moon traveller herald

Greatest family friend Dorothy Little passed away last week. When Mrs. Little and Dr. Little had a celebration in 1999, they asked friends to contribute reminiscences. Which I did. And append here. Thinking back, I guess my parents met the Littles due to the good grace of Grandma Maude Little. We lived a few doors down from her on Augusta Street -- we were new to Racine having come from Boston to work for Johnson’s. I was too young to know but I think Dorothy and Bill and Mary and Bill were just coming then to Racine having gotten out of the service. Maude thought that Dorothy and my mother Mary would find friendship together and this was exceptionally astute and true. So ensued many years of wonderful friendship much due to Dorothy's bigness of heart. If my mother was on the phone in tears with laughter I knew she was talking to Mrs. Little. All the holidays -- Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas as I recall -- we had together. Billy and I would be out quickly after dinner (t...

TSS.COM editor Joseph Ottinger has posted a summary of Marty Andrews' reflection on defining software architecture roles. There are architects and there are architects. And then, one might add, there are architects. read more  |  digg story

“The Search” by John Battelle is a casual and mostly entertaining walk through the last 10 or so years of digital search, mostly but not entirely centered around the phenomenon of Google. Search technology as contrived today is the act of continually applying better and better algorithms as new patterns are unearthed in the large body of data that is the Web. The first result is a several-billion-dollar advertising business that flattened print and brand advertising. As the algorithms are still young, there is still room for Search to grow. It is even, notes Battelle, reshaping our “cultural grammar.” Disembodied terms. We search to find information, to locate things to buy, to find a shorter route to what we knows exist, but also, he chides in an aside, to secure our immortality. We search for what we know exists, and we search to discover what we have a feeling may exist. Battelle mentions Melvil Dewey, of the dreary Dewey Decimal System. But he assigns mathematician Gerald Salton – ...

Well this week is another Dylan week, no question. Gordon Thomas - the man who not only played keyboards at my wedding but also took the photos as well -- pulled our coat to a New York Times story that uncovers the half suspected story of grafting done on Modern Times. We went through this with the Yazuka book and Love and Theft too.. Gordon Writes ... On Modern Times, Dylan sings: More frailer than flowers, these precious hours/That keep us so tightly bound On hearing these lines, I thought, well, that’s like something from an old poem, isn’t it, and, now, this just in from the NYTimes (9/14/06): Dylan’s lines are from an old poem. More precisely from Henry Timrod’s Rhapsody of a Southern Winter Night: A round of precious hours/Oh! here, where in that summer noon I basked/And strove, with logic frailer than the flowers No big surprise, not after hearing of the borrowings, on Love & Theft, from an obscure, but recent and copyrighted, Japanese book on the Yakuza culture. Timrod d...

Times change and don’t change. So Dylan wrote in notes from his sole Egyptian Records release, a 1996 tribute to Jimmie Rodgers. That notion, that things change but don’t change, has been central to the set of records he began with Time Out of Mind [1997], continued with Love and Theft [2001], and adds to now with Modern Times. As we out here in radioland tend to think of things as trilogies, it is now a trilogy. All and all, it’s been a grand return to form for Dylan. Modern Times stands with the previous two sessions like a Black Panther trackster at the Olympics - head down and fist up, getting a medal while the National Anthem plays. Maybe with an eye on the exit. The return to form is triadic. Modern Times? Who knows? Maybe that’s the key. Have you noticed that what was pre-modern is now post-modern? But what about that Modern?! There is a rich sound here – and hell if it and its immediate antecedents aint likable to the rebirthed art Chaplin offered the world in his few sparse t...

Some songs over their histories paint a real picture of a developed style. Hey Joe, Tip Toe Through the Tulips, White Christmas, My Way, The Train Kept a Rolling .. come to mind. Elements are abstracted; what I mean to say is new portions of the former gain prominence. Recently heard this to effect in a side-by-side playing of the original Real Wild Child by Johnny O’Keefe, which I’d never heard before – kind of a Eddie Cochrane-like band-orientedpure full-push 50s rocknroll rendition, hard to describe actually – and Jerry Allison AKA Ivan’s version. [There is also Iggy Pop’s ‘80s [?] version, which has a Devo or Ramone’s kind of incessant drone [but power chords and an almost disco beat], and Iggy’s droll delivery. That would fill out the evolution as far as I know.] So I had to find out when Ivan’s version came from. It seems as if it could be from the Bubble Gum era, which, in my opinion, was a style that harkened back to rocknroll [albeit for youngsters] at a time when ‘rock’ was g...

A DVD documentary on Film Noir I watched over the Labor Day Weekend informed that the genre is defined by deep shadows; strong angles; a wedding of style and content; a visualization of non harmonic space; stylized (angled) views of abstract concepts; presence of femme fatale; a mythic way of dealing with music as another character; music that evokes rain, dark, fear, lonely, ticking clock; flashback dreamy structure, laconic voice overs, peculiar narrative devices. The only area of contention I found as I viewed this: That the hero must be drawn into the evil. That would make Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past a film noir hero [which he is] but not Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon. The Film Noir commentators included some sick puppies. I don’t think even the French who came up with the term Film Noir meant it to be more than a depiction of color scheme .. in any case, I don’t think they would stipulate that the hero has to be a loser.