Saturday Night Live - 25 Years of Music (1975) Review

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(More customer reviews)Contents:
Volume 1
Billy Joel Only The Good Die Young 1978, Ray Charles What'd I Say 1975, Carly Simon You're So Vain 1976, Grateful Dead Casey Jones 1978, Simon & Garfunkel The Boxer 1975, Joe Cocker Feelin Alright 1975, Elvis Costello Less Than Zero / Radio Radio 1977, Blues Brothers Soul Man 1978, Patti Smith Gloria 1976, Mick Jagger & Peter Tosh Don't Look Back 1978, The Band The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down 1976
Plus Sketches starring John Belushi, Steve Martin, Jane Curtin, Laine Newman, Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, Paul Simon, Bill Murray, Andy Kaufman, Lorne Michaels, Dan Aykroyd and Mick Jagger
Volume 2
Tina Turner Better Be Good to Me 1985, James Brown I Got You 1980, Queen Crazy Little Thing Called Love 1982, Randy Newman I Love L.A. 1983, The Go Go's We Got the Beat 1981, Rick James Super Freak 1981, Talking Heads Take Me To The River 1979, Spinal Tap Big Bottom 1984, John Mellencamp Pink Houses 1983, Duran Duran Hungry Like The Wolf 1983
Plus Sketches starring Martin Short, Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, Ringo Starr, Stevie Wonder, Joe Piscopo and Rich Hall
Volume 3
The Bangles Hazy Shade of Winter 1988, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers Free Falin' 1989, Paul Simon Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes 1986, Neil Young Rockin' in the Free World 1989, Roy Orbison O Pretty Woman 1987, Pretenders Don't Get Me Wrong 1986, Fine Young Cannibals She Drives Me Crazy 1989, Sting We'll Be Together 1987, Elvis Costello Veronica 1989
Plus Sketches starring Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, Aerosmith, Chris Farley, Patrick Swayze, Jon Lovitz, Harry Hall, Mick Jagger, Phil Hartman, Michael Myers, Chris Rock, Sting, Valerie Bertinelli & Eddie Van Halen
Volume 4
R.E.M. Losing My Religion 1991, Sinead O'Connor War 1992, Madonna Fever 1993, Aretha Franklin Chain of Fools 1994, Eric Clapton Wonderful Tonight 1990, Nirvana Rape Me 1993, Paul McCartney Hey Jude 1993, En Vogue Free Your Mind 1992, Counting Crows Round Here 1994, Bruce Springsteen Living Proof 1992, Live I Alone 1995 Blind Melon No Rain 1994
Plus Sketches starring Mike Myers, Mick Jagger, Dana Carvey, Madonna, Phil Hartman, Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, James Taylor, Rosie O'Donnell, Kevin Knealon, David Spade, Paul McCartney, Michael Bolton
Volume 5
Mariah Carey Butterfly 1997, No Doubt Don't Speak 1996, Alanis Morissette Hand In My Pocket 1995, Spice Girls Wannabe 1997, Garbage Special 1999, Jewel Who Will Save Your Soul 1997, Hanson Mmm Bop 1997, Beck Where It's At 1997, Snoop Doggy Dog Snoop's Upside Upside Your Head 1997, Metallica Fuel 1997, Garth Brooks Two Piña Coladas 1998, Dave Matthews Band What Would You Say 1995, Backstreet Boys All I Have To Give 1999, Ricky Martin Livin' La Vida Loca 1999, Paula Cole I Don't Want To Wait 1998
Plus Sketches starring Matthew Broderick, Will Ferrell, Paula Abdul, Jon Lovitz, Kevin Spacey, Beck, Michael Palin, Garth Brooks, Joshua Jackson
there are a few great moments it would have been nice to see again that were not included, but it looks like a pretty nice set.

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The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg (Deluxe Two-Disc Set) (2006) Review

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(More customer reviews)The film at 85 minutes is amazing. The extras at over 6.5 hours are incredible. This DVD set is a source of all things Beat that I will be looking back at for years. It is beautifully arranged so that you can watch many extras on the same disc as the feature and also watch 35 interviews on Disc 2 including so many friends of Allen who also happened and happen to be cultural phenomenon's in their own right including Baez, Beck, Bono, Brakhage, Burroughs, Depp, Glass, Hoffman, Kesey, Leary, McCartney, Sonic Youth, Ono, Patti Smith, Hunter S. Thompson, Andy Warhol and so many more!
Also, Allen reads poetry to the camera for over 30 minutes, talks with Neal Cassidy in the basement of City Light in 1965 for almost 20 minutes, and reminisces with William Burroughs in 1984 at Naropa in Boulder, CO.
I can go on and on but this heartfelt collection made me want to read more of Ginsberg's poetry and remember a man who was truly a pacifist and helped make the world a better and more peaceful place. How we need that today!!!!!Here is a recent New York Times review on the DVD:
"The New York Times"
Jerry Aronson has augmented his crisp, straightforward 1993 documentary portrait of the poet Allen Ginsberg with six hours of extra material for this double-disc release, which now makes it a scholarly resource as well as a remarkably clearheaded study of a singularly complex individual.
Mr. Aronson's film follows Ginsberg from his middle-class upbringing in New Jersey through the media explosion that was the Beat movement, his role in the flowering youth movement of the 1960s and his last years as a devoted Buddhist and political activist. Those interviewed range from close friends and family members to artists whose relationship to Ginsberg was more remote (Beck, Bono and Johnny Depp, while the footage Mr. Aronson has gathered includes lengthy excerpts from Ginsberg's 1998 memorial tribute at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, Ginsberg and Bob Dylan visiting Jack Kerouac's grave, a 1965 reading with Neal Cassady at the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco and sequences from Jonas Mekas's touching record of Ginsberg's wake, "Scenes From Allen's Last Three Days on Earth as a Spirit."

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Patti Smith : An Unauthorized Biography Review

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(More customer reviews)I confess that when I first browsed through this book over a year ago, I really didn't like it. It seemed like quite a hostile work, and I put down a lot of the apparent bias to Bockris also being Deborah Harry's biographer and the Smith-Harry relationship, such as it ever was, being one of oil and water. However. On rereading, this book doesn't look as bad as all that. Smith won't enjoy reading it, but it certainly does not trash her--the clips and quotes from her most demented phases are kept to a minimum and the balance of what people have to say about her to this biographer is respectful, if somewhat baffled. There is a great deal of overlap between this treatment of Smith and Patricia Morrissey's far more detailed and professional biography of Robert Mapplethorpe, the Diego Rivera to Smith's Frida Kahlo. If one reads it as a supplement to that book, rounding out the picture of Smith as professional acquaintances and non-intimate friends saw her, the result is reasonably consistent. This in itself is an achievement. Bockris does not exactly get inside Smith's head, but that may be an impossibility for anyone other than Smith; she comes across as a powerful but fragmented personality. And this may be the mark of the born performer, the man or the woman with a sixth sense for their effect on others but little cohesive sense of self in private, giving them the talent for battening onto any symbols that project (and supply) their personal subjectivity, and fueling the combination of selflessness and narcissism that allows a person to take the blows on the path to fame. Smith's peculiar genius--the word is not too strong--is that of a long line of American artists who have been able to take this aspect of their personalities and use it to mirror the intense ambition, puritanism, fragmentation, and self-consciousness that typify the American character. She may have been obsessed with foreign influences--what American isn't?--but her unique talent was to be in some measure conscious of the source of this obsession, and use it, at her best, actually to find and channel links between the dementia of all nations and an indigenous spiritual lineage going back to John Brown at least. And as a working-class hero from the Rust Belt, her obsession with transcendence parallels that of a country whose greatest appeal and danger lies in the promise it holds out of being able to transcend one's origins--not to rise above them, but to bring them to a higher level, through a combination of courage, vision, and Napoleonic megalomania. Patti Smith remains dangerous long after punk has ceased to be; she remains dangerous because America does.
The trouble is that Smith's fans already know all this, and consequently there is only limited interest in hearing one more anecdote about the artist's eccentricities or one more piece of speculation about how she got that way. This book is not really a biography in the usual sense. It amounts to a superior compilation of stories and press clippings, most of which are not salacious (Smith always wanted you to believe she was bigger and badder than she was). But in the absence of the context provided by testimony from family members and others who know Smith best, and who naturally are not talking, the one or two pieces of interesting information sound like a tease and take on a pejorative quality. This effect can be observed in the little that we get to know about Fred Smith, Patti's late husband and, after Mapplethorpe, the biggest influence on her life and work. There is no doubt that his American populist aesthetic harmonized with hers, and may have rescued her from the manic "Radio Ethiopia" kitsch into which she was disappearing at the time of a near-fatal accident (she danced off a stage) that temporarily stymied her career. But depending on who you talk to, Fred Smith was either a kind and considerate husband, or a creep who stopped his wife's career, crushed her spirit, may have belted Patti around. The anecdotes to either effect are just that, anecdotes, and do not transcend the feeling of being breaches of privacy. And what does anyone mean by charging that the two albums Patti cut in the wake of his death are "careerist" or "professional mourning," just because he may not always have been good for her and she still misses him deeply? Sheesh.
The true biography of Patti Smith remains to be written. As for most important artists, it may need to wait till she is gone: Smith guards her privacy closely and there's no reason why she shouldn't. But by all means, read this one: it will take you back. And the pictures are good.

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