Best Engineered Recording of an Album?
I recently watched a podcast by Rick Beatto about the best sounding LPs ever recorded. I knew Steely Dan's Aja had to make the list, and it did, but this one came in at #1.
"Echoes of Everywhere" - paintings by Sylvia Trotter Ewens
Via BOOOOOOOM
In “Echoes of Elsewhere”, Trotter Ewens’ fragmented environments are shaped as much by lived experience as by distance and imagination. Born in Honduras, Trotter Ewens was adopted as an infant and has long felt a sense of dual belonging. The works assembled here explore the lingering impressions of environments and relationships that persist across time and were created from photographs taken of both Honduras and Québec—the two sites/distinct geographies merging to reflect Trotter Ewens’ own experience of being “neither completely of here nor there”.
If only we had the wall space, this is the type of art I’d be looking to obtain and enjoy. Ewens’ website can be found here: https://www.sylviatrotterewens.com/
Via BOOOOOOOM
Joe Macken Spent 21 Years Hand-Assembling a Model of NYC
Via Colossal
I wouldn’t know where to begin a project like this, which is currently on exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York. The sheer enormity of it is impressive and the value immense as an historical artefact. From the immense structures in the financial district and midtown to the begrassed homesteads of the outer boroughs, nothing appears to be left out.
Macken began working on the 50-by-27-foot model in 2004, first in Middle Village, Queens, before moving to Clifton Park, New York. It comprises 340 individual sections, each built from everyday materials like cardboard and glue, with many of the buildings constructed of balsa wood and detailed with pencil and paint. He completed the structure in 2025, and it’s now on long-term view at the museum, where visitors can walk around it and are encouraged to use binoculars to find familiar buildings and neighborhoods.
Via Colossal
Musems and Women and other stories
John Updike
The title story, Museums and Women, explores the narrator's interactions with, shockingly, museums and women.
To a Wall of Flame in a Steel Mill, Syracuse, New York, 1969
Larry Levis
Except under the cool shadows of pines, / The snow is already thawing / Along this road . . . / Such sun, and wind.
Satantango
László Krasznahorkai
The novel is set in a desolate, rain-slicked landscape where the inhabitants are trapped in a state of perpetual decay, waiting for a miracle or a catastrophe.
Portraits of an Artist
Photos of the artist, who would later give us bread crumbs to throw to the koi, making for this photo.
Palestinian Walks
Raja Shehadeh
To go on a sarha is to wander aimlessly, not restricted by time and place, going where the spirit takes you, to nourish your soul and rejuvenate yourself. This book contains six sarhat the author takes between the early 1970s to the early 2000s.
AI (GitHub CoPilot) is now involved on this site
I described in about three paragraphs the capabilities my project needed to feature and how it had to tie in with other software I use, making the latter much more feature-rich…
Chronicles of a NY Locksmith
A touching small feature from The New Yorker about a small locksmith shop in Brooklyn
Growing up in China as a White Man in the 50s
Michael Crook talks about growing up in China in the 1950s.
The Golden House
Salman Rushdie
In the humid, over-ripened air of a post-Obama Manhattan, where the sunlight hits the brownstones of Greenwich Village with a cloying, amber insistence, we find the "Gardens"—a private enclave of old-world quietude suddenly invaded by the operatic.
The Assault
Harry Mulisch
A singular event in the ending days of WWII sets off decades-long reverberations for the sole survivor of a Dutch family.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Matsuo Bashō
A half poetic, half discursive travel journal by the inventor of the haiku.
Royal Game of Ur
An ancient Middle Eastern game that found its way to the west through the Jewish population of Kochi, India, after they migrated to Israel.
