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Song of the Day #954: ‘This House is Empty Now’ – Elvis Costello

Back in the early days of the Internet, when newsgroups were still in vogue, I used to frequent alt.fan.elvis-costello where I conversed with a group of smart, literate music fans/computer nerds who shared my fondness for Elvis Costello.

The Web has become so much about images and sounds that it’s hard to believe there was a time when people engaged each other on the Internet primarily through words.

It reminds me of the Infocom video games I loved in the 80s, which consisted of text descriptions of your adventure and simple prompts where the player would type things like “Walk west” and “Pick up the key.” Compared to today’s cinema-quality games, those things are like cave paintings.

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Song of the Day #953: ‘Toledo’ – Elvis Costello

In 1998, Elvis Costello followed up All This Useless Beauty with Painted From Memory, a collection of songs co-written with Burt Bacharach. Even longtime Costello fans, accustomed to the man’s musical detours, were understandably taken aback.

My initial reaction to Painted From Memory was along the lines of the old guy at the Past Lives Pavilion in Defending Your Life: “What the hell is this? What the hell’s going on here?” [To see what I’m referring to, check out this clip, and as an aside, if you haven’t seen Defending Your Life, you should do so right away.]

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Song of the Day #952: ‘Hey Ya!’ – Outkast

A few weeks ago I went to a going-away party for a former student of my wife’s who is joining the Coast Guard. The music, served up from an iPod as I suppose most music is these days, was a mix of hip-hop and pop songs from the past decade.

At one point, Outkast’s ‘Hey Ya!’ came on and a surge of excited recognition washed over the room (ok, over the five or six people left in the room who were paying attention to the music). My 4-year-old daughter launched into one of her trademark dance moves.

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Let Me In

It’s a testament to the quality of writer/director Mark Reeves’ Let Me In that it reminds me of so many other films I’ve loved.

Like M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, it elegantly blends horror movie tropes with a coming-of-age tale. Like Steven Spielberg’s E.T., it captures suburban life from a child’s-eye view and drops an otherworldly visitor into the life of a boy in a broken home. Like Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, it juxtaposes supernatural horror with the horrors of the everyday world.

I thought of each of those films after I finished Let Me In. I also thought about the Twilight series, a far more popular and less compelling tale of a vampire finding love and acceptance with a human being. And I thought about True Grit, another of my favorite 2010 films, that — like Let Me In — is both a remake of a beloved movie and an adaptation of a beloved novel.

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Song of the Day #951: ‘Prairie Wedding’ – Mark Knopfler

I have a lot of one-off albums in my collection that I love despite not owning anything else by the artists who recorded them. Albums such as k.d. lang’s Absolute Torch and Twang, The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and The Afghan Whigs’ 1965, to name just a few.

In most cases, I’ve sampled other work by those artists and decided it wasn’t really my thing. But on that one album, they tapped into something special and earned a spot in my heart, and on my CD shelf, forever.

Now that I think about it, those albums are probably worth a theme week of their own. Stay tuned.

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