Change takes place in the margins
This dude used to work with me at the newspaper. He was in a back corner, both literally and metaphorically, and was kinda quiet, and it took me a while to figure out that he was the smartest and most interesting person in the room.
The advantage, from an audience perspective, of music over painting
Joshua Cooper Ramo’s got some great schtick his new book about Picasso that has me pondering again the remarkable intellectual trajectory that leads from the raw innovation of Les Demoiselles to the crisp completion of the thought in Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Lots of cubism after that point, but in some sense the space [...]
Jimmy Carl Black
A friend sent me a link the other day to a video of Jimmy Carl Black appearing on stage with Frank Zappa in the early ’80s in Albuquerque. I immediately set off in search of Black. Did he still live here in Albuquerque. (And by “set off in search”, I mean “Asked Dan Mayfield, who [...]
Roadrunner
Back in the day, I loved to write about supercomputers – the fastest this, the latest that. Eventually it got old. How many stories can you do about another computer being faster than the last one? But I brought the old tool kit out of retirement yesterday to mark Roadrunner breaking the petaflop barrier. Because [...]
Daybook
reading:The Nature of Economies, by Jane Jacobs listening: Bongo Fury word of the day: fuggy – stuff or smelly paper of the day: lead in the North Pacific – Ice cores from the Yukon record rising lead levels resulting from the industrialization of Asia
Daybook
water politics: Looks like Sophie and the guy with the steely set in his jaw are going to stop Caesar’s evil plot to steal groundwater to build subdivisions. water politics II: Looks like Sophie and the guy with the steely set in his jaw may need to head over to Arizona next. water politics III: [...]
Daybook
reading: Tired of printing out PDF’s, I’m placing my order today for the IPCC Working Group I report paper of the day: “A Method of Approximating Rainfall over Long Periods and Some Results of its Application,” A.E. Douglass, Science, Jan. 3, 1913. Sorry, nothing to link here, you’ll just have to take my word for [...]
I’m Jimmy Carl Black, the Indian of the Group
Back in the summer of ’78, my friend John Colton visited me in L.A. It was his first visit, and while we were there, he made sure we drove around Beverly Hills, looking for jockeys on rick people’s lawns. Dweezil and the gang played Uncle Reemus at last night’s Zappa Plays Zappa Plays Zappa gig [...]
Daybook
birds: For the first time I can remember, two hummingbirds in an uncomfortable detente, sharing our front porch feeder. A third hovered in the distance, out by the daylilies. Why can’t we all just get along? paper of the day: For reasons that will eventually become clear – Holocene Vegetation in Chaco Canyon, by a [...]
Daybook
Quiet MorningOriginally uploaded by heinemanfleck. It’s quiet Saturday morning in Albuquerque, the sort of quiet you get when a light blanket of snow dampens the sound and keeps everyone inside, including the dogs. We’re going to be in trouble today when the mailman comes. There’ll be no dogs out to protect us. music: Django (the [...]
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