Music
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Bruce on the Beeb
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BBC4 let us spend a night with my New Jersey homeboy, Bruce Springsteen. Selections from The Seeger Sessions, recorded with a BBC audience at St Luke’s in London, gave us middle-aged Bruce as protest singer, rocking up some folky standards. This may indeed be what the world needs now, but with its whitebread, bespectacled audience,…
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Looking for a Musical Offering
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OK, this post is a bit different: nothing to do with astrophysics, nothing to do with me. Instead, it’s an opportunity for you to do some good in the world. Sorry, I’ve removed the rest of the information in this post for personal reasons!
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Atomic quote
The nightmare of all art, as well as of all politics, is generalities. You cannot generalize. You’ve got to keep things as specific to the minute, as down to the wire, as possible. –Peter Sellars in Alex Ross’s “Countdown” (from The New Yorker), on Dr. Atomic, the new opera about physicist Robert Oppenheimer and the…
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Ever Fallen in Love with Someone?
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Don’t worry, I’m not getting all personal on you. Rather, this month marks the sad anniversary of the death of John Peel. In his honor, a scary all-star cavalcade has recorded a version of one of his favorite songs: the Buzzcocks’ “Ever Fallen in Love?” — Robert Plant (ok), Roger Daltrey (hmmm), Elton John (!!!!),…
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Holy trinity
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Revelations: Bob Dylan! Johnny Cash! Singing Hank Williams!
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Anybody can be just like me, obviously
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The best thing so far about “No Direction Home”, Scorsese’s Dylan PBS/BBC2 documentary, hasn’t been the hagiographic tone (although Allen Ginsberg is always a joy to behold), nor even hearing Dylan’s own flat, midwestern drawl, but the footage of his performances with his band (later The Band, who got their own Scorsese treatment in “The…
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New Orleans: Alex Chilton missing — found!
Among all the tragic stories coming out of New Orleans, the devastation of families and homes, I’ve learned that Alex Chilton is among the missing. Chilton was, first, the teenage singer of the Box Tops who had a late-60s blue-eyed-soul hit with “The Letter. In the 70s, Alex formed Big Star, one of those obscure…
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Idiot’s delight
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As much as I miss Today and most of BBC Radio 3 (especially Late Junction and Andy Kershaw) when I’m away, it’s always a joy to be able to listen to National Public Radio back in the US (it’s just not the same streamed over the net). Especially pleasurable this trip was rediscovering Vin Scelsa’s…
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Guitars, Chevrolets, etc., etc.
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A shameless plug for a very talented friend: go listen to the fine music at Warren Malone’s site, and when you like it as much as I do, buy his CDs. And if you’re in New York (or in Oxford, UK, in October), catch one of his gigs.
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Weekend notes: Live 8
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Live 8: Normally I would be cynical, or at least pessimistic of the prospect of change, but then Geldof, after showing a film of the poverty-stricken children of Ethiopia in the 80s, brought out one of the starving infants we had just seen, Birhan Woldu, grown up into a beautiful, healthy and well-educated twenty-four-year-old. My…
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