Six Damn Fine Degrees #182: And, all of a sudden, there they were…

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness.

When I was a kid who got into watching films very early, the actors I’d see in movies had somehow always been there. A large part of this was that 99.9% of what I’d watch was on TV, so early on already I’d see all those films with the likes of James Stewart, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn (or indeed Audrey Hepburn), Shirley MacLaine, Steve McQueen, and so on. When it came to newer films that came out in the late 1970s or 1980s, it may have been a different set of stars – Sigourney Weaver, Dustin Hoffman, Bruce Willis, Kathleen Turner, Harrison Ford, and many, many more – but somehow it still felt to me at the time that these had always been around.

Because, for someone born in 1975, they kinda had.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Running away to join the clone club

Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.

Our Fellini series continued this week with Matt’s post on 8 1/2: a film that is likely to evoke strong reactions, both for the filmmaking and for the way in which it does arguably indulge its man-child Fellini stand-in protagonist, even when it’s mocking him.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #181: Reduce it to its bones

The story goes that Bruce Springsteen recorded his darkest album Nebraska (1982) in his bedroom, most of it in one day. There are absolutely no adornments, no frills, just his voice and his guitar, sometimes a short bit from his harmonica, not much more. He intended those recordings as demo versions, but they just wouldn’t fly when he played them together with his E-Street Band. So the demo version it was for the album for almost all of the songs. Because the Boss is strumming away on his guitar, the effect is one of being there listening, as if it was a live album in a more unusual sense of the word. The same is true for the Cowboy Junkies’ debut album The Trinity Sessions (1988), which was recorded live in Toronto’s Church of the Holy Trinity, and the band gathered around the only microphone. Like with Springsteen’s album, there is an immediateness that would be hard to replicate in any studio.

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