Jack White’s increasingly baroque love of packaging means that it takes more than one review to get to grips with a solitary release. Hence “Under Great White Northern Lights”, a package commemorating The White Stripes’ 2007 tour of Canada which, in its simplest iteration, comes as a live CD and a longform documentary DVD about the ambitious jaunt.
Never personally had much time for Martin Amis’ writing, but I was idling my way through an interview with him in The Guardian the other day, when I came across his predictably splenetic response to The Bookseller’s claim that the new Amis novel, The Pregnant Woman, was a “return to form”.
This is pretty fantastic. A few days ago, Drag City streamed a song from the forthcoming Joanna Newsom album, “Have One On Me”, which I really should’ve flagged up.
This year’s Academy Award nominations have just been announced. No great surprises, I see – plenty for The Hurt Locker, Up In The Air and **whisper it** Avatar in the big categories. But it’s certainly grand to see the likes of Kathryn Bigelow, Jeremy Renner, Jeff Bridges, Michael Haneke and Jacques Audiard in there, at any rate. Anyway, here’s what’s what in the key categories, with my take on the nominations, for what it’s worth.
