Grace under pressure, poetry in motion. I do not recommend you attempt skateboarding down the Alps but I do suggest you witness Josh Neuman’s 11:27 minute crazy-ass decent.
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Listen
A friend of mine (hi Gregg) shared with me this remarkable interview with someone who can hear music through his finger tips.
The Oscar-nominated film The Sound of Metal (the best of the year frankly) has several scenes in which the director really tried to convey what it is like to be going deaf.
Both the film and interview with Bob Lichtenburg are wonderful examples of how the human spirit can rise up and overcome even the most daunting of obstacles.
Inspirational.
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Getting into the mood
Five Utah school buses with their lights synced up to The Nutcracker’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” Details about the how and why on the original YouTube post.
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Folksy Database
Part of the charm of the greater Grateful Dead culture was that there was something for everyone. Like any good pastime there was some aspect of a Grateful Dead show to please everyone.
I often compare the sub-culture of Deadheads to baseball fans. There are those that go for the scene, the roar of the crowd or to see their heroes play. Others go for the party, the beer & hot dogs on the one hand or the recreational drugs and lightshow on the other.
Then there are the stat nerds which also exist in both cultures. Go to any ball game and you’ll see people with detailed score cards, recording every hit and at bat using their own custom shorthand.
Baseball scorecard from September 10, 1999 Red Sox v Yankees game There are stat nerds in Deadhead culture too. These are the people that can tell you the last time the band opened the second set with Saint of Circumstance or when they last played Red Rocks. There’s a special language of code to how they talk and a learned shorthand to normalize communication.
During the time when I saw the band, computers were not that widespread so a lot of the documentation was collected from memory and passed around on handwritten notes. Historic setlists were passed down as legend.
Printknot Printer’s 1985 Year at a Glance The photo above is something I found in a drawer as I was packing to move house. It’s a handwritten collection of every setlist from every concert the Grateful Dead played in 1985. Crib sheets like these were passed around like a folksy database of shared knowledge.
Detail with graphic annotations There’s endless detail in the notations that hint at a shared understanding of how a Grateful Dead setlist works. The capital “E” in the detail above ties Estimated Profit and Eyes of the World together as those two are often paired and segue seamlessly from one to the other. The “Gimmie Gimmie” scrawled above Gimme Some Lovin’ is a wink to the fact that Bob Weir was especially enthusiastic in his rendition of Spencer Davis that night.
All this was just to say that while the ever-connected phones in our pockets are wonderful for precision and recall, they don’t transmit knowledge and understanding as well as these folksy databases of handwritten notes. An illuminated manuscript from the medieval past, carefully hand-copied and embellished, is so much better at transmitting culture and passes on so much more than just the written word.
To listen to two Deadhead stat nerds get into the weeds, check out my post on Alex and JM Hart’s discussion about the evolution of Bob Weir’s playing style on Deadicated.
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Deadicated
Alex Wise is a professional musician (alexwise.com) and longtime Deadhead. As an accomplished guitarist, he listens to the music of the Grateful Dead with a careful ear for detail and can speak to the evolution of their style in a much more nuanced way than your average Deadhead.
Listening to Alex’s interview with Brokedown Podcast’s JM Hart is like listening to two baseball stat nerds get into the weeds on the specifics of the game. I love it. The cracks about Weir’s attempts at slide guitar are something that would make any member of this particular tribe smile.
If you have a passing interest in the the music of the Grateful Dead and wondered what all the fuss was about and how people can listen to so many different versions of Morning Dew, this podcast episode will unveil some of layers of that fan-hood.
The entire episode is above but the two get down to details at around 18:30.
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Walkin’ NYC
Did I mention that we’re walking the streets of Manhattan in order to get to know the neighborhoods? I use this iOS app called Trails to track where we go and then trace it old skool style with a sharpie onto a tourist map.
Log of our stroll on Sunday 
Total log of walks since we arrived Trails keeps track of our walks automatically. The nice thing about Trails is that it automatically logs everywhere we go so I can just put the phone in my pocket and go about our day. The location tracking doesn’t take as much battery on my iPhone XR as I thought but I do bring along an extra charged up external battery to top things up just in case.
One app that I also recommend is Urban Archive. They have a database of all the old buildings in NYC and using it, you can quickly lookup the history of buildings you see while walking around.
Here’s the master map with all the traces of where we’ve been so far since arriving on September 25th. Lots to still see (we’ve only spent a short time in Brooklyn) but it’s been a blast.
If there are particular walks you recommend, please add links in the comments!
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Talkin’ NYC
I can’t believe that New York City is my new home. We’re still nailing down details of a place to live (more on that later, don’t want to jinx it) staying in a furnished apartment in the meantime so it feels temporary.
But no. NYC is our home. Weird. I’m now one of youz guyz.
I’ve been trying to think of the best way to describe what living here is like, from a Californian point of view. Certainly people talk a lot more than back in Bay Area. Walking down the street is like an exercise in verbal river rafting. There’s no time to look down at your phone. Everyone has a quip or comment and you need to be fast with a witty reply to make a connection. Everyone is always, ON.
In this fast moving stream of conversations, whenever a group of New Yorkers gather for more than a few minutes, an instant community forms. This evening was a perfect example.
As you know, the pandemic limits the number of people that can be inside a shop at any one time. There is an amazing cheesemonger down the street, they’ve got cheeses from around the world and a chalkboard listing specials that they fly in each day for their customers. A sign out front that says no more than “two people or one group” at a time in the shop. Outside the store there are three people that don’t know each other, each waiting their turn to go in. As three individuals it’ll take more time to go in because that’s three separate groups.
A man is chatting with two women. Right as Izumi and I walk by I hear the man say,
Wanna be a group?
That phrase, right there, captured the perfect NY moment. A little eddy of inactivity shunted to the side of the overall flow of people walking by. Three people, milling around, waiting. There’s a problem. A restriction, a rule that is slowing their progress. A community forms – collective problem solving is put to work, they band together. Problem solved.
This is NYC. People of all types, strangers, reaching out to solve problems, together, with a laugh.
On a more serious note, we’re heading into what many are predicting will be a dark winter of the third wave. It’s going to be tough but that same resourcefulness from that vignette above gets force multiplied in times of crisis. The blackouts of 1977 and 2003, Hurricane Sandy, 9/11. New Yorkers rise to the occasion to meet the challenge, together.
NYC got walloped by the virus earlier in the year but they know what’s coming this time around and will face what’s coming with grit, camaraderie, and a sense of humor. I’m glad we got to experience the tail end of the Summer but am prepared for what’s coming.
Sign in SoHo paraphrases Queen’s We Will Rock You -
Kyrö Distillery
Kyrö Distillery – proudly Finnish Friends from Finland shared this advert for Kyrö Distillery, a Finnish distillery, who gives us a master class at how to introduce the world to their unique line of products.
If you’re going to introduce a new Malt Rye Dairy Cream Whiskey to the world, there’s only one way to do it. With a naked man strolling around and staring straight at the camera in all earnestness.
Oh, and the story about five guys in a sauna dreaming up a business is true.
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Leaps of Faith
Two different perspectives on taking a leap. You never know what’s on the other side, sometimes you just gotta go for it.
Butterflies on a Ten Meter diving board in Sweden 12-year-old Sky Brown takes on Tony Hawk’s “mega ramp.”