Why This Blog?
Right now you are reading this blog. Your reasons are your own. My reasons for writing, however, effects us both, so I thought I’d lay them out here.
This has always been somewhat of an aimless blog. I started writing some slice-of-life essays, added some recipes, and throwing in some bits about computers. Because there was no focus, I never really new what to write about, and as such I posted rather infrequently. Most of what I wrote I found myself putting out on Twitter. I lacked the attention span for long form blogging. Meanwhile, I never saw much traffic because who was the target audience, anyway?
But now I’ve got a new project, and as such the focus of Nothing Was Delivered is going to change some. If you’ve followed me before, I hope you’ll find the new content interesting. If you found your way here because of the is new content, I hope you enjoy it, and please check out the back catalog, so to speak.
Here’s the deal. I’ve gotten bored lately. I had a band, which fell apart. I thought about starting a new one, or striking out on my own, but haven’t felt inspired. I’ll leave the details for a separate post, but ultimately that was something I had done, and I wanted a new challenge.
So a while ago I started poking around with programming. Like many Americans, I sit in front of a computer most of the day, and when I’m on the go I have my iPhone with me. The power and flexibility of these devices constantly amazes me, but I realized I had no idea how they worked, at a basic level. We all know that computers see 1’s and 0’s, but how the hell does that translate to all the things that go on on these screens?
In particular, I was interested in Apple’s ecosystem. I started reading Apple rumor sites, which lead to technical descriptions that I couldn’t make heads or tails of. I also stumbled on some Apple centric podcasts, which lead to others that were less fan sites and more developer focused. I would sit through the technical bits of shows like Hypercritical so that I could get to the more general discussions of Mac OS X or iOS. Eventually, I started to pick up some of the low-level lingo, or I would Google some phrases, and eventually these parts didn’t seem so scary. I found the book Code, by Charles Petzold, which gave a good fundamental explanation about what was going on inside these machines. I started to see technology as a puzzle that I could figure out, given time.
Now I have a project that I want to work on (more on that another time), and wanted to document it. This is mostly for my benefit, as I’m pretty much teaching myself as I go along. I have no formal training, though I’ve bought some books and completed some tutorials online. I figured if I had a place to think through these problems out loud as I come to them, they would be easier to work out.
I also thought I could offer a bit of a different perspective from many of the tech and Apple centric blogs. Sure, I’m as much of a white dude in his thirties as most of the other writers in this sphere, but I’m coming to this as someone that has very little idea about how this technology works. There are many wonderful writers that are very knowledgable about Apple’s past and present, and therefor able to give insightful context the changes this industry is seeing. I wanted to approach this as someone who has never been to a WWDC, hasn’t witnessed the evolution of Apple’s APIs over the last several decades, and in fact just learned what an API was recently (in layman’s terms, my understanding is that it is short a series of code snippets that an operating system creator or platform vendor gives that allows other developers access to more complicated technologies e.g. GPS APIs on a smart phone that let apps get your location without writing everything from scratch).
So that’s the new focus. There will still be more general purpose writing. In fact, I hope that by getting in the habit of writing more, I’ll be even more likely to turn to blogging to get out whatever I have on my mind. I do think that the food posts are going away. I actually intend to spin those off into a separate blog at some point.
I’m rather excited about having a new direction. Here’s hoping that this blog will keep me honest.
Through The Past… Darkly
Every once in a while Keith Richards likes to remind the world that he’s more than just a pretty face. Earlier this week he appeared in a video, along a dozen or so other musicians, with a medley of his own “Words Of Wonder” mixed with the Bob Marley/Peter Tosh classic “Get Up, Stand Up”. This was exciting mostly because it’s just fun to see Keith play anything other than the standard Stones set list at this point.
If you’re not familiar with “Words Of Wonder” it’s from Main Offender, Keith’s most recent(to date) solo album. Go ahead and listen to it. I’ll wait.
“Words Of Wonder” is probably the most interesting song any of the Stones have done, separately or together, in over 20 years. The track is builds slowly from a spare, empty beat. At first there is nothing but snare and high hat and a big, open tom. The guitar comes in to provide a bit more life, and then bass as an accent. Keith alternates between whisper and chant. It’s not really a reggae track, it’s more like proto-reggae. It’s primal. There are hints of dub as the instruments slowly build a wall not of sound but of rhythm. At the end it drops any pretense of being a love song. Giving chants and praises. Low friends in high places someone intones.
What’s interesting to me is that you can hear in this song a thread that the Stones nearly picked up. Listening to this one track, you can imagine the later day Rolling Stones sounding very different. Instead of settling down into comfortable blues-rock, the band could have taken the blues back to their foundations.
There were hints of this going at least as far back as Undercover or even, arguably, Beggars Banquet. When the Stones reconvened to make Steel Wheels, they brought in the master musicians of Jajouka for “Continental Drift”. That was light years from the souped up funk of “Shattered”.
After Main Offender, the Stones made Voodoo Lounge, of which Mick said:
It’s very much a kind of time-and-place album. In that way I was quite pleased with the results. But there were a lot of things that we wrote for “Voodoo Lounge” that Don [Was, the record’s producer] steered us away from: groove songs, African influences and things like that. And he steered us very clear of all that. And I think it was a mistake.
…
I think it was an opportunity missed to go in another direction, which would have been more unusual, a little more radical, although it’s always going to sound like the Rolling Stones.
In the end, I think you could say Keith gave us a feint in that direction with “Thru and Thru”, but mostly Voodoo Lounge was, well, a Stones album.
During the 90’s the Stones toured, and they played “Honkey Tonk Women” more times than you could count. When he had some time off, though, Keith visited Jamacia and produced a group of local Rasta musicians (chanters, really) calling themselves the Wingless Angels. He was clearly fascinated by this sort of primordial, pre-blues music. In 1997, he was quoted as saying “[t]here’s only one song, and Adam and Eve wrote it; the rest is a variation on a theme.”
The Rolling Stones have been pretty quiet in the 21st century. To date they’ve only released one studio album, 2005’s A Bigger Bang. It mostly plays with the Stones time-tested riff-rock(though in a much more convincing way than most of Voodoo Lounge). Still, there are some hints of what could have been.
To me, the most compelling song on A Bigger Bang was “Laugh, I Nearly Died. The song focuses on mood and atmosphere. When the instruments drop out at the end, the song ends with nothing but voices and foot stomps. Back where it all began.
Freedom From
While I am rarely at my best beyond 140 characters, I thought I’d expand on some thoughts I tried to put together on Twitter earlier (you can read the original thread here. The discussion was about the importance of liberty, but I didn’t feel I was ever able to engage the topic. Before we could argue value of liberty, we had to agree on what it meant. That turns out to be surprisingly difficult in the space of a tweet.
It’s a slippery word. Like “freedom”, “liberty” is a noun. It is something you have. But while you have freedom to act a certain way, what do you do with liberty? You can be at liberty, but that makes it sound like a ballpark, a place you can visit but never reside.
So is liberty different from freedom? If so, in what way? For one thing, you can have freedom from as much as you can have freedom to. This is where conflicts arise. My freedom to can interfere with your freedom from. That’s the great challenge of a pluralistic society; how can we live free of hate, violence, even crippling poverty, while still allowing for the fact that sometimes people are not always going to get along? Liberty is constrained not just by oppressive government laws, but by inadequate school systems in black neighborhoods, by science and engineering programs that cater to young boys at their female classmates exclusion, by companies who sue the government for the right avoid paying for their own employee’s reproductive healthcare.
Clearly we’re not going to resolve that over Twitter. And that’s what I was getting at. Maximizing liberty means taking all of our freedoms into account, and making sure everyone’s voice is heard. It’s a hugely difficult balancing act, and it means that liberty and democracy really two sides of the same coin.
A few thoughts on Lou Reed
Most everyone has a personal story of when we first got Lou Reed or the Velvets. I came to the party late. Throughout college the only Lou I knew was Transformer. I had that CD in constant rotation in my car (along with Exile On Main Street and L.A.M.F.). Transformer is a glorious rock and roll album, but I don’t think I really understood what Uncle Lou was up to until just after college, when one day I walked out of Vintage Vinyl with the Velvet Underground box set.
I didn’t listen to it right away. I remember ending up in south Jersey one night with a couple friends of mine, for no reason other than it was a hours drive away from all our usual haunts. We were parked next to a Church’s Chicken, having just eaten the worst fried okra imaginable. We had all heard the stories. Lou and Andy and John and Nico and the Factory. So we put on disk 2 and played it. Loud.
It wasn’t the raucous punk rock album we were expecting. It was at times melancholy, violent, and desperate. No doubt the effect has dulled a bit by the decades of imitation. But clearly the album was something special. Then we got to disk 2, and the White Light/White Heat sessions. It was too much to process in one night.
Lou Reed got a lot of milage out if being Lou Reed. When you’re the guy who invents cool, you can do albums of tai-chi background music and pretty much get a pass. But now that he’s passed away, we’re left with some crazy stories and a truly remarkable and expansive body of work. If the is one sentiment that sums up his oeuvre, it would be okay, you did that. Now try something else. No looking back.
My Friend Matt
My friend Matt had a huge heart. He was a light-up-the-room-with-a-smile type of guy. Excited and excitable, he brought with him a boundless energy. Without a doubt, he represented the best of our impulses.
The one constant about Matt was motion. There world was too big for him to sit still. After high school, Matt joined the Army to see the world and maybe, in some way, make a difference. So he went to Iraq. We never talked about it much, but when they called, he went back. When he was stateside, you could tell that south Jersey couldn’t quite hold his attention any more. But even when he left, he never left his friends behind.
One thing about Matt was that he never saw a problem as unsolvable. So when, while studying at Rutgers, he saw the trouble other vets were having getting access to college financing, he signed up with a service to help them, and he threw himself into it.
My friend Matt passed away a few days ago, on the morning of his 32nd birthday. The night before, he went to his friends and asked them to donate to his cause, the Rutgers Veterans Emergency Scholarship. Since his passing, his friends and family have been very generous, and we have hit his modest goal of $2500. But we can do more.
This is good cause. The organization provides much needed assistance to soldiers who have just returned from a traumatic ordeal and are trying to pull their lives together. I hope that you will find possible to donate. Every little bit helps.
Please find it in yourself to give a little something. Make a little difference. It’s what Matt would have done.
The Devil’s Right Hand
The world needs more and better rhythm guitarists.
If you’ll allow me to get all curmudgeonly on you, I will tell you what’s wrong with music today. On most radio hits, synths and drum machines have taken over most the rhythm duties. Where there is guitar, it lacks personality. Somewhere along the line, we as a society stopped valuing great rhythm guitar work, and we are clearly worse off for it.
One of the unfortunate hallmarks of modern production is a sanding down of the rhythm. Every beat is put into place digitally. A song’s chording is run through compressors and digital overdrive to give it a focused, buzz-saw tone. It’s placement against the bass and drums is deemphasized. We allow our songs to be driven by click-tracks rather than allow it to flow organically from the musicians. It’s clear that this style has lead to the increasing homogeny of the last 15 or so years of American popular music.
If I could give one bit of advice to aspiring guitar players out there, it would be work on your right hand. This is the hand from which the rhythm flows. It can lead the band, controlling the tempo, providing accents and character to the song. Your right hand provides propulsion and defines the beat. And too many guitar players today treat it as an afterthought.
I’d like to live in a world where learning guitar meant spending as much time practicing a Bo Diddley riff as learning scales. Where we recognize that rhythm is the soul of a song. Where you can tune your radio to damn near any station and dance.
Brisket-Infused Bourbon Is Now A Thing
Thankfully, Austin’s CU-29 opens at 4p, and they’ll be infusing six-liter batches of a mystery bourbon with two pounds of Franklin’s moist for over a month before freezing it, removing the fat, and straining it into what must be the happiest jug in the world.
Goodness knows that BBQ and bourbon whiskey go well together. I, personally, would not have tried serving them in the same glass.
And The Cycle Will Continue
I am heartbroken at the news that George Zimmerman was acquitted late last night in the murder of Trayvon Martin. I am not a lawyer. I did not follow the ins and outs of the case. But it seems to me as though something is seriously wrong when you find no consequences for shooting an unarmed young boy. The system is showing a deep, destructive rot.
America has shown that we put little thought into the lives of those at the margins. Wearing a certain kind of sweatshirt is now suspicious behavior. Worse, it can be a death sentence.
It didn’t have to be this way. That jury, like so many before, chose to send a message that the fault here lie with the victim. If only he had looked more presentable. If only he had been in his part of town. Maybe he wouldn’t have gotten himself shot. I weep for his family, and for the family of all future Trayvons, who will find out the hard way just where they stand in America today.
What’s in Prince’s Fridge?
”This stuff is TOO AMAZING. It clarifies your skin and your mind. It is given freely by the yak, so U can truly enjoy it. Great with Chex – Rice Chex, Wheat Chex, whatever!!!”
If, like me, you have always wondered what was in Prince’s fridge, finally it is revealed.
Nothing Was Delivered 