Epiphanies

Art, Technology

Creativity Flows Through You

Sun, 17 Mar 2024

Rick In his book, The Creative Act, Rick Rubin eschews celebrity name-dropping or gossipy story-telling about the staggering number of famous musical acts he has produced in the past four decades. Rather he dons the persona of the wise sage, an Alan Watts of creativity offering zen-like meditative reflections on summoning the muse. And just when you think each chapter is about to end, he serves up yet one more aphorism for ya. What can we learn here? Click to Read More...

		
		
		

Calle Sin Salida: Flamenco Beach

Sun, 21 Jan 2024

Flamenco Flamenco Beach, on the tiny Puerto Rican island of Culebra, is difficult to get to from pretty much anywhere. But, by my second visit, I had decreed it my all-time favorite beach. Click to Read More...

		
		
		

The Band That Techno Left Behind: Tangerine Dream

Sun, 01 Oct 2023

Tangerine These guys are so historic that they should play in a natural history museum. Before electronica, techno, house music, Skrillex and Mija, the Pet Shop Boys, Moby, the Flock of Seagulls, OMD, Gary Numan and even Kraftwerk, there was Tangerine Dream, making electronic music with analog synths, big-ass sequencing machines and various reverb boxes, all sans drummer. A bit more beat-centric these days (probably a good thing), Tangerine Dream overall has remarkably changed little in the last 50 years, a pristine specimen from the heady days of 1970s progressive rock music. You stillcan not dance to Tangerine Dream, but you can most certainly still space out to them. Click to Read More...

		
		
		

The Mystery of John Henry

Sat, 30 Sep 2023

The The legend of John Henry has been passed down now, for centuries. But what is he well known for? And did he ever exist? The more you look, the more he disappears behind his own legend. His is a tale of man against machine. The man wins, but even though he is the mightiest of men, dies. The machine, slower than the man, will nonetheless just keep chugging away. The descendants of that steam drill will finish the tunnel, then finish a much larger tunnel, rendering the one that killed John Henry obsolete. Click to Read More...

		
		
		

A Colossi of Vanishing America

Tue, 15 Aug 2023

The In general it is highly inadvisable to roll up on the private property in West Virginia without prior approval (obtained usually by phone), especially for a place as nestled deeply in the Appalachian Mountains as this farmhouse, affectionately named the Farnham Colossi. But they disconnected their phone and no longer answer the door when strangers call, maybe tired from the endless requests to wander the grounds, and admire their collection of gigantic fiber-glass figures, and other strange bits of commercial flotsam. Click to Read More...

		
		
		

Ted Nugent is Country Music AF (and That is OK)

Tue, 01 Aug 2023

Ted The guitar slinger informed his audience that there were only two genders, and that anything else was "bullshit." He then commented that he once dressed up as a Viking one Halloween, but he did not go around identifying as a Viking. I dunno though. After all these years, Nugent still reads pretty heavily as a Viking. If Nug were to self-identify as Viking, I am pretty sure no one would object. In fact, his viking tendencies have done him fairly well in life, I would say. Click to Read More...

		
		
		

Barbie the Movie, But All About Ken

Sat, 22 Jul 2023

A While primarily the Barbie movie is about Barbie's epic journey to the real world to maintain her perfect beauty (free from even a single cellulite), the funniest part was Ken trying to make it all about himself, which is something guys always do. It is funny because Ken is not only useless in that vaguely existential way that all dudes are in this post-industrial era but literally because Ken has always only been an accessory in the universe of Barbie. Speaking of accessories, check out this awesome retro Barbie hat case, which my friend Adele rocked at the Baltimore premier of Barbie. Click to Read More...

		
		
		

Dead T00th at the Rogue Festival, Bushwick

Tue, 18 Jul 2023

Dead Bands come into the world kicking and screaming and from this they must learn to communicate with the rest of us. I remember seeing the Bushwick band Dead T00th several years back when the then-still toothy Zach the Silver Spaceman, so affable offstage, would jolt and contort such when playing his songs, it was as if he - or something else - were trying to break out from his body. Now, the band all aspire, in unison no less, to this frenzied rock n roll, and results can be glorious, as I witnessed at the first-ever Rogue Festival, at the Sultan Room, Bushwick NYC... Click to Read More...

		
		
		

The Road Ends Here: The Final Dead Tour

Sun, 18 Jun 2023

Live To be honest, I did not have high expectations of this show. I had seen the Dead & Co the year prior, almost to the day, at this venue, and was underwhelmed by the blatant commerciality of it all. This show, however, came as a nice surprise, a great way to end the run for this band, for the Grateful Dead, and maybe even rock n roll itself. It was an evening of endings, but also, strangely enough, of new beginnings. Click to Read More...

		
		
		

A Brief History of Metallurgy

Tue, 13 Jun 2023

How Iron came from the Gods. A meteorite -- a knocked-off husk of iron and nickel from a comet or asteroid that hit the earth atmosphere a bit too hard -- flamed to the ground, providing a source of iron that Eskimo locals used to create tools and weapons for generations to come. Even for centuries after, though, it did not occur to anyone that you could actually dig up more iron from the ground. Click to Read More...

		
		
		

At Least We Enjoyed the Ride...

Fri, 24 Feb 2023

Photos Before Burning Man, there was the Grateful Dead parking lot scene. The show was usually at night but we would still try to get there as early in the morning as possible, for a full day of hanging out and partying. Here are the photos from one such show, March 17, 1991, at the Capital Centre, outside Washington D.C. Click to Read More...

		
		
		

The Taste of Capitalism: Wendell Berry

Sun, 19 Feb 2023

A Sometime ago, somehow,, we were implicitly taught that capitalism would solve all our problems, that we could rely on the free market economy to supply whatever we need. Personal responsibility is not required as long as you kept your checkbook open. But I am driving down the road with a bag of Taco Bell grub and I am eating a taco but I am not tasting the taco at all. Like there is nothing appealing about this food whatsoever, but I was hungry and I had money, and Taco Bell could sell me a bag of food. Taste, or even nutrition, has little to do with it. I am eating capitalism. The message of naturalist Wendell Berry, collected in his lifelong book essays, is that this trust in capitalism has led us astray, estranged from the land that is our collective home. Click to Read More...

		
		
		

Tripping: The Fabulous Suitcases of Machine Dazzle

Sun, 29 Jan 2023

The The New York Museum of Arts and Design is holding a retrospective of costume designer and performance artist Machine Dazzle, in an exhibit entitled Queer Maximalism. While his over-the-top outfits filled the exhibit with color and sparkles, it was the accompanying suitcases that really caught my eye. There was one for each planet of Solar System, plus ones for the Sun and Moon, and for the galaxy. Which one would you rock for your next journey? Click to Read More...

		
		
		

Get a Life

Sat, 21 Jan 2023

Victor It was those who were the most ruthless, with the least scruples, who survived the German concentration camps of World War II. Others gave up, sunk into apathy, and slid into disrepair and inevitable death. Those who chose to find meaning -- any meaning -- found will to go on day-by-day. Suffering is inevitable. It is how you choose to respond to external hardships that make you who you are, argued Viktor Frankl, in his account of being a WWII prisoner in Auschwitz. Click to Read More...

		
		
		

The Satchmo Indexing System

Sat, 17 Dec 2022

The One of the highlights of visiting the Corona, Queens home of jazz great Louis Armstrong was to get a glimpse of his reel-to-reel recording setup, in his cozy second-floor front-room den. He had long made it a habit to record everything he could on reel-to-reel tape, even while on the road. What I had found fascinating was his indexing system. Sitting at his expansive desk, Armstrong would write on a piece of loose-leaf paper a short description of every recorded snippet he made. The tapes could hold multiple segments, and he filled each one up as he had time, writing a short description alongside the start time, segmented by minute. Click to Read More...

		
		
		

Look Who is All Chatty Now

Fri, 09 Dec 2022

Exploring Google search has trained us all into formulating questions in a round-about way: What are the best sushi restaurants in Brooklyn? What if instead you could request, from some agent, for the best California sushi roll in the neighborhood. Using a model of your own evaluative criteria, the assistant would make a selection on your behalf. Such a product, running on a large language model, could, some say, replace the search engine altogether. Just say what you want, and let the AI engine to do all the work. As a content creator or sorts, I can see the profound changes that such models will have on how we write, and who, or what, we write for. Click to Read More...

		
		
		

Beyond the Models of Linear Regression

Fri, 18 Nov 2022

What The barriers between the different professions that use statistical modeling are breaking down. Today, we have much more compute power and a lot more data to play with, so different groups of researchers have been developing strategies to create their own, far more nuanced, models of the world. Statistical modeling is entering into an ecumenical era. Click to Read More...

		
		
		

Numpy: Fast Arrays for Python

Tue, 15 Nov 2022

An NumPy is a Python library for applying functions to multi-dimensional arrays.The package includes operators for mathematical, statistical, logical, shape manipulation, and for sorting, selecting, and random simulation. NumPy processes arrays fast thanks to the vectorization, which is running a single action across large arrays for data. Click to Read More...

		
		
		

A Stoic's Guide to the Good Life

Sun, 06 Nov 2022

What When you wake in the morning, reflect on the day ahead. Know that you will meet people who will be busybodies, ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, selfish, wrote Marcus Aurelius in Meditations. Needy people zap your energy. Social media zap your energy. Stop doing things that do not have a clear purpose, he advised. Click to Read More...

		
		
		

The Plow as Greatest Technology

Mon, 17 Oct 2022

A Civilization arose when humankind moved beyond food collection into food production.Up until the Neolithic era, starting at about 3,200 B.C. man mostly hunted for food. Every day would be devoted to finding the next meal, be it hunting or foraging. Only when people started cultivating the soil for crops did they produce enough food to free up the days for other activities. And it was the invention of the plow that saved us from early extinction. Click to Read More...

		
		
		

Dining Along Death Highway

Thu, 01 Sep 2022

Diners A photojournal of diners alongside I-81 and I-78, including stops in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia. There is the Blue Mountain Diner, with the Turkey and Dutch filling; The Clinton Hill Diner with the huge slices of banana cream pies; the breakfast-only Midway Diner, with the sausage and gravy (cheese and onions extra); and more. Click to Read More...

		
		
		

All You Need to Know About Tyler Childers is Right Here

Wed, 31 Aug 2022

A After Nashville, I jumped off the Highway to take State 50 south and west, backroading my way to New Orleans. I did not check the weather and soon was stuck in a torrential downpour. The rain falls to Biblical proportions in this part of the south. There was an ice cream shop that also sold salads. I ducked in and ordered one, then stood there, because I was the only customer. The teenager behind the counter asked me what my favorite Tyler Childers song was. Click to Read More...

		
		
		

Photos: A Decade on Suydam Street, Bushwick

Sun, 31 Jul 2022

What Bushwick is like purgatory. You can have as much fun as you want, but you can not leave until you learn something important about yourself. I planted myself there as a tax dodge, when my new job would not let me use Maryland as a permanent address. But my first Brooklyn Airbnb host, Ginger, taught me the Airbnb racket so well (check those ratings!) that, in the decade that followed, I ended up making friends with people who stayed at my place from the world over. And one afternoon at Pearls, I randomly met Tania, who taught me how to love NYC, and all the mad people there. What a weird decade that was. Click to Read More...

		
		
		

Ongoing: Raymond Carver Short Story Synopses

Wed, 01 Jun 2022

A In their brevity and terseness, the short stories of Raymond Carver suggest a darkness inarticulated, a state of perpetual unease that mapped very well into those last few years before the Internet, when answers did not arrive instantly through text or Google. This post will (eventually) summarize each one of the 37 short stories in his last collection, published in 1989. I will not comment on the stories here, but just try to capture, by plot summation, the mysterious precision of Carver, at least at a surface level. Click to Read More...

		
		
		

A Compendium of Python Commands

Tue, 10 May 2022

A I love the Python programming language. It is the most intuitive of all the languages, I feel. After you use it awhile, you can pretty much guess the proper syntax for an operation, and you would probably be right. Still I need a handy reference guide from time to time. So here is a collection of basic Python operations, presented not so much as a form of instruction, but as a guide for quick consultation. I also cover the creation of lists and dictionaries, functions and file input and output. Click to Read More...

		
		
		

How to Spot a Revolution

Sat, 16 Apr 2022

A The first thing you notice is the anxiety, the growing frustration of small things not fitting together like they should, an unease that the things taught to you are not entirely true. Things are pretty well laid-out these days. But once there was a time when everything was possible, with different people trying out wildly different things. Over time, however, they converged on what is now known as The Way. For us here today, it is really just working out all the messy little details and edge cases around supporting The Way, with specialists talking to other specialists. But then someone discovers something. Click to Read More...

		
		
		

The Desert Sculpture of Donald Judd

Tue, 22 Mar 2022

Donald Millions of years from now, after humans eradicated themselves from the planet, alien creatures will wonder about the meaning of the large concrete blocks lined up across a Chihuahuan Desert plateau, created by Donald Judd. Arranged into small stand-alone clusters, each set of boxes is a unique and mysterious configuration. A Stonehenge of our own. Click to Read More...

		
		
		

Who is Up for Some Grinding? 19th Century Tennessee AgTech

Tue, 15 Mar 2022

The Just south of Nashville, the Tennessee Agriculture Museum is housed, understandably enough, in a barn. The main level is well-stocked with AgTech wonders from years gone by: mills, mechanical harvesters, a covered wagon and even a sheep treadmill. But like any barn, the upper level is the place for the best rummaging. Here, they stashed the gear they have not gotten around to fully displaying or even figuring out what to do yet, a bric-a-brac of primitive, discarded agricultural technology. The showcases of plows and cultivators alone are worth the climb. Click to Read More...

		
		
		

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