Culture

No Cheating

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I wanted the ultimate magic kit when I was a kid, but as with so many things in life, disappointment lay in the fact that the magic kits grew more complex, more “magical,” only with higher prices.

Each of them included a “magic wand,” which was just a wooden dowel painted black, or, in the more expensive kits, painted black with a white tip, because a white tip equals classy. The photo of the kid on the magic box with the white tipped wand often showed the kid in tails and with a top hat. (I am sure that because of kids like me, or because of just me, the toy companies needed to add the disclaimer, “Hat and tails not in package.”)
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Elvis Costello’s ‘The Last Year of My Youth’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Elvis Costello is 62 today. It might be obvious to anyone who visits these pages that I am something of an amateurish fan of his work. He is touring America (near me) this fall with a concert based on his 1982 album, Imperial Bedroom. This column first appeared in May:

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The phrase must have been much on Elvis Costello’s mind the summer of 2014: he was going to perform a set of solo shows at Carnegie Hall in June and he had even titled the shows “The Last Year of My Youth.” But he did not have a song with that title.

He did have a song that addressed aging, the folly and wonder of being middle-aged, a song called “45” that he debuted on The Tonight Show in the 1990s and then performed on his 2002 album, When I Was Cruel. He was around that age at that time and found for himself a wealth of metaphors to being 45, from the end of World War II in 1945 (“bells are chiming in victory”), to 45 RPM records and what rock singles meant when he was young: “Bass and treble heal every hurt.” One reviewer, also in his mid 40s, wrote that “45” hit him so hard at the time, “I was shaking at the end” of the song. When I hit 45, I understood this thought about the song and I also understood the song; I also found that I understood the song better than I had the day before, when I was still 44.

The summer of 2014, Costello was turning 60, because math happens, and that phrase—”the last year of my youth”—must have been much on his mind.
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‘Nobody is sleeping in the sky’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

It is believed that August 19 is the date on which the poet Federico García Lorca (above) was assassinated by Nationalist forces in Spain. The killing was 80 years ago today. The poet was 38.

Lorca was murdered during the Spanish Civil War by soldiers on the Nationalist side, the Francoists. In “Fable and Round of the Three Friends,” he foresaw, in his surrealist fashion, his own end:
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