We all know that sweetened, carbonated soft drinks have effects on those who drink them. The most conspicuous, among especially avid consumers, include obesity and its associated health troubles. This, fair to say, was not the intention of John Stith Pemberton, the Georgia pharmacist who in the 1880s came up with the drink that would become Coca-Cola. In that era, writes Smithsonian.com’s Kat Eschner, “people overwhelmed by industrialization and urbanization as well as the holdover of the Civil War and other social changes struggled to gain purchase, turning to patent medicines for cures that doctors couldn’t provide.” And it was in a patent medicine, one of the countless many dubiously ballyhooed in the nineteenth century, that Coca-Cola first appeared.

Injured in the Civil War, Pemberton developed a morphine addiction for which he fruitlessly sought treatment. But then he got word of a new substance with the potential to cure his “morphinism”: cocaine.  At the time, cocaine was an ingredient in a wine-based beverage enjoyed by Parisians called Vin Mariani.

“It actually made people feel great, and it was sold […]

In addition to playing the beating human heart on the Beatles’ glorious swan song Abbey Road, Paul McCartney’s bass provides melodic accompaniment, harmony, counterpoint, emphasis… and sometimes it just sings a little tune up and down the neck, the sort of thing a bass player can turn into needless showboating in rock and roll.

That’s not at all the case on “Something,” where McCartney runs, slides, and bounces through the guitar solo, a moment when a support player might conserve his musical energy…. McCartney totally goes for it, as he does on every song, Fender amps pushed into overdrive through Abbey Road Studio’s famous compressors.

Go on… put your LP on the Hi-Fi and listen to the way he swings on “Oh! Darling,” how he anchors “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” so heavily he almost makes Ringo’s bass drum redundant (but it isn’t), how he bounces through Ringo’s “Octopus’s Garden” with an exaggerated music hall lilt, then, in the bridge, obliquely turns the song into an almost fuzzed-out rocker.

Do I even need to mention “Come Together”….? Do we need to talk about Side 2?

“Ngl,” writes […]

If only we could have had a teacher as insightful as Sir Ian McKellen explain some Shakespeare to us at an impressionable age.

Above, a 38-year-old McKellen breaks down Macbeth’s famous final soliloquy as part of a 1978 master class in Acting Shakespeare.

He makes it clear early on that relying on Iambic pentameter to convey the meaning of the verse will not cut it.

Instead, he calls upon actors to apply the power of their intellect to every line, analyzing metaphors and imagery, while also noting punctuation, word choice, and of course, the events leading up to the speech.

In this way, he says, “the actor is the playwright and the character simultaneously.”

McKellen was, at the time, deeply immersed in Macbeth, playing the title role opposite Judi Dench in a bare bones Royal Shakespeare Company production that opened in the company’s Stratford studio before transferring to the West End. As McKellen recalled in a longer meditation on the trickiness of staging this particular tragedy:

It was beautifully done on the cheap in The Other Place, […]

On Substack, starting on May 3 and ending on November 7, Studio Kirkland is running a project called Daily Dracula, where you can get Dracula delivered to your email inbox, in small chunks. They write:

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is an epistolary novel – it’s made up of letters, diaries, telegrams, newspaper clippings – and every part of it has a date. The whole story happens between May 3 and November 10. So: Dracula Daily will post a newsletter each day that something happens to the characters, in the same timeline that it happens to them.

Sign up here.

via Boing Boing

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The practice of cultivating mindfulness through meditation first took root in Europe and the U.S. in the 1960s, when Buddhist teachers from Japan, Tibet, Vietnam, and elsewhere left home, often under great duress, and taught Western students hungry for alternative forms of spirituality. Though popularized by countercultural figures like Alan Watts and Allen Ginsberg, the practice didn’t seem at first like it might reach those who seemed to need it most — stressed out denizens of the corporate world and military industrial complex who hadn’t changed their consciousness with mind-altering drugs, or left the culture to become monastics.

Then professor of medicine Jon Kabat-Zinn came along, stripped away religious and new age contexts, and began redesigning mindfulness for the masses in 1979 with his mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program. Now everyone knows, or thinks they know, what mindfulness is. As meditation teacher Lokadhi Lloyd tells The Guardian, Kabat-Zinn is “Mr Mindfulness in relation to our secular strand. Without him, I don’t think mindfulness would have risen to the prominence it has.”

His secularization of mindfulness, however, has not, in […]