PicoBlog

I used to think Sweeney Todd was my least favorite Sondheim musical. What I’d always loved about Sondheim, after all, was the tension between his cynicism about human nature combined with his gentle love of people: the sorry/grateful that makes so much of his work so bittersweet. Sweeney Todd, brutal and bleak, with lyrics like “there’s a hole in the world like a great black pit / and it’s filled with people who are filled with shit,” and telling the story (with a book by Hugh Wheeler) of a revenge-driven “demon barber” who murders his victims and bakes them into meat pies, always felt like a curiously nihilistic entry in Sondheim’s oeuvre.

As you probably have heard, Robbie Robertson passed away yesterday (Wednesday, August 9, 2023) at age 80 after a long illness. Robertson is best known as a cofounder, chief songwriter, and guitarist of The Band, the Canadian-American rock quintet regarded by some as the greatest and most influential North American rock band of all time. With The Band, Robertson was responsible for penning such timeless classics as “The Weight,” “Stage Fright,” “Up on Cripple Creek,” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” as well as becoming the group’s unofficial leader after the other four members ceded creative and organizational control to the guitarist.

Setsuko Hara’s face, it seems, has been stuck in a smile for the past century. It should not be surprising that some have chosen to remember her, this Japanese woman, one of the greatest movie stars of any era—our Garbo, our Bergman, our Hepburn—frozen in sweetness. I sound accusatory. But when I was a child, I would pause Naruse films whenever she beamed on a bike. That wattage, that force. “The only time I saw Susan Sontag cry,” a writer once told me, his voice hushed, “was at a screening of a Setsuko film.

A superstimulus is, quoth Wikipedia: A supernormal stimulus or superstimulus is an exaggerated version of a stimulus to which there is an existing response tendency, or any stimulus that elicits a response more strongly than the stimulus for which it evolved. For example, it is possible to create artificial bird eggs which certain birds will prefer over their own eggs,[1] particularly evident in brood parasitism, and humans can be similarly exploited by junk food[2] and pornography.

Hello!  If this is your first time reading my dispatch: thank you for popping by – I hope you’ll return. And if you’ve been here before, welcome back! I’ll be honest. I didn’t think of the implications of setting Sunday as a publishing day when I have (immovable) deadlines some weekends (like this one!). Because of this, I’m moving this newsletter’s publishing day to a weekday. Likely Monday or Tuesday. Maybe Wednesday or Thursday.

This is part one of two about my time with the Fakirani Jats in Kutch, India.  It describes their camel pastoralist lifestyle, how they milk, and my initial impressions.  The second piece gets into the darker side of what I’m seeing here, and the emotional/ethical complications of visiting groups like this.      It didn’t seem real.  I slipped in and out of sleep, lying on a wool blanket, under a dome of milky stars.

It is angry outside, very January. On Friday night the Chicago Bulls unveiled a Ring of Honor, meant to augment banners already hanging in the arena for Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Bob Love, and Jerry Sloan. Coach Phil Jackson and late longtime lead executive Jerry Krause also have banners, as does the 72-win 1995-96 team, each were honored again on Friday. Well, Krause wasn’t honored, he was booed. As he was in every public appearance since his hiring as Bulls general manager in 1985.

Ronnie Wood first found fame as bassist in the original lineup of the Jeff Beck Group. Then in the early 1970s he distinguished himself as the lead, slide, and pedal steel guitarist for The Faces and Rod Stewart, with whom he played on The Rod Stewart Album, Every Picture Tells a Story, and other classic LPs. In 1974, he replaced Mick Taylor in the Rolling Stones, a gig he still holds today.

I have been known to endlessly sing the praises of Caffe Reggio, the cramped Italian establishment that has been a staple of Manhattan’s West Village since the 1920s. The caffe is known for its walls covered in “byzantine clutter”—pieces of art ranging from Renaissance prints and originals by students of Caravaggio, to religious icons and busts of Nefertiti. It also boasts numerous claims to fame including having been featured in books and movies, being the home of the world’s first cappuccino machine (so they say), and being situated across the street from what was once the house of Louisa May Alcott.