December 2009
35 posts
9 tags
The End of Solitude →
Dec 29th
3 tags
The Decade in Music Genre Hype →
(via).
Dec 29th
6 tags
What is good music? →
A review of Roger Scruton’s new book, Understanding Music. I like this analogy, where he uses Wittgenstein’s idea that music is like a facial expression: Just as facial expressions do not communicate something that can be understood so much as enjoin us to imagine what it feels like when we ourselves make such an expression, so too, according to Scruton, does some elemental aspect of...
Dec 28th
2 tags
“The central failure of these interviews, like so many, is that they operate from...”
– TIME for Magnus Carlsen - The Daily Dirt Chess News Blog. I don’t care about chess much at all, but that line is good. (via)
Dec 28th
3 tags
Dec 28th
4 tags
“And sud­denly every­thing he had been doing stood up…”
– The five texts « Snarkmarket. Great line.
Dec 28th
3 notes
4 tags
Dec 27th
1 note
7 tags
Dec 23rd
3 tags
Dec 22nd
7 tags
“I volunteered to serve food to the workers at Ground Zero after 9/11. There were...”
–  Sigourney Weaver. (via)
Dec 22nd
5 tags
Dec 21st
5 tags
Dec 20th
2 notes
3 tags
The best films of 2009 - Roger Ebert's Journal →
“There was hell to pay last year when I published my list of Twenty Best. You’d have thought I belched at a funeral. So this year I have devoutly limited myself to exactly ten films. On each of two lists.”
Dec 20th
1 note
5 tags
Dec 18th
10 notes
5 tags
Dec 17th
4 tags
Dec 17th
4 tags
FreeHarvardEducation.com - The Boston Globe →
Dec 17th
17 notes
4 tags
Dec 17th
6 tags
“The crisis in performance is, I believe, based on one simple fact. When it...”
– Little Steven (via austinkleon). There’s some good discussion of this in How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll. A while back I tumbled one of the good quotes about music critics versus those who dance.
Dec 17th
4 tags
Having Fun With Elvis On Stage (1974) →
austinkleon: Having Fun With Elvis on Stage is considered by many critics to be the worst live album Elvis or anyone else has ever put out. This is because there were no song performances on it, only tape byplay recorded between songs - Elvis telling jokes, requesting a drink of water, and demonstrating eleven different ways to pronounce “Memphis.” Gotta have it.
Dec 17th
6 tags
Dec 17th
3 tags
Dec 16th
4 tags
Kirby dots - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia →
Dec 16th
5 tags
Yeasayer at Masquerade (Atlanta) on 6 Apr 2010 –... →
Score. I’ve been wanting to see Yeasayer for a while now.
Dec 15th
5 tags
Bob Ross: Teacher, Painter, Optimist - PopMatters →
An appreciation of the great public television painter. I loved this guy. “This was a man palpably at peace with himself, doing something he loved, wanting nothing more than to include you.”
Dec 14th
22 notes
5 tags
“Someone from R.E.M. was saying to me the other night, ‘Get nervous when...”
– Thom Yorke on the perils of fame. Addicted to Noise interview, 1996.
Dec 14th
3 tags
“Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old,...”
– Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook [pdf].
Dec 14th
3 tags
Dec 13th
1 note
3 tags
Dec 11th
9 notes
5 tags
Dec 11th
10 notes
5 tags
The War on Mediocrity - Heuristic roundup '09 →
“The heuristics on this list are easily memorable and implementable life problem-solving strategies — “quick and dirty” ones, if you like — that I’ve drawn from experience which, even if they prove shaky in border cases, still work most of the time.”
Dec 10th
5 tags
“To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as...”
– Joan Didion (via bobulate)
Dec 9th
12 notes
4 tags
Dec 8th
3 tags
Dec 7th
5 tags
Dec 7th