Mary Chapin Carpenter Announces Tour Dates with Shawn Colvin, Dawes

mary chapin carpenter and shawn colvin

MARY CHAPIN CARPENTER CONFIRMED TOUR DATES
BOLD 
on-sale this Friday, June 16 at 10:00am local time

June 13—Scottsdale, AZ—Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts*

June 15—Boulder, CO—Chautauqua Auditorium*

June 16—Breckenridge, CO—Riverwalk Center*

June 17—Telluride, CO—Telluride Bluegrass Festival

August 3—Brownfield, ME—Stone Mountain Arts Center

August 4—Brownfield, ME—Stone Mountain Arts Center

August 5—Katonah, NY—Caramoor Center

August 6—Richmond, VA—The National†

August 8—Wilmington, NC—Greenfield Lake Amphitheater†

August 9—Charleston, SC—Charleston Music Hall†

August 10—Greensboro, NC—Carolina Theatre†

August 11—Charlotte, NC—Knight Theater†

August 12—Lexington, KY—Lexington Opera House

August 18—Beverly, MA—Cabot Theatre†

August 19—Portland, ME—State Theatre†

August 20—Nashua, NH—Nashua Center†

August 22—Northampton, MA—Academy of Music†

August 25—Vineyard Haven, MA—Beach Road Weekend 

August 26—Vienna, VA—Wolf Trap‡

September 28—Immokalee, FL—Seminole Casino+

September 29—Fort Lauderdale, FL—Amaturo Theater+

September 30—Clearwater, FL—Capitol Theatre+

October 3—Birmingham, AL—Lyric Theatre+

October 4—Chattanooga, TN—Walker Theatre+

October 6—Atlanta, GA—Buckhead Theatre+

October 8—Nashville, TN—Ryman Auditorium+

October 10—Ann Arbor, MI—Michigan Theater+

October 11—Evanston, IL—Cahn Auditorium+

October 12—Eau Claire, WI—Pablo Center at the Confluence+

October 13—Minneapolis, MN—Pantages Theatre+

October 14—Urbana, IL—Krannert Center for the Performing Arts+

October 18—Newark, OH—Midland Theatre+

October 20—Buffalo, NY—University of Buffalo+

October 21—Ithaca, NY—State Theater+

October 22—Potsdam, NY—Helen M. Hosmer Concert Hall+

October 24—York, PA—Appel Center for the Performing Arts+

*with special guest Emily Barker

†with special guest Brandy Clark

‡with special guest Dawes

+with Shawn Colvin

Wilco Announce New Tour Dates

I alredy got my tickets to the Tulsa show.

Wilco Fall 2023 Tour

Mon. Sept. 25 – Wichita, KS @ Wave
Tue. Sep. 26 – Tulsa, OK @ Cain’s Ballroom
Thu. Sep. 28 – Dallas, TX @ South Side Ballroom
Fri. Sep. 29 – Austin, TX @ Moody Amphitheater @ Waterloo Park
Sun. Oct. 1 – Albuquerque, NM @ Kiva Auditorium
Tue. Oct. 3 – Scottsdale, AZ @ Scottsdale Civic Center East Bowl Stage
Wed. Oct. 4 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Theatre at Ace Hotel
Thu. Oct. 5 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Theatre at Ace Hotel
Fri. Oct. 6 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Theatre at Ace Hotel
Sun. Oct. 8 – Monterey, CA @ Rebels & Renegades Festival
Wed. Oct. 11 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Bellwether
Fri. Oct. 13 – Santa Barbara, CA @ Arlington Theatre
Sat. Oct. 14 – Berkeley, CA @ Greek Theatre
Mon. Oct. 16 – Portland, OR @ Keller Auditorium
Tue. Oct. 17 – Seattle, WA @ Paramount Theatre
Wed. Oct. 18 – Seattle, WA @ Paramount Theatre
Fri. Oct. 20 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Eccles Theater
Sun. Oct. 22 – Denver, CO @ Mission Ballroom
Mon. Oct. 23 – Omaha, NE @ The Astro Theater
Wed. Oct. 25 – Kansas City, MO @ Midland Theatre
Thu. Oct. 26 – St. Louis, MO @ Stifel Theatre
Fri. Oct. 27 – Bentonville, AR @ The Momentary

Watch Bob Dylan Perform “Gotta Serve Somebody”

Does anybody know what this is from? The Youtube clip was uploaded by Christ Rules Radio which I was hoping would be a cool channel that posted spiritual songs by awesome rock and roll artists but is actually just straight-up Christian acts.

Bob is in a tux and I see Kris Kristofferson and Kenny Rogers and others in the audience so I’m assuming an awards show like the Grammys or maybe the County Music Awards. But I’m sure someone out there knows.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed (2004)

ginger snaps 2 poster

Ginger Snaps (2000) is a wonderful coming-of-age horror film about two angst-filled, sarcastic teenagers who form a death pact before one of them gets bitten by a werewolf and begins to change.

Its sequel finds one of the girls, Brigitte (Emily Perkins) stuck in a rehab clinic after she overdoses on the wolfsbane she’s been injecting to keep her own transformation at bay.

At the clinic, she meets Tyler (Eric Johnson) who trades whatever the girls are addicted to for sexual favors, and Ghost (Tatiana Maslany) a young ward of the clinic who quickly realizes that Brigitte is a werewolf and becomes her only friend.

The film loses a lot of what made the original so great – mainly the bond between the two sisters and their withering takes on suburban life in high school. Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) does appear in the film, but only as a hallucination and she’s more foreboding than fun). Ghost doesn’t provide nearly the same punch.

Yet, it is still an enjoyable film. It relies more on the drama of whether or not Brigitte will escape the clinic and stop her full transformation into a werewolf than horror tropes. Though there is a werewolf stalking her, looking for a mate.

The first film used the werewolf transformation as a commentary on puberty, this film critiques the ways in which men tend to prey on young women.

When the horror does come it is appropriately violent, and gory. Overall it isn’t quite as great as the first one, but it’s still carries quite a bite.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Special Effects (1984)

special effects movie poster

There is a question that, I suppose, needs to be asked here. What, exactly, is a horror movie? Sometimes that’s easy to define. Horror movies have ghosts or monsters in them. Vampires, blobs, werewolves and other creatures of the night fill the screen of many a horror film. But what about more pedestrian horror? Movies in which the villain is human.

Jason Vorhees is just a man in a hockey mask with a machete (at least in the early films, he later becomes superhuman and virtually unkillable). But there are lots of crime movies with higher body counts. No one would argue that the Friday the 13th movies are anything other than horror, but serial killer movies are often called thrillers.

Maybe that’s because there usually isn’t a police detective trying to solve the case of the Jason killings. But then there are a lot of Italian horror films, giallos especially, that plotwise are basically police procedurals.

Maybe horror movies are more gore-filled. But that doesn’t always track either because some cop flicks concentrate on the extreme violence of their killers. And plenty of horror films have very little gore or none at all.

I don’t have an answer here. It is a big debate that I won’t solve in these pages. I mention it because tonight’s Friday Night Horror movie could be considered more of a thriller than a horror, but it does carry the horror genre label on IMDB and that’s what I thought it was coming into it, so that’s what we’re gonna keep calling it.

Andrea Wilcox (Zoë Lund) left her husband Keefe (Brad Rijn) and small child in Texas to go to New York City and pursue an acting career. Though she’s willing to sleep with producers and directors and anybody who will give her a part she’s only able to find jobs doing nude modeling and the like.

When Keefe comes to get her back and bring her home she lies and says that her career is starting to take off. Why, she has a meeting that evening with Neville (Eric Bogosian) a famous movie director. She does in fact go to his house that evening and literally begs him to at least take a look at her.

He does look at her, then sleeps with her, and secretly films the encounter, and strangles her to death. He cleans her up, puts her inside Keef’s car, and dumps it at Coney Island.

The cops immediately suspect Keef and arrest him. Neville hires an expensive attorney and gets him free on bail. He then decides to make a movie about Keef and Andrea. He gets Keef to play himself and finds an amazing Andrea look-alike in a woman named Elaine (also played by Zoë Lund) to play Andrea.

Things get weird from there.

B-movie auteur Larry Cohen mixes Vertigo (1958) with Body Double (1984) and bits of Peeping Tom (1960) into a sleazy cauldron of awesome. He has Brian DePalma’s flair for taking Hitchcockian ideas and amping up the sex and violence, but very little of either director’s sense of style. Though he does create some really interesting sets, especially Neville’s giant apartment filled with mirrors and water.

The film really is more thriller than horror as Neville takes his movie ideas to extremes and is more than willing to kill again to maintain his cinematic goals.

Special Effects wasn’t at all what I was expecting when I put it on, but I found it to be quite enjoyable.

The Movie Journal: May 2023

everything everywhere all at once poster

I watched 26 films in the month of May. Twenty-one of those films were new to me. Thirteen of them were made before I was born.

I had originally intended the theme of this month to either be Pre-Code films or erotic thrillers. Neither of those became a reality. The theme this month became that there was no theme this month. And that’s ok.

My brother-in-law died early in May. Naturally, that threw everything out of whack. We spent a week in Nashville and I didn’t watch anything. In the weeks that have followed, I’ve remained a bit out of sorts. I’m still trying to get back into the groove of things here on the blog. As you’ve probably noticed I haven’t been writing any movie reviews, or anything else really. I will make a better effort in June.

I hate how callous that sounds. Of course, a death in the family has impacted my movie-watching and blog writing. These things are completely secondary to the well-being of my wife and mourning with her family. I’m not complaining about not being able to watch as many movies this month as I usually do. Not at all.

But this is a post about the movies I did watch and so I mentioned it as a way of explaining why I didn’t watch as many movies.

I did watch the new Scream movie. Actually, before I watched the new one I went back and rewatched the six movies that came before it. I had really planned on doing a whole write-up on them, maybe even doing one of those dumb Ranked posts you see all over the Internet. But I just couldn’t get it done.

The Scream franchise did do a number on my most-watched actors of the year list. Four of those actors (Courteny Cox, Roger Jackson, David Arquette, and Neve Campbell) are now in the top five. James Coburn is the only non-Scream actor on that list.

The Director’s List remains mostly the same except for Wes Craven taking a spot due to him directing several of the Scream films.

Here’s the complete list:

Spy Hunt (1950)
Appointment with a Shadow (1957)
One Way Street (1950)
Undercover Girl (1950)
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
Undertow (1949)
The Pope’s Exorcist (2023)
Fear in the Night (1972)
Outside the Wall (1950)
Hold Back Tomorrow (1955)
Doctor Who: Silver Nemesis (1988)
Sister, Sister (1987)
Bullet Train (2022)
Winchester ’73 (1950)
Eight Hours of Terror (1957)
The Babysitter (2017)
Psycho III (1986)
Safe in Hell (1931)
Scream VI (2023)
Scream (2022)
Scream 4 (2011)
Scream 3 (2000)
Scream 2 (1997)
Honor Among Lovers (1931)
Scream (1996)
The Comfort of Strangers (1990)

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Pope’s Exorcist (2023)

the popes exorcist poster

I love going into a movie completely blind. Not knowing anything about a film before watching it can lead to beautiful surprises. It can also lead to utter befuddlement and disappointment.

The only thing I knew about The Pope’s Exorcist before watching it tonight was that it starred Russell Crowe. Well, I knew it was a horror movie, and I was pretty sure it was going to involve some exorcism, but that’s it.

Honestly, I kind of thought it was going to be about the Pope getting demon-possessed and Russel Crowe was going to save him. I didn’t really think about the details of how that might work – how the head of the Catholic Church could get possessed – but it sounded kind of cool. It still does.

But no, the title refers to the fact that Russel Crowe’s priest – Father Gabriele Amorth, who was a real person – was hired directly by the Pope and would, in fact, be his personal exorcist were he to be possessed. But that doesn’t happen here. Instead, a demon possesses a little boy (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney).

Though Amorth was a real person and he was the official exorcist for the Diocese of Rome, the actual story is completely made up. Although one could easily argue it was mostly stolen from The Exorcist (1973). The boy does all the things demon-possessed kids do in these types of movies. He curses, he blasphemes, he sexualizes his mother, turns crosses upside down, etc.

There is also a mom (Alex Essoe) and an older sister (Laurel Marsden) and a tragic backstory (the dad was killed in a car accident, the boy saw it happen). But all of that is very bland and the film doesn’t really care about any of it.

Russel Crow plays Amorth like a jokester who carries a lot of pain. His performance reminded me of his character in The Nice Guys (2016). He periodically, though not often enough, lays down these great little sly jokes. I wish they’d leaned into that aspect a lot more. I rally wish I’d watched The Nice Guys again, that movie is terrific. Mostly this film is a very serious slog.

They don’t do anything new with the possession angle, but do spend a lot of time having Amorth and his newfound buddy Priest Esquibel (Daniel Zovatto) dig up the church’s sins (the Spanish Inquisition and the child abuse scandals) and blaming them on the devil.

It all concludes in a big sloppy, CGI mess that is as incoherent as it is dumb.

Life in France, And Other Things

I started this blog on May 29, 2004. That’s almost 19 years ago. When I started it I had no idea what I was going to do with it. I certainly would have never guessed I’d still be blogging all these years later.

My wife and I moved to Strasbourg, France in September of 2004 and stayed until June of 2005. This blog was started as a way of journaling my experiences there. I knew I’d want to keep a record of our adventures and blogs were just really becoming a thing back then so it seemed like the perfect way to take notes. I wasn’t even sure if I’d make the blog public, or rather, if I would send anybody the links to what I was writing.

Eventually, I did, then I got to where I wanted more and more people to visit. At first, all I did was journal our time in France. In time I started writing reviews. Then it became a full-fledged pop culture site. Soon enough I was talking bout bootlegs, then sharing them, and then they overtook the site altogether. And here we are.

As most of you know a few years ago I started getting nasty letters from lawyers claiming violations of one thing or another. That got me scared and I turned the blog private. Actually, I made every single post on the site private and then I turned the entire site private. Eventually, I started inviting people to my private site, but even then most of the old posts were hidden from everybody but me.

For a long while the only posts I allowed anyone to see were bootleg related. Now the site is public again but those old private posts have remained hidden. I’ve slowly been making them visible again, but I’ve been very selective about it. That is about to change. I’m ready to start working my way through the site, from the oldest posts to the newest and making everything public.

I’m going to be slow about it. I want to read each post, make some light edits, and then make them public. Before I do that thought I want to explain France a little bit.

Back in 2004, my wife was a graduate student at Indiana University in Bloomington. She was studying French Linguistics. I was a working schlub. Her department had an exchange program with a university in Strasbourg. Basically, Indiana students would go to France and teach English and some French student would come to Indiana and teach French. She signed up and we lived in Strasbourg for roughly ten months.

It was an amazing time. It was a long time ago. I read some of those old posts and I hardly recognize myself. I spread a little caution here to note that as you read those posts, recognize some of them are almost two decades old. The man that I was is not the man that I am. I’ve changed. I’ve grown. My beliefs have changed and grown too. Also recognize that in the beginning, I was writing to a small audience. Mostly my family, my wife’s family, and a few close friends. I had no idea I’d eventually open this up to the world or that music nerds would be reading my thoughts many years later.

I grew up in the Church of Christ. That’s a very conservative, evangelical-esque Christian church. I was still very much a member when we lived in France (like I said I was a different man back then). Before we left we made contact with a Church of Christ missionary from Belgium who was working in Strasbourg. He and his amazing wife picked us up from the airport and allowed us to stay with them for a couple of weeks while we got ourselves sorted. We attended his church the entire time we lived in France.

I say church but really we gathered in his house and some of the other member’s apartments. The Church of Christ is not very big in France. France has an odd relationship with any church that isn’t Catholic. While we were there a group of college kids from America, who were part of a missionary in-training program called Adventures in Missions, also attended the little church. They were young, nice, and very naive. My wife and I became friends with them.

I mention all of this because as I’m making all of my journal entries from France you will hear me talk about church and those AIM students quite a lot. I don’t talk about politics or religion much on my blog anymore (intentionally so as I want the blog to be about music and movies and art – things that gather us together not divide) so I expect it may be a little jolting to hear me talk about it so often in those old posts.

Like I keep saying I was a different man back then, but that is who I was, for better and for worse. I’m making it sound like I’m writing sermons in those old blogs and that isn’t the case at all. Mostly it is my experiences in a foreign land. We also often hung out with my wife’s British coworkers and drank ourselves silly. You won’t read so much about that as, well my mother was reading and she would have had a fit.

My plan is to make several of these old posts public every day. Some days there will be more than others. So prepare yourself for random e-mails from my blog. Also please notice the dates these posts were originally published. It may be rather confusing to get an e-mail about me adventuring in Europe when in reality I am stuck here in dreary Oklahoma.

I do hope you enjoy ready about my life all those years ago. My apologies if you do not.