Holy Week recommendation: the Netherlands Bach Society performing the St Matthew Passion. ✝️ 🎵
Brad Mehldau’s cover of “Little Person” is just sublime. 🎵
My friend Jim Beitler on Tolkien, Lewis, George Herbert, and trees.
Not really interested in the Bauhaus Clock screensaver, but if it were based on John Harrison’s H4 I’d be saying TAKE MY MONEY.
I’ve got a post up on Harvard’s argy-bargy with the Administration — mainly quotations, which I’ll probably be adding to.
If my favorite MTV Unplugged has always been 10,000 Maniacs, that may be because they look like a band started by my fellow graduate students.
“Hey, that’s the dress Natalie wore to the English department Christmas party.”
“Yeah, but she finally got a good haircut. You know, I’m pretty sure that the lyrics to ‘Candy Everybody Wants’ come from something I said in our Modern American Lit seminar.”
“Wow. How do you feel about that?”
“It’s complicated.”
“I guess so…. Um, is it just me or are … are they really great?”
“Yeah. Yeah, they are great.”
🎥 I recently watched The Last of the Mohicans (1992) for the first time since it came out, and my main thoughts are
- The best actor in the movie, by miles, is Wes Studi.
- MERCY, did Peter Jackson go to school on this movie. Scene after scene in The Fellowship of the Ring, and some in The Two Towers, are almost directly copied from this film.
- Michael Mann is such a “city” director that it’s constantly surprising to see how beautifully he films forests and streams — and, in one memorable case, people crossing a bridge:
