Unable to travel anywhere without reading material, I, in emergency mode, visited the Beatnick-revered City Lights book store in San Francisco. I picked out a novel by Simon de Beauvoir, then went to celebrate with a plate of Mandarin Chicken around the corner. Click to See...

Almost 50 years on, Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason rescued Pink Floyd's instrumental "Atom Heart Mother" from the overproduced mess it was on the 1971 Pink Floyd album of the same name. Give the drummer some. Also: Lil Nas X's new single, Sly, and other music I listened to last week. Click to Read...

This post is the first part in a series summarizing the definitive book about computer operating systems, by Andrew Tanenbaum, which would go on to inspire Linus Torvalds to create Linux. This first post starts with two major types of OS system calls: those for processes and those for files. Subsequent posts will follow. Click to Read More...

Ever wondered what your life would be if you married your high school sweetheart, or that person you met on the train in Europe? First-time author (and game designer) Holly Gramazio takes this speculation to the furthest, and most enjoyable, extreme, with her debut novel, The Husbands. A woman returns home to find she has a husband waiting, surprising given that when she left the house, she was single. Even more surprising, she soon finds the husband can be exchanged simply by having him pop up into the attic, for any arbitrary reason. One goes up, another comes down. I love this book on every conceivable level. It is flawlessly executed, and an enjoyable read throughout. Click to Read More...

For the performance of Joep Beving in Washington DC (6/26, Miracle Theater), he exposed the innards of his piano, so you could see the individual notes play through the delicately dancing hammers, shimmering more beautifully than a thousand AI-created worlds. He explained this was to get a more unfettered feel for the sounds emanating from the instrument. But it also seemed like there was an unspoken emotional directness to it as well, much like the music itself. Click to Read More...

I guess I am an eclipse chaser now. For this latest one, April 8, 2024, I drove 16 hours to Arkansas to get under the path of totality, to the Atlas Obscura Ecliptic Festival at the lovely Cedar Glades Park, up the mountains a bit from Hot Springs. The event had a mix of speakers and musical acts, including the wonderfully alien Sun Ra Arkestra following up the main event itself. It was a three day shindig, so you had to camp, or take a shuttle back into town each evening. So I bought a Coleman Pup tent (more on that later) and secured a home directly underneath the passing. Click to Read More...

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... Click to Read More...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...