Don’t wake up now, it’s almost over

Well, we’ve almost made it. Sure, every minute takes an hour and every hour is a week these days, so the evening is a million years away, but I am confident we will get there. It’s an easy prediction to make because if it doesn’t happen you will have so much more serious stuff to contend with that you won’t bother to come back and call me out on being wrong about it. Anyway, the clock is ticking and it’s got to get to the time you want eventually. Until then, enjoy this. [Via]

A reflection in verse

The fucking litany of lies
That fuel this fucking enterprise
The steady fucking stream of bile — 
The fucking man is infantile — 
The evil fucks he keeps around
To fuck this country to the ground
The fucking grotesque disregard
For those whose lives are fucking hard
The feeling in the fucking air
Of fucking chaos and despair
The fucking fact that two months hence
This still makes zero fucking sense
The thought with which I’m fucking stuck:
What the fucking fucking fuck?

★★★ Dried leaves had emerged from somewhere to bounce and scuttle in the gusts. An ice bank in a planting bed had been undercut till there was a full cavern beneath it, with an aluminum can in its depths. The crosstown wind surged and then surged some more. Cornice decorations stuck out like saw teeth. The sun was high but there was no need for sunscreen under a hood pulled low. The black ice in the night held sharp crosshatchings where tires had crisscrossed when it was still soft, yielding slush.

Like looking into a mirror

It is rare that a work of art precisely duplicates the events of my day but this accompaniment to the standout track from Eluvium’s False Readings On is so similar you might think it was a shot-for-shot remake of the afternoon over here. I imagine you will find it relatable yourself. Please do enjoy.

If you haven’t gotten False Readings On yet, why not? We don’t have a lot of time left.

False Readings On

No, wait, hear him out.

“I hate getting email. But I recognize that the problem is not email as a technology; the problem is people wanting to talk to you. Email is the least annoying way for people to contact you, so it’s the most popular, which is why you have so many emails, which is why, paradoxically, it feels so annoying. But, what, you want everyone to start texting you? You want them to send you LinkedIn messages? You want them to call you on the phone?”

— Matt Levine, who has an email newsletter and so might not be the most disinterested observer here, still makes a good point. If “in a bar, preferably just the two of us” is the best way to have a conversation with someone, and “via old-fashioned telephony” is the worst, email is probably somewhere in the middle. If you can think of a better method, write it on a piece of paper and try to find a way to get it over to us. Thanks!

Bond Quotes and Performance Art

On the origin of the college basketball game trope

Over at Vice Sports today, David Roth has a delightful review of the history and cultural rise of the “Oversized Disembodied Head” (ODH) at college basketball games. It’s a wild ride from early-aughts San Diego State Shenanigans to Alabama Face Guy to (obviously) late capitalist ends:

Mongan’s contribution to the long tradition of fans trying to make things weird for the visiting team unfolds like basically every other cool thing in the culture, with young people messing around and being creative and trying to amuse and impress each other with acts of avant-garde dumbness. It was not just a DIY process but something like an artisan one; Mongan made the prints at Kinko’s and assembled them himself. “Back in the day,” he said, “there would almost be like an audible gasp or a cheer when we’d unveil a new one, because there was this element of surprise. I’d just like, roll in from Kinko’s and no one really knew what it was going to be. It was this cool time period where we just kind of had freedom, creatively, to pump out the weirdest stuff possible.”

You can read the whole thing here.

Those Oversized Disembodied Heads at College Basketball Games: A Life Story | VICE Sports

Favorite “Friends” moments with a twist.

Chris Sartinsky has written for The Onion, Adult Swim, and Billy on the Street.

Classical Music Hour with Fran

I’m giving myself this week to finish my enormous Brahms book so I can go back to the two things I care about most in life: 1) beating Wind Waker for the first time in a decade and 2) writing about other composers in this column. It’s been tough to read and write about and listen to Brahms for almost a straight month. At times I feel both closer and further away from a man I barely understand up until the winter of this year; his work is so intensely loaded — especially for someone who more or less rejected the idea of programmatic music — that I’ve felt forced to rethink a lot of what I felt about him. I thought he was a sad guy! And sure, maybe “sad” in a traditional artist sense, like “I’m writing a sad poem right now” sad, but there was so much more color and vigor to his work than I previously understood.

The last Brahms piece I want to highlight — and in fairness, this is only the second one I’ve written about in the context of this biography, so lay off me — was my first introduction to Brahms in an academic setting. In college, I took a very easy and lovely class called “Introduction to Classical and Romantic Music” which lay a wonderful foundation for a lot of the reading and research I do now. In the midst of the two units (you could probably guess, but they were titled, uh, “Classical” and “Romantic”), we listened to Brahms’s Symphony №3 in F Major as this very bizarre hybrid of the two genres. Many have called Brahms’s third symphony his Eroica, which is a ringing endorsement if I’ve ever heard one.

Premiering in 1883, this is definitely considered late Brahms. In fact, Richard Wagner, his old rival featured in last week’s column, had just died that year. Even up until his final days, the dumb feud between these two men had not subsided, to a point where Wagner enthusiasts (if you know what Wagner fans called themselves back in the day, “BeWagners” or whatever, please tell me) protested outside of the third symphony’s debut. What the hell!!! It’s not Congress, you dopes. Get a life.

It’s less obscure and puzzling to work through. I know I set you quite a challenge with that first piano concerto of his. The first movement of the piece is an Allegro con brio, and this particular recording is conducted by who else but Bernstein. This first movement, nearly thirteen minutes in length, sounds aggressively Beethovenian in nature, starting with a confident fanfare from the horns. Once the introduction settles down, there’s a really lovely melody on the strings and woodwinds. It lilts back and forth, by no means delicate, but not too forceful to push its listener away. It’s a melody you can hum! It’s even a little playful at times, hearkening back to that bit in the first piano concerto in which a big dark build-up in the strings leads to a precious piano melody as its punchline. This is a symphony in a major key after all; it feels triumphant and glorious and self-assured. No longer are we sensing the Brahms struggling to live up to the reputation set in motion by the Schumanns or otherwise. In its final 20 or so seconds, the first movement concludes softly. Finitely. No bursts. It just lays to rest.

Its Andante doesn’t feel like your typical Andante. You often picture something slow or mournful, pensive and meandering, at times, but Brahms’s Andante has a profoundly forward momentum. There are a lot of passages in my Brahms book about the composer taking summers to hike through the German countryside. I will openly admit that this isn’t a part of my heritage (oh, you didn’t know I was German? Look at my last name for 0.4 seconds) that has been passed down genetically, but in times of worry, I think, “yeah, I could go back to 19th-century Germany and have a big stick and walk up a nice hill and be perfectly happy.” And this is what I’d want to listen to!

And then we have the movement I really want to talk about. A movement I think about all the time, the Poco Allegretto. It’s the shortest movement in the whole piece, and in the way that the Andante doesn’t feel quite as, well, sad as an Andante usually feels, it’s the Poco Allegretto that changes places with it. In college, when I took my music class and we listened to this symphony, we were instructed to listen to this movement in particular, which my professor said was one of the saddest movements of a symphony he ever heard. I don’t know if it tugs at my heartstrings in quite the same way as it did for him, but it does ache. This movement is, I’m not kidding, unrequited love in a nutshell. It’s sweeping and overdramatic, almost to a point of being funny. There’s a tonal shift at around the 1:45 mark where it becomes light. The clarinets are really just going to town. It’s almost a little nagging, as if Brahms wants you to remember something lighter before pulling you back down into the tragedy of it all. You will listen to this movement and then you’ll listen to it again. It’ll stick in your head the way a person can. It is truly one of the most beautiful movements in all of classical music. If you listen to nothing else from this symphony, listen to the third movement.

Symphony №3 in F Major ends with an Allegro, plain and simple. Fast. Quickly. Let’s do it. Let’s blow through. The movement begins with a buzzing in the strings and a quick, nervous melody on the woodwinds. Then: at about 46 seconds in, we’re going. This is a fricking FINALE, folks. This is the same type of raw energy you could sense in the first piano concerto, only much more guided and focused. Remember all one thousand times I’ve written about cello here? Get a load of that cello melody at the 1:19 mark. I want to stand up and applaud then and there, but there’s still a good seven minutes to go. The rest of the movement is fairly upbeat and even a little bombastic in parts, but it doesn’t go full Beethoven. Like the first movement, Brahms ends quietly. On a clean chord. It’s resolved — the symphony, the piece, the heart behind it, everything.

Including, of course, this little mini-series on my giant Brahms book. I’ll be back next week with something very fun and dare I say, American.

Fran Hoepfner is a writer from Chicago. You can find a corresponding playlist for all of the pieces discussed in this column here.

On Love

If wind asked permission
we might wait and listen
as if night stopped its blue
curtain and wheat bent without scattering
its hope of what happens in the dark,

and happens by accident.

John Freeman is the editor of the literary biannual Freeman’s and author of several books. Maps, his debut poetry collection, will be published in the fall by Copper Canyon.

The Poetry Section is edited by Mark Bibbins.

A Listicle Without Commentary

21. Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles Flirt About Tampons (1992)

20. Martin Amis Rips Off Entertainment Weekly In a New Yorker profile of John Travolta (1995)

19. Mrs. Gingrich Tells Connie Chung Newt Called Hillary Clinton A Bitch (1995)

18. Bob Livingston Admits To Extramarital Sexual Affairs (1998)

17. Dan Quayle Gives Murphy Brown Speech (1992)

16. Milli Vanilli Admits To Lip Syncing And Has Their Grammy Taken Away (1990)

15. Pee Wee Herman Arrested for Masturbating At A Movie Theater (1991)

15. Robert Downey, Jr. Arrested For Speeding Down The PCH With Heroin, Coke, And A Pistol (1996)

13. Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss Busted For High-Class Prostitution Ring (1993)

12. Kathie Lee Gifford’s Clothing Line Revealed To Be Manufactured In Sweat Shops (1996)

11. Ted Danson Wears Blackface (1993)

10. Marv Albert Tried For Forcible Sodomy And Assault (1997)

9. Jerry Seinfeld, 39, Dates A 17-year-old (1993)

8. Tonya Harding vs. Nancy Kerrigan (1994)

7. Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s Sex Tape Stolen (1995)

6. Hugh Grant Arrested For Getting A Blow Job In Public From Prostitute In Hollywood (1995)

5. Woody Allen Takes Naked Pictures of Soon-Yi Previn (1992)

4. Woody Allen Marries Soon-Yi Previn (1997)

3. Michael Jackson Accused Of Child Sexual Abuse (1993)

2. Kevin Costner Beats Martin Scorcese for Best Director in the Dances With Wolves/Goodfellas Competition (1991)

1. Bill Clinton Gets A BJ in the Oval Office (1995)