Boulangerie: October 2023

An unbaked bit from the month.

The Boulangerie is a regular, unscheduled feature of Technocomplex, appearing once or twice a week. It is for half-baked, rising dough, the just-now-in-the-oven entries. After all boulangerie in French is bakery. Entries are always very short. To find out when new loaves have been set out, follow @mrdelong@mastodon.online or watch Substack Notes.

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Boulangerie: Very large bus stop music boxes

They appeared, then disappeared. Crank and hear a song.

October 30, 2023

I walk a mile or so from parking space to seminar room, and I pass the bus stops along the way. I’m impatient, so waiting for the bus rubs me wrong, and I know the brisk walk will do me good anyway. One day, I stumbled upon a new feature at two bus stops near the Rubenstein Arts Center and the Nasher Museum of Art. Colorful boxes with a crank on top. They played music, if you could crank hard enough.

I took the pictures on September 12, 2023, on Campus Drive, caddy-corner from the Rubenstein Arts Center. A couple weeks later they were gone.

This box played a tune from The Mountain Goats, a group with a solid Durham, North Carolina, connection.

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Something of the spontaneous musical and artistic spirit was invoked in a post from May 2023. See the Links at the bottom of that post, too, for

Wendy MacNaughton

’s post in her

DrawTogether with WendyMac

called “The Most Important Response to Our Work is Our Own.” I still think we should do something like “DrawTogether” at a couple of Duke bus stops.

Hanging out with artists in The Ark

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