Thom's Link Emporium - 0026 - 25 July 2022

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Apologies for the lack of a newsletter last week. I had a very busy weekend and just hadn’t found enough through the week to warrant sending anything out. We should be back to normal from now on.

Hope you’ve been surviving the heat. I’m beginning to wonder if we shouldn’t keep turning up the thermostat on this planet.

As ever, if you want something to read as the planet burns, you can subscribe here.

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Links

  1. I was interviewed by my good friend (who I've never had the pleasure of meeting face to face) Andy Mascola on his People Are The Enemy podcast. It was a really fun chat!

  2. Ted Gioia on the books that changed how he heard music. And they're not music books, but a very good list (at least the couple I've read, Flow and From Ritual to Romance) I also recommend that you sign his petition to get Duke Ellington the Pulitzer he was denied in 1965. (Update)

  3. Is the largest NFT seller, the Bored Ape Yacht Club, racist? (As well as, obviously, being a massive scam)

  4. The surprising crossovers between early series of Red Dwarf, and those of Chucklevision

Listening

Anyone who's read more than a couple of these knows that I've fallen very deep into a Beatles rabbit-hole of late and as such, found a wonderful story this week that I'd never heard before.

Back in 1970, Phil Collins was a jobbing session drummer. He was in his band Flaming Youth, and wouldn't join Genesis until later in the year. One day, Ringo Starr's chauffeur called saying they needed a percussionist for Harrison's solo project, an album that would become All Things Must Pass.

Collins, being a huge Beatles fan, jumped at the chance, arrived at Abbey Road, and saw Harrison and Starr there as well as Klaus Voormann, Billy Preston and Phil Spector. Collins was given congas to play, and sat with Starr, cadging cigarettes through nervousness and playing when asked. He wasn't an experienced conga player, adding to the anxiety, and at the end suddenly everyone disappeared and he was left in the studio alone. He was told they'd all gone off to watch TV or something and he wasn't needed any further and could leave. Still, he'd recorded his parts, and he headed home wondering how his life would change after appearing on a solo Beatles record.

When All Things Must Pass came out, Collins was understandably excited, but checking through the credits, his name wasn't there, and listening through the track in question, they'd clearly used a different take. Collins was disappointed and for some years, reached out to Harrison to see if he could get a tape of his contribution.

This continued for many years and Harrison wouldn't send him what he asked. However, eventually Collins happened to buy F1 driver Jackie Stewart's house. When Collins and Stewart were chatting, Stewart mentioned that his friend Harrison was remixing All Things Must Pass and Collins told the story and asked again whether he could receive the tape.

This time, though, he was successful and a couple of days' later a tape arrived with a note from Harrison saying "Could this be you?" Collins's put the tape on, one can imagine rather eagerly, to see how his youthful self sounded playing with his heroes.

So there he is, one can imagine him with his headphones on, listening to this cut, wondering if the new remixed version would contain this fascinating moment from his history. Maybe this take is the better one and people would realise when they heard? Obviously I'm guessing a bit here, but I assume those are the sort of thoughts running though his head. Instead, though, he heard the congas come in and they were loud, out of time and just generally terrible. To add to the ignominy at the end of the take you can hear Harrison in the recording booth saying to Spector "Hey, Phil, can we try another without the conga player?"

Suddenly, everything became clear. Collins wasn't left alone while the others watched TV, he was politely fired without him even realising it. And Harrison hadn't been keeping the tape from him because he was busy, or was just ignoring him. He'd kept it from him because the tape was awful and he didn't want Collins to know.

These thoughts float around in Collins's head, until he gets a call from Jackie Stewart. "I've got someone here to speak to you" he said and puts George onto the line. "Did you get the tape?"

"I now realise I was fired by a Beatle" said Collins.

I imagine here that there's a few moments of silence, perhaps a little muffled giggling, before Harrison said "Don't worry, it was a piss-take. I got Ray Cooper to play really badly and we dubbed it on. Thought you'd like it!"

So not only had Harrison kept a joke running with Phil Collins for many, many years, he finished off the prank by paying for a whole band to spend time in the studio with him just so he could make the joke. If this doesn't make you love George Harrison more than ever, I really don't know what will.

Reading

Yet more Beatles in my reading list this week I'm afraid, because I'm currently reading Many Years from Now which is a biography written by Barry Miles and published in 1998. It's effectively an official biography since Miles (a friend of McCartney for many years) had unparalleled access to his source. As such, it's a very one-sided picture, and McCartney says as much towards the beginning of the book.

However, once you read it knowing that that's the case, it colours in many parts of McCartney's life I was either unaware of or didn't quite understand. His time living in Jane Asher's parents's house in Wimple Street is described in the most detail I've come across, as is McCartney's involvement with the setting up of the Indica gallery where, later, John Lennon would meet Yoko Ono.

It also contains one of my favourite stories that says an awful lot about McCartney. One day, he decided he'd go and speak to philosopher and, at the time, famed war protestor Bertrand Russell. So that's what he did - he just turned up to his house, knocked on the door, was kept in a waiting room for a while before being introduced to one of the greatest British philosophers and chatting with him for an hour or two.

Basically, McCartney lived the fantasy 1960s that all fans of the 1960s really wanted to live, bumping into William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, checking with Alma Cogan whether Yesterday was his own composition. In summary, it's both a fascinating picture of a great life and some wonderful wish fulfilment.

Watching

I rewatched Cloud Atlas this week. I realise this is a film that splits people. I think it's a classic, perhaps the second best film the Wachowskis ever made. However, I can see why people would watch it and find the plot baffling and the actors playing multiple characters of varying races and genders either actively offensive or at the very least confusing and annoying.

However, for me, it's an outstanding and sympathetic solution to filming a book that to most would have seemed entirely unfilmable. The problem with adapting David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is that it's a book about words. About how words are passed through the ages, and can affect us in hugely different ways depending on our context. However, running through it too is the fact that humanity does not change that much. Problems that appear to be "solved" in the earlier parts of the story (e.g. slavery) come back in the later stories in various ways.

To see, then, these characters being played by the same actors throughout the film ties all of the stories together, reinforcing that we are who we are by the chance of when we were born, and how we were raised. We're reminded of this fact over and over when actors play entirely different roles, we know underneath they're the same person. It's a brave, creative, and sympathetic approach.

The film is a gamble from end to end. It's two creators pushing themselves as far as they possibly can. You can argue that some of it doesn't work, but to me it's one of the most innovative and interesting films of the 21st century.

Quote

"You're on Earth. There's no cure for that"

Samuel Beckett

Thom's Link Emporium - 0025 - July 11 2022

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Can’t really talk in detail about this week because the Civil Service requires me to be neutral, but in summary, regardless of the party in power, things like this are like the World Cup for the politically nerdy. It’s been an interesting week.

Links

  1. If you enjoyed the article about the struggles of TalkTV, this article about the struggles of GB News is a nice companion

  2. A fun, morbid, game in which you can guess whether a particular celebrity is still alive or not

  3. A comprehensive answer from a historian on Reddit to the question "What is the likelihood that Catherine the Great ever ate a banana?"

  4. A good friend of mine, Steve Lawson (you might know him as @solobasssteve) has been diagnosed with cancer. He's been a true inspiration in how well he's faced up to it, but you can support him by subscribing on Bandcamp (and getting access to a wealth of outstanding music)

  5. One of my favourite conspiracy theories is almost 300 years of history that never happened were inserted into European records (and, for this to work, equally plausible history records across the rest of the world). This short extract from John Elledge and Tom Phillips's new book about conspiracies is a good summary

  6. Kat Lister interviews John Wood, the producer of Nick Drake's Pink Moon

Listening

I promised last week that I'd share my favourite songs from the first half of 2022, so here it is on Spotify and Apple Music - any feedback in the comments or on Twitter gratefully received!

Watching

I really enjoyed this video of someone making the Flintstones car out of Lego. This version includes some pretty nifty steering which leads to some important questions about the original. How does Fred steer the car? Did Fred just lift and carry the whole car (including two huge columns of stone) briefly to get it to turn? I'd have thought the easiest thing to follow the route back from the cinema would be to swap the direction of the roof and go home without turning it at all?

Quote

When we get a new tool, we generally start by forcing the tool to fit the work we already do. Then, over time, we change the work to fit the tool.

Benedict Evans, Newsletter

Thom's Link Emporium - 0018 - 23 May 2022

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If you’d like these links delivered directly to your inbox (or spam folder) every Monday, you can sign up here.

Links

  1. If I still lived in London, I'd have snapped up this real-time LED tube-train tracker in a second

  2. How to build a nuclear weapon. In fact a lot of this is about getting enough enriched uranium, which to be fair, is the hardest part if you’re starting from scratch. The reason US only set off one test prior to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings is because they only had enough materials for two uranium bombs and one plutonium bomb.

  3. What are the features of a good audiobook recording? There’s a lot in here on why stage actors don’t necessarily make good audiobook readers. Similarly there are a lot of excellent audiobook performers who are not well-known in the slightest. It’s a very different skillset.

  4. Can lavender treat anxiety? In summary, maybe, and since there’s no likely harm, it might well be worth trying. The news on its effectiveness being through giving people lavender-scented burps is something you’ll have to decide on for yourself.

  5. Rob Manuel runs @Fesshole, a Twitter account where people can anonymously confess to anything. Someone confessed to putting rude words in the starting letters of academic papers, so Manuel reviewed 32 million papers to see what he can find.

  6. Schopenhauer's 38 ways to win an argument. From 1896, but it still feels very relevant for the social media age, e.g. "Ignore your opponent's proposition, which was intended to refer to a particular thing. Rather, understand it in some quite different sense, and then refute it. Attack something different than that which was asserted."

Listening

If you're a fan of Wet Leg, and if you're not you should be, you might like to see Rhian singing very differently in 2016.

Reading

I’m currently reading Solid State: The Story of "Abbey Road" and the End of the Beatles by Kenneth Womack. Even in the context of Beatles books, this is pretty nerdy and spends an awful lot of time looking at the equipment that was available in Abbey Road through the years and the specific change of a recording console that affected the tone of the recording. The book is better on the tech than a lot of the story (which, to be fair, really needs to be updated following what we discovered in Get Back), but it’s an interesting read if nerdy music-recording information is your bag.

Watching

Firstly, there’s a new feature-length episode of Detectorists being made. It’s one of my favourite sit coms and I really can’t wait. They'll have to meet in the new village hall, though, since the previous one has been knocked down.

A couple of weeks ago, I shared a video about RRR, an Indian blockbuster that hasn’t had much impact in the west so far. However, it’s on Netflix now, so I had the opportunity to see it. It’s three hours long, totally epic, has some of the best dance and fight scenes I’ve seen in years. It’s genuinely extraordinary. As an aside, I’ve got so used to seeing western blockbusters graded in increasingly murky shades of brown that seeing a film so comfortable with a bright colour palette felt pretty revolutionary all by itself.

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We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy.

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

Thom's Link Emporium - 0017 16 May 2022

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Links

  1. It's certainly no bad thing this child porn ring was brought down, but it shows how despite claims to the contrary, bitcoin transactions are far from secret and private. But the crypto community have a catchphrase, so presumably that'll help? The catchphrase ("we're all going to make it") itself has a pretty dark history.

  2. A British true crime writer with a colourful CV as a profiler turns out to be a charlatan

  3. Neil Armstrong responds to a conspiracy theorist who thinks he didn't go to the moon

  4. DJI claims that drone-tracking signals were encrypted. They weren't, but DJI kept up with the lie until proven otherwise

  5. Less than a month after I met my soulmate, I ended my 14-year marriage. The title of her book is a pretty good punchline to this piece (borrowed from Martin Belam's newsletter, which comes highly recommended)

  6. An update from Lawrence Freedman on the current state of the war in Ukraine with particular focus on the 9 May parade

  7. Douglas Adams gives feedback on a comic adaptation of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "If you feel that referring to ‘Marks & Spencer’ might seriously freak out Americans because they haven’t heard of it… we could either put warning stickers on the label (‘The text of this book contains references to places and institutions outside the continental United States and may cause offence to people who haven’t heard of them’) or you could, I suppose, put ‘Harrods’, which most people will have heard of. Or we could even take the appalling risk of just recklessly mentioning things that people won’t have heard of and see if they survive the experience. They probably will – when people are born they haven’t heard or anything or anywhere, but seem to get through the first years of their lives without ill-effects."

  8. One for the nightmare banks: Melted and damaged wax figures at Madame Tussaud’s

Listening

I’ve been enjoying Rosalía’s new album, Motomami. It remains a latino-pop album similar to her previous work, but it feels like she’s moved into a considerably more confident and experimental space and the end result is perhaps the most interesting pop album so far this year. (Spotify,  Music)

Reading

I’ve known about the stand up, Phil Wang, for some time (who can forget his Bruce Lee onesie-wearing appearance on Taskmaster?), but I was only made aware of his most recent book, Sidesplitter, on Adam Buxton’s podcast. The book is part-memoir, part reflections on being a mixed-race person growing up in Malaysia and then the UK. It’s funny, well-written, thoughtful and intelligent. Unlike, therefore, most comedian’s memoirs.

Watching

I watched A Hard Day’s Night for the first time as a teenager. Subsequently, I’ve probably seen it another four or five times. I like it, although I don’t think it’s quite the classic that some seem to think it is. It has its moments but it’s very dated, not all that funny, and The Beatles are not the greatest actors.

I’d never seen Help before. It has a reputation of being terrible, and it’s certainly very dated, both in style and culture. However, I don’t think it’s a great deal worse than its predecessor, and it’s pretty watchable. It too is very dated and not all that funny, and The Beatles haven’t got noticeably better at acting since their last outing.

All that said, it’s very watchable, it’s great to see The Beatles in colour, and although there should be a lot more of them, all the musical numbers are great. It’s worth checking out, as a curio if nothing else. There isn’t an option to see the film on a streaming service as far as I’m aware, so you’ll have to work out for yourself if it’s worth splashing out for.

Quote

Men who are inferior to their fellow men, are always most anxious to establish their superiority over women.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Thom's Link Emporium - 0016 - 9 May 2022

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Links

  1. Helen Lewis’s piece on abortion laws in the US and the differences with the UK is well-worth reading as a very clearly argued introduction to what's gone wrong, basically "this is what you get when you can’t pass new primary legislation: endless judicial chicanery and sleight of hand"

  2. Patrick Willems on RRR, the 13th biggest film of the year (so far) based on box office that there's a good chance you've never heard of. It looks amazing.

  3. The short version of this article could be "mushrooms are dangerous" but I didn't know the details of how they killed you. If you, like me, are interested in this gloomy science, then this for you!

  4. Amit Chaudhuri on arriving in London in the 1980s and studying TS Eliot's Burnt Norton. Eliot is extremely problematic, but still manages to be my favourite poet. The Four Quartets (of which Burnt Norton is one) is my favourite piece of poetry as well, and Chaudhuri does a great job of exposing Eliot’s fascination with the Bhagavad Gita.

  5. TikTok of an Amazon Echo connected to a series of singing wall-mounted fish singing the Spice Girls.

  6. The music industry is a messed up place to work. This review on Ian Winwood's Bodies draws attention to its exploitation of, and total disregard for, the artists it lives off. Added to that, once it's done with you it spits you out into the real world. This is a great article on how hard it is to make that adjustment.

  7. I've been enjoying the spring magnolia flowers and this is a love song to those wonderful plants.

  8. After Sam Freeman last week debunked the vast majority of "dead cat" strategies, this week, his father Lawrence Freedman points out that most false flags are normally false too.

  9. The Umoza Music Project are an Indonesian hip hop group. Their most recent single, Home has Paul McCartney playing on bass (and, unsurprisingly, he and they are great). If that's not enough, you can listen to all of Paul's bass tracks on Abbey Road isolated. They sound amazing.

Listening

March and April have both passed without me doing an updated playlist, so there’s one below, but first, my favourite albums from this month. Not all were released in April, but all were released in 2022.

  1. Chloë and the Next 20th Century - Father John Misty - If Harry Nilsson had spent the last 10 years making sardonic comments on Tumblr reshares. (Spotify,  Music)

  2. Topical Dancer - Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul - The best sarcastic Belgian pop-dance album you’ll hear this year (Spotify,  Music)

  3. Classic Objects - Jenny Hval - Experimental pop from the Norwegian songwriter (Spotify,  Music)

  4. Wet Leg - We don’t get many indie darlings nowadays, so it’s nice that undeniable indie darlings have at last got their album out, and it doesn’t disappoint (Spotify,  Music)

  5. Kaina - It Was A Home - Summery R&B from the Chicago singer’s second album (Spotify,  Music)

  6. On Early Music - Francesco Tristano - A mixture of early music alongside the pianist’s own compositions as though they make up an alternative past of piano pieces. Beautiful (Spotify,  Music)

  7. Next Stop EP - Portico Quartet - A short, but uniformly excellent EP from London-based jazz group with ambient and electronica influences (Spotify,  Music)

  8. Daniel Rossen - You Belong There - Grizzly Bear’s frontman produces a delicate and beautiful album that feels like his band’s work turned up to eleven (Spotify,  Music)

  9. The Dream - Alt J - A charming alt-rock-pop album (Spotify,  Music)

  10. Syphon - Wojciech Rusin - Experimental and hard-going classicaltronic music but fascinating throughout (Spotify,  Music)

And as promised, I’ve made a list of my favourite tracks from March and April that you can enjoy on Spotify or  Music.

Reading

You may end up a little sick of my working through Agatha Christie books, but my most recent one, Death Comes As The End, is particularly unusual as it’s set in Ancient Egypt. Christie’s second husband was an archeologist and she regularly went on digs with him. As such, the book is based on pretty good research and makes for a great plot. No Poirot or Marple though.

Watching

I finished watching The Dropout this week (Disney+ in the UK, Hulu in the US). It’s a fascinating story that shows that multiple, smart, rich people can be fooled when they want something to be true. It also should make us wonder if having twenty-somethings winging it in charge of multi-billion dollar companies is a good idea. Amanda Seyfried is excellent as Holmes and I was impressed at how good a job Naveen Andrews did of making Sunny Balwani somewhat sympathetic.

Quote

But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

Thom's Link Emporium - 0015 - 2 May 2022

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My final week of leave went by very quickly and the weather wasn’t quite so good, but it was, nevertheless, a wonderfully relaxing time and I’m almost looking forward to getting back (whilst also realising how well-suited I’d be to an aristocratic life of luxury without commitments). Anyway, here’s what my restful week has produced for you.

Links

  1. It's not a dead cat. Sam Freedman patiently explains that pretty much every time calls something an example of the "dead cat" strategy, it's not. I really couldn't agree more. I find it particularly stupid when people claim that a minor story is being distracted by another story that's catastrophically damaging to the party in question. Most of the examples seem like the equivalent of forgetting someone’s name and covering it up by shitting yourself.

  2. Do people get radicalised by YouTube algorithm suggestions? Not really - people who find extremist content tend to be looking for it or have "high prior levels of gender and racial resentment", and those without those priors that stumble across it tend to ignore it.

  3. A Guardian profile (from March) of Angela Gallop, a leading forensic scientist in the UK. Fascinating, and depressing on the current state of UK forensics.

  4. Helen Lewis writes in The Atlantic about Europe's ex-royals. I guess it never really occurred to me quite how many of them there might have been.

  5. Robin Sloan has some thoughts on Musk's purchase of Twitter. It's full of great insights. "His substantial success launching reusable spaceships does nothing to prepare him for the challenge of building social spaces. The latter calls on every liberal art at once, while the former is just rocket science." And perhaps most of all "The speed with which Twitter recedes in your mind will shock you. Like a demon from a folktale, the kind that only gains power when you invite it into your home, the platform melts like mist when that invitation is rescinded."

  6. Try out an AI that will generate images from text (e.g. "old master painting of a polluting factory" works pretty well). There's lot of fun to be had here.

Listening

I had a friend over for a drink this week, and as usual we exchanged some of the songs we’ve been listening to recently since a lot of our conversation tends to revolve around music. Coincidentally, I’d been looking into make a playlist of Beatles covers so it was great to be given this example, a cover of Lennon’s Dear Prudence covered by The Five Stairsteps (Spotify,  Music, YouTube) which maintains the interest of the original in a different, funky setting. Watch out for a full playlist in a few week’s time.

Reading

I really enjoyed listening to Ezra Klein talk to Emily St. John Mandel about Station Eleven and her new novel, Sea of Tranquility. What doesn't get much of an outing (I'm not even sure if it's mentioned?) is my favourite book of hers, The Glass Hotel which is a wonderfully well-told mystery which was published in 2020. It has a dark and somewhat distant telling, but the story winds itself around you very effectively. Well worth checking out.

Watching

It’s that time of year when Gardeners' World is back on our screens and I am unequivocally a massive fan. Indeed, I might go as far to say that it’s my favourite programme on TV. It’s certainly the one I look forward to the most. It’s slow and methodical, informative and interesting, and matched with some of the most beautifully filmed shots in hundreds of gardens. Monty Don is welcoming and delightful throughout and there’s never a sense in which the deep knowledge about gardening the presenters all have is used to belittle or patronise the audience or contributors. It’s comforting, delightful TV and it’s on every single week for almost the whole year.

Quote

Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

Thom's Link Emporium - 0014 - 25 April 2022

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Morning all. I’ve been enjoying a week off and have used at least some of it tackling the garden. For a small garden, I’ve done a lot of work for very little impact so far, but I guess the point of gardening is that it’s a long-term project, and I’ve enjoyed being outside in some lovely weather. The cats have even got involved, moving some of the seeds I planted through their own digging.

Plants, when planted.

Plants, this week.

Anyway, onto the links.

Links

  1. A work colleague of mine, Terence Eden, has trained an AI on 25,000 pictures of benches to produce pictures of non-existent benches. There's something particularly satisfying seeing the animated pictures of what the AI "thinks" a bench is.

  2. Music historian Ted Gioia asks, did the blues originate in New Orleans? There's so much in this article from a man who has about as broad a knowledge about this era as you're likely to find.

  3. A fully-working five-speed (with reverse) gearbox made out of Lego

  4. A wonderfully surreal corporate event. Surely this is what the end of pandemic restrictions really means. One day, the people dressed as, I dunno, grapefruit? will be allowed into the room.

  5. The man who stopped the WannaCry ransom cyber attack is arrested in the US, this article (from 2020) works back through his fascinating career. “Janet Hutchins had the day off from her job as a nurse at a local hospital. She had been in town catching up with friends and had just gotten home and started making dinner. So she had only the slightest sense of the crisis that her colleagues had been dealing with across the NHS. That's when her son came upstairs and told her, a little uncertainly, that he seemed to have stopped the worst malware attack the world had ever seen. “Well done, sweetheart,” Janet Hutchins said. Then she went back to chopping onions.”

  6. “How I Experience The Web Today” - seems pretty accurate

  7. Ian Leslie responds to a Jonathan Haidt piece in the Atlantic which claims social media as the source of a lot of our ills. Leslie finds it's more complicated than that, and - as I think feels right to most of us - that social media is both a blessing and a curse.

  8. There’s No Need To Wear A Mask On This Flight—We’re Not Scared! Now Take Off Your Shoes In Case There’s A Bomb In Your Socks

  9. Asking the question we all want an answer to - whose wang is it on the wikipedia 'Penis' page? If nothing else, this is a good insight into how information ends up on Wikipedia with the many, many fights that go on behind the scenes.

  10. And finally, here's a comfort for you (if you don't live near a military site), nuclear weapons are not as destructive as you think (basically, there aren't as many as there used to be and the largest ones that have been tested have been retired). How's this for a comforting statement? "To put this another way, each bomb can destroy an area of 34.2 square miles, and the maximum total area destroyed by our nuclear apocalypse is about 137,000 square miles, approximately the size of Montana, Bangladesh or Greece."

Listening

I’ll admit that Father John Misty can be a an acquired taste. He matches beautiful melodies with dark, sarcastic and arch lyrics which can make you smile but can also make listening to a lot of his music a little dispiriting. The new album, Chloë and the Next Twentieth Century (Spotify,  Music) is very much in the same camp as his previous albums, but is also the most tuneful and beautiful. A good example is the track Q4 (Spotify,  Music, YouTube) which is a darkly funny look at the production of content in a consumerist society, but also has a great, singalong chorus. The line "This ironic distance kept her sane" sounds a little like Father John Misty’s own approach to the world and it’s one I have a certain understanding of.

Reading

I finished off a Lee Child book this week (doesn’t matter which one, they’re all basically the same. Some day I’ll write about Jack Reacher, but this is not that day.) Instead, I’ve started a book about HandMade Films called Very Naughty Boys by Robert Sellers. HandMade films came about when The Life of Brian was being made. EMI was going to release it, but pulled out just prior to production. George Harrison, and his business manager, Denis O’Brien put up the cash for the whole production themselves (in part, at least, as a tax dodge) and HandMade films was made. It went on to fund and release many of the best British films of the 1980s (e.g. The Long Good Friday, Time Bandits and Withnail and I). It’s a great story well-told.

Watching

As I mentioned, I had this week off so I went to an almost-deserted cinema to see Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. The good news is that it’s probably the best of the three Fantastic Beasts films. Mads Mikkelsen is a much better Grindelwald than Johnny Depp’s attempt at a menacing Keith Richards, and the film almost has a plot that you can follow. Less good is that it lacks much believable character development, and I’m not fond of David Yates’s visual style (YMMV, it’s very much in keeping with the later Potter films). Basically, it’s fine. It’ll probably be the last one that’s made, judging on the box office trajectory.

Which is particularly frustrating since it doesn’t cover the biggest secret of Dumbledore, which is why he looked like Jude Law in 1933, but by Michael Gambon in 1938.

Dumbledores.

Fun fact: Dumbledore was born in 1881, meaning he’s the same age as Picasso, PG Wodehouse and Alexander Fleming.

Quote

[T]he primitive agonies of our childhoods live on into adulthood. Many of my patients, conditioned by Western psychology, feel that once they have some understanding of where their feelings come from, they should be finished with them. But we are not built that way. Primitive feelings continue to be stirred up throughout adult life. Understanding them does not turn them off. They are our history, our emotional memories; part of the people we have become.

Mark Epstein, The Trauma of Everyday Life

Thom's Link Emporium - 0013 - 18 April 2022

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Morning all. We’re sticking with Monday delivery for now. There didn’t seem a lot of point in changing it until I’ve had the timing change for a few weeks. Let me know if it does/doesn’t work for you.

For those excited about my personal news, I’m on leave for the next two weeks so you can see if that changes the content I find. I’m planning to do very little indeed and certainly am not travelling anywhere. I’m very much looking forward to it. Now onto some stuff I’ve found this week.

Links

  1. I can't get enough of reading about Crossrail's engineering, and this article doesn't disappoint. It really gets to the heart of the scale of the project, which will expand the tube network by 10%

  2. Man has tiny hole in curtains, room turns into camera obscura

  3. Patrick Willems makes a pretty persuasive case as to why the OC is great. As with most of his recent videos, it contains an ongoing story which you can skip if you feel so inclined. The main content is excellent.

  4. Michael Hobbes (formerly of the You're Wrong About podcast) expertly dismantles a New York Times piece on cancel culture.

  5. Data from Am I The Asshole on Reddit (for those unaware, a poster will share a situation, asking the question at the end whether they, or usually one other specific person is “the asshole”. Basically, it's an argument-solver): "Male posters were significantly more likely to be the assholes. They made up only 23% of the NTA [not the asshole] posts but 60% of the YTA [yes, the asshole] posts." You do surprise me.

  6. There's a fly species that's about as big as your fingers. I’ll warn you that there's a pretty good chance you don't actually want to click on that link. The flies are going to get added to my list of animals that I'd turn a bit of a blind eye to becoming extinct. Currently the Coconut Crab is the other member.

  7. There's some great form-replies to criticism here. I like H.L Mencken's "You may be right". Might use that for Twitter arguments in the future.

  8. A gorilla in a Chicago zoo spends too much time looking at the phone screens of visitors. There's a lesson in there somewhere.

Listening

This week, I've been revisiting a 2011 track by the band Girls. It's called Vomit, which perhaps might not be a word that entices, but this is one of my favourite tracks of the last decade or so. It starts off with a a dark guitar-led verse that drags and sways before dropping into a chorus that foreshadows the gospel coda where this song is going to meet its glorious end. The second arrival of the chorus tests the gospel waters even further, as a choir grows in the mix. In between we get an acid-infused psychedelic guitar solo before the real show begins.

The song takes one final reset in the form of a middle eight with the descending bassline that will drop us into the coda which is nothing but "come into my heart, my love" over and over and the song finally gives up and becomes the beautiful gospel track it was always destined to be. A Hammond Organ heralds the arrival of a freestyle vocal solo and the coda swells and grows until you wonder if the final rebellion against this beautifully crafted song was titling it "Vomit". A true classic. (Spotify,  Music, YouTube)

Reading

I started reading The Story of Wivenhoe this week. I’m not even going to link it, because it’s very out of print. It's by Nicholas Butler and was published in the late 1980s. It's quite a serious book and doesn't have the fun, if dubiously-sourced joy that some of Martin Newell's Wivenhoe books have, but it seems well-researched. It has informed me that my street name (Valfreda Way) was actually a misspelling of a yacht that was built in Wivenhoe, the Valfriya.

I accept that a book about the town that I live in, that isn't in print any more, isn't much of a recommendation, but I'd suggest seeing if you can find something equivalent for your own area. There are a surprisingly large number of local history books available if you look around. Their quality can vary dramatically, but it's great to learn more about the history of where you live.

Also, Wivenhoe is lovely. I very much recommend it.

The Colne in Wivenhoe

Watching

There's a new series of Taskmaster this week, the first episode was on Friday. Taskmaster is one of my favourite comedy shows . The guests are as good a collection of well-known and up-and-coming comedians that you could hope for, and the tasks set by (little) Alex Horne are well-crafted to make for great TV. All 4 has all the old series, including those produced for Dave. I particularly recommend the series with Bob Mortimer, who is reliably hilarious throughout his series. You can see some of his best bits here. His piss-graph (at the end of the previous video) is one of the funniest things on TV over the last few years for my money.

Quote

“From the bathtub to the bathtub I have uttered stuff and nonsense.” This is the bathtub in which the baby is washed at birth and the bathtub in which the corpse is washed before burial.

Alan Watts, Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life

Thom's Link Emporium - 0012 - 11 April 2022

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I’m trying a bit of an experiment this week to move when this is delivered to a Monday. I’m still writing it at about the same time, but delaying its delivery. This is primarily because I find I’m more inclined to read newsletters on weekdays and also because it means it can arrive at roughly the same time each week regardless of when I finish it, but I’m more than happy to move it back if people find that Saturday or Sundays are better.

Links

4 months out

Choose your cake

Sort poppyseeds from dirt in Baba Yaga’s garden

Buy wedding bands

If unable to afford gold wedding bands, seek them in belly of a talking trout

Listening

  • Ted Gioia on the "fake" music found (and extraordinarily popular) on Spotify and other music streaming platforms. I was loosely aware of this on Apple Music, particular types of playlist are full of music from artists that seem strange. This piece suggests they might be made by a tiny number of composers, for reduced rates, for stocking those playlists. Primarily it seems to be for the sort of background music, but speaks to the fact that people increasingly see music much more as a commodity that just sort of plays in the background like Muzak, which is deeply depressing.

  • In cheerier news, I’ve been enjoying the album Topical Dancer (Spotify,  Music) by Belgian duo Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul. It’s electronica, but with some humorous touches that manage not to wear thin. An example is the closing, deeply sarcastic track Thank You (Spotify,  Music, YouTube) which is a response to being a creative person meeting fans / critics, one would imagine primarily on social media “Couldn’t have done this without you / And your opinion / Enlighten me with your vision”

Reading

  • I think I might have mentioned here before that I’m gradually reading my way through all of Agatha Christie’s books. In her long life she wrote 66 detective novels and 15 short-story collections, but the ones that I find most interesting are the six novels she wrote under the alias Mary Westmacott. They’re sometimes described as “romantic” but considering one is about a woman considering suicide and another is about a woman trapped in the middle east gradually realising that her husband is cheating on her. They’re as beautifully written as the detective novels, but are laced with a depth of emotion not found in your average Poirot. I’m particularly enjoying Absent in the Spring at the moment.

Watching

  • I got around to watching Encanto this week, and it’s typically well-made Disney fare, with some great songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda. I’m not too sure about Disney demoting their animated movies to going straight to streaming, but the quality of the output certainly hasn’t dropped.

Quote

This is their world, starless and sacred.

They think it impervious. Impenetrable and eternal.

Yet all things change in time.

Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

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Thom's Link Emporium - 0011 - 3 April 2022

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Links

* Music producer Steve Albini writes to Nirvana to lay down the ground rules for recording In Utero. Contains such gems as:

I do not consider recording and mixing to be unrelated tasks which can be performed by specialists with no continuous involvement. 99 percent of the sound of a record should be established while the basic take is recorded. Your experiences are specific to your records; but in my experience, remixing has never solved any problems that actually existed, only imaginary ones. I do not like remixing other engineer's recordings, and I do not like recording things for somebody else to remix. I have never been satisfied with either version of that methodology. Remixing is for talentless pussies who don't know how to tune a drum or point a microphone.

Previously, Albini wrote an essay ripping apart the music industry of the time.

To understand why everyone was bemoaning the imminent Oscars takes last night, first, we have to define what Twitter is in 2022. It’s a fandom app for current events. The users on there don’t have anything in common other than an increasingly pathological need to consume either news as content or content as news. Which can get kind of dark, like when a pandemic starts or an actual war breaks out. But an awards show is the perfect kind thing to bring every pocket of Twitter user out of the woodwork. It’s essentially the school assembly that all the app’s different insane cliques have to attend. And then they use it to project whatever weird fixation they have on the rest of the platform’s users.

Highly stylized musical laments were acceptable—for example, songs representing the weeping of Mary at the cross of Jesus, or a planctus for the funeral of monarch or noble, especially if it were sung in Latin. But the actual melodic keening at the death of a peasant or artisan was repeatedly criticized, sometimes even prohibited, during the entire medieval era. In text after text from leading authorities—John Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine—these intense expressions of grief were singled out for attack.

Listening

  • Not all of the albums in this list were released in March, but they were all released this year. It’s been a good month:

  1. Crash by Charli XCX (Spotify,  Music). I loved Charli’s 2020 lockdown album, How I’m Feeling Now, but this feels like a great progression into more bombastic, extroverted pop. Pretty much every track’s a potential single, this is just great.

  2. Black Country, New Road by Ants From Up There (Spotify,  Music) Really fascinating album that brings together elements of indie, jazz and classical whilst still making melodic, catchy tracks. An excellent album that would have won in any other month.

  3. Life on Earth by Hurray for the Riff Raff (Spotify,  Music) Another strong HFTRR album. I’m more of a fan of Small Town Heroes from 2014, but there’s a lot to like here.

  4. Glitch Princess by Yule (Spotify,  Music). I’ll admit I didn’t listen through the 4:44:00 long final track, and this isn’t actually as glitchy as a lot of other music around, but there are some good pop tracks here.

  5. Plonk by Huerco S. (Spotify,  Music) Fun, experimental album that deserves a couple of listens.

  6. PAINLESS by Nilüfer Yanya (Spotify,  Music). I didn’t find too much all that exciting in this indie album, but it’s certainly a solid piece of work and I suspect it might grow on me.

Reading

  • I finished Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman this week. It’s another productivity book, but one that goes considerably deeper than most and is soon pointing out that your need to get tasks done relates to your fear of death. It’s up to you how much that appeals, but it’s one of the best books in this field I’ve read.

Watching

Quote

Before a man studies Zen, to him mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after he gets an insight into the truth of Zen through the instruction of a good master, mountains to him are not mountains and waters are not waters; but after this when he really attains to the abode of rest, mountains are once more mountains and waters are waters.

D. T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, 1926

Thom's Link Emporium - 0010 - 27 March 2022

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Afternoon all. Another Sunday edition this week. Mainly because I’m experimenting with some slightly longer writing in this week’s with a longer piece looking at Ringo Starr’s 1973 album, Ringo which contains all four Beatles and one of the most misogynistic songs you’re likely to hear today. Any feedback on the changes or anything else always welcome in the comments or by replying and you can share this to people you think might enjoy it here: Share

Links

  • Two thousand "attempts at poetry" were sent into the BBC’s Children Hour, but the producers thought they they were all shit so they gave the prize to charity:

Listening

Reading

At long last, I finished the excellent, but very long, The Making of the British Landscape by Francis Pryor. It’s full of little asides such as this about the extremely political roots of rambling and the Youth Hostel Association in the UK:

The Youth Hostel Association grew from the organized rambling tradition and played an important part in opening up the hills to a wider public: in 1931 there were 71 YHA hostels; five years later there were 260. The newly energized rambling movement culminated in the famous Kinder Scout ‘mass trespass’ of 1932, when a large group of Manchester ramblers confronted gamekeepers. It was a highly politicized occasion: Mancunian ramblers affiliated to the British Workers’ Sports Federation, under their leader Benny Rothman, sang ‘The Red Flag’ and the ‘Internationale’, as they walked towards a group of gamekeepers and temporary wardens in the moor. 27 ‘The pushing and shoving that followed saw only a few open fights; and then they left.’ 28 When they returned to the nearby village of Hayfield five supposed ringleaders were arrested and were later given sentences ranging from two to six months. This and other actions led directly to the foundation of the Ramblers Association in 1935. Today the hill of Kinder Scout is a part of the Peak District National Park and access to it is unlimited.

Watching

The majority of the road trip, now taking up most of The Nan Movie, were then written and filmed on the cheap without [original, now uncredited, director] Rourke. The animation sequences were then added when the reshoot budget couldn't stretch to all that was deemed necessary, which meant re-recording part of the soundtrack to add an early reference to Jamie being an amateur animator to try and justify it.

Quote

It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people. It is not our duty to understand the arbitrary, meaningless dictates of machines.

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman

Thom's Link Emporium - 0009 - 18 March 2022

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Links

  • Five books about the BBC. The BBC is such a fascinating institution, fusty and imaginative at times, bold and groundbreaking at others. But I reflected, as Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo leave the BBC that they could probably charge something in the region of the license fee just for their podcast. It’d be pricey, but I’d consider paying it myself. Shows the value you get from the BBC compared to the pay-for-every-subscription free-for-all emerging elsewhere.

Thinking of which, if you fancy subscribing based on that throwaway comment about the value of the BBC, here’s how you’d go about it.

Albrecht Durer drawing of some pillows and they're really good.
Another drawing of a couple of pillows by Durer. These too are fucking awesome.

(from the long-running and still marvellous Swissmiss blog)

  • I admit that I play the lottery semi-regularly. I understand the maths, I really do, but it’s fun to see it play out in this simulator that plays the UK lottery 1000 times every second. There’s something mesmerising about watching the money pour away while the centuries tick by. There’s some interesting things to take from it. By chance, you’re likely to pick up literally thousands of smaller prizes before you win the main one. I enjoyed this in the comments:

Can we run this simulation multiple times with different numbers to find out which are the luckiest numbers?

Autocrats such as Putin eventually succumb to what may be called the “dictator trap.” The strategies they use to stay in power tend to trigger their eventual downfall. Rather than being long-term planners, many make catastrophic short-term errors—the kinds of errors that would likely have been avoided in democratic systems.

Listening

  • I find it weird to think this Stormzy show in Newcastle was the tour that would have followed on from the Glastonbury show I was at two and a half years ago had the pandemic not intervened

  • I’ve been really enjoying the album Ants From Up There by Black Country, New Road (Spotify,  Music, YouTube) - a bold album that's rock at its heart, but with strokes of jazz, folk and even minimalist classical music brushed across it. And, yes, that makes it sound a lot like a prog album (and I accept there's an argument to be made there) but it feels very natural and unpretentious. My favourite album of the year so far.

Reading

  • For months now, I’ve been reading The The Making of the British Landscape by Francis Pryor. It’s a wonderful book and I’m enjoying the detail of it immensely. It has a huge scope (the subtitle is "How We Have Transformed the Land, from Prehistory to Today") but Pryor explains it in a very immediate and enjoyable way. Those of a certain age will remember Francis Pryor from Time Team

Watching

  • The Baftas took place this week, and I didn’t watch them but I thought as usual they were pretty sensible. Glad to see a lot of recognition of Dune. I’m yet to see The Power of the Dog as well as a few others, but Summer of Soul is a very deserving winner for documentary.

Quote

“Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.”

George Santayana, Quoted in this Lawrence Freedman piece on Russia's potential for negotiating peace

Thom's Link Emporium No. 0008 - 11 March 2022

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Links

there is one emotion that seems to help us make good choices. In their study, the Chicago researchers found that sad people took time to consider the various alternatives on offer, and ended up making the best choices. In fact many studies show that depressed people have the most realistic take on the world. Psychologists have even coined a name for it: depressive realism.

And one more for luck?

Whatever the future holds it will hurt or please you less than you imagine

  • Vanity Fair interview Grimes. So much to love here, not least the fact that she inadvertently(?) reveals their second baby. I also like the idea of Elon Musk as a cheapskate:

“But at the same time…” I can physically observe her brain cells saying screw it. “Like, bro wouldn’t even get a new mattress.” This was back when they were both living in Los Angeles. Her side of the mattress had a hole in it. When she raised the issue, he suggested they replace his mattress with the one at her house. The mattresses are fine now. Still: “Bro does not live like a billionaire. Bro lives at times below the poverty line. To the point where I was like, can we not live in a very insecure $40,000 house? Where the neighbors, like, film us, and there’s no security, and I’m eating peanut butter for eight days in a row?” She is well aware that many see Musk as some embodiment of luxurious excess, and Grimes is here to tell you she fuckin’ wishes.

Listening

  • I went down an internet rabbit hole when a song on a friend’s playlist sent me off investigating Fred Again, someone who I was beginning to be aware of, but whose career I had never pieced together. The song in question was Daddy’s Car (Spotify,  Music, YouTube, YT Live) from Someday World by Eno * Hyde, the album that Brian Eno made with Karl Hyde of Underworld in 2014. Fred Gibson was working in Eno’s a cappella group at the time but showed skill in Logic Pro, so helped produce the album, and got Eno as a mentor. Since then, he’s produced and co-written Shotgun by George Ezra (Spotify,  Music, YouTube), and loads of Ed Sheeran and Stormzy stuff, but I came to know him through two excellent tracks from last year Angie (I’ve been lost) (Spotify,  Music, YouTube) and Baxter (These Are My Friends) with Baxter Dury (Spotify,  Music, YouTube). It’s hardly like he’s one to watch since he’s been successful already (a couple of Ivor Novello nominations and a Brit), but he’s certainly worth exploring.

  • It was a shock to hear Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode announce the end of their run on the BBC this week. Their show is probably the one I’ve listened to the longest in any format. I just hope that the way that it’ll be “alright in the end” is by them taking the podcast private, and preferably ad-free.

Reading

Watching

  • It’s got some mixed reviews, but I’ve been enjoying The Witchfinder on iPlayer. Tim Key and Daisy May Cooper are excellent and although the show is a bit hit and miss with jokes, I hope it shows enough promise for a second series.

Quote

An expert is someone who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.

Niels Bohr

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Thom's Link Emporium - 6 March 2022

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Links

“Here are some other facts, apropos of nothing: You’re close with your grandmother, but she still refuses to explain the significance of the cryptic map that hangs over her fireplace because “it’s too dangerous.” You’re self-conscious about your height and you’re allergic to roses. A local zookeeper has just been infected with a mysterious tiger virus, and he rides the same bus as you. Your kitchen is home to an extensive collection of high-end olive oils—and yes, that will come in handy later on in a hilarious, slippery way you’ll never see coming.”

“When I was a younger man, I used to handle negotiations on business acquisitions. I’ve lost count, but I probably did 30 or 40 multimillion dollar deals over the years. In more than a few instances, the acquiring company destroyed the business it bought. Not immediately, but it happened sooner or later. They didn’t do it out of malice or contempt. They often had the best intentions. But when forced to choose, they did what was best for the parent company, not the acquired business.”

Listening

  • My top albums for February (not necessarily released in February, but at least from this year):

    1. Time Skiffs - Animal Collective (Spotify,  Music) Tuneful mayhem from the indie stalwarts.

    2. Texas Moon EP - Khruangbin & Leon Bridges (Spotify,  Music) World music aficionados find a kindred spirit in Leon Bridges making what sounds like Frank Ocean outtakes.

    3. Live from Studio S2 - Hania Rani (Spotify,  Music) Solo piano music from the Polish musician and composer.

    4. Motordrome - MØ (Spotify,  Music) Indie pop star MØ returns with a fresh, inviting album with a dark side

    5. Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You - Big Thief (Spotify,  Music). Beautiful, melodic folk pop

  • Here’s some of my favourite music from February on Spotify and on  Music

  • Also, this week’s In Our Time about anarchist Peter Kropotkin was excellent

Reading

  • I haven’t been reading many books this week what with the extra time I’ve been forced to devote to doomscrolling. However, a few weeks ago I finished Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr. I absolutely loved his All The Light We Cannot See, and definitely enjoyed the scope and adroit handling of the various threads but it didn’t hit me in the heart quite as much as All The Light…

Watching

  • I went to see The Batman. It was fine, I guess. I liked the grittiness, Robert Pattinson was well cast as a sulky Kurt Cobain and I like the idea of Batman returning to his detective roots. Perhaps its best feature is that it didn’t end up with a couple of invincible people kicking the crap out of each other. But it was pretty long and I’m not sure it really sold its reason to exist.

Some Batman Bonus content

Quote

Take life seriously but none of the people in it.

Kurt Vonnegut, Letter to Gail Godwin, 25 November 1967 (From Letters of Note newsletter)

*Now called “Lucy and Tom at Christmas” to make it sound like a cookery’s show’s festive special

Thom's Link Emporium - 27 February 2022

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Links

Listening

Reading

Watching

  • I watched The Duke this week. Broadbent and Mirren are both excellent, and although the main character, Kempton Bunton, is insufferable, the film doesn’t outstay its welcome. It’s quite interesting to see a period of time in which the elderly seemed some of the most marginalised people in society.

Quote

Because here we are. This, right here, is what we have been looking for all the time. It was right here.

Alan Watts, Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life

Thom's Link Emporium - 20 February 2022

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Links for the Week

Now Listening

  • More on Euphoria later, but at the end of series one, Labrinth, who scores the show chose one of my favourite songs, A Song for You by Donny Hathaway and it’s just perfect. (Apple Music, Spotify)

  • On another episode, they make use of Kelsey Lu’s cover of 10cc’s I’m Not In Love (KL: Apple Music, Spotify, 10cc: Apple Music, Spotify) which reminded me about this excellent clip from a documentary showing the astonishing lengths that 10cc went to to create the song:

Now Reading

  • I’ve been working through all of Agatha Christie’s books over the last few years. There have been a few that weren’t much to speak of lately, but I’ve really been enjoying Towards Zero, which is the last of Superintendent Battle’s stories. He’s no Poirot or Marple, but I like him as a character and this story is engrossing.

Now Watching

  • As mentioned above, I’ve really been enjoying Euphoria (HBO in the US, Now TV / Sky in the UK). It’s a bit like a high-budget Skins with actors who are already famous rather than likely to become so in a few years. It’s excellent and moving and Zendaya is brilliant.

  • The Danish film, Flee, telling the true story of a refugee from Afghanistan is brilliant and gripping and rightly nominated for many awards. You can watch Flee on Curzon Home Cinema in the UK.

  • Similarly, the The Real Charlie Chaplin is an excellent documentary on the filmmaker. It doesn’t shy away from his many teenage brides and other problematic areas whilst also giving a fair view into his position around the McCarthy trials. A great insight into a fascinating, if troubled, man. The Real Charlie Chaplin is also available on Curzon Home Cinema.

Quote

People nowadays think that the scientists are there to instruct them, the poets and musicians etc. to entertain them. That the latter have something to teach them never occurs to them.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, quoted in The Spiritual Dimension by John Cottingham

Thom's Link Emporium - 11 February 2022

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Links for the Week

  • Cancel Culture on Campus. I’ve thought for a long time that the actual experience of college/university students is very different from what the media choose to portray. I mean, I’m middle aged so I don’t know a load of young people, but the ones I do know never seem to be these fragile people who can’t possibly hear any word that hasn’t been vetted. They seem like tough, thoughtful people with a good deal more empathy than previous generations.

  • Why is the internet full of cat pictures?

Another way of saying this is that cats are still-wild animals that depend on us for food and shelter. And it is precisely their innate wildness, bundled into small packages of cuteness residing in our homes, that make cat pictures the social phenomenon it is. The best cat pictures and jokes negotiate this tension between the wild and the domesticated. Cats getting stuck in the blinds or atop a door. Cats swatting a glass of water onto the floor. Cats dipping their paws into the fish tank. Cats sleeping on a keyboard. Cats poking their heads in toilet bowls. These behaviors are not unexpected for anyone who has lived with cats, but they continue to tickle our funny bone as they mock us for our inability to master their nature.

Basically, because cats are the best. I mean, you can have a little tiny tiger live in your house, and it’s haughty and beautiful and ridiculous. Here are my tiny tigers to add to the cat picture glut.

RICH LADY: Young Hot Rich Guy is going to visit! And now I’m going to make a comment about women that will land poorly with our twenty-first-century viewing audience.

SLIGHTLY LESS ATTRACTIVE BUT STILL PRETTY ENOUGH FOR ALL NORMAL PURPOSES YOUNGER SISTER: And I’ll counter that with a viewpoint that there is no conceivable way I would have held unless I was a time traveler, but will show me to be in alignment with the viewing audience’s core beliefs.

RICH LADY’S HUSBAND: (popping in) I’m just popping in to make a blanket statement about race. So I can learn a lesson later in this episode. See you at dinner! (leaves, almost bumping into Household Servant, entering)

Now Listening

  • Chocolate Hills by Khraungbin and Leon Bridges. Turns out that the combination of the two sounds an awful lot like Frank Ocean. Which is definitely a good thing. (Spotify, Apple Music)

Now Reading

  • Following on from Get Back, I’m reading Lennon Remembers - an interview from 1970 in which he eviscerates almost everyone that he worked with during his time in The Beatles. It’s an excellent exercise in bridge building that only Lennon would be likely to attempt. He still likes Ringo though, because who doesn’t love Ringo? It’s available as a book, but you can also just read it on the Rolling Stone website (part 2).

Now Watching

  • What went wrong with Drone Delivery? Remember when we were all going to get our parcels delivered by little drones that would drop stuff on our lawns? Well, turns out that working out how to do the final delivery, as well as the fact that drones can’t fly in a lot of places, means that getting a human to bring your stuff in a van is still the most viable option. Our drone delivery dreams will need to wait for another time.

Quote

Their musical group was formed in John’s image and driven ever onward by his restlessness, but without Paul he would have upset too many people too many times to make the progress they both craved.

Mark Lewisohn, Tune In, on John Lennon and Paul McCartney

Thom's Link Emporium - 6 February 2022

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Links for the Week

  • AI plays NES Tetris. It’s interesting to see Tetris being played in a basically perfect way, and it’s also interesting to watch the edges of the program cracking as the AI unlocks further scores and levels that no-one expected to see:

Now Listening

A little different for this week. Here are my top albums from January 2022.

  1. Dawn FM - The Weeknd (Another great pop album, perhaps his last? A lot of fun)

  2. Antidawn EP - Burial (I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago, it’s dark and intriguing)

  3. Get Back The Rooftop Performance - The Beatles (It’s a bit of a cheat to include this, but it’s the first time the full rooftop concert has been officially released and it’s a wonderful companion to Get Back)

  4. Fragments - Bonobo (Great, relaxing beats from Bonobo)

  5. Caprisongs - FKA Twigs (FKA Twigs’s mixtape is not far off being a fully-fledged album, and it’s really pretty good).

I’ve also put together a list of some of my favourite tracks from January (Spotify, Apple Music)

Now Reading

I’m re-reading some Jane Austen at the moment. I am finding that I don’t like Sense and Sensibility anywhere near as much as Pride and Prejudice (or even Northanger Abbey, which I have a real soft spot for). It’ll be nice to have a bit of a comparison by reading them relatively close to each other though. I’ll let you know.

Now Watching

I tend to watch Groundhog Day every Groundhog Day. It feels appropriate to rewatch a film that’s about repetition, and it’s a film that rewards revisiting. There have been a lot of articles on why Groundhog Day is a Buddhist myth (in this, the stream of repetition matches the Buddhist notion of Samsara) but to me there’s something wonderfully simple in the journey the film takes you on. Phil starts out by someone who’s bored with his job, then he’s confused with us by why his day keeps repeating, but eventually, he finds satisfying things to spend his time on. Phil’s discoveries about life are not major revelations, they’re stuff that deep-down we know too.

Quote

Planning and building a great sacred space was the necessary trial run for urban civilization – or, as he strikingly put it, reversing the traditional sequence, ‘First came the temple, then came the city.’ In other words, we lived with the gods before we lived at close quarters with each other.

Living with the Gods, Neil MacGregor

Thom's Link Emporium - 28 January 2022

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Links for the Week

  • The Year of Duke Ellington "He maintained his orchestra for fifty years, while the post war shifts ended many an ambitious big band and traveling orchestra in the late 1940s, Ellington did not capitulate. He attributes some of his relentless drive to the fact that he wanted to hear his compositions played as quickly as he wrote them, by the musicians he liked best."

  • Wes Anderson and Brecht "The viewer finds in Anderson’s work a supremacy of both film and high art, differentiating his cinematic form from Brecht’s dialectical theater. Where Brecht sees revolutionary potential and empowerment of the masses, as he does in 1939’s Mother Courage and Her Children, in which Brecht portrays a war-torn Europe to encourage his audience to resist both Nazi Germany and the coming world war, Anderson finds ethics of warm affluence and nostalgia, of the individual quirk, and of bourgeois aesthetic control."

  • Ian Leslie on The Beatles Get Back: "When we meet Lennon in Get Back, he is in a fallow period, which has a dampening effect on his all-round confidence. Although, hang on a minute: can we really say a man is in a creative trough if, just a matter of months ago, he made Dear Prudence, Julia, Happiness Is a Warm Gun? When he is in the midst of creating Don’t Let Me Down? Perhaps it depends on who he’s sitting next to. In January 1969, Lennon seems like he’s drying up, and to an extent is drying up, because his primary creative partner is on a hot streak of epic proportion. McCartney apparently only has to sit at the piano, pick up a guitar or just allow his mind to wander, for songs to come surging through him. Months after Blackbird and Hey Jude, we now get Let It Be, Long and Winding Road, Get Back, Golden Slumbers, Two of Us, Oh! Darling, and more. Perhaps the question is not why Lennon is in a creative slump, but why McCartney isn’t."

Now Listening

  • For more the full Get Back experience, I’ve been watching what happened day by day, on the day throughout (their) January 1969, in (my) January 2022. Accompanying me is Chris Shaw and his excellent guests on I Am The Eggpod. For me, the wonderful thing about Get Back is to experience the contingency required for the canon of Beatles songs to exist. They didn’t have to be created in they way they were. You can see how some songs got close to being on the album but never made it (e.g. George’s All Things Must Pass). You see how songs come into existence (Paul writing Get Back is the one that people refer to, but I find it equally interesting seeing George explain how I Me Mine came out of what he was watching on TV the previous night). These songs feel unquestionable, they’re such a core part of our culture, but they didn’t have to be this way and I find that endlessly fascinating.

Now Reading

  • I’ve just finished Kenneth Clark’s 1939 book on Leonardo (I don’t think it’s in print at the moment, hence the lack of link). I certainly enjoyed it considerably more than Walter Isaacson’s biography. It’s all about the art, really, so it’s less of the “life” but I found it really engaging and exciting and if you’ve watched Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, you’ll recognise the voice immediately.

Now Watching

  • Final section on The Beatles Get Back, I promise. But I am, as outlined above, watching it again, and it’s so magical. I know there are a lot of Beatles fans out there who would love a similar project but filming Revolver, or Sgt Pepper (and, obviously I would too), but there’s something particularly special about it being the end of their career - all of the history that we know is already there with them. They’re living at the end of a time that’s so familiar to Beatles fans, and they know that the time is coming to an end, and mostly they’re OK with that and just enjoying these last couple of flares of being together before everything falls apart. And it’s beautiful and poignant and sad but also exciting.

Quote

If you feel restless in the here and now, or you feel ill at ease, you need to ask yourself: “What am I longing for?” “What am I searching for?” “What am I waiting for?”

Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Living

RIP to Thich Nhat Hanh who lived an extraordinary life.

Anthony McGowan on Walking in Cricket and Ethics

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I enjoyed this piece in the Guardian on walking in cricket (a batter admitting that they’re out), related to various schools of philosophy. There’s an awful lot to agree with (e.g. “although Plato is perhaps the most revered of all philosophers, I think he’s wrong on almost every important issue”) but there’s a few I’d quibble over.

The stoics, for example, are put down as batters who would stay quiet due to their faith in fate. But I’d say their focus on justice and courage would make them walk. I’d also argue that Kant isn’t "the greatest of all philosophers" and that his ethics, especially as he interpreted them in his own beliefs (e.g. "The race of the whites contains all talents and motives in itself”), are a rather mixed bag.

Still, that’s applying a nitpicky focus on a piece that ties together two things I enjoy - philosophy and cricket - and isn’t intended as an academic thesis. I enjoyed it and it made me wonder which category I’d fall in to. I’d like to think I’d be a walker. For me though, it was normally obvious whenever I was out, which was limited only by the very few times I was allowed to bat at all.