Nick Richardson, a former editor at the LRB, is a software engineer working in the cosmetics industry.
Whitstable might not seem an obvious location for a summit on the musical avant-garde, but then, before 1946, neither did Darmstadt. This February and last, the Wire magazine and promoters Sound and Music have put on a weekend series of testing lectures – on electronic, improvised and marginalised music – at the Whitstable Playhouse.
‘The second half of this century will spoil by overestimation all the good of me that the first half, by underestimation, has left intact,’ Arnold Schoenberg prophesied in 1949, 16 years after his move to America. He was a man, he felt, whose time had never quite arrived. Before the First World War he had struggled for recognition; afterwards, in the age of Brecht and Weill, he...
I recently got back from la Creuse in central France, where the annual local treasure hunt has been glossed by an insanely elaborate, cross-disciplinary polytext. The instructions for ‘Sherlock Holmes enquête à Boussac’ come on a double-sided sheet of A3 done up to look like an old newspaper, l’Eclaireur. About 15 square inches of it are taken up by the rules; the rest – six fat columns of newsprint (c.3300 words) – is devoted to explaining the game’s back story. Holmes and Watson have been summoned to the small Creusois town of Boussac by a painter friend, who has been tipped off by one of his more famous painter friends (Gauguin) that there’s buried treasure in the region.
Ehrich Weiss was ten when he popped his first pair of handcuffs. He was working as a locksmith’s assistant in Appleton, Wisconsin. One lunchtime the local sheriff came into the shop chained to a bearded hoodlum: the magistrate had decided the man should go free, but when the sheriff tried to unlock the handcuffs his key snapped. Could Ehrich saw through the lock? Ehrich broke two...
Resistance was futile. The X Factor winner Matt Cardle’s sickly debut single, ‘When We Collide’, made Christmas No. 1. The two favourite outside chances – Billy Bragg et al’s version of John Cage’s 4’33”, and Captain SKA’s ‘Liar Liar’ – didn’t even make the Top 40. If it seems obvious now that the nation would choose the most popular participant in the nation’s most popular game show over four and a half minutes of near-silence, or a slice of ebullient agit-pop, it didn’t seem that way a few weeks ago. Both tracks had well-run campaigns behind them, Facebook groups with masses of members, whips on Twitter; ‘Liar Liar’ disgusted George Osborne on Newsnight while the Guardian thought 4’33” likely to be the ‘most serious competition the forthcoming X Factor winner will have to face’. Sadly it wasn’t.
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