David Wheelock
David Wheelock
Recent Stories
Ray Davies now a politico, no longer Kinky
In a dozen crisp tracks Davies holds forth with ruminations on everything from globalization to religion to the United Nations, all delivered in the slightly cheeky tone of a Brit who’s seen the setting of enough suns to be capable of invoking “the old country” with some credibility.
Don’t think twice, biopic’s all right
Audacity per se isn’t necessarily the mark of a great film.
Traveling Wilburys defined supergroup rock
Scene Again
When “Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1” was released in 1988, the album shot to No. 3 on the U.S. charts and eventually went double platinum. Later it was nominated for one Grammy (album of the year) and won another (best rock performance by a duo or group). The record’s central conceit was pretty straightforward: a band of wayward musicians, Nelson, Otis, Lefty, Lucky and Charlie T. — all of them sons of Charles Truscott Wilbury, Sr. — got together in a house and laid down ten easy-rocking t
Searching for Yale’s avant-garde
Today’s campus hints at the existence of something different, something much harder to encapsulate. There’s activity and energy, but there’s no army. There’s plenty of motion, but there’s no movement. As Stein herself said in another time and place, “There is no there there.” Call it the Ghost of the Avant-Garde.
‘Souls’ needs Zoloft and sense of humor
At some point, James Blunt seized upon the idea of writing songs that make him sound sadder, lonelier and more tormented than the rest of the people in the world. The habit would be far more maddening if he weren’t occasionally quite decent at it.
Artspace installs new leadership
Visitors to Artspace, the Ninth Square’s proud outpost of artistic innovation, will notice that several important faces have changed over the summer among the gallery’s staff. But it will be harder to find any major changes to the spirit of openness and originality that has ensured its relevance over the past 23 years.
‘Bean’ sprouts deja vu, slapstick
Watching the putty-limbed Atkinson grimace and gambol his way through an hour and a half of farcical shtick (with virtually no lines, Bean really has no option except physical comedy), moviegoers themselves might feel as if they’ve landed in the distant past.
Fall film crop is streamlined
Anybody monitoring the seismograph between this past May and August in search of a massive box office stampede was bound to come away rather nonplussed: even the concept of the summer blockbuster is beginning to feel obsolete.
Adult Swim absurdity
For those unfamiliar with Adult Swim, the Cartoon Network’s nightly parade of irony-soaked Gen-X programming, the main characters of “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” are Frylock, Master Shake and Meatwad — a talking carton of French fries, a talking milkshake and, what else, a talking wad of meat, respectively. Normally their adventures are confined to the space of a 20-minute television segment, but in “Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters” the fast-food cohorts are allotted
Avril gets mad, gets lewd, gets old
Take a relatively clean-cut pop star like Avril Lavigne, have her snarl enough cuss words to snag a Parental Advisory on her latest album, maybe apply some more hair dye and eyeliner, and people will automatically start talking about her updated image, or something like that.