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The problem with the theory of the “uni-context” is that it’s an explanation of the behavior of Extremely Online People masquerading as an account of “everyone” or “the world.”
Absolute tactical idiocy by Tuchel. 🏴-🇦🇷
Don’t park the bus, England. DO NOT DO IT. You will pay. 🏴-🇦🇷
Watched: Eno. What a wonderful documentary: a film about a person who does generative art that it itself generative. 🍿
Back cover of the forthcoming.
In my previous post I used the line “Can you dig it? I knew that you could.” It’s a line I've been using for fifty years, since I heard Billy Crystal deploy it in a routine on Saturday Night Live in which he portrayed an old jazzman called Face.
Crystal’s routine was based on people he knew from his childhood, jazz musicians who came into the Commodore Music Shop on 42nd Street in Manhattan:
That’s Billy Crystal’s father Jack in the plaid shirt on the right. Larger image here.
Currently listening: Count 'Em 88, by the Ahmad Jamal Trio. Can you dig it? I knew that you could. ♫
Finished reading: A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies by David Thomson. Thomson is the best living writer on the movies, but this is his worst book, by miles. He seems to be judging movies for what was done to us by TV and the internet. Dyspeptic without being insightful. 📚
Dan Cohen:
Call me an optimist, but I believe that the majority of scholars, despite being under enormous pressure to publish, would prefer to be more engaged than removed from the fundamental pursuits and texture of their discipline. They enjoy wrestling with sources, data...
When Oklahoma! was near the beginning of its staggeringly long Broadway run, the great Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn saw it and spoke to Richard Rodgers afterwards. Goldwyn thought it was the best show he had ever seen, brilliant and riveting from the first notes of the opening number to the very end. He had never seen anything to approach its greatness. “And,” he added, “I know what you should do next.”
Rodgers: “What?”
Goldwyn: “You should shoot yourself!”
Yesterday I stopped at the McDonald’s in Burnet, Texas, and the young man who brought me my food said “Here is your luncheon, kind sir!“
Francis Young:
Religions are as significant for what they leave unmapped and open to the imagination in the supernatural world as for what they rule on definitively – and religions are often pretty bad at drawing definitive conclusions beyond their core tenets. So I don’t s...
I like to think that the imaginary crowd has a similar salutary effect on more complex thoughts. The audience does more than just make me imagine I might be wrong. It invites me to consider, from the diverse perspective of the audience members, the multiple dimensions along which I might be wrong.
Phenomena like these mean that thinking is never really a solitary activity. It is fundamentally social. Even when we are talking to ourselves we are using the socially orientated mechanisms of language to externalise our thoughts and feed them back “into” our minds.
Someone should write a book about this idea that thinking is “fundamentally social”! Oh wait.
I tried to log in to Bluesky the other day and was told that, because I live in Texas, I have to verify my age through some process Bluesky does not explain, though it is clear that the process involves some third-party site that might or might not be a reliable custodian of … well, of whatever information it demands. The page also said that if I don’t want to verify my age I can delete my Bluesky account. In the extremely vague circumstances that seemed the best option.
What is the very pinnacle of American music? I can answer that question: it’s this.
- Possibly Richard Rodgers’s most gorgeous melody (which is saying a great deal)
- Lorenz Hart’s masterpiece of a lyric, at once funny and heartbreaking
- The elegant and tasteful arrangement by Buddy Bregman
- And a vocal performance to die for by the incomparable Ella
There’s nothing to match it.
Here is the first in a series of four essays on the Second World War: Why has it been so central to the American imagination for so long? And how much longer will that centrality last?
Freddie on “Our Poptimist Dystopia":
Aesthetic hierarchy of any kind has become the last obscenity, the one judgment we’re no longer permitted to make, because to say that one thing is better than another is to admit that better exists. And if better exists out there, in the world of songs and books and movies, then it exists out here for us too, in the world of our lives, and that way lies the intolerable thought that we might have gone too easy on ourselves. Anti-elitism is the snobbery of those who have decided that the glory of great art is not worth bearing the thought that someone else might have better taste than we do. So we haven’t democratized taste; we abolished it so no one ever has to come in second, so that no one ever must face the implied judgment of other people’s preferences.
That story reminds me that my old friend Ken Myers, who has interviewed thousands of people in his time, started out in radio as a student at the University of Maryland, where the very first person he ever interviewed was Johnny Cash.
TIL that when, in 1935, Gertrude Stein did a book tour in support of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she visited the University of Texas and was interviewed by a student journalist named Walter Cronkite.
Nikolai Ge, Portrait of Leo Tolstoy (1882)
The first book published by Random House was a fine-art edition of Voltaire’s Candide, illustrated by Rockwell Kent (who also designed the company’s famous logo).
I hate VAR so, so much. ⚽️
The value of a papal encyclical — certainly for non-Catholics and maybe even for Catholics — stems not from the quality of the arguments it makes but rather from the quality of the responses it provokes. Leah Libresco Sargeant’s new piece is an excellent example.
I continue to be bemused by the sheer number of these AI-generated book-promotion scams — I get them every day. Most of them never make it to my inbox, which speaks well for current spam-filtering software, because they look more legit than spam typically does. This too shall pass, and I will be glad when it does.