Notes from Silicon Valley

Finally finished reading this book. This book describes the history of Avante-Garde music in San Francisco. The cast of characters include Ramon Sender, Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick, Terry Riley, Lucianio Berio, John Cage, Stewart Brand (of the “Whole Earth Catalog” and the Long Now Foundation), Don Buchla (Synthesizer pioneer), Ken Kesey (and the Trip Festivals), Phil [...]

I decided to read some additional novels by Jack Kerouac, after listening to a series of lectures about the beat poets from Naropa University, which have been posted at http://www.archive.org. I had not read “Big Sur” previously, and decided that it looked interesting. It is a study of a person going mad, as you read it [...]

Heard a reference to the “Project for a New American Century” and decided to investigate. These people are basically the mind trust of the current Bush administrations foreign policy and defense policy. Normally you could cry conspiracy theory about what they are currently doing, but that is not the case here; they published their ideas in [...]

“Angels and Demons” is a very good book, I think better than “The DaVinci Code;” although I am curious how the main character has a different girlfriend in “The DaVinci Code” when he has the heroine in “Angels and Demons” as [...]

Finished “The Devil in the White City” by Erik Larson. The book is really two books interwoven; the first describes the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair; while the second describes a doctor living in Chicago who was a mass murderer. Chicago in 1893 sounded dreadful because of the lack of sanitary conditions at the time. The doctor [...]