Earlier this year in March Bob Dylan released ‘Murder Most Foul’. Nick Cave wrote about the song in The Red Hand Files Issue #91 in April. Now in November I’m finally able to do what I couldn’t find time to do back then, and that is direct your attention to both.
I saw Sam Baker in January by chance. It was AmericanaFest UK. My friend and I wanted a drink and Sam happened to be next on in the bar we wandered into. I didn’t buy any of his music that night, but over the next few months I bought his entire back catalogue. His music became the music of my summer.
People who think technology is going to lead to a mistake free world are very wide of the mark. What are you going to get is a different argument about a more highly refined type of mistake. And it’s going to come down to scrutiny of inches and millimeters of a television screen, rather than a judgment made out in the middle.
Ed Smith was talking in 2018 about the cricket review system, but as Liverpool’s disallowed goal in the Merseyside derby yesterday proves again (it being just the most recent example), what he said is turning out to be more than true for VAR in football.
It’s so familiar, so beloved, so immediately and everlastingly catchy, that it’s easy to no longer notice just how weird it is. As is often the way, while seeking to do their most self-consciously experimental work, the band fashioned their finest moment of pure pop. Has any magnificent pop song been quite so eccentric; has anything quite so eccentric become so magnificent a pop song?
My summer wasn’t devoid of travel thankfully. There was a day trip to Deal, Kent; camping on the Isle of Sheppey; and a weekend in Newquay, Cornwall.
Deal pier (photo above) was impressive for the design of functionality over prettiness. The decent weather on the Isle of Sheppey, while the rest of the country seemed rain and wind, was much appreciated. And in Cornwall the tour of Healeys Cyder Farm with sampling at the end was good fun.
No improv shows, or rehearsals, on the immediate horizon. I might look to online improv at some point but still haven’t yet been compelled. I did do a couple of 5min stand-up spots and nearly had a third this weekend, but that got cancelled because they couldn’t guarantee a Covid secure show. Fair enough. That type of uncertainty is perhaps going to be the way all winter.
Watching:Breaking Bad. I never watched it when the hullabaloo surrounded it and I’m struggling to see what all the fuss was about. It’s good, but not a patch on The Americans which I’ve just finished.