stern
Review: “Life on Mars: The New Frontier”
Unrelated to the TV series, other books with similar titles or even the Governator in Total Recall, Jonathan Strahan’s collection of short stories is a superb glimpse into what life might be like on the red planet. What sets it apart is that all of the stories are related through the eyes of its intended [...]
Review: Bill Bruford, The Autobiography
I’ve finished Bill Bruford’s obviously titled autobiography, and I’m almost relieved I made it to the end. Bruford is an accomplished, amazing, creative and adventuresome drummer. The names dropped in his book range from the obvious (Yes, King Crimson) to the obscure (Pierre Moerlen) to the overlooked (Allan Holdsworth). While I learned that Bruford’s drum [...]
Triangulation: In Memory of Pierre Pellaton
Pierre Pellaton, hockey coach for more than 30 years, died last night. He will be sorely missed. Pierre was the one coach that everybody loved. I really do mean everybody – players, parents, other coaches, the NJ Devils Youth Hockey board, refs, the Zamboni guy. It was impossible not to like him, with his outsized [...]
Peoplehood: Just Metal
A prelude in two parts. 1. Nathan Rapoport’s Scroll of Fire sculpture was the first sight I visited on my first trip to Israel in 1989. The part of the sculpture that resonated with me was the menorah representing the reunification of Jerusalem, the converse of the Arch of Titus in which Roman soldiers are [...]
Peoplehood: Carmel
It was windy on the mountain, windy enough that a small scrap of black plastic tarp was blown through the air, into my field of view, and over the top of the memorial. What a shame, I thought to myself, that the quiet, simple scene intended by the memorial’s artist was intruded on by construction [...]
Peoplehood III: Long Tail
Part of our pre-reading for the Peoplehood Project is Erica Brown and Misha Galperin’s Case For Jewish Peoplehood. While it reads at times like the condensed reading room syllabus for a survey course in sociology and religion, the authors make several forays into topics that remind me of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail view of disperse [...]
Networking Killed Kodak
I’m watching with both sadness and bemusement (perhaps the definition of schadenfreude) as Kodak limps toward bankruptcy. The company that gave us song titles (Kodachrome), vernacular (Kodak moment), iconic Olympics television ads, and made it possible for the consumer to chronicle his or her life is now about to end its own corporate lifetime. Disclaimers: [...]
The 2011 List
I never published “a list” last year, and probably for good reasons – 2010 was a rough year. Little did I know that 2011 would be even more strange, with higher highs and lower lows, another ten or twenty decibels of emotional dynamic range. In an effort to at least put a stake in the [...]
Team Santa
Twenty-four years ago, I joined Team Santa. The initiation was quick and somewhat forced; the COO of my startup asked me to be Santa Claus for the office Christmas party, holding various small children on my lap for (film) camera photo opportunities. At the time, I had no idea that I even liked kids, or [...]
Peoplehood II: Alliteration
Anglicization does strange things to non-English alphabets. My father’s family name (in the Ukraine) was “Shtechter”, probably with a hard “ch” in the middle (like Bach), but it turned into both “Stern” and “Shtier” when the two halves of the family arrived on Ellis Island. Hailing from a rural town – a “mudhole”, in the [...]