Walking in our neighborhood these covid summer nights, a friend and I have been counting roadrunners. They are incongruous, relic dinosaurs as apex predators (but what of the hawks, and cats?) in our suburban neighborhood. Early in the pandemic, we’d see one or two. Rarely zero, but rarely more than one or two. We’d see …
Continue reading ‘“I say, roadrunner once, roadrunner twice….’ »
Carlos Santana was born in Jalisco, the son of a mariachi, and grew up in that stateless borderland between Tijuana and San Francisco playing first the violin, then the guitar. There was a breadth to his musical education: If I would go to some cat’s room, he’d be listening to Sly and Jimi Hendrix; another …
That corner in Winslow Arizona, the one with the pretty girl and the flatbed Ford? Actually happened in Flagstaff, the truck was a Toyota.: Browne was traveling through Arizona when he began working on the song. But the scene about the corner and a girl in the Ford was written by Frey after Browne related …
Continue reading ‘The West has always been, in part, a thing of our imagination’ »
Striking video by my colleague Pat Vasquez-Cunningham of a horse roundup at Canyon de Chelly
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.
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 …
Continue reading ‘The advantage, from an audience perspective, of music over painting’ »
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 …
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 …
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
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: …