Ahead of the Irish alt-rockers’ highly anticipated fifth album, Dopamine Chamber, we count down their potent, occasionally political, catalogue
A single inspired by the birth of bassist Conor Deegan’s daughter, It’s Amazing to Be Young is a lovely example of Fontaines DC operating in euphoric mode, a relatively recent addition to their emotional mood board: “Sometimes,” offered frontman Grian Chatten, “optimism is a necessary delusion.”
Continue reading...Society tells us there is one way to live a life, and joy is a byproduct on the path there. But you don’t need a reason to enjoy the act of being alive
I have been dwelling on what it means to live well. Not because I have mastered it, but because I have become very comically bad at it. I have spent years rushing through my life, panicked and convinced I was running out of time. I worried constantly about work – getting it, keeping it, doing it, caring about it too much, hating it and losing it. I obsessed over being more productive. I fretted about money, mostly about not having any left after travelling too much. I poured so much energy into dating that it’s kind of impressive I haven’t had a relationship for the last six years.
But most of all I became fixated on my fertility and how it dwindled in my early 30s, leaving me to make choices most women don’t have to until later. I tried to save my eggs and couldn’t. My lack of a partner in a conservative Catholic Lebanese family became a cudgel.
Continue reading...Emerging in early-1970s New Zealand, the band turned pop into surreal theatre. Percussionist Noel Crombie was the band’s visual architect, shaping their looks via outlandish costumes, makeup, hair design, album covers and music videos.
In a new book written with music journalist Michael Dwyer, Crombie and the band look back on their chameleonic eras
Continue reading...People often forget social rules when dogs are involved, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. But you’ll have to say something if you want things to change
Read more Leading questions
A good friend of mine stays with me regularly when she comes into town. She brings her husband and two dogs that don’t get along with my dog. They’ve “used the bathroom” in our house before. I try to be nice and help clean or pretend it doesn’t bother me so that they feel comfortable. But when she asks for a weekend to come back with everyone, I kind of dread it. I enjoy seeing her and she’s a great friend. I think our friendship would be better if she stayed somewhere else, but I would feel bad if she stayed in a hotel and I don’t think she’d visit as often. She cleans up after the dogs and whatnot, but I like my home to be my safe haven. This friend doesn’t handle confrontation well, but is understanding. What can I do to handle this?
Eleanor says: It sounds as though you’re in the jam we all get into when we try to smooth things over: you can have the social ease of pretending something is fine; or the outcome from confessing it isn’t, but not both simultaneously.
Continue reading...The Handmaid’s Tale author reflects on her loves, losses and literary achievements in a memoir that showcases her wisdom and wit
Margaret Atwood had to be persuaded to write a memoir. The thought of writing about herself initially seemed “dead boring. Who wants to read about someone sitting at a desk messing up blank sheets of paper?” Yet, she continues, time passed and the possibility of a memoir took on a “lurid phosphorescent glow. ‘Wasn’t there something appealing in the idea?’ my sinister alter ego whispered … I could thank my benefactors, reward my friends, trash my enemies and pay off scores long forgotten by everyone but me.”
Subtitled “A Memoir of Sorts”, Book of Lives is the Canadian author’s account of her loves, losses and literary achievements (she has written just over 50 books, including novels, short stories and poetry collections), and a fine showcase for her wisdom and wit. What little score-settling she includes is purely for the punchline. When a poet told Atwood in the early 1970s that she wrote like a man – he intended it as a compliment – she told him he forgot the punctuation. “What you meant was, ‘She writes. Like a man’.”
Continue reading...Susan Tomes
(Hyperion)
From Marianne Martines – taught by the family lodger, Haydn, to Teresa Carreño who played for Lincoln, there’s names new and old in this fascinating and appealing collection
This attractive compilation came out of Susan Tomes’ research for a book on female pianists across history. As she discovered, many wrote music as well, producing short works for the salons and domestic circles to which they were frequently restricted. Thanks to pioneering performers such as Tomes, some of the dozen women presented here are familiar names, but several will be new to many, as will their appealing compositions.
Take Marianne Martines, given lessons in lieu of rent by the family lodger, Haydn. Her miniature A major sonata possesses the sparkle of Scarlatti. Marianna von Auenbrugger died aged 23, but she was taught by Salieri, who paid for the publication of the Mozartian E-flat major sonata recorded here.
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In 1965 kreeg ze de kans om voor de Apollo-missies van NASA te gaan werken. Haar software was erop gericht om zelf fouten op te lossen.
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