Ah. Sigh. What a fun long weekend. We spent Memorial Day in Nashville, Tennessee. Not my idea. I was just tagging along. But a grand idea regardless. We were lucky with the weather and the layout of the town suits our desire to walk everywhere very well. We had a rental car which we didn’t use. Although we did have an old friend tool us around for part of a day. The holiday weekend may not be representative of most but it suited me just fine. The amount of live music in the lower Broadway area is amazing, bordering on overwhelming.
We lunched at the roof-top bar of the Kid Rock-branded restaurant. Pretty good salad actually. What was striking was that on each of the four levels of the bar a different band was playing, rather loudly. The elevator, the only access to the upper floors, rose through the four levels and on each, only the band associated with the floor could be heard — by me anyway. On another stretch of the street several bars in a row had bands playing with their backs to large open windows. There, it all blended together. And generally, in the background everywhere, two or six or whatever bands could be heard at one time.
The other sources of music were the buses and such-like that had been carved up and hollowed out to create combo party spaces and dance-floors that cruise up and down the streets. One was a firetruck. Another a farm trailer pulled by a tractor. Most were retired school buses. Perhaps 98% of these were occupied by groups of young women. Most of these were dancing in a risque fashion wearing only daisy-duke shorts, cowboy boots and skimpy t-shirts. Some wore cowboy hats. Most had beers. Ahh, hallelujah, the bible-belt.
We did visit some of the museums of the lower Broadway area: the Johnny Cash and Glenn Campbell Museums and the Country Music Hall of Fame. And we spent an evening in a tiny venue which has featured bluegrass musicians for decades. I’m not a huge fan of bluegrass but it was cool to be in a small bar where Bill Monroe had once held court. I’ve been to similar places related to blues in Chicago, flamenco in Spain, and Jazz in Paris and New York. We only happened upon it using the “hey, there’s a big line over at that one” method. We saw a Grammy nominated bluegrass band under somewhat cramped circumstances.
Nashville photographs from the weekend are included in my photography galleries at the end of southeastern usa 2 and thus far all of southeastern usa 3. Way down there at the bottom. In general, if you click on one of the images a gallery with around 250 images should appear.
As to the museums and country music in general I am of a somewhat mixed opinion which has varied greatly over time. I should note that both Cash and Campbell are natives of Arkansas. And, oddly enough, so am I. Both of my parents were journalists who went to work in Arkansas from the northern US because of civil rights issues in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. My Dad worked first in Little Rock, then took a journalism fellowship at Harvard for a year, and returned to do the same thing in Pine Bluff on the Mississippi River delta. My Mom wrote at papers down there also. But, quite unfairly in keeping with the era, my Dad’s career sort of drove the bus.
So I am a son of the south. The weird thing is that I don’t remember much of it at all. My parents hauled me out of there back to the north when it was time for me to first attend school. There are the general memories: the sweet smell of honeysuckle and the pain of bare feet on hot asphalt, and more specific memories: a dog I hid under the house and fed stolen table scraps for a few weeks in Pine Bluff, my Mom ironing and watching the funeral of JFK on a tiny television, me getting in trouble for throwing one of my shoes into a fountain outside of my Mom’s office. Stuff like that. That’s all I got. I have been all over the south on short trips here and there over the decades since then. I never did return to live there. And I really have never felt part of it. So in many ways, for me, the south is a mystery, even though I was born there and lived there for six years.
My Dad was a big fan of the Hank Williams genre and I was also but to a much lesser and retroactive extent. I pretty much sat out the more commercial 1960’s and 70’s Barbara Mandrell era. But came back very strongly for the country rock of the late 70’s. And then phased out again for almost everything after that. A couple things that interested me about the museums was that the Country Music Hall of Fame had taken Bob Dylan, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the Grateful Dead, the Eagles and the like under their wing. Increasing the size of the tent I suppose. But I don’t remember any of those bands as being considered country at the time. Look out Jimmy Buffet and the Beatles. They are coming for you next.
Also there are a few artists that I have thought of as country and have loved over the years: Jerry Jeff Walker and Woody Guthrie and a few others, that somehow haven’t managed to get into the museums, or that I saw represented there, anyway. Overall I suspect that the music industry has some say in who makes it into the museums and who doesn’t and their relationship with the artists back in the day may play a role.
Outside of the lower Broadway district we did spend a chunk of time in the more upscale “gulch”. A good place for English beer and if you want to be photographed with some enormous wings that are quite stylish. It is also the neighborhood of the historic bluegrass place mentioned above.
We also spent a morning walking around a lake at Radnor State Park with an old college friend and her husband, both Tennessee natives, and that provided a nice calm, balancing out the over-abundant stimuli of downtown. The lake included very close-up fledgling great herons, a distant bald eagle, lovely conversation, and a very ominous looking snapping turtle. The size of a VW Beetle. Well perhaps somewhat smaller. We all followed that up with what was perhaps the highlight of the trip, lunch at the original Pharmacy Burger Palace and Beer Garden, not the one downtown.
Nashville is a great three-day trip if the weather cooperates.
I think I have gotten near the end of my adventures learning Python. Currently my favorite sports are cleaning big data sets using Pandas and telling stories with plots using Pandas, Matplotlib, Bokeh, Plotly, Seaborn and Folium. Bokeh is my favorite at the moment. The other half of Python, as I tend to think of it, using classes and writing more conventional code is much more akin to JavaScript than is Pandas. I like that too.
I am looking for a large data project to get into with both halves of the Python language and a bunch of other stuff like CSS and JavaScript tossed in. To be clear, I’m not about Python for the data science and machine learning used in artificial intelligence. I’m just in it to tell stories. That is what I like to do. And as an alternative to D3, Python and its numerous data wrangling and charting libraries work for me.
Regarding AI, I am still using Github Copilot regularly. I like it. Although it is dangerous. The code-hints are misdirected a lot of the time. If you don’t know what you are doing you could spend a lot of time sorting that out. It has upgraded to now include a chat functionality for asking questions which used to be in a beta version called labs and that does seem to be pretty accurate most of the time. I’m still on board with it being a huge time-saver, along the lines of a 50% increase in efficiency which Microsoft has suggested. I still haven’t used it much with HTML, JavaScript and CSS, so I can’t say how well it works there. A couple things that have come up with Copilot and code related AI in general that could become issues. The first of these is that AI is backward looking, so anyone wanting to render it less useful would only need to change the code base very frequently. A second issue is that I noticed, when working with a set of data that contained a column for sex, meaning gender, Copilot didn’t work at all if that column was to be used. A little googling revealed that there is a list of words that, when present, will make the program stop functioning for that line of code or comment. This concerns me in that these lists of words could easily be corrupted by governmental or corporate influence. The last issue is that the code-hinting is often wrong in small ways that are hard to notice leading to unnecessary distraction. But, as mentioned above, I like it and intend to continue using it.
With regard to Adobe’s efforts, I’ve tried their generative fill. This allows you to fill sections of Photoshop files with AI generated content. I didn’t find it all that useful. Sort of a work in progress. Although it is a beta version of Photoshop and I didn’t try it for long. It struck me as a tad clumsy. But I do get it in terms of where they are intending to go with it.
In general over the last two or three weeks I think all of the AI hype has gotten out-of-hand. It is complicated because most companies were using some forms of AI before and not necessarily calling it that. Now they seem to be tripping over themselves to show their AI capabilities. I’m not sure it should be the thing that suddenly lifts the stock market the way that it has. It isn’t really new and it may take a while to get where it is going. I saw a comment this morning that I found apropos of my feelings about AI. “Out with the mundane and in with the creative” or something like that. The push for more clear and succinct writing over that which is complex and creative for instance finds a new context in a world where AI can easily and cheaply generate the former.
I should get around to a post with a lot of various approaches to graphical and / or statistical story-telling with data. For now, there is this, which can be updated daily, scraping a baseball site. A complementary graph of the team budget would go quite nicely alongside this one. But figuring out the daily variations in budget is a bit of a sticky wicket and I couldn’t find it published anywhere. Suffice it to say, I’m not sure the large increase in budget from 2022 to 2023 has had the desired effect just yet.