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

Only in Florida: A quadruple amputee is “armed and on the run” from authorities, a shoplifter managed to stuff a chainsaw down his pants and make his getaway on a bicycle, and proof that if a deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

New in the animal kingdom: A Slovenian unicorn, a recently discovered “bat frog” named for Ozzy Osbourne, and a breakthrough in the race to clone a woolly mammoth.

Music recommendation: John Luther Adams’s Become Ocean, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Film recommendation: The Station Agent (2003). It’s streaming on Netflix.

This day in history: In a letter to J. C. C. Davidson on November 17, 1935, British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin wrote that “I feel we should not give him [Churchill] a post at this stage. Anything he undertakes he puts his heart and soul into. If there is going to be a war—and no one can say that there is not—we must keep him fresh to be our war Prime Minister.”

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

We talked a little last week about poetry and rhythm, and it occurred to me afterward that poetry is an awful lot like jazz: there’s a tendency to want to get it, rather than simply experience it in the moment. And because we don’t always immediately understand what we see on the printed page, we walk away rather than engage with it. Plus, there’s a sense that poetry—again, much like jazz—is so rarefied as to deliberately thwart expression. Nonsense, say I! And I’ll prove it with a poem by Zbigniew Herbert.

From Study of the Object, Herbert’s third book of poems, originally published in 1961 (translated by Alissa Valles):

NOTHING SPECIAL

nothing special
boards paint
nails paste
paper string

mr artist
builds a world
not from atoms
but from remnants

forest of arden
from umbrella
ionian sea
from parkers quink

just as long as
his look is wise
just as long as
his hand is sure—

and presto the—world—

hooks of flowers
on needles of grass
clouds of wire
drawn out by wind

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  comments(1)

Because it’s Friday—and because the 70s were awesome—I bring you Sean Connery in what is quite possibly his finest role ever:

Why yes, that is a mankini in helveticka red. Here’s hoping it’s the new corporate uniform.

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

While there are a lot of reasons for bad writing, the one I most frequently see is a lack of rhythm. When writers are more intent on cramming information into a sentence or bullet points into a paragraph, the result is akin to slamming one’s forearm onto a piano keyboard: yes, the notes are all there, but nobody can make any sense out of them.

There are a couple of ways to address this. The first is to listen to more music. A Bach partita is all about the right notes at the right time (the correct sequencing of words to form a sentence); early John Cage teaches the value of the silence between the notes—Strunk & White’s “omit needless words” principle.

The second? Read more poetry. Some argue that it’s all about imagery, but, to me, good poetry is pure rhythm, whether it’s T. S. Eliot…

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

…or the Grateful Dead.

Jack Straw from Wichita
Cut his buddy down
Dug for him a shallow grave
And laid his body down

And if you’re lazy like me, you’ll want to streamline the process, incorporating the best poetry and music into your life at the same time. How, you ask? Two words: Bob Dylan.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  comments(1)

Dan Friedman was an extraordinary designer. His work is currently on display at the American Institute of Graphic Arts National Design Center in New York City through January 9, 2015. Dan Friedman: Radical Modernist explores his range of skills as an educator, designer, artist, and writer.

Friedman worked comfortably between these disciplines—from teaching (Yale and Cooper Union) to straight-up corporate design (one-time partner at Pentagram) to his experimental work in the East Village art scene (with the likes of Basquiat, Haring, and Koons).

Before he died in 1995, Friedman offered up a 12-point “radical modernist” agenda, among which are (1) engage in self-restraint; accept the challenge of working with reduced expectations and diminished resources, (2) bridge the boundaries that separate us from other creative professions and unexpected possibilities, and (3) be radical.

posted by: CK Anderson  |  category: the design life  |  make a comment