Patsy Cline, in today's parlance, gave zero fucks.
I feel a certain kinship to Cline, if only because I attended the same school she did, Gore Elementary, 12 miles west of Winchester, Virginia (though I attended 30 years after she did). Back up against the Blue Ridge Mountains, Gore is a tiny unincorporated town, mostly a few buildings coalescing around a single road breaking off Route 50.
Many of the refined folk in the nearby metropolis of sorts, Winchester, had looked down on Patsy Cline, as being from the wrong side of the tracks, even after she became famous. Click to Read More...
For these three minutes in 1973, Grand Funk Railroad were the smartest kids in the room (cribbing no doubt from Todd Rundgren, who produced the track, "We're an American Band"). Bet Freddie King still beat them at poker though.
While everyone probably agrees a consistent numbering scheme for software releases is a Good Thing, there are those software and package managers who flout the largely agreed-upon conventions of numerical versioning, either out of ignorance or of a willful disregard. This is the subject of Sentimental Versioning where Dominic Tarr seems to both hold in awe and at the same time subtly mock the singularly odd versioning schemes of a few software packages, such as Node.js and Tex.
The problem with humans is that they are only hard-wired for local time. For hundreds of thousands of years, we have carried around with us the notion that it is the same time wherever we go--Noon is when the sun is directly overhead.
The gradual but inevitable dissolution of William Basinski's Disintegration Loop 1.1 -- a brief, ancient tape loop is literally falling to pieces with each repeated play -- is heartbreakingly beautiful. And the hour-long single-shot video of the smoke that just continued to billow up so many hours after the WTC collapses captures, for me, the dark undercurrent of what September 11, 2001 felt like. 
Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray remained young while his portrait aged in an attic. John Sargent (1856-1925), in a way, pulled off the opposite trick, preserving on oiled canvas the full beauty and animism of people who are now all long deceased.
A few months back, a country radio consultant remarked that "If you want to make ratings in country radio, take females out." The comment ignited a brief wave of indignation. This is 2015, after all! But the comment was just the latest example of how country music marginalizes women, a tradition as old as the genre itself, and one that singers from Kitty Wells to Miranda Lambert have fought against through song and their presence, I've learned. 
Time, as we experience it, moves only in one direction, forward, by our vantage. Eggs break, we get old, etc. Conventional wisdom says time is the measure of decay, or entropy, or the Second Law of Thermodynamics, to get progressively STEM-y about the matter. But there is nothing inherent in the laws of physics that forbid time to go in reverse. Now here is a fella asking what if entropy is not the measure of time. What if gravity is? 
"Bushwick Christmas" is how my pal Tania describes Bushwick Open Studios, which takes place in early June in Brooklyn NYC (June 6-7 this year).
Even during the apocalypse, people will still check their smart phones, I bet.
Go on and call on your telephone. The number is right there on the For-Sale sign under the windshield 350-9801 all seven digits ask the guy who answers how much for the blue Chevy Impala with the 400 ci V8. He will tell you its a Historic Car. I bet he tries to sell it for $800 but you could talk him down to $600. It runs too. Do not believe him when he tells you it gets more than 8 mpg. 
Explaining the law of quantum interference, in which an event that is observed has different properties than one that goes unobserved, Richard Feynman his Caltech students that "No one has found any machinery behind the law."
I love how Instagram forces me to be in the now, if only for a few seconds. You can plan for an Instagram moment, but the freshest ones are those off-the-cuff. Observation takes the place of preparation.
As giant piles of rocks go, the Mayans did a phenomenal job building El Castillo at Chichen Itza, in Yucatan Mexico. The pyramid, built sometime between the 9th and 12th centuries, has 91 steps on each side, adding to a total of 364. An additional single step at the top brought the temple in align with the modern yearly calendar of 365, one trip, more or less, around the giant ball of fire in the sky. Was this design intentional? 
People forget, but BB King used to make the young women holler back in the day. He had some good advice for the menfolk too. 1965's Live at the Regal album was one of the most electrifying live albums I've ever encountered, and one, inexplicably, scrubbed from the Innertubes. 
In honor of Record Store Day 2015 , which was, umm, yesterday, I dusted off an old player, complete with tiny built-in speakers, and spun some Bo Diddley platters. The booming voice of Bo Diddley sounded so solid on these tiny, crappy speakers. In fact, Bo probably sounds better on cheap record players, than on any of the other, supposedly superior, formats that followed--cassette, CD, MP3. 
Something that I can (probably) safely cop to, now that I'm on the senior side of 50, is getting my drink on and listening to Bob Dylan. I mean, I've never been a Dylanologist, per se. But the man's music has been with me for pretty much my entire life, in one form or another. Some of it is pleasant; A lot of it is crap. I can't really defend Dylan to anyone otherwise uninclined. He's creaky, cranky and makes a snarled racket. That said, at three distinct times a Dylan song has crashed into my life speaking to me directly with a lucidity I never thought possible from a pop song. These times, and from these times alone, I see why Dylan could be one of those rare artists of an Olympian stature. 
Street art is like television for urban perambulators. A secret channel open to anyone who just tunes in, it tells stories and captures your attention with brash spectacles of color and form.
America is a vast country. Even today, there is probably too much land for the people who inhabit the place, and we lay much of it to waste. The tangles of roadway connecting our homes and points of interest are rarely scenic; they are littered on each side with hastily erected fast food joints, strip malls, scrub land. 
I don't know much about art, but one thing I do know a little bit about is LP covers. I grew up before MTV, which is to say before music came with visual accompaniment. Those days, when you bought an album, you took it home, put it on the record player and just listened. If you wanted visuals, you scanned the LP cover. 
"Beard oil," I thought when I first heard Sun Kil Moon. From a remove, it rang out at similarly rarefied level of attention, a fussy rough-hewn acoustic guitar traveling at a somber pace of introspection, accompanied by vocals of unrelenting gravitas. But while "Benji" comes in the husk of hipsterism, there's something much more going on here. I've never heard an album quite like this, an intensely personal musical novella where each song is a chapter that builds on the others, that, all totaled, offers an almost uncomfortable intimacy of one man's life at 50, both the wisdom and the warts. 
Machine learning models can solve any problem at hand, given infinite data and time for training. With infinite resources, you could simply map into memory every possible answer, and then every possible path to every answer. The challenge in making deep learning practical is to find a way to get the desired result with only a finite amount of resources, namely, what you have on hand. 
Young prince Telemachus was hanging around the fam's castle, increasingly fed up with all these sycophantic suitors sucking up to Mom, wearing down his long-lost father's riches with all their feasting, dancing and having their hands washed by his family's servants. 
If you're over, say, 45, and lived in the states, "Long Tall Glasses" is pretty much in your DNA, even tho you probably don't remember it now. And when you hear it again, you'll probably recalled that you hated it. But, really, back then, whenever it floated over from some nearby radio, you dug it (maybe secretly). That'd be my guess, anyway. 
Some nights words do not describe how cold New York can get. Last Thursday was one of those evenings. Gallery hopping through Chelsea, we called it early, but before heading back to the E, we stumbled into an exhibit of linen wall sculptures of Janet Bohman. I do not know why exactly, maybe I was finally warming up from the frigid temp, but walking into the room of her works, I felt a surprising and somewhat unexpected sense of joy. 
I am not entirely sure how many cultures this image could piss off, really. It is a quick camera phone capture of some rain-washed paste-up street art in Williamsburg. A veiled, topless woman, rife with religious symbols, gives the viewer a heavily tattooed finger, with what appears to be 'thug' tattooed across her stomach. But it was probably the nips that got it taken down from Instagram. 
The Tower of Babel, for me, was always a cautionary tale about the limits of technology: The more sweeping your vision, the more complex to build, and once it gets too complex, it will collapse entirely because no one working on the thing will understand what anyone else on the project is doing... 
This is Cassie, Karaoking in Laddies, a neighborhood bar in Hedgesville, a small West Virginia town just outside of Martinsburg. When I came in, on New Years Eve, Cas was singing a frisky Dolly Parton song. Over the following few hours, she proved to be the best singer in the joint, with the possible exception of a guy who looked like Garth Brooks and proclaimed every song he sang to be his favorite. 