SCALES #5
Hello!
Recently I've been listening to quite a bit of music on my old portable touchscreen-enabled listening device™, which has taken on the role of an impromptu lab jukebox. Alongside the nostalgia of an outdated interface that isn't even that old (maybe circa 2009?), there's the nostalgia of encountering the slice of my music library that, according to half-a-decade-ago-me, was worth taking with me wherever I go. Some albums were favorites, some were aspirational, and some were an attempt to get to know better the obscure corners of my library.
There's been a lot of Laurie Anderson, prophet, and a re-realization of Sleater-Kinney's brilliance. It has also surprised me to hear much more clearly that the pop music that I glommed onto in high school and college was not, in fact, invented whole cloth by those musicians. I know I would read in reviews that, say, The White Stripes recapitulate black American blues and the generations of rock music accumulated on top of it, but at the time my understanding was more abstract. Now I can't help but hear the influences. It's a different mode of listening. Less feeling like I've discovered new sounds, and more appreciating the richness of personal glosses within a web of stylistic continuities and inspirations.
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So I've been listening to this podcast...
I really liked the formal inventiveness of "The EP" for the New York Times Magazine music issue, even if dealing with 13 short tracks is kind of unwieldy.
Trapping an ultra-cold quantum gas 'droplet'. And I thought trapping room-temperature liquid droplets was tricky…
"Sam Phillips, Sun Records, and the Acoustics of Life." Some incredible tape, framed around Phillips' founding mission to provide poor black and white musicians a space to record their music.
Should We Season 3 just started. I'm still puzzling over why this podcast works for me. I think it functions at its core as a very gentle self-help session: a model of how to take seriously, without apology, the project of learning about yourself, how you change, and how to be fully yourself. The hosts do this without falling into the traps of corniness or triteness. (It's also now the third podcast I've Patreoned, joining Babes of Science and Gastropod.)
Links
From the start of this year, Helen Macdonald on swan upping, tradition, national identity, and Brexit: "Swan upping is a progress in the old-fashioned sense, a journey upriver that claims the right not only to own swans but to own their meanings, the meanings of the river, the meanings of Englishness. You move through a landscape thick with narratives handed to you by others, and what you read from the banks as you pass is part of what you choose to believe about your nation and who you are."
A trio of pellucid Robinson Meyer pieces in the Atlantic:
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Why California can regulate its cars' emission standards, and why the EPA's pending attack on that ability matters.
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The ecological impact of changes in spring weather. Strongly reminded me of a talk last week about Adélie penguins on the Antarctic Peninsula—as the peninsula warms, the penguins can migrate further south where it's cooler, but it's unclear how far south they can go before the days start becoming too short.
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Further evidence for not thinking of the Amazon as "pristine", but rather as having been cultivated by indigenous peoples for millennia.
Looking back at a Mughal miniature painting: "I think I was moved by the range of this tradition, which swept from the shores of Europe to the eastern rim of the Bay of Bengal; that fused Persian lore, Islamic cosmology, Chinese aesthetics, European technique, and a welter of other influences; and to which I, as an Indian, could feel some kindling of an ancestral claim."
Rising nationalism complicates how to study global history.
The Danish-Greenlandic artist Pia Arke addressed the history of colonialism in Greenland, including the myth of "arctic hysteria".
On the nativist origins of the Met's American period rooms: "The rooms elided the influence of late nineteenth-century waves of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and the Middle East, along with the increasing importance of German, Jewish, and Catholic culture within the U.S., as well as Victorian innovations in design. They presented American culture as an early nineteenth-century fait accompli, in which rococo revival and neoclassical styles reigned supreme and home decor was all but exclusively authored by males."
Daylong conference at Harvard addressing historical connections between academia and slavery.
"In putting a critical vocabulary people were already using into a polished, appealing YouTube show, however, Quashie ends up providing a model for what a food criticism that speaks to a broader, browner, less-wealthy audience might look like. It’s fast food, framed as a product of its place and time, by someone who is winning and funny in front of a camera, and who happens to be young and black."
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I should have known better to claim the end of winter at the start of March.
—Adam