Besides, in this throw-away culture, maybe DIY projects like this are precisely what's needed to create a new generation of component builders.
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How to make your own headphones. They may not be an audio upgrade from the ubiquitous three-buck upchuck earbuds available from your friendly flight attendant, but I love this guy's roll-your-own attitude.
Here's a fascinating review of John Bridcut's Britten's Children, a book that traces Benjamin Britten's fascination with a succession of young boys and that obsession's role in the creation of so much of his glorious music.
Peter Grimes, starring John Vickers, was my first experience of live opera at the Met, but prior to that I had little experience of Britten's music. I was gob-smacked by the power of the opera and its wonderful orchestral interludes, but in the weeks after seeing it, I kept attempting to suss out why the townspeople of the Borough got so upset over the death of his…
That's ray guns to you and me—and Lockwasher has assembled a beautiful bevy of 'em. I love the spray-gun/toilet float-ball jobbie and just may be inspired to create a few of my own—depending, as Lockwasher says, on what kind of stuff I find.
Via Grow A Brain.
Locust St. finds the hidden links between color and music, Newton and Aristotle, and the Rolling Stones and Dolly Parton.
Nice set.
I had a nice chat recently with Mark Berry, publicist for classical music’s Naxos label. Naxos, for those unfamiliar, is a label with one hell of a back story.
Once they were just purveyors of ultra cheap CDs of classical music, much of it played by ridiculous, unheard of ensembles with names like the North Bratislava Radio Orchestra. Their records, often packed in large cardboard display boxes that stores like Tower would just put out as is, caused a moral split among classical music fans.
One camp held that the label and its owner Klaus Heymann were systematically lowering…
Some things have led us to consider what we want — exactly, more or less, I suppose — from music. Feel free to substitute "the band," or "art," or even "life," for music. That is:
Some things have led us to consider what we want from the band, or: Some things have led us to consider what we want from art, or: Some things have led us to consider what we want from life. Everyone seems to be doing it, considering.
I saw him sliding down the stainless steel wall, dropping to the dirty concrete of Newark Penn Station, exhausted. Among the many pins decorating his backpack lived one…
Mark Lowery's Exciting World of Chess reproduces two of the immortal chess games of all time: the 1851 "Immortal Game" between Anderssen and Kieseritzky and the 1852 Anerssen-Dufresne "Evergreen" game. The best part, if you struggle with chess notation, Lowery has animated the games so you can watch them unfold—at your speed.
Great site.
IBM has announced a "philantropic cultural heritage initiative" that will allow folks to virtually tour the 800-building Forbidden City complex using immersive cell-chip technology developed for gaming.
We'll have to see how successfully they pull it off, of course. Back in the '70s, I thought the whole "opening up the museum" thing was going to create better museums, but the last few exhibits I've visited that stand out in my mind adhere to the old-school do-the-research-and-label-everything model. The flashier exhibitions have just seemed dumber, not better.
Of course, the…
On his website, Neil Gaiman pulls off the difficult accomplishment of making me want to read Alan Moore's Lost Girls in a longer version of an essay published in Publisher's Weekly.
It's not that Moore hasn't written great stuff. I swooned over what he did with Swamp Thing back in the '80s and I agree with Time magazine that Watchmen was one of the best novels of the '80s (I'm not sure I'd go as far as "one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century," but give me a late night and the right lubrication and I might make either side of that argument). And I admired From Hell, thinking it too…
Friends like John Marks actually send me stuff like this John Derbyshire National Review book review of Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn. Derbyshire's essay is argumentative and intriguing—the very qualities that Wade seems to have mastered in his book.
Marks pulled this quote for his email: "Then a tremendous event occurred. A small band of modern humans—it may have been as few as 150 people — crossed from Africa into Arabia via the Bab al-Mandab (“Gate of Grief”) at the southern end of the Red Sea. Their descendants proceeded to populate all of Eurasia, Australasia, Oceania, and the…