Cruelty has a Human Heart
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Apple Music’s 100 Best Albums
Chosen by members of the Apple Music teams and a panel of experts (including Pharrell & Charli XCX), this is their list of the 100 Best Albums of all time (see also a text listing on Wikipedia). It’s an interesting list, worthy of argument and comparison to Rolling Stone’s list. Here’s the top 10:
1. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill by Lauryn Hill
2. Thriller by Michael Jackson
3. Abbey Road by The Beatles
4. Purple Rain by Prince & The Revolution
5. Blonde by Frank Ocean
6. Songs in the Key of Life by Stevie Wonder
7. Good Kid, M.A.A.D City by Kendrick Lamar
8. Back to Black by Amy Winehouse
9. Nevermind by Nirvana
10. Lemonade by Beyoncé
You can stream all 100 albums on Apple Music and (unofficially, cheekily) on Spotify.
How to Get Past a Paywall to Read an Article for Free
Being a classical music lover, Keating might like this insult from Beethoven to a fellow composer: "I liked your opera. I think I will set it to music."
ABC iview - The Gospel According to Paul
Jonathan Biggins gives such an uncanny performance you’d swear he’s Keating in this hilariously funny, astute, inspiring show.
Jonathan Biggins. All photographs © Brett Boardman
Bob Carr once said of Keating: “No political leader in Australia has been more entertaining.” The Bankstown boy who became the self-described Plácido Domingo of Australian politics certainly makes for a hugely entertaining onstage protagonist. Casey Bennetto’s Keating! The Musical, which began life in 2005, was a huge hit, touring for three years, winning awards and attracting sold-out, enthusiastic audiences, among them Keating himself who saw it several times.
Now comes The Gospel According to Paul, a new show written and performed by Biggins who, in his theatre program note, dubs it “the first three-dimensional, unauthorised autobiography written by someone else”.
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO PAUL
Written and performed by Jonathan Biggins
One of Australia’s favourite performers, Jonathan Biggins, is Paul Keating – visionary, reformer and rabble-rouser – in the return of the smash hit comedy, The Gospel According to Paul. Full of intelligence and wit, The Gospel According to Paul is a funny, insightful and occasionally poignant portrait of Paul Keating. The man that - as he tells it – single-handedly shaped contemporary Australia.
Photo by Brett Boardman
Biggins almost out-Keaters Keating...If only we had someone this clever running the country.
Is today’s lack of leadership a product of our times? Or can real leaders shape their times? The Gospel According to Paul answers these questions with a funny, insightful and poignant portrait of Paul Keating.
Written by and featuring Jonathan Biggins, The Gospel According to Paul paints a sympathetic but uncompromising picture of one of our most unique and compelling politicians, exploring his impact on our country and history - and more importantly, our understanding of both.
Jonathan Biggins’ performance as Paul Keating is well known from the long-running Sydney Theatre Company success story, the Wharf Revue. But beyond the canny impersonation, Jonathan, like so many Australians, has long been fascinated by Keating and what he represents to Australia.
Paul Keating is a man of eviscerating wit and rich rhetoric with an ego the size of Everest. Distilling the essence of his leadership into 90 minutes, The Gospel According to Paul focusses on landmark political achievements as well as personal obsessions: a man who grew up in the tribe of the Labor Party and gained an education at the knee of Jack Lang, who treated economics as an artform, and demanded we confront with rigorous honesty the wrongs of our colonial past. And perhaps most fascinating of all, his great engagement with the arts and in particular classical music, and his profound belief in the power of an inner life.
What can we learn from this grand politician, and this momentous time in our country's history?
FROM THE CREATOR
In all my years writing and performing for the Wharf Revue, one character has remained a constant favourite of the audience: Paul Keating. I can’t think of a more entertaining or significant figure in recent Australian history with whom to spend an evening. All iceberg, no tip.
Jonathan Biggins
Lifehacker: “Over the past several years, countless websites have added paywalls. If you want to read their articles, you have to sign up and pay a monthly subscription cost. Some sites have a “metered” paywall—meaning you can read a certain number of articles for free before they ask for money—and others have a hard paywall, where you’ll have to pay to read even one article.
Paywalls are mostly a thing with news websites, largely because relying on advertising income alone isn’t a viable strategy anymore, and news companies are pursuing more direct revenue sources, like monthly subscriptions. Of course, paywalls aren’t entirely a bad thing—it’s worth it to support journalism you find valuable, so by all means, if you can afford to pay to read articles, you absolutely should.
But whether you lost your password, haven’t saved it on your phone, are in a rush, or are just strapped for cash and promise yourself that you’ll subscribe later, there are several ways to bypass paywalls on the internet. You may be able to use some of these methods successfully today, but that could change in the future as websites clamp down on bypass methods.
If nothing else, I hope you support the websites that you do read—especially your friendly local news outlet. But if you can’t right now, here are some of the best ways to bypass paywalls online.” [Note – 12ft.io was shut down]
“Revelations” (1961):
“Of course if we didn’t write,
Our faults wouldn’t come to light.
As for our virtues, they
Are what our writing earned—
We carry them away:
The poem’s what the poet learned.”
“A poem is what you do about a fact—
A poem is an act.
“A poem is what the mind does at its best—
Is an intelligence test.
“A poem is a performance—on a stage
No larger than a page.”
Without fail, Hayford’s poems are about something, never airily abstract. Their form is part of their aboutness. “Permanent Surprise” (1978) is how Hayford describes a poem’s function:
“A permanent surprise?
Yes, what a poem supplies.
“Unlike most jokes and stunts
Which seldom work but once,
“The coil-springs of fine rhyme
Go off—ping—every time
“Because it’s not just wit,
Though wit is part of it;
“The rest of it is heart,
The everlasting part.”
Not just any content, but humanely emotional content. Good poems demand that we feelsomething. Take “A Little Case” (1966):
“A poem’s the essential novel
Housed in a little case:
The narrative compacted,
The hero a pronoun—
Two verbs tell how he acted.
The poem saves time and Space
“Most poetry is as poor as most fiction or most biography, or most books. But it is often so aggressively, so conceitedly poor and undistinguished that readers cannot be altogether blamed for not bothering with the new books as they come out, and I am always hesitant to make them try.”
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