Rediscovering Georges Méliès

The movie special effects we take for granted today had their origins with a wildly inventive filmmaker, magician and visionary around the dawn of the 20th century. The director of more than 500 fanciful films, Méliès didn’t push the envelope on movie magic; he invented it. Thanks to Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s new and widely hailed 3-D family film, children of all ages are being awakened to the work of a true pioneer. Susan King of the Los Angeles Times reports. See Movies

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Image from A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la Lune) (1902) by Georges Méliès. Scope of copyright (author’s life plus 70 years) expired in 2008; image is now in the public domain in the United States

‘Tis the CD season

If you’re one of the 152 million early adopters of holiday shopping expected in stores or online this weekend, you know the countdown’s on for the Perfect Gift. For the music lover(s) on your list, the classic CD box set may be just the ticket (assuming your giftee hasn’t fully converted to the dark side of music as ones and zeroes). CNet blogger Steve Guttenberg surveys holiday-timed box sets from Pearl Jam, Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix and more at The Audiophiliac

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Pearl Jam vs. and Vitalogy box set: Legacy Recordings

DeLillo’s uneasy overview

Writing in his signature intense, compact style, Don DeLillo has always seen the spaces we ignore, the interstitials that knit together our anxious, fractious modern world. Now the celebrated author, whom New York Times Book Review critic Liesl Schillinger calls “a master transmitter of American zeitgeist anxiety, even in times when there was less to be anxious about,” is back with his latest. The Angel Esmeralda, a collection of nine stories written over 32 years, reveals how DeLillo stays current — cataloging what Schillinger calls “the enduring adaptability of human insecurities.” See Word

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Photo: © Joyce Ravid

Paul Motian dies at 80

One of the greatest drummers of the modern jazz era died Wednesday in Manhattan, after suffering from a blood and bone-marrow disease. A contemporary of Bill Evans, Motian had a career whose span encompassed work with musicians from Stan Getz to Keith Jarrett, from Lee Konitz to Greg Osby. Ben Ratliff surveys the life and career of a musician who was, Osby said, “an economist: every note and phrase and utterance counted.” More in Music

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Photo: © T. Bruce Wittet (via drummerworld.com)

Beijing: Weiwei targeted again

Ai Weiwei, considered China’s most celebrated artist, is once again the victim of government harassment as Chinese officials ratchet up a new campaign to silence a man known for speaking his mind. CBS News’ Celia Hatton reports:

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NYC: Opposites attract, and repel

Kim Cattrall shines with style and sass in a revival of Private Lives, Noël Coward’s 1930 comedy of marital love and combat. For Ben Brantley of The New York Times, the production just opened at the Music Box Theater “convincingly stakes a claim not only for Ms. Cattrall as a skillfully pliable actress but also for the bubbly pleasures forever on tap” in this romantic classic. In Stage

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Photo: Kim Cattrall and Paul Gross: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Some Stones

Fifty years?!? Hard to believe the Rolling Stones, the band we love (or, for some, love to hate) are looking toward their golden anniversary next year. But facing a milestone birthday that suggests more candles than cake, the Stones are looking forward and back at the same time. A reissue of the 1978 classic Some Girls is out next week. There’s even talk of a tour. Geoff Boucher of the Los Angeles Times sits down with Mick and Keith. More in Music

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Spinner: Keith Richards celebrates his reinvention as a writer, and weighs the future of the Rolling Stones — maybe with old hands (Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor) coming along.

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Photo: via Spinner

AU/NZ: Big Day Out sets 2012 lineup

Noel Gallagher, Bassnectar, Das Racist and The Vaccines are just some of the acts announced Wednesday in the second big reveal for the next (somewhat downsized) BDO concerts, set to begin in Auckland, New Zealand on Jan. 20, with later shows in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth, through Feb. 5. Other acts previously announced include Soundgarden, Kanye West, Kasabian, Foster the People, Battles and My Chemical Romance. The BDO site has more details.

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Logo: Big Day Out

L.A.: Heavy D dies at 44

Heavy D (Dwight Errington Myers), the hip hop legend whose hits with Heavy D & the Boyz helped redefine the genre in the late 1980s and early 90’s, died Tuesday in Los Angeles, at the painfully young age of 44. No cause of death was immediately determined. Alvin Blanco, writing in The Root, recalls the style and career triumphs of “the rapper you could bring home to Mama.” More in Music

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See the video, from last month’s BET Awards show, to see Hev in full flow, at his lady-killing best, at the top of his game.

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Photo: From BET Awards 2011

Lou Reed + Metallica = WTF?

Lulu, the insanely long (87-minute), two-disc collaboration by two masters of metal machine music, is a fascinating thing by virtue of its creators alone. For The Stranger’s Sean Nelson, this mashup doesn’t make a lick of frickin’ sense. “But simply to call the record poor is both too easy and weirdly beside the point. Its utter unlikeliness puts it well beyond the reach of critical judgment and into the realm of fascination, simply because it exists.” See Music

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Photo: Anton Corbijn

Joan Didion’s Blue Period

Perhaps our most incisive chronicler of the power and agonies of the family life, Joan Didion has also brought an unsparing eye to her own life and times. Her new memoir, Blue Nights (out today), examines the life and death of her daughter, Quintana. For Susan Cheever, writing in The Daily Beast, the book is “a tragic story that is compelling as a thriller.” And it almost didn’t see the light of day. Below, Didion in her own words:

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Read part of the Cheever interview in Word

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Photo: Blue Nights cover: Alfred Knopf

R.E.M.: Every goodbye ain’t quite gone

Five weeks after announcing their breakup after a 31-year career, the trailblazing band from Athens, Ga., is releasing Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage, a retrospective spanning the band’s days as a darling of college dorm dwellers in the indie era and its time in arena mode, as one of the biggest bands in the world (It’s available for preorder through Amazon). More than just a random collection of odds and sods, the two-CD set is a righteous sampling of their most popular tracks, some we’d frankly forgotten, and three new tracks recorded this summer with Jacknife Lee at the boards. Check the video below. 

They’re gone five weeks and we miss ‘em already.

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Photo: R.E.M./Athens Ltd.