Jools Holland is probably best known as the host of the long-running BBC music series Later …, which has been showcasing live performances since 1991. He’s also a bandleader and pianist, and was a founding member of Squeeze in the late 1970s.
One of his most celebrated performances is a piano solo on Uncertain Smile on The The’s debut album, Soul Mining. The solo is exuberant, almost breathless, and lasts for more than three minutes. It bursts with energy, has Holland at some points banging away on the keys, and ends with softer, almost tentative playing.
And it was never meant to be that kind of solo at all. How it came together is quite a story.
“If you want to avoid a trip to the ER, I’d say get your advice from real doctors instead of a 25-year-old woman on TikTok with three first names.” — Gina Ippolito
This will be the first time I’ve taken a quote o’ the day from a breakdown of a TV show, but Gina Ippolito’s quip about wellness influencers — a subject I’m increasingly fascinated by and concerned about — hit home.
The comment is from her recap last week of the 13th episode of the second season of The Pitt, and a lighter plotline about a woman who consumed way, way too much turmeric. The character (played by Sara Wyle, who’s married to series star and executive producer Noah Wyle) insists she only makes healthy decisions, but has found she got sick from, as she calls it, a spice.
“I believe in an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.” — Arthur Hays Sulzberger (attributing it to others)
Sulzberger was publisher of the New York Times during some consequential years (1935 to 1961). This quote appears in numerous places as a quote of his making, including in the Times itself in 1996, although it Sulzberger popularized a phrase that had been expressed elsewhere.
Over the last decade, words like “inclusion” have become weaponized. It ought to mean making sure that people from various backgrounds — reflecting diversity, which has also become divisive — feel comfortable and welcome in a group setting, like an office, a public service, a school, etc.
I was struck recently while reading how two people who had been convicted over the Jan. 6 riot in Washington in 2021 were making an unusual bid for a judge’s favour.
Their argument: the memorial was not “inclusive” because … it was not about them.
“When you first get a hill in sight, look at the top of it only once. Then imagine yourself at the bottom of the other side.” — Florence Griffith Joyner
The American sprinter still known to this day as Flo-Jo was recruited by the folks who do the “for Dummies” books to handle Running For Dummies, from which today’s quote is drawn.
“It was a pudding, you know? It really was a pudding. It was a pudding of new ideas, and we were terribly excited, and I think we took it on our shoulders that we were creating the 21st century in 1971. That was the idea. And we wanted to just blast everything in the past.” — David Bowie
David Bowie was reflecting on the creation of Ziggy Stardust — character, persona and album, all wrapped up in a shiny, gender-fluid cacophony of colour and sound — in a 2003 interview when he made this remark.
While Ziggy was being cooked up in 1971, the world didn’t get to meet the alien rock star until the next spring. The album came out in mid-June. A few weeks later, in early July, Bowie joined the fellow Spiders from Mars on a telecast of the BBC’s Top of the Pops.
And, with a rendition of Starman, the universe kind of changed.
“I can’t even really tell a joke. I find being funny very hard work. I am always asked about it and I feel guilty saying that, but it’s the truth. I love my work but it ain’t easy.” — Madeline Kahn
She created some of the funniest moments in the movies , so it is something to learn that Madeline Kahn had to work hard to get a laugh. She revealed this in a 1993 New York Times profile.
Kahn trained as an opera singer, and somewhere along the line, people noticed she could command a scene and kill with comedy.
“Most of us have trouble juggling. The woman who says that she doesn’t is someone whom I admire but have never met.” — Barbara Walters
The legendary host, interviewer and anchor Barbara Walters made this comment in The Successful Woman, a book by Joyce Brothers that was published in the 1980s. Four decades later, both Walters and Brothers have both died, and the “having it all” narrative still seems to be constructed in a way that many women are made to feel guilty for wanting a career and a family.
It happens all the time: the moment when someone realizes they don’t know what they’re talking about — and they know everyone else is realizing it, too.
It could be in a presentation in a boardroom or a conference, or a meeting, or an awkward exchange in a classroom.
In journalism, I saw it during news conferences or official events, and an ordinary question would yield an extraordinary moment: the politician at the podium didn’t know what to say. They don’t call it the hot seat for nothing.
They had a speech, they had memorized their well-honed remarks, but they just didn’t know the material and they were caught with nothing on how to answer it.
Many experienced or bold politicians will find an exit ramp — a joke, a self-deprecating remark or enlisting someone who does know to answer the question — but even then it can be a revelatory moment, a bit like The Emperor’s New Clothes. It’s the the instant when credibility can vanish into thin air.
“It should not be forgotten that art is not a science where the latest ‘correct’ theory declares the old to be false and erases it.” — Wassily Kandinsky
A lawyer before he made the later-in-life decision to paint, Wassily Kadinsky likely had synesthesia — that is, he experienced colours as sounds and vice versa. He began painting in Russia in the 19th century; his work, which evolved continuously, still seems so contemporary all these decades later.
Imagine earning supper money from playing a game that you’d play anyway … tempting, no?
That in a nutshell is the pitch from companies like Freecash, which work in an area of the online economy known as GPT, or “get paid to” do something for whoever is footing the bill.
Freecash is a legitimate company, although there are some buyer-beware caveats.
What’s had my eye lately are the shadier players in this world, and things are definitely not legitimate there. More on that in a moment.
“I was going to sue her for defamation of character, but then I realized that I have no character.” — Charles Barkley
Basketball superstar Charles Barkley has always been mindful of publicity — and he’s also self-aware when it comes to taking himself down a peg, too.
He uttered this quote just before the Lillehammer Olympics in the winter of 1994, when the whole planet was talking about Tonya Harding and the attack on rival Nancy Kerrigan, and Barkley — always a controversy magnet anyway — found himself part of the narrative.
“The world of fantasy fills the gaps in people’s knowledge.” — Fred Vargas
The French archaeologist Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau is better known to the world as the crime writer Fred Vargas. My father loved her novels and introduced them to us. Reading them all is still on my list of things to do. I must get on that.
This quote comes from her novel This Night’s Foul Work (or at least that’s the title of the English translation). It speaks to storytelling and our imaginations, and I think to the limitations of cold, hard facts.
“Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I heartily recommend Adichie’s recent book Notes on Grief, which she wrote in response to the death of her father in the spring of 2020, when the world was shutting down amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Her dad died of kidney failure, not the virus, but the pandemic complicated things dramatically: Adichie could not travel at that time, and was trying to absorb the shock while isolated.
The book, which began as an essay Adichie wrote for The New Yorker later that year, is powerful. Having lost my own dad a couple of years ago, it resonated deeply; when she talks about how grief can affect the body, she was putting words to something I too have felt.
There’s been a mature wave of television shows that grapple deeply with mental health and its complexities (I’m thinking of The Bear and even supposedly light fare like Fleabag), but nothing is like HBO’s The Pitt for exploring multiple storylines about challenging characters and their struggles, all at once.
Many people who watch The Pitt have found Dr. Santos to unpleasant, if not offensive. She doesn’t bother me; as the show continues, it’s clear that her character has always been very carefully constructed, and as layer upon layer is revealed, we see a very human story.
[This post, by the way, is going to be up to date with the series, which is now nearing the completion of its second season. If you don’t want spoilers, feel free to click away.]
