The whole “selfie” thing has finally peaked:
This One Is Kind of A Big Deal
Everybody fire up yer radios! Wednesday night – well, actually, Thursday morning – I will be a guest on the Coast to Coast AM radio show with host George Noory. Coast to Coast “…airs on...
Read MoreThe Future Is Prologue:
Cosmic Summit 2024
Some of you know that for the past couple of months I have been ‘laser focused’ (I actually hate that expression, but it does seem to express the ADHD way I go at some things) on the...
Read MoreAvailable Now on Audible!
As Philo-The-Third told me, his father – Philo T. Farnsworth The Second – had ‘two major cases in his life. The first was electronic video. You wouldn’t be looking at this if he...
Read MoreLinks For My ACA Friends
So that I could just put it all in one place… Little Green Boat – the poem I mentioned I wrote that describes how everybody in the neighborhood knew what was going on except us kids...
Read MoreEulogy For Harvey Schatzkin
Arthur, Harvey and Paul ca. 1953. The kid on the right is the only one still living. Not shown: mother Ellen, sister Dorothy aka Dotsie _________________________________ September 30, 1958 Ellen has...
Read MoreComing Soon: TBWIT – The Audiobook!
More than fifty years after I first heard of Philo T. Farnsworth (in the summer if 1973)… More than twenty years after The Boy Who Invented Television was first published… And a year...
Read MoreHow’s This for Dark Thoughts?
Once again, on the subject of why we can’t have the keys to the Cosmic Ferrari… I am preparing a presentation for a conference in North Carolina in June. Consider this the...
Read MoreTurns out there’s an app for that:
Sierra Hull first showed up on my radar about three years ago, when a friend who worked for her management company invited me to a CD release concert at the Belcourt Theater.
Since then, I have had the pleasure and privilege of working with Sierra on more than several occasions. She was a featured performer on The 1861 Project – Volume 2: From the Famine to The Front (Spotify), lending her charming vocals and dazzling mandolin lines to The Song of The Mystic (Spotify), a song about Father Joseph Ryan, “the poet laureate of the Confederacy” and the namesake of one of Nashville’s most prominent parochial schools.
More recently, I had an opportunity to photograph Sierra as she warmed up to perform with Irene Kelley at Irene’s CD release party at the Station Inn.
[tweetable alt=””]I’ve actually shot quite a few lovely photos of Sierra since she came on board with The 1861 Project, but this one has to be my favorite.[/tweetable] I could probably say more about it, but I think this is one of those instances when I’ll just let the picture speak its thousand words and leave it at that….
If that’s still not enough, have a listen to Sierra’s 2011 Rounder Records release, Daybreak:
A note to the Weekly Digest Readers:
You’re going to see a lot more posts in my weekly digest this week…
It’s mostly photos that I posted from the week that Ann and I just spent in New York. Well, starting in New York but mostly in Connecticut, a bit of New Jersey for my niece’s wedding, and then a couple of days pounding around Manhattan.
I’m still sort of digesting the trip… a couple of big takeaways are:
1) The prevalence of mobile devices. I know this is nothing new to observe, but when you are in a city of like 10 million people and every one of them has their eyes fixed on a tiny screen regardless of what else they’re doing, it becomes that much more obvious that something fundamental about the way we live in the world has changed.
2) On a related note: when did it become OK to conduct an entire conversation with another person without even bothering to remove the ear-buds in your ears? I mean, who does that? Well, a lot of people in New York do that. We had dinner in one restaurant where we had a good view of the patrons at the bar, and we literally watched one guy conduct and entire conversation with the woman seated beside him, wired dangling from his ears the entire time. Like, for almost an hour. Sorry I didn’t get a photo of THAT.
3) Contemporary, popular music played on sound systems in public places like trendy restaurants is just fucking ghastly. I guess it’s just de riguer these days, the establishments have a sound system installed, put it on some channel, and then ignore what’s being played, it’s just part of the background noise. But for the the patrons (OK, this patron), the sonic assault detracts from the experience of the joint. It makes me want to leave (especially if it’s this godawful nothing-but-beats hip-hop stuff that is so popular these days, and yes, I know saying that makes me a very old man of the “get off my lawn” stripe…).
FWIW, the issue is not unique to New York. It’s a problem in Nashville, or anywhere else I’ve been lately. It just seems worse when you’re already well out of your comfort zone and trying desperately to find some – well, comfort in an otherwise hostile urban environment.
The only reading of consequence you will find in today’s Digest is the first post – which appears at the bottom of the Digest listings – which I posted last week. It’s the second installment of some reminiscences about my first year in Nashville, the year when I started “Songs.com” and a bit of what it it was like to explain the Internet to people who had often never heard of it. Hard to imagine a time like that now…
Other than that it’s just photos from the trip, and not even the good ones – just the ones I thought to send from my camera to my phone so that I could Instagram them. I’ll have to see what else I got when I get to the files…
Just a few shots combined into one on my phone:
As seen from 5th Avenue, just south of Bergdorf’s and the Apple Store:
After Bergdorf’s we went across the street to Apple’s flagship Manhattan store, the one with the entrance that’s just a big glass cubed access to a transparent stairwell that takes you into an underground cavern that is all things Apple. It’s a rather impressive place. I found this photo of me on a MacBook that was open to Photobooth:
Running out of things to do Monday afternoon, we started exploring the upper reaches of 5th Avenue, starting with Bergrdorf Goodman. Where we saw these $1,500 dollars shoes. At least the ones on the right look like you could walk in them, though probably not very far…
It was really weird to hang out even for a minute in a place where you could overhear patrons talking about “the season” like it really means something.
I guess, for them, it does…