One of the most lovely pieces of snark, and/or early example of an Easter egg on an album cover. This is TUBULAR BELLS by Mike Oldfield (1973), and faintly printed in the lower left corner we find:
“This stereo record cannot be played on old tin boxes no matter what they are fitted with. If you are in possession of such equipment please hand it in to the nearest police station.”
(I write this to put it on the web. If Google is to be believed, no one else has written about it.)
A friend has long sworn by the coffee this remarkable object makes. The Cona coffee maker. But I also find it extremely elegant to look at. The design is by Abram Games. The device is still available from Gezang.
Mr. Games is more famous as a poster designer. Here’s his work for the then-upcoming centenary of the Royal Shakespeare Company, in 1975. It uses the titles of each of the plays.
Here at Mission, one of my fellow residents is quite old — 99.
I thought about that a little bit. So he was born in 1922. That’s not right. Surely a 99-year-old was born in the 1800s. Horse-drawn carriages, not Duesenbergs and gin.
I think that way because for so much of life, it was true. But time advances, and now 99 years reaches back only to the Jazz Age, instead of the McKinley administration.
Jason Kottke has something he calls “The Great Span”: “(T)he link across large periods of history by individual humans.” The last surviving child of a Civil War veteran (and thus drawing an Army pension) died in 2020. Units of 99 years (sometimes called “Bettys,” after Betty White) definitely qualify, but it’s stunning how quickly that event horizon moves on.
At least to this 60-year-old.
“As a man, his character cannot be spoken of too highly; no stain of cruelty or faithlessness rests on him.”
That’s an old fashioned, but quite wonderful, assessment of a life. It comes from the 11th Edition Britannica, discussing Étienne Macdonald, one of Napoleon’s marshals.
(To explain his surprising last name: His father was a Jacobite exile, who was of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s retinue. The elder Macdonald married well, giving his son the background to have a chance to advance in the Army.)
“Another of this wonderful woman’s wonderful sayings (I told you—I got a million of ‘em; don’t make me prove it) was “Milk always takes the flavor of what’s next to it in the icebox.” Not a very useful saying, you might think, but I suspect it’s not only the reason I’m writing this introduction, but the reason I’m writing it the way I’m writing it.
Does it sound like Harlan wrote it?
It does?
That’s because I just finished the admirable book which follows. For the last four days I have been, so to speak, sitting next to Harlan in the icebox. I am not copying his style; nothing as low as that. I have, rather, taken a brief impression of his style, the way that, when we were kids, we used to be able to take a brief impression of Beetle Bailey or Blondie from the Sunday funnies with a piece of Silly Putty (headline in the New York Times Book Review: KING OFFERS EERILY APT METAPHOR FOR HIS OWN MIND!!).”
— Stephen King, from his introduction to Harlan Ellison’s Stalking the Nightmare
I once asked film critic Leonard Maltin how much movie production experience he had. He answered, “You don’t need to be a Cordon Bleu chef to know the omelette needs more salt.”
Michael Chabon has done an interesting project, that he calls “The Shelves of Time.”
“An imaginary reconstruction of the Fantasy & Science Fiction section at Page One Books, Columbia, MD, as aggregated and averaged by memories of regular, intense perusal during the years 1972-1980.”
It’s a kick to see many of these covers again, many of which I imagine will be familiar to y’all. It’s also a strange glimpse into Chabon’s mind.
There’s a version of this RIAA infographic going around that’s a) total revenues, and b) not adjusted for inflation. “Total revenues” includes subscription revenues, ie Spotify (or as Ulrika calls the model, ransomware).
This is sales only, and also unadjusted for inflation. But I’m calling your attention to it for two reasons:
Now, it looks like video streaming really does benefit from economies of scale, and fragmenting the market is probably going to lead to everyone except Netflix imploding. Had the studios just stayed out of things, let Netflix take their cut, and kept everything consolidated, vast amounts of capital expenditures using shareholder cash wouldn’t have been wasted. Everyone would have been fat cats.
But there’s that damned ego problem. Faced with a second gatekeeper, the studio execs had to give it a try, other people’s cash be damned.
Oh, well.
One of the things about music services like Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube (and if you don’t think of YouTube as a music archive, you’re missing a bet) is how you can look up songs and find covers you never knew existed. Take “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”
Aretha Franklin – goes right back to her gospel roots. After a quick Aretha and choir intro, we get a two minute piano and Hammond organ duet, followed by Aretha and choir returning, with a building set of accompaniment.
Johnny Cash – this is late Cash. Spare, raspy, you can almost see the whisky and cigs nearby. Fiona Apple comes in about verse two, and does harmonies. Not displeasing — they work — but even I was surprised by the choices she made. (Ask Ulrika about that one.)
Elvis Presley – in an eerie parallel to his career, the first verse is a real surprise. Sparse, clean, clear, restrained. Then, with each succeeding verse, the accompaniment becomes more overbearing, complete with a soprano of the school of what Stan Freberg called “vapor girl.”
Roberta Flack – just a woman and her piano. A drum set comes in later.
As you listen to them all, you get to appreciate Art Garfunkel’s original clarity. Sure, his tone is an acquired taste, but everyone else has enunciation problems by comparison. You can always understand Art’s words.
EDIT: It’s spooky to hear the cast of Glee’s version, which is a note-for-note copy of Aretha’s. Instrumentation, arrangement, vocal flourishes, the lot. Oh, ok, they cut back on the piano and Hammond thing, but it’s TV — time constraints. But everything else.
When we visited Vienna/Wien in 2015, it coincided with diplomatic talks about Syria, at the Hotel Imperial. These were the first talks Iran deigned to attend, so the atmosphere was quite hopeful that progress could be made.
We were in the hotel’s Café Imperial when I overheard that line from the distinguished gentleman above, presumably in one delegation or another. If you recognize the image, it’s because yes, this is the source for one of my banners.