Children grow up, go to school, get jobs, may have their own families, and at some point usually stop getting gifts from magical beings. But it is not that the magic does not exist. It is that the children themselves have become part of the great, benevolent cartel of nurturers of warmth and plenty.
Mike Mills told Carl Marsh he did not want trite symphonic embellishments of R.E.M. melodies—he wanted new music for orchestra with R.E.M. songs encoded somewhere within them.
Flying a kite is the simple pleasure of celebrating, in the quietest but most glorious way, winter folding into spring.
In Eric von Schrader’s books, St. Louis remains a colossus of bricks, careful not to destroy its solid and elegant legacy. And Cahokia! It has been rebuilt by a pair of archaeologists, one Osage, the other White, who were fired from Washington University for their absurd insistence on the site’s significance.
Mussorgsky’s music represents a tsarist, imperial vision of what Hartmann, and no doubt other Russians, wanted to see constructed so that it could adorn the capital city of Ukraine for generations. When we listen to Mussorgsky’s music we can instead, for now, call to mind the Golden Gate of Kiev that still stands.
Ever since it was filed in 2022 this was a case shoved into the headlines by boring egos, sloppy legal work, and with the anemic celebrity appeal of America’s most blasé, greedy 1970s rock band lounging sleazily at the center of it all.
Ivan is a nationalist in the Putin mold and during our visit mistook me, at least, to have some American equivalent of his native love for authoritarianism.
Phonics was my nemesis, and later, I heard it as Phyllis Schlafly’s battle cry. Why, I wondered, was reading instruction political?
Despite some overlaps, military branches do in the end have their own histories, traditions, and, in particular, things, which set an emotional tone. Marines are “Leathernecks” for their stiff collars, originally meant to prevent cutlass wounds. Sailors were “swabbies” for their mops, or “tars” for the tar used on old ships. Navy cadre at the dive school called us “trees” for our camouflage-patterned army uniforms.
The story of Scott Walker is the story not of making it big, but making it big the right way across an entire career, including even the long breaks in between.