but look at what you're missing

Missing nothing from Christmas buffet at work

John Sayles, A Moment in the Sun
Robyn Hitchcock, Tromsø, Kaptein
Common, The Dreamer/The Believer (streaming at AOL)
Robert Wyatt, Drury Lane
Arthur Russell, World of Echo

• This snippet of dialog from A Moment in the Sun might be the best thing I've read all year.
  
  “I been thinkin bout peach pie,” says Wilbert.
  “Aint none on that wagon.”
  “Man needs a dream.”
  “Not me."
  
  I think it sums everything up. The whole human condition.
    
• Maya Angelou is surprised at the language surrounding her reading included on "The Dreamer" from the new Common album, though it must be said that she completely owns the track (starting at the 4:40 mark).
  
  
  Common featuring Maya Angelou, "The Dreamer"
      
• My wife came across this bit from Umberto Eco's Travels in Hyperreality about the Madonna Inn of San Luis Obispo, CA. We spent our honeymoon in the "Rock Bottom" room - each has its own theme - and still talk about the strawberry champagne wedding cake obtained from their in-house Swiss bakery. We had a steak in here:
  
  
  
  Anyway, Umberto Eco nails the place by describing as follows:
  
  Let's say that Albert Speer, while leafing through a book on Gaudi, swallowed an overgenerous dose of LSD and began to build a nuptial catacomb for Liza Minnelli.
     
• Joe Bonomo pointed to this story about M. Henry Jones, an artist in the East Village who has been for decades pursuing the perfection of an arcane form of 3-D photography, who is being forced to move to a new studio because of rent prices. The landlord, for what it's worth, comes off like he's really helping the guy out as much as possible.
       
• It brought up Mr. Jones connections to the New York underground film scene, one of the greatest microperiods of art history (Jonas Mekas' ecstatic compendium Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959-1971 is the best book on the subject) , and this old post about Harry Smith's films and the tedious and luck-of-the-draw manner by which knowledge was once obtained and now, just from clicking around, emerges a film by another of that scene that I've read about but never seen.
  
  
  Bruce Baillie, Mass for the Dakota Sioux, parts 1 and 2
  and over on Facebook I see that my friend Dickie Landry is going to be doing a solo saxophone concert in the Guggenheim rotunda in March and then I glance over at Spotify and see the profile of someone who's recently passed away, and like this post, it's all too much, it's a buffet table with too many hands in the food, and I have friends that proudly opt out of the din of social media or the Internet in general which, whatever, they seem to do just fine, but I want to pull them over and say but look at what you're missing.