August 2023
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Well, I guess that's not technically accurate. To set a trend, one must not only be enacting the trend, but be seen doing it. Nobody apart from my immediate family and my neighbors know that I'm doing it. And I'm pretty sure that they are themselves not trend-watchers who have noted that I'm doing it…
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Last Christmas someone gave me a biography of Bill Frisell: Bill Frisell, Beautiful Dreamer, by Philip Watson. In case you don't know the name, Frisell is a guitarist, one of the best-known musicians on any instrument in the contemporary jazz world, though "jazz" is not the right word for much of his work: how about small-group…
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There is a lot to say for the scientific method, but in the social sciences it is often little more than a magical trick: the ritualistic application of statistics to poor data measured by imaginary instruments. Author unknown, found on a sheet of paper in my files, in quotation marks so apparently not my words.…
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I don't have any idea at all where I got the mp3 of this song, or rather track–it's not exactly a song, but a combination of droning and mechanical sounds and percussion. I found it haunting. And I don't remember how I figured out that the voice might or must be that of Robert Oppenheimer,…
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This past Easter I wrote about going to the Vigil at a small parish where the pastor is a young priest, and said this: The young priests I've encountered in recent years are all similarly committed to the traditional mission of the Church, which makes them "conservative" in the confused mind of our time. And…
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That's a line from an Al Stewart song, "On the Border," the second hit single from his very successful 1976 album (and extremely successful single by the same name), Year of the Cat. It's one of the little cultural fragments that are always bouncing around in my head, and it probably shows up once a…
Light On Dark Water 