I can't remember an invention with as near universal appeal as YouTube. Just about everyone can find something to adore about it.
Nobody goes around dissing youtube. None of the hipster-or-homeless crowd that populates vast swaths of this city. None of the right wing circus freak sideshow that's taken over our country again (this week). None of the granola patchouli stink hippies. Nobody.
Everyone loves it. Not One Nation Under God. Not One Nation under YouTube. One World Under YouTube.
I love it especially for music. It seems like every week there is something better. Middle school choirs singing Bjork? Check. Unholy covers? Check. DJs with too much time on their hands? Oh hell yeah. Indie superstars on kids shows? I think we can do that. Doc Watson playing a Chet Atkins tune on a Henderson guitar Check -- maybe my favorite video ever.
Today's time waster, in between writing 20 odd notes for 2 busy inpatient services (14 hr days on weekends aren't that fun, especially if you are doing the 14 hr days on weekdays too) is Boing Boing's feature Adventures in Music. This guestblogger, Stephen Worth, head of the ASIFA Animation Archive, has put up some truly incredible clips of old music on YouTube. I haven't watched all of it yet, but what I have watched is mind blowing. Mind blowing.
His "big finale" today was a big finale indeed. It's 10:51. Watch it all. You'll be a better person for it: Cab Calloway, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Lena Horne, and oh-my-word the Nicholas brothers. If you're not interested in being a better person, watch from about 5:30 in. You'll miss most of Bill Robinson and Lena Horne but you'll catch Cab skatting like nobody's business and nobody should miss the Nicholas brothers.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Travel day
Back to the grindstone tomorrow.
Airport screening was very concerned over my EKG calipers, which prompted a hand search of my bag. I had forgotten them in my work bag in the pen holder. They, apparently, are not a TSA forbidden item to I was allowed to keep them.
Other than that, despite it being the end of the Christmas weekend and in the era of idiot Nigerians burning their balls off with fireworks becoming an international incident requiring direct blame to the administration, I got through airport security in no time and am sitting at the gate. Cheers to Boingo and Google teaming up to give us free wifi for the holidays!
Hopefully the flight will be devoid of M-80s and Roman Candles both.
Airport screening was very concerned over my EKG calipers, which prompted a hand search of my bag. I had forgotten them in my work bag in the pen holder. They, apparently, are not a TSA forbidden item to I was allowed to keep them.
Other than that, despite it being the end of the Christmas weekend and in the era of idiot Nigerians burning their balls off with fireworks becoming an international incident requiring direct blame to the administration, I got through airport security in no time and am sitting at the gate. Cheers to Boingo and Google teaming up to give us free wifi for the holidays!
Hopefully the flight will be devoid of M-80s and Roman Candles both.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Co-inky-dink
They have told me to start posting again. It's been a month and a half. I got out of practice while on my busiest month, consults at the Big Hospital. And then I was an ICU fellow for the first time. That rotation, at the VA, wasn't so bad but it was 1.5 hr commute each way. So it wasn't like I was up to thinking about something witty. Now I'm on an easy-ish rotation with a shorter commute (although today I may have set a record for business -- 7 new consults and 2 outpatients!). So here's to hoping.
We are having a ton of fun here, doing little trips every weekend that I'm off. Point Bonita (windy, beautiful), Point Reyes (windy, beautiful), Mount Diablo (windy, beautiful). I didn't want to rub it in.
Anyway, to ease back into the swing of things, here's a little co-inky-dink for you. I take the shuttle from the General to the 16th Street BART station, at 16th and Mission. And I was listening to All Songs Considered on podcast. As I stepped out of the shuttle, this song came on. Valencia is a block west of Mission.
This version of the song is much worse than thealbum version, which is almost listenable. This version is not. And Devendra Banhart has never really floated my boat. There's about 5 other freak-folk people I prefer over him (Sufjan Stevens, Animal Collective, Iron & Wine, Panda Bear, Cocorosie just off the top of my head). But here's to him and Bob Boilen for messing with my mind.
And speaking of music videos that mess with my head, here's another one from the same All Songs Considered that is exactly my dream from last week.
We are having a ton of fun here, doing little trips every weekend that I'm off. Point Bonita (windy, beautiful), Point Reyes (windy, beautiful), Mount Diablo (windy, beautiful). I didn't want to rub it in.
Anyway, to ease back into the swing of things, here's a little co-inky-dink for you. I take the shuttle from the General to the 16th Street BART station, at 16th and Mission. And I was listening to All Songs Considered on podcast. As I stepped out of the shuttle, this song came on. Valencia is a block west of Mission.
This version of the song is much worse than the
And speaking of music videos that mess with my head, here's another one from the same All Songs Considered that is exactly my dream from last week.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
San Franciscans, a funny lot
I do like living here a lot. The main academic hospital in the city doesn't have air conditioning. People wear winter coats in July. And I know it comes as a shock, but people here have foibles.
- One day of rain is the end of the earth. A few hours of legitimately hard rain (2.76 inches of rain in a day, which actually was twice the usual rainfall for October) led to widespread civic dysfunction. It was all anybody could talk about. I'll give them that -- talking about fog vs no fog is the only outlet for the natural human tendency to talk about the weather. I guess cities deal with different things. It would have been the equivalent of 15 inches of rain in Houston, but Houston shuts down with 1/8" of ice or snow. And Baltimore, god love it, gets 10 inches of rain and snow and ice and can also deal with neither.
- Putting a barely noticeable S-curve in a bridge leads to 50% delay in traffic and frequent wrecks which can shut down the city for close to 6 hours.
- People are very, very proud of their commute, their dogs, and their marijuana smoking.
- The most aggressive people on the road are the pedestrians, followed by the bicyclists. A pedestrian will think nothing of standing in front of a MUNI light rail train and yell at the driver.
- Fire engine red hair, chunky glasses, a lip ring, and a low cut t-shirt to show off shoulder and back tattoos is appropriate work attire for health care professionals and exotic dancers alike, where it would be for neither anywhere else in the world.
- One day of rain is the end of the earth. A few hours of legitimately hard rain (2.76 inches of rain in a day, which actually was twice the usual rainfall for October) led to widespread civic dysfunction. It was all anybody could talk about. I'll give them that -- talking about fog vs no fog is the only outlet for the natural human tendency to talk about the weather. I guess cities deal with different things. It would have been the equivalent of 15 inches of rain in Houston, but Houston shuts down with 1/8" of ice or snow. And Baltimore, god love it, gets 10 inches of rain and snow and ice and can also deal with neither.
- Putting a barely noticeable S-curve in a bridge leads to 50% delay in traffic and frequent wrecks which can shut down the city for close to 6 hours.
- People are very, very proud of their commute, their dogs, and their marijuana smoking.
- The most aggressive people on the road are the pedestrians, followed by the bicyclists. A pedestrian will think nothing of standing in front of a MUNI light rail train and yell at the driver.
- Fire engine red hair, chunky glasses, a lip ring, and a low cut t-shirt to show off shoulder and back tattoos is appropriate work attire for health care professionals and exotic dancers alike, where it would be for neither anywhere else in the world.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Study music
I figured I'd listen to some classical music for a change, as I'm trying to put together a presentation for tomorrow.
Glenn Gould's 1955 recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations came up in my classical playlist. During my breaks, I've watched some of the videos of him as he is a genius and a nut. He had many famous idiosyncrasies -- he would only play sitting on a chair his father made. He sat almost under the keyboard, hunched over in a pose bound to give any piano teacher fits. The piano had to be a certain height off the ground. He liked the room hot during recording. He hummed and swayed along with the music. He made bizarre demands out of fellow performers. There is a famous story about a concerto he played with Bernstein. Bernstein apologized to the audience beforehand because Gould insisted that the first movement be played at half speed.
But his playing was impeccable. Especially when it came to Bach. With some Google-fu, you can find a 47 minute video on Google Videos of him playing the Goldberg Variations, complete with humming, swaying, and ridiculous left hand runs.
Here's something shorter. One of the coolest stories in all of music, if only it were true:
This is the last 2.5 minutes of Contrapunctus XIV, the last fugue from Bach's monumental "Art of Fugue." It was written at the end of his life as his vision was failing. Bach introduces a new theme here -- B flat-A-C-B, or in German musical nomenclature B-A-C-H. That's the four slow notes Gould plays at the beginning of the clip. He then starts to develop a fugue around this theme. A few minutes later, in measure 239, the score abruptly ends. There is a note there from JS Bach's son CPE Bach indicating that at this point, the conductor died.
This story has been widely circulated, including in Hofstadter's book "Gödel, Escher, Bach." Unfortunately, like most things in life, the truth isn't as simple. Bach probably wrote lots of stuff after this, including the ridiculously good Mass in B Minor. It does, however, make an awesome story.
Glenn Gould's 1955 recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations came up in my classical playlist. During my breaks, I've watched some of the videos of him as he is a genius and a nut. He had many famous idiosyncrasies -- he would only play sitting on a chair his father made. He sat almost under the keyboard, hunched over in a pose bound to give any piano teacher fits. The piano had to be a certain height off the ground. He liked the room hot during recording. He hummed and swayed along with the music. He made bizarre demands out of fellow performers. There is a famous story about a concerto he played with Bernstein. Bernstein apologized to the audience beforehand because Gould insisted that the first movement be played at half speed.
But his playing was impeccable. Especially when it came to Bach. With some Google-fu, you can find a 47 minute video on Google Videos of him playing the Goldberg Variations, complete with humming, swaying, and ridiculous left hand runs.
Here's something shorter. One of the coolest stories in all of music, if only it were true:
This is the last 2.5 minutes of Contrapunctus XIV, the last fugue from Bach's monumental "Art of Fugue." It was written at the end of his life as his vision was failing. Bach introduces a new theme here -- B flat-A-C-B, or in German musical nomenclature B-A-C-H. That's the four slow notes Gould plays at the beginning of the clip. He then starts to develop a fugue around this theme. A few minutes later, in measure 239, the score abruptly ends. There is a note there from JS Bach's son CPE Bach indicating that at this point, the conductor died.
This story has been widely circulated, including in Hofstadter's book "Gödel, Escher, Bach." Unfortunately, like most things in life, the truth isn't as simple. Bach probably wrote lots of stuff after this, including the ridiculously good Mass in B Minor. It does, however, make an awesome story.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Tsunami watch
Tsunami Watch!
Tsunami Watch!
In other news, I've become a mass consumer of media. The two hours on the BART have done it to me. Besides slowly chewing through my music library, and adding to it at the limits of my paycheck, I've been reading NEJM religiously, I'm joining ATS tomorrow so I can start to read the Blue Journal, I listen to podcasts of All Songs Considered, This American Life, and Car Talk, and I have burned through Neal Stephenson's Anathem, Cormac McCarthy's The Road (soon to be a Major Motion Picture starring Viggo Mortensen!), and Cory Doctorow's Little Brother in the past 2 weeks. I'm now firmly putting myself into reading that will slow me down. Next up is a book of Chekhov's stories and the only Pynchon I haven't read yet (except the new one) -- Mason & Dixon. Speaking of the new one, Inherent Vice, it's on my Amazon list, along with Infinite Jest which interestingly has a very similar title and supposedly is quite Pynchon-esque. Wonder if ole' Tom named his new book as a tribute to David Foster Wallace.
To recap:
Anathem -- A relatively slim tome by Stephenson (at least it's only one 900+ page volume) about a world in which instead of having religious cloisters, there are "maths" which keep scientific, mathematic, and philosophic knowledge alive through societal upheavals. Quite nice, a great page turner, especially if you turn quickly through the dozens of pages of philosophic discussions over epistemology and the nature of the universe. For those of you who like their books with timelines, glossaries of lingo, appendices with math and orbital mechanics lessons, and so forth. Let's say Dune meets The Name of the Rose. Or Canticle for Leibowitz without so much post-apocalyptic mayhem.
Speaking of post-apocalyptic mayhem, The Road (soon to be a Major Motion Picture starring Viggo Mortensen) puts a mysterious man leading small people across a desolate landscape avoiding evil. To be played by Aragorn himself in a movie, of course. Except this time he's simply "The Man" wandering south across a post-nuclear America with his son. It being a Cormac McCarthy novel, you know things aren't gonna be all peachy. I kept waiting for Javier Bardem to pop out with a cow stunner.
At to make a nice segue, another tale of an America gone wrong is Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. I found out about it because both it and Anathem were nominated for Hugo Awards (Little Brother was nominated for a Nebula as well.) I read it on my iPhone as it is available for free all over the internets (legally). I found it very fitting to read a tale about the next 9/11, where terrorists blow up the Bay Bridge and the BART tunnel while riding through the BART tunnel twice a day. Anyway, as you know it would, Homeland Security goes all apeshit. The story is told by a 17 year old who lives in the Mission as he gets caught up in the inevitable extreme overreaction that would come from another 9/11. A good parable of the pitfalls of security theater and how we will have to actively fight for the right to privacy in the future (as well as giving some good hints as how to go about doing just that). I'm not sure I really dug the 17 year old point of view but hey that's what Doctorow was aiming for.
So after Pynchon what's next? I can't very well follow a Pynchon with a Pynchon (the new one) or even a David Foster Wallace. Any suggestions?
Tsunami Watch!
In other news, I've become a mass consumer of media. The two hours on the BART have done it to me. Besides slowly chewing through my music library, and adding to it at the limits of my paycheck, I've been reading NEJM religiously, I'm joining ATS tomorrow so I can start to read the Blue Journal, I listen to podcasts of All Songs Considered, This American Life, and Car Talk, and I have burned through Neal Stephenson's Anathem, Cormac McCarthy's The Road (soon to be a Major Motion Picture starring Viggo Mortensen!), and Cory Doctorow's Little Brother in the past 2 weeks. I'm now firmly putting myself into reading that will slow me down. Next up is a book of Chekhov's stories and the only Pynchon I haven't read yet (except the new one) -- Mason & Dixon. Speaking of the new one, Inherent Vice, it's on my Amazon list, along with Infinite Jest which interestingly has a very similar title and supposedly is quite Pynchon-esque. Wonder if ole' Tom named his new book as a tribute to David Foster Wallace.
To recap:
Anathem -- A relatively slim tome by Stephenson (at least it's only one 900+ page volume) about a world in which instead of having religious cloisters, there are "maths" which keep scientific, mathematic, and philosophic knowledge alive through societal upheavals. Quite nice, a great page turner, especially if you turn quickly through the dozens of pages of philosophic discussions over epistemology and the nature of the universe. For those of you who like their books with timelines, glossaries of lingo, appendices with math and orbital mechanics lessons, and so forth. Let's say Dune meets The Name of the Rose. Or Canticle for Leibowitz without so much post-apocalyptic mayhem.
Speaking of post-apocalyptic mayhem, The Road (soon to be a Major Motion Picture starring Viggo Mortensen) puts a mysterious man leading small people across a desolate landscape avoiding evil. To be played by Aragorn himself in a movie, of course. Except this time he's simply "The Man" wandering south across a post-nuclear America with his son. It being a Cormac McCarthy novel, you know things aren't gonna be all peachy. I kept waiting for Javier Bardem to pop out with a cow stunner.
At to make a nice segue, another tale of an America gone wrong is Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. I found out about it because both it and Anathem were nominated for Hugo Awards (Little Brother was nominated for a Nebula as well.) I read it on my iPhone as it is available for free all over the internets (legally). I found it very fitting to read a tale about the next 9/11, where terrorists blow up the Bay Bridge and the BART tunnel while riding through the BART tunnel twice a day. Anyway, as you know it would, Homeland Security goes all apeshit. The story is told by a 17 year old who lives in the Mission as he gets caught up in the inevitable extreme overreaction that would come from another 9/11. A good parable of the pitfalls of security theater and how we will have to actively fight for the right to privacy in the future (as well as giving some good hints as how to go about doing just that). I'm not sure I really dug the 17 year old point of view but hey that's what Doctorow was aiming for.
So after Pynchon what's next? I can't very well follow a Pynchon with a Pynchon (the new one) or even a David Foster Wallace. Any suggestions?
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