Saturday, May 30, 2020

'I will kill you if you give this song to anyone but me': how Peggy Lee was perfect for Is That All There Is?

Coffee, “the most grateful lubricant of the human machine,” has made — and destroyed — entire societies  



In 1970, right in the middle of his minimalist period, Philip Glass composed a work called Music in Eight Parts. It was performed a few times and then lost to the sands of time.


Recipe books that could almost double as celebrity memoirs

Now is the perfect time to catch up on the best books, films, television shows, music and podcasts you might have missed.



Monday musings on Australian literature: Guest post from Bill on Melbourne and Sydney, 1880-1939


“The Lumen database collects and analyzes legal complaints and requests for removal of online materials, helping Internet users to know their rights and understand the law. These data enable us to study the prevalence of legal threats and let Internet users see the source of content removals…” Lumen is an independent research project studying cease and desist letters concerning online content. We collect and analyze requests to remove material from the web 

Is This Private Island Tasmania's Best Kept Secret?



 Our dangerous addiction to prediction - UnHerd
There are subtler manifestations of the prediction addiction. In science, for example, researchers —  and I include myself in this — often deploy the word “predict” in a way that doesn’t comport with its everyday usage. Variable X predicts variable Y,  they say, even though both were measured at exactly the same time. What they mean is that, if you didn’t know anything about Y, you would have some information about it if you knew X. But this “prediction” can be very weak: usually just “a bit better than chance” rather than “with a strong degree of accuracy”. By the time this translates to the public, often via hyped press releases, it’s frequently been imbued with a great deal more certainty than is warranted by the data.
Well, astrology and alchemy were once thought to be science.

The World’s 10 Richest Cities

Arvo Pärt On What The Pandemic Says To Us


“This tiny coronavirus has showed us in a painful way that humanity is a single organism and human existence is possible only in relation to other living beings. The notion of “relationship” should be understood as a maxim, as the ability to love. Although this is truly a high standard, maybe even too high for a human being. Our current situation is paradoxical: on the one hand, it means isolation, on the other, it brings us closer. While isolating ourselves, we should be able to – we are even forced to – appreciate our relationships in a small circle and to tend to them.” –Estonian World


 ROGER SIMON: Twitter as Prototype of the New High-Tech Totalitarianism.
It’s a virus of the mind as well — somebody should write a book about the multifaceted elements of its insidious nature.
David Allen is a tattoo artist who does postmastectomy tattooing. He works with women who survive breast cancer to design and implement tattoos that cover scarring from mastectomies, transforming what might be seen as a destructive disfigurement into something creative and beautiful. Here’s Allen writing for The Journal of the American Medical Association (abstract):

I am a tattoo artist who works with women after they’ve had mastectomies to transform their sense of disfigurement and loss of control into feelings of beauty and agency. On a good day, I can heal with my art.
The women with breast cancer with whom I work share a feeling that they’ve been acted upon — by cancer, the health industrial complex and its agents, the sequelae of their treatments. Their physical and psychological points of reference are destabilized, having changed so quickly. A successful tattooing experience establishes a new point of reference, a marker that’s intimately theirs that replaces their sense of rupture and damage with an act of creation and, in my work, images of natural life.
Allen even does “solidarity tattoos” for his clients’ partners and friends. You can see more of his postmastectomy work on Instagram.

Success requires flirting with the public, saidGeorge Bernard Shaw. He was more accomplished as a flirt than as a playwright  






Artist Boss Move: Befriending Your Thief


Not everyone’s first reaction, is it? But: “After two of her most prized paintings were stolen, Czech artist Barbora Kysilkova came face-to-face with thief Karl-Bertil Nordland in a courtroom. Rather than reprimand Nordland though, she asked him if she could paint his portrait.” – Vanity Fair 




Like the carpenter whose tools were so dull
he couldn’t for the life of him devise a miter joint

Like the mattress left out on the curb all night

Like the woman
so fallen out of practice, she can no longer sing from the hymnal
Like the smoker on the scaffolding

Like the sleeper on his cardboard on the pavement Like the rain

Like the dog whose human so loves her      Whose hip
will never heal again
Like the dog who trembles in pain on her leash whose human
so loves her, he cannot bear to let her go

Like the takeout tossed into the bin for recycling      Like
the crosswalk the postbox      the flashing light

Like the beggar whose accordion knows only
the single musical phrase      Like the air
with its particulates      Like the idling bus

Like the cherries at the fruit stall      Like the cyclist      Like
the bus      Like the cyclist Like his cellphone Like the bus

Like the beggar so bored with the music, he
has never sounded out the rest of the song      Like the carpenter

whose work went so slowly for the dullness of his tools,
he had no time to sharpen them



 IPA is wrecking our democracy



The history of the IPA is curious. Many of the key players in its early years are either still around, or their children are. Continue reading 


'I will kill you if you give this song to anyone but me': how Peggy Lee was perfect for Is That All There Is?


Vale Comrade Jack Mundey



A day after John Hatton's 87th  birthday,   It is impossible to overstate the legacy of Jack Mundey. Continue reading 


The Shepherd’s Life is well written and thoroughly engaging. Rebanks’s story is about those who work hard and, it seems, hardly play at all, to make a living from sheep in the Lake District.  The weather is tough, the hills are tough and the men are tough.

The Shepherd's Life: A Tale of the Lake District by James ...



Alex Ross: Connecting With Music Through Tinny Video


“As a critic, I am desperate to maintain contact with what musicians are doing, thinking, and feeling. The sound is often tinny, the stage patter awkward, the home décor distracting. One could instead sample archived professional-quality videos that opera houses, orchestras, and other organizations have placed online. For me, though, the live or freshly recorded happenings matter more. They document, with the oblique power that the arts possess, an extraordinary human phase in history. Their mere existence is bracing, and at times they achieve startling power.” – The New Yorker




'The Whirligig of Time Brings in His Revenges'



A reader asks if I know the work of Isabel Bolton (1883-1975), in particular the novel The Whirligig of Time. Only by name. I do know the title’s origin, spoken by Feste, Olivia’s servant, in Act V, Scene 1 of Twelfth Night: “And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.” Meaning just deserts, getting precisely what we deserve, which is something few of us, happily, ever get.

A whirligig is a class of child’s toy that include tops. It dates from the mid-fifteenth century. Whirl means pretty what we would expect and a gig, besides being a job for a jazz musician, is a whipping top, the sort that’s wrapped with a string and thrown, according to the OED. I remember my step-grandfather, who grew up in Harrisburg, Pa., recounting how he made money as a kid “gigging” eels in the Susquehanna River and selling them. In this context a gig is “a kind of fish-spear” (OED).

The Dictionary cites Shakespeare’s use of whirligig as part of a complicated set of metaphorical usages: “(a) Something that is continually whirling, or in constant movement or activity of any kind; (b) a fantastic notion, a crotchet; (c) circling course, revolution (of time or events);  (d) a lively or irregular proceeding, an antic;  (e) a circling movement, or condition figured as such, a whirl.” All but (b) seem to apply to Feste’s use. There’s a suggestion that time “toys” with us, that nothing remains in place, that life is perpetual motion. Anthony Hecht adopts the expression in his adaptation of Horace’s Ode 1:25 as “The Whirligig of Time” (Flight Among the Tombs, 1996): 

“They are fewer these days, those supple, suntanned boys
Whose pebbles tapped at your window, and your door
Swings less and less on its obliging hinges
For wildly importunate suitors. Fewer the cries
Of ‘Lydia, how can you sleep when I’ve got the hots?
I won’t last out the night; let me get my rocks off.’
Things have moved right along, and behold, it’s you
Who quails, like a shriveled whore, as they scorn and dodge you,
And the wind shrieks like a sex-starved thing in heat
As the moon goes dark and the mouth of your old dry vulva
Rages and hungers, and your worst, most ulcerous pain
Is knowing those sleek-limbed boys prefer the myrtle,
The darling buds of May, leaving dried leaves
To cluster in unswept corners, fouling doorways.”

Cruel, hardly kind, but a memorable accounting of vanity, especially of the sexual variety.