Art? Not art? Play the game to find out!

On this day in 1903, the world got a little smaller. Here’s Orville Wright’s telegram to his father from North Carolina:

SUCCESS FOUR FLIGHTS THURSDAY MORNING ALL AGAINST TWENTY-ONE MILE WIND STARTED FROM LEVEL WITH ENGINE POWER ALONE AVERAGE SPEED THROUGH AIR THIRTY-ONE MILES LONGEST 57 SECONDS INFORM PRESS HOME CHRISTMAS

Also today? The Simpsons first aired in 1989. As Michael Adams points out, the English language will never be the same.

A Chinese restaurant employee came up with a novel way of thawing out meat. Oh, sure, you end up with a little extra “blackened gum, cigarette butts and foot-tracked bacteria,” but man is it tender.

And apparently a lot of murderers have the same middle name. Chuck Shepherd has the details. Because, you know…science.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

In the penultimate installment of our annual roundup of the year’s best music, we finally get around to the classical and jazz categories. You know—the serious stuff. (Check out parts 1–4 here, here, here, and…here.) Next week we’ll reveal the artist of the year. Stay tuned…

Best jazz album of 2014: Mark Turner Quartet, Lathe of Heaven Turner’s jazz isn’t the tap-your-foot, hoot-and-holler type. It’s far more cerebral; a soft-spoken, patient, carefully considered jazz that speaks to the soul in whispers. With no chordal instrument—the quartet comprises tenor sax (Turner), trumpet (Avishai Cohen), bass (Joe Martin), and drums (Marcus Gilmore)—the two horns are completely exposed, which in less capable hands might mean a more tentative approach to improvisation. Not so with these guys, however. They seem to know exactly what to say and how to say it. And more important, when to let the space between the notes do the talking for them. (Honorable mention: Dave Douglas & Uri Caine, Present Joys.)

Best classical album of 2014: Reinhold Moritsevich Glière, Symphony No. 3 in B minor, op. 42 (Naxos: JoAnn Falletta conducting the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra) This was by far the toughest decision for me. With Vasily Petrenko concluding his survey of Shostakovich’s symphonies, the release of Harrison Birtwistle’s Chamber Music, and a glorious recording of Herbert Howells’s Stabat Mater—not to mention the Pulitzer Prize-winning Become Ocean by John Luther Adams—2014 was a great year for contemporary classical music. Why did I ultimately decide on Glière? In part because it’s a beautifully engineered recording of a monumental work that, sadly, is virtually unknown. But also because Become Ocean is on everyone else’s list.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

From Sleeping with One Eye Open (1964), by former United States Poet Laureate Mark Strand, who died a couple of weeks ago at 80:

OLD PEOPLE ON THE NURSING HOME PORCH

Able at last to stop
And recall the days it took
To get them here, they sit
On the porch in rockers
Letting the faded light
Of afternoon carry them off.

I see them moving back
And forth over the dullness
Of the past, covering ground
They did not know was there,
And ending up with nothing
Save what might have been.

And so they sit, gazing
Out between the trees
Until in all that vacant
Wash of sky, the wasted
Vision of each one
Comes down to earth again.

It is too late to travel
Or even find a reason
To make it seem worthwhile.
Already now, the evening
Reaches out to take
The aging world away.

And soon the dark will come,
And these tired elders feel
The need to go indoors
Where each will lie alone
In the deep and sheepless
Pastures of a long sleep.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Influential science fiction author Robert Heinlein (The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Puppet Masters) was a pretty keen observer of human nature:

“Political tags—such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth—are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.”

To which I would add that those who want people to be controlled are usually those who crave the power to control them. So…politicians. But I interrupted. (Sorry.) Heinlein continues:

“The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.”

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

What better way to celebrate the holiday season than eating meat? Well, actually…breakfast sausage. But I don’t think it’ll mind being called meat.

Thanks to Mr. Mraz for the hearty meal.

posted by: Shirlee Roberts-Downey  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Rob Long, who cut his teeth on a little television show called Cheers, is one of the most interesting writers on Hollywood and the entertainment industry out there. What he has to say about the current state of the movie business is eye-opening:

“…the entire entertainment industry—the whole show business economy—is built on the shaky premise that people still want to sit and watch in numbers large enough to keep everyone in Hollywood driving fancy cars and living in fancy houses, to keep everyone in Hollywood rich.

“Except: unlimited bandwidth + unlimited storewidth = some people are going to have to get into another line of work.”

Guess I won’t be moving to LA to write million-dollar screenplays any time soon.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  make a comment

2014 is winding down. Which means, of course, that it’s time for a review of the year’s best music. We’re going to do something a little different this time around, though. Rather than simply listing the top 10 albums—half of which would likely fall within the pop or rock genre (it was a good year for both)—I assigned a single winner to each of 10 different categories. Starting today, we’ll share a couple of winners each week. Then, the big reveal: artist of the year. Stay tuned.

Best avant-garde album of 2014: Meredith Monk, Piano Songs “Monk’s most notable mediation,” writes Matthew Guerreri, “is between the poles of minimalist repetition and modernist continuous variation.” Drawn from works composed between 1971 and 2006, Piano Songs revels in the music’s purity, asymmetry, and transparency. (Honorable mention: Vijay Iyer, Mutations.)

Best debut album of 2014: Rudy Royston, 303 It’s not like Rudy Royston’s unheard of. It’s just that it took him a while to release his first album as a leader. So how good is 303? Let’s just say that it’s pretty much all I listened to during the entire month of February—both for Royston’s inventive compositions and for his septet’s amazing musicianship.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

I’ve been working my way through Gwynne’s Grammar, a delightful little book with a somewhat cheeky subtitle: The Ultimate Introduction to Grammar and the Writing of Good English.

N. M. Gwynne is a prescriptivist; as such, he is “prepared, on the one hand, to welcome any innovations—such as new words for new things—that are useful, and, on the other hand, to fight in order to resist any changes that are not in the direction of greater richness, clarity and precision, and are not consistent with the best features of our language, the features that have been tried and tested over a long period and not found wanting.” So he’s a lot like these guys.

Try this grammar quiz Gwynne created for The Telegraph. You’ll want pick up his book at Auntie’s—they have a copy on their shelves right now—when you’re done.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  make a comment