An Open Letter to Rice University President David Leebron and the Board of Trustees, Part II

We now return you to your regularly scheduled moment of silence.

Realigning the Nonalignment Pact

Regular readers may have noticed a downturn in the reliability of our posts recently. We’re sorry. After more than five (?!?) years going strong, the blog in its current format is losing steam. A group of current and former writers is currently having a discussion on the best way to keep NAP vital, interesting [...]

repurposing

The wife and I have started a mom and pop software enterprise. Here’s the first bit of PR we’ve mustered – something the artist requested to put in her site’s upcoming events area…

tigerBaby is a new mom and pop software enterprise based in Chicago. tigerBaby’s primary mission is to match great Chicago print [...]

Oh fuck Steely Dan let’s talk about Randy Newman

OK, so one of the bands that people always try to sell me is Steely Dan. I’ve at best thought them to be pleasant but for the most part find it to be glorified oldster music. Dig up any kind of Steely Dan appreciation post and you will find something similar to this except [...]

Space-rock vs. the Dudebros

A couple of night ago I went to see Maserati here in Austin.

Maserati at the Mohawk, Austin 2011.04.10

One of the psychological effects of an elevated stage, especially when one is close to the stage, is to make the performers appear taller than they really are- literally “larger than life.” My [...]

analytics

In my day, night, weekend and sleep job I do a lot of software development type stuff for marketing firms; in which activity I have absorbed knowledge on the tracking of the people and things that look at the stuff one posts online. So I put this knowledge to use when doing marketing type [...]

The Salt Flat

If I don’t post this week, that will be three weeks for me during which I have contributed nothing but some blithe comments to this blog. I love the NAP. And yet, my ability to pontificate on music has waned deeply into the arena of uselessness.

For all the reasons that I contribute to [...]

sVe

Another future mix entry, Sharon Van Etten‘s “Peace Signs”. Heard it on the radio, but sounded really familiar, so must’ve heard it earlier, probably on a live show I downloaded.

She has a really striking voice imbued with character, and despite her youth it seems real, rather than a put-on like I hear [...]

Oh man…really?

You know every once in a while when searching on the internet you get a weird result.  I can’t even recall what I was searching for that got me to this result but it was one of those moments where you kind of had to follow through and see if it was just as [...]

Damn ?uestlove, U Cold

Last week, after being reminded of its existence by an internet friend, I watched Dave Chappelle’s Block Party.

It’s basically a concert film about a day-long hip-hop show put on by Chappelle. The Roots served as the backing band for most of the artists, and the climax of the film is their [...]