1. I've had the latest phonebooks lying around - they've been there for almost a year, I guess. I was looking through the white pages for a name for one of the characters in my new comic, when I thought I should check if my name is there. And it is! My name is in a French phonebook! I was almost as excited as Steve Martin was in The Jerk.2. After not being in a cinema for over a year I went and saw the new Mission Impossible. It's not bad. It's not as good as the first one. It's better than the second one. The setpieces are great. There is some character stuff, and the problem with that is that you don't really care about Tom Cruise as a character. You want to see him run and punch people out. The talky/feely scenes are a bit boring. Some of the gadgets in the film, like making the new agent being able to hover over the ground was a bit hard to believe in. And the bad guy was a bit boring. Wanting to start World War 3, the Bond villains stopped doing that in the seventies. The rabbit's foot, in the third one, was a better macguffin, even not knowing what the damn thing was.
3. For some reason I've been thinking about the duet that Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash did together, Girl from the North Country. There are one of two places during the song where one of them starts to sing one thing and the other something else, then they correct themselves. I've wondered why they didn't make a second take. But perfection can be boring. And that small mistake actually makes it more memorable, more human.
Thanks for ATHOS IN AMERICA!(Astiberri, con lomo de tela) Other name: "SAMUEL BECKETT IN AMERICA".
ReplyDeletefeel free to use 'Sean Fairhurst' for any character!
ReplyDelete3: That kind of thing is all over Dylan's body of work, especially in the '60s. Laughter or flubbed lyrics in "All I Really Want to Do", "I Don't Believe You", "Rainy Day Women", "Mobile Blues Again"... and on "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream", he starts the song without the band (although the producer has them start over). He used to care a lot more about writing the songs than recording them, although in recent years he's taken greater care and has even produced his last few albums himself.
ReplyDeleteThat particular performance of "Girl from the North Country" was one of many songs the two played together during the recording of Nashville Skyline; there are bootlegs circulating of the two performing "One Too Many Mornings", "Good Old Mountain Dew", "Big River", and others from the same sessions. So I think the idea was to do a song and then move on to another song, rather than do one song over and over until it was gotten right (although I know they did at least two takes for "One Too Many Mornings", which the technician or whoever mistakenly refers to as "A Thousand Miles Behind").
I would have liked to hear those songs. Too bad they haven't been released on an official cd or The Bootleg Series.
ReplyDeleteIf you want a copy of the Dylan/Cash recordings I'd be happy to send you one. Is there any way I can contact you?
ReplyDeleteThanks! Do you have an e-mail adress and don't mind putting it up here?
ReplyDeleteKind of corny, maybe, but my favorite mistake in a recording is one made by Billy Joel in the song "You're Only Human (Second Wind)".
ReplyDeleteHe stumbles in one of the verses, laughs, and gets on with it. He wanted to do a retake, but Paul Simon and Christie Brinkley, who were in the studio at the time, convinced him to leave it in. It was a song about making mistakes, so leaving it in just seemed to reinforce what the whole song was about!