From Portland to NOLA: two of my favourite places.
A Week In The Life Of Zach Zamboni, Anthony Bourdain’s Cinematographer.
A Brief History of Stigmergy
Someone has posted Guy Theraulaz’ and Eric Bonabeau’s classic paper from Artificial Life.
The boredom of boozeless business
This piece from The Economist – cheers!
Another recent paper from the journal Consciousness and Cognition by psychologists at the University of Illinois confirms what many have long suspected: a couple of drinks makes workers more creative. Tipsy employees, they say, find it hard to focus on a task, but this makes them more likely to come up with innovative ideas. This may help to explain the success of Silicon Valley, one of the last workplaces in America where hard and soft drinks still jostle for space in the company fridge.
Headquarters
To mark the 5oth anniversary of Preservation Hall. We are all in profoundly debted to Allan and Sandra Jaffe.
The Oxford Handbook of the Self
“Von” Freeman
“Von” obituary
Louis Armstrong used to come by from the time I was about 3 years old, and he’d always say to me, ‘Hi Pops,’ recalled Freeman, pointing to the era when Satchmo was enjoying his first blush of success as a Chicago bandleader and emerging recording artist. “Earl Hines came over, and Fats Waller played this (Starck) piano of mine.”
Branford Marsalis Interview
As usual from any Marsalis, an articulate, provocative and amusing view.
It’s essentially inauthentic when I listen to it. It doesn’t sound like jazz, and I can find few situations with the exception of popular music where the music is so far removed from its roots that it’s so unrecognizable from the original form.
So I didn’t really grow up on the self-esteem campaign. When you were lousy at something, they told you you were lousy, and they told you how to fix it.
. . . because the two elements that you have to have to become successful are cognition and intuition. Intuition does not come without cognition, and my cognitive abilities were very, very low at the time.
I’d had enough of New York living — I had enough of 5-year-olds calling adults by their first name.
I could tell that he played gospel music or R&B or something like that because his feeling was really, really — it had a real strong feel to it. He was playing very simply; he wasn’t playing any overcomplicated thing.
You have a lot of people who want to play jazz but want to ignore the cultural imprint of the music.
But, if you play Eine Kleine Nachtmusik for your kid, the music is whatever your kid wants it to be about. It’s instrumental music. The kids’ imaginations can run wild.
Black Dog: Now and Zen
One has to hand it to Robert Plant for eventually finding his way through the dreadful ’80s and now re-establishing himself as an elder statesman without ever becoming a caricature of his former self, not trying to be perpetually hip (a la Bowie) and now no longer feeling he has to escape the burden of Led Zep. He is clearly so excited about surrounding himself with fantastic musicians from country, delta blues, folk, classic 50s rock and more besides. He doing far more successfully what Bowie could have done and what Rod Stewart tried to do (with modest success – I don’t mean commercially of course). Hats off to Plant for being a great supporter of New Orleans and especially to his (and Zep’s) appreciation of Fats. Here’s a perfect example of a blistering rock song given new life.
Now
Zen
Plant’s contribution to a Fats Tribute album
A bootleg of Zep doing Fats’ version of Blueberry Hill
The Conscious Brain
Coming soon (an unlikely cover for an OUP book).
Oakeshott on Law
STEVEN GERENCSER trailer from A Companion to Michael Oakeshott
To write about law in relationship to Michael Oakeshott’s ideas generally, or his thoughts on politics in particular, presents a complicated task, not because law is an obscure concept in Oakeshott, and not because it is a topic about which he has written little. In fact, Oakeshott wrote about law and jurisprudence at the beginning of his life as a publishing scholar and was still writing essays on law more than half a century later. Rather it is a challenge to write about Oakeshott and law because his ideas about law are so closely nested with related and interlocking concepts that it is very easy to start by thinking about law and find oneself considering authority or politics, or his distinction between civil association and enterprise association. These concepts are woven together so tightly for Oakeshott that to pull one out and consider it on its own without attention to the others would badly misconstrue the idea. To express this idea in the terms that Oakeshott employs regarding Hegel and Hobbes, these ideas are related as in a system, and to attempt to understand any element of the system in isolation can only generate a limited and incomplete view, that is, a misunderstanding.
manwithoutqualities 