The next time you meet some person who is utterly captivated by some undertaking that completely mystifies you, give him the benefit of the doubt. Hold back on your instinctive imputing of excess spare time and hang the obsession in a tickler-file in the back of your brain to pull out and think about in the shower or the post-office line. If you’re very lucky, a little of that delight may rub off on you, too.

Too much time on his hands / Boing Boing
Source: Boing Boing

I noticed that touring — which is wonderful in some ways — is absolutely confining in other ways. It’s so difficult… you just can’t think about anything else. You try your hardest: You take books with you and word processors, and you’re definitely going to do something with the time. And you never do. It’s so easy for it to become your exclusive life, this one and a half hours every evening that you play. And I just thought, “I’m losing touch with what I really like doing.” What I really like doing is what I call Import and Export. I like taking ideas from one place and putting them into another place and seeing what happens when you do that. I think you could probably sum up nearly everything I’ve done under that umbrella. Understanding something that’s happening in painting, say, and then seeing how that applies to music. Or understanding something that’s happening in experimental music and seeing what that could be like if you used it as a base for popular music. It’s a research job, a lot of it. You spend a lot of time sitting around, fiddling around with things, quite undramatically, and finally something clicks into place and you think, ”Oh, thats really worth doing.” The time spent researching is a big part of it. I never imagined a pop star life that would’ve permitted that.

Brian Eno (via austinkleon)

Monday Assorted Links

When Procrastination doesn’t keep me from doing what I should be doing, I fall back on creating a links post.

  1. Digitized K-mart in-store background music (1989-1993). As Susie Bright said in her Facebook post, “This is a soundtrack waiting for its porn film.”
  2. Pick your guru carefully.
  3. 19th-century views of the Year 2000.
  4. Alternate Histories has released its 2015 Holiday Pack!
  5. The James Randi documentary, An Honest Liar, which I saw via Netflix. Randi fought the good fight, but as his nemesis Uri Gellar says near the end, “We won.” And as the movie shows, Randi’s own need to believe is great. The most bizarre scene is an old television clip of him hanging upside-down, escaping from a straitjacket, while a woman in elegant poofy dress sings “You’ve Got the Magic Touch.”
  6. We suffered a break-in earlier this year. Nevertheless, I draw the line at this.

Pre-Med: Preparing the Instruments

It’s worth stopping to consider what the Doc Martin creators did next. One thing we know they did not do, for whatever reasons, was go back to Simon Mayle. They needed a writer who could think in terms of serial television storytelling by creating a world that could hold a supporting cast of regular characters causing trouble for the protagonist yet also sparking off their own stories. The stories had to be involving and promise change without actually delivering it (if the castaways leave Gilligan’s Island, the show is over). And the show had to have a “voice” to go with its “look,” as everyone knew from the start that Port Isaac would be the show’s chief visual asset. Continue reading “Pre-Med: Preparing the Instruments”

A Facelift for Shakespeare

A new translation effort aims to make all of Shakespeare’s plays comprehensible to today’s audiences

Source: A Facelift for Shakespeare

I once interviewed an actor playing Hamlet who preferred using Shakespeare’s language in a production where the rest of the cast played a revised text. He felt the text was perfectly understandable if it was capably played, and that removing Shakespeare’s language constrained him from fully inhabiting the character.

I sympathize with McWhorter’s points insofar as reading the plays; but if I’m watching a performance, then I think the music of the words, and the actors’ skill (movement, intonation, characterization) will convey the meaning.

But the question remains: who would fardels bear??

 

 

The Price We Pay for Sitting Too Much

For every half-hour working in an office, people should sit for 20 minutes, stand for eight minutes and then move around and stretch for two minutes, Dr. Hedge recommends, based on a review of studies that he has presented at corporate seminars and expects to publish. He says standing for more than 10 minutes tends to cause people to lean, which can lead to back problems and other musculoskeletal issues.

The Price We Pay for Sitting Too Much

Pre-Med: The Doc Martin Movies

Telling the story of Doc Martin is a complicated business from the start: do we begin with the first movie, Saving Grace (2000), and then watch the two movies that followed– Doc Martin (2001) and Legend of the Cloutie (2003)?

Or should we instead watch them as part of the character’s chronology — that is, start with the prequel Doc Martin and its sequel, Legend of the Cloutie, that lead in, kinda sorta, to Saving Grace?

In a way, it doesn’t really matter since the movies have no narrative overlap with the TV series. Yes, there’s a Doc Martin. Yes, there’s a Cornish fishing village. Yes, there are a few key creative people behind the scenes who remain constant. But after that, the similarities stop dead. If you’re coming to the movies after bingeing on the TV show, it’s like glimpsing the face of a long-ago friend from a long way off, then realizing when you get closer they look nothing like you remembered.

But put the TV show to one side for now — there’s even a marked difference between Saving Grace and the two Doc Martin movies that followed. The Doc Martin idea that created an international television hit went through lots of changes from his first appearances onscreen. Continue reading “Pre-Med: The Doc Martin Movies”