Thom's Link Emporium - 28 January 2022
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."
An argument against apologising when we don’t respond to an email immediately "One of my favorite suggestions was to omit the apology and just write the email as you would if you were responding right away. “I think the other person cares more about the content, not the speed, of my response,” Giurge, the co-author of the email study, told me."
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
Pearl Charles is one of my favourite discoveries from trudging through many end of year lists. In the year of ABBA’s return, she released a song that’s as good as anything on ABBA’s new album. This year she’s back with another slice of pop in the form of Givin’ It Up, which is wonderfully catchy pop. (Spotify, Apple Music)
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