Monday Night/Tuesday Warning #23: Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will... a view to a kill.
Your semi-regular paid subscriber-only email of recommendations and miscellaneous items.
Hello and welcome to the first of these recommendation emails since I got married. With any luck they’ll become as regular as I keep promising they will be from now on. Usually they appear on a Sunday, but this one has wandered into Monday evening, bringing you the best of last week and last weekend.1
Today’s main newsletter was: "Can't I have oranges like everybody else?" Writing studs-up commentary in a world of diving columnists...
Earlier today I heard the worst adjective applied to this newsletter by an otherwise happy reader: “Sneery…” I try my best to write something that’s three parts funny to one part enraged but I realise the seasoning will not be to everyone’s taste all the time.
Hit the button below to send me some adjectives and I’ll include the best (and) worst in the next one of these emails…
Here are some articles you might enjoy:
1. From the archives — Neil Tennant, in his pre-Pet Shop Boys music hack era, on the 1985 BRIT Awards:
Discontent is seething in the press tables where I'm sitting. All us poor hacks are up in the balcony above the main hall where all the important guests are dining. The man from the Star and the man from the London Evening Standard keeping trotting off to see who's here. I tuck into the smoked salmon, followed by vegetable soup – or Creme de Legumes, as it says on the menu – duck, profiteroles and bottles of wine, chilled in buckets of ice. All quite acceptable, really, even if it is a bit "like punk never happened".
One photographer at my table asks another if he's going to hang round in the foyer to photograph Wham! when they arrive.
"Oh God, no!" he replies. "They always look the same.''
2. Tom Morello, it turns out, is a very good columnist:
… there is a segment of my audience that freaks out whenever I refer to being Black. To them, I must be white. Music that sounds like that must be made by people who look like them. This cognitive dissonance has haunted me throughout my career. There’s this mental discomfort triggered when their belief (“I’m a fan of Tom! Tom is white!”) clashes with the evidence (“Tom says he’s Black!”). These people don’t sleep well at night. And while I sincerely appreciate the good-hearted fans who chime in with, “I don’t see you as any color, Tom. I’m colorblind. I just enjoy the music” — thank you, but this is America, and you’re missing the whole damn point.
3. Mary Gaitskill for LitHub on taking from life and putting it into her fiction:
I’m sure it did not matter to her when I said that I did not mean the portrait to be an unflattering one, and that in fact many people found the character touching. I’m sure it mattered less when I explained that, while my memory of her had been the clay that built the image of that character, in my mind the image was not literally an image of her, the real person. I’m guessing that sounded like fanciness to her. But I was sincere.
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