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brian eno songs that will make good book titles for my 10-volume memoir, in order: here he comes, baby's on fire, golden hours, brutal ardour, taking tiger mountain, events in dense fog, through hollow lands, some of them are old, everything merges with the night, dead finks don’t talk


ry cooder albums that every man should own: into the purple valley, boomer's story, paradise and lunch


thelonious monk's middle name: sphere


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#301: the beatles - all you need is love (1967, our world live telecast)

last week nick sylvester wrote about what makes animal collective’s merriweather post pavillion so good, though he was really writing about someone else’s takedown of the album and what made it so bad, but actually he was really writing about getting swept away by beautiful things and trying to fathom how that happens, instead of being cooly dismissive and self-conscious and snarly.

“i have this relationship with music,” he says. “there is this cold and dizzy feeling that overtakes me sometimes, when a song or a passage of a song happens to gun it to my heart. and i am addicted to this feeling—i seek it out, sludging through days upon days of music, much of it very objectively “good”, for those moments capable of the cold and dizzy.”

all you need is love does that for me—especially the wobbly strings, but especially the bach horns, and especially the she loves you finale, and then there’s the gum chewing in the famous live tv performance, and mick jagger clapping along giddily from the tv audience, and, oh god, the moment when paul shouts “everybody!” and he and john smile at each other, even though fucking paul was wearing a rose in his headset to upset john’s plans for all-green uniforms.

anyway: “i don’t mean to paint things in binary but there are two basic poles here, with all of us probably falling in between them. you can be open, and vulnerable, and ignorant, and admit to your ignorance, and try to understand your own wiring and ignorance, and come to terms with the fact that you are one complex motherfucker with complex and not exactly logical or objective reasons for liking and loving what you do, but nevertheless still liking and loving the things that you do, or you can be the person who points out that everyone is pretty fucking ignorant, nobody ever has a clue what they’re really doing on this earth, everybody’s reasons are all so screwy, and do so on a daily basis, as a way of masking your own ignorance and insignificance and vulnerability. you can try to know, and own the fact that there are things you do not know, or you can be knowing, and hide your own ignorance with sideways shots of been-there done-that familiarity.”

my main man leon introduced me to the piece, and he liked it too.

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