New John Mayer DVD shows fans "Where The Light Is"

John Mayer has gone through three major phases in his career: he began as a acoustic singer-songwriter, became a pop/rock sensation, and then took a detour through the blues. In his most recent music (the album Continuum) listeners can hear all three of these phases blended together. For fans curious to see how his sound came about, or to get one of the better concert videos of the year, Where the Light Is will show you the way.
Recorded in L.A. on December 7, Mayer decided to take his 7,000-plus fans in attendance on a sort of tour of the different facets of his career. He opened with a five-song acoustic set, a scorching blues set with the John Mayer Trio, and closed the night with his band, playing some of his biggest hits.
It’s all here on the DVD, with the audio and visual transfer coming across gorgeously. The DVD looks just as good on a regular TV as it does on a giant plasma screen. The sound quality is immaculate, and really makes you feel like you’re right there in the audience, rocking along at the show.
Of course, what fans will really be buying it for is the man himself, and Mayer delivers in spades on the DVD. Whether it be a killer acoustic cover of Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’,” the blistering blues trio cut, “Out Of My Mind” or the sweet sounds of “Gravity” – taken to a whole new level by opening the song with Otis Redding’s “Dreams to Remember” – fans of a certain phase in Mayer’s career, or just the man himself will be in for a treat. For those who want to carry the music around with them, a two-disc CD is being released simultaneously.
For any who have never seen John Mayer, but have been a fan, Where the Light Is shows fans just that.

"God, I'm glad I'm not me."

I first became fully aware of Cate Blanchett as Galadriel in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. I remember watching her brilliant performance – I’m not one of those Tolkien snobs who thought the movies totally butchered the books – and recognized her from minor roles she had been in, but nothing massive. T0 me, being in The Lord of the Rings was about as big a role as an actor could ask for.
Afterwards, in the spirit of further support for Rings – like it really needed it – I started paying attention to all the actors wherever they popped up. Orlando Bloom started showing up everywhere, and Viggo Mortenson finally was picked up by Hollywood’s radar, but Blanchett had been doing steady work for years before Rings, and continued right on.
Upon meditating on all her performances prior to Rings and since, I’ve come to a simple conclusion: she is one of the best actresses of this age. No doubts about it.
Not only is she extremely convincing in every role she plays, but her ability to take on real people and bring them to life is truly out of this world. See her portrayal as Queen Elizabeth, her Oscar-winning (and rightfully so) take on Katherine Hepburn, and her most recent – and in my opinion, best – turn as Jude Quinn (a.k.a. Bob Dylan) in I’m Not There. How she lost the Oscar to Tilda Swinton – who did fine in Michael Clayton, but not spectacular – will forever remain a mystery to me. Her portrayal of Dylan just coming off his stunning electric performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, where he alienated the entire folk scene, is so right on, so careful and nuanced, that it is less a performance, and more like a inhabitation. It’s impossible to watch Don’t Look Back (the brilliant documentary of Dylan at this period) without thinking of Blanchett’s Quinn: skinny, androgynous, wired and tired beyond help, while being bitterly sarcastic to a world that doesn’t understand that no genre of music defines him. His angry banter with a reporter from BBC who just doesn’t get “it” is right on, but what really sells the performance is her monologue at the end, capped by the dead on line: “Everybody knows I’m not a folk singer.” That is Dylan at that time, fully summarized in one sentence.
Another thing I think Blanchett has going for her is her beauty. Now, she’s not the stereotypical Hollywood beauty that’s going to bring all the young men and teen into the theatres, like Jessica Alba or Scarlett Johansson, but she has more of a classic, timeless beauty. She reminds me of Helen Mirren, who is still gorgeous after decades of acting. This weird, ethereal beauty allows her to play gorgeous women (see her in the Elizabeth movies and her gorgeous portrayal of Galadriel) to more off-kilter roles (like Quinn and in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou).
The only thing I’d like to see from her is a comedy – she so often plays such serious, demanding roles, but I think in a smart, intelligent comedy, she could shine.
As far as I’m concerned, every film that Blanchett is in, allows the audience a chance to view one of Hollywood’s future Golden Ladies while here fire is burning at it’s brightest.

Let Me Tell You What It Is To Write - An Introduction

"Let me tell you what a writer is. A writer takes comprehensive views, holds large convictions, makes wide generalizations. A writer's not English, Mexican, or American. A writer's not a woman nor a man. A writer's not Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Muslim, nor snake worshipper. To local standards of right and wrong a writer's civilly indifferent. In the virtues, a writer's concerned only with general expediency. A writer doesn't waste time focusing on fixed moral principles that aren't yet before the court of conscience. Happiness discloses itself to a writer as the end and purpose of life, and art and love are the only means to a writer's happiness. A writer is free of all doctrines, theories, etiquettes, and politics. To a writer, a continent doesn't seem long, nor a century wide. And a writer has ever present consciousness that this is a world of...fools and rogues, blind with superstition, tormented with envy, consumed with vanity, selfish, false, cruel, cursed with illusions, and frothing mad." – Ambrose Bierce

My name is Clarke Reader, and I am a writer. Or, at least, I want to be one.

I’ve wanted to be one for as long as I can remember; I can recall with the utmost clarity the joy I first took from books when my father read them to me as a young man. I have a particularly fond remembrance for the evenings he spent reading me J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Since then, Tolkien has become my favourite author - and a completely unappreciated one in most literary circles, which I’m bound to rail against at some point…repeatedly – for a myriad of reasons, one being that through him I fell in love with literature. As I grew up my tastes matured quicker than my body – I remember being in elementary school and slogging through London with Charles Dickens, in junior high gliding along with Jack London and cursing the phonies with J.D. Salinger. In high school, my literary ambitions reached – for the first time – their fullest outlet, as I dove into Hemingway, Rand, Goethe, Updike, Mongham, and Camus. Since high school – having just graduated college two weeks ago – I’ve delved into Russian, Spanish and African literature, with a venture or two into the Far East. I collect books with a passion, and to any who point out the existence of libraries – for which I am very grateful – I give John Updike’s essay, “A Case for Books” on why I still buy them.

I give this all as an introduction because, in large part, I define myself through what I’ve read, seen and listened to. More often than not, I can summarize a situation or feeling I have through someone else’s words than my own. For example, here would be a great place to quote John Cusack’s Rob Gordon in High Fidelity when he says, “…what really matters is what you like, not what you are like... Books, records, films -- these things matter. Call me shallow but it's the fuckin' truth.” And so it is. In this blog, I’ll be just as likely to write about literature, music and films as I will be to write about what’s going on in my life, or any small forays I make into fiction.

Quoting Tolkien – my literary hero – when he wrote that, “I don't tick. I am not a machine. (If I did tick, I should have no views on it, and you had better ask the winder)” is all I have to say on what made me the kind of person I am, or any one of those cliché, ridiculous questions that are often tried to clear up in any introduction. Any who read this will learn about me in the way that one really gets to know another person: through hints dropped in discussions about things they are passionate about, and through the occasional story from my life. Information I will give here and now – aside from my literary ambitions, my obsession with pop-culture and the fact that I just graduated college, which have already been mentioned – is that I live in the great state of Colorado and am engaged to a woman I am madly in love with. I’m being deliberately vague here for, in accordance with the quotation that began this entry, a writer is no one thing, but embraces everything. Read along to pick up any other details about me.

And at the end, as is so often the case, we return to the beginning. I want to be a writer, and it is to that end that I am beginning this blog. You have to love writing and do it every day to be any good at it, and that is my full intention. I end with a quote from Jorge Luis Borges on the writing lifestyle: “A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.”

Thank you, and welcome…