• Footloose at Forty

    Footloose at Forty

    Footloose at forty. This one hurts. Not that I was a fan boy. I didn’t have the poster. I think my brother had the vinyl. But this news that Footloose turned forty on February 17, 2024, rang like a bell and made me sad. That story of the out-of-town kid (if I’m remembering correctly) turning…

  • Dark Mode in Google Docs on Chromebooks: Color Inversion

    Dark Mode in Google Docs on Chromebooks: Color Inversion

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    For writers, facing a blank page is always tough.  The blank page is a negative space—it sucks thoughts. It kills ideas. It’s like a black hole … but so white. This morning, facing a bright white Google Doc page was beyond harsh. Dark mode was not recognized by Google Docs in my Chrome browser. I’m…

  • Do What Only You Can Do

    Do What Only You Can Do

    On New Year’s Day, 2024, I’m haunted by an epiphany I had in 2015 – that I should do more of what only I can do, and less of what anyone can do. Not that what I can do is better. It’s just better for me. At the time, I was trying to break the…

  • My Annual Board Meeting: Is 2022 the Year of the Thaw?

    My Annual Board Meeting: Is 2022 the Year of the Thaw?

    I had my annual board meeting with myself yesterday. This year, I convened on a stump by the frozen lake in Prospect Park, Brooklyn.

  • Art: Banksy, Beautyist, Bob Dylan, and Brooklyn

    This week, my evening scribbles thread of bundled bookmarks (you can tell I’m still figuring out what to call these) is focused on art. In tough times, I’ve said to my family, “We’ve got to write our way out of this.” Whether writing privately to someone or in journals or publicly in blogs or “real”…

  • Restoration: Statues, Buildings, and Brains

    On a family Zoom last week, I found myself blurting “When the pandemic is over, everyone will forget what it was like, what we all went through. They’ll just ask, ‘Well, what have you accomplished in the last years?’” I was speaking about professional, educational, or artistic accomplishments. I had a hunch that the kind…

  • Sounds of the City and a Barbaric Yawp

    Today I’m threading some sounds that have reached me recently. It started with birds, what sounded like a hundred tiny beaks chirping as fast as they could on my window sill, about an hour before I needed to wake up. Under the lead of an assertive, entrepreneurial leader, they discovered warm air leaking from the…

  • Time Management and 12022021

    Today I’m threading time. (That is, I’m realizing as I write this that these things can be connected.) First, I saw Catherine Clifford’s piece on CNBC.com: “Why billionaire VC Marc Andreessen schedules every second of his day, including ‘critical’ free time.” Since the 90s, I’ve known Marc Andreessen is one of the smartest people in…

  • Garry Wills and the Definition of Saint: Studs Terkel

    Garry Wills has a great definition of “saint” in The New York Review of Books (June 7, 2018), in “The Art of the Schmooze,” a tribute to Studs Terkel: “I considered him a saint, by the only definition that makes sense to me: a man or woman whose company you leave feeling that you should…

  • The Reality of Seeing Laurie Anderson at Bryant Park Following Her Virtual Reality Award

    Geez, I don’t have a photo. But here’s my recent sighting of Laurie Anderson. On September 11, 2017, at about 6:40 pm, on the way home. Beautiful evening, perfect as the morning of 9/11 in New York. I walked through Bryant Park on 42nd Street in NYC. My eyes focused on a small woman in the center plaza…

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