Mixed lollies
Our muse this month is one-time Bollywood beauty Mumtaz Begum Jehan Dehlav and, as George Costanza was inclined to say, “I’m back in business, baby!” A truckload of lollies has been accumulating since last month, and I’m talking wide-load, long vehicle here.Mark offers us this Slate piece on smoking; Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear’s convincing argument that binge drinking is good for you; and hyphens perishing in the name of so-called progress. We at NZBC are liable to paraphrase Heinrich Heine on this matter: “Wherever hyphens will be spurned, apostrophes also, in the end, are spurned.”
Meanwhile, an Englishman is becoming the most feared man in American letters; and (as Mr Stratford points out) what a great and accurate analogy that is in the final paragraph. Also via Mr Broatch, from the pages of the Guardian, the man who plays insensitive and arrogant anaesthetist Guy Secretan on The Green Wing; and the wise but mirthless Pamela Stephenson.
As usual, Stephen has the lion’s share of lollies. There have been a number of online discussions about why recent audio CDs don’t sound great (“when there’s no quiet, there can be no loud”), and this video demonstrates the effect nicely. The artistic validity of smoking on stage is under attack over at Tim Worstall’s blog. Robert Fripp of King Crimson in League of Gentlemen mode (that’s the band, not the comedy troupe), and oh, how much fun that so does not look. So thank God for the “Young Americans”, Levin and Belew. Still on Great British music, Stephen and I liked this nostalgic anecdote about Kevin Ayres:
“Kevin can be cripplingly shy,” Shepard says. “He tells a story about arriving in Berlin in the early 1970s. He met up with Iggy Pop and a newly famous David Bowie, and the three of them scored some coke. Kevin had a 500-Deutschmark note—his only cash, to last him a week—and he took it out and rolled it up. He used it, Iggy used it, then Bowie used it and pocketed it. Kevin says that’s why Bowie became a rock star and he didn’t. Bowie had the balls to nick his money, and he was too shy to even mention it.”Here we have a post-modern computer game review, from Stephen’s man at the UN; and a debate on journalists’ ethics, with Vicky Pollard weighing in. The Stratford Theory of Numbers is being tried and tested again, this time on Stuff:
“Surfing the net has become an obsession for many Americans with the majority of US adults feeling they cannot go for a week without going online and one in three giving up friends and sex for the Web.”Hmm... statistically that should mean, since there are a lot of frustrated people with web-obsessed partners, at least some of the remaining two in three are getting a whole lot more action.
Via Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen calls this Economist piece about his book Discover Your Inner Economist “one of the best book reviews I have ever encountered”. And finally, from Stephen at least, a quadruple-lolly of breeding, Chaucer, farts and, just to break the, er, theme, Thomas Pynchon.
I urge you to watch the video to ‘Dark Road’, Annie Lennox’s beautiful new song from her album Songs of Mass Destruction. The My Fonts newsletter has a nice story about the man who has redesigned Baskerville as well as its top 10 typographic crimes. On video, there is the making of the Six Feet Under title sequence—a TV classic in the pedigree of the Twin Peaks titles (hat tip to Matt Buchanan at CactusLab). And the 34th episode of Amazon Wire features William Gibson, talking about his new novel Spook Country.
Naomi Klein’s new book Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is about the economic practice of “shocking people into obedience”. There’s a short promotional film by Alfonso and Jonás Cuarón, the guys who made the movie Children of Men. Penguin’s podcast is very good, too.
NZBC friend Chris McBride recommends a short piece about how the “Edward Hopper landscape” in Truro, Massachusetts may or may not be under threat (doesn’t it exist only in Hopper’s paintings?); director Spike Lee talks about the elusive green light, proving that even those with major credibility receive rejection slips:
“They never really tell you the reason,” he sighs. “You never get the real reason.”And in LA you can now map your travel plans to avoid stumbling into a high-risk area. It makes for sobering reading. Thank God for most days in New Zealand. Stay safe.
posted by Chris Bell at 2:02 PM
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