Arcade Fire reflects on Reflektor

CBC News Posted: Oct 26, 2013 11:49 AM ET Last Updated: Oct 26, 2013 10:13 PM ET

Arcade Fire's fourth studio album, Reflektor, is now out. CBC arts reporter Pierre Landry sat down with band members Richard Parry and Tim Kingsbury to discuss the ideas and influences behind the new release. 

Here's an excerpt from that interview:

Pierre Landry: Tell me about the influences that are seeping into Reflektor.

Richard Parry: We spent time in both Haiti and Jamaica, and we recorded in this super weird old castle in Jamaica on a bay. You’d get these beautiful waves of bass coming over the bay from clubs, which found their way into the music.

PL: Did you know that you wanted to incorporate new sounds and different sounds into the album, or did it just happen organically?

Arcade Fire performs during a benefit concert last October in memory of Denis Blanchette, the lighting technician who was killed at the Parti Québécois' election-night victory rally. (Paul Chiasson / Canadian Press)

Tim Kingsbury: We’re all fans of a lot of Jamaican music, and we decided this time to embrace it a little more. We became more comfortable expanding our horizons a little bit.

RP: There’s definitely an organic thing, that you don’t want to sound like you’ve already sounded… We were chasing those things that are new and exciting to our ears, even if they were super old or from a different culture. We were chasing those things that bring magic to recordings in old music and over a wide landscape, from different musics and different times and places.

TK: There was a lot more trying different things on this album.

PL: The songs are written in a way that they’re not very direct, they’re not black or white, they’re open to interpretation.

RP: This album is about the flip-side or alternate dimension or reverse reality idea. It’s not a concept of the album but it is an idea that re-occurs.

RP: It's so amazing to be in this position where people pay so much attention to what we're doing, and I think all of us feel that it's important to use that position to make art and not just make it some hollow celebrity or hollow fame or empty hype thing that's not interesting and makes one bored of music. 

View the original article here

Stephen King and son Owen discuss family and fiction

Stephen King's Doctor Sleep is a sequel to The Shining, but the new novel isn't simply an attempt to reclaim the classic story — now often remembered for Stanley Kubrick's subsequent film adaptation.

"People made too much of the way that I feel about the Kubrick film [The Shining]. I've had a lot of books that have been turned into films. I like some of the adaptations — in fact, I like a lot of the adaptations — and there are a few that I don't like. The Shining is one of the few I don't care for, but I don't take it personally and I don't take it to heart," the bestselling novelist told Jian Ghomeshi on CBC's cultural affairs show Q on Thursday.

"Movies and books are apples and oranges... [When] a book gets sold to the movies, it's like sending a kid off to college. You hope they're going to do well and everything. Most of them do. Every now and then, somebody falls by the wayside."

After writing more than 50 novels (which have sold more than 350 million copies worldwide), King says he was inspired to return to The Shining's child protagonist Danny Torrance by those who regularly asked him what happened to the character after the tale ended. He was also inspired by the story of a therapy cat reportedly able to predict the impending death of terminally ill patients.

Owen King, seen with Stephen King in the CBC Q studio in Toronto on Thursday, helped offer a fresh-eyed perspective on his father's latest novel Doctor Sleep. (Mitch Pollack/CBC)

Published earlier this fall, Doctor Sleep came to life, in part, thanks to fresh-eyed feedback from King's youngest son, Owen. A screenwriter and author who has just published his comic novel debut, entitled Double Feature, Owen King was born in 1977, the same year The Shining hit bookstores.

The pair arrived in Toronto to speak at writers' rights group PEN Canada's annual benefit, the opening event of the 2013 International Festival of Authors.

In the attached audio, Stephen and Owen King talk to Q about picking up the thread of The Shining in Doctor Sleep, their father-son relationship, the challenges facing King's adult children (now writing novels as well) and whether they might one day collaborate.

View the original article here

Star Wars sequel gets new writers

The Associated Press Posted: Oct 24, 2013 5:37 PM ET Last Updated: Oct 24, 2013 5:37 PM ET

Screenwriter Michael Arndt is exiting Star Wars: Episode VII with director J.J. Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan assuming scripting duties.

Lucasfilm made the unexpected announcement Thursday. Kasdan co-wrote The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, making him a revered figured in Star Wars lore. The 64-year-old scribe, who also wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark, had been serving as a consultant on the film.

Michael Arndt poses with the Oscar he won for best original screenplay for his work on Little Miss Sunshine. Arndt is exiting Star Wars: Episode VII with director J.J. Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan assuming scripting duties. (Kevork Djansezian/Associated Press)

"There are few people who fundamentally understand the way a Star Wars story works like Larry," Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy said in a statement. "Michael Arndt has done a terrific job bringing us to this point."

Arndt was named the sole screenwriter last year. He won an Oscar for the script to Little Miss Sunshine, and also wrote Toy Story 3 and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.

Shooting for Star Wars: Episode VII is to start in the spring, with the film due out in 2015.

Battling Boy reinvents comic book superheroes for younger readers by Jonathan Ore Oct. 25, 2013 8:09 PM With his latest work, comic book veteran Paul Pope has created a template-smashing new kind of superhero: Battling Boy, a kid (admittedly the offspring of gods) who sets out to protect other kids. "The thing that's attractive about kids as characters is that, if anything, they represent potential," he tells CBC News.Let Franz Ferdinand kick up your Friday Oct. 25, 2013 5:45 PM We've got live performance throughout the show from Franz Ferdinand, the Scottish band whose single Do You Want To sent them to the top of the charts internationally. Who Said It Quiz: Stephen King or Justin Bieber? Oct. 25, 2013 3:08 PM One of them pens tales of terror. One of them croons to shrieking girls. But they have more in common than you might think. So in honour of Stephen King's newest book, Doctor Sleep, a long-awaited follow-up to the terrifying 1977 novel The Shining, we give you our latest Who Said It Quiz: King or Bieber?

View the original article here