Brooklyn Diasporism

testing

I’ve decided to move my blog over to blot. I’ve been trying to simplify things and with a relatively slight learning curve, I can get myself settled in with blot. WordPress has served me well for a long time but I’ve come to feel that it’s too much a platform with too many options and too many plugins. I like markdown and although it can be dowloaded and installed on your computer, there are so many markdown-compatible apps and platforms that I’m not sure why one would do that. blot is one such platform.

It does away with any kind of CMS and uses a folder directory in Dropbox or Google Drive to store .txt files (or .docx files, maybe others?), each file of which is a post. Nothing could be simpler, nothing could be more future-proof. There aren’t any plug-ins to lean on and the inclination to muck about with scripts I don’t understand or the like. I just make the file, link to an image if I want to include one, and up it goes. Or just drop an image in the Posts folder and it becomes a post on its own.

No more worrying about which writing app to use on which device or which writing app to use at all. I can kill a couple of subscriptions I’ve been clinging to because their products integrate so easil with WordPress. So we’ll see, I guess, if I stick with it as plannned but the older I get and the more I get into steering clear of social platforms, the better something like blot starts to look.

I’m not moving the whole blog over quite yet. It’s a long process given my past reliance on some WordPres plugins but I’ll try to get the more poular stuff taken care of before too long. If you have any questions in the meantime, you can drop me a line at mail@zachbarocas.com.

Where Are New York’s Best Acoustics? We Took a Listening Tour. | The New York Times

The composer Michael Gordon and members of Mantra Percussion tested the piece “Timber” in resonant spaces around the city. Here is what they learned.

Is André 3000 in his jazz era? | NPR

When sessions for New Blue Sun began, he was still figuring out how to operate the digital woodwinds that feature heavily on the album. As it turns out, it’s precisely this aspect that makes New Blue Sun so appealing as a live show.

One of my favorite music writers and creative music thinkers, Hank Shteamer, wrote this terrific piece for NPR. He had a companion piece looking more broadly at the current spiritual jazz renaissance (“spiritual-jazz-aissance”) in his newsletter which is also worth a look.

The Dumbphone Boom Is Real | Kyle Chayka

I’ve cut myself off from such meaningless digital stimuli but preserved my ability to answer texts or phone calls if necessary. (I’m too much of a millennial to actually leave the house without any phone.) I find myself looking more at my surroundings, which are particularly enjoyable in springtime, and I am more relaxed when I return from the excursions. When I switch the sim card back into my iPhone, the device seems momentarily absurd: an enormous screen filled with infinite entertainment and information that follows me wherever I go. Then I open all my usual apps in quick succession—e-mail, Instagram, Slack—to see what I’ve missed.

The rationale behind dumbphones isn’t lost on me but it’s a phenomenon that doesn’t appear to reach Generation X as a point of serious interest or concern, which is not to say it shouldn’t be of great concern but simply that it isn’t. Oh, well, whatever. Never mind.