I’ve posted this recipe before, but, honestly, this is precisely the sort of medicine we all need right now:
Trinidad Sour
1 oz. Angostura Bitters
1 oz. orgeat
3/4 oz. fresh lemon juice
1/2 oz. Rittenhouse Rye
Shake with ice and strain into a chilled coupe.
“Medicine”? Damn right. Angostura Bitters was invented by a doctor, so obviously it’s good for you. Stay home, wash your hands, and drink up. It’ll all be over soon.
“When we give ourselves over to the art of walking,” writes John Kaag over at Aeon, “we exist in the moment for no reason or purpose other than that of the experience alone, for the appreciation and apprehension of beauty. There is no purpose in this occurrence, only the immeasurable effect it has on our nerves, our body, our being. Woe the society that sees little or no value in this.”
He’s right. I’ve been walking for a long time—it’s my usual lunchtime activity—and, for almost as long, I’ve occupied myself during those walks with a podcast or two, figuring that I might as well be learning something at the same time. The thing is, though, walking is good not only for your legs and your lungs; it’s also great for your mind—provided you’re not filling it with yet more information. Try it without the earbuds. Greet passersby. Listen to the birds.
It’s amazing what this small act of rebellion can do for your mental health.
These are troubling times. Disconcerting, unsettling, trying—not to mention downright weird—times. So I offer a little something to take your mind off the news: a couple albums that dropped today.
The first, Mixing Colours by Roger Eno and Brian Eno, is some of the most achingly beautiful music I’ve heard in a very long time. The second is by afro-futurists Onipa: We No Be Machine. It sounds almost blasphemous to say it right now, but it’s downright fun to listen to.
That’s all. Just a reminder that, no matter what, there’s still beauty and joy in this world. Stay safe and take care of each other.
“After fifty years, billions of dollars of intensive marketing campaigns, and tens of billions of dollars of profits for pharmaceutical companies,” writes George Scialabba, “it is still far from clear that antidepressant drugs are any more effective than placebo. The only group of people who have demonstrably benefited from the widespread use of antidepressants are pharmaceutical executives and investors.”
There’s more—much more—in Scialabba’s forthcoming How to Be Depressed, excerpted in the current issue of n+1 magazine.
“With [McCoy Tyner’s] death,” writes Andrew L. Shea, “we’ve lost our last living link to perhaps the greatest jazz quartet ever, but more importantly, we’re stripped of an individual and searching voice.” The missus and I happened to catch one of Tyner’s sets while on our honeymoon nearly 30 years ago.
Speaking of the passing of personal heroes, Brewmeister Smith shuffled off this mortal coil yesterday.
Pssst: “Although most people would define authenticity as acting in accordance with your idiosyncratic set of values and qualities, research has shown that people feel most authentic when they conform to a particular set of socially approved qualities.”
$9,992 is what an in-state student will pay for tuition and fees to attend Purdue next year. Which is what it cost in 2013.
The great David Gilmour turns 74 today. There are few rock guitarists with such an immediately recognizable sound—or, for that matter, who possess such a lyrical sensibility—and few artists who contributed so much to my understanding of what popular music could achieve.
To celebrate, may I suggest a handful of representative albums? Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (1973) and The Wall (1979) are the obvious choices, I suppose—particularly the latter, if only for Gilmour’s solo on “Comfortably Numb”—though Meddle (1971), Wish You Were Here (1975), and Animals (1977), are my personal favorites; his first two solo projects, David Gilmour (1978) and About Face (1984), demonstrate more of a pop/rock side to his writing and playing; and his collaboration with The Orb, Metallic Spheres (2010), is a revelation.
Feel free to play them in whatever order seems right and good.
About a block from helveticka world headquarters there’s a business that offers “Spokanes only 15 minute workout.” A missing apostrophe, I thought to myself. Where could it have gone to?
Only as far as the shop across the street, it turns out—on a notice in the window that says they’re now “open on Sunday’s.”
I briefly entertained the possibility of returning the stray punctuation to its rightful owner, but thought better of it. There are already enough weirdos in the neighborhood.
In the meantime, repeat after me: Apostrophes don’t make nouns plural! (Unless we’re talking about, say, the plural form of lowercase letters. But that’s something else entirely.) Also, while we’re at it, if it’s possessive, add an apostrophe + s, e.g. Spokane’s only 15-minute workout.
Or, you know, if you don’t know the rules, maybe just refrain from making signs.
bricoleur (noun; French) one who creates without the aid of a plan or strategy
“Aaron’s such a brilliant writer, I’ll bet his outlines are insane!”
“Dude. Haven’t you heard? He’s a bricoleur. His process is empirical; organic. You can’t achieve that level of artistry through design.”
The definition of the word privilege, like that of racism, has lately been stretched so far as to have lost all meaning. So you can imagine how I felt when I read the following:
The thing I’m most sure I had though, that was a direct result of my extraordinary privilege, is the blindness with which I bounded toward this profession, the not knowing, because I had never felt, until I was a grownup, the very real and bone-deep fear of not knowing how you’ll live from month to month.
That’s Lynn Steger Strong writing in the Guardian about how “you can only be a writer if you can afford it.”
But it wasn’t the obligatory use of the p-word that raised an eyebrow. No, it was the terrible writing. And if you think a fifty-six-word sentence with six commas is bad, it does, in fact, get worse:
I did not know what this writer, who I thought was single, paid in rent, or all the other ways that they might have been able to cut corners, that I, a mother of two, could not cut, but even then, it felt impossible to me that this writer was sustaining themselves in any legitimate way without some outside help.
One sentence, sixty words, eight commas, zero rhythm. And it’s all made even more confusing by the almost aggressive use of they as a singular pronoun. Here’s another example, just for fun:
For my students, for all the people I see out there, trying to break in or through and watching, envious, I want to attach to these statements and these Instagram posts, a caveat that says the writing isn’t what is keeping this person safe and clothed and fed.
Do you have any idea what she’s saying? I sure as hell don’t.
Look, it’s not the length of the sentence that bothers me.(I’ve written about this before.) It’s not the inordinate number of commas, either. It’s not even the random shifts from one subject to another. It’s the dearth of any sort of musicality in her writing. Like the person who claps on one and three, Lynn Steger Strong has no inherent sense of pitch and rhythm.
But ultimately, it doesn’t matter, because she’s right: If someone is making money writing like this, privilege can be the only possible explanation.
Big day today.
On February 28, 1943, eleven Norwegian soldiers took out the Vemork chemical plant, putting German nuclear scientists months behind—and allowing the U.S. to overtake the Nazis—in their quest to build an atomic bomb.
And this day in 1970 saw the American release of Van Morrison’s Moondance. It’s one of my favorite albums of all time, so you should definitely know about it if you expect to stay friends.
Oh, also, this is the day, back in 1895, that Sidney Wright, a porter at London’s Albemarle Club, handed Oscar Wilde a visiting card from the Marquess of Queensberry calling him a sodomite. Good times.
Couple of heavy reads for y’all today.
Over at Cabinet magazine, Justin E. H. Smith takes stock of his soul: “My dad,” he writes, “was a computer guy, my mom was a rural family-law attorney, known to accept chickens and goats from destitute clients in lieu of legal tender; I am a philosopher. And we’ve all spent our lives, with varying degrees of success, chasing after that sweet, sweet cash.”
And Agnes Callard continues her series of columns on public philosophy at The Point with a look at thoughts and prayers: “I refuse to beg God. As I see it, God already knows what I want, and doesn’t need my advice on how to run the universe.”
If that’s a all bit much, you may find Jessica Riskin’s The Defecating Duck, or, the Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life an amusing read—particularly if you’re familiar with your Voltaire. “Without the shitting duck,” he wrote, tongue planted firmly in cheek, “there would be nothing to remind us of the glory of France.”
And speaking of such things, does anyone—anywhere—need to be told this? Really?
Finally, a new music recommendation: We’re New Again: A Reimagining by Makaya McCraven.
“No matter where I’ve worked,” writes Molly Young in perhaps the greatest takedown of corporate-speak I’ve ever read, “it has always been obvious that if everyone agreed to use language in the way that it is normally used, which is to communicate, the workday would be two hours shorter.”
Only she prefers the term garbage language to corporate-speak or jargon or buzzwords, “because garbage is what we produce mindlessly in the course of our days and because it smells horrible and looks ugly and we don’t think about it except when we’re saying that it’s bad, as I am right now.”
It really is a devastating piece, and you really ought to read the entire thing. Especially for the closing statement.
Words of wisdom from the great James Hubert “Eubie” Blake:
“Be grateful for luck. Pay the thunder no mind—listen to the birds. And don’t hate nobody.”
Amen.
“High-rez music streaming is one of the finest developments in the history of hi-fi,” writes Jim Austin over at Stereophile. There are no serious downsides, he adds. So embrace it:
If you care about musician incomes, the best thing you can do is subscribe to a music streaming service, or more than one, and listen. The logic is air-tight: Streaming is taking over music distribution—whether we want it to or not—and the more money streaming services make, the more money musicians make from streaming.
Now I know it’s not technically high-rez, but one thing I’ve experienced since subscribing to Apple Music is the joy of a month’s worth of nearly unfettered discovery for the cost of a single album. And yet I still buy physical copies of the stuff I really dig. So there are benefits even with the lower-quality services.
Case in point: A friend recently introduced me to the Danish band Heilung. Thirty seconds later, I’d downloaded all three of their albums and started listening. This would have taken months back in the days when I was swapping cassette tapes through the mail.
Like I said a couple of days ago, we truly live in the best of times.
There is a Twitter account called Wiki Titles Singable to TMNT Themesong. It is, as its name suggests, a bot that chronicles—hourly, mind you—the titles of wiki articles that can be sung to the theme song from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. To wit: “Sisters of the Infant Jesus,” “Microsoft Solutions Framework,” “Brewster-Douglass Housing Projects,” et al. As of this writing, the account has nearly 50,000 followers.
We truly live in the best of times.