Recent content in Hello on Aahaan
The Mahabharata is as contorted and branched as a narrative has ever naturally become. Though the poem balances upon the events of the Battle of Kurukshetra, it twists through the tales of generations before and after, the distant causes and enduring consequences of this internecine struggle. So, too, does it reach through multiple frames of narration to discuss events of only tangential…
I’ve written not one, but two new things for school publications! First, I’ve written about The Sound, one of my favorite bands, in Firebird . If you were wondering why I’d dug up an old Sound interview for this installment of the Library (you probably weren’t), this is why. Additionally, I wrote an op-ed about AI use on both sides of the classroom for our newspaper , The…
Minor League Baseball is a wonderful form of entertainment. Unlike the majors, it is both highly accessible and dirt cheap. Teams will put on all sorts of wacky promotions, like mascot races, world record pushes , and veggie-themed celebrations . There is also something refreshing about the lower standard of baseball on display. The certainty of a play’s outcome, at least at this level, is…
This is an overhead view of the University of Chicago Quadrangle, circa 1914. Figure 1: I couldn’t find a newer licensable aerial photo of the quad. There are new buildings, of course, but the quad’s paths have not changed very much from their original design in the Olmsted Brothers Plan . The north-south and east-west paths continue through the entire quad and there is another path…
There is a concern that I will keep repeating the same websites in these collections, but so far that has not been an issue. With the new RSS Reader, it has become much easier for me to manage aggregator feeds like Hacker News and Lobsters , so I have access to a bunch of random tech blogs. As for the links of interest: Music NME on the Internet Archive : NME sits at the bottom tier of music…
Ideally an app would be its own justification, but there are so many dang RSS readers out there that there is nothing inherently interesting about making yet another one. I am flattering myself by considering my own app, Celadon , to be of sufficient interest, but clearly I believe in it if I made it. I would like to discuss how and why. I can’t quite recall how I came across RSS, because…
I think that you could, I really do! In fact, an attempt was made to this very end in the recent past, and while it failed, it carries important lessons for us, as potential leaders of the new government. We study history to inform our future actions, so let us examine the facts of this abortive abortion of the ancien régime and see how we can launch a more effective coup.
I have a new article out in Firebird (that’s UChicago’s music magazine) about Siouxsie and the Banshees’s Kaleidoscope ! This post that I wrote a while back was a collection of interesting tidbits that I found over the course of researching for this article. Enjoy!
My friend is not a fan of La Campanella . Despite being among Liszt’s best known works, he told me recently, it is not a particularly great piece of music, never mind the fact that the theme itself is Paganini’s. Back when I still played the piano (in elementary school), I would occasionally put on classical music before bed, usually Mozart or Mendelssohn or something. I can’t…
The French Wars of Religion are an interesting period of history. My AP Euro class (way back when) focused far more on it than any other religious conflict of the era. I don’t think the 30 Years War even got a mention, which seems like a bit of an oversight. My interest in the period was revived recently so I went down a Wikipedia rabbithole, and found that many of the articles on the…
Another edition of interesting things that I have encountered online. Music Adrian Janes Interviews Adrian Borland : To me, The Sound is the essential post-punk band. Jeopardy and From the Lions Mouth are passionate and steely works that hit you in the face with their sincerity. If there’s one thing you’ll read about The Sound, though, it’s that they’re underrated, which…
Taking required art courses, as marginalized as they are, is a privilege of the university. The best class I have taken in college was a class offered by the creative writing department about making comics. The second best was a class I just took, also by the creative writing department, on graphic design. I suppose that the creative writing department is to the college what protists are to the…
Stina Nordenstam is one of those strange figures that I am only aware of because of the internet. She’s a Swedish songwriter who was active in the ’90s and early 2000s, but she hasn’t released an album in two decades or left a trace online in one, and has therefore in one way ceased to exist. Regular readers (myself) will notice the appearance of the musical stalking tag on a lot…
For various reasons, I have been reading a lot about SatB recently. They’re a fascinating group of people and there’s a lot of interviews and whatnot that they’ve done. Some interesting tidbits from the recent readings: The Johns There were three Johns who played guitar for the Banshees: McKay, McGeoch, and Carruthers. (sidenote: John Valentine Carruthers, which is a great name…
I went to Indiana Dunes recently, along with fifty other people, as the last among my friends to do so. The others went either last year or the year before, so I knew what to expect, but I somehow had trouble reconciling the concept of sand dunes with Indiana in the same way that I laughed at the billboards in Chicago advertising their beaches. It’s a case of taking what you can get, I…
I have gotten around to compiling the interesting things I’ve read over the past couple of weeks. Without further ado: Music Siouxsie Sioux - A Teenage Obsession : People laugh at teenage girls for being obsessed with certain artists but it used to be a more common thing, and a more physical thing. This guy had some really interesting experiences with the Banshees in their early days until…
Can you solve this Immaculate (Music) Grid?
I’ve talked to a lot of people about where they find new music. One gets them from talking to fellow musicians. Another solicits them from friends. Many are dependent on Spotify’s suggestions to some degree. None of them actually read musical criticism in judging what to listen to. Why is that? More importantly, does it matter? Friction Music has historically been on a trajectory towards greater…
The mayoral primary was heating up when I arrived in New York City on a humid June morning. By the time I’d reached the apartment, three flights up, I’d absorbed the spirit: an hour of lugging my bags down, up, and around had made me sweaty, and the twenty minutes I waited for someone to open the door had caused it to crust. The floor had tracks of New York dirt, the counters were…
I feel like there has been a mismatch between the amount that I’ve read over the summer and what I have to “show” for it. Generally, when somebody talks about what they’ve read (or wants to impress on somebody just how much they’ve read), they will be referring exclusively to books. The book as a structure seems to carry with it an inherent prestige, which is…
In my first year of college humanities, my class was instructed to keep a commonplace book of quotes and comments for each of our assigned readings to get us thinking critically about them. This had the effect of making the unit more interesting, but also of making the idea of keeping a commonplace book less attractive. Still, the idea held some appeal to me. Over the past couple of years, I have…
I decided a few weeks back, while interning at Tudor, to create a new website. The initial reason was that circumstances conspired to make me use a command line editor in order to debug something. In the second semester of my freshman year, I was forced to use Emacs for a week. No reason was given. I did not enjoy this task from above because Emacs felt cumbersome and the commands they gave us…