Category: Music

The very best parts of the best Beatle songs

You also might title this post “How to listen to The Beatles.”  Here are the best parts, in no particular order:

1. The violins/voices warm-up to Sgt. Pepper.

2. The George/John background vocals to “You Won’t See Me.

3. The sounds during the fade out section of “You Never Give Me Your Money.”  This is perhaps my #1 pick.

4. The total, sudden silence at the end of “I Want You “She’s So Heavy.”  Radio stations and streaming services don’t get this one right.

5. The drums/bass collision, combined with backward tape on the vocal, at the end of “Rain.

6. The short Indian drone segment in one of the latter choruses of “She’s Leaving Home.”  Starts at about 2:57.

7. The airiness/breathing aspect of “Long Long Long.”  Not George’s very best song, but still notable for its acoustic properties.

8. Paul’s brief “return to the womb” piano and vocal close to “Cry, Baby, Cry.

9. The parts of “Blue Jay Way” (starts about 3:44) and “I am the Walrus” (1:59) when the normal music stops and a bunch of sounds, including cello and also some “acoustic-electric” sounds, come together in a crescendo.  Try also Paul’s much later “Cosmically Conscious,” originally written in 1968 and obviously so (how?).  The cacophony and fade at the end of “All You Need is Love” is the best part of that (very good) song!

10. All of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” which apparently was produced so as to be in two different keys at the same time.

In an earlier post, I suggested that to understand the Beach Boys and their sound world you should listen carefully to “Vegetables” on a high-quality sound system.  Figure out that sound world, and then apply that understanding to the rest of your Beach Boys listening.  Well, here are my comparable tips for The Beatles.

Emergent Ventures winners, eighteenth cohort

Zvi Mowshowitz, TheZvi, New York City, to develop his career as idea generator and public intellectual.

Nadia Eghbal, Miami, to study and write on philanthropy for tech and crypto wealth.

Henry Oliver, London, to write a book on talent and late bloomers.  Substack here.

Geffen Avrahan, Bay Area, founder at Skyline Celestial, an earlier winner, omitted from an early list by mistake, apologies Geffen!

Subaita Rahman of Scarborough, Ontario, to enable a one-year visiting student appointment at Church Labs at Harvard University.

Gareth Black, Dublin, to start YIMBY Dublin.

Pradyumna Shyama Prasad, blog and podcast, Singapore.  Here is his substack newsletter, here is his podcast about both economics and history.

Ulkar Aghayeva, New York City, Azerbaijani music and bioscience.

Steven Lu, Seattle, to create GenesisFund, a new project for nurturing talent, and general career development.

Ashley Lin, University of Pennsylvania gap year, Center for Effective Altruism, for general career development and to learn talent search in China, India, Russia.

James Lin, McMaster University gap year, from Toronto area, general career development and to support his interests in effective altruism and also biosecurity.

Santiago Tobar Potes, Oxford, from Colombia and DACA in the United States, general career development, interest in public service, law, and foreign policy.

Martin Borch Jensen of Longevity Impetus Grants (a kind of Fast Grants for longevity research), Bay Area and from Denmark, for a new project Talent Bridge, to help talented foreigners reach the US and contribute to longevity R&D.

Jessica Watson Miller, from Sydney now in the Bay Area, to start a non-profit to improve the treatment of mental illness.

Congratulations to you all!  We are honored to have you as Emergent Ventures winners.

Claims about taste

Chen et al. show that people’s aesthetic tastes are not arbitrarily different from each other in different sensory modalities but vary primarily along only a single dimension across sights and sounds: how similar a person’s taste is to the average taste. People who have atypical taste for images also tend to have atypical taste for sounds.

Here is the paper, via Michelle Dawson.

Jesse Michels interviews me at Hereticon

Jesse’s description was “Wide ranging discussion with the brilliant @tylercowen. Topics include: Satoshi’s identity, Straussian Jesus, the Beatles and UFOs. Taped in early January but he presciently expresses concerns around Russia/Ukraine”

Great fun was had by all, and they added in nice visuals.

Anti-Russia sentiment is the new McCarthyism

That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column:

The Metropolitan Opera of New York has announced it will no longer stage performers who have supported Russian President Vladimir Putin. Carnegie Hall has done the same, and the Royal Opera House in London is canceling a planned Bolshoi Ballet residency. I expect more institutions to follow suit. Russia’s contemporary art scene, already financially struggling, fears ostracism from museums and collectors, mostly because of Putin’s recent actions.

Unwise, says I.  And:

It is simply not possible to draw fair or accurate lines of demarcation. What about performers who may have favored Putin in the more benign times of 2003 and now are skeptical, but have family members still living in Russia? Do they have to speak out?

Another question: Who exactly counts as Russian? Ethnic Russians? Russian citizens? Former citizens? Ethnic Russians born in Ukraine? If you were an ethnic minority born under the Soviet Union, your former Soviet passport may have explicitly stated that you were not Russian.

And what about citizens of Belarus, which according to some reports is planning to send troops into Ukraine? Might they be subject to such strictures as well? How about citizens of China, which abstained from the United Nations vote condemning Russia’s invasion? Which wars are performers from Rwanda or Democratic Republic of the Congo required to repudiate?

When exactly is this ban supposed to end?

And to close:

If anything, the McCarthyism of the 1950s is a bit more explicable than the cancel culture of the present. At least it was trying to address what was then considered a great threat. That said, McCarthyism is not a practice America should want to revive. Witch hunts, by their very nature, do not bring out the best in people, Americans very much included.

I guess we will really see who is against cancel culture and who is not.

My Conversation with Chuck Klosterman

Excellent stuff, we had so much fun we kept on going for an extra half hour, as he decided to ask me a bunch of questions about economics and personal finance.  Here is the audio and transcript.  Here is the CWT summary:

Chuck joined Tyler to discuss the challenges of writing about recent history, the “slow cancellation of the future” that began in the aughts, how the internet widened cultural knowledge but removed its depth, why the context of Seinfeld was in some ways more important than its content, what Jurassic Park illustrates about public feelings around scientific progress in the ’90s, why the ’90s was the last era of physical mass subcultures, why it’s uncommon to be shocked by modern music, how his limited access to art when growing up made him a better critic, why Spin Magazine became irrelevant with the advent of online streaming, what made Grantland so special, what he learned from teaching in East Germany, the impact of politics on the legacies of Eric Clapton and Van Morrison, how sports often rewards obnoxious personalities, why Wilt Chamberlain is still underrated, how the self-awareness of the Portland Trail Blazers undermined them, how the design of the NFL makes sports rivalries nearly impossible, how pro-level compensation prevents sports gambling from corrupting players, why so many people are interested in e-sports, the unteachable element of writing, why he didn’t make a great editor on his school paper, what he’d say to a room filled with ex-lovers, the question he’d most like to ask his parents, his impressions of cryptocurrency, why he’s trying to focus on what he has in the current moment rather than think too much about future plans, the power of charisma, and more.

Whew!  Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: I see the world as follows. Every decade, to me, is super weird, but the 1980s and ’90s pretended they weren’t weird. The ’80s pretended to be good versus evil. The ’90s pretended that good won. But when crypto comes and persists, you have to drop all pretense that the age you’re living in isn’t totally weird.

You have internet crypto, and everyone admits, right now, everything’s weird. And that, to me, is the fundamental break with the 1990s because everyone pretended most things were normal and that Seinfeld was your dose of weird, right? Jason Alexander — that’s a very manageable weird.

KLOSTERMAN: Oh, absolutely.

COWEN: Some guy in an apartment in New York City cracking sarcastic jokes — like, whoop-de-do.

And:

KLOSTERMAN: …this guy, Mark Fisher, who’s dead now, had this idea about the slow cancellation of the future. I feel like that’s one of the most profound ideas that I’ve come across in the last 10 years of my life, and it seems so palpable that this is occurring.

An example I will often use is, if you take, say, 10 minutes from an obscure film in 1965 with no major actors, and then you take 10 minutes from an obscure film from 1980 where nobody became famous, and you show anyone these 10-minute clips, they will have no problem whatsoever figuring out which one came first. Even a little kid can look at a movie from 1965 and a movie from 1980 and instantly understand that one predates the other.

But if you do that with a film from 2005 and a film from 2020 — again, an obscure film where you don’t recognize the actors — you’re just looking at it aesthetically and trying to deduce which one came first and which one came second. It’s almost impossible.

This phenomenon just seems to almost be infiltrating every aspect of the culture…

And:

KLOSTERMAN: Before I did this podcast, I listened to your podcast with Žižek.

COWEN: Oh yeah, that was hilarious.

KLOSTERMAN: Are you friends with him? It sure seemed like it. And if you are, what is it like to be with him when he is not in a performative scenario?

Recommended.  And again, here is Chuck’s new book The Nineties.

What is so great about *Pet Sounds*?

That question is the subject of this short Holden Karnofsky essay.  Many people told Holden it is the best album ever, some citing its use of the recording studio, and he tried to work his way through that claim, basically remaining skeptical.  Here are various responses to him.  Here is a piece explaining the wonders of Pet Sounds, it is OK enough but not so insightful.  I would stress the following points:

1. It is an album of sadness, loss, and infinite longing.  Melancholy.  Do I know of a sadder album?  Listen to the lyrics.  And yet it is all set amongst the sunshine and girls and southern California.  As for the harmonies, they are continually building up expectation and never satisfying it.  It is necessary for the album to end on the down note of “Caroline, No,” a song which itself just fades away and ends, merging into the “pet sounds” that give the album its name.  I think of the combination of the sadness and the rising and swelling but never satisfied expectations as the key feature of Pet Sounds.

2. It is worth a listen-through following only the bass lines.  You also will hear the huge influence on Paul McCartney.

2b. It is worth a listen-through following only the harmonies.  The bells.  The percussion.  The woodwinds.

3. I don’t even think it is the best Beach Boys album.  Or sort of it is.  Overall I find the Smile period to be more profound, noting that this material ended up spread out over a number of separate albums.  That said, every single composition on Pet Sounds is excellent.

4. “You Still Believe in Me” and “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” I both prefer to “God Only Knows,” which perhaps I have heard too many times.

5. Overall I find the secret to the Beach Boys (and some Beatles) listening to be their sound world.  Interpret the Beach Boys through John Cage!  Listen to a simple song such as “Vegetables,” but on a very good sound system or with head phones.  Surrounded by silence.  Or pick some of the other works from the Smile period, or even Wild Honey or the top cuts on Sunflower, such as tracks 7-10.  Try to discern the sound of the air behind the music, the silences, and the tautness of the sounds that are sent your way.  Internalize that understanding (if you are trying this for the Beatles, pick the noises at the end of “You Never Give Me Your Money.”)  Carry that understanding of the sound world with you every time you hear a Beach Boys song.  At first you will hear that sound world in the “pet sounds” at the end of the album, most of all the train, and then will you will hear it throughout the entire album.

Musical life will never be the same again.

The Fanfare meta-Want List

Every year I read through the Fanfare Want Lists for new classical music releases, and collate the new recordings that are recommended by more than one person as one of the five most noteworthy releases of the year.  This time around I noticed the following as multiple nominees:

1. Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony, Beethoven Symphony number nine.

2. Daniil Trifonov, Silver Age, two CDs of Russian music.

3. Pavel Kolesnikov, Bach, Goldberg Variations.

I am happy to give another thumbs up to each.

If you google the word “self-recommending,” the first three items are all connected to me.  Yet I learned the term by reading Fanfare, where it is used repeatedly.  Of these three items, the Trifonov is the one that comes closest to being self-recommending.  The performers on items #1 and #3 are highly regarded, but to invoke the name Daniil Trifonov is a kind of magic, and as far as I know without fail.  It is hard to give any praise to #2 that goes much higher than simply stating that Trifonov has produced a recording of that music.

For those who need it, here is a (only slightly out of date) 2009 MR vocabulary guide.

How political was 1960s music?

That question is debated at length in the comments section of this post.  There are obviously political songs, such as the protest songs of Bob Dylan, or “Revolution” by The Beatles, much misunderstood at that.  Still, much of 1960s music was far more political in its time than it seems to us today.  The mere fact that the singer had long hair, or shook his hips in a “lewd” manner, or that white stars aped black music styles…all of that was intensely political.  “I don’t want you listening to no music by no long hairs” was a common parental sentiment at the time, because people mostly did understand what was at stake, namely an overturning of a lot of societal mores.  Elvis Presley sounds to us today like another early rock star, but the black vocal affectations and the grinding hips were a big deal for some period of time.  Drug songs were political too, and there were lots of those.  Just try “Eight Miles High,” or a big chunk of Jefferson Airplane or how about Donovan?  Hippie culture also was political.  Motown carried ideas of black capitalism, and was actually somewhat of a counter to the more politically radical forms of black music.  The Beach Boys are an example of a significant period group who mostly were not very political (though you can find a superficial embrace of consumer culture at first, followed by a collapse into tragedy and sadness), and plenty of the “one hit wonder” songs were apolitical too.  Most of the stuff that has survived in collective memory was fairly political.  The Byrds album Sweetheart of the Rodeo was political too, and it is no accident that Roger McGuinn ended up as a Ben Carson supporter and a Christian.  The album was mostly hated upon its release in 1968, but now is seen as a classic.

A simple theory of culture

The transistor radio/car radio was the internet of its time.  Content was free, and there were multiple radio stations, though not nearly as many as we have internet sites.

People tuned into the radio, in part, for ideas, not just tunes.  But the ideas that spread best were attached to songs.  Drug use spread, in part, because famous musicians sang about using drugs.  Anti-Vietnam War themes spread through songs, as did many other social movements.  Overall, ideas that could be bundled with songs had a big advantage.  And since new songs were largely the province of young people, this in turn favored ideas for young people.

Popular music was highly emotionally charged because so much of it was connected to ideas you really cared about.

Of course, by attaching an idea to a song you often ensured the idea wasn’t going to be really subtle, at least not along the standard intellectual dimensions.  But it might be correct nonetheless.

Today you can debate ideas directly on social media, without the intermediation of music.  Ideas become less simple and more baroque, while music loses its cultural centrality and becomes more boring.

We also don’t need to tie novels so much to ideas, although in countries such as Spain idea-carrying novels remain a pretty common practice (NYT).  A lot of painting and sculpture also seem increasingly disconnected from significant social ideas.

In this new world, celebrities decline in relative influence, because they too are no longer carriers of ideas in the way they used to be.  Think “John Wayne!”  Arguably “celebrity culture” peaked in the 1980s with Madonna and the like.

When I hear various complaints about the contemporary scene, sometimes I ask myself: “Is this really a complaint about the disintermediation of ideas”?

In this view, the overall modern “portfolio” may be better, but the best individual art works, and in turn the greatest artists, will come from the earlier era.

My Conversation with Ana Vidović

She is one of the world’s leading classical guitarists.  Here is the transcript and audio, here is part of the CWT summary:

She joined Tyler to discuss that transition from prodigy to touring musician and more, including how Bach challenges her to become a better musician, the most difficult piece in guitar repertoire, the composers she wish had written for classical guitar, the Beatles songs she’d most like to transcribe, why it’s important to study a score before touching the guitar, the reason she won’t practice more than seven hours per day, how she prevents mistakes during performances, what she looks for in young classical guitarists, why she doesn’t have much music on streaming services, how the pandemic has changed audiences, why she stopped doing competitions early on, what she’d change about conservatory education for classical guitarists, her favorite electric guitarists, her love of Croatian pop music, the benefits and drawbacks of YouTube for young musicians, and what she’ll do next.

Excerpt:

COWEN: You once said that you don’t practice past seven hours a day. What would happen in that eighth hour if you were to go there?

VIDOVIĆ: [laughs] I would probably go crazy.

COWEN: Is it mental? Is it physical? Or . . . ?

VIDOVIĆ: I just had a conversation with a friend of mine about that — how the amount of hours are actually not important as much as the quality of the practice. As a child, I used to practice many, many hours because I didn’t know, I didn’t find a way. You kind of experiment over the years. At this age, I finally learned that it’s more about concrete work, focused work, working on things that give you trouble, either if it’s technical or musical, and then you practice in sections. That takes less time.

You practice very slowly before playing fast, and then you put it all together. It just takes a lot of years to get to a point where you know what you need to work on. Two or three hours of focused practice is more efficient than seven or eight hours because sometimes there is a danger of just playing the piece through and not really working on sections and things that we should work on. I think at the eighth hour, we should all stop. [laughs]

And here is a very good Ana performance on YouTube.  And here is Bartkus discussing Conversations with Tyler.

Reader request on Herbert von Karajan

From Sean:

From his NYT obit: “But Mr. Karajan was always more than a mere conductor: he was a man of enormous energy and careerist determination, and he managed at his peak, in the late 1950’s and early 60’s, to tower over European musical life as no one had done before or is likely to do again. His nickname at the time was ”the general music director of Europe,” leading the Berlin Philharmonic, La Scala in Milan, London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, the Vienna State Opera and the Salzburg Festival.”
Is this true? How was he able to do this?

A few observations:

1. In that time the central European classical music canon was far more dominant than it is today (later this month the NSO is doing Beethoven with William Grant Still, for instance).  That made the dominance of a few figures such as von Karajan and Klemperer, who specialized in that repertoire, far more possible.  In America, Germanic culture was more influential as well.

2. There was overall less conducting talent around at the time.  Yes, I know the beloved status of your few favorites from back then, and their unique styles, but conductor #30 today, in terms of quality, is far better than before.  Today it is harder for anyone to stand out.

3. The authoritarian and possibly abusive management style of von Karajan was far more acceptable back then.  Without that style, he could not have honed such a unique sound.

4. Back then conductors actually could sell classical LPs and bring in revenue.  This helped enable many of von Karajan’s projects, including costly operas and symphonic cycles.  Whether he would have done as well on YouTube, or other more contemporary media, is very much an open question, but probably not.  He was very much a “whole package” sort of musical star.

4b. Radio really mattered too.  His distant and forbidding but legendary personal style worked well in that medium, and the “always forward impetus whiplash” sonics cut through the poor sound quality.

5. I grew up with von Karajan’s recordings in so many parts of the repertoire, but how many really have held up?  His Bruckner’s 8th and Mahler’s 9th are incredible.  His Cosi is amazing, though too rigidly controlled for my taste.  His Verdi Aida.  A big thumbs up to his Mozart #40 and #41.  But the Wagner I don’t listen to any more.  Never loved his Beethoven cycle.  Rarely is he the conductor in my favorite concerti performances, as he tended to blunt the styles of his accompanying soloists.  Would I ever prefer him for Haydn, or for French music?  No.  Definitely some Strauss (the conductor most suited to him?), or perhaps his Tristan?  I feel I could get 85% of his value with maybe five recordings?  In a way that is quite impressive, but it does put matters in perspective.

6. He was a Nazi, and perhaps that would go over differently today.

7. In short, that was then, this is now.

*Red Rose Speedway*, or drinking the Paul McCartney Kool-Aid

Of all the early McCartney albums, this one has been the easiest to dislike.  Band on the Run was recognized as high quality and classy from the beginning, whereas McCartney and Ram eventually developed a strong avant-garde pedigree.  Wild Life wasn’t even trying.

But Red Rose Speedway doesn’t fit the picture, not even for the pro-McCartney revisionists.  It doesn’t have strong avant-garde elements (“Loup” being the exception), nor did it have the perfection of Band on the Run, which almost could have been Beatles material.  It is McCartney shoving his classic romantic McCartneyisms in your face.  It is a Paul and Linda album.  It has a closing medley as Abbey Road did.  It is not afraid to be corny.  There is something relentless about it.  It does not in every regard reject the notion of monotony.

Robert Christgau decreed it was “quite possibly the worst album ever made by a rock and roller of the first rank.”  Dave Marsh said it was “rife with weak and sentimental drivel.”

Unlike some of the Wings albums, Paul dominates every song, but along with Linda.  “Man devotedly in love with his wife” was not the optimal 1973 message, but it has held up better than a lot of other ideas from that era.

Red Rose Speedway has many of Paul’s best vocal performances.  Just try the end of “My Love” or the “ows!” in “Get on the Right Thing.”  The bass playing is uniformly excellent (best on “Loup”?), and Paul cuts loose on piano, mellotron, and synthesizer more than he had done before, or was to do since.

Some drawbacks:

Many of the lyrics are mediocre.  The love notes aside, Paul was not inspired in how he “set” his material.  In this regard he is much the inferior of John Lennon.

“Big Barn Red” is a programmatic opening, promising you…something.  Maybe it set the wrong tone for what was to follow.  But in fact I am fully on board.

“Little Lamb Dragonfly” — A lot of blather in this one, maybe the weak point of the album?  The melody is nice, but the song is overlong and lacking in energy.

Some pluses:

My Love” — one of Paul’s best songs.  And his best song to Linda.  The Henry McCullough solo was done in one take, and yes it is better than what George would have come up with.  No one will admit this, but “My Love” is better than “Yesterday” or “Michelle,” and it is also more real.

Single Pigeon” — Everyone mocked them, but the Paul/Linda vocal duets are excellent.  Don’t forget how much Paul loves the Everly Brothers.  “When the Night” is very nice too.

Loup (First Indian on the Moon)” — An early inspiration for what would later become Paul’s innovations in techno and electronica.

Hold Me Tight” — There is an early Beatles song with the same name, so maybe Paul is reclaiming the legacy as his own or at least asserting some continuity?  Are the melody and vocal here really worse than on the originally titled song?  It’s debatable.

The closing medley — melodically and harmonically excellent.  Maybe it’s pointless, but the Abbey Road medley is pretty improvised too and lacking in any real dramatic center until you get to the very end, when it becomes a good-bye to the Beatles.

Red Rose Speedway originally was to be a double album, with a lot of Wings representation, more rockers, and even some live material.  Yes, I’ve heard all of those cuts, and they belong elsewhere.  Macca kept the love songs, kept the Macca/Linda dominance, kept the love orientation, and caused the previous incarnation of Wings to dissolve in protest.  He basically made the right decisions.

This album was recorded only a few years after the “Get Back” Paul you saw in the Peter Jackson movie — have some faith in him!  It was surrounded by material such as “Hi Hi Hi” and “Live and Let Die,” and followed by Band on the Run, all of which are more critically acclaimed but I think this stuff is really good too.

Then again, I also like “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and “Seaside Woman.

Dan Wang’s 2021 letter

Here it is, one of the better written pieces of this (or last) year.  It is mostly about China, manufacturing, and economic policy, but here is the part I will quote:

But Hong Kong was also the most bureaucratic city I’ve ever lived in. Its business landscape has remained static for decades: the preserve of property developers that has created no noteworthy companies in the last three decades. That is a heritage of British colonial rule, in which administrators controlled economic elites by allocating land—the city’s most scarce resource—to the more docile. Hong Kong bureaucrats enforce the pettiest rules, I felt, out of a sense of pride. On the mainland, enforcers deal often enough with senseless rules that they are sometimes able to look the other way. Thus a stagnant spirit hangs over the city. I’ve written before that Philip K. Dick is useful not for thinking about Hong Kong’s skyline, but its tycoon-dominated polity: “governed by a competent but fundamentally pessimistic elite, which administers a population bent on consumption. Instead of being hooked on drugs and television like in PKD’s novels, people in Hong Kong are addicted to the extraordinary flow of liquidity from the mainland, which raises their asset values and dulls their senses.”

And then on Mozart:

Among these three works, Figaro is the most perfect and Don Giovanni the greatest. But I believe that Cosi is the best. Cosi is Mozart’s most strange and subtle opera, as well as his most dreamlike. If the Magic Flute might be considered a loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s Tempest—given their themes of darkness, enchantment, and salvation—then Cosi ought to be Mozart’s take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Donald Tovey called Cosi “a miracle of irresponsible beauty.” It needs to be qualified with “irresponsible” because its plot is, by consensus, idiotic. The premise is that two men try—on a dare—to seduce the other’s lover. A few fake poisonings and Albanian disguises later, each succeeds, to mutual distress. Every critic that professes to love the music of Cosi also discusses the story in anguished terms. Bernard Williams, for example, noted how puzzling it has been that Mozart chose to vest such great emotional power with his music into such a weak narrative structure. Joseph Kerman is more scathing, calling it “outrageous, immoral, and unworthy of Mozart.”

I readily concede that the music of Cosi so far exceeds its dramatic register.

Recommended!  There is much more at the link, substantive throughout.  Though I should note I am less bullish on both manufacturing and China than Dan is.  I fully agree about Bleak House, however, and at times I think it is the greatest novel written…

The Jeff Holmes Conversation with Tyler Cowen

Jeff is the CWT producer, and it has become our custom to do a year-end round-up and summary.  Here is the transcript and audio and video.  Here is one excerpt:

HOLMES: …Okay, let’s go through your 2011 list really quickly.

COWEN: Sure.

HOLMES: All right, number one — in no particular order, I think — but number one was Incendies. Do you remember what that’s about?

COWEN: That is by the same director of Dune.

HOLMES: Oh, is that Denis Villeneuve?

COWEN: Yes, that’s his breakthrough movie. It’s incredible.

HOLMES: I didn’t know that. I’d never heard of it. French Canadian movie, mostly set in Lebanon.

COWEN: Highly recommended, whether or not you like Dune. That was a good pick. It’s held up very well. The director has proven his merits repeatedly, and the market agrees.

HOLMES: I’m a fan of Denis Villeneuve. Obviously, Arrival was great. I can’t think of the Mexican drug movie off the top of my head.

COWEN: Is it Sicario?

HOLMES: Sicario — awesome.

COWEN: It was interesting, yes.

HOLMES: He is one of the only directors today where, when he now makes something, I know I will go and see it.

COWEN: Well, you must see Incendies. So far, I’m on a roll. What’s next?

HOLMES: All right, number two: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

COWEN: Possibly the best movie of the last 20 years. I’m impressed by myself. It’s a Thai movie. It’s very hard to explain. I’ve seen it three times since. A lot of other people have it as either their favorite movie ever or in a top-10 status, but a large screen is a benefit. If you’re seeing the movie, pay very close attention to its sounds and to the sonic world it creates, not just the images.

There are numerous interesting observations in the dialogue, including about some of the guests and episodes.

Self-recommended!