a splendid torch
“Life is no brief candle for me. It is sort of a splendid torch which I have got hold of for a moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
—George Bernard Shaw.
Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan
Click here, and then click there, for your Father’s Day moment of Zen.
inscribed vinyl
Pictured is the fourth side of the two-disc vinyl version of Low’s Things We Lost in the Fire from 2001, an extreme example of a phenomenon that we might call inscribed vinyl.
Usually these inscribed vinyl messages are more discreet. Their size is limited to the “run-off” area after the end of a song, and so they are easily overlooked. According to my Google research, now spanning into its third day, a “matrix number” is usually inscribed here to identify the pressing before the paper label is applied. But sometimes there is a message directed at a wider audience. The earliest such message may have been a charming “Phil loves Ronnie” on one of producer Phil Spector’s early 45s from the 1960s. I don’t know which 45, if it was a Ronnettes 45, or anything more. (OK. This may just be a rumor, but Phil’s been in the news lately so I thought I’d mention it.)
I have more confidence in the following sightings: on the Grateful Dead’s album Anthem of the Sun there is an inscription that reads “The faster we go, the rounder we get,” on their Terrapin Station the question “Where do you keep your stereo, Jer?” and on John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy one can glean the message “one world one people.” (Where is John Lennon now that we really, really need him?)
These inscriptions are not to be confused with “backmasked” messages in the music itself. These are sonic vocal snippits which make no sense until the record is played in reverse and the hidden message is revealed. Some of these are the famously feared “satanic” messages of the 70s and 80s. Unlike inscribed messages, which have yet to be fully studied, these backmasked messages are neatly listed, for our convenience, on one page of the ever-growing and amazingly handy Wikipedia.
Click here, if you think you can handle them.
the Golden Floor
“That is indeed very good. I shall have to repeat that on the Golden Floor!”
—A.E. Housman, responding to a risqu’ joke told to cheer him up just before he died, 1936; Daily Telegraph, February 21, 1984.
a brief crack of light
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”
—Vladimir Nabakov, Speak, Memory, 1951.
The white goes on forever
“The music that had been playing in my head has vanished, leaving behind some faint white noise like a taut white sheet on a huge bed. I touch that sheet, tracing it with my fingertips. The white goes on forever.”
—Haruki Marakami, Kafka On The Shore, translated by Philip Gabriel, 2005.
The moon belongs to everyone
“The moon belongs to everyone
The best things in life are free
The stars belong to everyone
They gleam there for you and me”
—Buddy De Sylva, Lew Brown & Ray Henderson, The Best Things In Life Are Free, 1927 song.
A verbal contract
“A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it is written on.”
—Sam Goldwyn, cited by Alva Johnson in The Great Goldwyn, 1937.
That old black magic
“That old black magic has me in its spell
That old black magic that you weave so well”
—Johnny Mercer & Harold Arlen, That Old Black Magic, 1942.
the old grey Donkey
“Eeyore, the old grey Donkey, stood by the side of the stream, and looked at himself in the water. ‘Pathetic,’ he said. ‘That’s what it is. Pathetic.’”
—A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, 1926.