Memories of the Roland TR-808: the drum machine that revolutionised music.
“If you layer its bass drum, clap and snare on top of each other, it fills up such a specific but perfect frequency range that it sounds great in a club, at home, even on laptop speakers. … I shouldn't really say this, but they've made it really easy to play live when you're drunk. The sound palette is one of the best that's ever existed – whatever you do is probably going to make people dance. And I really enjoy that, because I like a drink.”
Nick Asbury luxuriantly luxuriates over the meaning of luxury.
“One of the most enduring commercial slogans of all time came from De Beers in 1947. "A diamond is forever" was penned by Frances Geraghty, a copywriter who has been described as the original Peggy Olson. But even that is only the second best line De Beers ever produced. Rory Sutherland, of Ogilvy Group UK, has noted the evil brilliance of the 1930s slogan: ‘How else could a month's salary last a lifetime?’. Designed to sell engagement rings, it's a deft act of price anchoring that frames a serious financial outlay as a new social norm. The strain only began to show in the 1980s when De Beers updated it to ‘How else can two months' salary last a lifetime?’”
Sam Parker attempts to be alone. Completely and utterly alone.
“Solitude is overrated – these are the last words I hear from anyone for several days. Left alone, I stand rooted to the spot for a moment, then start pacing back and forth. It is a strange situation and I don’t know what do with myself. Instinctively, I reach for my phone – this is mad! Tell someone! Put it on Facebook! – but my phone isn’t there, it’s turned off in my bag, and it wouldn’t work here anyway. So I start manically chopping wood. I line up the logs and hack away. I am rubbish at it: missing the logs altogether or sending useless shavings spiralling into the snow. Defeated, I stop and go back inside and try to sit down for a moment. A horrible sense of panic makes me stand back up. I try to read, but the silence is unbearably loud. I sit. I reach for the wine I’ve brought. I get drunk as hell.”
Analysis of Steven Soderbergh's recut of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
“Watching the new cut, one gets the idea that this movie was about HAL all along. He's always watching, too—as Frank and Dave whisper to each other by the pod bay doors; as man discovers tools; as astronauts explore the moon; as Dave travels through the Stargate. In Soderbergh’s cut, the two most famous shots in 2001—the close-up on HAL’s red eye, and the alignment of celestial bodies above the black monolith in the Dawn of Man sequence—are now in consecutive sequence. At the end of the film, when the star child stares enigmatically at Earth, HAL stares enigmatically back, his presence as essential to man's evolution as that of the monolith itself.”
Aislinn Hunter on the importance of writers' belongings.
“The idea of the writer writing, of the physical space they occupy when they create a great work, of what they choose to surround themselves with, has always been a source of fascination. It is for this reason that writers are often asked where they write and with what implements. History is full of the details of great men’s desks – how Charles Dickens kept a ‘china monkey’ on his desk without which he couldn’t settle down, or how Sir Walter Scott kept his mother’s old toilette boxes and his father’s snuff box and etui-case on his desk – but as Victorian women writers rarely had a designated room to write in, let alone a desk large enough to hold their most valued things, we know little of what objects they kept with them when they sat down to work.”
That is all.