I just ordered a Lenovo S10. If it's as nice as that Chevy S-10 my folks owned when I was a kid, I'll be pretty stoked.  ¶ 12:10 PM 0 comments

  There was a post about Lafayette Gilchrist here, but now there isn't. You might like this, though--it has all the links and then some.

Unrelatedly, I'm part of a sort of mp3-swapping group. Here are this month's songs.  ¶ 3:46 PM 0 comments

  March's Down Beat has a neat feature where they ask jazz musicians to pick their favorite Blue Note album. Here's Jason Moran:

Bobby Hutcherson's Dialogue lumped together all these crazy people--Bobby, Andrew Hill, Sam Rivers, Joe Chambers, Richard Davis and Freddie Hubbard. The compositions on there were by Andrew and Joe, not Bobby, and they show the gamut of where music was at at that point--some free stuff, and the first song, 'Catta,' has a Latin feel. The playing is phenomenal. It's a well-rounded cast and a well-rounded record. These musicians represent a thread of how Blue Note functioned, with which I hope I'll be associated in the long term. It's like a football team, and Andrew, Sam, Bobby and Freddie represent the offensive line, who push the defense back further and further, while other people catch touchdowns and get the hoo-rah.
I love The Real McCoy, but the music on this and on Contours, the Sam Rivers record, is biting in a way that The Real McCoy is not, in how they approach the use of dissonance and melody. A lot of my ideas about a format or a sound to play free come from Dialogue. How Joe Chambers plays this march drum sound in the middle of the space. It's so mystifying. It's a record you can't grasp. Often black artists who choose abstraction are considered a sellout to their race because they aren't doing anything representative of African or African-American culture. I don't know whether they thought about taking a chance. They were just doing it because it's what was ready to be done.

Unrelatedly, I'm on Facebook now. Look me up, if that's your thing.  ¶ 1:53 PM 0 comments

  New Harper's Index site is really good.  ¶ 10:00 PM 0 comments

  Video Game Recommendations: Burnout Paradise and Skate 2.

Burnout Paradise is an open-world driving game. I've been waiting my whole life for a video game where all you do is drive around in a graffiti-covered old pickup listening to classical music and destroying 'Private Property' signs, taking occasional breaks to enter running-people-off-the-road contests. I guess there are some races and time trials and alternative rock and stuff too, but who cares?

If you like the old Burnout games, and especially if you like the open-endedness and non-linear nature of open-world/sandbox games, there's a very good chance you'll like this one. It's readily available for twenty bucks these days, and it provides a great example of how to do DLC right. BP doesn't get everything right, but it gets a lot of things right, and it's definitely worth playing.

Skate 2 is a (relatively) realistic open-world skateboarding game. This means, among other things, that it's kinda hard. And like a lot of things that are kinda hard, those moments where you suddenly get it are very satisfying.

If you loved the first couple Tony Hawk games, but then started to get tired of 'em, you might love Skate 2. If you still remember Thrasher: Skate and Destroy for the PSX, you'll almost certainly love Skate 2.  ¶ 3:46 PM 0 comments

  Andy Rooney Game.  ¶ 2:18 PM 0 comments