“Blackpatch,” Judy Kuhn
“Midnight Radio,” Dar Williams
“Tears + Sorrow,” Common, Me’Shell NdegeOcello & Djelimady Tounkara (Red Hot + Riot)
“Build a Bridge,” Audra McDonald
“VCR,” the XX
“Pressure,” Rusko
“Shake It Out,” Florence and the Machine
“Dilettante,” St. Vincent
“The Shadowlands,” Ryan Adams
“Accidental,” Inara George
“Effington,” Ben Folds Presents: University A Capella
“Beauty Secrets,” Barbara Cook
“Mashed Girl (The Temptations vs. Cee-Lo Green), FAROFF
“The Page,” Chromatics
“Intro/Stronger than Me,” Amy Winehouse
“Castles Made of Sand,” Chaka Khan
“Oh You’ve Really Gone and Done It Now,” Duncan Sheik
“The Rain,” the Swell Season
“40 Mark Strasse,” the Shins
“Gunbeat Falls,” Shabazz Palaces
“The Other Woman,” Jeff Buckley
“I Crush Everything,” Jonathan Coulton
“Never Forget You,” Noisettes
“Never Goin’ Down,” Adamski
“Dust Bowl Children,” Alison Kraus & Union Station
“Terra,” Caetano Veloso
“Orphans,” Beck featuring Cat Power
“Court and Spark,” Herbie Hancock featuring Norah Jones
“Miss Broadway,” Glass Candy
“Cloud of Unknowing,” Rickie Lee Jones
“R.I.P.,” A R. Rahman (127 Hours OST)
“Madman Across the Water,” Elton John
“Ye, Renew the Plaintiff,” Of Montreal
“Always,” Kelli O’Hara
“The Moon,” Once: A New Musical
“Caught a Long Wind,” Feist
“I Knew You Were Waiting,” Aretha Franklin & George Michael
“I Can’t Help You Anymore,” Aimee Mann
Playlist: iPod shuffle, 8/31/12
September 3, 2012In this week’s New Yorker
August 22, 2012Some amazing stuff, starting with the cover, a characteristically dense, witty Bruce McCall special called “A Greener, Greater New York” (see above). Four pieces stand out for me in particular:
* Leo Carey’s biographical essay on Stefan Zweig, the once-famous Austrian writer and biographer whose name I’ve heard but never knew much about (he and his second wife committed suicide together in Brazil in 1942, in despair over the future of Europe);
* Alice Munro’s “Amundsen,” long, slow, and satisfying as her stories usually are;
* Jon Lee Anderson’s harrowing “Letter from Syria” (I hope he didn’t have to witness first-hand all the brutality he reports in the story); and most of all,
* “Altered States,” Oliver Sacks’s astonishingly candid Personal History essay (an excerpt from his forthcoming book Hallucinations) about his personal use of LSD, peyote, morphine, amphetamines, and other recreational drugs, which ranged from loosely controlled scientific research to the kind of self-isolating absorption that worried his closest friends.
Quote of the day: VICTIM
August 16, 2012VICTIM
“Victim” describes a specific moment in time, not a permanent self-definition.
— Dusty Miller
Quote of the day: RIGHT
August 12, 2012RIGHT
You can always count on Americans to do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else.
— Winston Churchill




