December 26, 2013 Contact Calendar The Mix Archives
It's the season for best of lists.
Here are the top ten new artists I added to my monthly mixes this year:
Rising Appalachia
Chic Gamine
McCrary Sisters
Laura Mvula
Band of Heathens
Kevin Gordon
Jenny O
Willis Earl Beal
Rokia Traore
Marchfourth Marching Band

Great live performances this year include
Band of Heathens at the Altamont in Ashville, NC
New Orleans Guitar Quartet at Jazz Fest in New Orleans
Chic Gamine at Fest International in Lafayette
Soul Fruit in the gospel tent at Jazz Fest in New Orleans
Lake Street Dive, Milton, and the Duhks at Green River Festival in Greenfield, MA
Hymn For Her at Unity Center.

Reading Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson. Here's a quote:
In 1956, at the age of three, I was walking home with my father, physicist Freeman Dyson, from his office at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, when I found a broken fan belt lying in the road. I asked my father what it was. “It’s a piece of the sun,” he said. My father was a field theorist, and protégé of Hans Bethe, former wartime leader of the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos, who, when accepting his Nobel Prize for discovering the carbon cycle that fuels the stars, explained that “stars have a life cycle much like animals. They get born, they grow, they go through a definite internal development, and finally they die, to give back the material of which they are made so that new stars may live.” To an engineer, fan belts exist between the crankshaft and the water pump. To a physicist, fan belts exist, briefly, in the intervals between stars.

We haven't had a winter like this one in several years. Had to haul out the serious down parka. An ice storm bracketed by snow storms. We did not lose power but thousands did. At one point there were three things you couldn't buy anywhere: a generator, YakTrax, and rock salt. We had a wonderful Christmas Day with family and friends. It was nice to be able to do merry and bright for friends who had no power at home.

 

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