Magnet Magazine
San Francisco quartet Wooden Shjips just released a video for “Black Smoke Rise” off West, due out September 13 via Thrill Jockey. The clip is black and white and beach-y, following a lone boy walking around under the summer sun. The band will tour the U.S. starting November 5 in Chicago, but in the meantime, watch the video for “Black Smoke Rise” below, and download an mp3 of another West track, “Lazy Bones.”
Ever wonder what will happen during the last five minutes of late-night TV talk shows? Here are tonight’s notable performers:
The Late Show With David Letterman (CBS): Thurston Moore
Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore is supporting new solo album Demolished Thoughts.
The Tonight Show With Jay Leno (NBC): OK Go
OK Go is celebrating its recording of “The Muppets Theme Song,” the first track off The Green Album, a new tribute to the Muppets. The band is performing the song with the furry creatures themselves.
Jimmy Kimmel Live! (ABC): Josh Ritter
Rerun from August 15. The singer/songwriter and novelist promoted So Runs The World Away with a performance of “Kathleen.”
Late Night With Jimmy Fallon (NBC): Kirk Franklin
Gospel musician Kirk Franklin is supporting new album Hello Fear.
Last Call With Carson Daly (NBC): Foster The People, MNDR
Rerun from May 24. Foster The People plugged debut full-length Torches, and electronic duo MNDR performed “Cut Me Out” and “Fade To Black.”
Since the mid-’90s, Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks have both had successful music careers, she as an acclaimed singer/songwriter and he as an electrifying guitar player with his group and the Allman Brothers Band, among others. The two met on tour in 1999, married a couple of years later and had two children, but their hectic solo schedules often kept them apart. To rectify the situation, they formed the Tedeschi Trucks Band, an 11-member ensemble that recently released debut album Revelator (Sony Masterworks), which was recorded at the duo’s home studio. Knowing how much they like to do things together, we asked Tedeschi and Trucks to guest edit magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with them.
Susan: Jack Owens is a Delta-blues legend from Mississippi, a man born in 1904 who lived to see every decade in the 20th century. He never quite had the recognition of some of his peers like Skip James and Bukka White, but he was every bit as talented. As much as the blues has evolved over the years, there’s really no substitute for someone playing solo acoustic guitar, keeping time by stomping his foot and singing the blues because he’s lived it every day of his life. If authenticity is what you’re looking for, they don’t get any more authentic than Jack Owens.
Video after the jump.
Aaron Livingston and RJD2 have teamed up as Icebird and will be releasing their debut album, The Abandoned Lullaby, on October 11 via RJ’s Electrical Connections. The two first worked together on “Crumbs Off The Table,” a track off of RJD2’s most recent album, Colossus. Individually, RJ’s decade-long career has produced solo records and high-profile commercials, as well as features and theme songs (most notably for Mad Men), while Livingston has headed the group the Mean and participated in the Black Lily Music Festival. Download Icebird’s “Going And Going. And Going” below.
“Going And Going. And Going” (download):
https://magnetmagazine.com/audio/GoingAndGoingAndGoing.mp3
MAGNET contributing editor Jud Cost is sharing some of the wealth of classic films he’s been lucky enough to see over the past 40 years. Trolling the backwaters of cinema, he has worked up a list of more than 100 titles—from the ’20s through the ’80s—that you may have missed. A new selection, all currently available on DVD, appears every week.
La Dolce Vita (1960, in Italian with English subtitles, 175 minutes)
La Dolce Vita (“the sweet life” in Italian) was certainly meant by director Federico Fellini to be taken with a large dollop of irony. Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni), a journalist who acts more like a publicist, is on-call for the “beautiful people” who jet into Rome, including Sylvia (Anita Ekberg), a platinum blonde Swedish film star who resembles Marilyn Monroe on human growth hormones.
It would be hard to top the “everything’s for sale/anything goes” message of the opening sequence of this three-hour epic, as Marcello buzzes through the skies of Rome, following a lead helicopter carrying a large statue of Jesus down below, suspended from the armpits by a thick cable as though he’s water-skiing in the air. Bikini-clad girls, catching rays on an office rooftop, holler out at Marcello, asking where he’s going. “To the pope,” he shouts back, but they can’t hear him.
“I like Rome. It’s like a tranquil jungle,” says Marcello to his blasé newest conquest, Maddalena (Anouk Aimée). “You have too much money. We are among the few people left to be unhappy.” For kicks, they pick up a prostitute in Maddalena’s Cadillac and go back to her place for the evening. “Get good money from these guys. They’re richer than Onassis,” shouts her pimp as the limousine squeals off into the sunset. Marcello and the haunted Maddalena make love on the hooker’s bed. When confronted by the pimp the next morning about her low cash return, the prostitute says, “Hey, they did everything on their own.”
Marcello returns home to find Emma (Yvonne Furneaux), his distressed live-in girlfriend, passed out in the hallway from a drug-overdose attempted suicide. He rushes her to the nearest hospital in his Triumph sports roadster, where she has her stomach pumped, not for the first time.
Marcello is soon off to his next press project, the arrival via Alitalia of Sylvia, Sweden’s new “it girl.” With boundless energy, Sylvia runs up the steps of St. Peter’s just to hear the magnificent ringing from the Vatican’s bell tower, then asks to see something that Marcello explains is in Florence, not Rome. She fields cotton-candy questions at a press conference with ease. When asked what she wears when she sleeps and what things she likes in particular, she replies, “I sleep only in two drops of French perfume. And there are three things I like: love, love and love.”
Who better to document every move of this rudderless subculture that would one day sprout such baffling personalities as Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, famous only for being celebrities, than a horde of newspaper photogs chasing after them through the streets. One of the chroniclers of the rich and famous here is called Paparazzo (Walter Santesso), whose character’s name has now become synonymous with the job title.