Advent Gifts! (II)
It's that time of year again! (The Bus 4.21)
Welcome aboard The Bus!
The Stop
Last December saw the first of these Stops honouring my Uncle Mike’s tradition of giving what he called ‘Advent Gifts’ - ones (usually books) that weren’t officially part of the Christmas pile and thus didn’t break the ‘don’t overdo it for the kids’ rule. To continue Mike’s tradition, today’s Stop is a brief selection of recommendations for a few other Substacks - and two from outside the Substack ecosystem - I read regularly. They’re all excellent - and completely worth your time!1
Inside Substack
Earworms and Song Loops. Steve Goldberg has hit on a winning premise for a Substack with this one: investigating those ‘songs and bit-o’-songs’ that get stuck into our heads. From songs about spiders (there are a lot), 80s hair metal one-hit-wonders and Pink Floyd, to MC Hammer, the Meat Puppets and Culture Club, you never know what’s coming next in Steve’s ‘place where memoir and earworm intersect and conjoin.’ It’s a consistent, welcome pleasure. Find it here:
LP. Ian Sharp only started posting at the very end of July, but this has quickly grown to be one of my favourite Substacks. Existing purely to ‘celebrate, cherish and appreciate the art of the album,’ LP arrives in the inbox in different forms, including ‘Glimpse’ - an informative 5-6 minute read on a different LP (with an admitted - and, in my case welcome - bias towards prog rock), to his brilliant weekly ‘Gems’ - an album-length (he breaks it into sides, people!) playlist in which classics sit alongside new material, all accompanied by his very informative Listening Notes.2 You can find it here:
Out Over My Skis. Tom Pendergast has one of the most engaging voices I’ve read in years - and it seems to only get better with each of his deeply considered posts. His most recent - ‘Retirement: Freedom or Free-Fall’ - is, in my opinion, a profound meditation on this major life change and all that comes with it - good and bad. I personally don’t think he realises how good he really is - which is, of course, the mark of an artist regardless the medium. Find him here:
Situation Normal. Billed as ‘stories for people who enjoy humor with a side of humanity and a dash of insight,’ Michael Estrin’s Substack is one of the best. Clever, perceptive, well-observed and very funny, I always enjoy his regular diversions into what makes people so bafflingly human. Find him here:
Outside Substack
The Lorem Ipsum. Written by Daniel Herndon, this is an ‘independent opinion magazine filled with news, politics, and humor.’ Billed as a ‘Funny Email About Serious Topics,’ I find it a refreshing take on the ‘serious’ news I’m reading, hearing and watching - and every time I throw my hands up and start ranting about how anyone could be so profoundly stupid to think a reality TV star with 91 indictments has their personal welfare in mind … well, it’s nice to know I’m not alone. You can find the letter here: The Lorem Ipsum.
Out of This World is an outstanding weekly podcast produced by Joël Roszykiewicz, the possessor of the best music collection of anyone I’ve ever met. He’s incredibly generous in sharing his deep love for music old and new, and this podcast is his weekly gift of world music to all who wish to listen. It’s available on Podbean.3 You can find it here: JPRPodcasts (Out Of This World).
The Detour
Today’s Detour is to AI - The World is too much with us. A very short (1:20) video created entirely by AI generated images, it accompanies a reading of Wordsworth’s titular poem (1807) soundtracked by Debussy’s ‘Claire de lune.’ Worth the minute of your day.
The Recommendation
Today’s Recommendation is Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (1989). A dense, complicated novel, the plot not only involves a group of academics who get enmeshed in a conspiracy theory about the Knights Templar, but it manages to be frighteningly prescient about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence.4
From the back: Three book editors, jaded by reading far too many crackpot manuscripts on the mystic and the occult, are inspired by an extraordinary conspiracy story told to them by a strange colonel to have some fun. They start feeding random bits of information into a powerful computer capable of inventing connections between the entries, thinking they are creating nothing more than an amusing game, but then their game starts to take over, the deaths start mounting, and they are forced into a frantic search for the truth.
The Sounds
Today’s playlist is a selection of five tracks that have been in my ‘To Use’ folder for a while:5 ‘England 2, Colombia 0 - Live at the Jazz Cafe, London, 12 October 1999’ (Kirsty MacColl, 1999), ‘Texas Sun’ (Khruangbin and Leon Bridges, 2020), ‘She Belongs to Me - Live at the Royal Albert Hall’ (Cat Power, 2023), ‘Pancho’ (Don Williams, 1998) and ‘Amsterdam’ (Coldplay, 2002). Enjoy!
The Thought
Today’s Thought is from Umberto Eco:
‘The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.’
If you have a thought on this Thought - or any part of today’s issue - please leave a comment below:
And that’s the end of this Stop - I hope you enjoyed the diversion!
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Until the next Stop …
You can find Advent Gifts! (2.20) in the Archive. It’s currently scheduled to be paywalled on 8 December as that’ll be a year since its release, but this will be changing soon.
I particularly appreciate Ian’s insistence the tracks be played in order and not (ugh) shuffled - there’s a reason they’re in that sequence, after all.
Joël is one of (if not the) most generous people I know when it comes to sharing music. When we were colleagues, it was the discovery of a mutual love of Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead that brought us together initially, and soon it grew into deep dives into Dylan and the Stones, Patti Smith and Peter Gabriel - before moving into the eclectic delights of World Music. When he retired, he returned home to Provence where he enjoyed living in one of Earth’s most beautiful places while selling vinyl records at various markets throughout the week. According to a recent email, he’s no longer selling vinyl - but is still buying it and is now focussing on writing and recording his own music (while also still living in one of Earth’s most beautiful places). He’s also agreed to curate a Stop or two in the near future - so, keep your eye on the information display!
The novel is good, if you’re into this genre, and it’s on my re-read-in-the-very-distant-future list, but I’m including it today because it was an Advent Gift from Mike that went wrong. The Christmas just after its publication, he surprised me with a copy the day before Christmas Eve (Christmas Eve Eve?). What he wasn’t expecting was the surprise he gave the three other family members who’d bought me the book.
To be accurate, four of them have - the Cat Power track was only released a week or so ago, but it’s already a constant in my playlist. I’m not a fan of Coldplay (I kind of see them as a (very) poor man’s Keane at their best), but ‘Amsterdam’ is a nearly perfect song. After recording this one, they should have just looked at each other and said, ‘Damn - we’ve done it. Let’s head our separate ways and hopefully never be asked to duet with Rhianna.’ Oh, well.
Bryan, this mention is a true gift, just like the wonderful comments you leave on Situation Normal! Thank you!
Wow- thanks for the kind words and support. 🙏 I’ve always wanted to be a passenger on your Bus!