waldorf

My dear wife S. likes to look at me despairingly and ask why I’m the way I am. It’s a fair question. My usual trite response is that my mother raised me that way, at which point she says I should show my mother more respect, and so on. (I love my mother, truly.) While this series is more focused on my career in tech than on my formative years, those formative years do explain a lot, and I like all the stories. This is the story of how the family wound up half-moving from Cape Cod to New Hampshire, plus an explosive revelation. It captures a lot of our family dynamics, and sheds a little light on my tendencies to resist authority. ...

The format of these is likely to change, but I do need someplace besides Twitter to dump random thoughts. We’ll see how this works. Thanks are owed to my pal Ginger for demonstrating the value of this sort of thing. If you like music, Elizabeth Nelson’s piece on Marquee Moon is a must read. It’s such a perfect album made in such weird, imperfect circumstances. I learned not too long ago that those two “pantheonic instrumentalists of the 20th century” she mentions finally united on Matthew Sweet’s great three albums of the 1990s, starting with Girlfriend. Assuming that she meant Richard Lloyd as the first. It’s also worth checking out her band, Paranoid Style, which is as one might expect from the name. ...