You're Such A Nasty Little Girl...

As summer approaches, us music junkies are bombarded by a variable deluge of live performances from which we must select the few that on which we are willing to spend our limited concert dollars. That's pretty f'in hard to do if you're like me and obsessively crave live music like it was high-grade street drugs that you are desperate inject in between your toes five times fortnightly.
To that end, I have begun my show selection process, and was fairly content with my modest set of about 15 concerts and two festivals until I heard a rumor that Ms Lucinda Williams is coming to town.. with one drawback... she's playing a double bill with John Horrible Meloncamp!


WHAT THE SHIT?!?! They don't even sound alike...

but let me not lie... Lucinda Williams could open for a poo catapult machine and I would pay to see it.

The tricky part is convincing someone to go with me... because no one wants to see John Meloncamp. I have no issue with paying 50 or 60 bones to go to this show, because I know that it will be well worth it once Lucinda saunters on to the stage, beer in hand, rocking her signature cowboy hat. Just like I knew it would be well worth it when I spent, en toto, about $1200.00 to attend Bonnaroo just so I could see Gillian Welch perform a 50 minute set.. but I also watched that set alone, because my friend didn't want to see her...


If anyone out there in blog-land wants know.. here is the sweet and dirty lowdown on Lucinda:

Sounds like: A lower voiced happy Emmilou Harris who just got dumped and is drinking and smoking while singing with a band in the back of a bar below the mason Dixon.

Why you should listen: Lucinda Williams does not hold back, whatever she is feeling she puts it on the table. Throughout her career she has evolved from paying homage to her folky roots in twangy spare blue-grass to creating rich to warbling compelling songs fueled by two fisted anger and bitterness with just a touch of gun blazing sweltering humid whisky soaked sexuality. She is a sick-amazing song writer and has some bad-ass tattoos!

Best Lyrics: from Come On

You think you're in hot demand

But you don't know where to put your hand

Let me tell you where you stand

You didn't even make me, come on!

You weren't even worth it

I'm sorry I ever flirted

The effort wasn't even concerted

You didn't even make me, come on!

All you do is talk the talk

You can't back it up with your walk

You can't light my fire, so fuck off

You didn't even make me, come on!

What's not so great: everyone thinks that Mary Chapin Carpenter wrote Passionate Kisses... but Lucinda Williams did... BUMMER!

Lights, Camera, Elitist Cultural Enjoyment...

The Philadelphia Film Festival is upon us once agian, not that Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, mind you, but a good time none the less. I am not a big movie person, but I have a good friend who knows movies who went to SXSW and checked a few out.

Taking his recomendations I am going to partake in the following...

Medicine for Melancholy

USA 2008, 90 min

The day after a one-night-stand, a young man and woman wander the streets of San Francisco attempting to fill in the blanks of the past evening while reflecting on what it means to be black in a city whose cherished ideals of progressive thought and inclusion coexist uneasily with marginalized minority groups and ruthless gentrification in this unsentimental love letter to the City by the Bay.

Mister Foe
aka: Hallam Foe
Great Britain 2007, 95 min

A troubled Scottish teen still traumatized by the suicide of his mother runs away to Glasgow and falls into an Oedipal love affair in this intoxicating coming-of-age story with the dark passion and desperate romanticism of Trainspotting.

Then I picked out this one...

Beloved
aka: Saawariya
India 2007, 137 min

Ablaze with music and luscious imagery, this big-budget Bollywood adaptation of Dostoyevsky's "White Nights" tells the story of an idealistic young wayfarer who becomes entranced by the smoldering beauty of a young woman waiting for her true love's return.

Stay tuned for reviews!