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Very taken by the Blackest Rainbow label at the moment, thanks to things like the Wooden Wand album I blogged about last week, the Beggin’ Your Pardon Miss Joan album and various Natural Snow Buildings projects.

Plenty new here, though that might not be the right word for the Dylan mono versions which turned up here on a USB stick last week.

The set-up of this piece is a bit out of date, since I wrote it a month ago for the current issue of Uncut. Nevertheless, worth running here I think, not least because I've subsequently discovered Forest Swords' "Dagger Paths" is getting a CD release in the UK on No Pain In Pop.

The arrival this week of a second new Wooden Wand album prompted me into finally getting round to “Death Seat”, James Jackson Toth’s terrific return after what, for him, seems to have been a relatively quiet stretch.

No Polish epiphanies this week, sadly: thanks, by the way, for all your Czeslaw Niemen guidance – you’re invaluable.

What's this, you say? The Coen brothers remaking a John Wayne classic? With the Dude, no less, as Rooster Cogburn? Is this just the latest curveball from the Coens, the kind of twisted joke they're often accused of playing on their audience? This was, roughly, the initial reception last year when news broke that the Coens were eyeing up True Grit. And, last week, the trailer finally arrived to prove they were serious.

I was reading over this interview with Robert Wyatt today, thinking about “The Ghosts Within”, and about how he flourishes as a collaborator with friends, but not as a bandmember. “The trouble with a band is I can’t take orders and I can’t give orders,” he said around the time of “Comicopera”. “So there’s no comfortable role for me in a band, whereas on a project I think, well, if they’ve asked me I shall try and do whatever it is they’ve imagined me doing. As close as possible. There’s no pressure on me. I try and do what they want.”

More sad news, I'm afraid, coming so soon after the passing of Arthur Penn. Tony Curtis' death, aged 85, feels like the last severing of our link to a golden age of movies. Andrew Sumner spoke to him in late 2006, when he was promoting the DVD release of The Persuaders, his 70s TV series with Roger Moore. Curtis was on typically entertaining form: "Talk to me about anything you want, my English chum!" So we did, chatting at length through his career highs - including Some Like It Hot and Spartacus.

Sad news reached us last night of the death of Arthur Penn, aged 88. Penn, of course, was the director of many great films including Bonnie And Clyde, Night Moves and The Missouri Breaks. Here, by way of a tribute, I thought we'd run the transcript of an interview Damien Love did with Penn for Uncut. The interview took place in 2004, while Penn, then 81, was directing a Broadway revival of the play Sly Fox. Speaking in detail about his career, he shared his memories of working with Beatty, Brando, Newman and Hackman, as well as discussing the enduring legacy of his masterpiece, Bonnie And Clyde.

Take a look at this, which has been the best thing I’ve heard this week by a mile, and the clip’s superb, too.