The Long Goodbye: Altman and Gould’s Marlowe, the Scuzzy ‘70s, and an Imagined Soundtrack
Director Robert Altman called his 1973 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled crime novel The Long Goodbye “a satire in melancholy.” The film stars goofily sincere Elliott Gould as detective Philp Marlowe alongside the beautiful Nina van Pallandt, baseball pitcher turned controversial memoirist Jim Bouton, film director Mark Rydell, the stormy Sterling Hayden, and Altman regular…
Reflecting on Beck, Thurston Moore, Yanni & “Refections of Passion”
In the 1950s, the practice of an artist or band covering a song associated with another performer was commonplace as labels rushed covers into the marketplace in order to compete with the original cut on the charts to lessen its impact. This initial piratical motivation behind cover songs has faded away and replaced by different…
“Screenwriter’s Blues” and More Tales from Late ’90s Los Angeles
One day when I was living in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles in the hazy days of 1997 or 1998, my roommate M. exploded through the door of our apartment and declared to me and our other roommate W., “You have to hear this song.” It was “Screenwriter’s Blues” by Soul Coughing from the…
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Recliner Notes 