search
Dean Starkman posits: "As a Burkean liberal and paleo-librarian of longstanding, like many of you, The Audit has long understood that the Chicago Cubs represent all that is good in this life: the sun (day baseball); nature (ivy); tradition (a mechanical scoreboard); openness to alternative points of view and information from foreign, underdeveloped cultures (inning-by-inning out-of-town scores, even from the American League); transparency (W or L flags run up the scoreboard after games); nourishment (smokey links); democracy (I’m sure George Will or someone can help with that); free market…
"When the news reached my father's ears that I was running around the streets with gangs, he said to my mother, 'We have to do something, Maria, otherwise we're going to lose the boy.' Our neighbour Candida, whose nephew was one of the principal dancers with the Cuban National Ballet, had a suggestion: 'You say he likes dancing? Why don't you send him to ballet school?'
"My father's eyes lit up. Ballet! Suddenly there was hope. I was only nine, but I still remember that day when my parents told me their plans.
"'What's everyone in the neighbourhood going to think? They'll say I'm…
Oxford quantum scientist David Deutsche thinks he's proved they do. BTW, he thinks time travel is possible, too. Calling Dr. Who . . . .
First the sad. An old friend, harp player and all around sweetheart, Gary Primich passed away, suddenly as they say, in Austin on Sunday night. He was only 49. Although he'd had a solo career for some time, Gary was once a member of a smokin' Austin bar band called The Mannish Boys.
On my very first visit to SXSW many years ago, during the Austin Music Awards which we were clearly not watching, Gary and the band somehow got my friend Jeb and I into an inescapable whirlpool of beer drinking—Shiner Bocks of course—from which none of us emerged even remotely sober. We bonded that night…
Hopefully the Meg White (or not) sex tape dustup will not engender a drummer sex tape trend. There are a lot of skin pounders that I for one have no desire to ever see in the buff. The mental images alone are like taking a woodburner to your brain.
Caryl Phillips named his first play Strange Fruit. It had nothing to do with lynching, US race relations, or anything concerning Billie Holiday's famous song.
When he visited Alabama in 1983, he got a first-hand education in what the phrase means in the US, courtesy of Chris McNair, father of one of the four girls killed in the 1963 Birmingham 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.
If you follow only one Stereophilia link this week, make it this one.
Albert Fuller has died. I enjoyed his playing a lot and, the one time I met him—we shared the elevator to Weill Recital Hall—he was gracious enough to tell me about the night he met Igor Stravinsky.
A friend corralled Fuller into tagging along to a party at the composer's LA residence. When the maestro met Fuller and heard he was a musician, he asked what he played.
"Harpsichord," Fuller responded.
"Ah," said Stravinsky. "What a beautiful sounding instrument. I adore it."
"I'm delighted to hear that," said Fuller. "But why don't you write more music for it?"
…
I always thought I had a problem with Oliver Sacks. I found his The New Yorker articles interesting, but frustrating—I always had unanswered questions at their end. Then I read Uncle Tungsten and realized that his métier was not the long essay but the book-length exploration of a subject.
I'm really looking forward to reading Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.
Mark Fleischmann, knowing my fascination with Harry Beck's London Tube Map, sends along this tasty variation.
Stanley Wells has a bit of fun with it at The Guardian.
A couple of my dearest friends were in the market for a new table radio. "We had a chance to hear that Bose Wave thing, and it sounded pretty great."
My heart sank. I couldn't let this happen. I'd heard the Bose Wave thing, too, but I had never really paid much attention to it. When I found myself near one, I did whatever I could to turn down the volume. I took this opportunity, however, to learn a bit about it. I visited the Bose Wave website, and was absolutely off-my-ass shocked to find out that it sold for $500.
$500?!
"Yeah, we want something that'…