On Late Style

droid

Well-known member
Its his 39th studio album, and its actually pretty good. His voice sounds the youngest it has in about 30 years.
 

Leo

Well-known member
ah, maybe 60th with live albums and comps included. read that number somewhere. not that 39 isn't impressive.
 

jenks

thread death
I remember a discussion on Dylan a few years ago in which K Punk was having none of it. The new album is great, if you like Dylan. It’s not going to convert newcomers, I think. There’s a great deal of humour in there, knowing winks about his own legend, some outrageous rhymes that just hold, wry jokes but also it does feel like he’s doing some summing up - his review of the twentieth century on Murder Most Foul and his inward glare on Multitudes. Whether you buy into that or just think it’s a series of cheap tricks is up to you. It feels sincere to me.
I’ve kind of got to that stage now where I generally think about most things - I like it but I don’t necessarily expect anyone else to.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Mandelbrot:

Some time back, I tried to draw up an informal list of those who have done their best work late in life. Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell published their celebrated Principia Mathematicae between 1910 and 1913. Therefore, Whitehead was about 50, and before the Principia had not produced anything of significance; Russell was just 30. Yet the cover page lists the co-authors in inverse alphabetic order, meant to emphasise that the senior author was Whitehead. He had been in charge of the mathematical part of the book but Russell was a famous high aristocrat, well known for pacifist views; he went to prison, etc. As a result, Principia Mathematicae is usually considered the work of Russell 'helped' by Whitehead, while the inverse would be more just.
Another deeply entrenched myth is that a mathematician who interrupts his work for 10 years "forgets everything", "loses his ability" and consequently is destined to disappear. Inversely, a writer or composer can stop for 10 years and come back stronger than before…
 

sus

Well-known member
Three weeks earlier, [Paul] Simon had released a new album, “Stranger to Stranger,” with its cover taken from a portrait that Close painted of the musician a few years back. Then, the day before I saw [Chuck] Close, Simon announced that the album would be his last. “I called him up, and I said, ‘Artists don’t retire,’ ” Close told me. “I think I talked him out of it. I said: ‘Don’t deny yourself this late stage, because the late stage can be very interesting. You know everybody hated late de Kooning, but it turned out to be great stuff. Late Picasso, nobody liked it, and it turned out to be great.’ ” Close reminded Simon that Matisse was unable to continue painting late in life. “Had Matisse not done the cutouts, we would not know who he was,” Close said. “Paul said, ‘I don’t have any ideas.’ I said: ‘Well, of course you don’t have any ideas. Sitting around waiting for an idea is the worst thing you can do. All ideas come out of the work itself.’ ”
 

version

Well-known member
I read a review of the new Refn thing, Copenhagen Cowboy, that simply said:

"Is it possible to exercise late style before exiting your prime?"

😂
 
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