VENDING MACHINE OR BANQUET?

You couldn't pay for a day like today. A perfect summer day. Hot, but not too. A soupcon of humidity. Mild and quiet.

After therapy, I wandered by a stoop sale where I bought seven CDs and a book for ten bucks. All great music. I think the folks are moving. Too bad. They'd be fun to know.

I had a lovely read wherein I finished reading the current New Yorker cover to cover, something I have not done in a year or more. And then a sweet nap in the dappled afternoon sunlight.

Miep is back to harshing Cooder's mellow and yeowling at me so I think the anti-biotics worked.

Here are some shots from the Los Lobos gig. It was raining too much to have the iPhone out. Los Lobos were superb. And those of us who braved the rain were well-rewarded.

I am not 100% better but improving. Sometimes I forget that I still have pain.

So, back to that New Yorker. Inasmuch as my divine friends Jennifer, Susan, and Brenna "suggest" that The New Yorker features a surfeit of the male perspective, as if women cannot write as well, it is (one of) my weakness(es). One of the best articles, about Jaron Lanier, the purported "inventor" of virtual reality, is not available online.  Inasmuch as he pains me terribly and I was subjected to a performance of his "virtual reality music" at SIGGRAPH Las Vegas in the early 1990's, he makes some good points. One quote:

"Unlike more Luddite critics, Lanier complains not that technology has take over our lives but that it has not given us enough back in return. In place of a banquet, we've been given a vending machine.

'The thing about technology is that it's made the world of information ever more dominant,' Lanier told me. 'And there's so much loss in that. It really does feel as if we've sworn allegiance to a dwarf world, rather than to a giant world.'"

— Jennifer Kahn, The Visionary: A digital pioneer questions what technology has wrought.


I'm a internet junkie, to be sure. But I find I can spend a lot of time not getting much done or enjoyed.  And, being the hippie Romantic that I am, I will answer the question "Is that all there is?" with a "no."