If you only ever buy one album of Cuban music, this should be it. It's worth owning simply for the 7-drum intro to "Prepara los Cueros"...and then Ruben Gonzales' Monk-cum-Latino piano kicks in and, well, basically you are in Heaven. Everybody who was anybody in Cuban music in the 2nd half of the 20th century plays on this astonishing record. Masively fluid, totally open grooves mix with letter-perfect musicianship and endless space for all comers to solo. Enovuh said...this is the Buena Vista Social Club, after hours, unbuttoned, rum flowing freely and pipes packed with mota.

Essential.

Armstrong's book is a fascinating trip through the history of monotheistic (one-God) religions. As usual, the most interesting stuff in here are the historical details and a look at the political and social contexts where these religions-- all of them now very different than they were even 500 years ago-- began.

Who knew, from looking at Wahhabist Islam in its horrid Saudi and Afghani incarnations, that the prophet Muhammed explicitly took on the task of creating equality for women and slaves? Who knew that Judaism had millenialist movements as far back as the 1600s?

What comes very clear from Armstrong's book is that theology, as smarty-pants Marx knew, has its roots as much in the social and economic world as in the imaginative. For example, Islam succeeded as a political movement which enabled the first great post-Greek intellectual empire. it did so not because of arcane metaphysics that would bog down Christianity, but because it gave the Saudi tribes a concrete way of reconciling political and spiritual needs into a harmonious system.

The main problem with this book is that the people who most need to read it (anybody on Fox news, any conservative religious American) won't bother. Oh well, there's still much for the rest of us. here's hoping that Armstrong next writes about Asian non-theistic religions.

Guy Vanderhaeghe has crafted a masterful novel about the Canadian WIld West and 1920s Hollywood which starts as a riveting thriller and turns into a meditation on quetions of identity (personal and national), the role of memory in historical reconstruction, and the value (or is it futility?) of remembering and retelling the past.

The book tells two stories. In one, the Swan Hills Massacre looms as Caandian settlers head out into the West, following "horse thieves." Among them is the Englishman, from the point of view of whose servant-- the Boy, Shorty McAdoo-- the action unfolds. The other story tells of Damon Ira LaChance, Hollywood mogul, who wants to make an epic D.W. Griffiths-inspired Western. La Chance's producer seeks out the reticent McAdoo and the narative alternates between the Hollywood and Wild West stories.

ALthought the characters remain opaque, Vanderhaghe is on sure fictional footing here. One of the novel's points is that history ironically becomes less knowable the more it is interpreted. The horror of the events that McAdoo will witness is both the subject of LaChance's film and the simple fact that makes it necessary for the film to "misintepret" the events it portrays. So it is with the characters: we see actions and words, but motivations are strangely absent, as is interior character development. It is as if the narrator knows that his own story is a re-creation (and not recreation) whose limits-- a hundred and twenty years after the "fact"-- are acknowledged in his refusal to make up yet ANOTHER story about the men's interior lives. Perhaps, as some have suggested, this is the flaw in Vanderhaeghe's novel; perhaps it is his subtle nod to the Hollywood tradition within which the novel must work.

The book is an edge of the seat thriller, a philosophical question-poser, and often oddly beautiful, its nostalgia shot through with a bitter self-consciousness. Like all great Westerns (Unforgiven, The Wild Bunch, The Shooting, The Great Northfield Minnesota Gang, High Noon), The Englishman's Boys is about the death of the imagined West and, sadly, the death of the real, complex but strangely opaque people who once lived there.

Chandler is, bar none, the best writer of the so-called "hard boiled detective" genre, and this is his greatest work.

In a labyrinthine plot featuring corrupt, orchid-growing millionaires, beautiful blondes, gray men with guns and the cynical, deeply romantic narrator-protagonsit Marlowe, we see Los Angeles of the 1940s as Marlowe looks for the truth about murder, pornography and, ultimately, loss.

The sheer genius of Chandler's writing-- aside from the accompished plot twists-- is his deceptively simple language, which sparkles, and his narrator's deadpan wit. From the descriptions of women ("Inside was a blonde. A blonde! A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.") to the caustic remarks in the face of death ("She would either shoot me, or she wouldn't.") to his existential comments ("I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun"), Marlowe is as entertainign to lsiten to as he is to watch.

Chandler's achievement here goes beyond the action sequences, or the wit of his narrator, or the complexity of his plots. His narrator, the tough-as-nails Marlowe, appeals because he is profoundly romantic at heart, but doomed, like Hamlet, to be disappointed. Like Hamlet-- who writes a play to discover the origins of his misery-- Marlowe too is a storyteller, whose stories lead to one kind of understanding, where actions and sequences finally cohere. But Marlowe's dilemmas are Hamlet's, in that although he can tell the story, his sense of what it all means at the end is far from complete.

Chandler's stories are really about people who are lost. Marlowe's quest to find the body and re-tell the story-- although always successful-- is always undermined by his elliptical and understated awareness that, for all our ingenuity and striving, it all ultimately comes down, as it does for Hamlet and for all of us, to the big sleep.

Lynch's film starts in a typically bizarre way. Jazz musician Fred Madison hears a voice on his Beverly hills house intercom, tellign him that one of his acquantiances is dead. When he goes to the door to see who is speakng, he finds a video...of him and his wife, in bad, sleeping, filmed by a stranger with access to their house.

Lynch's film follows Madison as he pursues this bizarre revelation, fearing that his wife, Renee, is having an affair. Then the film-- in Lynch's new signature twsit-- transforms Madison into a young man who works for a Mafiosi, whose wife devlops an interest in this young man.

Lynch's film has been called a Mobius strip, where following one side of it will gradually take you around so the opposite surface, looking at thigns from an entirely different point of view. Here, Lynch uses his transformation device to examine sexual jealousy, transgression, revenge and evil. The film has the usual Lynch hallmarks-- a subtle and perfect musical score (co-writtten with Trent Reznor), languid pacing, oddly comic moments, and a few sections of sheer, gut-wrentching terror. The scene where Madison meets a Devil figure at a cocktail party has to be the weirdest thign ever done in cinema-- Lynch is in the company of Bunuel here.

The film is ulteimately a loop, bringing its iewer back to its beginning. As such, it is an intense, and terrifying experience, but, since its sens of horror stems from its claustrophobic structure, viewers may miss the final sense of transcendence that his earlier Blue Velvet offers. Nevertheless, this is a fine outing from Lynch, and much superior to the throwaway play of Wild At Heart.

The late Polish film-maker Krzysztof Kieslowski, who began his career as a documentarian, has, with the Decalogue, produced what is surely one of the defining moments in late twentieth century cinema. Kieslowski's project, out of whose fifth episode this film grew, was nothing less than a wholescale re-interpretation of the Ten Commandments, applied to modern life.

In A Short Film About Killing, Kieslowski shows us a murder and its aftermath. Jacek, a young man, dreams of escaping the Warovian housing projects and dreary, late-Communist life to visit the mountains with his girlfriend. At the same time, a young lawyer graduates from law school, is called ot the Polish bar, nad has his first child. In what is surely one of the most horrific killings on screen, Jacek brutally strangles and beats a cab driver to death. Kieslowski's film goes on to examine the consequences of the murder on not only Jacek but his young lawyer.

Kieslowski's film achieves its brilliance in its delicate balance of condemnation with compassion. Even as we see the justice of Jacek's execution, the subtly riveting scenes where we hear of the major trauma of his childhood undermine any easy sense of moral certainty we have developed. The final execution is nearly impossible to watch, as Kieslowski has, by then, made his point-- that there is an ineffable beauty in life, and that, as Plato suggested in the Republic, justice is somethign that improves us, not which destroys.

Warsaw, ably filmed by the brilliant Slawomir Idziak (the cinematographer of GATTACA), is soaked in green and yellow colours, pestilential, and sometimes oddly beautiful. Kieslowski's pacing is superb. The film paints and whispers when it needs to, then it simply and quietly rips the viewer's heart out.

Ultimately, the film's suggestion is deceptively simple: killing, be it for individual gain, or by the State as sanctioned punishment, is murder.

The brilliant Tom Ze, who began recording in the 1960s, is here lovingly and thoroughly documented by ex-Talking Head David Byrne, the compiler of the uniformly excellent "Brazil Classics" series.

Ze's music is impossible to categorise. Taking elements of funk, pop, samba, forro, concrete poetry, Dadaism and a whole lot of humour, Ze's songs range from the cryptic and elliptical (Cade Mar) to gorgeous, melancholy ballads (So-- Soledao) about the old Portuguese pain, "saudade," a word loosely meaning "melancholy" or "gentle despair," but, like Ze's music, impossible to accurately render in English. At other times, Ze's music bleats erriely and insistently like nightmare. The album opener, "Nave Maria" (its title an allusion to Columbus' ship and the European discovery of the new world) starts as a gentle samba ryhthm, and exfoliates into modal wailing while the narrator mumbles about babies metaphorical and real being born. At other times, Ze's music is hilarious and seemingly childlike. One song has spoken syllables coming to life and arguing with each other.

Like all great avante-garde music, Ze gets you to hum along while he rearranges his musical heritage and your mind. Ze has described his work as "a mix of Jackson do Pandeira, Beethoven, and the Beatles." He is an acknowledged influence on artists as varied as the Talking Heads, DJ Shadow, and Beck, and his work-- most of what is on this disc is 1960s-1980s-- anticipates hip-hop collage turntablism and the arty underground of '90s bands like Pavement and Sebadoh.

As both an introduction to Ze's enormous ouevre and as a superbly coherent record in its own right, "Brazil Classics IV: The Best of Tom Ze," like the other records in Byrne's series, is outstanding.

Tainter's project here is to articulate his grand unifying theory to explain the strange and disturbing fact that every complex civilisation the world has ever seen has collapsed.

Tainter first elegantly disposes of the usual theories of social decline (disappearance of natural resources, invasions of barbarians, etc). He then lays out his theory of decline: as societies become more complex, the costs of meeting new challenges increase, until there comes a point where extra resources devoted to meeting new challenges produce diminihsing and then negative returns. At this point, societies become less complex (they collapse into smaller societies).

Complexity, writes Tainter, describes a variety of characteristics in a number of societies-- many differentiated social roles, a large class of administrators not involved in the production of primary resources, energy devoted to different kinds of communication, centralised government, etc. Societies become more complex in order to solve problems. Consider this example:

A simple hunter-gatherer society with limited agriculture (i.e. garden plots) is faced with a problem, such as a seasonal drop in food production (or an invasion from its neighbours who have the same problem and are coming over for food). The bottom line is, this society faces an energy shortage. This society could respond to the food crisis by either declining in numbers (die-off) or by increasing production. Most societies choose the latter. In order to increase production, this society will need to either expand territorially or increase agricultural production . In either case, this investment can pay off substantially in either increased access to food or increased food production.

Herein, however, lies the rub. Since, as Tainter writes, the "number of challenges with which the Universe can confront a society is, for practical purposes, infinite," complex societies need to keep on increasing their level of complexity in order to survive new challenges. Tainter's thesis is that these "investments in aditional complexity" produce fewer and fewer returns with time.

The hunter-gatheres of the above example incur costs as they try to solve their food-shortage problem. If they conquer their neighbours, they have to garrison those territories, thus raising the cost of government. If they start agriculture on a larger or more intense scale in their own territories, they have to create a new class of citizens to man the farms, distribute and store the grain, and guard it from animals and invaders. In either case, the increases in access to energy (food) are offset somewhat by the increased cost of social complexity.

But, as the society gets MORE complex to confront newer challenges, the returns on these increases in complexity diminish. Eventually, the costs of maintaining garrisons (as the Romans found) is so high that both home and occupied populations revolt, and welcome the invaders with their simpler way of life and their lower taxes. Or, agricultural challenges (a massive drought, or degradation of soils) are so great that the society cannot muster the energy reserves to deal with them.

Tainter's book examines the Maya, Chacoan and Roman collapses in terms of his theory of diminishing marginal returns on investments in complexity. This is the fascinating part of the book; the disturbing sections are Chapter Four and the final chapter. In Chapter 4, Tainter musters a massive array of statistics that show that modern society has been facing diminishing returns on investments in complexity. There is a very simple reason for this: we solve the easiest problems first. Take oil, for example. In 1950, spending the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil in searching for more oil yielded 100 barrels in discovered oil. Now, the same investment yields 5. The per-dollar return on R&D investment has dropped for fifty years. In education, additional investments in programs, technology etc. no longer produce increases in outcomes. In short, industrial society is looking at steadily fewer returns on its investments in both non-human and human capital. When a new challenge comes, Tainter argues, society will eventually be unable to muster the necessary resources to deal with the crisis, and will revert-- in a painful and unhappy way-- to a much simpler way of life.

In his final chapter, Tainter describes the modern world's "arms race of complexity" and makes some uncomfortable suggestions about our own future. (...). In an age where, for example, the U.S. invasion of Iraq has yielded net negative returns on investment even for the invaders (where's that cheap oil?), and where additional investments in education and health care in industrialised countries make no significant increases in outcomes, the historical focus of Tainter's work starts to become eerily prescient.

The scary thing about this deeply thoughtful and thoroughly researched book is its contention that the future, for all our knowledge and technology, might be an awful lot like the past.

Walt Mink were a kind of Big Star of the '90s. Massively talented, incredible songwriters, superb live players, and screwed over by two major labels. This is their debut disc, and it rocks in a way most '90s music doesn't.

The album is Beatlesque pop in places, screaming (yet groovy) metal in others ("Croton Harmon," their take on train communting), and elsewhere we have rip-roaring psychedelia in the form of a Nick Dake cover. This is an album that gets better and better with age.

John Kimbrough is a masterful guitarist, something like a funkier Bob Mould, with both serious technical chops and an amazing ear for rhythmic counterpoint. Bassist Candice Belanoff is a girl player who can actually PLAY, not just look good and play three-note punk lines, and drummer Waronker is like a groovier John Bonham. He would later work with Beck on "Mellow Gold". The three make an awesomely tight yet supple unit-- this is heavy but funky and groovy music that really breathes. If you can imagine the Beatles, Motorhead and Sly and the Family Stone playing in the same room, you are getting the idea.

This is superb indie rock form te '90s-- buy it!

This is Richard Thompson as he was meant to be heard-- live, acoustic, and solo, without the other instruments that often distract one's attention from the man's incredible playing.

This record was recorded in NYC in 1982, shortly after Thompson divorced, giving some of the songs (e.g the haunting "Beat the Retreat") a wistful edge. It is a retrospective, mixing Fairport songs, Richard and Linda songs, and even a Hank Williams cover.

Thompson is not only anintriguing lyricist (e.g. "The Great Valerio"), he is a master acoustic guitarist, not only technically proficient but extraordinarily sensitive and nuanced. On many of these tracks, he is powerful; on a few, he is simply stunning-- "Roll Over, Vaughan Williams" and "Down Where the Drunkards Roll". Thompson's music recalls English folk, Renaissance troubadors, and American blues, often seamlessly.

The occasional dud tracks on this recently re-released record are minor, skippable inconvencinces on CD. This is esential Thompson.