (and all other music) from my phone and added all her songs. When she left, I couldn’t remember which Garcia album I had been listening to. I wanted to give it one more listen before I wrote a review. I knew it was from a performance in 1980, saw that this GarciaLive disc was from that year, and I added it to my phone. Pretty quickly, I realized I had the wrong disc, but I just went for it.

Which is just another example of why I won’t be listening to these albums multiple times before I write my own thoughts.

I don’t know why the Garcia releases changed their name from Pure Jerry to GarciaLive (or why they are sometimes called something completely different). The first volume of the GarciaLive came after a four-year gap between official releases, one of the longest gaps since they started releasing them regularly.

Jerry Garcia’s main band, of course, was the Grateful Dead, but nearly from the beginning, he was doing side projects with lots of different people, under a variety of names. This more or less coalesced into the Jerry Garcia Band by the mid-1970s, though the band members regularly changed. 1980 is a really interesting period as it has Johnny d’Fonseca, who only lasted a few months on drums, and Ozzie Ahlers, who didn’t last much longer on keyboards.

One of the things I love about the Jerry Band shows is that they regularly played smaller venues than the Grateful Dead. While Jerry’s solo audiences did grow over time, they were routinely still smaller than what the Dead were playing to. In 1980, the Grateful Dead were playing coliseums and civic centers with capacities in the tens of thousands, while the Jerry Garcia Band was still gigging in small concert halls. On tour, he often played places with capacities of a couple of thousand, but in the San Francisco Bay area, he still often performed in places like The Stone or the Keystone in Berkeley that could only fit a few hundred. How amazing would it have been to see Jerry Garcia in a place like that?

I also love that the Jerry Band allowed Garcia to play lots of songs he wouldn’t necessarily be able to perform with the Dead. While they usually would play one or two Dead tunes in a set, and sometimes something from one of Garcia’s solo albums, they mostly did cover songs. They’d play old Motown tunes, reggae, jazz, early rock and roll, and so much more. Bassist John Kahn’s wife once noted that it was Kahn who often brought Garcia songs to play.

Which finally brings us to this show. This was the closing performance of a multi-week tour for the Jerry Garcia Band on the East Coast. It opens with an excellent version of the Grateful Dead classic “Sugaree.” Garcia takes a nice solo early on, then Ahlers gets his turn with some synth-heavy keys, and it closes out with another boisterous solo by Garcia.

That’s another thing I love about the Jerry Band – it is very much Garcia’s band. While Jerry was the biggest star of the Grateful Dead, the band was truly a cohesive whole. They played together. They listened to each other and had an uncanny ability to intertwine their individual notes into something singular. Garcia often soloed, but the band wasn’t just backing him up or playing behind him; they were making music together. From everything I’ve read, Garcia treated everyone in the JGB kindly – he paid them well and listened to their ideas – but there is no doubt this was his band. His name was on the marquee, and the audience was there to listen to him play. For the most part, the band is there to back him up. But Garcia also gives them time to shine. The keyboards often get a solo part, and sometimes even John Kahn will get a solo.

For the first few songs on the early show, Garcia’s guitar has a strange tone. I’m not a musician, I don’t have the technical knowledge to explain it, but it sounds a little high at times to me and screechy. By the time they are playing Bob Dylan’s “A Simple Twist of Fate,” it has gotten better, warmer somehow. The performance of that song is very emotional. You feel the sadness of the song in Garcia’s playing. He absolutely nails the final solo.

Ozzie Ahlers has a beautiful solo at the beginning of Jimmy Cliff’s “Sitting Here In Limbo,” and then the band really pulls together with a wonderful bit of cohesive jamming in the middle. When I was listening to After Midnight: Kean College, 2/28/80, I fell in love with that performance of “That’s What Love Will Make You Do.” It is a brilliant version. This one isn’t nearly as good, but it’s still pretty damn great. Kahn’s basslines really stand out. The keyboards get a little crazy with it. The cover of Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come” is super fun with some good funky riffs.

Robert Hunter was the opening act for this show. He opened most shows on this tour. Apparently, Rachel Sweet was scheduled to be the opening act for this tour. She did perform a couple of shows, but then disappeared, and Hunter replaced her. I wasn’t able to find any information on why she left. The Hunter set is not included in this release, but he did come out and play with Jerry on two songs, “Tiger Rose” and “Promontory Rider.” I love Robert Hunter. He wrote some of my favorite lyrics. But he is not a great singer or guitar player. I have some unofficially released recordings of his solo shows, and they aren’t great. I mean, they aren’t bad, and it is cool to hear him perform the songs that he wrote. Those shows are mostly him by himself on a guitar, and they do not blow my mind. But these two songs with the Jerry Band backing him are terrific.

It all concludes with a scorching cover of Peter Rowan’s “Midnight Moonlight’ and a soulful rendition of The Beatles’ “Dear Prudence.”

If I’m being honest, I think After Midnight: Kean College, 2/28/80 has the edge over this release. It has more fire in it. Maybe the band was just tired after a long tour. I don’t know. But this is a very good show. I’ve not spent a lot of time with the Jerry Garcia Band in the early 1980s, but these two releases are definitely going to change that.

Here’s the track listing

Jerry Garcia Band
Capitol Theatre
Passaic, NJ
03/01/90

Disc 1
Early show:

“Sugaree” (Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter) – 14:33
“Catfish John” (Bob McDill, Allen Reynolds) – 9:56
“How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You)” (Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, Eddie Holland) – 9:05
“Simple Twist of Fate” (Bob Dylan) – 16:16

Disc 2
Early show continued:

“Sitting in Limbo” (Jimmy Cliff, Guillermo Bright-Plummer) – 12:40
“That’s All Right” (Arthur Crudup) – 8:09
“Deal” (Garcia, Hunter) – 8:22

Late show:

“Mission in the Rain” (Garcia, Hunter) – 12:50
“That’s What Love Will Make You Do” (Henderson Thigpen, James Banks, Eddy Marion) – 8:56

Disc 3
Late show continued:

“Dear Prudence” (John Lennon, Paul McCartney) – 10:22
“Russian Lullaby” (Irving Berlin) – 15:39
“The Harder They Come” (Jimmy Cliff) – 11:47
“Tiger Rose” (Robert Hunter) – 4:10
“Promontory Rider” (Robert Hunter) – 6:10
“Midnight Moonlight” (Peter Rowan) – 8:39

The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec Vol. 1

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Over the last few months, I’ve been trying to up my review game over at Cinema Sentries. I seem to not be writing as much strictly for the blog, so this seems like a good way to keep me in the game. As part of that, I’ve been dipping my toes into other media. CS has a relationship with Fantagraphics, a comics company that puts out a lot of independent stuff. That mostly means books by folks I’ve never heard of, and lots of kind of weird stuff.

I’m not opposed to any of that, but in the past, I’ve been a little reluctant to dive right in because I don’t write a lot of book reviews, and writing about comics is a little bit different. I actually was aware of this one, as my wife is a French nerd and she knows a lot about French books, movies, and culture. They actually made a movie about Adèle Blanc-Sec a few years ago, and I’ve seen it. So grabbing this comic was a no-brainer.

And I quite liked it, and now you can read my review.

A Man Named Rocca (1961) / La Scoumoune (1972)

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If you spend any time at all watching French cinema, then you will no doubt know the name Jean-Paul Belmondo. He was one of the great actors of the French New Wave and remained a popular favorite for decades.

In what seems like a very strange turn of events, he wound up starring as the same character in two different adaptations of the same book, some eleven years apart. Kino Lorber has just released them, and I watched them back to back. It is a fascinating glimpse into the adaptation process. I reviewed them both over at Cinema Sentries.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: In the Mouth of Madness (1994)

in the mouth of madness poster

The great Sam Neill passed away this week, so I knew I wanted to pay tribute to him with tonight’s horror film. It was either this or the wonderfully weird Possession, and I decided to go with this as I’ve already written about most of John Carpenter’s films on this site. I may try to write about Possession later this weekend.

Carpenter had an insane run of great films between 1976 (Assault on Precinct 13) and 1988 (They Live). But then things drop off sharply. He reminds me of Dario Argento in the way he went from making absolutely incredible genre films one moment to making largely crap for the rest of his career. Carpenter’s drop wasn’t quite as horrid as Argento’s (though Argento has recently made some decent movies, whereas Carpenter hasn’t done anything in years). I’d argue that In the Mouth of Madness was the beginning of the end. You could probably argue that Memoirs of an Invisible Man – made two years before this one was the real beginning, but I haven’t seen it since it came out, so I’ll remain silent on its quality.

This isn’t a bad film by any means, and in fact, it has some wonderful moments, but you can just start to see things falling apart. It is actually quite reminiscent of Prince of Darkness (1987) in the sense of how preposterous the plot is, but Carpenter can make that film into something utterly wonderful, whereas he can’t quite convince me on this one.

John Trent (Sam Neill) is an insurance investigator. He’s good at his job. He’s hired to find Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow), a horror writer who is a bit like a cross between Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft, but way more popular. He’s so popular that riots are starting to occur at bookstores because his promised upcoming book has yet to be released. He has always been a bit of a recluse. Only his agent knows where he lives (and his agent has gone crazy and nearly killed Trent with an axe when he was learning about the job in a cafe.) Cane went missing weeks ago, just after he sent part of his manuscript to the publishing house (ran by Charlton Heston in a small role). After reading all of Cane’s books, Trent realizes that there is a secret message in their covers – a map that indicates where Hob’s End is located (the fictional town where his books are set). Linda Styles (Julie Carmen) is assigned to go with him.

The book cover map doesn’t give them exact directions, so they drive around all night hoping to find it. They run into some weirdness, but just as dawn breaks, they find the town. It is exactly as described in the books. It seems like a picture postcard small town. But it is strange. It seems almost deserted at first. Then they see some strange kids wandering around. They are greeted kindly by the inn’s elderly shopkeeper, but there is a strange painting in the lobby. One that keeps changing. Then there is the church. In the books, it is described as an absolute evil. So, naturally, they go check it out.

They find Sutter Cane there, and he’s gone completely mad. So have the townspeople. They say his books have always had a weird effect on their readers, but this latest one is turning them into something evil. It is starting to affect Styles.

The plot is pure pulp. It doesn’t always make sense. It doesn’t always have to. Sam Neil is having so much fun. Trent is the skeptic. He’s not read Cane’s books before this assignment. He thinks the town is a put-on. Something the publishers did to sell more books. But we know how things will wind up because the film begins with Trent being institutionalized. He marks up his cell, his clothes, and his face with crosses. There is some indication that the world outside is on fire.

Carpenter handles the material well, but not amazingly well. He’s playing in the Lovecraft sandbox and loving it. I’m not super familiar with Lovecraft, but apparently, there are a lot of references to his books. He uses a lot of practical effects, which I love, and his monsters are all snake-like and Cthulhu-like in appearance.

It is a good movie. I liked it quite a bit. But I always expect more from John Carpenter, and looking at the films that were to come from him, it is difficult not to think of this as a turning point. As the beginning of the end. And that’s a little hard to take.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore Is the Pick of the Week

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Before I went on vacation last week, I rushed to write my Five Cool Things article.I usually write them on Tuesday evening, and they are published on Wednesday. But we were leaving early Tuesday morning, so Monday evening, while I was packing, I quickly wrote that article plus a comics review. I was so proud of myself. We drove back home this Monday. Somewhere on the ride, I told myself to remember to write this week’s Pick of the Week.

Then we got home, and I discovered that my keyboard was no longer working. All of the lower keys no longer worked at all. I tried unplugging it and messing with the wires, but nothing. Luckily (or so I thought), I had a spare keyboard lying around. I picked it up to discover that the cat had puked on it at some point in the past. Cleaned it off as best I could and plugged it in. Alas, it also had keys that weren’t working, but they were different keys. Luckily (or so I stupidly thought once again), I had yet another keyboard lying around. It is a wireless one. I grabbed it. No cat vomit, but the lid to the battery casing was missing.

I ordered one on Amazon (and then cancelled that order and purchased a different one – a story for another time). It arrived yesterday afternoon. I was swamped with catching up on everything I didn’t do while on vacation that I totally forgot to write my pick. Emailed the owner of Cinema Sentries about 11 last night, apologizing. We decided it would be okay to go ahead and write it today and be late with it.

So here we are. I intentionally try to not pick released from the Criterion Collection each week because that just feels like cheating. Or lazy. I like to highlight a variety of interesting releases from different companies. But this week, my favorite director, Martin Scorsese, is getting a new release, and I just had to pick it. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore isn’t my favorite Scorsese, but it’s still a very good film (you can read my review of it here.)

You can read all the details of the interesting new releases at Cinema Sentries.