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Elvis Costello Filmography
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Declan Patrick Aloysius McManus (born August 25, 1954), better known by his stage name,
Elvis Costello, is a popular British musician, singer, and songwriter of Irish descent. He was an early participant in London's pub rock scene in the mid-1970s, and later became associated with the punk rock and new wave musical genres, before establishing himself as a unique and original voice in the 1980s. His output has been wildly diverse: One critic has written that "Costello, the pop encyclopedia, can reinvent the past in his own image."
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:ly09kect7q70~T1
Born into a musical family (his father, Ross McManus, sang with Joe Loss), McManus moved with his mother to Liverpool in 1971. It was there that he formed his first band, Flip City, which had a style very much in the pub rock vein. They lasted until 1975–1976, by which time McManus was living in London with a wife and child. McManus worked a number of dead-end jobs, during which time he continued to write songs, and began aggressively looking for a solo recording contract, which led to an incident in which he was arrested while busking outside a conference of record executives. On the basis of a demo tape, he was signed to Stiff Records. His manager at Stiff, Jake Riviera suggested a name change (using Presley's first name and his mother's maiden name to form "Elvis Costello") and teamed him with a country/soft rock band named "Clover" (who would later back Huey Lewis as 'The News').
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LiteratureTwo Fast Reads
...with surprisingly enduring flavor. I'm a slow reader so I particularly like books that read fast. Prose that "leans forward" in a way that makes it easy to keep going. Both of these books had that quality for me, yet manage to pull off some nice social commentary and human pathos at the same time. Personal Days, by Ed Park, is a post-Dilbert, post-Microserfs look at office culture. It's like the show The Office, except populated by people who, for the most part, understand what is happening to them. What I like best about the book is Ed Park's use of cliché phrases. You know how that first song on Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom album (Beyond Belief) strings together known phrases into something entirely bigger? Or the way Delmore Schwartz would italicize a phrase as if to show it was a saying instead of just words? Know what I'm saying? Park does this throughout his text, creating a gentle, phantom hypertext that required no further explanation. And this black comedy about downsizing brings an almost Beckett-like sense of reduction to the dwindling office. The Rules for Hearts, a family drama, by Flytrap comics writer Sara Ryan, reads a bit like one of those young adult novels I'm so very fond of, even though its characters experience some of the kinds of sex reversals and confusion usually postponed until one's late twenties or early thirties. I hate memoirs (just because) so I depend on short novels with characters I can relate to for that necessary shot of personal narrative. Sara Ryan isn't a totally new voice, but this, her third book, still reads with that freshness of someone's first novel....
Published: Fri, 03 Oct 2008 20:11:06 GMT - Source: Boingboing.Net - Read the article
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