- Blog
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Igor Stravinsky, Tupac Shakur and the uncanny
(a post from 2012, which is pretty uncanny in itself) The Player Piano was the Tupac Hologram of its day. — The most thrilling of our inventions are the ones that return to us a person we’ve lost or that recall a scene from the past that we couldn’t have experienced or a place we…
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Noisy beds
I love a bed. I should leave it to a radio production expert to explain what I mean by a bed, but since I don’t have one to hand, a ‘bed’ is the radio term for sound (usually music) played under the presenter’s voice during a link. In music radio it stops things going dead,…
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You know, actual curation
Everyone’s going on about curation these days. We’re all curators now. But yesterday I witnessed some of the old-fashioned variety, the kind they do in art galleries, and I was blown away. I took two of my kids to Tate Britain (four different modes of transport: train, tube, boat and bus – I suspect that’s…
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Total radio – six reasons BBC Radio 3’s ‘Spirit of Schubert’ was awesome
The ‘Spirit of Schubert’ finished a week ago. It was Radio 3’s biggest ‘takeover’ yet – over 200 hours of output devoted exclusively to the work of Franz Schubert. Every one of his ‘performable works’ was played, many in brand new versions, some for the first time ever. It was a remarkable thing – and…
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What would I print if I had a Little Printer?
Some disagreement out there about what BERG’s Little Printer is for. I don’t have any special insight but I think it’s a charming and clever thing and I badly want one (I’ve put my name on the tell-me-when-I-can-order-one mailing list). So I had a think about what I’d print if I did have one: Inscrutable…
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Not understanding Greece
UPDATE: April 2022. It’s kind of embarrassing reading this 11 year-old blog post now. It seems callous and ignorant. But then thinking about it, the post dates from before we knew the extent of the brutalisation of the Greek people that the ‘troika’ had in mind, before we understood the EU elite’s readiness to visit…
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Steve Jobs and everyone’s fork in the road
Robert Scoble’s got a touching video on his blog today. He’s outside Apple’s Cupertino HQ and talking about his first encounter with an Apple computer. He talks about unboxing an Apple IIGS, the last in the line of pre-Mac Apples and a hugely influential machine in its time. He says: That was the time I…
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A new job – and an afternoon of undiluted pleasure
In a few weeks time I’ll be heading back to BBC radio, where I’ll be taking over the job of Interactive Editor for Radio 3, the Proms and the performing groups. I’m almost speechless with pleasure at this development while also terrifically sad to be leaving my lovely friends in digital comms where we have…
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The second-best book about twentieth century music
Everybody knows the best book about Twentieth Century music is Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise but there’s another brilliant book set in the same period – Wilfrid Sheed’s The House That George Built, a history of the golden age of American popular music. It’s about the generations of American songwriters, starting at the turn…
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You may think you want the death penalty but you don’t have the stomach for it
Surveys suggest that a majority of ordinary Britons want a return to the death penalty for the most heinous crimes (this online poll on The Sun’s web site has 80% in favour). And, thanks to the government’s rules for e-petitions, our legislators may soon be obliged to debate the topic again. Some of them may…