I was depressed to hear a few weeks ago of Roberta Flack's passing. It was the first headline I read in the news that morning, to which my only response was to embark on a long, meditative walk with the soundtrack supplied by her first half-a-dozen or so albums. I don't think I have anything to say about her legacy that hasn't already been expressed elsewhere, but I do have some words about her artistry which I thought I'd share here, along with some of her less widely appreciated songs.

At some point in my teenage years, when I listened to a lot of hip hop music, I fascinated myself with the production of 90s and 00s hip hop songs -- in particular, I was interested in where all the samples came from. A frequent bump of mine one month was Lil Kim's Queen Bitch, which I learnt had sampled Roberta Flack's Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye (which itself is a beautiful cover of the Leonard Cohen original). If you listen at about 1:50 of the Roberta recording, you can hear the piano phrase that formed the basis of Queen Bitch. Though that was my first introduction to the music of Roberta Flack, it wasn't until perhaps a year or so later until I really got into her sound.

I'm pretty sure my first extended experience with her music was an LP I acquired when looking for samples myself, titled Quiet Fire (1971). Despite its importance and popularity, I think this is in all honesty one of her most underappreciated albums. The opening song -- Go Up Moses -- is a Roberta Flack original (plus some other writers), and stands out in her discography to me as one of her most sincere recordings. I distinctly remember loving this album, and being routinely distracted from my goal (sampling its contents) by the enchanting sounds it contains. Very gospel. The other stand-out song here is Sunday and Sister Jones. Quiet Fire was the album that got me into Roberta in the first place, and for that reason I'll always have a special place for it on my shelf.

But it's not my favourite album of hers. Two years prior in 1969, she released her debut, First Take, which I think I also have the LP of somewhere. If you haven't listened to this album, you should do so immediately. If you have and you still don't like it, you must either lack a soul or be allergic to groove. The playing, the singing, the arrangements, the pocket -- all of it is supreme. Ron Carter plays on the whole album, leaving us with iconic basslines like that on the opening track Compared to What (incredible), or my all-time favourite RF song: Tryin' Times. You'd be easily forgiven for thinking that the album is full of Roberta Flack originals; in fact, given the way she sings them, you'd have a hard time believing that they weren't hers to begin with. As far as anyone is concerned, she owns those songs. Her voice on First Take is mature, intelligent, precise, relaxed, delicate, rough, big, small, honest, sarcastic, joyful, painful, and makes you feel every feeling you know in just three quarters of an hour. The album is one of those rare works of art that you just know is special, that you just know will never be equalled again. The whole thing is a masterpiece from start to finish, and is probably one of my desert island picks (if someone were so cruel as to make me choose).

Much of the music that came after Quiet Fire -- that is, from Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway (1972) and beyond -- is fairly well known. There are the famous hits, like Killing Me Softly With His Song, Where Is the Love, and Feel Like Makin' Love, but neighbouring them on the same albums are some equally fantastic songs which just don't seem to get played all that much. For instance, Feel Like Makin' Love (the album) is well-known only for the titular song, despite housing plenty of other excellent tracks. The same is true of Killing Me Softly (1973). At the bottom of this post is a list of songs which are either completely underrated or which, though liked by fans, are overshadowed by more popular tunes from the same album.

In the end, I wish she had've recorded more jazz and soul and folk -- more stuff like First Take and Quiet Fire. Lots of the pop music has aged terribly for one reason or another (usually the cheesy production, like the abominations on 1994's Roberta), and doesn't do enough justice to the beauty of complexity of her voice. (Not to mention, she's one hell of a pianist!) I can't help but feel she was pushed into recording pop music by the music industry. Perhaps that choice was indeed her own, but even if it were I still couldn't help wonder what might've been. Regardless, she has left us with a lifetime's worth of soul and one of the best discographies of any artist I know. May Her spirit live on in the groove.

¶ Tryin' Times, First Take. ¶ Sunday and Sister Jones, Quiet Fire. ¶ Early Ev'ry Midnight, Feel Like Makin' Love. ¶ 25th of Last December, Blue Lights in the Basement. ¶ You've Got a Friend, Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway. ¶ No Tears (In The End), Killing Me Softly. ¶ I Can See the Sun in Late December, Feel Like Makin' Love. ¶ Ballad of the Sad Young Men, First Take. ¶ Go Up Moses, Quiet Fire. ¶ Some Gospel According to Matthew, Feel Like Makin' Love. ¶ I'd Like to Be Baby to You, Blue Lights in the Basement.

My friend F recently sent me this interesting photo of a shopfront somewhere in Asia (China, maybe?), showing the use of a novel blend 'CREAMOROUS' -- formed (I'm assuming) from 'cream' + '(glam)orous'. The photo also shows the ending of the previous word: '...FUL &'. Initially, I thought the full version might've been 'BEAUTIFUL & CREAMOROUS', which made me think the place was some kind of beauty salon or shop, probably thanks to the similarity to 'glamorous'. After a simple search, it turns out it's a patisserie with the name 'BUTTERFUL & CREAMOROUS'. Two blends! The first is probably 'butter' + '(beauti)ful'. I find 'creamorous' to be extremely funny for some reason. I checked a few English corpora for these, and very few results returned. 'Butterful' showed up a handful of times in the News On the Web (NOW) corpus (~20 billion words), with 'creamorous' appearing only once -- in a review of Butterful & Creamorous. So, they're pretty novel, at least in the corpora I checked.

I rode the tram up north to my mother's house, and I saw a man juggling a seven-ball cascade on a street corner. It was at the intersection of two big roads; he was facing away from the traffic. The juggler could manage to get them all airborne though he'd lose control shortly after. He kept doing it, a pile of balls on the floor each time. Something like a week later I saw a juggler on a different corner, westward but not far from Intersection 1. He had four pins, and he was juggling in front of the stopped traffic for money. In the same fashion as the first man, Juggler 2 couldn't persist through the toss. Was it the same person? I saw him again on my return, after I'd retrieved my groceries.

You start to use them for emphasis, which slowly leads you to rely on them for establishing contrast, which turns them into a vehicle for your intonation. Eventually, each sentence becomes overpopulated with emphasis, rendering the text cheap and slightly condescending. The reader (usually) isn't stupid, so they should be able to work out what's surprising or contrastive on their own. If they can't, or you feel that italics is the only way they'll understand the impact of your point, then you haven't written the thing well enough in the first place.

The other day I visited my friend J for lunch, and to discuss some music he is intending to include in his book-in-progress. I offered some technical descriptions of the songs, something which I hadn't sat down and done since my music analysis subject in high school. We listened to a lot of disco, dance, funk, and soul deep cuts from the 1970s and 1980s. So good.

It was pretty hot that day, about 40°C I think. I caught the tram from Coburg into the city, then a train out to [ PLACE ], which was much further than I'm used to going. It was still a fun journey, and I listened to some Aretha while I travelled. As repayment for my help, J made the lunch (mostly) pictured: homemade olive tapenade on sourdough, fennel gazpacho, and Eton mess. Perfectly curated and very hot-weather-friendly. I will certainly be adopting the soup recipe into my repertoire.

If for some reason you had seen this site before the publication of this post, you'd notice that it looks quite different! Over the past couple of weeks I've been working on migrating everything to Hugo, and along the way I decided to redesign the site to make it look less like its original muse (which I referenced heavily in the initial development stage).

One of the biggest problems with my original website was that it was very cumbersome to update. Essentially, I had designed it as one single HTML page, which had a navigation bar allowing the user to show only particular sections of the site (e.g., writing, presentations, etc.). This meant that if I wanted to add new content, I needed to go to the spot in the HTML file where that content belonged, and add it accordingly. You can imagine how messy this would become, especially since I planned on updating the site regularly with content. I needed a far more modular approach. The solution I found was to use Hugo to structure the site -- an idea I got from consequently.org, the beautiful website of Greg Restall, a former lecturer of mine at university.

I'm writing this sitting on my bed, reluctant to leave my surprisingly well-insulated room for some refreshment in the kitchen. It's about 33°C outside, though the temperature is predicted to reach over forty. I live in a (very) old terrace house in inner city Melbourne, which is classically double bricked and so provides some respite from the weather. However, the house is so old that the principal amenities are contained in separate units external to the actual house. That is, the kitchen and shower and toilet are all outside. Not very common, I don't think, at least not in this part of town.