Bits and bobs (2026.07)
The Phoenician Scheme by Wes Anderson. Another excellent Montblanc ad from Wes Anderson. (I’m kidding, of course. The Phoenician Scheme is less refined, less substantial, less amusing, and generally less memorable than the Montblanc ad.)
John Lanchester at the London Review of Books:
Since fewer and fewer people are using banknotes, it follows logically that fewer banknotes are needed, and therefore that fewer banknotes are being printed and put into circulation. Right? Wrong. In the UK, there is £1300 cash in circulation for every single one of us, but the amount of cash we actually hold is one seventh of that figure. […] So where is all that cash, who’s using it, and for what?
The answer is blindingly obvious: “it’s being used in criminal transactions.” Fascinating piece.
The Boys of Dungeon Lane by Paul McCartney. The first minute of the opening track, “As You Lie There”, sounds like a false start. Once the electric guitar and the drums kick in, The Boys of Dungeon Lane is tightly wound and supremely well produced. The lyrics are as naive as ever, but that doesn’t mean they’re not effective.
“Down South” is a poignant homage to a hiking trip Macca took with George Harrison in their teenage years. “We Two”, the highlight of the album, could have been written for Linda McCartney as well as John Lennon. “Home to Us”, a duet with Ringo Starr, would be cheesy as hell if it didn’t come from two 80-somethings reminiscing about the good ol’ days.
Paul McCartney might not have the voice of his 20s any more, but after 38 albums, not counting the 12 he recorded with the Beatles, he still has something interesting to say.
Zarathoustra at Maurice Ravel Auditorium. I’m not the biggest fan of Richard Strauss, whose later years were murky to say the least, but i have to admit that Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks and Also sprach Zarathustra are two of the most awe-inspiring pieces of music ever committed to staff paper. The former reminded me why i don’t listen to that much orchestral music at home — it can’t be properly reproduced without missing the quietest phrases… or blowing up your speakers. The latter is more than the cliché it’s become since Kubrick and Deodato — played on the magnificent 82-stop and 6,500-pipe organ of the Maurice Ravel Auditorium, the introductory double low C is properly gut-churning.
The inclusion of Beethoven’s third piano concerto in between the two was a bit of a surprise. Leif Ove Andsnes had to cancel his performance due to illness, so Javier Perianes replaced him at the last minute. I’ll never fault a sub, but even if i wanted to, i couldn’t. Perianes is the perfect blend of sweetness and rawness. He spent the first two minutes of the concerto facing the orchestra, like a kid watching candy being made, and displayed incredible expressivity when he finally turned to the piano. Half an hour later, he sprang back to play Manuel de Falla’s Ritual Fire Dance as an encore, with such speed and force that, for a moment, i forgot the auditorium’s perennial sonic limitations.
For a while now I’ve been working with the people at Shiny Frog — the team behind Bear — on something new. Today it goes into beta testing. It’s called Lettera, and it’s a Markdown editor for macOS.
I’ve always liked Bear’s look and feel, but i’ve never liked the idea of putting my notes in a locked-down database. Enter Lettera — it’s basically Bear without the database. You might think we don’t need yet another Markdown editor, but each one has its flaws, and more than one perfectly fine editor has become a bloated mess after a few misguided “upgrades”. We can never have too many choices.
The current beta is still rough around the edges, but it’s promising. You can enable the file browser, the table of contents, the style bar and document statistics to work on big projects, but you can also hide all the complexity away to work on single files. It’s difficult to explain why, but it feels right, neither too simple nor too complex. As a typewriter collector, i find the name is the cherry on the cake.
Franz Schneider Brakel GmbH + Co KG:
Forty years after the Brakel door handle workshop, FSB is bringing back an unmistakable design by Dieter Rams. […] Revised and future-oriented, the entire lever handle is now manufactured locally in Brakel from aluminum. The gray tone of the rgs reappears in the new Aluminum Pure finish. These minimal interventions were carried out in close coordination with Dieter Rams — and the standards he set for his design back in 1986 continue to meet today’s requirements with ease.
I’m writing this from the comfort of my 620 sofa, my feet on my 621 side table, a few metres from my 606 bookshelves. In other words: my home looks like a Dieter Rams exhibition. And yet, i don’t think i’ll ever own an FSB 1138 door handle, designed by Dieter Rams with his student Angelika Knoop.
Back in 1986, deep into the postmodern era, its design was plainly reactionary. Forty years later, it’s fashionably boring, in an “Apple globalized a bastardized version of Rams’s design ethos” kind of way. And even though it’s now “fully manufactured from aluminum in Brakel”, €535 for a door handle is a bit rich for my blood. (Then again, send me the money and i might just change my mind.)
Francisco Trujillo at The Conversation:
We have developed what we call an ultrasonic espresso: a room-temperature brewing process that uses high-frequency sound waves to extract the flavour, oils, aroma and caffeine from coffee grounds. The result is an espresso-strength coffee made in under three minutes, but needing far less energy than the conventional method.
I can’t wait for James Hoffmann’s take on this.
Rebecca Solnit at The Guardian:
The United States of America is a truck that has driven into a ditch. The United States of America is a program that has been hacked. […] It is the country that gave the world jazz and blue jeans and atom bombs and the birth control pill; it is its best and its worst people and products.
I love the USA so much that i majored in North American studies. (Granted, i crossed over to Canada midway and never looked back.) It’s given me two careers, my second language, my favourite genre of music, so many books, and the pair of blue jeans i wear each and every day. It’s also given me regular bouts of existential anxiety. Happy 250th birthday, i guess?
I guess i have a new hobby: going to a concert not to see the headliner. As Big Freedia cancelled her whole European tour, the Jazz à Vienne festival’s organizers scrambled to find a suitable replacement. Fortunately, the New Orleans Jazz Museum sponsored the creation of a new group comprising trumpeter James Andrews (Trombone Shorty’s older brother), trombonist Greg Hicks, pianist Victor Campbell, guitarist Sam Dickey, double bassist Sélène Saint-Aimé, drummer Tiss Rodriguez… and drummer Anne Paceo. Yep, that’s right, two drummers.
Anne Paceo’s talent is undeniable, but sometimes, i find her playing too perfect. It’s like listening to a math problem. Last night, though, she let loose just enough to soften her metronomic pulse. She was the deep and sharp yang to Tiss Rodriguez’s lax and floppy yin. I wrote “she’s squaring his circle” while they were engaging in their second battle of the night, a masterclass in the art of call-and-response that lasted a long time, and yet seemed far too short. When they were over, she just sat there with the widest grin i’ve ever seen. Exactly, Anne, exactly.
For his only concert in France this year, Jon Batiste came with the incredibly soulful Desz, guitarist/producer extraordinaire Nick Waterhouse, and Stay Human’s rhythm section. I’ve yet to meet someone whom Batiste can’t win over, but this could have been the night, because Nêgah Santos stole the show. I’ve always liked the way she adds a subtle texture under Joe Saylor’s drums, but she revealed herself as a frontwoman in her own right with a fun rendition of Mas que nada that transported us right into the heart of São Paulo. (The sweltering heat helped.) All in all, it was a good night for percussion.
Veld by Sick Gazelle. Put Eric Block (Veloce), Bruce Lamont (Yakuza), Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth) and Douglas McCombs (Tortoise, BASIC) in the same room, and you get Sick Gazelle. The name is weirder than the music — a thoroughly engrossing blend of post-rock, shoegaze, ambient and jazz. The seemingly endless intro to “I’ll Come Running” evoked my long walks in the countryside, right up to the thunder-like drum roll.
The Odyssey by Christopher Nolan. A movie — even a three-hour one — could never translate the complexity of a tale as rich as the Odyssey, but it could convey depth and meaning by displaying Homeric qualities. Unfortunately, the acting is anodyne at best, the pacing is atrociously stop-and-go, the soundtrack is caricatural, the colour grading is distractingly juvenile, the gorgeous on-location establishing shots are ruined by the overuse of poorly lit studio shots and stiff 3D animations, the costumes are ridiculous, and worst of all, the dialogue is so dull that it’s hard to believe they were inspired by the most influential epic in the Western canon.
As Stephanie Zacharek says, this is an “eye-glazing dud of a movie” that “churns […] dutifully toward its predictable conclusions”. Like in Dunkirk, Nolan has flattened the immense contradictions powering the human mind down to a New York Times-style “war is bad” op-ed. Like in Oppenheimer, he has carefully stayed away from anything that could be construed as a commentary on the consequences of one’s actions. But this time, he did it while filming on occupied land. Imagine if Odysseus had sold out like this.