Scottish singer-songwriting Lloyd Cole is on my mind this morning. Over the weekend, Apple Music started streaming Lloyd Cole In New York, the six-disc box set that gathers up his first four solo albums, a fifth unreleased collection recorded as the followup to Love Story, and a disc of demos made during the period covered by the retrospective: 1988 – 1996. As the title of the box underscores, this was Cole’s New York City period. The physical set is available for purchase on March 24th.

I’ve been a real-time Lloyd Cole fan: I loved him with The Commotions, loved him with half of Lou Reed’s band, loved him with The Negatives, loved him solo, and loved him as a duo with his son Will. This ongoing fandom implies something important about about Cole—at least for me: He doesn’t have a proper Imperial Period in the manner of The Rolling Stones or Paul McCartney or Elton John. An Imperial Period is that moment of never-putting-a-foot-wrong, usually accompanied by commercial success, inevitably followed by a leveling-off of pop ascent and, with luck, respectable cruising speed instead of a crash landing.

Lloyd Cole, along with Miles Davis, Pet Shop Boys, Peter Hammill or Robyn Hitchcock are among a handful of artists I listen to who have managed to evolve as opposed to leveling off or declining. I have no Unified Theory Imperial Period Survival. Peter Hammill was never a commercial powerhouse; Pet Shop Boys were bonafide pop stars at one time; Miles Davis, like David Bowie, kept shedding his skins and thus specific followings.

Thinking about this, it seems that Lloyd Cole aligns most closely with Robyn Hitchcock: Early modest success with a specific band, a solo career that exhibited early commercial potential and attendant Big Label support, and then an accomplished life post-air-play and post-big-labels as a constantly questing cult artist. Cole and Hitchcock had Compact Imperial Periods most accurately described as the zeitgeist briefly (perhaps even accidentally) intersecting their respective idiosyncratic artistic visions. Neither of them were mirrors of specific times—rather, the eras of their youth simply glinted off them as they made their artistic ways elsewhere.

This is a very lengthy way of saying that Lloyd Cole In New York is an important box set for fans because Cole has done so much excellent work in the years after his Compact Imperial Period that it’s nice to be reminded of the times when he was regularly played on the radio and his music had wide distribution.

Cole’s work in the 21st century is so good that I can (and have) happily listened to The Negatives, Music In A Foreign Language, Antidepressant, Broken Record and Standards almost at the expense of his earlier Big Label releases.

Lloyd Cole In New York is evidence of just how good he’s always been. The material in the set isn’t less mature, it’s simply earlier in what in retrospect has been a single, clear-cut evolutionary arc. It’s younger installments of a larger musical journey. It makes me recall how much I loved his first four solo albums when they were released. Which is a good thing because when Smile, If You Want To, the fifth “lost” album wasn’t released in its time, the astonishing pop perfection of The Negatives was—a recording whose brilliance, for me, nearly subsumed the first four solo releases.

Which brings us back around to Miles Davis: This box set does pretty much what the Sony Legacy boxes of Miles Davis periods did for his Columbia catalogue—it reminds the listener just how much excellent work was done in at a single point of the artist’s career.

If you have Lloyd Cole’s early solo work, you need this box. And if you don’t buy it and be astonished.

This morning for no reason I started thinking about a certain subset of recordings that I’ve always been partial to. I call it Though The World Falls Apart Music. But this gives the impression that it’s a recognized genre that I became attracted to. In truth, however, I only saw the commonality of these albums after the fact, and I only gave it a name once I was aware of the significance of my curation.

Though The World Falls Apart Music mostly emerges from the stressful circumstances surrounding its recording. The most obvious examples are The Wind and Blackstar, the self-consciously final albums of Warren Zevon and David Bowie. But many other cohesive collections have emerged from less dramatic but equally troubling periods of artists’ lives. A partial list includes in no particular order: Blue Moves (Elton John), Berlin (Lou Reed), Oar (Skip Spence), Third/Sister Lovers (Big Star), Mona Lisa Overdrive (Trashmonk), Over (Peter Hammill) The Bride Stripped Bare (Bryan Ferry), Blemish (David Sylvian), World Without Tears (Lucinda Williams), No Song No Spell No Madrigal (The Apartments), Blood On The Tracks (Bob Dylan), Kelvingrove Baby (The Bathers), Music In A Foreign Language (Lloyd Cole), Mid Air (Paul Buchanan), The Yard Went On Forever (Jimmy Webb via Richard Harris) and Music For A New Society (John Cale).

The through lines of Though Things Fall Apart Music is the urgency and focus that the not-optimal periods of the artists’ lives imposed on their respective recordings. These albums are not simplistic “sad geezer” soundtracks. The grief or issues that the artists were going through varied wildly—as did their musical responses. But in almost all instances, there is both a cohesiveness and concision to the releases—their scope is narrow and there’s no fat on them. Though The World Falls Apart collections are like athletes: specialized for a specific event and taken down to bone, sinew and muscle.

I think I found myself in this alley of pop music because I was attracted to the emotional intensity of the music. Particularly as the recording industry matured and became progressively formulaic and commodified, the strength and integrity of Though The Falls Apart releases have grown, much as a half-submerged outcropping looms larger as the tide goes out. As pop increasingly plays it safe and predictable, the stature of these off-road explorations of grief, despair and even doom are more attractive to me than ever.

Yesterday’s New York Times men’s fashion supplement is what was on my mind first thing this morning.

I’d let it sit there next to the sports and privileged-people-getting-married sections for a full nine hours after I brought in the Sunday paper. But then, over a late lunch, I decided to get on with it; my twice-yearly men’s supplement ritual: A slow leafing through every page and seeing how many times I can genuinely say “Oh, hell, no!” at whatever is before me. This time, as every time, it’s easier to say how many times I didn’t make this pronouncement: Yesterday, Spring 2017 yielded 12 instances. That is to say, out of perhaps 1,000 pieces of displayed men’s fashion, there were a dozen that, squinting hard, I could maybe—maybe—see me wearing.

And so this morning I was thinking about what this biannual ritual says about me. First and foremost, of course, it demonstrates how much I hate fashion. But that’s a deceptive statement—it suggests that I walk around in ill-fitting clothes that are haphazardly thrown together. Because for most people, fashion equals style. Except that it doesn’t.

Know this about me—my clothes are not fashionable, but they are stylish. Know this too: I was a pioneer of Normcore three decades before Normcore even had a name. In the world of clothing, this is my only claim to fame. And lastly, I’m also a devout believer in style uniforms: find a look that works for you and, well, never change it. Andy Warhol understood the branding benefit and daily efficiency of this strategy and so do I.

For instance, take my writerly workdays: I favor jeans, Oxford cloth shirts with the sleeves rolled up and deck shoes. If it’s winter, I’ll drape a crewneck sweater over my shoulders. On days that I’m feeling wild and crazy. the Oxford cloth will be replaced with a Lacoste-style polo shirt. End of my “fashion” statement. And, yes, it’s been this way since 1975 or so.

There is, however, another unplanned level to my personal style—something which didn’t occur to me until years into wearing my work-day uniform: It is the perfect apparel for time-traveling:

My crewneck sweaters trace their origin back to 1920, when Benjamin Russell Jr invented the crewneck sweatshirt.

My Brook Brothers button-down Oxford cloth shirts (confusing called the Original Polo Shirt—because that’s exactly why they were invented), trace their nearly unchanged lineage back to 1896.

Lascoste-style tennis shirts were created in 1933 by Rene Lacoste.

My Levi original 501 button-fly jeans were introduced in 1927.

And my Sperry Gold Cup Topsider deck shoes have a similarly unchanged ancestry that extends back to 1935.

In all of these cases, the styles have changed only slightly since their years of their introduction. At this juncture, someone else might go on a tangent about a wardrobe built of iconic American classic apparel. But not me.

What I see is the ability to be dropped anywhere in the last 100 years—especially in America—and instantly blend in: to be as invisible in 1920, 1930 and 1940 and as I have been in 1980, 1990 and the 2000s. Even my unchanging haircut is unintentionally smudgy in terms of decades: not too short, not too long, not bohemian, but not Regular Guy. This realization makes me yearn for a time machine because I’m eager to test my theory.

So that’s the story me and unfashionability. No, NYT men’s fashion supplement, I will not be wearing the angry-elephant print man-purse or the just-like-SNL-Stefon striped, baggy shirt or the pink checked cloth A-line overcoat or the silk jump suit with the single, massive flap pocket in front so—I assume—my dick has access to my iPad while I’m walking. Nope, nope, nope and definitely nope.

But what I could be doing, with an assist from Time Lord technology, is effortlessly and without attention striding through the last ten decades in my dull and boring style uniform that’s more effective than the latest military breakthroughs in camouflage design.

I’m very okay with this—in fact, I think it’s kind of cool.

A few thoughts on the other side of last night’s Academy Awards. Moonlight, my favorite film of the year, remarkably got most of the honor it deserved. Remarkable because over the last 20 years or so, the Academy Awards and I have increasingly parted ways regarding quality cinema.

This morning I pondered exactly what it was about Moonlight that was so deeply satisfying. My answer—and yours most likely will differ—is that the film represents a near-perfect meshing of dialogue with the visual. Put another way, it is a breathtaking example of the writing axiom “Show, don’t tell”—a dictate that, weirdly, is often ignored in mainstream filmmaking.

You can’t just listen to Moonlight to appreciate it, nor can you just settle back and watch it. It seems so simple, doesn’t? Mainstream film as the equal meeting, contrasting and melding of words and images. So why does it happen so infrequently?

Way too often—even now in the early 21st century—what mainstream movies are serving up is either an illustrated radio drama or compositions with with discrete commentary, as if we’ve opted for the audio tour of an art exhibition.

I’m looking at you, Aaron Sorkin—and you, too, Terrence Malick.

Sorkin personifies the exposition-as-dialogue school of film. His characters have no inner life, only a series of nonstop monologues about what’s they’re thinking and what that may mean for you, the other characters and them. And when they’re not talking about themselves, they’re opining on the metaphoric significance of their situations.

Malick quite simply wants to be a painter—and that’s very cool, except that he’s a filmmaker. Take Sorkin, turn him inside out, and you’ve got Malick.

In retrospect, this explains much of my hatred of superhero movies and the films of Woody Allen: For me, both are the worst of cinematic worlds—exposition-as-dialogue surrounded by singleminded and clinically astonishing and / or pretty visuals. Blatancy inside of blatancy, like the motion picture equivalent of Russian dolls.

Moonlight, on the other hand, got the balance exactly right. Evocative, dialogue by characters struggling to in some way articulate what’s going on in their heads met cinematography that wordlessly deepened the narrative even as it helped advance it. And thus Moonlight was robbed when La La Land won the Oscar for best cinematography because the visuals of La La Land were Prettified Blatancy, even in the context of film musicals—and most especially when compared to the roving, observing camerawork in Moonlight.

But on the other hand, Moonlight taking home the best picture Oscar has given me a tiny bit of hope that maybe, fingers crossed, Hollywood’s implacable desire to replicate successes will look beyond the coming-of-age take or even the African-American cinema peg and understand that the perfect meshing of dialogue and visuals is the main source of the film’s greatness.