Stream "Good Bones" on Spotify
See also:
]]>It expresses very directly the struggle any parent has, to try to frame this flawed world to their children as an enticing place.
It became a very popular poem online in the wake of the Orlando shooting, and it is passed around again with fresh currency every time something awful happens. This recent Washington Post article is a good survey of the year it's had.
I was struck by it personally, like so many others; it dug into me. After admiring it for a long while, I started to wonder if it would work as a song (even though it's been many years since I've tried to compose or arrange music).
I noodled around a bit with possible melodies, thinking about different approaches like "what would Suzanne Vega do with this text?" Or Joe Jackson? Or Lin-Manuel Miranda? And on and on, trying out different approaches.
Eventually I reached a melody line I was happy with, and it solidified to the point where I couldn't hear any other competing melodies in my head. (I'm pretty curious to hear other musical settings of it now, since I expect they'll be completely different.)
Once I was happy with the shape of it and convinced myself it would be worth sharing, I wrote to Maggie Smith requesting permission to compose, publish, record, etc. She generously agreed, and so I've been working on polishing it into a final form.
Without further ado, here is a demo (unfinished) version of my "Good Bones" song that you can listen to (click to download the mp3 file)...
I hope to post a more polished recording in the near future (for sale on iTunes and Amazon), but for now I'm sharing this.
UPDATE: I originally posted a demo version of the song; now that it's released, here is a preview version of the real thing:
See the update post for links to Good Bones on major music services.
And here is a draft of sheet music for it, if you're curious to see: piano & voice, PDF.
I'm curious for feedback -- I haven't done this exact sort of thing before. I'm easy to reach on Twitter (@nowthis) and on email (same handle @ gmail.com).
]]>The Secret
by Denise Levertov
(via The Poetry Foundation)Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.I who don't know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not evenwhat line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can't find,and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so thata thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
linesin other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
forassuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.
Here is a recording of the author reading it.
Levertov died in 1997. Here's a page from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with extensive material on her career, including a page of several more of her poems.
]]>New things I tried, some of which succeeded:
Some things I enjoyed:
A few other 2015 highlights that come to mind:
Visiting St. Louis for the 30th Anniversary Concert of the Pikers (YouTube playlist) and getting to direct some of the old tunes.
My favorite part, which made it to YouTube: my old "Take Me Home" arrangement, performed for the first time in many years (with Matt Cooper on solo).
A few goals for 2016:
Not looking forward to in 2016:
I'm sure I'm forgetting numerous things, but that's a fair amount of links to throw out in one post.
Happy New Year to you & yours.
]]>iOS and Android both offer a feature where you can make your own custom typing shortcuts which the device expands into longer phrases. (For specific instructions, see any of the many articles with specific steps out there.)
I've never used any of the example shortcuts I see given. Some are:
My criteria for a truly time-saving shortcut are:
Be really easy to type.
Typing it should be as eyes-free an operation as possible. If you could type it without looking, that would be ideal. This is next to impossible on a touchscreen, but you can still make it easier on yourself by applying Fitts' Law:
“The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to & size of the target”
The easiest letter to reach from the letter you just touchscreen-typed is? The same letter.
If you make your shortcut a series of the same letter repeated, you're making it about as easy for yourself as you can.
My most commonly-used shortcut is ‘hhh’, for “Heading home”. The only key I have to find is the H key, then poke it three times fast, then find ‘Send’. It's fast, the phone doesn't think I'm typing some other word, and it works great for me every day.
Here are some others which serve me well:
If I used ‘on my way’, I'd probably use ‘www’ since I don't want to use ‘ooo’.
Along a similar line, this Lifehacker article recommends using “@@” as a shortcut for your own email address, with “@@@” for a second address and so on. (If I actually gave out my email address much from my phone, I would use this.)
One nice side-effect of using this style of shortcut: since they don't look like regular words, your phone has a good chance of auto-correcting to the right thing even if you don't get it exactly right. I typed too many ‘h’s once and my phone helpfully suggested “Heading home”, which was indeed what I meant.
What are your shortcut secrets?
]]>Specifically, his habit of writing out software-development diary entries discussing what decisions he is facing and either how he is solving it or what he is stuck on (and then his readers will often jump in with useful advice on Twitter & elsewhere.)
One big example is his Vesper Sync Diary series. There are others too -- this is a Google search of his site for 'diary'.
I have a lot of posts along that line I could make about a tool I made and released last year: SankeyMATIC, "a Sankey diagram builder for everyone".
It really deserved several blog posts here but never got any; I plan to remedy that and pick back up the thread of its development, as there are several improvements left to make before I can consider it properly done.
]]>It went well—he didn't have a lot of nervousness, he did remember his 3 very short memorized pieces, and he played them fine.
But I was struck by something as I watched the procession of students play.
I have been out of the watching-kids-perform world for so very long that I had totally forgotten that when kids make mistakes, their natural reaction is to back up and fix them.
(Several of the students, across a wide range of ages and skills, did this.)
I tried to think of when that was trained out of me, and have concluded that it was essentially when I began performing in ensembles--orchestras, choirs, etc.
Whether they said so out loud or not, it became clear from my various directors that in a performance, the group will not be stopping for one person's mistake. It is simply not practical to go back and fix much of anything.
(I have definitely had a few of the worst-case experiences where everything gets so cocked-up that there is no hope of proceeding together coherently, when you can feel the director's pain as they halt the entire song, quickly communicate a measure number or other fresh rendezvous point to the group, and try to resume with some dignity.)
It gets even more pronounced when you are having to coordinate with other performers who are not even looking at the same conductor as you—say, being in the pit orchestra for a musical. The action on the stage is going to happen whatever you do, so you do your best to stay in sync with the actors no matter what, caution to the wind and devil take the hindmost.
But.
Watching piano students play by themselves, especially some just starting out, I have to shush that longstanding instinct. They are more concerned with correctness than with maintenance of tempo, and frankly this is fine and age-appropriate. Just a little unfamiliar.
(Another idea this experience reminded me of was the "Five Nines" concept as applied to musical performances, which I will have to elaborate on in some future post.)
]]>Interrogator: "Is that a fair thing to say? That you've been under the influence of other people?"
Sheridan: "No."
Interrogator: "No, really? I find that most remarkable. I mean, aren't we all under the influence of others? It's part of being in the world. Somebody in the office is in a bad mood, pretty soon everybody's in a bad mood. We're all influenced by other people."
—Babylon 5, Episode 4.18, "Intersections in Real Time"To avoid one problem I have with writing—the strong feeling that I am repeating myself, leading to being super redundant, pointless and boring—I'll try a new tack.
For many of the various things I feel I've learned over the years, often I can point back to one or more specific things which led me there.
And rather than just expound on my various philosophies & heresies here, I think it will be more interesting to write about where some of these things came from (when I have particular things I can point back to).
This sort of rhymes with my wish to post about #ExcellentThings as well.
On some level, these kind of posts are just another series of 'Things What I Like'. But they are specifically things that I recall often, that I can point to as having had a lasting effect on my thinking.
Another part of wanting to post about these is to leave a trail for my son to find someday, helping to explain 'why was Dad like that, anyway?'.
I was an avid reader of DC's The Question, by Denny O'Neil and Denys Cowan.
O'Neil used a lot of Eastern philosophy in his dialogue and plots, which was fairly interesting as a counterpoint to the Rand and Heinlein and so forth I was reading as a teen.
Of all the interesting thoughts and quotes that came out of it, the one that has stuck with me for decades is from the finale of a three-part crossover with Green Arrow and Batman, titled "Fables". (For an extensive exploration of that story, with scans of many panels, visit that link.)
Skipping the very very long setup, the line I come back to is spoken across a stormy ocean from a dying sensei to the main character Vic Sage (who is still immature, quick to anger and so forth).
The world was roaring around me...the wind shrieking, the water pounding and hissing.
I can't be sure I heard the old man's voice... I don't know if he really said it...
—The Question, Annual #1, "Fables Part III" by O'Neil, Cowan & Magyar, 1988"I was once like you.
If you live, you will change."
it's a versatile idea, approachable from several angles:
If you live, you will change. If you continue to live, you will continue to change.
The only way you will stop changing is to stop living. You are never a "finished" person until you have no more breaths.
Assuming that you will change, that more changes are coming: will you deliberately attempt to become better, or inattentively change to become more calcified, more rigid, more of the same?
I come back to this whenever I get pushed out of my comfort zone, or when I have clearly made a bad mistake.
It's an egotistical thing to think that my behavior is as good as it really ought to be in all ways, in all situations. I can improve, and frankly as an adult human I should be capable of improving. And one's friends and spouse can give you a nudge at times by helpfully pointing out when, e.g., you have been a real ass. And it's helpful to see that as guidance for your future changes.
A discussion of 'change' would not be complete without the other thing that reliably leaps to mind any time it comes up:
]]>Benjamin: How would you feel about making a change?
Garth Algar: We fear change. <hits nearby machine with hammer repeatedly>
—Wayne's World, 1992 (clip)
Lessons I am trying to learn again, or for the first time:
It is better to publish things on your own site than on Twitter or Facebook.
You can control it, and it can't just go away without warning. Those sites are fine for mentioning posts and for getting feedback though.
Waiting for polished writing means waiting forever.
As evidenced by my very very sparse blog output over the last several years, I am a bit fussy about what I publish here—too fussy. These days, I think I will be happy enough to have some output of just-publishable quality instead of little-to-no output of quality I feel proud of.
It's okay to have an idea cross multiple posts.
I get stuck wanting to compile everything I have to say about a thing into one comprehensive master post, and that just leads to never ever finishing.
So I'll stop here. More to come.
]]>Out with 2013, bring on 2014. A few select goals I have in mind:
After many years of relative quiet in public (mostly existing as a twitter feed), I would like to plan for 2014's underlying nature to be this:
Ever said this, exasperatedly? "It's the twenty-first century!" "It's 2012!"
These are the things that people I know say when faced with a problem that seems like it should have been solved long ago.
Or, more soberly:
So it's usually said with a negative affect.
Why aren't we further along than this? <negative>It's 2012</negative>.
But there was just an election. And some things which have seemed overdue (or downright futuristic) have actually begun to happen.
Marijuana legalization was passed in Colorado and Washington. While I don't partake myself, I appreciate this move as possibly the beginning of a rational climb-down from the endlessly expensive/ineffective/violence-soaked War on Some Drugs.
18 women were elected to the US Senate (including the first disabled woman, first openly lesbian woman, first Asian-American woman..), bringing the number serving to 20.
Marriage was legalized for gay couples by voters in Maine & Maryland & Washington, and Minnesota voters declined to pass an anti-gay amendment.
Not to mention the first-ever black President earned re-election, by a pretty significant margin.
Look at that, gentle sentients.
<positive>It's 2012.</positive>
Then of course on December 14 there was the Newtown slaughter.
Not that there isn't always some horrible news out there if you look for it. But this one obviously stood out as both extra-horrible and potentially-preventable at the same time.
In its wake, I have been left philosophizing and analyzing and theorizing to myself even more than usual, and contemplating to the point of great distraction both the powerful inertia of everyday life and the sudden randomness of some fates.
I don't have an essay in me right now about how I tie all this together in my mind; instead I'll try to sum up one piece of it—
I read a lot of Isaac Asimov stories and essays when I was young. And he argued well for his outlook on humanity and the future, which has been labeled 'Humanist' or 'Secular Humanist'. Here's one summation from him I found:
As indicated by our very name, we humanists celebrate humanity, want humanity to survive, and recognize that if humanity does survive, it will be by its own efforts.
Never can we sit back and wait for miracles to save us. Miracles don't happen.
Sweat happens. Effort happens. Thought happens.
And it is up to us humanists to help—to expend our sweat, our effort and our thought. Then there will be hope for the world.
And since I—who am not on the front lines of any of today's conflicts—despair sometimes at the intractability of the problems we face and at our intransigence as a species in addressing all but the shortest-term issues, I find it helpful and important to look to those like Asimov and Carl Sagan—who saw far and were confronted very directly with obstacles and resistance—and remember that they could bring themselves to continue to put forth effort in the name of Humanity, day after day. Somehow.
Their example is useful when I feel defeated, as I have by Newtown and other events.
As a valediction for 2012 and an epigraph for 2013, I nominate this somewhat recent musical mashup of clips from Carl Sagan's Cosmos, with a special emphasis on this part of the chorus:
The sky calls to us
If we do not destroy ourselves
We will one day
Venture to the stars
If we do not destroy ourselves... by giving guns to as many people as possible and inviting ever more accidental gunshot deaths into our lives (even if you dubiously exclude the supposedly-deterrable intentional ones).
If we do not destroy ourselves... by biasing all our planning for the short term and leaving any real progress on longer-term threats (like a warmer planet) for much, much later.
If we do not destroy ourselves... we will one day venture to the stars.
Let us not destroy ourselves.
Happy 2013.
]]>And a Twitter list which follows these accounts:
I followed these accounts because they gave me a good balance between informative/timely on the one hand and not a bloody firehose of updates on the other. (That's why @barackobama was not included - too chatty.)
Suggestions for other qualifying feeds gratefully accepted.
]]>A presentation from Maciej Ceglowski about his Pinboard experience: The Business of Bookmarking (warning: PDF).
The most popular business model has been to offer a free service and then shut down.
(Ha.)
...while the [Pinboard] business is healthy and profitable, no angel investor or venture capitalist would touch it with a long stick, as it sits on the wrong side of the risk/reward curve. The combination of low startup costs and investor aversion means there are all kinds of opportunities lying around for a developer to run a profitable small business, provided he or she remembers to charge money.
...An archive needs to have a credible plan for offering the same basic feature set over a time scale of decades. Any major redesign risks spooking users who will perceive it as a sign of instability. And the last thing people want to hear is that you're swinging for the fences - real archivists bunt.
A good role model here is craigslist, which has endured sustained derision for its 'ancient' UI for years from a succession of more modern websites, nearly all of which are now out of business.
Related: A fellow named Tom Armitage created a workflow which automatically turns his Pinboard stream into books, by year.
Comic writer/artist Kate Beaton (of Hark! A Vagrant) dispenses a bunch of good advice for aspiring comic writers/artists in: A lil' Q and A, part one [tumblr]
My first comics were awful. Everyone's are. Some people are awful for a long time then stick with it and get good. But you have to know you can.
(You can.)
... The real wonder of the New Yorker is that anyone can submit cartoons, so technically, anyone has a chance of getting in. Can you say that about many other 'prestigious' publications? Not really.
Last Thanksgiving I found this carving video more valuable than all carving instructions and videos before it: Wegmans Turkey Carving Time Savers.
]]>I was lucky enough to score a front-row-center ticket to The Bobs (@bobsbestofbreed) performing at Wolf Trap this past weekend.
I didn't do anything special or illegal to get it -- I just checked the website when I was reminded of the concert by the Bobs' email newsletter, and lo and behold the seat I was presented with was the best seat in the house. I can only think someone who had the prime seats had to return them, or something strange like that. Thanks, unintentional anonymous benefactor!
Having scored an amazing ticket, I of course somehow misplaced it. Luckily the Wolf Trap Box Office person I spoke to on concert day was very helpful and printed a fresh ticket for me to pick up once I provided a blood sample and a confirmation number.
This was an unusual Bobs concert, in that it was a passing-the-torch moment: Amy Bob Engelhardt's last gig with the group and Angie Bob Doctor's second-ever Bobs concert.
Angie Bob and Dan Bob Schumacher have a CD of duets out, He Said, She Said which is just the two of them singing fascinating, complex arrangements (by Richard Bob Greene) which fill in just enough notes to feel like a song is 'all there'. This is hard to do in the best of circumstances, and even harder to reproduce reliably in a live setting. But the two of them performed a few of their tracks as the 'opening act' for the Bobs, and it was impressive.
Amy Bob was as good as ever in her farewell gig (i.e. very good). "Sandwich Man" was probably my favorite Amy song of the night.
Matthew Bob Stull has been with the group for all of its 30 years. I had the opportunity to find him after the show and tell him what I have always appreciated about his performances, namely his complete, matter-of-fact commitment to whatever profoundly goofy shit is happening on stage. (He laughed.) Having done some goofy shit on stage myself, I know how hard that can be, but he succeeds at it all the time without going over the top. If I have a challenging task to do on a stage, I will actually sometimes consider: How would Matthew Bob do this?
How was the new member? Angie Bob is clearly a very skilled singer, but in contrast to Matthew Bob's practiced ease with weird material, she seemed a bit tentative a good part of the time. This frankly isn't surprising: some of the material is truly, deeply odd, plus she's having to learn a deep catalog of songs for live performance and it's hard to ramp up quickly.
In hindsight I'm really glad I saw her duets with Dan Bob first, because she really shone there. That tells me she's not wrong for the job, she probably just needs a bit more time to settle in.
It's worth mentioning that each lady Bob who has been in the group has had a very different sensibility in terms of exactly what kind of odd songs they seem to enjoy singing, and often it's hard to imagine other lady Bobs really digging each others' stranger material. (Lori Bob Rivera's "Vapor Carioca" leaps to mind, and I'm not sure any other human can ever do justice to "Fluffy's Master Plan for World Domination" besides Amy Bob.)
All that to say: I'm looking forward to hearing Angie Bob do her own weird tracks on the next album.
Richard Bob's "Disappointment Pants" is one of my favorite tracks. They sing it noticeably faster live, which I think takes something away. Trivia: Last time I saw them (2008) they dedicated the song to Eliot Spitzer, which was perfect.
Cream's "White Room" is still a kickass closer, with Dan Bob doing most of the kicking.
Public service announcement: there are some still-fairly-new cover tunes available on bobs.com including Queen's "Bicycle Race" and "Synchronicity" by the Police. Worth a listen.
Fascinating reading if you work on software. Quoth Medley after reading it, "Now I need a cigarette..."
Found this linked a few places today, and if you care about interfaces and communicating complexity (like I do), then it's a fascinating read.
The toy example itself isn't important at all, but the approach is.
In sad news, Dennis Ritchie, inventor of C, has died. His death coming close to Steve Jobs' means that some people are already straining to weigh the contributions of the two against each other, as though it is a contest.
Really people, they can both be titans in their own way. It's OK.
]]>