Art Kavanagh

I replaced my 5-year-old Intel MacBook Air with an M4 and got 3 free months of Apple tv thrown in. So, I binge-watched Liaison 📺 with Vincent Cassel and Eva Green. Meh. Good cast (très sympa), risible story, a combination I find particularly frustrating.

Astonished to learn that Stiff Little Fingers still exist, with two original members. Who knew? 🎶

The Moonstone, we are told, is “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels.” But perhaps that’s not where its main interest lies.

“My Back Pages” is the only song from Somewhere Before that I ever listen to now (though I have the album on CD). I hadn’t realized till I read Ethan Iverson’s Shades of Jazz today that the Byrds recorded a version that Jarrett’s performance resembles more closely than it does Dylan’s 🎶 🎹

Daphne du Maurier’s novel, The Scapegoat, is set roughly contemporaneously with its publication (1957) in the aftermath of the Second World War. When two doppelgängers, a French aristocrat and an English lecturer in French history, swap identities, neither gets quite what he was expecting.

Henry Fielding’s 1749 novel is centrally concerned with justice (particularly natural justice) and the difficulty of knowing the truth. And more besides (it’s a long novel), but I focus on these two themes.

Missing from this list of Irish second albums are Clannad 2 (1975) and The Radiators’ Ghostown (1979) — the latters’ first being TV Tube Heart 🎶

Been comparing Enrico Pieranunzi’s “Earlier Sea” from the album Special Encounter (with Haden and Motian) with the Italian radio recording of “Mare Anteriore” (with Marc Johnson and Joey Baron, apparently from the same session as Current Conditions) and the Johnson/Baron version is better! 🎶 🎹

First the meme coins, now the market manipulation. I suppose it was predictable that Trump would shamelessly exploit his immunity to make himself obscenely rich. It’s infuriating that he’s getting away with it, though.

Chet Baker Reimagined — new reworkings by R&B. pop, soul and jazz artists: The review doesn’t mention “That Old Feeling”. Surely they didn’t leave that out? 🎶

The newsletter post that should have gone out today will, I’m afraid, be delayed by a week. My apologies. As I said at the end of the previous post, today’s should have been about Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. The reason for the delay is that I haven’t finished rereading it yet; indeed, I’m only about halfway through. I’d forgotten how long it is (800 pages). There’s no doubt, too, that I’m a slower reader than I was in 1995, which is the last time I read it.

The Guardian has Daryl Hannah’s 10 best films — ranked 🍿. Hmmmm. I don’t want to make any extravagant claims for Ivan Reitman’s Legal Eagles. It was very average and failed to justify its enormous budget, but surely it’s better than at least one of the films on this list.

Goodbye Val Kilmer. I liked him in Spartan 🍿. Wouldn’t mind seeing it again.

The Critic has a nice profile of Paul Simon, composer of such superb jazz standards as “I Do It for Your Love” (Bill Evans), “Still Crazy After All These Years” and “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” (Brad Mehldau) and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (Kevin Hays) 🎶🎹

… the humanities are going to survive, yes, but for the next good long while they are going to be stewarded into an uncertain future in a deinstitutionalized virtual space.

Justin Smith-Ruiu’s Hinternet

Judges support planet, it says here. That’s worrying on two counts: first, it probably isn’t the best use of judges’ costly time and, second, it presumably means the elephants and turtles have wandered off.

Trump’s “plan” for tariffs on pharma will damage the business of big American companies who have subsidiaries in Ireland. What a brilliant idea! I wonder why it doesn’t seem to have occurred to any previous US administration?

A continuation of a previous post in which I discussed two of Robert Browning’s poems about music (“A Toccata of Galuppi’s” and “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha”). In this one, I’m writing about “Abt Vogler” and “With Charles Avison”.

Can’t help thinking an abstract would have been more useful, though I can see it might have been more difficult for the publishers.

“In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:” followed by a screen of unintelligible characters.

The firm, the White House claimed, also acknowledged the wrongdoing of Pomerantz, the partner involved in the investigation into Trump’s hush-money payments to an adult film actor.

If that’s true, Pomerantz should sue them. Trump rescinds executive order affecting Paul, Weiss

Yet another actor who will find it a challenge to play a spymaster who looks like “a bullfrog in a sou’wester”: Macfadyen cast as Smiley 📺

This time, there are just two I’ve written about (39 and 31) and two I’ve read but haven’t written about (47 and 27): The 100 best Irish books of the 21st century: 50 to 26 📚

I’ve written about eight of these in my newsletter or (in the case of 96) on my personal site: 96, 92, 88, 86, 84, 75, 69, 58. I have copies of 99 and 77 but haven’t yet got around to reading them; and I’m just about to start reading 72: The 100 best Irish books of the 21st century: 100 to 51 📖

Reupping this post about why I don’t intend to stop reading Alice Munro. In fact, I haven’t read anything by her since I posted it last August so I’m putting this here mainly as a reminder to myself 📚

In wartime and its aftermath, the pursuit of some approximation of justice is represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the military who do the actual fighting and the lawyers, some of whom attempt to ensure that legality is maintained. These are their stories.