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Fall 2003
Letter From
The Editor
I am a world-class procrastinator.
It’s a miracle that you’re reading this.
by Hayden Childs


Lost In Translation
While touted in some reviews as a Brief
Encounter-like romance, Lost in Translation is much more than
that, including an examination of aging — the confusion met upon reaching
adulthood, the
staleness of married life, and the aloofness of being past your prime.
by George Wu

Special
Feature: Sam Peckinpah
Introduction
Welcome to The High Hat’s Sam Peckinpah
feature.
by Hayden Childs

Looks That Kill
What is unique to Peckinpah is the
distribution of these points of identification. Rather than focusing
on the protagonists alone, the audience is encouraged also to witness
the action from the perspectives of horrified onlookers and victims
of crossfire.
by Gary Mairs

Ride the High Country
A film of abundant visual beauty,
it’s also a highly literate one through whose heart blows a chill valedictory
breeze.
by Tom Block

Major Dundee
Moby Dick tells us that pursuing
your obsessions can destroy you; Peckinpah should have been more wary.
by Hayden Childs

Algonquin Kids’ Table: The Wild Bunch
In which various participants gush and
squibble over Peckinpah’s classic tale of bad men in bad times.

Straw Dogs
If Peckinpah truly wanted to make
Death Wish, he’d have made Death Wish. But Straw Dogs isn’t
a vengeance orgy at all unless you’re not quite paying attention.
by Dana Knowles

Junior Bonner
The Tao of Sam Peckinpah.
by Hayden Childs

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
The very title suggests a brace
of opposing forces, an either/or that needs sorting out, but it’s a
riddle that Peckinpah, even had he been sober and left to his own devices,
had no intention of solving because he knew it couldn’t be done.
by Tom Block

Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia
There’s no heroic scale, little
beauty, and the tenderest relationship is between a man who’s dead and
one who ought to be. All that’s left is a vein of black humor a mile
thick and a feeling of disgusted rage potent enough to blow you across
the room.
by Phil Nugent

The Bottom Shelf: Convoy
It was as if Stanley Kubrick had
decided to follow Barry Lyndon with a lavish adaptation of Disco Duck.
by Scott Von Doviak

The Osterman Weekend
Peckinpah, however, was always a
foe of received wisdom, and this is why: The Osterman Weekend isn’t
a terrible movie. It’s not even a bad movie. It’s certainly not a great
movie, but its status as the movie that literally and figuratively buried
him is entirely unjust.
by Leonard Pierce

Pick a Peck of Poses
A Beginner’s Field Guide to the
Peckinpah Actor.
by Phil Nugent


20th Century Essentials
The last half of the century was beset
by intensive ‘style wars’ wherein critics and composers wed to one style
or another attempted to marginalize the supporters and practitioners
of other styles — to silence them.
by Steve Hicken

The New Heavy
This is why a band like Korn, whose
guitar and bass strings are practically falling off, are not Heavy.
They
create a static throb, like some sort of large machine, and after about
five minutes the sound is intolerable — listening to one of their albums
is like working in a metal shop.
by Phil Freeman

How MP3s Made A Music Fan Out Of Me
I blame They Might Be Giants. And of
course theres the little matter of Apples culpability for
the iPod to take into account.
by Erin McKean

You Think You Really Know Me: An Interview with Gary Wilson
To my surprise, John Cage invited me
to his house, and we went over my scores. I went to his house for three
days. I was only 14 years old.
by Brent Bozman

Richard
Thompson: More Guitar
Its become something of a ritual
for critics to start their reviews of Richard Thompsons work by
scratching their heads over why he is not a household name on a rank with
John Lennon or Neil Young.
by Chris Roberson

Planting Together: An Interview with Iron & Wine
Its pretty easy to strip the
music down. In fact, we sometimes strip them down more than whats
on the record.
by Maud Newton

Sadism and Perversity At Work
Miles Davis in Person Friday and Saturday
Nights at the Blackhawk, Complete
by Phil Freeman

Brothers In Arms
Reissues from The Blasters and Rank & File
by Phil Nugent

Does It Help When You Close Your Eyes?:
An Interview with Jean Smith of Mecca Normal
Getting older as an artist is different
than other ways of going through life. I have not been worn down by the
world; I feel my best work is ahead of me.
by Leonard Pierce


Clockers
Done Right
The Wire: Season Two
by Bronwyn Jones

The Decidedly Unfunky Buzz of Boomerang
In the quiet of a million-plus personal
weekend mornings, the Boomer and X generations got to enjoy a weekly
waking
dream called Saturday cartoons. It was just you, the cereal bowl and
the TV.
by Greg T. Hough

Swimming With Sharkey
Wiseguy on DVD
by Phil Nugent

Brassed Off
Brass Eye, Chris Morris’
spoof of moral panic on TV news, infuriated a nation and redefined satire.
by Andrew Levine


Sex and Death in Four Colors
“Pulp Art: Vamps, Villains and Victors
From the Robert Lesser Collection” at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
by Chris Hall

He Kills Coppers
If Jake Arnott is indeed as
much a British doppelganger of James Ellroy as critical consensus would
seem to indicate, then he’s hopefully on the same career path as Ellroy
— and that means we’ll be seeing better and better work out of him as
time passes.
by Leonard Pierce

Short Reviews
Sophie by Guy Burt and Ready,
Steady, Go! by Shawn Levy.
by Gus Sheridan


That
’90s Show
It’s early yet to forecast what
the concept of ’90s nostalgia will look like in the mainstream, although
recent history does offer one clue: the element of ‘youthful American
exuberance’ will be played up, as it has been for every decade from the
1940s on.
by Greg T. Hough


The Probabilistic Soap Opera
or The Consolations of Fantasy Baseball
In many ways, it is not unlike picking stocks. We allocate resources,
we study the available commodities. Risk, reward and probability. Buy
low and sell high.
by John James

Serious Hillbilly Shit
These guys are the real deal: guitar,
mandolin, fiddle and banjo. They play and sing, completely un-amplified,
just standing out in the
yard. I have attended this party for several years because the music
is special, but for Thomas and Sean Clinton and their circle, it is
an occasion
to get more than usually drunk and high.
by Davis David
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