I had another Borders stop on the way home. Actually, first I stopped at a local CD store about a block away from Borders to see if they had the special (apparently already rare) edition of the Lost in Translation soundtrack. No luck. They had no regular edition either, as it keeps flying off the shelves. What can you expect? There are a lot of eager My Bloody Valentine fans eager for some fresh Kevin Shields work. So I went to Borders instead, as there were some books and magazines I wanted to pick up.
The first thing I picked up. I've seen the movie [only] three times now, but wanted the soundtrack from the first viewing. The killer came about halfway through the film when Bob and Charlotte are riding in a cab through late night Tokyo to the sounds of My Bloody Valentine's Sometimes.
As stated above, just the notion of some Kevin Shields work is enough to get MANY people excited. My Bloody Valentine's last album, Loveless, from 1991, is legendary. Part of the legend comes from Shields inability to follow it up - out of fear, out of something. Reports and interviews surfaced around 1997 that a new album was nearly ready. Nothing came. Shields has done some production work, recorded with Experimental Audio Research (one of the handful of Spacemen 3 offshoots) and Primal Scream, and has done a handful of remixes (including ones of Yo La Tengo and Mogwai). But his MBV work is the most remembered and recognized. Warm thick guitars and songs that have almost a "melted tape" quality - tones and pitches not quite on normal marks, but not discordant either.
The Lost in Translation soundtrack also features Air (who probably got their widest recognition for their soundtrack to Sophia Coppola's previous film, The Virgin Suicides), Dirty Vegas, Squarepusher, The Jesus & Mary Chain, and others. And it includes, in semi-hidden fashion, Bill Murray's karaoke rendition of More Than This (a very poignant moment of the film).
Piano renditions of Radiohead songs. At times, it has a bit too much elevator music sound to it, but most of the time it works. This is not the first time this has been done - I believe there's an all-strings rendition of OK Computer, but O'Riley's album covers all Radiohead albums up to Amnesiac.
I knew of True Love Waits' existence, but hadn't paid much attention to it until I watched Unfaithful this past weekend. At one point, O'Riley's rendition of Radiohead's excellent Exit Music for a Film is used in the soundtrack. The song is haunting any way you play it (maybe it's because the lines I always remember are "today we escape" and "we hope that you choke"). I need more piano music anyways, so it was a good acquisition. I think it would actually fit in well on random with some Glenn Gould and Stockhausen's Mantra.
I got this for Sy Hersch's The Stovepipe article that paints a very disturbing picture of the CIA and how the whole "yellowcake uranium from Niger" story came to be. Since I didn't renew my New Yorker subscription when it expired last spring, it will be nice (and interesting) to see how I feel about it now. I miss it, somewhat, but The Atlantic Monthly is giving me similar, if not better, quality, and is only monthly instead of weekly - making The Atlantic easier to keep up with. I do miss the New Yorker cartoons and Talk of the Town sections.
This is a very heavy mens fashion magazine from Europe. This one is straight up fashion (as far as I can tell), unlike the Maxim style mens magazines. But I got this not for the main magazine, but for a separate supplement that came with it. Half of the supplement is dedicated purely to Helmut Lang, whom I've been a big fan of for years.
Lang (whose midrange items I used to be able to afford) is very admirable to me. I love his sense of aesthetics, and how deeply that sense cuts across the company - from the small ad campaigns, to the flagship stores in SoHo (where Lang's offices and NYC residence also are located) designed by Gluckman Mayner architects. Helmut Lang is a master of minimalism and understatement, and everything about his work is presented to stand entirely on its own, and it almost always does. From a design and aesthetic standpoint, he has rarely stumbled. Understatement is key - there's always just some little extra thing that makes his work stand out. Even his jeans have a unique quality that I've never been able to peg down fully. I continue to be a fan, and he continues to be an influence on Eucci (and onto new parts of the Eucci family, such as Rive).
I only wish I had bought a parka from the A/W 99 00 collection. My coat from the following years collection is much loved by me, but a heavy parka would have been nice. I do have an excellent denim jacket from Helmut Lang, whose quality and styling I haven't seen before or since (even in Lang's own collections). The jacket has no side pockets, no bottom 'ring' of material, no extraneous buttons. It's very minimal and functional, and wears more like a fitted shirt than a jacket.
This is a book that compiles three articles that ran in The Atlantic Monthly in 2002. That was prior to my first Atlantic purchase (which has just turned into a subscription), but it was what first really caught my eye about this magazine. It turns out that I'm already a small fan of the author, William Langewiesche. His article, The Crash of EgyptAir 990 is in The Best American Magazine Writing of 2002, and is the article I most remember (but I'm only about 2/3 of the way through that collection). I just finished reading his article about Columbia's Last Flight from the November 2003 issue of The Atlantic, which was another great read alternating between rich portrayals of space flight (including the some of the final conversations in the cockpit) and the problems inside NASA that contributed to last February's tragic accident. There is a followup interview online with Langewiesche which I need to get to. And Anarchy at Sea from the September 2003 Atlantic, my first Atlantic issue ever, was another phenomenal read. But I didn't realize, except for some style similarities, that all of these articles were by the same author until just this past week.
But I'm looking forward to American Ground, as I've heard so much good word over this series of articles. And it's a topic that I'm interested in. Langewiesche apparently covers the whole story, from when the towers fell to when the last piece of debris left the site. He had somehow secured unrestricted, round-the-clock access to Ground Zero within days. Various reviews say that he covers the story without allowing (too much) sentiment get in the way, which I believe, given the previous articles I've read by him. At the same time, I wonder what is in store. Anarchy at Sea, Crash of Egyptair and Columbia's Last Flight all contain very detailed and rather harrowing segments wherein the author portrays these doomed scenes in alarming detail. Whether it's what's going on in a large plane suddenly forced into a steep dive towards the sea, the breakup of a cargo ship in a huge ocean storm off the coast of Spain, or the casual banter of Columbia's crew cut in with graphic details of what is occurring (unknown to them) in the shuttle's left wing, he captures that. At the same time, he captures all of the people involved in the less frantic times - various air safety personnel from the U.S. and Egypt, different crews on shipping liners, members of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB), etc. William Langewiesche is definitely an author to keep an eye on.
