Back in the day, arguing about Ginger or Mary Ann was a thing. Jeannie vs. Samantha. Chevy vs. Ford was a hardy perennial, of course. Fender vs. Gibson was another one. But the real action was Motown vs. Stax records.
Motown was the Detroit thang, of course. Stax was Memphis. Most people assume that Motown was the older outfit, but Stax was founded two years earlier, in 1957. Motown was urban and polished. Stax was funky and raw. Motown was a new form of doowop. Stax was gospel church — the other six days of the week. They both had pretty good runs. Stax went bankrupt in 1975. Motown moved to Los Angeles about the same time and made money for a while, but ultimately lost its way. It was eventually swallowed up by Universal Records, and then burped back out in time for oldies shows.
The Blues Brothers movies resurrected Stax in the public’s eye. Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn appeared in it. They were from Booker T. & the M.G.’s, the original house band for Stax. The drummer in that band, Al Jackson Jr., was one of the most original drummers I ever heard. He’s drumming on all the Al Green records, among many others. He had this uncanny knack for sounding like he was slowing down, but never slowing down.
The Blues Brothers movie was mildly amusing. But it also contained stretches of what can only be characterized as: vibe.
vibe /vīb/
noun
A distinctive emotional quality or atmosphere that is sensed or experienced by someone.
Vibe was the M.G.’s stock in trade, and Stax had more of it than anyone outside of Muscle Shoals. To wit:
So everyone knows Motown stars. The Supremes, The Temptations, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, and The Jackson 5. I certainly listened to it. But I never wanted to play music like that, exactly. I wanted to play music like Stax. I wanted that vibe. Sam and Dave and Rufus Thomas and Albert King and Wilson Pickett and the Staple Singers and the Bar Kays.
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
Richard Brautigan (1967)
A while back, some of my readers were sorta arguing somewhere or another about exactly who I write like. A tempest in a thimble, in internet measurement. There were several competing theories, mostly amusing. My favorite was someone who said I was a hack who was just aping RIchard Brautigan. I like that one the most, because while I am a hack, I’d never even heard of Richard Brautigan.
I’m assumed to be quite literate, but the general public doesn’t understand the autodidact very well. Autodidacts seem to know all sorts of wonderful things, because they poke around on their own and go down alleys that the highways of academe blast right by. But what is commonplace for college isn’t always on the side roads, so you get caught out on the intellectual freeway from time to time, out of gas, and going, “Who the hell is Richard Brautigan?”
I bought one of his books to see for myself. I don’t write anything like Richard Brautigan that I can observe. Ain’t up to me to say, anyway. I leave such comparisons to others, who are obviously going to live to be a Methuselan age to waste time on a topic like that. But saying I copied his style is kinda silly. My memory is a little sketchy, but I’m fairly certain I didn’t readThe Abortionin first grade in Catholic school when it came out.
Many readers don’t get subtlety very well, no matter who is slinging it. It’s hard enough in regular books. The internet is not constructed to convey subtlety one iota. It’s a machine of loving grace, of course, but you have to watch out for the cybernetic cowpies as you frolic in the Facebook meadows.
The title of this poem, All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, gets used on the intertunnel all the time, but generally as a non-sequitur, lost and alone without context of any kind. I went looking for the poem itself and found it on some form of SEO-optimized poetry page.
It includes, at the bottom, what appears to be marked as an AI generated appraisal of the meaning of the poem, and it’s a doozy:
Analysis (ai): This poem envisions a harmonious coexistence between nature and technology, presenting a utopian vision of the future. It depicts a world where computers and animals live in equilibrium, free from human interference. The author’s optimistic tone and simple language convey a sense of hope and possibility.
Compared to the author’s other works, this poem exhibits a shift towards a more technology-centric perspective. Brautigan’s earlier works often explored themes of isolation and alienation, but here he embraces a vision of technological advancement that benefits humanity.
In the historical context of the mid-20th century, this poem reflects the growing optimism surrounding technological progress. The post-war period saw advancements in computing and automation, which raised expectations for a better future. Brautigan’s poem captured this sentiment, envisioning a world where technology serves as a catalyst for harmony between humans and the natural world
I have only one question: exactly how dense is whatever machine of loving grace that produced that? Then again, Large Language Models don’t know anything. They just survey what the internet says, and dishes it back out with all the words spelled correctly for a change. I gather that most readers think Brautigan, a semi-hero to both the beatniks and the hippies (both groups he rejected) was enthusiastic about the onrushing cyberpocalypse. Couldn’t wait to ride on that train all graphite and glitter, undersea by rail.
The internet has never understood parentheses, and even forbade their use in file names. Punctuation-ists! Parenthetical asides aren’t the modern intellectual’s strong suit. Then again, we’re dealing with people who think Mark Twain was a racist because he didn’t name his character Attractive and Successful Jim. Read the poem again and pay attention to what’s in the parentheses, where the LLM train doesn’t run.
Brautigan wrote another poem, one I quite like:
At The California Institute Of Technology
I don’t care how God-damn smart
these guys are: I’m bored.
It’s been raining like hell all day long
and there’s nothing to do.
Written January 24, 1967 while poet-in-residence at the California Institute of Technology.
I’m not sure when trash day is at my new digs. In a way, every day is trash day now. There’s a dumpster nearby. I feel like a Sesame Street character, or Redd Foxx or something. In any case, my bookmarks bucket is overflowing, and must be addressed. Why not read along with me, filled with wonder? Wondering why I put this stuff aside in the first place, mostly.
After decades of consolidation, just four firms now control at least 97 percent of the $68 billion frozen potato market, the antitrust cases reveal. These four companies participate in the same trade associations and use a third-party data analytics platform — PotatoTrac — to share confidential business information. The lawsuits allege the firms’ collusion has driven french fries and hash browns to record-high prices.
That website is great, sorta, in a breathless Mother Upton Ida Sinclair Tarbell-Jones kinda way. And interestingly, French Fry Cartel is the name of my Haircut 100 tribute band. But I digress.
I love food and I love to cook. I love to study the science of cooking. I’m very lucky—I’m not in a position that I have to strongly limit my food expenses, but I have always wanted to see how well I could cook and eat on a limited budget. It would encourage me to think about new ingredients, new techniques, and new dishes. I love cooking competition shows like Iron Chef, and enjoy cooking with limited ingredients, or cooking with a lot of a specific ingredient that someone dumps in my lap.
This was published in 2016. Let’s see if all that inflation we’re having or not having, depending on what newspaper you read, has affected his findings. First day is tomato soup, toasted cheese sandwiches, and (egad) homemade kimchi. Here’s his graph on costs:
I priced the same ingredients locally, in the same amounts. We’ll take the homemade kimchi as the same price as 2016. I think it’s made from bagged mulch from the gardening aisle, which has no doubt gone up, but you can source if from any potted plant at the mall for free. At any rate, in 2024, the same ingredients in the same amount add up to $3.14. That’s about a 60% inflation, or 7.53% per year. That seems rather more than the Fed’s (science fiction) target rate of 2%, don’t it? The gold standard for the gummint’s opinion of inflation is the COLA adjustment on Social Security benefits. I looked it up. They gave seniors 28.5% aggregate increases for the same period. They would have told grandma to eat dog food to adapt, I imagine, but dog food costs more than Campbell’s tomato soup, so it’s more homemade kimchi for you, grandma. Whoops, I meant 할머니.
The deck log of a commissioned U.S. Navy ship is generally not the place to mess around. In that humble book, a ship’s officer of the deck (OOD) meticulously notes vital information on weather, sea state, status of the engineering plant, the ship’s course and speed, along with other mission-critical factors.
But in the earliest hours of New Year’s Day, during the mid-watch from midnight to 3 a.m. or 4 a.m., the OOD can let their respective poetic prowess shine through, and write their deck log entry in poem form.
By the time explorers ventured onboard in 2009, the Duke of Lancaster had become an eerie monument to decay. But inside, they stumbled upon a treasure trove of arcade cabinets, some bearing the names of classics like Space Invaders, Galaxian, and Ground Shaker. These machines, once the stars of bustling arcades, had been stored and forgotten, their stories gathering dust for decades.
Well, my little brother once taught Richard Dreyfuss how to play Missile Command in an arcade in Westwood Village, near UCLA. Other than that, I got nothing.
“The art is fantastic,” Young said, referencing a game called Knock Out, which dates from 1950. The machine depicts a boxing match, but there’s far more fighting happening in the crowd, stylized brawls of all sorts. A clown is being led out on a stretcher. Shake the game too much, and a little speech bubble above his head lights up and says, “Tilt!”
One of the crowning achievements of my young life was getting my name under the glass for the high score in Airborne Avenger. It was still there many years later. Back in the day, when you got paid on Friday, you’d go to the bank, cash the check, and ask for twenties, tens, a five, five ones… and a roll of quarters.
The Evaporative Cooling Effect describes the phenomenon that high value contributors leave a community because they cannot gain something from it, which leads to the decrease of the quality of the community. Since the people most likely to join a community are those whose quality is below the average quality of the community, these newcomers are very likely to harm the quality of the community. With the expansion of community, it is very hard to maintain the quality of the community.
If this is true, I fear the participants in this little corner of the internet will become degraded to simply fantastic, from their current awesome level. And if anyone’s going to harm the quality around here, it’ll be me, thank you very much.
“We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” Zuckerberg added. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech. So we’re gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
The US is the world’s sole military superpower. It spends more on its military than the ten next highest spending countries combined. China is now the world’s sole manufacturing superpower. Its production exceeds that of the nine next largest manufacturers combined. This column uses the recently released 2023 update of the OECD TiVA database to paint an eight-chart portrait of China’s journey to superpower status and the asymmetric impact that its dominance has had on global supply chains.
Saying the US is the world’s sole military superpower because it spends more on its military than a bunch of Burkina Fasos is kinda silly. Guess what else those factories in China could make in a pinch? My dad flew in a Ford B-24, for example.
The deal will do a couple of big things if and when it is completed (execs say it could take 12-18 months): For starters, it will create a much bigger player in the virtual multichannel video provider (vMVPD) space, one that can more aggressively take on the market leader YouTube TV. YouTube TV said a year ago that it had 8 million subscribers, while Hulu + Live TV had 4.6 million subscribers and Fubo had 1.6 million subscribers, giving a combined offering 6.2 million subs.
I’m not sure which of these businesses are the drunks, and which is the lampost.
Deep’s agenda has a major milestone this year—the development and testing of a small, modular habitat called Vanguard. This transportable, pressurized underwater shelter, capable of housing up to three divers for periods ranging up to a week or so, will be a stepping stone to a more permanent modular habitat system—known as Sentinel—that is set to launch in 2027. “By 2030, we hope to see a permanent human presence in the ocean,” says Krack. All of this is now possible thanks to an advanced 3D printing-welding approach that can print these large habitation structures.
First guy who says, “Pull my finger,” goes out the hatch without a scuba suit.
Kids need sumfin’ to do. A little too much of that sumfin’ is way, way too structured nowadays. Playing pickup games in the park adds a form of self-organization and direction that transcends the benefits of the game itself. There’s no better self-organizing activity for kids than playing music you like with your friends.
You can quickly discover who your friends really are. The first lesson you learn is that 90% of show business is showing up. After a short while, you realize that initial enthusiasm is a poor substitute for punctuality. My own children performed as a duo because none of my older son’s friends would show up more than once or twice, no matter how much they promised they would. Hence the nine-year-old drummer got pressed into service. He had to show up. He lived there.
An adjunct to showing up is showing up knowing the material. Most budding musicians mistake rehearsal for practice. Practice is a solitary thing, and it takes fortitude to keep it up. To play in a band with your fellows, you’re required to show up ready to rehearse, i.e., play the songs with other people, not learn them on the fly.
The second lesson is mistaking performance for rehearsal. Practice is to get ready for rehearsal to get ready for performance. You can’t skip steps, or do them in the wrong order. I’ve played in a lot of bands over the years. In the most successful one, we had a simple rule: don’t play anything, and I mean anything, until you were playing a song. No noodling. And sound check isn’t performed with the audience staring at you, either. Showing up early is part of showing up, you know.
Look at the bright young faces in the Low Darts, making glorious noises in a basement in Fairfield Connecticut. Their reach doesn’t exceed their grasp, even though they mostly perform songs that less ambitious musicians would avoid. Too much practice. Too much rehearsal.
But hey; no risk, no story. What a nice Drop Ceiling Rock story the Low Darts are.
Recent Comments