ABBA thread Ring Ring: Ask yourself whether the pop songs of today sound more like the descendants of the Beatles or of ABBA, and you'll have to admit that the latter seems more likely — a great deal more likely, if you're frequently exposed to K-pop, as I am on a daily basis here in Korea.

Essays I've been reading, September 2022 "Like being in love, yoga tends to produce banalities, however transformational it may seem to the person doing it." @lucieelven lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/…

Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life "Each participant is expected to suppress his immediate heartfelt feelings, conveying a view of the situation which he feels the others will be able to find at least temporarily acceptable.

David Bowie thread David Bowie (1967): Here we have proof positive that Bowie never sounded young in his entire recording career. On his debut album his voice is just the same as it was in his fifties, even sixties; I struggle to accept that any of its songs was actually sung by a twenty-year-old.

Chris Marker thread Olympia 52: Like even most Chris Marker die-hards, I haven't had the opportunity properly to see this documentary about the 1952 Olympics, his first film. But just two weeks ago, a terribly transferred (but more or less audible) copy appeared in Youtube:

Things from 1971 The Rolling Stones, Sticky Fingers

https://twitter.com/colinmarshall/status/1349875174351405056

Things from 1976 The Rolling Stones, Black and Blue

https://twitter.com/colinmarshall/status/1360155064313151492

Bob Dylan thread Bob Dylan: More serious Dylanites — a group that at this point includes most everyone who's ever listened to the man — have suggested to me that his debut album can safely be skipped, consisting as it mostly does of covers. But I'm afraid that's not how I do things around here.

Peanuts thread It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown: To the best of my recollection, I only watched this once or twice in childhood in America. Yet in adulthood in Korea, it's become a required element of my Halloween viewing, and each time I watch it I grow more aware of its artistic merits.

"In the office in which I work there are five people of whom I am afraid. Each of these five people is afraid of four people (excluding overlaps), for a total of twenty, and each of these twenty people is afraid of six people... making a total of one hundred and twenty people who are feared by at least one person. Each of these one hundred and twenty people is afraid of the other one hundred and nineteen...

Essays I've been reading, March 2020 "What one is invited to consider here is the notion of artists whose work mattered supremely at the moment and in the place it was first performed, and depended largely on the physical presence of the artists themselves." nybooks.com/articles/2020/…

First listening to the Beatles at age 35 thread “You can't have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers," Michael Tilson Thomas once said. "They simply define what music is." On another plane, the same is true of the Beatle, whose super-canonical status means I've never felt the need to actively like them.

Martin Scorsese thread The Irishman: John Woo once said that he uses gangster as heroes because the world he knew offered no other "men of action." I would imagine that Scorsese could, to an extent, say something similar. Using gangsters also increasingly means returning to the physicality of the past.

Thread of essays I've been reading "What is remarkable about today’s oligarchy is not its ruthlessness but its pettiness and purposelessness. An all-consuming megalomania might at least produce some great art as a side-effect. But this collec­tion of mediocrities cannot even do that." americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/the-re…

A thread of things Seoul has that give me serious reservations about ever living in any other city, to which I will periodically add: 1. The card I pay for transit with is just my regular debit card (so no need to “fill it up”) and it works in every city in the entire country