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