Stepped outside yesterday afternoon and happened to look toward the easterly sky, and caught the tail end of a SpaceX rocket as it left the atmosphere. We’ve got a great, unobstructed view of Cape Canaveral launches from our house, even though we’re just under 60 miles away. The sky was cloudless, so I wish I had seen it from the beginning. Is there any way to receive alerts for impending rocket launches from the Cape? There are a couple of iPhone apps I’ve tried that supposedly do this, but they don’t work — no notifications received yesterday.⁣⁣⁣ (Dec. 18 Update: the iOS app LaunchTime did send a notification an hour before today’s aborted launch.)

Read a fine profile on Phillip Glass in the Washington Post, titled If You Think You Know Who Philip Glass Is, You Probably Don’t. ⁣⁣⁣From that article:

Glass also addresses the fallacy that all he does is play the same chords over and over. Certainly the language he developed, unhelpfully labeled ‘minimalism,’ involved subtle variations of similar patterns. But, “It never repeated all the time,” Glass writes in his memoir, “for if it had, it would have been unlistenable.” The chords are constantly shifting and changing; that’s the point. ⁣

Some amusement here at the label of minimalism as ‘unhelpful,’ as most approach the categorization head-on.⁣⁣⁣
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Last night we watched the documentary McQueen (streaming on Amazon Prime): fascinating, heartbreaking.⁣⁣ I learn a lot from documentaries about creative people who I previously knew nothing about.

I’ve started slowly working my way (and it will be slow) through Quietus’s ‘Albums of the Year’ list, a yearly tradition. I’m at 100 and enjoying the album Lekhfa by Maryam Saleh, Maurice Louca and Tamer Abu Ghazaleh … we’re off to a good start. (UPDATE: now I’m on to 99, the latest Simian Mobile Disco album, which a treat as well.)⁣⁣⁣⁣