1 Before Cormac McCarthy's novels were Pulitzer Prize winners ("The Road") and Oscar-winning films ("No Country for Old Men"), the old master penned what some critics call the most violent novel ever written. But "Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West" delivered its brutal vision of the 1850s borderlands with supreme, elegant prose. The new 25th-anniversary hardcover edition restores the glowing red dust jacket, emblematic of the bloody carnage captured inside. The reissue is a good excuse to revisit this classic tale of a young gunslinger caught in a fateful duel with the Judge, one of literature's more memorable -- and disturbing -- characters.
2 After spending a half-week in Los Angeles last week, we'll be spending more of our time at home tuned in to www.KCRW.com, the city's hipster nonprofit station. We would never trade in the Current 89.3 FM and its great reverence for our local music scene (something L.A. in general seems to lack), but KCRW excels at spinning fascinating new world music, grungier punk-rock and less predictable alt-rock classics. Henry Rollins' show last Sunday was especially a kick.
3 Jim Lichtscheidl, Luverne Seifert and Sarah Agnew have been clowning around together for years, so it's fun to see them take their game to the big stage. The three play a gaggle of roles in the Guthrie Theater's production of "The 39 Steps." Robert O. Berdahl plays the hero and only the hero. The three amigos do everything else. It's worth a look.
4 Rarely has an album of outtakes sounded as exciting as Bruce Springsteen's "The Promise" (out Tuesday), which includes 21 songs written and recorded for 1978's "Darkness on the Edge of Town." You can hear echoes of Elvis, Orbison and Phil Spector. The Boss sings with his usual epic intensity, offering his versions of "Because the Night," "Fire" and "Rendezvous." This stuff sounds as potent today as it would have if it had been released 32 years ago.
5 "The Looney Tunes Treasury" by three-dimensional human Andrew Farago imagines what the history of the celebrated shorts would read like if it came from the characters themselves. The result: sassy, scrumptious essays from Bugs, Daffy, Porky and a dozen more. But that's not all, folks. The 121-page book also offers unexpected treasures like original script notes for "Rabbit Hood," a copy of Wile E. Coyote's Acme Catalog and a Tasmanian Devil mask.
