Olympic Scupture Park, Seattle, Winter 2014 Malcolm Gladwell recounts the final days of the 1993 Waco, Texas standoff in his excellent article “Sacred and Profane” from the March, 31 issue of the New Yorker. He specifically cities a new memoir by Clive Doyle, a survivor of the incident and a follower of the millennialist Branch Davidians. Gladwell’s article […]
Monthly Archives: May 2014
The problem isn’t finding the stuff, it’s finding the time. Maybe this is the curse of our era. In any case, I’ve plowed through enough pages, sights, and sounds in recent months to warrant briefly turning off Shark Tank. Everything on this list comes highly recommended, but not all for the same reasons. I’ll leave it to […]
A sudden silence hit the Earth. If anything it was worse than the noise. For a while nothing happened… …Then there was a slight whisper, a sudden spacious whisper of open ambient sound. Every hi-fi set in the world, every radio, every television, every cassette recorder, every woofer, every tweeter, every mid-range driver in the […]
John Luther Adams by Chad Batka via the Times LiStening to it we becOme oceaN. This is how John Cage described the music of Lou Harrison, whose breadth and diversity he thought mirrored “a river in delta.” Years later, another composer named John found this text. On Tuesday, I saw the Seattle Symphony give […]
Rubio as critic About a month ago, a certain Daily Beast article by Ted Gioia stirred the opinion pot for alleging that criticism is now mostly “lifestyle reporting,” focused on “clothes, hook-ups, and run-ins with the law.” In short, everything other than the music. Once upon a time when I was set on becoming a critic, I would often […]
