September 2006 Archives

LEARNING THE GAME
or: How John Lennon Learned to Stop Worrying and Love His Inner Geek
Perfect Sound Forever

LONG BEFORE "POST-MODERN" became pure jargon, Buddy Holly put quotes around his "normalcy" to disarm rock machismo. Holly, the "King of the Sixth Grade," hiccupped his hormones out loud, flipping everybody's high school jitters into metaphor. His futuristic Stratocaster guitar gave his horn-rimmed glasses sudden but certain panache, and in a style crowded with "hipsters," "Marlon Brando with a guitar" as Jackie Gleason dismissed Elvis Presley, Holly pushed "normal" to extremes. On his records, everyday stuff turned radical. In musical terms, squeezing the eccentric from the banal meant deconstructing all the elements of song as recording, from verse-refrain-bridge constructions to bending analog tape to do your song's will. This persona, the ordinary as cosmic, consumes The Complete Buddy Holly (Purple Chick), last year's underground epic, a 10-CD remaster of everything Holly touched. This grand, sprawling patchwork weaves early 1953 appearances on KDAV with Jack Neal as "Buddy and Jack" with radio spots, alternate takes, even phone messages to reluctant executives. His chart action wedges a creative infinity into two years, from 1957 up to his plane crash on February 3, 1959... more

NIXON... OR BUSH?

HERE AND NOW story aired today: interview with David Leaf, co-director of THE US VS JOHN LENNON.

ARCHLY ANTI-STARCH

"I appreciated the relative anonymity of the actors (one doesn’t want recognizable faces in trash), but what is Samuel L. Jackson doing in “Snakes on a Plane”?"

--David Denby in the New Yorker.

WHERE THE PAST PEEKS INTO THE FUTURE

"Archimedes Palimpsest," a 10th-century parchment document, has been rotting for hundreds of years, besides being erased and painted over numerous times. And lost. And rediscovered. On August 3, Uwe Bergmann, a physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, spoke about his work at the Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory. It was a lecture that became a podcast that led me to this page, where some brighter-than-sun intense X-ray beams are now used to transcribe the Greek mathematician's thoughts.

Archimedes Palimpsest
Wiki: Archimedes

WINNER: MATH AS ART

Walters Arts Museum, Baltimore

MORE DREAMS OF JOE HILL

Mother Jones has posted an Iraq war timeline that's even better in its interactive edition: Lie By Lie

IF I WERE AN ASSIGNMENT EDITOR

Write me a story about how gas prices have fallen by as much as 20 percent in the past month, and do a comparison of gas price fluctations (relative to other economies) before the last three mid-terms elections.

CAN'T THEY PREP MATT BETTER THAN THIS?

HATE TO AGREE WITH THESE GUYS

Tierney in Friday's Times:

Compared with past threats — like Communist sociopaths with nuclear arsenals — Al Qaeda’s terrorists are a minor problem. They certainly don’t justify the hyperbolic warnings that America’s “existence” or “way of life” is in jeopardy, or that America must transform the Middle East in order to survive...

T-SHIRT SLOGAN TO LIVE BY

"I Never Thought I'd Miss Nixon"

OFF CAMP

"Pop Art is Beatle art," Susan Sontag

Let us be frank: godless sodomites is a COMPLIMENT in this day and age, ESPECIALLY if you don't get it. But we hasten to add: Annette Bening wuz ROBBED. (And we ADORE Helen Mirren. AND Jeremy Irons.)