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Got You Covered: “Kashmir”

March 16, 2010 | Permalink

I’ve always had a particular delight for cover renditions of popular songs. Not just any old covers, though: I mean covers that take chances. Covers that risk taking a song in a completely new direction. Maybe the new version is a surprising genre shift, or an imaginative re-orchestration, or is seemingly chopped up and re-assembled, it all comes down to one definitive cliché: if it works, it works.

Here then is the first of what will be an ongoing series of posts called Got You Covered, showcasing audio clips of some of my favorite cover tracks. Future installments will appear at no particular time interval… but they will appear, I promise you. I have about 20 tracks lined up to use — I just prefer to spread ‘em out instead of running through all of them at once.

Many of you are surely familiar with Led Zeppelin’s driving, semi-orchestral song “Kashmir.” It is one of the band’s quintessential tracks — eight and a half sprawling minutes of wailing, mystical Led Zep bombast. If you’re not familiar with it, here’s about 30 seconds:

haimovitz-cbgbCovering this hard-rockin’ bad boy of a tune are Matt Haimovitz and his all-cello band, Uccello. That’s right, nothing but cellos. Read the rest of this entry »


Get Lost: Early Frontrunner for 2010 “Top 10 Videos”

January 20, 2010 | 2 comments

I’ll give you this, Lost-ies: the first season was pretty good. By the end of the second season, however, I was annoyed. I’ll give it credit for trying something different–and I use “different” here in the strictly value-neutral sense. “Different” is only different until it suddenly isn’t. Read the rest of this entry »


Facebook Meme-esque Movie Quiz, Part II

October 13, 2009 | 1 comment

The moment you’ve all been waiting for has arrived. Here it is, the thrilling conclusion of the quiz from Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule which I began in the post before this one. Let’s get right to the action:

  1. Best Film of 1979.
    Absolutely, definitely, unequivocally Manhattan.

  2. Most realistic and/or sincere depiction of small-town life in the movies.
    The one that made the biggest impression on me was All the Real Girls.
  3. Best horror movie creature (non-giant division).
    Read the rest of this entry »

George Carlin, 1937-2008

June 23, 2008 | 3 comments

George Carlin is gone. Damn it. I never got to meet him.

carlinPeople who know me well will attest that in a normal conversation, it’s quite common for me to quote George Carlin. It’s no accident: he was so prolifically funny and insightful for so long that he covered the majority of topics relevant to our lives at one time or another. More than any other individual source, George Carlin’s stand-up formed the basis of my comedic sensibility. He showed me what comedy could be—that its full effect extends well beyond what is merely funny. His wit was restless, impatient; it tugged persistently at the uneven corners of our society.

When I was about 11 or 12, his 1972 album Class Clown became the first comedy recording I ever owned. I brought that LP home, listened to it, and then listened to it again. And then again, a few more times. Soon his brilliant riffs were committed to my memory (where they remain), and I returned to Tower Records in Mountain View to repeat the process with another opus from the Carlin catalogue. LPs gave way to cassette tapes – easier to store, useful for my new, bitchin’ bright-yellow Walkman, and good for comedy recordings because the eventual decline in audio fidelity didn’t matter so much.

As I’ve mentioned, his penetratingly funny insights are too numerous and wide-ranging to recount. Here’s just a few, off the top of my head. George, forgive me if I paraphrase.

Read the rest of this entry »


Pure Male Fantasy

November 12, 2007 | 1 comment

The NFL and the TV networks have my old buddy Jason to thank, because quite possibly the only reason I’m still a fan of pro football is the fantasy football league that he brought me into a few years back. I’m grateful to J for this as well (see also his picture in the sidebar of this blog’s home page), because I had meandered away from sports fandom at the time, and hadn’t realized that I missed the catharsis that it provides. Obviously actual participation in athletic competition generally benefits one’s personal health in a way that vicarious participation does not; indeed, the manner of vicarious engagement with sports practiced by many these days is, conversely, a health liability. Versions of this observation are often expressed by those who disdain sports fans, generally because they envy the fan’s enjoyment of something which they themselves haven’t bothered to understand.

For men, myself most definitely included, there is perhaps no more reliable trigger for juvenile recidivism than football. The brilliance of fantasy football is that it capitalizes upon this behavioral rewind. Love it though I do, I’ll be the first to admit that there is something fundamentally laughable about Read the rest of this entry »


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