Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line

Glad to read that I wasn’t the only one to notice the Magnetic Fields homage in Bruce Springsteen’s “Girls in their Summer Clothes”:

Enter wry New Yorker Stephin Merritt, Mr Magnetic Field. Merritt is a pop auteur of great distinction, if not wide renown; he probably earns more comparisons to Cole Porter than royalties. He might be best known for his songs accompanying the Lemony Snicket series of children’s books rather than the Magnetic Fields’ triple album of 1999, 69 Love Songs. (But was ‘Girls in Their Summer Clothes’, on Bruce Springsteen’s Magic album, a Merritt tribute?)

—Kitty Empire, The Observer

On my flight out to Cleveland via Chicago, I sat next to a lovely, hip-looking couple watching The Sopranos on DVD, wedged into the cattle-class middle seats. They turned out to be Brett and Rennie Sparks — husband-and-wife band The Handsome Family. They actually started out in Chicago in the early 1990s back when I was a graduate student and part-time DJ at WHPK radio, and have recorded with some of my favorite musicians such as various members of the Mekons. Their records have been lauded as amongst the best of the alt.country/Americana/No Depression genres — just the sort of stuff that I love, so I’m now a little embarrassed that I haven’t paid much attention to them before. A quick listen to their myspace and iTunes samples means that it’s time for a trip to the record store.

Imagine this. You are male, somewhere between 38 and 55, your recent purchases include recordings by the Hold Steady and that Robert Plant and Alison Krauss album, and you like to think you know about new world wine and the rough outlines of global warming. For nearly 30 years, your aesthetic universe has been constructed around a bandy-legged, bespectacled man who seems to have an innate sympathy with you and your lot, and though he has regularly tested your faith, you have clung on. You are, of course, an Elvis Costello fan.

-John Harris on Elvis Costello’s emigration, Guardian Unlimited Arts

Embarassingly right-on, really.

Next stop, Cleveland, where I’m giving a couple of talks, and New York, for a collaboration meeting and Thanksgiving.

I went to see and hear “The Book of Longing” last night, Philip Glass’ musical setting of a selection of Leonard Cohen’s poems.

Leonard Cohen, praised for the last forty years or so as much as a singer-songwriter as a poet, is an odd choice as a libbrettist. Glass may mostly be a better composer than Cohen, but it may not be a surprise that Leonard Cohen writes better Leonard Cohen songs than Philip Glass, and sings them better too. Throughout, the work suffers from the usual problem of my lowbrow encounters with English-language “art song”: words not written to be sung sound stilted to the pop-trained ear. (Some of the poems had actually been used as lyrics Cohen himself on Ten New Songs in 2001, and, while Glass’ pulsing melodies offer a lot, they’re not an obvious improvement on the originals.) Although many poets are terrible interpreters of their own work, Cohen’s experience as a singer means that the brief recorded interludes of his shorter poems are more pleasing than the longer songs between which they are sprinkled between and on which they comment.

The most magical moment of the evening came not at the Barbican but in St Paul’s tube station on the way home: my companion had dropped a glove and a good Samaritan came running up to return it. In a lovely coincidence (which he would especially appreciate), the bystander turned out to be my friend and colleague Bernard Carr who had just been watching the same concert with his wife and friends.

Too busy for much blogging for the next few weeks. In the meantime:

First, my grad students: Goodbye to one just finishing, hello to my new one, congratulations to the one who just transferred to official PhD-student status, and, finally, to the one staying on as a postdoc! I’m excited that I’m able to still work with all of them on various projects, all concentrating on understanding the state of the Universe at its very earliest moments.

Second, to the undergrads: I hope that my teaching is going better than last year.

Third, the new record from my homestate boy, Bruce Springsteen, is better than you might expect from a still-left-wing pro-Union old-fashioned rock’n’roller. And “Girls in Their Summer Clothes” sounds like it could have been written and performed by Stephen Merritt and his Magnetic Fields (this is intended as a huge compliment!).

Next time, an update on the odd combination of Philip Glass’s versions of Leonard Cohen’s poems. And maybe that 16-solar-mass Black Hole (technical paper here). Conversely, I am unlikely to usefully comment on race relations as seen through the eyes James Watson or Sasha Frere-Jones. But the rest of the blogosphere has those well in hand.

End of the world or age of Aquarius?

Also in honor of Sputnik, the best lyric of the year: “Driving herself crazy/ like that astronaut lady”, from the Common/Lily Allen collaboration, “Drivin’ Me Wild” (deconstructed by the Guardian here).

Well, Summer break is over, the days are surprisingly short already, the sky is rarely clear, and the students are back.

Warm-weather highlights ranged from the intellectual pleasures of my visits to Portugal and Chicago, to the rather more visceral ones of Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation at the Roundhouse, The Hold Steady at Shepherds Bush, and the diminutive Prince somehow filling up the massive O2 arena formerly known as The Dome. I also let my PhD Alma Mater pimp me to promote themselves, but I got lunch with the writer of Freakonomics out of it, and a surprisingly wonderful cocktail party at the residence of the used-car-salesman-cum-American Ambassador in London.

But now, back to real work. I’ve spent the day in front of my computer, more even than usual, dealing with the repercussions of our having decided to give the returning second-year students a test to get them to flex their mathematical muscles in preparation for the year — during which they’re liable to see lots of new mathematical and physical concepts for the very first time. We’ve decided to run the test through our online learning system, and, unfortunately, new technology almost always has its quirks: we had some fires to quench in the early hours of the day, but things seem to be running smoothly now. My proverbial and actual fingers are all crossed.

I’ll be covering quite a few of those new concepts in my second attempt at teaching our course on Fourier Methods; it didn’t go very well, last time, I must admit, and I’m hoping that the changes I’ve made in both the form and the content of the course — and the test they’re taking now — will make it better for the students. Feedback, positive, negative, or even ranting, is appreciated, from any present or past students.

A sad note from the other end of the pop-music spectrum: less than a year after the close of his downtown New York club, CBGB, its owner, Hilly Kristal, has died at the un-rock’n’roll age of 75 (but still too soon, of course). Intending to start a very different kind of club (the initials stand for “Country, Blue-Grass, Blues), he inadvertantly backed into a role of (poorly-paid) impressario and godfather to the NYC punk scene, nurturing bands like Talking Heads, the Ramones, Blondie, and Sonic Youth (whose “Daydream Nation” I’m going to see performed in its entirety this weekend in London), not to mention literally thousands of others no one’s ever heard of. I only made it there a couple of times during my not-at-all errant youth, but it’s jarring to see the thousands of people all around sporting there CBGB t-shirts everywhere from London to Barcelona, not that any of the money paid for them ever made it back to the club itself when it needed it.

Combining as it does my vocation with my avocation, it’s impossible to resist an easy post about our favorite rock-star PhD student, especially when he’s made the Guardian’s Leader (aka Editorial) page and the front of the BBC News site (complete with a spiffy pic of the rock star with our new head of group). Less than three nervous weeks for Brian to prepare for his PhD viva! Of course, I should point out that, like parents and their kids, we love all of our students equally, even the ones who haven’t made platinum records, written West End musicals and books on astrophysics, and inspired Wayne’s World.