| April 15th, 2005 05:18 PM |
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| Joey |
Hello My Stones' Brothers and Sisters ................
Now that I have everyone's attention :
" Are they the last of a dying breed?
Like McCartney and the Stones, the band packs 'em in "
Friday, April 15, 2005 -
" U2's latest record was released to worldwide frenzy, multiplatinum sales and less-than- ecstatic reviews last November, but "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb" was the last thing on the public's mind when it propelled the band to some of the quickest sellouts of the summer concert season.
U2's Denver shows - Wednesday and Thursday at the Pepsi Center - sold out in minutes not because of any raging excitement over the newish single "Vertigo." Rather, the whole scene plays into U2 settling into its role as successor to the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney - an odd, privileged and endangered throne in which it doesn't really matter what a band releases so long as its mammoth back catalog plays a pivotal part of each tour. For example, the most notable news this time around is Bono & Co.'s affection for tracks from "Boy," the band's 25-year-old debut.
"Considering they rehearsed something like 70 songs and are doing five songs from 'Boy,' people are U2 fans either way and whether they bought this record or not doesn't come into play here," said Alan Miller, co-founder and co-publisher of Filter Magazine. "On an old-school record platform, you've gotta have a record or something in the market to go out on tour. But does U2 need a record to tour? No. People will always be there until it's a $1,000 ticket. They could be on the road forever."
This vaunted position is almost like a band's pension: Congratulations, Bono, Larry, Adam and The Edge. After 25 years of consistent creativity and innovation, you're now deemed one of the greatest rock bands of all time. For this, you're guaranteed packed arenas for life.
And it's deserved - sort of.
U2 is responsible for some of the most important, relevant music of the '80s and early '90s. Who could forget "The Unforgettable Fire," and nobody saw the genius of "Achtung Baby" coming. But although there have been some bright spots since - including the subtle beauty of "Numb," the fierce exploration of "Pop" and the unexpected quiet fury of "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of" - U2's music has seen a steady creative decline in the past decade.
This is not the sign of the end, the signal of U2's irrelevance. Not yet, at least.
U2 needs new direction.
"This new record has a lot of fans, and some critics really like it too," said Doug Brod, executive editor at Spin magazine. "But a lot of people, like myself, are slightly disappointed, thinking it could have been a better record. But this record isn't a grand misstep on their part or a dash into irrelevance. They can bounce back three years from now with a milestone record again.
"They're one of those bands, like Bruce Springsteen, who will release an album every so often and it kind of transcends any current sound. It doesn't really matter if they're fitting in, they're still U2. And that's what people care about."
Bono's voice sounds weathered on new tracks such as "City of Blinding Lights" and "Yahweh," but it is still unquestionably Bono. But it's almost as if they all need a Red Bull. And maybe this current tour will prove that these songs have life in them beyond the lackluster versions laid down on the record.
"With a band like Duran Duran, people are not going to hear the new record," said Filter's Miller. "They want the old stuff, and they'll walk out and get beers during the new songs. But with U2, the new songs are coming off great live, even if it is the classics that are bringing people to the shows."
Brod doesn't see U2 fully filling out the Rolling Stones' throne anytime soon. Even though U2 passed the 25-year mark this year, it's still releasing albums of a certain import - or at least it's expected to.
"Nobody remembers the Stones' last few studio albums," Brod said.
"But with U2, fans are still expecting great records.... They started when they were kids, and they're just now growing into middle age. The Stones still have 20 years on them."
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~28704~2814863,00.html# |
| April 15th, 2005 07:40 PM |
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| Poplar |
I saw U2 last weekend, and i plan on posting a review here shortly. All i can say is: if you're on teh fence about whether or not to see the Vertigo tour, drop some $ and get a seat. It's interesting.
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| April 16th, 2005 05:03 PM |
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| MrPleasant |
Casanova was a lover of life as well as women
March 13, 2005
By Kevin Jackson
Giacomo Girolamo Casanova (1725-1798) was a man of many parts, but only one of those parts made him immortal. He was, by turns, a friar, a lawyer, a scientist, a soldier, a diplomat, a violinist, a notary's clerk, a practitioner of the occult arts, a spy, a businessman and a librarian.
He founded a state lottery - in Paris - and briefly became a millionaire on the proceeds; he established a workshop for printing silks; he wrote, in Italian, a huge and intensely scholarly History of Unrest in Poland; he translated the Iliad into Italian verse; he ran a theatre company; he wrote a scandalous novel, Ne Amori ne Donne; he published assorted learned pamphlets on mathematics, and worked on several treatises in philosophy; he travelled compulsively (and under harsh compulsion); he spent large parts of his life in exile or in various prisons.
In his later life he spent 13 years as a near-hermit, writing almost nonstop: the main fruit of this labour was a sprawling autobiography, about 3 700 pages long, almost none of which was published in his lifetime, and the bulk of which has been accurately edited only in quite recent years.
And yet, for all this prodigious and wide-ranging activity, most of us persist in remembering him for just one thing. Casanova - even the dictionaries will tell you as much - is history's greatest lover of women, the triumphant libertine every heterosexual man has, at least once in a while, bitterly envied or dreamt of emulating.
Various artists and writers have tried to present Casanova in a different light, whether in a spirit of de-mythologising contempt - such as Fellini's chilly film portrait of a "bald, glabrous, waxen beanpole, covered with powder and oil, filthy and stinking" (Costanzo Costantini) - or of thoughtful affection, as in a recent psychoanalytical study, Casanova, or the Art of Happiness, by Lydia Flem. To little effect.
Try as one might to interest people in, say, Casanova's claims to being the father of modern sciencefiction - his five-volume fantasy novel Icosameron (1788) predicts the car, the plane and the television - they will still want to hear about the broads, the chicks, the totty.
Fair enough: better to be remembered for one accomplishment than for none at all. Sex is the obvious selling point for all popular re-creations of the Casanova story, even when the treatment is as glacial as Fellini's: advance publicity for the forthcoming BBC series has been heavy on torn stockings and bulging bosoms.
But it needn't spoil anyone's naughty fun to point out that Casanova was not merely a more complex figure than the hoary, whoring old caricature admits, but in many respects a much more agreeable one.
Over the past couple of centuries, the real-life figure of Casanova has become all but inextricably mixed up with the mythical figure of Don Giovanni, and has absorbed some of the Don's most sinister overtones.
Don Giovanni, as we know him from Mozart, is a heartless, vengeful seducer and an unscrupulous killer: he leaves a grim trail of dead rivals, ruined women and aborted foetuses behind him on his path to hell.
Most audiences see in him what they would see in a real-life counterpart: a man whose compulsion to make "love" to women is driven by aggression and hate.
Casanova is a very different type of lover. A tall and comely lad, he was, in his early years, as often the seduced as the seducer. Later in life, he proposed that "when a man is given the time, he achieves his aim by attentiveness, and when he is pressed ... he makes use of presents and gold". He wooed, that is, by kindness and generosity rather than brute force.
He maintained that "four-fifths" of the joy of sex was in giving pleasure to one's partner, and he seems to have had the enviable knack of staying on good terms with many of his former lovers, often for many years.
"You were born to make people happy," wrote one of his "conquests" in a mood of fond nostalgia. What's more, he even practised safe sex, using "a little garment of very fine, transparent skin, eight inches long, closed at one end, but resembling a
purse and having at its open end a narrow pink ribbon".
And if he is entirely frank about his sexual adventures, he is also fairly brisk and non-salacious - a point which was not always obvious to his earlier readers.
The most popular 19th century edition of the Memoirs was a French version by one Jean Laforgue, who took it upon himself both to suppress parts of the text he didn't like and to turn the author's sprightly original into something at once more pompous and more prurient.
Today, the reader who picks up the Memoirs in search of a bit of pleasing erotica will often be disappointed by the lack of juicy detail: by the standards of modern pornographers, Casanova is a dud.
Once that disappointment is past, though, there are plenty of other attractions on offer. It has been said that the Memoirs offer the fullest and most accurate portrait of 18th century Europe that any single writer ever composed; and also that "no man in history has ... left quite so sincere a record of his life as Casanova".
The adventures are wild enough, but they never read like the self-aggrandising whoppers of a compulsive braggart. He changed names to protect the prominent, but in other respects this seems to be about as reliable an autobiography as one will ever meet.
A couple of episodes from his childhood may serve to show what an interesting fellow he was outside the bedroom. The son of professional actors, Casanova was unlucky in losing his father when young, and even more unlucky in his mother, Zanatta, a pretty, snobbish, heartless airhead with the habit of seeing stupidity almost everywhere save in its true place: herself.
An incident from Giacomo's ninth birthday, on April 2 1734, now seems emblematic. He is being taken by river to Padua, and wakes in the morning to the astonishing sight of trees moving past the portholes. "Mother, what is happening? The trees are walking!"
The adults howl with laughter, and his mother wearily explains that it is the boat that is moving, not the trees. Giacomo ponders this for a while and then concludes: "So it is possible that the sun does not walk either, but that it is we who move from west to east."
His mother laughs at him, and one of her friends calls him an imbecile. But another adult, a free-thinker called Signor Baffi, tells him that he is quite right, and that from this point on he must never fear to use his reason, no matter how much the crowd may mock.
Another emblem: aged 11, he is brought down to supper for the entertainment of adults. To test the lad's learning and wit, a visiting Englishman writes out a Latin grammarian's riddle for him: "Tell us, grammar experts, why the Latin word for the female organ has the masculine gender, and that for the male has the feminine gender."
Giacomo ponders for a couple of seconds, and then writes out an elegant Latin pentameter: Dice quod a domino nomina servus habet - "Because the slave takes the name of his master".
One does not have to be a card-carrying Freudian to twig that there might be some connection between Casanova's loveless childhood and his tireless search for amorous adventure as a grown man.
The Don Juan type, it has been proposed, is a man whose promiscuity is an endless and doomed hunt for satisfaction in symbolically "conquering" and obliterating a cold mother, via the bodies of unfortunate real-life women.
The Casanova type, while no less insatiable, seeks something much healthier - adult compensation for a boyish lack, with the giving and taking of affection as important a psychological need as repeated orgasms.
A bit glib, this? Maybe, but the argument gains in substance when one considers the life of the 20th century man with the strongest claim to Casanova's prize title as "Ladies' Man": the novelist Georges Simenon.
Plenty of people who have never so much as opened one of the 400-ish books he published will be aware of his claim to have had sex with more than 10 000 women. Fewer, no doubt, recall that it was precisely in the context of a discussion about Casanova that he made this boast.
The story broke in L'Express on February 21 1977. Federico Fellini was just about to launch his new film - Donald Sutherland played the title role - and a Roman publicist had decided that it would be a good idea for Simenon to interview Fellini.
The published interview ran in reasonably orthodox fashion until the point at which Fellini remarked that he preferred to make love wearing a bra. This prompted the most famous words Simenon ever spoke: "You know, Fellini, I think that in my life I have been even more of a Casanova than you. I did the sum a year or so ago and since the age of 13 and a half I have had 10 000 women."
This apparently unpremeditated aside did little for the launch of Casanova but a very great deal for the fame of Simenon. He was 74 at the time of the interview, let's call that 60 years of sexual activity, equals about 166 new women each year, or about one fresh conquest every two days. Is it plausible?
Simenon's second wife, Denyse, was scornful, downsizing his amorous estimate to just 1 200: still a score that would leave most chaps looking fairly smug. Tired, anyway.
Notches on the bedpost aside, what do Casanova and Simenon have in common? Simple: awful mothers.
Where Casanova's mother was, as we have seen, vain, snobbish, shallow, utterly self-preoccupied, Henriette Simenon was grim-faced, perpetually anxious, parsimonious, emotionally blackmailing. She once told little Georges that if he did not behave, "they" - a nameless, horrific "they" - would take her away and operate on her in hospital.
She made no secret of preferring his younger brother, Christian, and always acted as if Georges was bound to turn out a failure. She "found unhappiness where no one else had suspected its existence" and, in the end, years of fretting and sourness reduced her to a shrew.
Simenon was not merely aware of the wounds this had left, but felt that it was in some way crucial to his artistry. In a French radio talk on Balzac, broadcast in 1960, he commented on "the unloving nature of Balzac's mother" and rather sweepingly defined a novelist as "a man who does not like his mother, or who never received mother-love".
A doctor once said of Simenon that he remained "a small boy holding the hand of a mother who would always withhold her approval".
The outstanding difference between Simenon and Casanova is that Casanova - a crude but fair summary - managed to grow up.
Where Simenon's pleasure in wealth, fame, comfort and Olympic-level fornication never quite escaped the taint of his mother's scorn, Casanova learnt how to cultivate that unsullied, neurosis-free pleasure that is a key component of common happiness. He is, quite simply, likable, and interesting into the bargain - which is why it comes as a shock to find that Fellini held his fellow-countryman in sheer contempt.
Interviewed by Costanzo Costantini, Fellini sneeringly described Casanova as "a national phallic monument" and raged that he was "a character so disgusting and supine: symbol of the ancien regime and the Counter-Reformation: an image of the frustrated, infantile, repressed Italian".
"How could I have liked him after I had undertaken the task of reading his Memoirs? They are deadly dull, written with such fastidiousness that one never understands what he is talking about."
(It sounds as if Fellini knew them in the verbose Laforgue edition.) "They're just an ocean of paper, more tedious and depressing than a phone book... I wanted to destroy the myth of Casanova."
Too bad for Federico. His film was dogged with bad luck from the start of shooting: production costs spiralled wildly, Sutherland fell ill, there were strikes, and the negatives of the film were stolen. Fellini's Casanova flopped at the box office, and many of the critics hated the film.
His explanation was that "the myth [of Casanova] was taking its revenge and destroying me". Moral: be careful when you mess with a myth, or the myth might just mess with you.
On the other hand, somewhere between the zones of "entirely possible" and "all but certain" lies the extraordinary story that one of Mozart's uncredited collaborators on Don Giovanni was none other than Casanova.
Evidence? A lot of it, none conclusive, all highly suggestive. We know that Casanova met Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, as early as 1777. By 1787, the year of Don Giovanni's premiere, so one rumour runs, Da Ponte had already started asking Casanova for some help with the libretto in progress.
It is even more plausible - at least, the contemporary historian Alfred Meissner says it is the case - that Casanova and Mozart met in Prague very soon before the dress rehearsal of October 27, and that the two men were locked up in a room together to work on the opera with furious haste. Corroboration of this yarn has been found in the form of manuscripts among Casanova's papers.
It is a thrilling vision - like Falstaff lending a hand to Shakespeare for the Henry IV plays, like the Ancient Mariner dictating to Coleridge, like Don Quixote scribbling revisions in Cervantes's margins.
The one consideration that damages this otherwise delightful thesis is that Don Giovanni's ultimate darkness is so very far from the characteristic mood of the Memoirs.
Let's say it again: you don't need to skim many pages to find that one of the secrets of Casanova's amorous success is that he was, and remains, very good company.
Perhaps the most generous-spirited of all modern evocations of the man appeared in 1993, in the unlikely form of a book-length, adults-only comic strip by Hunt Emerson, Casanova's Last Stand (Knockabout Books).
Emerson begins by depicting the elderly Casanova as a vain, irascible librarian, but as the story proceeds, with flashbacks to his thousand nights of debauchery, the old chap's nostalgia for lost loves grows more and more compelling. Regrets? He's had a few.
For all of the cartoonist's wild, brilliant visual inventiveness and comic fancies it is a surprisingly accurate rendition of the facts as Casanova reported them, and a tribute that is as humane as it is sexy.
Emerson reports that he grew more and more fond of Casanova as he worked on the strip, and his introduction explains why: "All his life, he struggled to maintain standards of pride, cultural sophistication and dignity that were higher than the society around him.
And of course he frequently failed, as often as not betrayed by his own emotions and sensuality. He was a survivor, whose base humanity kept him from ever achieving greatness, but whose spirit links his time with ours more, perhaps, than many of his 'greater' contemporaries."
Well said, sir; and equally well put the final verdict of the psychoanalyst Lydia Flem: "Beyond pleasure, there is still happiness - such is the insolent legacy of Giacomo Casanova." - Foreign Service
http://www.sundayindependent.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=&fArticleId=2444746
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| April 17th, 2005 04:18 PM |
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| icydanger |
yes, this thread has a stone content,
see casanova dandy in the header pic,
Casanova, a Magus, Fellini’s nostalgia and attraction to meet strong karmas. Satyricon one of my all time favourites
great read
[Edited by icydanger] |
| April 17th, 2005 04:38 PM |
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| MrPleasant |
The longest-suffering director in Oscar history was surely Steven Spielberg. He'd made four of the Top Ten biggest-grossing films in history before the Academy deigned to give him a gong, for Schindler's List in 1993. He was first snubbed back in 1975 when he didn't get a nod for Jaws. Having invited a crew over to film his reaction to the announcement of the nominations, Spielberg was caught uttering the incredibly inglorious line "I can't believe it - they went for Fellini instead of me".
http://www.tiscali.co.uk/entertainment/film/features/oscar_facts.html |
| April 18th, 2005 09:45 AM |
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| Joey |
http://www.photos.mccartney.net/report.htm
PAUL McCARTNEY THE 'US' TOUR
DATE CITY VENUE
Friday, September 16th Miami American Airlines Arena
Saturday, September 17th Tampa St. Pete Times Forum
Tuesday, September 20th Atlanta Philips Arena
Thursday, September 22nd Philadelphia Wachovia Center
Monday, September 26th Boston FleetCenter
Friday, September 30th New York Madison Square Garden
Saturday, October 1st New York Madison Square Garden
Saturday, October 8th Washington DC MCI Center
Monday, October 10th Toronto Air Canada Centre
Friday, October 14th Detroit The Palace
Tuesday, October 18th Chicago United Center
Saturday, October 22nd Columbus Value City Arena
Sunday, October 23rd Milwaukee Bradley Center
Wednesday, October 26th St. Paul Xcel Energy Center
Thursday, October 27th Des Moines Wells Fargo Arena
Sunday, October 30th Omaha Qwest Center
Tuesday, November 1st Denver The Pepsi Center
Thursday, November 3rd Seattle KeyArena
Friday, November 4th Portland Rose Garden
Monday, November 7th San Jose HP Pavilion
Friday, November 11th Anaheim Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim
Wednesday, November 16th Sacramento ARCO Arena
Saturday, November 19th Houston Toyota Center
Sunday, November 20th Dallas American Airlines Center
Wednesday, November 23rd Phoenix Glendale Arena
Friday, November 25th Las Vegas MGM Grand Garden Arena
Saturday, November 26th Las Vegas MGM Grand Garden Arena
Tuesday, November 29th Los Angeles STAPLES Center
'US' will rock and roll through the United States for 28 performances that will span a nearly 11-week period before its close on Tuesday, November 29th at Los Angeles' STAPLES Center. While highlights include return visits to Boston's Fleet Center, New York's Madison Square Garden, Chicago's United Center and Las Vegas' MGM Grand Garden Arena, 'US' will mark a first for some. On Thursday, October 27th and on Sunday, October 30th, Des Moines, Iowa and Omaha, Nebraska will experience their first EVER Paul McCartney performance (including Beatles and Wings). In addition, Miami and Seattle, amongst other cities, will celebrate McCartney's return after nearly 15 years. "
Jacky ! ™
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