Watched in 2024, Spotify's Ghost Artists, The Work of Art, etc.
In which nothing should stand in your way, broken piano or otherwise.
🎊 How much confetti is dropped on Time Square every New Year? About 3,000 pounds. A look at Treb Heining, the creator of the hand-thrown confetti effect that has become synonymous with the drop.
🎧 An album I love every week, in no particular order, figuring by year’s end I’ll have what would constitute my top 50.
The Beta Band, Hot Shots II: Where their initial outings were dense, anarchist explorations of everything, Hot Shots II is a polished, meditative and cohesive sonic journey of ambient synths, trip-hop percussion, sampled strings, acoustic guitars and occasional soarings into carefully-crafted rock. Its hypnotic rhythms, layered instrumentation and emotional resonance are perfect for cold, winter nights.
📺 Wrote a bit about the TV and movies watched in 2024. Still need to catch some of the bigger movies of 2024, but if the Academy has til March, so do I.
📖 Currently Reading: The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing, a Christmas gift from my mother and stepfather. “In this guided tour inside the artist’s head, Adam Moss traces the evolution of transcendent novels, paintings, jokes, movies, songs, and more. Weaving conversations with some of the most accomplished artists of our time together with the journal entries, napkin doodles, and sketches that were their tools, Moss breaks down the work—the tortuous paths and artistic decisions—that led to great art. From first glimmers to second thoughts, roads not taken, crises, breakthroughs, on to one triumphant finish after another.”
🍿 Apparently, The Sting is now the oldest movie currently streaming on Netflix, made in 1973. It is one of only five movies the service’s library made before 1980. A month ago, there were over twenty, though that’s almost nothing from the first almost 100 years of film history. Netflix killed the video store while failing to be an adequate replacement for it. Timely piece from The New Yorker: What we lose when streaming companies choose what we watch.
🏀 Lebron James scored 30 points Friday, his 563rd 30-point game, passing a record set by Michael Jordan over twenty years ago.
James’ longevity is unreal, and if you think he’s the greatest to ever play, so be it. But it should be noted, Jordan played seven less seasons than James, averaging over 30 points per game (still a record) and leading the league for 2/3s of his career. He was an absolute scoring machine, and I am not sure we’ll ever see anyone like him again.
🎷 If you’re looking for real jazz, I’ve been making my way through Detroit writer Ana Gavrilovska’s favorite jazz albums of 2024.
👻 A look at an allegedly shitty Spotify practice of using "ghost artists" to reduce royalty payments, populating its curated playlists with tracks from pseudonymous or nonexistent artists through an internal program called Perfect Fit Content (PFC), initiated around 2017. These tracks often appear on playlists designed for ambient, sleep, or focus music, but I’ve noticed them quite often in various jazz playlists.
🎹 How Keith Jarrett played on a broken piano and turned a “potentially disastrous concert into the best-selling piano album of all time.” “What Keith Jarrett did so brilliantly was to take this broken piano and use it to play music that only that piano could have played. He didn’t hide away from the faults of the piano; instead, he embraced them and put them in the music. This is the very essence of improvisation.” The Köln Concert would go on to become both the best-selling solo jazz album and the best-selling piano album.
✌️Happy New Year. Don’t let anything stop ya. Not even a broken piano.
And keep that Hoping Machine running.
Love,
Luke
