When you learn from the awesome 80-year-old instruction book written by dudes like George Hamilton Green, it’s nice to hear him play, too.
Category: uncategorized
TV is the epitome of Low Art in its desire to appeal to and enjoy the attention of unprecedented numbers of people. But it is not Low because it is vulgar or prurient or dumb. Television is often all these things, but this is a logical function of its need to attract and please Audience. And I’m not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simple because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests. It’s all about syncretic diversity: neither medium nor Audience is faultable for quality.

Suzy Parker and Robin Tattersall. Dress by Dior, Place de la Concorde, Paris, August 1956. Photo: Richard Avedon. I hope to go to Paris this fall.

COOKING IS A BLAST WHEN YOUR FIFTIES STOVETOP GOES TO INFINITE
At one point back in college I had a numbered kitchen dial like this, except it was on the oven.
DAVIDLYNCH.COM presents INTERVIEW PROJECT
20,000-mile road trip + interviews with folks. Launching on June 1.

A View of the Bombardment of Ft. McHenry. I was in Baltimore a few weeks ago and stopped by Fort McHenry (Star-Spangled Banner, etc.). This painting was one of my favorites, if only for the trails on the bombs.

Treadmills came into English jails following a 1779 prison reform act. That act said that prisoners should be given “…labor of the hardest and most servile kind in which drudgery is chiefly required and where the work is little liable to be spoiled by ignorance, neglect, or obstinacy…”
Maybe, subconsciously, this is why I’m not able to run on treadmills for any length of time.

Space Shuttle Atlantis and Hubble Space Telescope silhouetted against the sun. See it really large. (via nasa hq photo)

A favorite from Cliff Robert’s Book of Jazz. The St. Louis Blues is really nice, too.
Simmons + Gladwell
Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell talk about sports and such. My favorite bit:
We had lunch a few weeks ago and discussed the parallels between music and basketball. The structure is fundamentally the same: You have a lead singer (the NBA alpha dog, like LeBron or Kobe), the lead guitarist (the sidekick, like Pippen or McHale), the drummer (an unsung third wheel, like Parish or Worthy), the bassist (a solid, reliable and ultimately disposable role player: like Byron Scott or Anderson Varejao); and then everyone else (the other rotation guys). Bands can go different ways just like successful basketball teams. McCartney and Lennon were two geniuses who ultimately needed one another (like Young Magic and Older Kareem, or Shaq and Young Kobe), whereas MJ and LeBron were more like Sting or Springsteen (someone who could carry the band by themselves). And if you want to drag hip-hop or rap into it, the best parallel would obviously be Jordan’s post-baseball Bulls: MJ was Chuck D, Pippen was Terminator X, and there is no effing doubt that Rodman was Flavor Flav.
I’ll tumble for ya
I set up a separate tumbly thing on this domain. Here’s the feed for the tumbly thing. This whole operation was no doubt inspired by the blog/tumblr separation that Austin Kleon and Ryan Coleman have been doing for a while. Not too long ago Ryan also shared some thoughts on rolling up your content that helped decide the matter.
The tumblr will be a nice place to gather bits of influence and inspiration—hopefully both more frequent for you and less time-consuming for me; I’ll reserve the home page here for personal stuff and bigger projects TBD. I might clean up the tumblr styling later, and will probably break things in the process, but it’s up and running and good enough for now. Enjoy.
in Bb 2.0 – a collaborative music/spoken word project
Terry Riley’s In C meets Kutiman’s Mother of All Funk Chords.

Kind of Bloop: An 8-Bit Tribute to Miles Davis. I really want to hear Andy Baio’s latest project.

Old American road maps like this one were mentioned as one of the many influences on the Here & There horizon-less maps of Manhattan. Looks like a decades-old predecessor of Google Street View!
a late-night-style infomercial for an imaginary compilation of Twelve-Tone Greatest Hits
Steve Reich: City Life – Part 1 “Check it out”.
One of my favorite bits of music in any genre, period. All 5 parts are worth a listen.


It’s official, the world’s most remote place is on the Tibetan plateau (34.7°N, 85.7°E).
Audrey Hepburn sings “Moon River.” Swoon.

a cloudy day at Biltmore last weekend