January 2009
13 posts
Some Musical Things
A few things music-related:
Doves are giving away a song from their forthcoming album Kingdom of Rust in exchange for an email address, and there’s a nifty Google Maps mashup showing where in the world other downloaders are. The song itself is no Pounding, but it’s still good and bodes well for the rest of the album. Doves went to the same high school as I did, and the music teacher...
Debating the Merits of Molecular Gastronomy →
It had the grave air of a medieval disputation, one of those deep discussions in which 13th-century theologians debated the finer points of monotheism. In a highly anticipated panel discussion earlier this week at the international culinary conference Madrid Fusion, Ferran Adrià, Heston Blumenthal, and Andoni Luis Aduriz took on the pressing question of whether molecular gastronomy is for real....
People are coming to the library for books! →
Ann Patchett writing on the uplifting news that, for the first time in 25 years, the number of people reading fiction, in the US at least, is on the rise.
I am a firm believer in the fact that it isn’t so much what you read, it’s that you read. Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy...
Surviving Everything →
Films and computer games should have shown and trained enough people by now that surviving a Zombie Apocalypse will pose few problems but what about other kinds? Ralph Gamelli, for The Morning News, provides instructions on how to survive a multitude of possible apocalypses covering everything from dinosaurs (hide in trees) and Republicans (vote Democrat) right through to game-show hosts,...
Reporting on 2008
More lookbacks but these ones aren’t specifically musical, and they’re both quite special and interesting.
First off, we have the latest edition of the Feltron Annual Report through which 31 year old Nicholas Felton tells us what he did, in quite a lot of detail, in the last year. It’s all lovingly laid out in booklet form (printed version also available) and provides such...
Join the discussion you want to be part of →
A piece discussing how and why it was the Guardian that broke the story claiming Obama is willing to talk with Hamas:
What is novel here is the idea of including foreign media as part of your primary leaking options. This has to do with both the Internet—on the Internet you hardly know if the Guardian isn’t the New York Times—and it has to do with the fact that in the US media for at least a...
Is it Art? →
There is no other medium that produces so pure a cultural segregation as video games, so clean-cut a division between the audience and the non-audience. Books, films, TV, dance, theatre, music, painting, photography, sculpture, all have publics which either are or aren’t interested in them, but at least know that these forms exist, that things happen in them in which people who are interested in...
Music Lists
All across the internet looks-back at 2008’s music are giving way to predictions for 2009. Time then for some lists other people have made:
Sasha Frere-Jones has 21 songs and 28 albums with the top spots going to Lil Wayne’s A Milli and Bon Iver respectively. He also wrote a bit about some of his choices on his New Yorker blog. There’s plenty I hadn’t listened to much and...