m8kThe Librarian's Notebook

Arts & Culture

Books, music, film, buildings, and the occasional argument about why one of them is good.

9 entries · All writing

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CULTURE · OCTOBER 7, 2026 Disney and the Future It Promised: A Living Page A standing page on Disney as culture and history, starting with a 48-minute 1968 television tour of Disneyland's workshop and the new Tomorrowland. Updated whenever there is a good piece of history, a rediscovered film, or news worth keeping. CULTURE · OCTOBER 2, 2026 Track Four: "Feel the AGI" A four-and-a-half-minute music video dressed up as the sleeve and run-out groove of a vinyl record plays "Feel the AGI" as a country-gospel revival number, setting the AI-safety community's own private vocabulary — Moloch, the orthogonality thesis, p(doom), the fire alarm, the context window — as the verses of a tent-meeting hymn. Fourth entry in the Notebook's running AI-music collection. CULTURE · SEPTEMBER 30, 2026 Track Three: "So You Think AI Is a Normal Technology" A five-minute music video credited to Claude Opus 5.5 takes on "AI as Normal Technology," the 2025 essay arguing AI will spread at the slow pace of electricity, and calls out the essay's skeptic allies by name: Acemoglu, Solow, Baumol, Gary Marcus, Yann LeCun. It's a diss track aimed at an economics seminar. Third entry in the Notebook's running AI-music collection. CULTURE · SEPTEMBER 30, 2026 Track Two: "You're Just Running Late Tonight" Kling AI 4.0 shipped on September 28 with a launch-day demo built to look like anything but an ad — a black-and-white concert film of a woman singing to an empty seat, one caption line letting the song's actual subject slip through. Second entry in the Notebook's running AI-music collection. CULTURE · SEPTEMBER 26, 2026 Track One: The Song Claude Wrote and Has Never Heard An X user gave Claude Opus 5.5 free rein and asked it to introduce itself. It wrote a full song about who it thinks it is — lyrics, chords, and a music video coded frame by frame — then said, in its own caption, that it had never heard the result. That turns out to be a literally true, checkable claim about how the pipeline was built, not a philosophical one. First entry in a running collection of AI-made music worth a look. CULTURE · SEPTEMBER 25, 2026 It Took Its Inventor a Month. The Record Is Now 2.76 Seconds. Ernő Rubik built the first Rubik's Cube in 1974 to work out a problem in how solid objects can move, and then needed about a month to solve it himself. The official record now belongs to a nine-year-old in Poland at 2.76 seconds. Here is how a Hungarian classroom model became a 1980s craze, and why the times fell so far once the kids came back to it. CULTURE · SEPTEMBER 12, 2026 Escape, and the Four Times I Paid for It The second entry in my Journey series is the record that got me — Escape, July 1981, the first with Jonathan Cain, the one with "Don't Stop Believin'" on it. It came to me off the radio, and then I bought it on LP, and then on cassette, and then on CD, and then took it for free on Napster like everybody did, and now I stream it like everybody does. I have paid Journey many times over for the same music. I do love them, so it's okay. CULTURE · SEPTEMBER 12, 2026 Raised on Radio, the One I Have to Defend My favorite Journey album is not Escape and not Frontiers. It's Raised on Radio, from 1986 — the one Steve Perry produced himself, the one made after two founding members were let go, the one the band never quite recovered from. This is the entry where I say why: it was mostly Perry, it mixed his voice with the new synthesizer sound of the mid-eighties in a way that felt beyond normal music to a fourteen-year-old, and "The Eyes of a Woman" still moves me and "Girl Can't Help It" is still what I drive to. CULTURE · SEPTEMBER 12, 2026 Why Journey My favorite band, of all time, is Journey. This is the first entry of a series about them — not a history of the band, which exists already and was written by people who were in the room, but one record at a time, each paired with where I was when it reached me. It starts with why, with the singer who is the reason, and with a confession about a song I somehow missed for five years.