Feature creep

From Paul Jarvis: “Lately it seems like there are very few technology features I think are good ideas. Too frequently new “features” are touted as tools we can use, when more often than not they become annoyances we allow into our lives.”

Delirious desire

It’s easy to understand why we remember songs when we’ve heard them dozens or hundreds of times. But there are also songs that seize a permanent spot in our memory despite being heard only, say, four or five times. For me, one of those songs is “Say You” by Ronnie Dove. Originally written by J.B. Hicks and recorded by Jamie Coe in 1960 (with no chart action), Ronnie’s version barely cracked the Top 40 in late September 1964. It was the last track on the B-side of Ronnie’s Right or Wrong LP — kind of a weird position for a single… The follow-up single, a cover of Wanda Jackson’s great “Right or Wrong,” and a bigger hit, was the last track on side A. (Incidentally, Wanda’s song is another of those I heard only a handful of times back in the day, but never, ever forgot — like “Say You,” … Read more

Silence

I know one thing for certain: silence will not present itself unbidden amid the noise of the world. If I want it, I have to make space for it, and there is always a choice to make that space. … And in our time now, every decision in favor of silence is profound, even if it involves no more than deliberately turning away other things for hours or days in a week.
Jane Brox

Chamath Palihapitiya

The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth.
Former Facebook VP Chamath Palihapitiya

Paul Butterfield Blues Band, “Mary Mary” (1966)

For aspiring musicians in the 1960s, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band was hugely influential. If Bob Dylan turned rock into “music for adults” on a lyrical level, the Butterfield Band did the same thing musically. The band had a ferocious, street-tough sound, best heard early on in What’s Shakin’ cuts like “One More Mile” and “Good Morning Little School Girl.” The performances on their first full (eponomously-titled) Elektra album were great, but despite the instruction on the back of the jacket to play it loud*, the sound itself, the production, was a tiny bit distant, as if you were standing at the back of the club. What’s Shakin’ put you right at the front edge of the stage. (I don’t think Butterfield achieved that degree of in-your-face toughness again until 1969’s Keep On Movin’, produced by Jerry Ragovoy.) The first album was straight blues, pure Chicago. Sam Lay was probably … Read more

Santana on Szabo

Carlos Santana says that, for him, Gabor Szabo was the “exit out” from the “BB King freeway.”

Knausgaard’s Buddhism

Reading Book 6 of My Struggle. Karl Ove stumbles upon the essence of Buddhism, though he doesn’t acknowledge it as such. Like Korzybski’s “the map is not the territory.” “A world without language was a world without categories, where every single thing, no matter how modest, stood out in its own right. It was a world without history, in which only the moment existed. A pine tree in that world was not a “pine,” nor was it a “tree,” but a nameless phenomenon, something growing up out of the ground, which moved when the wind blew.”

Tao Lin

I love Tao Lin‘s Twitter style, especially his “I recommend…” tweets. Like: “I recommend avoiding insane culture and people who mock and ridicule other people”

Bill Frisell

The older I get, the more I keep looking back trying to figure out where I come from, and why. And the more I look back, the more information it gives me to move forward.
Bill Frisell

Foreigner

At the gym today, the soundtrack was 100% young white male post-Strokes rock. It was so bland and formulaic, the lyrics so forced and shallow, that when a song by Foreigner — Foreigner! — came on, it seemed fresh, human, real.