In this week’s exciting music news, Johnny Greenwood from Radiohead just released some new work for piano, but only on sheet music. A v Beck move, if you ask me, but he attributes the inspo to Glenn Gould, a great pianist probably before your time (died in ’82) who famously interpreted Bach’s Goldberg Variations in his own idiosyncratic style. But if Greenwood is the composer waiting for some genius to come along and play his work then doesn’t it feel like he’s comparing himself to Bach? Humble.
Onto our next humble genius of the day, Jeff Bezos. The stuff-shipping business, as we know, is going great, and now you can have a part of it. Kind of. Amazon is starting a program for people to make Amazon delivery startups. For $10,000+ people can start their own delivery services, with employees and everything, using Amazon trucks, uniforms, and more. They won’t be Amazon-employed; they’ll just help the cause and make some coin while they’re at it. Is an Amazon delivery truck the new taxi medallion? (Or– watch out UPS– the new Uber.)
Thanks to friends-of-Bezos*, San Francisco evidently can no longer afford waiters. Reportedly, rents are so high that service-industry-salary folks are moving away. So instead restaurants applying the principles of fast-casual to the sites of fine dining, asking diners to order, pick up utensils, and seek wine refills at the counter. But not for long– I hear Uber Eats is starting an offshoot company to staff restos with gig-based waiters.**
*What if we considered Jeff Bezos as a human rather than an allegory? Maybe next time.
**Patently untrue.
A two-second internet search reveals that there is an Everlane of cutlery. According to their about page, they traveled the world to find out what people ACTUALLY use (again, forks) in their everyday lives (clearly they didn’t venture beyond Europe) and found manufacturing partners whose “legacies [they] respected” (vague). Visit Year & Day and “make it easy to set a table you love.” (But what if you hate tables?)
