Music
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Marking Time: Longplayer
Yesterday, I went to visit Longplayer, Jem Finer‘s thousand-year composition, for the eleventh anniversary of its first note, played on New Years Day, 1999. Longplayer is currently controlled (performed?) from Trinity Buoy Wharf in London’s simultaneously desolate and overbuilt Docklands, covered in newly built flats and offices, with hardly a human in sight. Jem started…
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Good Cause #2: Revenge of the Mekons
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The Mekons are the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world. They started in the 70s as a punk band from Leeds but by the mid-1980s had picked up fiddles and mandolins to go with their loud guitars, and learned to love Hank Williams and Gram Parsons as much as they’ve sadly learned to hate the…
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Arvo Pärt at 75
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Today, among other less auspicious anniversaries, is one very worth celebrating: Arvo Pärt’s 75th Birthday. The Estonian “holy minimalist” composer has been featured at the BBC Proms this summer, including performance of his first new symphony since the early 1970s, his take on the St John Passion, and my favorite, the short, mesmerising Cantus in…
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Counterculture RIPs
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Two crucial figures from outside the mainstream of American culture have died. Tuli Kupferberg (1923-2010) has been hanging around, writing about and stirring up trouble in New York’s Greenwich Village since the 1950s as a writer, poet, occasional political activist and rock ‘n’ roller. First in the late 60s and early 70s and occasionally thereafter,…
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Sympathy for the Music Industry
A couple of my friends have got into a bit of a spat on the internet. Megan McArdle, a writer for the Atlantic Monthly, wrote “The Freeloaders”, arguing that file sharing, as practiced by today’s 20-something young adults, is destroying the music industry. Marc Weidenbaum, who writes the wonderful disquiet blog, first first answered in…
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Alex Chilton, 1950-2010
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I awoke Thursday Morning to an email from an old friend: Alex Chilton had died. Chilton was one of America’s greatest songwriters and musicians, blossoming first as a Blue-eyed soul singer with The Box Tops as a teenager in the 60s. He reached a short-lived and (at the time) too-obscure peak as the leader of…
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Adams and Glass in London
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I steeped myself in some imported culture this week — modern classical music by two of the most famous living American composers. Thursday evening I went over to the Barbican to hear the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by John Adams, performing his own new City Noir, written about Los Angeles in honor of Gustavo Dudamel’s…
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Born to Run
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Finishing off my summer of aging-but-still-strong rock ’n’ rollers and jazzmen, I pilgrimaged to New Jersey, the state of my childhood and adolescence, to see Bruce Springsteen play Giants Stadium at the Meadowlands, one last gig before they tear the place down. I’ve seen Springsteen a few times before: my very first concert back in…
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Elvis blues
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Today is the thirty-second anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. It was recently brought to my attention that I am now older than he was on that day. But rather than sit in the bathroom and eat cheeseburgers, I’ll just leave you with this: I was thinking that night about Elvis Day that he died, day…
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