BlitzBrau Pale Ale

Why BlitzBrau? Because I started drinking it two weeks after I brewed it. That's fast for homebrew. Then again I brewed it on New Year's Eve, which suggests that my blogging speed is something closer to SitzBrau. I know, that doesn't even make any sense.

Please ‘be’ in whatever moment you see fit, Ms. Whippman (My belated response to the NYT’s Op-ed on mindfulness)

Dear Ms. Whippman: Thank you for your New York Times Op-Ed ‘Actually, let’s not be in the moment.’ I agree that the indiscriminate application of mindfulness as a solution to everything is immensely problematic. Unfortunately, you’ve avoided actual criticism of the practice of mindfulness in favor of engineered outrage, straw-man rebuttals, and poorly researched questioning of its effectiveness. This may be related to what I would describe as your rather precarious understanding of what mindfulness actually is.

An unusual New Year's resolution: more social media

This might sound a bit like someone vowing to watch more TV, eat more junk food, or spend less time with their family. Social media has become one of those guilty pleasures that people want to cleanse themselves of in the New Year. Some celebrities have become experts at quitting Facebook or Twitter by doing it three or four times. I largely withdrew from social media about two years ago for reasons that I haven't really been comfortable talking about in a public forum. I guess this is a long-winded explanation of what happened.

Attention beer drinkers: Hops are not just about bitterness

After some recent Facebook chatter about craft beers getting too hoppy, I decided I needed to brew something that would show that hoppy beers are not all about bitterness - and then write a blog post about. Oddly enough, about an hour later I popped open something in my fridge that turned out to be exactly this. In a rare instance of social media inspiring me to write something, I've suddenly been handed an opportunity to talk about hops.

Jazz & Me - Part 8 - The "Me" part of "Jazz & Me"

My story about jazz and me has been more about jazz than about me. If you’ve made it this far, perhaps you’ve asked yourself why a person would dedicate this much effort into studying music without wanting to make it. It’s a question I’ve asked myself as well. So after years of thinking about all this and months of trying to figure out how to write it, I tried to put a proverbial coda on all this modal contemplation.

I bought a bass.

Jazz & Me - Part 7 - The New Sherriff in Town

Jazz’s evolution toward rock fusion naturally generated a backlash among musicians, but none were more damning that a young New Orleans trumpet player named Wynton Marsalis. A rising star in the 1980s who played with Herbie and Wayne while also showing impressive talent as a classical musician, Marsalis led a revival of the traditional jazz as it was known between the early swing days through the bebop era and into the 1960s.

Jazz & Me - Part 6 - The Twilight of Modal and the Dawn of Fusion

A musician doesn’t owe eternal allegiance to any style of genre of music any more than a listener is required to pay lifelong obeisance to any artist. This tends to generate cantankerous outrage among fans who accuse musicians of “selling out” when the fact is they simply wanted to do something different. It’s one thing for a fan to fall so head-over-heels for an album that they listen to almost nothing else for weeks on end, but it’s quite another to be that musician who has to eat, sleep, breathe and dream those same songs for months or years on end.