Miles Davis's 1959 album Kind of Blue is the best-selling instrumental jazz album of all time. As the music-buying public is rightly suspicious of jazz, that makes Kind of Blue the kind of jazz that people who don't like jazz can stand. This was not what Davis had in mind when he convened a six-piece for two sessions at Columbia Records' 30th Street Studio in March and April 1959. Jazz was then still young enough to follow Ezra Pound's 1934 advice, "Make it new," but old enough to have the technique and self-consciousness to do it.
I have no interest in Beyoncé, and don't care about her C&W album but I have been fun to watch for those fragile white dudes offended about a black R&B artist doing country like this has never happened before
On Serendipity. Bob Dylan in New Orleans, April 1, 2024
Infatuation is a form of idolatry that cannot last long in a marriage. Marriage cures it. That's an argument for marriage. There was no cure for Don Quixote's romantic fantasies because their object, the fair Dulcinea del Toboso, existed only in his imagination.*
Etymologically, to become infatuated is to become foolish.
But while infatuation lasts, it is blissful. One is made silly, often harmlessly so. One walks on air and can think of nothing but the beloved. The moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie. The world starts to shine like you've had too much wine. So smitten was I in the early days of my relationship to the woman I married that I sat in my carrel at the university one day and just thought about her for eight hours straight when I was supposed to be finishing an article on Gottlob Frege. Life is both love and logic. But sometimes hot love trumps cold logic.
A Cure for Infatuation - by William F. Vallicella.
The Evolution of Mozart’s Music (From 5 to 35 Years Old)
Rollin’ on the cold river in 1859
On April 9, 1859, a 23-year-old Missouri youth named Samuel Langhorne Clemens receives his steamboat pilot’s license.
The name Mark Twain is a pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Clemens was an American humorist, journalist, lecturer, and novelist who acquired international fame for his travel narratives, especially The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), and Life on the Mississippi (1883), and for his adventure stories of boyhood, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).
A gifted raconteur, distinctive humorist, and irascible moralist, he transcended the apparent limitations of his origins to become a popular public figure and one of America’s best and most beloved writers.
David Lynch: Depression Kills Creativity
Starting in 1978, a high school science teacher told his students that he was throwing a viewing party for the 2024 solar eclipse. More than 100 of them showed up.
