Posts Tagged ‘the kinks’

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Watch local: Do It Again

April 19, 2010

Guest blogger Scott writes:

In an earlier post about Kickstarter, I gave the example of how the producers of a documentary about The Kinks were funding its editing through small donations. That movie, Do It Again, premiered in March at the Cleveland International Film Festival to positive reviews, and will be showing in Somerville at the Independent Film Festival Boston on Saturday, April 24th. I haven’t seen it yet, but it looks to be less of a music documentary and more of a Nick Hornby/Studs Terkel mash-up, in that it isn’t so much about The Kinks as it is about how people (creator/star Geoff Edgers in particular, but also the people he enlists in his quest) think, or even obsess, about the band. And while the Hornbyish narrative story of a quest to reunite The Kinks is intimately tied a single band, it can be seen as a lens for thinking about the Terkel-ish question of why people love the bands they love and how that love shapes them. In that sense, it seems like a good pairing for The Heart is a Drum Machine — One asks “What is music?”; the other asks “What does music mean?”.

Previously on z=z: Watch: Music docs at IFF Boston, Apr 23-25

Image: Photo of Ray Davies from the Wikimedia Commons, used here under its Creative Commons license.

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Watch: Music docs at IFF Boston, Apr 23-25

April 19, 2010

Boston indie music and movie lovers, rejoice! There is a hat trick of music-related documentaries next weekend as part of Independent Film Festival Boston. All three screenings are at the Somerville Theatre at 7:30 pm. The italicized excerpts are from the IFF Boston site, and you can get more info and buy tickets there.

Searching for Elliott Smith:

Friday Monday, April 23rd 26th, 7:30 pm, Somerville Theatre

An icon defined by his music’s emotional accessibility and the detached enigma of his public persona, Smith is as quietly compelling in the accounts of his friends and fans as his life and lyrics were….Balancing his darkest depressions and greatest achievements, SEARCHING FOR ELLIOTT SMITH reveals its subject’s kindness, subtle humor, and reserved brilliance, as well as the perfect imperfections of his prolific output—and it testifies to the overwhelming effect his visceral truths had on his closest friends and anonymous admirers alike. [D. Barnum-Swett]

Do It Again

Saturday, April 24th, 8:00 pm, Somerville Theatre

Every real music fan has a favorite band—but it’s a very rare fan who single-handedly attempts to reunite them years after they’ve packed it in. In director Robert Patton Spruill’s DO IT AGAIN, that rare fan is Geoff Edgers, a Boston Globe staff writer and dedicated follower of the Kinks. Edgers was driven to embark on a risky and time-consuming quest to get the Davies brothers and their old bandmates back in the same room to play some songs…. [B. Searles]

Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields

Sunday, April 25th, 7:30 pm, Brattle Theatre

…Directors Kerthy Fix and Gail O’Hara provide us with comfortable, homey access to Merritt and the most important, grounding influence in his life: his decades-long friendship with his chipper musical collaborator Claudia Gonson. On his home turf, in the apartment that has doubled as the studio for the lion’s share of his recordings, Merritt is anything but prickly or uncooperative. He is a reflective, passionate, and even playful artist who is producing many of the great songs of his generation. [SL Frey/K Aikens]

EDIT: Factcheck fail. Dates, times, and venues have been corrected. Thanks to Brad for the heads-up!

MP3: Elliott Smith – Waterloo Sunset (Kinks cover) [via Rawkblog]


Posted in Threesome, Uncategorized, Watch | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

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Small-scale tiered pricing models

May 20, 2009

geoff edgers

Guest blogger Scott writes:

As technology has enabled increased efforts by musicians to sort customers by willingness to pay, it’s no surprise that people would be developing Web sites to bring those tools to smaller-scale creative projects. Kickstarter came to my attention when my friend Eric started a non-music-related project there, but musical projects are well-represented, unsurprisingly: you can also support the editing for a documentary about The Kinks (which I’d already heard about – it’s getting local press), for example, or you can buy a Creative Commons-licensed album on vinyl. Or, if it’s more your thing, you can support creative begging. According to Eric, there are still some minor process issues, but the developers are in the process of working out, well, The Kinks.

MP3: The Kinks – Low Budget [buy]

Posted in future of music | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment »

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Threesome: alternative holiday songs

December 24, 2008

lolcat-xmas-tree

In response to my ‘Christmas songs for non-Christmas people,’ guest blogger Scott offered up three finds. The first is “Father Christmas,” by the Kinks, which I immediately recognized as a staple of my local alt-rock station. It’s a heartwarming holiday song about getting a job as a department store Santa Claus and being mugged by a gang of kids. Rilo Kiley‘s ‘Xmas Cake’ and Jenny Owen Youngs‘s  “Things We Don’t Need Anymore” are both about how depressing Christmas can be if you don’t feel like your life is going very well. The former is mostly just sad (crying in the eponymous cake) and the latter song is heavily leavened with anger (‘Here’s to wishes that’ll never come true.’)

Scott also sent me a song called “I’m Going to Spend My Christmas With a Dalek,” off an album of Doctor Who related songs, Who Is Dr Who. I got 56 seconds in (1:32 to go) before I had to shut it off. It managed to offend me musically, as a fan of Doctor Who (since when do Daleks have left toes?) and, well, as a human (the faux-childish lisp of the singers – yeesh). I think it would be rather fitting if its perpetrators really do get to spend Christmas with a Dalek, since they are pretty low on the holiday spirit and big on the ‘EX-TER-MIN-ATE!’

I can’t actually bring myself to propagate the song further, sorry. There’s enough horrifying stuff on the Internet without my adding to it.

MP3: The Kinks – Father Christmas [amazon]

MP3: Rilo Kiley – Xmas Cake [buy]

MP3: Jenny Owen Youngs – Things We Don’t Need Anymore

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