I love this colorful installation of felt pieces by Masako Miki. I would love to learn how to felt things; I’d like to understand how to exert a little control over the magic that goes on between the initial construction and the felted product.

I’m catching up with reading I’ve socked away over the last month, and this from Laura Kalbag on personal websites was very good.

Back on Belgium time with most of the workday ahead of me before I expect to hear from U.S. collaborators. The best.

The redesign/reboot of the Public Domain Review that I’ve been working on is finally online.

In the final week of a project I’ve been working on all summer and fall. Looking forward to being able to talk about it.

20 years of late-20th century contemporary music journal Contact archived by Goldsmiths, University of London

_The Public Domain Review_’s Selected Essays Volume VI is available for order today.

Bless the nerd who put this list of Dutch-language Smurfs DVDs and their episode titles on Wikipedia.

I have the Berlin/Kantstraße issue of Flaneur, but haven’t kept up with it. This new Taipei issue looks like it has some amazing colors and typography.

Columbus Marathon starting area

🎵 Quality time with the PayPal Subscriptions API and the Friends of Dean Martinez cover of “Wichita Lineman”

This episode of Upgrade with James Thomson is interesting throughout, but particularly enjoyed the final third or so where a history of DragThing provided lots of 90s Mac shareware development nostalgia (ColdWarrior, Kagi, etc.)

So stoked on Kipchoge’s sub-2-hour marathon yesterday in Vienna. Seems like it must be only a matter of time now that one will happen in proper race conditions. www.nytimes.com/2019/10/1…

When trying out a Chromebook a few years ago, I remember being impressed by the Markdown editor Caret, but more as a parlor trick than a reliable tool. Revisiting it at version 4.0, and it has come a very long way.

I miss Phinery tapes. Always simple, beautiful packaging. Writing documentation and listening to this 2017 Vales release.

Pre-sunrise, post-rain frog song coming in through the window over the heavy drones from this Luciernaga/John Lindaman split from Oxtail Recordings.

Every time I revisit Ernest Haeckel’s natural illustrations I get into a different set of his palettes. This is my current favorite.

Cool use of double-paned glass: lettering on front pane with brushed backdrop on back pane creates depth effect.

I’m pretty happy with these updated presentations on our pieces connecting national touring bands to Austin and UT in the 1930s.

I’ll jump on anything about Sail Away or Good Old Boys, and this episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast gets into both. I am used to Gladwell answering his own questions emphatically. I think he thinks he answers his question here, if less emphatically. I’m not sure he does.

Glitch in VS Code is exciting. The online editor is impressive, but I‘ll be even more likely to use Glitch as a sandbox for experiments if I can use my normal tools.

Sunrise run in Savoy

Posted an interview with the late Alvin Fielder, a founding member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, about his time as a student at Texas Southern in 1950s Houston and the influence of R&B on jazz.

Juneteenth seems like a good time to link to these excerpts of Gene Ramey’s recollections of music performance in East Austin in the early twentieth century.

“The question we need to ask is not whether our data is safe, but why there is suddenly so much of it that needs protecting. The problem with the dragon, after all, is not its stockpile stewardship, but its appetite.”

https://idlewords.com/2019/06/the_new_wilderness.htm

We’ve published several updates and a couple of new essays to the Athens on the Colorado exhibit on Local Memory, our website on the history of music in Austin

The mid-year fundraiser for Public Domain Review ends Wednesday. Under 100 new supporters to reach the goal.

Rhein-Ruhr-Marathon starting line in Duisburg for my last European marathon for our year in Gent and fourth of four in two months.

At an early dinner on the Innenhafen and amazed at how little Duisburg has changed in the six years since we lived here.

The inclusion of tick repellent spray in my participant pack for the Rhein-Ruhr-Marathon is not comforting.

Woke up to the news that Roky Erickson had died. So much of my lifelong interest in seeking out challenging music can be traced back to memories of listening to Elevators records while doing the dishes with my dad as a kid.

1960s/1970s single-artwork or single-series spaces (e.g., Rothko Chapel) is probably my favorite architectural micro-genre. Tongerlo Abbey’s museum for their period Last Supper replica is very nice.

This episode of the Time to Eat the Dogs podcast on space science and the Arab world presented some interesting insights on the periodization of the history of science in the the Muslim world.

One of my surprise favorite tour nights was one of the dates we did with them at a tiny basement show under a Wendy’s in State College, PA and watching them play a super-extended ”Fields in Glass.”

Listening to the High Dials‘ War of the Wakening Phantoms (with opening banger “Holy Ground”) for the first time in a long time. Stoked they have something new coming out this summer.

I love this Paul Ford essay in WIRED on remaining enthusiastic about technology in its hegemonic phase (and still wish I’d asked to join tilde.club while I watched him spinning it up on Twitter).

Finally broke through a long plateau with a 5 minute improvement on my personal best. The right marathon for celebrating.

At the Moortgat Duvel brewery for the start of the Great Breweries Marathon.

Austin Abroad on the Clarence Nemir Orchestra, perhaps the first pop music band from Austin to tour globally.

Starting line at Antwerp marathon

I’ll be running through the 2km-long Waaslandtunnel in the Antwerp marathon tomorrow. It goes a long, long way down.

JSON data grooming is a little less grim from the Vooruit terrace on a springtime morning.

Good improvisation

Two good new-to-me Scarpulla murals in Dampoort. Really like the Resto collaboration on the submarine.

Good for Amy for bothering to say something about the Nike “Lost Cause” campaign and making something happen.

Stop what you’re doing, open the windows, and listen to Musik von Harmonia.

Very good houseboat scene here.

Settled into our city camping spot in Rotterdam for the marathon on Sunday.

Will‘s “Crazy Love” album from last year has me missing being in Austin.

In addition to being a GOAT track title candidate, “Jajouka Pipe Dream” is an exceptional spacey blend of synths, flutes, and percussion from Ghazi Barakat and Paul LeBrecque. The other side has more of LeBrecque‘s guitar, and is great as well.

I’m finally listening to the new Mdou Moctar and it has been well worth the wait. The vinyl is waiting for me when we get back to the States at the end of the summer.

I’m always trying to be too clever for a database.

Doing a “CD-Rs I was given while packing the trailer in college town parking lots between 2004-2007” listening session today. Clear winner is Art Lessing from Davis, CA with strong Jandek vibes.

Revisiting the Gorilla Vs. Bear Austin Mixtape from 2006. Good era.

The last time I spent a really silly amount of time wondering why a CSS rule wasn‘t being applied because I had forgotten I needed to interpolate my Sass variables inside of calc(), I wrote this blog post about it so I wouldn‘t forget again. Didn’t work.

Need to get back in a Python frame of mind. Spent 10 minutes starting to write a slap-dash CSV parser before it occurred to me to import csv…

Ordered a set of three Rabit screw tapes off Boomkat the other day. Listening to CRY ALONE DIE ALONE on Bandcamp while I wait. Great soundtrack for exploring 7500 row CSV files with Python.

Listening to “Our Love Will Change the World” and dwelling one more time on Matthew Smith‘s founding role in not one but two under-appreciated great bands in Outrageous Cherry and the Volebeats.

Natural Sciences Museum in Brussels

“Again, a less confusing solution would have been to just allow an extra argument to be passed to exec, but confusion is an essential feature of JavaScript’s regular expression interface.” From Marijn Haverbeke’s Eloquent JavaScript

The views are better when the run happens after the sun’s up.

Taking a break from work with a short walk in Patershol.

Spring has sprung.

This trilingual volume of Humboldt‘s specimen renderings and maps from Kronecker Wallis looks absolutely beautiful.

Sun rising behind Sint-Jacobskerk over Vrijdagmarkt

Working at De Krook on a snow day with Sint-Baafskathedral in the background.

On Thanksgiving Day in 1972, Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh joined Doug Sahm, Leon Russell, and members of the Elevators and Shiva‘s Headband at Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin. It was really great.

Collaborative mural by Bué the Warrior, ROA, and others on Kraankindersstraat

Messing around on Glitch with some generative color palettes and a riff on Tim Holman‘s Vera Molnar homage vera-memphis.glitch.me

Sunrise in the begijnhof

Vrijdagmarkt in the snow

This could be our only snow day of the winter, but it will be nice while it lasts.

Reading about mummies, looking out at the Zuivelbrug, and listening to the Dinzu Artefacts episode of the Norelco Mori podcast. One of my favorite labels of the last couple of years.

Writing an awful lot of stuff about mummies this morning given how little I really know about them…

My friend Michael and I have been working on Local Memory: A History of Music in Austin for a couple years now. Work is ongoing, but today we made it public.

Yacht harbor sculpture on a lunchtime walk

A day behind our projected soft launch date and still deep in that last 90% of tasks that shows up after you’ve done the first 90%.