This album is pure fluff and about as subtle as a porn flick.

Only the dead and infirm will be able to resist getting down to the sounds of You’ve Been Spiked. And you haters out there, too. You might shovel scorn upon this danceable disc for its candy-coated good vibes. Too bad for you.

I had no idea Alfred Stieglitz was such a serious fine art photographer. I’d only ever seen his portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe and known that he was an impresario of the early 20th century modernist art movement in America. The introduction written by John Szarkowski set me straight. And the photos, taken mostly late in Stieglitz’s life, are sensational, with a few exceptions.

I was on the verge of going berserk listening to the repetitive wailing of Mekurya’s saxophone when the lovely “Ambassel” faded in with its wonderful oom-pah-pah tempo and gypsy carny music melody. Then I became entranced. Weird and worth it.

This is a wonderful, beautiful cartoon-like book for children that reminds me a lot of The Frank Book, though it is less sinister in subject and design. Get it.

Grainy black and whites taken in 1955-56 all across America. Candid photos of young and old, rich and poor, going about their lives. Parties, restaurants, drug stores, juke joints, city streets, country fields, in cars, on motorcycles, in coffins; everywhere the people are laid bare. You see that America has already become a car culture, that the rich are fat and the poor are thin, and everyone is constantly in motion.

The intro is by Jack Kerouac. Of course.

This album has been my personal soundtrack for the last week. It is so awesome. It’s infectious. It makes me happy. And it’s completely new to me. Who knew there was a jazz scene in Addis Ababa in the late 60’s and early 70’s? (I first heard some of this music while watching Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers.) And it’s no ordinary jazz these dudes lay down. It’s a mix of cool, funk, latin, reggae, middle eastern and traditional Ethiopian styles. It’s wild. Lots of saxophone, piano, organ, electric guitar, and drums improvising all sorts of weird melodies and progressions suffused, one suspects, in a cloud of dense, dark ganja smoke.

eMusic has no less than 19 albums from the Ethiopiques series. Many focus on the short-lived jazz heyday of Ethiopia. You can be sure that I’ll be downloading more very soon.

Before Aragorn returned home to be crowned king he took a turn as a Borscht Belt “blouse man” c. 1969.

I started reading this aloud to my six-year-old daughter but she lost interest after learning how the leopard got his spots. If it were up to me we’d be reading these funny classic stories every night.

It has a slow deliberate pace but isn’t overly long. Every frame is carefully composed. Many shots are held an uncomfortably long time. The story structure is simple and linear and makes sense yet there is no recognizable ending. It has an anti-Hollywood style but is filled with Hollywood actors. Nothing is gratuitous. Nothing is left out. It is perfect.