Every month, Cosmik Debris brings you many CD and record reviews, but the writers manage to find a little time for other pursuits, like reading, going to movies and watching videos. That's where Everything Else In Review comes in.


MOVIE: Moulin Rouge
Starring Nicole Kidman, Ewan MacGregor, Jim Broadbent
Directed by Baz Luhrman
Reviewed by Rusty Pipes

WOW! This movie explodes out of the box and moves forward irresistibly like a locomotive. No, forget that. It's not a locomotive, it's more like it drags your heart and eyes after it like a supermodel in a flashy dress. No, that's still not it. It's a high tech rave opera. Except that it's about a time 100 years ago when high tech wasn't even an idea yet. And it's a new take on the myth of Orpheus which puts its roots in the Greek classical tradition. But it's also a comedy. And a musical.

Ahh hell, this is a music magazine so you're into music, right? Then you have simply got to see this movie. Stop reading. No, that doesn't do justice to this wonderfully inventive film. Let me start over.

Moulin Rouge is like a combination of Cabaret, Topsy Turvey, Shakespeare In Love and a touch of All That Jazz. I predict that it's soon to be a Saturday night fixture like Rocky Horror, with folks who've memorized every line in the thing dressing up for showings.

Better.

The Moulin Rouge of course still exists today. It's a Paris venue that in many ways was the original cutting edge club scene, the Studio 54 of its day. Or Studio 54 was the Moulin Rouge of its day. But rather than make a staid period piece about the club with authentic music, Director Baz Luhrman amps up every frame of the picture with all the modern tools at this command, to show in modern terms exactly how the Moulin Rouge felt. When they do the Can-Can in this flick, you feel exactly how risqué it felt then.

But there is a lot more going on than that. There are fantastic production numbers full of wonderful dancing throughout the movie. It's only natural, for the characters are trying to mount the best stage show ever, Spectacular Spectacular. Which brings the main characters together Christian and Satine, played by Ewan MacGegor and Nicole Kidman. Nicole as Satine looks rather like a young Ann-Margaret and has never been sexier, even when she bared far more skin in Eyes Wide Shut. And who knew she could sing? Who knew Ewan could sing? But they do it well and they ain't bad hoofin' it either. Jim Broadbent is also terrific as Zidler, the silver tongued owner of the Moulin Rouge and so is Richard Roxburgh as the confusable, but conniving Duke who tries to take Satine for himself.

The love story drives the film forward. And you've heard this story before, the chance meeting, the mistaken identity, the conflict of true love versus power, the doomed heroine, but under Luhrman's guidance it all drags you in again giving Moulin Rouge an archetypical quality, almost like a Shakespearean tragedy.

Did I say you've heard it all before? The characters keep spouting famous song lyrics from all sorts of different artists-- Elton John, The Beatles, Nirvana, U2, David Bowie, and others. It's a seemingly insipid ploy, and yet it makes the movie maddeningly endearing. Early in the movie our hero Christain meets Toulouse Latrec and his struggling artist friends, and wows them as a writer by spouting words from Rogers and Hammerstein's Sound Of Music of all things. But it still works in the surreal logic of this movie's world. Later the Like a Virgin sequence will have you on the floor laughing, but it too fits perfectly into the plot as if Madonna had written it for Moulin Rouge from the beginning.

Baz Luhrman did the updated version of Romeo and Juliet a couple years back, but that only hints at what he's brought off here. Flashy, and relentlessly Bohemian, modern in every way and yet timelessly touching, it'll have more than a few people in tears at the end. Goddam what a flick! Luhrman has just joined the pantheon of my all time favorite directors.


(C) 2001 - Rusty Pipes



BOOK: Michael Bloomfield: If You Love These Blues
by Jan Mark Wolkin & Bill Keenom (Miller Freeman Books)
Reviewed by Shaun Dale

Mother, brother, ex-wife, musical colleagues, hangers-on, passers-by and the greatest white blues guitarist (yes, it's true) of all time himself are among the voices assembled in this oral biography of Mike Bloomfield. From his privileged boyhood in the 'burbs, through his days as one of a gaggle of white kids hanging around the blues clubs of Chicago and on to his landmark recording and performance work with the Butterfield Blues Band, Electric Flag, Bob Dylan, Al Kooper and others, this is a remarkably insightful and informative story of a life. Perhaps most impressively, it never loses sight of the principle focus of that life, which was the music.

Alongside the personal biography, this book follows the migration of the blues from small, largely segregated, club music that had evolved in urban clubs from roots in southern jukes to a pan-racial musical phenomena played out by white, black and integrated bands on the major stages of the world. As young men like Butter, Bloomers and Charlie Musselwhite began to find acceptance in the world of blues and translate the music they found there to a broader rock and pop musical marketplace, they brought along many of the masters to whom they owed and paid homage. It was, in fact, Michael Bloomfield who introduced B.B. King to Bill Graham, and through his artfully blended bills at his Fillmore clubs in New York and San Francisco, it was Bill Graham who introduced King and many other masters of the blues to an audience of young, white hipsters.

Both Bloomfields life and the accompanying story of the blues explosion are fascinating stories, and they're related here in a way that makes a fascinating read. Miller Freeman has included a CD with seven rare tracks from 1964 which provide insight into the lessons that he was learning while hanging out in those Chicago clubs and provide some very fine musical moments as well. The book and CD create an outstanding package that belongs on the shelves of Bloomfield fans, blues fans and anyone interested in the genesis of American popular music.


(C) 2001 - Shaun Dale



BOOK: Off The Record
by David Menconi
iUniverse Books - $19.99
Reviewed by John Sekerka

The inevitable document of the late great TAB may seem redundant to one and all, but the stuff of legend does require a proper perspective. I tend to abhor vulture tomes picking at recently squashed rock and roll road kill, but "Off The Record" manages to clarify as humanly possible, the sordid laundry of everyone involved in the meteoric rise and crash of America's favourite junkie guitar god poster boy. Tommy Aguilar may have been a music visionary, when he could see straight, but like numerous predecessors stumbling down the fast lane, wasn't meant to stick around for reunion tours and VH-1 has-been specials. The story, and it's a doozy as told in Off The Record, paints a livid picture of the music industry. The greed, the back-stabbing, the payola, the blundering, the incompetence, the revenge, the depravity, you know, all the good things in life that make the world go round. From humble beginnings, when TAB would impatiently blow headliners off small stages, bewilder audiences with music virtuosity then pummel them with music mayhem, "Off The Record" bounces along like a super charged Indian rubber ball. Author David Menconi, a poorly disguised pseudonym for long time hack and early TAB supporter Ken Morrison, digs deep into every ugly crevice. The mark of someone who was there. The surprise comes with a sound knowledge and respectful understanding of the music itself, important and often overlooked in these types of cash-in accounts. Menconi’s version of the events reads like a well paced mystery novel. Characters play, fight and die, and everything comes full circle. Not the typical live fast die young story, Off The Record is more about survival, and more specifically, about Gus DeGrande: the soul selling devil of American recording industry himself. If even half of what Menconi insinuates is true then DeGrande comes off as the greatest huckster since Barnum licked his first sucker. I recommend reading the book as a simple piece of fiction fluff, cuz as we all know, truth is stranger than fiction, and the real escapades of TAB probably would never fly on paper. Fans will flock to it as they do to Aguilar's overrun memorial, and in the process will wind up reading a pretty good book.

Further details can be had at: www.offtherecordbook.com.


(C) 2001 - John Sekerka



BOOK: You Are Being Lied To
Edited by Russ Kick (Disinformation Books)
Reviewed by Shaun Dale

Subtitled "The Disinformation Guide To Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes and Cultural Myths," You Are Being Lied To comes from the people behind the Disinformation website www.disinfo.com, one of the Internet's most comprehensive, and most reliable, archives of the unofficial history of politics, pop culture and general paranoia. That's significant because, as the material that makes up this book makes clear, the official history is anything but comprehensive or reliable.

Village Voice columnist Russ Kick has assembled an outstanding collection of contributions from voices that range from (relatively) mainstream journalists and academics to (apparently) outright cranks. By the time you've finished pouring through those contributions, though, you'll likely be wondering which source belongs in which category as it slowly dawns that everything you know just may, in fact, be wrong after all. Or not. What you will know by sure by the end is that there's almost always more to the story, any story, than you heard on Headline News. This isn't the all-comprehensive sourcebook that will fill you in on everything "they" haven't told you, but as a virtual broom it's an excellent tool for a little mental cob-web cleanup and it provides plenty of pointers for the inquisitive.

You are, you know, being lied to. Perhaps even by some of the writers in this book. But you won't know until you look, and look again. This is a great place to start looking.


(C) 2001 - Shaun Dale



BOOK: Miles Davis - The Definitive Biography
by Ian Carr (Thunder's Mouth Press)
Reviewed by Shaun Dale

This Thunder's Mouth volume is the update of Ian Carr's 1982 biography of Miles Davis, which, at nearly double the length of the original, includes a wealth of new material drawn from original research and interviews conducted by Carr after Davis' death in 1991.

It's a comprehensive book, with a wealth of historical and anecdotal information, but its greatest value may be in its assessment of the music Miles Davis produced during the last 20 years of his life. His moves from fusion to funk and beyond were frequently the work of critical controversy, but Carr, a knowledgeable musician himself, provides a positive framework for assessing Davis' creativity during this period. While some might argue that Carr takes too positive a view of latter day Davis, it's worth the risk of some excessive zeal to get people to take another look at a body of music which, if not invariably exciting, did in fact come from one of the most talented, and most prescient, musicians of the late 20th century.

Davis was a fascinating character, as well as a phenomenal musical force, and during a half-century career he moved among and worked beside many of the giants of jazz. In addition to a thorough examination of the music he made, Carr offers an informative story of the life he led. This volume offers over 639 pages of biography and discography that everyone with an interest in jazz in all it's forms should read.


(C) 2001 - Shaun Dale