Holdsworth, to me, was this strange, shimmering, imposing palisade around something I was not at peace enough with myself to do more than touch with my fingertips so that I could feel its electricity course softly through me, through my heart and loin and toes. I couldn't do more not because it was too intense, but because it was too delicate; as ( Read more... )

Because I am so wise, and because I want to have various things I've said on Facebook (and others've said on my wall) in one place without navigating through ads, poor design, stupid things I've said (I'm mostly not wise at all), ephemera, and Trump posts, of FB, I'm archiving selected posts and comments below the fold. Reverse chronological order ( Read more... )

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I want to talk a bit about the mesmerising quality of the second single from Radiohead's new album. It's to some extent rhythmic, melodic and textural, but mainly harmonic; and is so in a really fascinating and fresh way ( Read more... )

I've been exploring music the last while, and found a musician I'm really fallen for, and who I think johnny9fingers will also fall for, if he doesn't know her already. So here he goes, because I don't know how less publicly to send her him.

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I don't know whether the reason I find it extremely hard to listen to this -

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- but find it much easier to listen to this -

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- is to do with the former being much more saccharine and seductive and adolescently emotional than the latter, or whether it's because my response to my what-for-lack-of-a-better-term-I'll-call-romantic loneliness for ( Read more... )

Welcome! opens Coleman, Welcome! to this building of great stone classically formed, its dignified and disdainful façade opening to silent cathedral halls of the white man's painted canvases, its doors reluctantly open to all rich or lucky enough to be able to pay pilgrimage since those doors first opened in October eighteen eighty-eight, an ( Read more... )

So having spent many hours slowly sailing through the Unterzee, captaining a ship entirely unfit for purpose, I finally saved up enough echoes to invest in a cargo ship, that I might be able to work the thin profit margins better and advance the game's well-written terror-ridden stories. It was huge and ever so ponderous, but it could carry massive ( Read more... )

The Ulysses reading group is still going strong (five weeks? left), and we've some of us agreed to continue on to Beckett's prose works afterwards. I'm also reading The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert in my own time (and have read a fair few contemporary novels recently, as well webcomics, poetry, graphic novels, etc.), reading and ( Read more... )

Tomorrow starts a reading group in which we read Ulysses alongside and in the order of The Odyssey (in order to see what happens!), so my weekend has been reading the first chapter of each. The translation of The Odyssey I have this time is Chapman's, and it's really astonishing. But Ulysses is something of a different order again. The life and ( Read more... )

I had a dream where I visited the Berliner Philharmoniker on a Saturday afternoon when they had loads of public musical education things going on, including Simon Rattle giving a violin masterclass that the public could look in on. (As I passed, I saw two cellists looking in through the glass trying to overhear and follow his instructions.) There ( Read more... )