"...He had a white-labelled 45 rpm test pressing on the turntable and he put it into play. The room was filled with this amazing sound. I had no idea what it was, but it was the most incredible thing I'd ever heard. I slowly and numbly felt my way through the aural maze and discerned what I thought were two black guys singing a very sad, tortured, oh so laboured and stated regret about things 'she' didn't do anymore when they kissed, of eyes no longer closing when they called her name... or was it kissed her lips?

"Underneath lay a bed of sustained everything -- drones of echo'd majestic hurt that lasted forever, the only movement provided by a La Bamba-thick bass on quinalbarbitone. Come the chorus, the track, as one, started a stop-start tymphflayed, ricochet'd beat as voices, angels and strings strained in Wagnerian, classical ache, followed by another verse of high pain. On the altar of middle eight the rhythm got down on its knees, pulling the symphonic sustain along to the next corner -- and just 'babys' and 'please.' The two voices' gospel shrieks and wails were then propelled by a bass-end Latin suggestion of rhythm and hope through the last heaven's gate of the final, telling chorus.

"That last chorus was as if Jesus had risen, as if Moses had come down with the Ten Commandments of sound.... There was so much sound that I wouldn't not have been surprised if I'd just heard three different recordings playing different parts of the whole. The audio fidelity was that awe-inspiring..." -- Andrew Loog Oldham in 2STONED (Vintage 2003), p. 76-77.

from Ray Connolly in the Daily Mail...

"...Who knows, the world may last long enough for her to play Dagny Taggart in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, or the mother of apocalypse in some ultimate explosion movie where - finally - her lips are seen floating away in the darkened sky like a Man Ray mouth, the mouth most Americans would like to kiss as the big one goes off..."

...However, it is at the very end that Recount cops out most egregiously. The last shot is a great one: a grim Kubrickian view down a long corridor, with floor-to-ceiling shelves on either side, all loaded up with crates of ballots -- ballots that had not been counted at the time. And yet, of course, those ballots were counted eventually, by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, with the help of all the nation's leading media outlets; and what they ultimately found was that, by every standard, Al Gore won. Again: If all the ballots in the state of Florida were counted, Al Gore won -- a fact that goes unmentioned at that final moment, as that great shot fades to black without an epilogue.

See also: Miller's blog, with reprints of first-person accounts from Florida.

This gets repeated tonight across many public radio stations.

A juicy sampling of writerly links from Granta.

Quote of the Year

'If you fight terror with terror,' the authors ask, 'how can you tell which is which?'

I just hope that the early slips and the unwieldy keys didn't give him too much bother... when I opened my eyes to watch him, it seemed as if he was using way too much arm control and not nearly enough body weight. They say the pianissimo is all in the flesh around the finger bones -- but it has to exist within larger contrasts, right? The crowd was enthusiastic, but not leaping to their feet the way some UK audiences are prone to do. This reserved British character gives way when they really love a performer and standing ovations are far more typical over here than in the states, ironically.

Filing on this today for NPR, stay tuned for air date.

PS: please oh please notify us all about Prince boots from Coachella. Trade you for last year's Super Bowl sound-check ("Johnny B. Goode").