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Last weekend I went to see my friend Andrew Raiskums conduct his terrific choral outfit Gloriana in one of their quarterly performances. It’s an amateur group – the thirty or so choir members (one of whom rejoices in the name Kate Gondwana) do it out of love and desire; you can tell. The drawings here [...]
Driving along and someone says, What’s that?
We all listen hard to the radio.
‘Elgar?’ I say. ‘And it’s got a bit of Jerusalem.’
‘Very Anglican church,’ says the driver.
A bit later the announcer tells us the wonderful stuff was the Jupiter section of Gustav Holst’s The Planets.
Which was a perfect excuse to go to Pristine Classical, [...]
Bye, Pop! Pop waves g’bye. So does Now take its leave of us …
Crashingbore, we had to drive five forsaken hours through dust and dirt – and at the next stop, in the little coal mining boomtown of Blackwater, Qld, between Bluff and Comet, we stocked up on water, fruit, alcohol (not for onboard consumption), [...]
Had to share: this is the extraordinary photograph taken by John Wright for the August cover of Q magazine (see previous post). Wright was given a minute and a half to do it.
In the issue Wright recalls: ‘He was very polite – he shook everybody’s hand. He’s very quietly spoken, but he had a normal [...]
Or should that be, Are you young enough*?
Back from my break (more later). During which we had to make a five hour drive cross-country, each way – in a small town we bought some cheap greatest hits to fill dead air, which gave rise to a music midlife crisis (later).
As it happened I had brought [...]
… all sorts of stuff gets drawn into its gravity field. In the blinding wake of michaeljackson’s death I collected a couple of odd, polar-opposite items.
Item one: michaeljackson writes an eulogy for Curly of The Three Stooges.
Item two: Miles Davis covers a michaelackson hit and it remains in his live set to the end.
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ONE (via [...]
Sick of the vulture sessions yet? michaeljackson nailed it in his ‘83 lyric, Wanna Be Startin’ Something:
You’re a vegetable, you’re a vegetable
Still they hate you, you’re a vegetable
You’re just a buffet, you’re a vegetable
They eat off of you, you’re a vegetable
Nonetheless, here are two notions I haven’t seen elsewhere:
1. By his legendary 1983 Motown performance [...]
On the day he died I scrounged around for the music. The vinyl of Thriller and Bad are sealed within a staircase of boxes. No CDs or MP3s. Finally, the Off the Wall cassette (!) bought in Tokyo in the early ’90s. In the slot, ker-chunk. The tape stutters to the end of the spool [...]
…be televised.
The slogan much bandied about recently comes from Gil Scott-Heron’s magnificent “proto-rap”. It was a prescient line: in Iran, television is a state apparatus. The uprising was cell-phoned, youtubed, tweeted and aggregated by private users and technologies.
fyi: lyrics at the youtube page.
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