Word: ghostly
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...story in space (Star Wars); Robert Bresson made it austere (Lancelot of the Lake), and six English cutups made it funny (Monty Python and the Holy Grail) But Boorman has never been cowed by precedent or expectations. In Point Blank (1967), he twisted the gangster genre into a psychedelic ghost story. In Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), he torpedoed The Exorcist's bad-seed plot for a Mach 2 excursion into religious ecstasy...
Garland Jeffreys has a new album that avoids both these routes, while creating a style that puts the rest of American pop music to shame. Jeffreys is an NYC street poet-songwriter who has to his credit three highly praised albums, Ghost Writer, One-Eyed Jack (now a cut-out), and American Boy & Girl, all commercial no-sells. His sound is reminiscent of Lou Reed, but with an essential divider: Where Reed's influences lie in jazz and his vocals tend to be experimental (sometimes to the point of irritating), Jeffreys thrives on another form of Black music--reggae...
...reggae songs recorded in London with reggae musicians, attacking hypocrisies and race riots, and a long, less happy-go-lucky, more personal, powerful version of the album's "Christine," as well as a throwaway song composed in the studio, "Lovers' Walk." There are similar superfluities on the album, like "Ghost of a Chance," but the extended length project accurately reflects Jeffreys' creative energy and vision. Daring to confront and reinterpret his own work, to create music with players of different nationalities and races, he cannot keep within the limits of a conventional album...
...March, when the wild cactus bursts into flower throughout the Southwest, Joe Abrigo's business also blossoms. Owner of an adobe trading post and bar near the ghost town of Terlingua, Texas, Abrigo, a 43-year-old Anthony Quinn lookalike, is one of a network of entrepreneurs along the Mexican border who are engaged in the lucrative if often shadowy business of buying and selling cactus plants wholesale. In summer, when demand hits its peak, a cactus trader may ship thousands of the plants in a week. They wind up in plastic pots at supermarkets or in the homes...
...kind of happy ending. After many chastening trials of decline and near-demise, the Hearst organization has emerged with a sort of hard-won wisdom. Since 1975, the company has been intelligently run, and neglected properties like Cosmopolitan have beet rediscovered and made profitable. A modus vivend, with the ghost of Pop Hearst has finally beer achieved: concentrate on magazines with simple formulas, buy dailies in single-paper small cities, keep the family occupied in harmless jobs with impressive titles, and avoid stirring up the old snakes by trying to revive the big city dailies. In short...