Update from last month
The Gävle goat survived this year1. Hooray.
This Night Wounds Time
It is 1974 and I am travelling with my parents from Guelph to go shopping at Sherway Gardens, a shiny new mall in Etobicoke. I come back with a copy of King Crimson’s latest album Starless and Bible Black. On the back, I find this curious image:
Sixteen year old me thinks it is a neat idea: highlight selected words (that might or might not have any meaning) from a page of text. Sixteen year old me also has questions: Was the partially visible background text written by the artist? Are the hidden words significant? What on Earth could “this night wounds time” mean? Does it mean anything at all? The album cover credits the image to Tom Phillips, but I pretty much forget about it.
Then in 2022, Tom Phillips dies and, somehow, I hear about his lifelong project to enhance/modify/alter the pages of a Victorian novel, A Human Document, into an entirely different work of art. The album cover art that I had seen in 1974 was just a fragment from the project he called A Humument, and sixty-six year old me thinks it is amazing.
Inspired by John Cage and William Burroughs, Phillips wanted to use chance in the creation of his work. He painted, drew, and pasted on the pages of the book, and in so doing revealed enigmatic snippets of text from the novel. Many of the pages he created are quite lovely. Here is one of my favourites, and you can see more here.
Dead Days
The dead days2 between Xmas and the new year can be a time to make lists: often meaningless “resolutions”. For many years, I used to make a list of new music that I had discovered3 in the previous 12 months. This year, I’m just going to post this graphic generated from my listening habits on Tidal (click on the image if you actually want to hear the tracks).
There is nothing from 2024 on my meaningless list this year, so I guess that confirms that all new music is crap4. If you have any questions, I am available during office hours.
Dear penpal….
People used to send letters. Parents would write to their kids when they moved away for a summer, or longer. The kids would write back! Friends would write to each other. Nobody does that anymore. We email, we text and live on social media, and now we know everything that’s going on with everyone, so it’s all wonderful.
Except when it is not. Although we gain in immediacy, we lose some of the thoughtfulness that is required to write a (good) letter.
All of this is just an oblique way of telling you about Craig Mod, who writes a couple of newsletters that are “about” his day-to-day experiences living and walking (he does a lot of walking) in Japan. His style is friendly and intimate, and since he is writing about his life in Japan, it is just a little bit exotic and intriguing. Each newsletter feels like a letter from a friend who has chosen a very different, but super-interesting, path in life; a friend you don’t want to lose5.
Earlier this year, he chronicled a walk from Kyoto to Tokyo and each coffee shop (or kissa) that he stopped at seemed to have some cool jazz playing. That led me to look into the music of Bill Evans, who I had never really listened to before. And now I can’t get enough.
If this sounds interesting to you, then check out his newsletters here.
- Also this year: Linus explained the real meaning of Xmas to Charlie Brown; Clarence Oddbody convinced George Bailey that he made a difference; Ebeneezer Scrooge decided that, actually, Xmas isn’t a humbug; and John McClane thwarted thieves at Nakatomi Plaza. ↩︎
- Credit to Andrew Sherwell (website) for the phrase dead days. ↩︎
- For anyone with a taste for history or the very bored: Here are the lists from 2022, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2012. ↩︎
- Kidding! ↩︎
- That’s actually a weird thing to say. Why would you ever want to lose a friend? ↩︎
