Soundings

Friends came to stay with us recently. Among their suitcases and belongings, they had a cute, quilted shoulderbag, which they plunked on the kitchen countertop. Out came sleeves of aluminum pods, each one a pre-ground single-portion serving of coffee. Then a milk frother. And finally the Pixie, a sleek, pint-sized machine. It turned out this was a smaller version of what they use at home, the Citiz and Milk. The Pixie, my friend explained, a tad embarrassed, was their travel-sized Nespresso machine. It accompanied them on road trips.

One of the remarkable features of the history of photography is that, less than a century after its invention and less than fifty years after film replaced the unwieldy photographic plates of its early years, it became the medium of choice for many whom we now regard as major artists: Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and many others.

Pop music remains amongst the most accessible and inclusive cultural conversations because, for the past half-century, it hasn’t really changed. In 1967, for example, I Think We’re Alone Now took Tommy James and the Shondells to #4 on the Billboard Hot 100, and then twenty years later, with negligible updating, Tiffany to #1. Then there’s Lana Del Rey—if she’s not the reincarnation of Patsy Cline, who is? Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound approach to producing persists as a load-bearing pillar of modern commercial rock. How did Oasis rise to the fame of the Beatles?

I’m writing these words on February 11, the same date that storied film critic Pauline Kael published her final column for The New Yorker in 1991. Hobbled by illness and, worse, uninspired by the crop of movies coming out of Hollywood—her final column was devoted to brief takes on Awakenings, L.A.

Dear Tragically Hip,

Terrence Malick’s recent film The Tree of Life does not appear to be a dangerous movie. It’s essentially a long, lyrical evocation of Malick’s nineteen-fifties boyhood in an upper-middle-class enclave of Waco, with an idealized mother (Jessica Chastain) and a stern, distant father (Brad Pitt)—and what could possibly be mood-altering or soul-shaking about that?

The talk this summer about the 2011 Polaris Prize can be summed up by the fact that, for the first time, it bent to popular opinion. Since its inception in 2006, this annual award for best Canadian record has been administered with exuberant contrariness by juries of music bloggers, journalists and DJs, each with an ear cupped to the national underground and eager to champion the obscure.

Craig Taylor is the author of two books, Return to Akenfield and One Million Tiny Plays About Britain, and he is the editor of the literary magazine, Five Dials. For years, he has been cataloguing the habits and behaviours of Londoners in his notebooks, and interviewing as many of them as possible. These notes are the basis of his new book, Londoners: The Days and Nights of London as Told by Those Who Love it, Hate it, Live it, Long for it, Have Left it and Everything In-between, to be published Fall 2011 by Granta in the UK and HarperCollins in the US.

In February, the video-streaming website Hulu, once best known as a place to waste time catching up on old episodes of Heroes, made a major announcement: they had struck an exclusive deal with the Criterion DVD label to eventually make more than 800 titles from their back catalogue available online, free of commercial interruptions, through their premium subscription service Hulu Plus. The first batch of films to appear included The 400 Blows, Rashomon, Seven Samurai, M, and L’Avventura.