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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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Politics ain’t beanbag
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Here in the UK, the Government has been criticised for “climbing down” in its presentation of a new bill to curb smoking in pubs: instead of an outright ban, it will allow smoking in private clubs and in pubs where “food” is not served (where the definition of “food” isn’t quite settled). Whether you think…
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Postmodernists and Scientists, partying together
In the nineties, after the infamous Sokal “Social Text” Hoax, it became fashionable to lambaste post-scructuralist/postmodernist academia for its misunderstanding and misappropriation of science and scientific terms — from “relativity” to “uncertainty principle” to “paradigm shift”. The latter itself is of course a term from the history and philosophy of science: Thomas Kuhn‘s description of…
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Teaching
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Regular readers may have noted a slackening of my posting pace over the last couple of weeks. For the first time in life, I’m earning my keep doing what most people think a “University Lecturer” (a.k.a. “College Professor” in the US) gets paid to do: teaching (in fact, most of our professional stature and advancement…
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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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Howl at 50; Happy New Year
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This week marks the 50th anniversary of the first reading of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”, most famously an angry eulogy for the destruction wrought by McCarthyite fifties America: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded…
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Tugging the Forelock
All from The Observer Review, 2 October 2005: “Robyn Hitchcock and Roy Harper gave individualistic tugs of the forelock to master Bob” –Praise be to Bob almighty, Neil Spencer “I have noticed over the years that even guys who own no other ‘female wailing rubbish’ happily tug the forelock to the majesty that is La…
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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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The BBC, the Big Bang and WMAP
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For some reason, the BBC’s Today Program had a feature on the Big Bang and its purported problems confronting modern data. Apart from the woefully misguided Eric Lerner, the discussion was relatively nuanced and at least attempted to distinguish between a wrong theory and an incomplete one — the questions that the Big Bang, as…