Have you ever had one of those songs that gets stuck in your head for days…weeks…years? Sure you have. These are the songs that always make the cut. The songs on repeat. We all have them. I have a ton. Welcome back to Endless Loop.
“Moonlight Sonata – Piano Sonata No. 14 (Movement 1)” by Beethoven
I know it’s hoity-toity and as pretentious as all hell, and could possible be viewed as a written foray into pseudo-intellectualism on my part, but I’m totally riffing on classical music today.
Jackie Mittoo The Keyboard King at Studio One
The title of “King” in regards to a craft or technique in the arts is often thrown around a little too loosely these days. That said, I’m going to use it here with the disclaimer that my application of the word is not hyperbole; for Jackie Mittoo, one of the founders of the legendary group The Skatalites and musical director of Jamaica’s label and recording studio Studio One, the crown as “Keyboard King” is earned and appropriate. I’m no aficionado of musicology (although I pretend to be sometimes) but I’ll tell you this: Jackie Mittoo’s importance to the development and influence of the numerous different styles of music that came from Jamaica during the 1960s and 1970s cannot be measured. With that I humbly give you this week’s edition of The Joup Friday Album: Jackie Mittoo The Keyboard King at Studio One.
Django Reinhardt at his best. Photo courtesy of pixsharp.com
Doves – Lost Souls (UK – Heavenly : US – Astralwerks)
“Oh God. I was just a boy.
I saw him in my dream.
He said he wanted to play.
He opened me and I invited him and he came inside me.”
~ Leland Palmer
image courtesy of geek-news.mtv.com
This book is f$%kin’ crazy!!!
Seriously, I was wandering around the best comic shop in Southern California last week, The Comic Bug, and asked co-owner Mike if there was anything new he would recommend. Well, Mike casually put Geof Darrow’s The Shaolin Cowboy No. 1 from Dark Horse in my hands and after glancing through it and falling IN LOVE with the art (something I almost never buy a book based on) I added it to my pile for check out. Several hours later, after I’d gotten home and clocked through my required reading list (and lately that IDW TMNT has risen almost to the top of that list – but that’s a story for another column) I picked up Shaolin and opened the front cover only to fall head-long into the most insane two-page story prelude f text I’ve ever encountered. I’m not even going to try and describe it here – you’re simply going to have to seek this one out for yourself, it’s that insane.
image courtesy of www.thecwaustin.com
Last year when Neil Gaiman first announced that he would be returning to Vertigo to pen a new story about The Lord of Dreams I was instantly elated. While it’s true that in 2013 most everyone is a bit burned out on sequels, prequels, spin-offs and the like, Mr. Gaiman’s classic series Sandman – which ran for approximately eight years from 1989 to 1996 – is a complete epic that, in my mind at least, retains all of the power that it had over me from the first time I read it and remains unsullied by time – a remarkable story that effortlessly weaves the nuances of the beauty, tragedy and triumphs of life into a fable for the ages. Sandman has remained pretty much pure as the driven snow for many of those that have carried it through two subsequent decades since its realization, two decades that have given it time to live and breathe in our hearts and minds.
