Live 8

A DVD of this year's Live 8 concerts has been released. Like A Prayer, Ray Of Light, and Music, performed by Madonna in London, are all included.

Ken Adam & The Art Of Production Design

Christopher Frayling has written an excellent new book about Ken Adam, who worked as a designer for Kubrick on Dr Strangelove and Barry Lyndon.

The book, Ken Adam & The Art Of Production Design, really is fantastic. There are photos of Kubrick taken by Adam, and photos of Adam taken by Kubrick. Amazingly, Adam says that "a few years ago" he was taken to the British Film Institute archive in London where he watched the custard-pie-fight epilogue from Dr Strangelove. This sequence, which Kubrick removed from the film at the last minute, had always been considered lost or destroyed, though Frayling's book appears to confirm for the first time that the scene is still extant.

Full Metal Jacket Diary

Matthew Modine, star of Full Metal Jacket, has published a journal about the making of the film, Full Metal Diary. There are several previously-unseen Kubrick photos, and transcripts of conversations between Modine and Kubrick. It's limited to 20,000 copies, and has groovy metal covers (a 'full metal jacket', geddit?). The best parts of the book (i.e. the Kubrick parts) were actually available a while ago from the Kubrick Exhibition website as a PDF download, titled Full Metal Dairy [sic.!].

Confessions On A Dance Floor

Madonna's new album, Confessions On A Dance Floor, improves every time I listen to it. The music is fantastic, especially Let It Will Be, Forbidden Love, and Push; the lyrics are extremely catchy, especially Hung Up, Get Together, Jump, and Like It Or Not.

There are a few dud songs, mostly because they endlessly repeat the same meaningless lyrics, such as Future Lovers: "In the evidence of its brilliance..."). Isaac would benefit enormously by cutting Yitzhak Sinwani's Kabbalah lines. The rhyme scheme in I Love New York ("New York"/"dork", "mad"/"sad"/"glad") is fairly simple, but it's also perhaps the catchiest song on the album.

The new album has been compared in the press to Ray Of Light and even Like A Prayer. I don't think it's as incredible as those two, though it's certainly as good as Music. There seems to be a general consensus that the previous album, American Life, was awful, and that Confessions On A Dance Floor is a return to form, but actually I really liked American Life.

The album's complete track-listing is: Hung Up, Get Together, Sorry, Future Lovers, I Love New York, Let It Will Be, Forbidden Love, Jump, How High, Isaac, Push, and Like It Or Not. A limited-edition version, Confessions Remixed, contains mixes by Stuart Price.

Weekendavisen

Danish newspaper Weekendavisen published a collection of Mohammed caricatures today, following those printed in Jyllands-Posten. The Weekendavisen cartoons feature Mohammed as a Pre-Raphaelite woman, a chair, Father Christmas, a Wassily Kandinsky abstraction, a hyper-real leg sculpture, a Georges Braque Cubist painting, a Danish man, and Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Mohammed is also shown with his mother in a childish drawing, and an anatomical drawing depicts his internal organs.