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Locust St. finds the hidden links between color and music, Newton and Aristotle, and the Rolling Stones and Dolly Parton.
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…
The Beeb is canceling Top of the Pops. Not that I ever watched it, but it's one of those things like the Grand Canyon that always seemed like it was eternal.
Country International Records
Starfish Records
Starfish Records
Making a summer record is something to proud of and while the Sugarplum Fairies may not ring the Summer 2006 bell the loudest, the smooth tones, quiet vocals and jangle moments on this, their third full length, become more vivid when it’s sunny, over 80 and cares begin to slip away. The vibe from this duo of Austrians, Silvia Ryder and Ben Bohm, is easy to dissect: whispery, unruffled vocals from Ryder backed with lots of midtempo guitarage (slide, acoustic, chimey, tremolo) from Bohm, all of it bathed in the glow of earnest…
Overheard (coming out of mine and other nearby mouths) at a tavern in Brooklyn:
Installment 12,009 in the long running Lyrics vs Music argument.
Is Dylan a poet?
Well, let's see.
"I want you I want you I want you, So bad."
That would be a big NO!
(much laughter).
Oh fuck you, you always were a music guy anyway. How about this?
"They sat together in the park As the evening sky grew dark, She looked at him and he felt a spark tingle to his bones."
(much silence)