New Orleans: Mon Amour

music

Love NOLA: Ten things you learn from living in New Orleans

By Brett Will Taylor

Good grief. Yesterday marked the two-year anniversary of my move from Boston to New Orleans.

Has it really been two years? Has it only been two years? Forty-eight months in and it’s hard to remember ever living anywhere else. This city gets into your bones, your blood, your soul … erasing all that has come before and taking control of all that will follow.

That’s what love and lovers do, right?

And there’s no doubt that I love New Orleans. I’m also extremely grateful to her. Because, you see, in just two years, she’s taught me quite a lot. About living in New Orleans. About living, period. Love and lovers do that, too. Right?

Oakeshott on Civil Association

oakeshott

A trailer from Noel O’Sullivan‘s essay.

The distinctive achievement of Western political thought since the seventeenth century is the ideal of the limited state. Despite extensive theorizing about this ideal, however, there has always been profound disagreement about its precise nature and implications. The full extent of this disagreement has been especially evident during the decades since the Second World War, in the course of which sustained efforts have been made by a variety of thinkers to construct a coherent alternative to totalitarianism. In Friedrich Hayek’s view, for example, the limited state is principally characterized by a free market economy that facilitates human progress. For Karl Popper, it is characterized by commitment to creating an Open Society which rejects absolute truth and asserts the conditionality of all knowledge. In the early writings of John Rawls, the limited state is characterized by commitment to rational principles of distributive justice. For Robert Nozick, it means the minimal state. For Ernest Gellner, it is the political structure appropriate to what he termed “modular man.” For Jürgen Habermas, echoing Rousseau, it refers to a political order based on rational will formation. For Vaclav Havel, what characterizes the limited state is the promotion of spiritual integration instead of the spiritual fragmentation associated with totalitarian regimes. Still other interpretations of the ideal of the limited state are found amongst theorists of globalization and the European Union.

A Brief History of Stigmergy

stigmergic, stigmergic cognition, stigmergy

Someone has posted Guy Theraulaz’ and Eric Bonabeau’s classic paper from Artificial Life.

The boredom of boozeless business

cognition

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.

The Oxford Handbook of the Self

metaphysics

Here is another review from NDPR on Shaun Gallagher’s immense collection that I mentioned a few months back. I have delved into this and have found some very good stuff that I’m currently reading.

“Von” Freeman

jazz

“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

music

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

"Fats" Domino

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