Links / Youtube
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McLaren revealed an evolved identity this month, the road cars and the racing team now sharing the same voice.
The Speedmark stays, and so does the Papaya colour. What’s new is the wordmark, sourced from the service station that Bruce McLaren’s parents, Les and Ruth, ran in Remuera, Auckland. That’s where Bruce McLaren built the car that won him his first race.
The service station in Remuera, and the new McLaren Racing lockup, images courtesy of McLaren I’m not sure how I feel about the new McLaren Racing lockup—the previous logo, still featured in the navigation bar on the McLaren Racing website, felt more… race-y? The production quality of the film itself, though, is extraordinary. The storytelling is very well done. Restrained, but crackling.
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“Resolution” is the second movement of A Love Supreme, the 1965 Coltrane album, and Nicholas Payton and Butcher Brown make playing their rendition look like a walk in the park.
This one’s taken from A Supreme Blue, a reimagining of that album alongside Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. The first five tracks follow the Davis album in order, then come Coltrane’s four parts.
As Jack Kenny puts it on All About Jazz:
A Supreme Blue is not a museum piece but a translation. It reframes two landmark statements through a contemporary sonic language that privileges groove, texture, and atmosphere. House rhythms, electric keyboards, and layered production reshape the modal and spiritual frameworks of the originals, rendering them less austere and more rhythmically grounded.
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A 26-minute documentary by NYT Cooking on what makes a good restaurant sign, and what they mean to a business. They look at New York City’s iconic lettering with the artists behind Noble Signs, who hand-painted signs all over the city. Wonderful work.
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The strangest thing happened in my brain today, where SpaceX’s IPO reminded me of this guitar teacher, who hears Radiohead’s Weird Fishes/Arpeggi for the first time, tries to deconstruct it on the fly, falls for it, and is especially taken by Phil Selway’s drumming like a metronome.
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Over the past few years I’ve grown to appreciate Jeff Parker (virtuoso guitarist from Chicago) very much. The jazzy, improvised nature of his work—best exemplified on a few of his recent albums, like The Way Out of Easy and Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy—is just phenomenal.
The latest album he’s released with his quartet, Happy Today, might be my favourite so far. International Anthem and Nonesuch Records recently uploaded the video of its recording to YouTube, and it is a trip.
Jay Bellerose on drums and percussion, Anna Butterss on acoustic bass, Josh Johnson on alto saxophone—I hope to catch them live all together one day. I can’t believe this has accrued just 14K views so far!
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A kid introduces his professor, a poet, to Kendrick Lamar. The professor, expertly spinning his pencil, impressively sinks his teeth into Kendrick’s lyric, from across a few albums, and—admiringly—lays out the poetic nature of his work.
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iPad Air with M4
№ 127Apple released a few ads this week and, while I haven’t paid very close attention to their advertising output recently, they are... quite great. I liked the one for the Neo, and the ad for the new iPad Air is particularly well executed. It has a lovely light touch, and is somewhat disorienting amd irksome, but in a good way. The horrendous macOS regression aside, it seems they’ve found their mojo on this front.
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The Winterkeeper
№ 124A lifetime spent protecting Yellowstone National Park. Steven Fuller is a winter caretaker of the park, and has lived there for the past fifty years, hunkering down in a remote mountain cabin, and raising his children there, too—a most idyllic upbringing.
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Produced by a clothing brand (apologies), this video follows Matt Somerville, a bee conservationist. For the last fourteen years, Matt has created log hives in winter, placing them throughout the landscape in summer to provide shelter for wild honey bees. They’re beautiful structures—sculptures of sorts—and I very much appreciate the work. Judging by this short documentary, creating just a single log hive is no easy feat, and the man has created thousands.
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Mr. Scorsese
№ 118I’ve been rewatching Scorsese films these past two weeks (Killers of the Flower Moon, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Departed, Casino), so I was excited to learn about the new limited documentary series Rebecca Miller made on the director, called Mr. Scorsese.
I appreciated the documentary, learning more about Scorsese’s older, brilliant work, and getting an inside look at films like Goodfellas, Taxi Driver and Gangs of New York. The man’s a great storyteller, and at five episodes, I think it could’ve been a little longer still!