Category Archives: Best Of

FCS, Choirmaster at Grace Died on Tuesday.

By Doug | Published: October 14, 10

I received an email last night saying that Frank Cedric Smith, choirmaster at Grace Church from 1960 to 1992 died on Tuesday at his home in Cape Cod.

It’s given me pause, the email, more so than most of these types of messages. We all stop for a moment at an obituary listing. An obligatory reflection on mortality surfaces, always a bit selfishly because the thought ends up circling back around to our own situation; then we push those “me” thoughts away, and with forced reflection a memory stirs, we move back in time.

Frank Smith made me Head Chorister at Grace in 1975. (My name is up on the wall in the church lest I forget)

Also posted in Around Town | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Getting Ready for PlainText

By Doug | Published: August 22, 10

I’ve moved almost all my notes out of my SimpleText folder. A few seasons ago I put them all in there when Hog Bay launched its free syncing service to support WriteRoom and TaskPaper for the iPhone and iPad. I did it because I thought I’d be notating and editing all sorts of items in the newly freed, on the go, mobile existence of the “i” revolution — no need for a heavy laptop for me. I was wrong.

Also posted in Productivity | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The Center Cannot Hold – Flarf in the WSJ

By Doug | Published: May 25, 10

Sharon Mesmer, Flarf, The Wall Street Journal, Page One.

There really isn’t any more that I can say….Poetry makes the big time.

Click through for the evidence.

Also posted in Writing | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The Influential Books Game

By Doug | Published: March 26, 10

Everyone’s making a list of ten books. Tyler Cowen started it. I caught up via Ross Douthat’s article NYT in the New York Times. The drill is: stream of consciousness, from the gut, no great research, off the top of your head, what ten books most influence your world view. Here’s my list…

Also posted in Writing | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

The Whitney Biennial – The End In Sight?

By Doug | Published: March 13, 10

Spending Friday at the Whitney Museum of Art’s Biennial was like spending an afternoon watching YouTube, except the Whitney’s installations were of a lower production quality and were vastly less meaningful — even when shouting their relevance at full volume. Room after room showed video after video in the show billed as the art world’s statement of what’s happening now, a statement, the Whitney will tell you, it has been making for over 75 years.

But this version of the Beinnial’s statement is about …

Also posted in Art | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

SimpleText, TaskPaper, WriteRoom, Notational Velocity – Going minimalist with my notes

By Doug | Published: February 14, 10

Going minimalist with my note taking tools has been a fantastic boon to my work flow. Using applications and tools that let me access my data set of files, without taking them over and making my work flow conform to the needs of those applications, has removed a whole set of steps, perhaps most importantly the one between capturing ideas and processing them to finished work.

Before, there was always the PITA process of transiting from flaneur to writer, now they are one and the same act; in other words the technology is doing what it is supposed to do.

Also posted in Productivity | Tagged , , , , , | 10 Comments

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