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Post by dino on Apr 11, 2008 4:46:55 GMT -5
A winery in B.C.'s Okanagan Valley is teaming up with the Rolling Stones - but they're not making music, they're making icewine.
Ex Nihilo Vineyards, in Okanagan Centre north of Kelowna, will be producing a limited release of an icewine labelled in honour of the Stones' hit "Sympathy for the Devil."
The company says the Rolling Stones approved the concept while they were on tour in Belgium last June.
Decoa Harder of Ex Nihilo says only 222 cases of the sweet dessert wine will be released May 1, priced at $125 a bottle.
Each bottle will be numbered and the label will feature the classic Rolling Stones red tongue logo.
The wine is also accompanied by a limited edition collectors' book.
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manho
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Post by manho on Apr 19, 2008 7:21:50 GMT -5
What Mick said to Keith
Michel Faber meets the Stones in Zachary Lazar's myth-mongering novel of the late 60s, Sway
Michel Faber
Saturday April 19, 2008
Guardian
Sway
by Zachary Lazar
257pp, Jonathan Cape, £11.99
Warning: spoilers. There's this pop group called the Rolling Stones, who get really famous, but their founder Brian Jones can't handle it, and he keeps beating up his girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, until she leaves him for the guitarist, Keith. In the end, he drowns in his swimming pool. And there's this film director, Kenneth Anger, who makes surreal, orgiastic movies like Invocation of My Demon Brother. And then there's a character called Charles Manson . . .
What? You've read this story before? Well, Zachary Lazar acknowledges that these highly public lives and deaths have become "a kind of contemporary folklore". Sway solemnises that myth-mongering, as if to suggest that the truth has become irreclaimable. "While many of the characters in the novel bear the names of actual people," Lazar disclaims, "they and their actions have been imagined by the author and should be considered products of the imagination."
Lazar's 1998 debut, Aaron, Approximately, was an irksome coming-of-age tale about an angst-ridden wannabe author. The Rolling Stones played a role in that book too, in that their album Exile on Main Street held a potent allure for the adolescent Aaron. Ten years on (having spent the meantime teaching creative writing), Lazar is ready to tackle bigger, gloomier themes. Although Sway ventures back as far as the Stones' pre-fame rehearsals and Anger's formative experiences as a young homosexual in 1940s America, its narrative sights are set on the deadly events of 1968 and 1969, a time when "the decade itself knows that it can never return, that it has only these few years to live out its own extremes". The Manson murders, the Kennedy and King assassinations, Brian Jones's decline and the tragic outcome of the Stones' concert at Altamont Speedway are woven together by the oft-repeated thesis that the flower children unleashed demonic forces demanding satisfaction.
As an imaginative insight into the dark side of the hippy dream and the violent end of the 60s, Sway offers little that was not already elucidated in Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg's Performance, but it's queasily intriguing all the same and reveals Lazar to be a considerable talent. The conversations between Manson and Bobby Beausoleil radiate the scary intensity of disconnected synapses, and Anger's myriad humiliations accumulate into a sort of stoic nobility. (Lazar's Anger bears little resemblance to the garrulous, bitchy butterfly who penned Hollywood Babylon; instead, like everyone else in Sway, he's a brooding introvert.) The prose generally mirrors the emotional numbness of the protagonists, but flares bright at unexpected moments, such as when Lazar spotlights a married couple "whose hatred for each other was like a cunning distraction from the doom that seemed to thicken the air around them: their sagging thoraxes, their nicotine breath, the haunted, midday fatigue that permeated their rooms".
Lazar describes Anger's movies with solemn wonder, evoking their dreamlike imagery while omitting what might be called the Ed Wood factor. He presents them as Anger would have wished everyone to see them, transforming the smacked-out somnambulism of Marianne Faithfull in Lucifer Rising or the fizzling penis in Fireworks into more elegant and majestic iconography than the celluloid allows.
Lazar also excels at the sensual details that journalism tends to miss: the way Brian cups his hands over Mick's as he teaches him to play the harmonica; the way Keith picks up his guitar "with such fluid indifference that it might have been a jacket or a set of keys"; the way, when the Hell's Angels have just made their kill at Altamont, "an empty space suddenly opened up in front of the stage . . . so big that Mick could see the grass between the motorcycles, lit up by the footlights".
Lazar's dialogue is a trickier proposition. To his credit, he seldom resorts to exposition-heavy exchanges that would break the spell of fiction. His characters converse with the private, elliptical economy that comes with long-term intimacy. Indeed, it's so private and so elliptical that you often feel as though you're eavesdropping on a clique of (frankly) tiresome narcissists. "Everyone so smashingly divine," quips Keith as Anita kisses his earlobe. "Just a lovely gathering of the loveliest people." "You're a shit," Anger says to Mick. "I know that," Mick smirks back. "I've been one for a long time."
My grasp of libel law is too feeble for me to understand why some novels must be withdrawn when it's discovered that the author innocently gave a corrupt character a real person's name and occupation, while Sway, which bends real people to its narrative will, can be published with impunity. But although it's interesting to speculate how Anita Pallenberg or Mick Jagger may feel about their quasi-fictional doppelgangers, there is a more insidious slander going on in the novel: a defamation of a whole era. The second half of the 1960s was, among other things, a time of fantastic energy, creativity, idealism and wit. Does a fictional portrayal have any responsibility to do justice to this? Is it defensible to recast an entire generation as amoral lost souls, drifting half-awake towards a vortex of the zeitgeist's dread design? I think so - if the writer's vision has sufficient power. We recognise, for example, that Kafka misrepresents "life" in all its richness, but his fictions still ring true. Sway, despite its merits, doesn't quite ring true. Like Jagger in his Lucifer hat at Altamont, this novel seems to be only playing with fire, not burning with it.
· Michel Faber's The Apple is published by Canongate
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
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Post by dino on May 2, 2008 1:37:00 GMT -5
The classic Rolling Stones 1969 US tour documentary Gimme Shelter is to get it's DVD premiere this August.
The film, named after the Let It Bleed lead track was directed by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin and chronicled the Stones' tour, which finished up at the chaotic Altamont Free Concert.
The film has a supporting cast of Jefferson Airplane, The Flying Burrito Brothers and Ike and Tina Turner.
Gimme Shelter has had full restoration of sound and vision, and will come accompanied by a 40 page booklet with photos and essays about the infamous events at Altamont.
The Warner Home Video DVD release will also feature extras by the way of a director's audio commentary and backstage outtakes of the Rollilng Stones when they performed at New York's Madison Square Gardens.
Gimme Shelter is set for release on August 11, 2008.
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Post by Cat Stevens on May 2, 2008 10:36:06 GMT -5
I already have it, but it's Region 3 (not for Europe) format, and it's fucking great.
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Post by Some king on May 4, 2008 14:02:02 GMT -5
About time. I've almost bought the criterion collection DVD loads of time, but it's way too damn expensive to warrant a purchase.
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zilla
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Post by zilla on Jul 16, 2008 20:00:52 GMT -5
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Post by cripes on Jul 17, 2008 0:51:15 GMT -5
Poor guy....has to hang out with Keith who can do whatever the fuck he wants....so not fair.
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Post by dino on Jul 17, 2008 2:36:48 GMT -5
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Post by dino on Jul 17, 2008 7:36:46 GMT -5
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zilla
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Post by zilla on Jul 17, 2008 19:46:02 GMT -5
That may be true Cripes, but come on, the man deserves to hang with Keith. He's played in 2 count them TWO great bands and not just part time either. Not many or shall I say anyone has ever done that and has been such a big part of the music. I can't think of anyone to have done that off the top of my head....God bless Ronnie!
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Post by cripes on Jul 17, 2008 22:59:49 GMT -5
I'm with you there....I just feel bad for Woody losing his drinking privileges.
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zilla
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Post by zilla on Jul 18, 2008 6:46:53 GMT -5
Well, hopefully it's just a reprieve and he'll drink again, just a little more responsibly. I don't want him to turn into another Clapton.
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manho
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Post by manho on Jul 18, 2008 6:58:13 GMT -5
wouldn't it be great if they invented a drug which had the exact same tastes and effects as all the various forms of alcohol but had absolutely no negative effects on the body?
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Post by dino on Jul 18, 2008 7:40:34 GMT -5
at least clapton wrote two decent tunes - and i mean just two - in the last 25 years, ronnie hasnt written a single decent song since he left the faces
ps: there were talk of a faces reunion in the last weeks....
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manho
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Post by manho on Jul 18, 2008 8:14:33 GMT -5
"talk of a faces reunion"
great news! steve marriott, ronnie lane.. what a group. can't wait to see them again.
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Post by owen on Jul 18, 2008 8:31:05 GMT -5
rule #3 rock n roll book - thou shalt drink, then go into rehab, then drink, go into rehab etc..
"wouldn't it be great if they invented a drug which had the exact same tastes and effects as all the various forms of alcohol but had absolutely no negative effects on the body?"
or you could just get a hypnotist
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zilla
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Post by zilla on Jul 18, 2008 19:39:11 GMT -5
3 words for you dino........Breathe On Me
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Post by Some king on Jul 18, 2008 21:46:53 GMT -5
"talk of a faces reunion" great news! steve marriott, ronnie lane.. what a group. can't wait to see them again. Call me crazy, but I'm pretty sure Marriott wasn't in the Faces. I'm sure they can enlist bill wyman or some other schmuck to take Plonk's place. Pretty sure Mac and Kenney Jones aren't busy, so it's down to Rod and Ron...which means it'll happen, until Mick decides to rev up the Stones for another 100 mill. Me, cynical? Never. |
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zilla
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Post by zilla on Jul 18, 2008 23:41:50 GMT -5
Steve Marriot was in the Small Faces....Nick was just playing around I believe. Also I think Mac is in some small band in Texas last time I heard, though I'm sure he'd drop that if he got the call.
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Post by dino on Jul 19, 2008 7:08:31 GMT -5
Iam McLagan lives in austin and he just released a new album, he have one new cd about every year
the only problem with a faces reunion is ronnie
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