See also: The musical performance I most wish I'd seen this year (2009).

In a story from Alex Ross:

At 4 P.M. on a Sunday, thirteen hundred people assembled in the Drill Hall to hear the piece, variously standing, sitting, or lying on the floor. First came an awakening murmur: one group of performers exhaled through horns and cones; others rubbed stones together and made whistling sounds by whirling tubes. Then one member of the ensemble — Schick, perched above the entrance to the Drill Hall — delivered a call on a conch shell. With that commanding, shofar-like tone, the sound started to swell: tom-toms and bass drums thudded, cymbals and tam-tams crashed, sirens wailed, bells clanged. It was an engulfing, complexly layered noise, one that seemed almost to force the listeners into motion, and the crowd fanned out through the arena. I spent some time in the outer hallways, where at one point I was caught unawares by a Chinese opera gong resounding deafeningly down a stairwell. Toward the end of the first hour, a decrescendo began, with the roar of drums and gongs giving way to gentler timbres of triangles, temple bells, and low cymbal washes. The sun was beginning to set, and the Drill Hall darkened. In the coda, piccolos and orchestra bells took up an array of bird songs that Adams had meticulously notated. For a few long minutes, it seemed as though Manhattan had been replaced by an endless tundra.

The results are darker than I expected — maybe I missed the endless tundra as I played all the sounds in my head — but stunning.

3. Sasha Frere-Jones on Stevie Nicks: "Nicks is like a USB thumb drive in lace, a small package containing a variety of pop-culture personality tropes."

2. Steve Coll on Osama Bin Laden: "Bin Laden was to Arab violence and dissent in the digital age what Adam Osborne was to laptop computers or Excite was to the search-engine business. He lacked the unifying ideas and insights required to build a sustainable community of followers, but, in some ways, he was ahead of his time."

1. John Ratzenberger to Anthony Lane on Pixar: "They really should be running Western civilization."

(Lane, earlier in the piece: "How you get a job at Pixar, nobody knows. The most reliable method is to be born there, preferably in a cupboard full of office supplies, then to sit tight for twenty years before sneaking out over Christmas and finding space at a workstation." Yep, I'll do it.)

From a review of various books about reality TV, with parenthetical notes from a blog's Very Good Paragraphs category (agreed):

Makeover shows inevitably build to a spectacular moment when “reveal” becomes a noun, and yet the final product is often unremarkable: a woman with an up-to-date generic haircut, wearing a jacket that fits well; a man who is chubby but not obese; a dog with no overwhelming urge to bare its fangs. The new subject is worth looking at only because we know where it came from, which means that, despite the seeming decisiveness of the transformation, the old subject never truly disappears. “The After highlights the dreadfulness of the Before,” [Brenda R.] Weber writes [in her book, Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity]. “In makeover logic, no post-made-over body can ever be considered separate from its pre-made-over form.” She might have added that no makeover is ever really finished; there is no After who is not, in other respects, a Before—maybe your dog no longer strains at the leash, but are you sure that sweater doesn’t make you look old and tired? Are you sure your thighs wouldn’t benefit from some blunt cannulation? Weber’s makeover nation is an eerie place, because no one fully belongs there, and, deep down, everyone knows it.

For the show perspective, this conclusion is depressing. But take away the TV, and I like the idea of us all being both Afters and Befores.

The New Yorker review of Werner Herzog's new 3D Cave of Forgotten Dreams is behind a pay-wall. But I must liberate the best paragraph from it, because it was the best paragraph I read last week, on how Herzog is "in the best and most quizzical sense of the word, nuts."

You can tell this because of the unerring way in which he searches out, or stumbles upon, his fellow-eccentrics. One of the first people with whom he discusses the cave turns outs, under gentle prodding, to have been a circus performer before becoming an archeologist. "Doing what? A lion tamer?" Herzog asks, straying slightly from the point. Then, there is the "master perfumer," whom we see sniffing at rifts in the external rockface, like a limestone pervert, and the "experimental archeologist" by the name of Wulf, who is interviewed wearing reindeer skins. Best of all is the director of the Chauvet project, a Frenchman who looks and smiles like Einstein, and whose English pronunciation of the phrase "woolly rhino" will keep me cheered into the autumn of my days.

Quick, the paywall guards aren't watching!

I don't know why or how, but my favorite story from last week's New Yorker is available outside the magazine's paywall right now. Burkhard Bilger's profile of neuroscientist David Eagleman involves amusement park thrill rides, how drummers experience time differently, Eagleman falling off a roof, and something called the oddball effect. There's also mention of a Calvino book that remains on my must-read-someday list.

In Eagleman's essay "Brain Time," published in the 2009 collection "What's Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science," he borrows a conceit from Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities." The brain, he writes, is like Kublai Khan, the great Mongol emperor of the thirteenth century. It sits enthroned in its skull, "encased in darkness and silence," at a lofty remove from brute reality. Messengers stream in from every corner of the sensory kingdom, bringing word of distant sights, sounds, and smells. Their reports arrive at different rates, often long out of date, yet the details are all stitched together into a seamless chronology. The difference is that Kublai Khan was piecing together the past. The brain is describing the present — processing reams of disjointed data on the fly, editing everything down to an instantaneous now. How does it manage it?

The whole story is fascinating. Plus, you learn the ridiculous lengths to which Coldplay apparently goes to sound less studio-ish in concert.

(Unintended bonus: If you want to try processing "reams of disjointed data on the fly," try reading the mag's chat with Bilger and Eagleman. Between the lack of design and some odd sequencing issues, you can practically feel your brain churn to stitch together the page's flow.)

Both are in the April 11 New Yorker. The first is near the end of a piece on performance artists Eiko and Koma. Joan Acocella finds something they told the Washington Post at some point (late '80s, Google says):

When we perform, we like to imagine that each of us is a fresh fish which was just caught and is on the cutting board. The fish intuits that somebody will eat it. No room to be coquettish. The fish's body is tight, shining blue, eyes wide open. No way to escape.

The second is in an Alex Ross story on Bach. I know so little about classical music, but Ross is so good at imparting art and challenge.

More than half of the sacred cantatas were written between 1723 and 1726, when Bach was in the early years of his long, and often unrewarding, appointment as the cantor of the Thomaskirche, in Leipzig. For extended stretches of the liturgical year, he produced one cantata a week, and for the most part he refused to take the easy path of reworking older pieces, whether his own or others’. Instead, in what seems a kind of creative rage, he experimented with every aspect of the cantata form, which traditionally served as a musical meditation on the Scriptural readings of the week. There are intimidating fugal choruses, sublimely extended operatic arias, frenzied instrumental interludes, weird chords galore, episodes of almost irreverent dancing merriment. To hear the entire corpus is to be buffeted by the restless energy of Bach’s imagination.

I have no intention today at work of lying nude on a pile of sticks and feathers. (And if as much happens, the daily 10 a.m. meeting has gone very wrong.) I also don't expect today to learn to write cantatas. But mash the two passages together and run them through this amazing cover of Wild Horses, from the forthcoming Paint It Black: An Alt-Country Tribute to the Rolling Stones. That's what I want today to be like.

Pieces like Lauren Collins' profile of Christian Louboutin are why I make myself read The New Yorker cover to cover each week, no matter how long it takes. I knew nothing of the designer before reading the story and undoubtedly ignored a conversation or two about him previously.

As you know, I'm no shoe connoisseur.

But the Collins article is fascinating from a how-we-design perspective, and every narrative counts, the little lines adding up well. The article is behind the paywall, but here are some moments that worked for me.

One from each page of the story–

First page, Collins: "To Louboutin, shoes are less interesting for their physical properties than for their psychological ones."

Second page, Louboutin on repelling preciousness in design: "We have a phrase in French, le petit quelque chose qui fout tout par terre, which means 'the little thing that fucks everything up.' "

Third page, Collins visiting the Louboutin design headquarters: "At the offices, I saw more pens and paintbrushes than keyboards."

Fourth page, Louboutin on creativity levels a few days into his working vacations: "Every drawing brings me to another. It's like a sentence."

Fifth page, Collins online: "A guide called 'How to Spot a Fake Christian Louboutin' warns that it might not a Louboutin if the 'shoe silhouette is granny rather than sleek' or it 'smells like toxic glue.' "

Sixth page, Collins on a kid Louboutin getting a phone: "He wrote the numbers of his friends directly on a wall, near his bed. 'I was always so happy to see my friends dancing above me as I went to sleep.' "

Seventh page, Louboutin on a game he used to pass time as a child: "I would go to the travel agent's office, and look at airline timetables and plan routes. I'd convert money, and check to see that I wasn't running into any national holidays, and figure out what fruit I could eat."

Eighth page, Collins talking sex and shoes with Louboutin: "He went on, 'I would hate to be in a position of a person that does things that repulse the guy.' At this, I mentioned a fur boot that Louboutin made, with a cleft for each toe, so that the foot looked like a lion's paw. I doubted that many men would find it as amusing as I did. Louboutin looked apologetic. 'Yes,' he said. 'That is for a woman who is alone.' "

Ninth page, Collins: "Midway through breakfast, the cloth on the side table caught Louboutin's eye. I had a pen and a piece of paper, which I gave to him. He started sketching, quick flicks of the wrist yielding graceful blue lines. Soon, a shoe had started to take shape. Its sole was high and thick, with the swooping shape of a roller coaster."

-Meghan O'Rourke, "Story's End."
-Joyce Carol Oates, "A Widow's Story."
-Francisco Goldman, "The Wave."
-Ken Auletta, "The Dictator Index."|
-Elif Batuman, "The View from the Stands."

(All above require a print or digital subscription.)

-The singer the listing description made me want to hear: Eli Paperboy Reed, Listening now, I'm not too sure what he adds to soul sound. But his live shows must be a sweaty movin-and-groovin good time.

-The photo, in not great quality.

-The ad was for USA Network's Character Approved awards.

For most of today, the sun carried me along, reaching through work windows and when the day was over tossing me down the street. I didn't notice any of my own footsteps or the changing traffic lights or how efficiently the clocks swung around, digit by digit, until they had.

But now night's come like a Nutcracker marauder, a mask in one hand and in the other a kaleidescope, which it puts in front of my eyes as I try to stay upright. The colored shapes spin and malform with anxiety, even as I turn out the light and pull the white shirt over my head, and I have  to tell you before I fall asleep about a magazine I read today.

Or issue, I mean. The magazine was the usual one, yes, the required reading and the exercise, and I haven't even finished the issue yet… But it was so good. I'm switching tense now and I'm sorry. I debated whether to try and tell you now, but the morning would be an entirely new day with any of today's Dylan Thomas-feeling transport potential unlikely and certainly without this exhaustion's gas-puddle rainbows.

Meghan O'Rourke's writing on losing her mother and the lifelong act of reading was beautiful. The magazine has been good on grief recently, with Joyce Carol Oates and next Francisco Goldman breaking us apart slowly. (I keep reading these stories on the train and regretting it but not really. If you see my eyes dilate as I lean back against the system map, okay.) As you keep reading this issue, the article on the Ibrahim prize is so unexpected and inspiring, and the immediately following trip to the world of Istanbul soccer is fascinating. This quote drops in from almost nowhere. but I know it was waiting for me (and you): "I have one problem and I wouldn't exchange it for a thousand solutions."

Up front in the issue, there's a description of a singer that makes me want to hear him, and there's a photo from an exhibit I now want to see. There's even an ad I like. The back of the book has fiction from a famous, late writer, and I haven't gotten there yet. I'm going to find my bed and hope tomorrow has slivers of today's urgency and ease.

I don't know from where those feelings showed up in such quantity.

But here are two things I took away from the recent New Yorker story.

1. Thirteen years later, I'm still embarrassed about how I answered an SAT II essay question about George Elliot. I don't recall the question or what I wrote about George, except that I had a lot to say about HIM.

2. I kind of love this quote from Middlemarch. "The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."