The Purdzilla Show

  Photo by Walker Fenton on Unsplash

Photo by michael schaffler on Unsplash I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived?  Henry David Thoreau

 

[Neil Young] comes out blazing, extending Ragged Glory 's Country Home and Love To Burn with long mission-statement solos on Old Black, his trusty Les Paul guitar - low, snarling notes wrenched into rippled spears of soprano  sustain; jubilant slaloms  coated in fuzz-box ash - tied to the groove by Crazy Horse's firm, human clockwork. David Fricke (in his recent  Mojo review of Neil Young/Crazy Horse's  Way Down In The Rust Bucket )

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash Novels and movies, being restlessly modern, propel you forwards or backwards through time, through days, years or even generations. But to do its noticing and judging, poetry balances itself on the pinprick of the moment. Slowing down, stopping yourself completely, to read and understand a poem is like trying to acquire an old-fashioned skill like drystone walling or trout tickling. Ian McEwan (in Saturday ) 

Photo by Tom Rogerson on Unsplash There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything you have to others, but lose nothing of yourself...only in music, and only on rare occasions, does the curtain actually lift on this dream of community, and it's tantalisingly conjured, before fading away with the last notes. Ian McEwan (in Saturday)