Greetings! Here is what I peaked my interest in the first week of February 2019…

On the 5th, David Walsh, a comrade at the World Socialist Web Site discussed how The Land of Steady Habits portrays the disillusionment of post crash America:
“The chief difficulty is that Holofcener’s film only dips its toe into the vast reservoir of disillusionment, disappointment and misery that the stock market and speculative boom have produced in the US, even for sections of its beneficiaries.”

For all you LiLo fanatics out there, Maeve McDermott looked back at Lindsay Lohan’s pop star career over at USA Today on the 6th:
“Before things went south for Lohan, when she was still one of Hollywood’s most promising young faces, she pursued a somewhat successful music career that, for all the millennial obsession over those warmly-remembered years, hasn’t endured as a staple of 2000s pop-culture nostalgia.”

Also on the 6th Stephen Rodrick interviewed Richard E. Grant for Rolling Stone:
“At 42, Grant had a nervous breakdown over his tumultuous childhood. At 48, he made the note-perfect film Wah-Wah, a grueling account of said childhood. In his fifties, he started a cologne line, helped break up a fraudulent HIV drug ring in Swaziland and hosted a preposterously excellent show titled Richard E. Grant’s Hotel Secrets, where the Sky Network paid him money to stay in, well, luxury hotels. (This was a real show and not to be confused with Posh Nosh, his dead-eyed parody of fancypants cooking shows.) Film fanatics know him as the insane, quick-to-sell-out director from The Player. Millennials and Lena Dunham know him as the manager Clifford in the classic Spice World. Still, for misanthropes of a certain age, he’ll always be Withnail to us.”

Finally, also on the 7th, at Consequence of Sound, Brielle Schiavone explored Led Zeppelin’s famous Boston show 50 years after the fact:
“The show was a last-minute addition to the three-night engagement already booked at the 720-capacity former-synagogue due to audience demand. It was the night where Zeppelin reportedly played for over four hours with only one album’s worth of material, eventually resorting to Elvis covers, Beatles favorites, and basically any other songs that the band all possibly knew or could quickly figure out, because the crowd would not let them offstage. Oh, and it’s the show that claims to be ‘the birthplace of headbanging.'”

Enjoy!