Love is the opening door
Good evening,
Hope you're well.
Our family has been ending the day with an episode of the Little House on the Prairie. If Netflix were going to do a contemporary update; a little bit True Detective, a little bit Shetland, a little bit Yellowstone, they could do worse than use this gorgeous music. Florence Price's String Quartet No. 2 in A Minor (1935). YouTube
Speaking of gorgeous. TikTok served me up this by Lani Hall.
Things to like: the lazy, floaty, stroky bass. The completely minimal male backing vocals, barely there, like he's doing it from bed, just an occasional love. Simple, delicious lyrics: love is the opening door. Here's the YouTube
Lani Hall used to be the singer for Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66. This doesn't sound like that. She also sang Never Say Never Again. It doesn't sound like that either.
Wardrobe Strategy is the best instagram account I've come across in ages. Clever, funny, insightful writing about clothes and famous people wearing them. She quotes Patti Smith:
“I cut out all the pictures I could find of Keith Richards. I studied them for a while and took up the scissors, machete-ing my way out of the folk era
"Catherine Christer Hennix drew on global and minimal sounds to compose her music. Though she toiled mostly in obscurity for many years, her work has had something of a revival in the 21st century...She fused minimalist drones, mathematical logic and global spiritual traditions into an approach she called “infinitary composition,” She died on Sunday at her home in Istanbul. She was 75."
Hennix won't be everyone's cup of tea. You could start with these three minutes of double basses, but I can really recommend surrendering to 'Blues Alif Lam Mim In The Mode Of Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis'
Tilda Swinton was asked what she dreams about:
"Forgetting things. The heady possibility of travelling without mislaid passports. Breathing under the sea. I’m not particularly forgetful but there are such exertions needed for travel, especially because, when I’m at home, I do sink down into the loam a bit. I always think if you work in cities, it probably keeps you on the boil, but I’m not at all on the boil at home."
UPDATE
Last month I asked you to fill in this form if you wanted to receive "a free physical thing...In the post". Bless you for your digitalness but quite a few of you just filled in your email address. I'm sorry but I can't send physical things to email addresses. I've made it clearer on the form that what I'm after is your postal address, if you'd like to have another go please do.
SELF-PROMOTIONAL NEWS
The esteemed Adam Morgan was kind enough to interview me for his podcast. First about Do Interesting. Second about PPT. I've been unable to listen back, I hope it's OK, but Adam is a masterful interviewer and I imagine he's made more sense of both topics than I did.
I'll give you back your day.
See you in 2024.
(There are 913 of you. The Kildare Poems (British Library Harley MS 913) are a group of sixteen poems written in an Irish dialect of Middle English and dated to the mid-14th century. Two of the poems are:
The Land of Cokaygne: a satirical piece about a corrupt community of monks, who lead a life of fantastic luxury and dissipation in the mythical land of Cockaigne.
and
Five hateful things: a short, seven-line poem expressing a gnomic saying about human vices)