music clip of the day

only rock ’n roll

Animal Collective, Unitled/“Brothersport”
Live, Chicago (Pitchfork Festival), 7/15/11

*****

Want to hear the entire set?

Jazz, classical, gospel, rock: the names may be different, but what they offer is the same—a way, pleasurably, to lose your mind.

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lagniappe

In the evening darkness at a place outside New York, an outlook where/you can perceive eight million people’s homes in a single glance. . . ./Schubert’s being played in some room/there and for someone the tones at this moment are more real than everything else.

—Tomas Transtromer, “Schubertiana” (excerpt), trans. Samuel Charters

Here, in an undated audio clip, Transtromer, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature, talks about this poem and reads it in this English translation.

*****

Transtromer suffered a stroke in 1990, at the age of fifty-nine, which robbed him of speech and impaired the use of his right arm. Rather than delivering the customary [Nobel] laureate’s address when he accepts the award, on December 10th, he will play a piece on the piano using only his left hand.

—Dan Chiasson, “Night Thoughts: The poetry of Tomas Transtromer,” New Yorker, 10/31/11