Il glorioso:
Project C-90, the ultimate audiotape guide.
Il sublime:
Promises, the new album by Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, and the London Symphony Orchestra.
Il bello:
If you’re wondering why the subheads are in Italian, it’s because of this, the greatest title sequence of one of the five greatest films* of all time:
*The other four are, in no particular order, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, and Planet of the Apes (the 1968 original, obviously).
NPR host Scott Simon:
I interviewed Elmore [Leonard] at a Tucson book festival in 2010. Just before going onstage we thumbed through a program listing all the esteemed authors, of which he was easily the best-known and, he told me, the one who had won no prestigious fellowships and few awards. “Most of these writers don’t write for a living,” he said. “They write for tenure. Or for the New York Times. Or to get invited to conferences like this. When you write to make the rent or send your kids to school, you learn how to write without a lot of nonsense.”
“The semi-colon is a funny fellow,” writes Tom Hogkinson in his review of Claire Cock-Starkey’s forthcoming Hyphens and Hashtags: The Stories Behind the Symbols on our Keyboards. “It was invented by a Venetian printer called Aldus Manutius in 1494 for editions of Dante and Erasmus. He adapted it from a bit of musical notation called the punctus versus, and it was Ben Jonson who really made sure it stuck by including it in his 1640 style guide, The English Grammar. In the 18th and 19th centuries writers went mad for it and in 1837 two rival French legal experts fought a duel over its use: one favoured the semi-colon to end a certain passage, the other a colon. The semicolon supporter was wounded in the arm by the apologist for the colon. Today I still find it an impressive piece of punctuation and young people would be well advised to use it in emails in order to impress their bosses.”
I’m not sure what I could possibly add to that, other than that I’m totally behind settling grammar arguments with pistols, and yes, you should definitely use the semicolon more often.
This morning on Twitter I saw an ad for Chipotle’s new “hand-crafted quesadilla.” No, I’m not making this up. It’s “a whole new way to Chipotle,” apparently. It’s so exciting that the “longtime leader and innovator in the food industry” sent out a press release.
So I checked out their online menu: $8.20. For a cheese quesadilla. Sure, the guacamole is included, but still.
I’m not sure who needs to hear this, but making a quesadilla on your own requires neither culinary training nor special skills. Just some basic kitchen tools and, what…two ingredients? Maybe three or four if you’re feeling extra fancy?
It’s also really cheap—like around two bucks for roughly 400 calories of cheesy goodness. Which means the 300 percent markup at Chipotle must go toward paying for all that hand-crafting. (It certainly isn’t the guacamole. That costs like 20¢ an ounce to make.)
But according to Chris Brandt, Chipotle’s chief marketing officer, this is “one of the most highly anticipated menu items in our brand’s history. The Hand-Crafted Quesadilla brings so many new possibilities to our menu, and fans will love exploring fresh flavor combinations through its sides and salsa options.”
I’m not sure who we should be more worried about: The customers for whom the combination of tortillas and cheese is a world-historic event, or the “longtime innovator” coming up with…a quesadilla.
Journalists call it a lede; normal, less pretentious folk simply call it an opening paragraph. Either way, Caitlin Flanagan is one of the best in the business at shooting “straight as a rifle bullet into the reader’s attention”:
One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.
The rest of the article, if you want to continue reading—and why on Earth wouldn’t you after that?—is here.
Reminds me of the time I was interviewing Bill Mize, former national finger style guitar champion. “People ask me all the time what they can do to be better players,” he told me. “Pat Metheny and Charlie Haden, Beyond the Missouri Sky. That’s what I tell them. You wanna know how to play guitar? Listen to that record.”
So. You wanna know how to write? Read Caitlin Flanagan.
I’ve been reading A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary by, well…Brian Eno. It’s literally his diary, but from 1995, and I’ve been matching my reading with the actual entry dates.
Anyway, it’s chock-a-block with quotable aphorisms and witty asides, from the banal-yet-relatable…
“Home early. Cinema: The Madness of King George – between so-so and OK. Like most movies, I shall probably never think of it again.”
…to the utterly profound:
“Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.”
It’s not only great reading, it’s also a beautifully designed book. Highly recommended.
On the one hand, 61 percent of Americans reported undesired weight gain during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Check out the average poundage for millennials!)
On the other hand, Krispy Kreme is giving away free doughnuts: “The chain says it will offer a free original glazed doughnut to anyone who shows their vaccination card for the rest of 2021, starting today. And the offer is not a one-time deal.”
I need to get me some of that vaccine, stat.
The practice of smoke enemas—something that “early modern Europeans in particular took up with a surprising degree of enthusiasm”—was apparently so widespread by the 1780s that “a charitable foundation, the Royal Humane Society, installed a series of emergency tobacco-enema kits along the banks of the River Thames.”
No, really. There are pictures and everything.
But…why along the river?
Because Richard Mead, a prominent physician at the time, had written that the first step in resuscitating a drowning victim “should be to blow up the smoke of tobacco into the intestines.”
Makes sense, I guess. I mean, why not?
All I know is that, after reading “Our Strange Addiction,” I really want a cigar. That’s not weird, is it?
Somebody check the temperature in Hell. Rolling Stone has actually published something worth reading:
For a brief moment in the early Seventies, Judee Sill was one of L.A.’s most promising artists. She was one of the first musicians signed to Asylum Records, a label David Geffen started with Elliot Roberts that became famous for its roster of the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, and others. Sill was produced by Graham Nash, and her songs were covered by the Turtles, the Hollies, and Cass Elliot. But unlike her labelmates, she never found fame and success. When the decade of the singer-songwriter ended, she ended with it, dying on November 23rd, 1979, of a drug overdose.
I only just discovered Sill last year, courtesy of The Album Years—the podcast from Steven Wilson and Tim Bowness, now in its second season.
But man, when I first heard “The Kiss,” from Sill’s second and final album Heart Food, I was gobsmacked. XTC’s Andy Partridge says it best: “Unfortunately, I can’t listen to ‘The Kiss’ anymore because it just presses the ‘sob your heart out’ button. I’m just destroyed for the next hour. I actually think it’s the most beautiful song ever written by anybody.”
Amen, Brother Andy. Here it is, in one of the few known videos of Sill performing live:
Kudos to Angie Martoccio for a sympathetic, well-written portrayal of an artist who deserves to be known. “More than 40 years after her death,” asks the article’s subhead, “could the world finally be ready to appreciate her?”
I dunno. But it damn sure ought to be.
In an article about my favorite record label over at City Journal, Ted Gioia closes with an astute observation about the difference between art and entertainment:
Entertainers work to please the audience—after all, that’s the definition of entertainment—but genuine art requires the audience to adapt to it. That’s why the artistic experience is more powerful than mere entertainment. It forces the audience to go places and experience things they may have never anticipated. The artistic experience is broadening and expansive, while entertainment is narrowing and repetitive.
He’s right, of course. And it reminds me of an old joke—not sure where I first heard it—about a certain pop culture phenomenon that happens around this time every year: The GRAMMYs is a music awards show for people who don’t like music.
In the 1930s, the USSR began building hundreds of lighthouses along its 3,500-mile arctic coastline. Eventually, neither keepers nor electricity were needed to run them—thanks to radioisotopic thermoelectric generators: nuclear batteries.
How secure is your password? Here’s a handy chart that will should terrify you. (And here‘s my recommended solution.)
Random question: At what point did we decide that the addition of end to result and user was necessary? Isn’t end result redundant? Isn’t an end user just a, you know…user? So annoying. Not to mention completely unnecessary.
Real-life LEGO (sort of) houses you can build yourself.
What’s the point of fiction? According to Erik Hoel, the novel is “the only medium where there is no wall between the intrinsic and the extrinsic…a possible world where thoughts and feelings are just as obvious to an observer as chairs and tables.”
More than five years have passed since Sandy Hingston spoke truth to power:
Daylight Saving Time is killing us. It increases your chances of having a heart attack or stroke, increases air pollution, decreases economic production, causes skin cancer, and has been linked to increased rates of depression and suicide. It’s damned inconvenient, and nonsensical, too.
And yet here we are, again pretending that we somehow have the power to manipulate the fourth dimension (sav•ing n. 1. Rescue from harm, danger, or loss. 2. Avoidance of excess expenditure; economy. 3. A reduction in expenditure or cost. 4. Something saved.*).
Basically, Daylight Saving Time benefits golf courses and the barbecue industry at the expense of our lives and well-being. Sounds about right.
*American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, fourth edition.
Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955–1967
Dr. Robert J. White: “Someday, God willing, medical technology will have sufficiently advanced—and the line between research and ethics appropriately blurred—to enable a skilled surgical team to successfully transplant a sick patient’s head onto an entirely different body.”
Sea slugs: “I got you fam.”
I’m not entirely sure what sort of incantation is required to change the molecular structure of stone—or whether the boulders themselves, having somehow assumed sentience, are deceiving us for purposes yet unknown—but one thing is certain: Sorcery is afoot near Kettle Falls.
