Tag Archives: history

Bowblog is ten years old today

I adapted the name from Kevin Werbach’s Werblog, which seemed like a cool thing to do at the time. I’d been blogging for a few years before that (since the twentieth century) but only fragments survive. The archive suggests I used to update it a lot more too – back before Twitter. Anyway, I’ll tweet [...]

Igor Stravinsky, Tupac Shakur and the uncanny

The Player Piano was the Tupac Hologram of its day. The most thrilling of our inventions are the ones that return to us a person we’ve lost or that recall a scene from the past that we couldn’t have experienced or a place we couldn’t have known. There’s a rush, a kind of zipwire effect. [...]

You know, actual curation

Everyone’s going on about curation these days. We’re all curators now. But yesterday I witnessed some of the old-fashioned variety, the kind they do in art galleries, and I was blown away. I took two of my kids to Tate Britain (four different modes of transport: train, tube, boat and bus – I suspect that’s [...]

The second-best book about twentieth century music

Everybody knows the best book about Twentieth Century music is Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise but there’s another brilliant book set in the same period – Wilfrid Sheed’s The House That George Built, a history of the golden age of American popular music. It’s about the generations of American songwriters, starting at the turn [...]

Is that it for the PC?

The latest Mac OS is the first that can only be bought from an app store, from a tightly-integrated, locked-down, official source. I reckon that’s pretty much it for the freerange, open platform we call the PC. Googling myself the other day, I found this article from The Guardian nine years ago. It’s about the [...]

Really suffering for your art

Everyone says music is getting more physical again. We continue to get our daily sounds from ever more insubstantial sources, floating above us like those glittering landscapes in Neuromancer, but we’re going to more concerts and festivals than ever and buying more stuff while we’re at it (merch. fancy limited editions. Even musical instruments are [...]

My inspiration

I’m not a geek. I missed the boat. When I left school they’d just acquired a computer. It was a mysterious, chattering presence in a room in the maths department – a teletype connected to a mainframe somewhere – and I never met it. But when I first encountered a computer – in a roomful [...]