• Though it did catch my eye. Apparently there is some sort of sub-sub-genre of disposable music for dance clubs which is called “lounge,” and the album art is often something like the picture below. I nearly always stop and look at images like this for a moment, though the music is of no interest to…

    Read more →

  • Aftermarket: Mercy

    Weekend Music This is from an album called Southward, another album that I sampled on eMusic only because the art and the title intrigued me, and ended up buying. It consists of old gospel samples mixed with rhythm tracks, synths, and other things. This is probably my favorite track.   Here's the cover:

    Read more →

  • It’s only noon…

    …but I expect this is the funniest thing I'll read today: The Prez could go seal-clubbing and much of the media would see it as a new epoch for winter sports. From the Telegraph, on President Obama's distinctly unsurprising endorsement of same-sex marriage.

    Read more →

  • The "super-moon" stuff from last weekend–a full moon at the moon's closest approach of the year (or for some number of years, I think)–was a little overdone, with many pictures of the moon looking truly enormous. But if you actually looked at the actual moon, you saw it looking pretty much like it always does…

    Read more →

  • Oh no

    Vegemite losing its appeal to young Australians.

    Read more →

  • So I went to see the Metropolitan Opera's Rheingold tonight, as I had said I would, unless I didn't. And I'm glad I did. I greatly enjoyed it. Visually and sonically it was very impressive, although opera singers were never meant to be seen in movie-style closeup, the way video productions show them, and it's occasionally…

    Read more →

  • Presumably you've heard about this. Conservatives have been having trouble deciding whether they're more amused or appalled by it. I'm very much in agreement with Ross Douthat's view. A lot of people have attacked it, quite correctly, for its weird vision of the heroine Julia as a sort of social atom whose chief relationship is…

    Read more →

  • Images and Sounds I haven't posted any pictures here (my own pictures, that is) for a while. The reason is partly that I haven't been taking very many, and partly that I haven't sorted through the ones I have taken over the past months. And the reason for both those things is lack of time.…

    Read more →

  • I've just been browsing in the most recent issue of The New Criterion, which is a memorial issue for Hilton Kramer, the magazine's founder, who died recently. During the time I've been reading TNC–a little over ten years–Kramer hasn't appeared very often in its pages, and so I really don't know that much about him,…

    Read more →

  • Ride: Vapour Trail

    Weekend Music Yeah, ok, I can't resist starting this up again,  mainly because there's always something I want to share. This is one of the bands of the early '90s for whom the term "shoegazer" was coined. Originally it referred to peforming mannerisms: standing still, looking down. Now it means…well, stuff that sounds something like…

    Read more →