What I’m reading

Nigel Williams on what it was like to work with William Golding on the stage version of Lord of the Flies. Sample:

He went backstage afterwards and said to the boys, “Did you like being little savages?” “Ye-e-eahhh!!” they shouted. “Ah,” he said, “but you wouldn’t like to be savages all the time – would you now?” They looked, suddenly, like the boys in the story do when the adult comes to rescue them at the end – cowed and, indeed, awed by what the world might hold in store.

 Mike Daisey on his hit theatre show/podcast The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs about Apple in China:

I'm not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard.

Hey, it’s worked well all these years for Winston Peters.

Via IIML, Cheryl Bernstein tweets a quote from Alan Mulgan’s Home: a New Zealander’s adventure, published in 1934. Even though he was born in Katikati, close to my hometown Tauranga,  I’d always thought Mulgan a very dull fellow – all that banging on about England being Home meant nothing to my generation – but no, he was just like the rest of us:

I used to wander about Chelsea and look for green and white doors and fantastic knockers.

David Rieff on Kony 2012 argues that “the road to hell is paved with viral videos”; Charlie Beckett of the LSE has more. Charlie Brooker has a go too on Channel 4’s 10 O’Clock Live, with a devastating selection of clips from previous Invisible Children campaigns and funny commentary. Sample:

“What the fuck?” doesn’t begin to cover that. So, in summary, Invisible Children are expert propagandists, with what seems to be a covert religious agenda, advocating military actions…

There is much more.

This is the only thing that makes me want to go to the Olympics if I win Powerball next Saturday: the first complete performance of Stockhausen’s opera Mittwoch aus Licht (Wednesday from Light) which includes the Helicopter Quartet mentioned here before (with a YouTube clip). That’s right, the members of a string quartet perform separately in four helicopters a-hovering.

Finally, StatsChat reckons that this Herald story about World Sleep Day is a bit of a snore.

So here are Cream in 2005 with “Sleepy Time”, 39 years after they recorded it for  their debut album Fresh Cream in 1966. The guitarist may look familiar because he is Eric Clapton; the drummer is Ginger Baker, the bassist and singer is Jack Bruce, who wrote the song. Bass and drums famously hate each other, but then it was like that in almost every band I’ve been in.