"Chayka, a millennial, is nostalgic for... the images he once shared on Tumblr; an earlier, jankier World Wide Web of illegal file-sharing, blogs and and massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) forums."

"He first heard 'My Favorite Things' not in 'The Sound of Music' but the John Coltrane version, listening to an indie station as he wended his way back from a friend’s house in the suburbs in the early ’00s. Boomers and Gen X, with more years logged algorithm-free, might find 'Filterworld' unduly bleak; Zoomers, hopelessly naïve. Or, as they say on the internet, YMMV."

I'm reading "Can You Escape the Algorithm?/‘Filterworld’ Gives It a Try. An experiment in digital disengagement prompts Kyle Chayka to consider how technology has narrowed our choices and dulled the culture" (free access link to the NYT).

That's a review, from a couple weeks ago, of the book "Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture" by Kyle Chayka (commission-earned link).

I'm reading that this morning after searching the NYT archive for "MMORPGs," a very annoying set of letters that I'd never noticed before, but ran across as an answer in a crossword, clued as "RuneScape and World of Warcraft, for two: Abbr."

My reaction was: If that's the way it's going to be, I'm not doing your crosswords anymore.

Overreaction? My test of whether this is something I should recognize, because it comes up in real life, is whether it's in the NYT archive. This was not the NYT crossword. And, yes, I'm a Boomer.

You can see that the recent appearance of MMORPG was in parentheses, after a spelling-out of what it abbreviates. Before that, it hadn't appeared since 2019. But back in 2013 and in 2005-2006, the annoying letter combo appeared a handful of times. I see the phrase "the wonderfully named MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games)."

I guess I won't boycott that puzzle, but I can see how puzzle publishers risk alienating their audience. Puzzles are full of things that are easy for Boomers like me and that must be very annoying to Millennials and Zoomers. But when I see something like MMORPG, I just think it's a pathetic play to get young people to think this thing is for them. And please don't say YMMV either. 

And yet MMORPGs are among the things the "Filterworld" author is nostalgic for. It's not new. It's old. Mid-level old. Like blogs. I'm nostalgic for blogs too, of course, but I'm still here in mine, and I presume there's this other group of people — who the hell are they? — who are still out there in their MMORPGs.

David Lee Roth explains jazz using The Beatles.

The Van Halen frontman was asked by Joe Rogan to explain jazz:

“…We will do it in the old Beatles style, here is the best way to go for somebody that’s interested [in Jazz]. The old Lennon note and McCartney note. The McCartney note is always kinda happy... There’s a darkness among those last three notes. That’s where you get a little bit of pepper in the chocolate, ya know. It’s a little wistful, a little melancholy and when you put them together it doesn’t sound like they do but if I could I would sing both parts and it goes together. Bittersweet like my fucking career, like my last three relatio-here we go!”

Rogan: "So you kinda have to listen to jazz like you’d taste wine?" Roth:

“The best for this is Thelonious Monk, the same thing, the right hand is Paul, the left hand is John, it’s working and you can’t tell is it happy or sad? I don’t know how was dinner last night? Same! It’s indicative of what’s around you because it’s not just happy, that’s Disney. It’s not just sad, think of someone just tuning his guitar to sad, think of Leonard Cohen. [Roth imitates Cohen] That sounded more like Bowie but whatever.”

Here's the whole interview.



I have not listened (yet), so I can't pinpoint the place where Roth plays the notes and Joe Rogan tries to sing like Leonard Cohen. If you know the timestamp, let me know.

"I’d been playing in a lot of bands, and often I’d feel like improvising not on the chords but on the melody or the rhythm or just the mood of a song."

"But I couldn’t. The other musicians didn’t know what I was doing, they got thrown off," said the great jazz bassist Charlie Haden, speaking about a time in the 1950s, before he found Ornette Coleman, who was having a similar problem with other musicians. Here's "The Shape of Jazz to Come," the first album they made together and one of 4 albums that made "1959 The Year that Changed Jazz."

Haden died yesterday, at the age of 76. 

ADDED: Let me embed that "Year That Changed Jazz" video. You'll see Haden, speaking beginning at 7:57, talking about Miles Davis (during the part about the first of the 4 albums, which is "Kind of Blue" ("It makes you feel life so deeply that you could almost cry")).



AND: Start the video at 28:05 to concentrate on the Ornette Coleman material and to hear Haden discuss his connection to Coleman. "This guy started to play — it was like the heavens opened up to me, because I saw and I heard something that I'd been feeling."