The Sundays
Douglas Adams called it the long, dark teatime of the soul. I do a lot of work on myself to enjoy Sundays, mostly in the form of actual work. Today it's some legalese and another spelling check. I went for a run in the very early a.m., weaving between kids on their way home and drunks doing the chicken walk, one clutching the side of his face as blood trickled down his elbow. (Stepping between pools of vomit in London is a fitness exercise all in itself.) And shortly I'll get into the tiny, teeny revisions: spell check, some crabbed sentences and tracking down a scene that continues to appear twice, like a ghost in a photograph.
The NYT has a great article on Laurie Anderson's Homeland album. Her working method now features some guy named Lou Reed:
The NYT has a great article on Laurie Anderson's Homeland album. Her working method now features some guy named Lou Reed:
When Ms. Anderson finally began assembling the album, she faced an overwhelming amount of data. "I was staring at like a million sound files, trying to fit together pieces from different songs, different years," she said. "I thought I was going to lose my mind. I was going to give up, and I was kind of crying about it every day. Lou got a little sick of hearing this. So he finally said, "Listen, I'm going to sit with you until you finish it.' " And Mr. Reed did, sitting on the studio couch and helping her make ruthless, don't-look-back decisions.Commentators are annoyed by NYT commentator David Brooks' comments on the Rolling Stone article on General McChrystal. Brooks has interpreted the magazine's reporting of the Afghanistan commander's statements as a symptom of a 'culture of exposure':
By putting the kvetching in the magazine, the reporter essentially took run-of-the-mill complaining and turned it into a direct challenge to presidential authority... the exposure ethos, with its relentless emphasis on destroying privacy and exposing impurities, has chased good people from public life, undermined public faith in institutions and elevated the trivial over the important.I listen to Brooks and fellow columnist Mark Shields' PBS broadcast every Saturday and always enjoy it. I doubt I'd agree with any of Brooks' politics (he leans towards the neocon) but I'm always interested in what he says. Ditto Rolling Stone, the ultimate wannabee magazine: even its writers who were there write as if they weren't and desperately wish they had been.