Mutton

Three years after releasing the masterpiece The Mechanical Fair, Ola Kvernberg returns with a new magnificent, imaginative, rhythmic deluge of an album: Steamdome. The title of Kvernberg’s latest project was not chosen at random. Steamdome presents thoroughly percussive music. It lunges brutally ahead like a runaway train. As enthusiastic, surrealistic and swelling as Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns.

The Girl on a Motorcycle or better yet, Naked Under Leather (as the film was called in France), was a British / French film directed in 1968 by Jack Cardiff. The film starred Marianne Faithfull and was due to air at Cannes but due to the May 68 riots it never did. The plot is fairly simple: A woman leaves her husband and zips away on her motorcycle to be with her lover.

Chester Alan Arthur, surely our unlikeliest president, may have been saved from complete obscurity only by the mutton-chop whiskers that stand out among the full-bearded visages of late-nineteenth-century presidents. But as this highly readable portrait of Arthur and his age reveals, duty's unexpected call turned the quintessential patronage politician into a statesman who skillfully guided America's first steps on the road to becoming a world power.