October 2024
What I got up to this month
Most of my output this month got little online engagement. This has been a recurring problem, so I wrote a well-received essay about it.
Otherwise, I have been busy on campus, working in an office, and making a variety of online content as always.
Activities
The venue for my November 16th gig turned out to have double-booked, so I had to scramble for a new one and eventually got The Thirsty Scholar in Central Manchester. The gig is set to go ahead.
I don’t currently have any pupils for Mandarin but am still uploading my online lessons. This month there was one on a pop song released in 2021:
I also uploaded a guitar lesson on ‘Unchained Melody’, one of the most recorded songs of the past century:
Output
On my The Kev YouTube page, two of my English albums are now entirely available as playlists. Within the next three months, all of my albums should be available on there. This month I released an updated version of ‘Hope It Might Be So’, with a lyrical allusion to TS Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’, sung by Madeleine Ford (who I have never met but found on Fiverr):
Also released on that channel this month were the English song ‘Sometimes’, which owes a lot to WH Auden, a comedy skit called ‘Manc-ing up’, and the Chinese song 《说实话》(‘Truth Be Told’). With the latter, I had written the music when I was a teenager, but was well into my thirties before I could write a lyric that had the right mixture of tenderness and world-weariness:
Wider World
In the dying days of Joe Biden’s presidency, the United States and Taiwan have made a $2 billion arms deal. Naturally, China is not amused and has sent warships around the island.
Although the last U.S presidential election took place during the biggest international upheaval for 75 years, whoever is inaugurated on January 25th, 2025, will inherit an even more daunting inbox than did Biden four years earlier.
With no end in sight to war in Europe, and continued escalation of the carnage with Israel, the choice of presidential candidates appears to be between (as Andrew Sullivan put it), the venal and the vacuous, the malign and the mediocre.
Polling is too close to call, but I hope Kamala Harris wins. She is unprincipled, uninspiring and insincere, in other words she is the best damn presidential candidate around.