John Fraim It’s not exactly a shift in the San Andreas Fault. But I can say that my personal muses are shifting again on me. I get my old interest in creating music back and start to resurrect the digital instrument members of the Midnight Oil Band (MOB) from storage in our downstairs film studio […]
Yeah, I know this doesn’t exactly sound like the famous song “Old Man River.” I was inspired to create my own version of it a few nights ago after watching Show Boat on TCM. I think the song is one of the most beautiful songs America has produced and says much about American history. The […]
Disco Times – 4/11/21 The music muse has struck again and I’ve gotten a few of my digital instruments out of storage and set them up in my office on the table right behind my desk. I moved just three instruments out of storage:The Korg Minilogue Polyphonic Analogue Synthesizer, the Korg Electribe Sampler and the […]
Stupidity today is on display more than ever. Yet it is that “elephant in the room” few talk about or are aware of. There is much to be learned about it from an essay by an Italian economic historian named Carol Cipolla (August 15, 1922 – September 5, 2000). Graduating from the University of Pavia in […]
A good documentary on Hemingway was on PBS tonight. A Ken Burns film and it is really good. Tonight was Part 1 and covered Hemingway up to 1928 when he was 29 and just written A Farewell to Arms. I did my senior thesis in high school on Hemingway and read a great biography on him […]
In 1996, Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, was curious to see whether the then-non-peer-reviewed postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text (published by Duke University Press) would publish a submission which “flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.” The submission was an experiment to test the journal’s intellectural rigor. Specifically, to investigate whether “a leading North […]
John Fraim I’ve come to believe the way forward for the modern novel is through the creation of new narrative techniques rather than the structural forms of screenplay as Hollywood would have writers believe. Experiments in voice and narrator were at the heart of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Michael Ondaatje’s Collected […]
One of the strangest and most unique bands is the American indie folk band Lord Huron based in Los Angeles. Founded by Ben Schneider, the name of the band is a tribute to Lake Huron where the Michigan native spent many of his summers growing up where he spent evenings at the lake playing music around […]
“Francis Bacon never tired of contrasting hot and cool prose. Writing in ‘methods’ or complete packages, he contrasted with writing in aphorisms, or single observations such as ‘Revenge is a kind of wild justice.’ The passive consumer wants packages, but those, he suggested, who are concerned in pursuing knowledge and in seeking causes will resort […]
John Fraim One never knows how much they’re connected to the digital world until needs like updating an old computer come along. Living in the Bay Area since the mid-70s, I’d been involved in some way with Apple Computers I lived in Berkeley in the 80s and attended meetings of the Berkeley Apple or Mac […]
