Fickle Ears

On December 31, 2009 I was living in the Central Time Zone, which means that this post from Way Out West comes as I enjoy a two hour bonus t...

Sports have never been more fully integrated with the wider entertainment industry than they are right now, and neither have I, but I find, ...

I’m someone who needs deadlines, and who for that reason finds the moment itself painful and anti-climactic. I feel acutely the truism that,...

Just like music, what started as an activity became an obsession. When I first started playing Scrabble online, I set the racks to display...

"Each art has its technical side...what would often be, were it not for the ultimate end of the process, sheer monotony and drudgery. B...

"In some sense, man must forgo his purely personal preference and submit to the machine before he can achieve good results in the limit...

"...this recognition of the human importance of technics was indeed one of the radical discoveries of modern times...[Bacon] proposed t...

"We ordinarily use the word technology to describe both the field of the practical arts and the systematic study of their operations an...

If the acronym STEM once found merely prosaic use, it now by its mere existence and invocation encapsulates quite neatly the territory which...

"Order of any kind gives man a sense of security: it is the changeful, the unexpected, the capricious, in other words the unpredictable...

Since I first posted a recipe here, I've made peace with cheese, re-upped on eggs, and scheduled meat once every other week, but there a...

"...until recently we have taken for granted that, since we ourselves live in a Machine Age and boast of that fact, every other age was...

"What my friend Matthew Nowicki used to say about architecture--that a great client was essential in the production of a great building...

"Our power and knowledge, our scientific discoveries and our technical achievements, have all been running wild because Western man tur...

I have done three posts worth of blog work today, but nothing is quite ready to serve just yet. This is one consequence of using other write...

The workers who have been repairing the house next door to my apartment building were either absent or silent this morning, offering the hop...

...that the development of art historically has its parallel in the development of the individual, and that human infants exhibit, without e...

In rock music, the important thing about a harmonica solo is that it is played on the harmonica. In a cavernous retail space, where everythi...

...the very growth of mechanical facilities has given people a false ideal of technical perfectionism, so that unless they can compete with ...

If you're from the future and you're reading this blog from start to finish, it probably comes as a surprise that this weekend bring...

"In this and similar incidents, I have concluded that actions unintentionally performed are bound to be a source of misunderstanding in...

From Kyle Gann, Except That Like much of my music, the piece doesn’t wear its strangeness on the surface. On the surface are the normal el...

I remember an evening sometime in my early twenties, at band practice (not rehearsal) with a group of mostly much older people, when I said ...

When Whole Foods became Whole Paycheck, we could at least rationalize this by reciting the old adage, "You get what you pay for." ...

The portion of LA Metro's Red Line between Hollywood/Highland and Universal City frequently becomes a stage for pop-up dance performers....

Three and a half centuries ago Francis Bacon hailed the advancement of scientific learning and mechanical invention as the surest means of r...

When differences of political opinion arise from differences in either (a) basic underlying facts, or (b) bedrock ethical principles, there ...

One of the lengthier and more in-depth chapters of Anthony Haden-Guests's 1973 book The Paradise Program is about the Muzak company. Am...

Consent is a hot, fraught topic. One particular application of the concept tends to command most of the attention, trailed at a distance by ...

The question of gaining access to art for those who don't have it is much discussed. This series considers one species of the obverse sc...