Daily Archives: February 28, 2011

This Year’s Oscar Theme: Self-Aggrandizement (As Usual)

February 28, 2011
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This Year’s Oscar Theme: Self-Aggrandizement (As Usual)

By Ilana Mercer If Kirk Douglas stole the show, you have got to know that there was not much to steal. So blared an MTV online headline describing the 2011 Academy Awards. (Headline here.) Earlier this year, I watched the Grammys and came away with the conclusion that the winner was Auto-Tune, “the ‘holy grail of recording,’ that ‘corrects intonation problems in vocals or solo instruments in real time,” and without which the tartlets I watched ‘sing’ would have been even more inaudible and tuneless. (Here.) The Oscar’s self-aggrandizing crowd proved too much for me. Stutterers are the cause célèbre (because of The King’s Speech). Helen Mirren, full of airs and graces, really does believe she’s a queen, and so does everyone else. When I see Mirren’s name paired with that of Simon Schama in the Financial Times, I ask myself what a well-known historian (and superb writer) like Schama is doing interviewing a woman who makes a living imitating other people? (Here) Shouldn’t she be interviewing him? I’m not in sync with the times, I know. The unfunny shtick, the specter of the poor, palsied Kirk Douglas spluttering incoherently while the pretentious onlookers cooed: You get the picture. The

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‘This Is the Sound of Your Life Getting Better’: Review of ‘The Ghost of Chivalry’

February 28, 2011
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‘This Is the Sound of Your Life Getting Better’: Review of ‘The Ghost of Chivalry’

(Available via iTunes on 22 Feb; Available on CD at ptwalkley.com on 1 Mar.) You may have heard P.T. Walkley before, but you probably didn’t know it. The Wisconsin native and New York City resident has composed scores for everything from independent films to credit card commercials, and has released a couple of rock albums, including 2009’s double-LP concept album Mr. Macy Wakes Alone. As befits his career in film scoring, he has demonstrated a chameleonic gift for genre-blending, but always manages to provide the listener with a memorable melody. Consequently, it’s really not surprising that his new three-song EP, Ghost of Chivalry, explores power pop, a type of rock that may be among the genre’s most hook-oriented. Power pop may have reached an apex of sorts in the 1970s, when bands like the Raspberries, Badfinger and Big Star began to combine Beatlesque melodicism with the high-energy hammering of the Who. Later practitioners like Cheap Trick, the Romantics, and the Smithereens had greater or lesser degrees of success, but the style has largely survived in an underground where devotees recognize one another by references to the Yellow Pills anthologies, the Rainbow Quartz label, and IPO (which stands for the International

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