Meandering Tour

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Random observations about current events, language, science, technology, culture, and life -- with a touch of humor

Meandering Tour

Time Travel | Rock Concerts | AI Music | Apostrophobia | Password Protection

Nov 06, 2025

5) Train of Thought

Last week, I was riding the train from Newark, NJ to Baltimore, MD, when, a few minutes from my destination, I glanced out the window at street after street of dilapidated housing. Suddenly, I realized that’s where my father grew up as a teenager. Not just his neighborhood in East Baltimore, but the actual location, at the corner of North Milton Avenue and East Hoffman Street, where his parents owned a small store from the 1930s through the 1950s. The family lived upstairs.

I was seated on the right side of the train, headed west, and looked right, to the north. (Google Maps)

My father, Jerry Sherman, was born in 1925. He himself used to muse about “where he had come from” when he rode Amtrak past his old working class neighborhood. Granted, Baltimore is a small town, but my own coincidental connections to the corner of Milton and Hoffman — past, present, and, yes, future — are surprising.

In March 2012, the Baltimore Sun ran an article about a major drug conspiracy case involving Felicia “Snoop” Pearson, who played a hitwoman on HBO’s The Wire. According to one of the photo captions, “Prosecutors say the drug ring’s heroin was packaged and distributed to dealers all over East Baltimore, with the corner of Hoffman and Milton the hub.”

I captured a screen shot of the photo (see below) and determined (through Google Map addresses and my father’s military records) that the structure with the yellow awning in the center was my grandparents’ store and my father’s home. I then matched pictures of family members, including him and me, standing at that very location.

There I am (above left), circa 1957, around age 3, sitting with my mother, aunt, cousins, and paternal grandparents on a stoop on one side of the building. (Yes, I’m wearing a sailor suit.) Above right is my father, in 1944 or 1945, then around 19 years old, standing on the other side of the store, dressed in his Air Force uniform. (He flew 10 missions over Germany in World War II as a tail gunner in a B-24.)

Two years after the Sun article was published, I was reading On Such a Full Sea, a novel by one of my favorite authors, Chang-Rae Lee, about a post-apocalyptic world “ruined by environmental disaster where the population is divided between those who live in Charter villages, highly regulated and self-contained labor settlements, and the open counties, land that is full of crime and unsupervised by the government.”

The story takes place around what I surmise to be 2150 in a labor settlement called B-Mor, originally Baltimore. “Maybe Charters can easily forget what it’s like out there,” says the narrator,

. . . but we B-Mors and others in similar settlements should be aware of the possibilities. We shouldn’t take for granted the security and comfort of our neighborhoods. . . . But hold on, you might say. On our street, once called North Milton Avenue and renamed Longevity Way by our predecessors. . . there hasn’t been a property theft in recent memory, and a report of a serious crime, some mugging or assault, would likely halt all work and social activity immediately, for how exceedingly rare such a thing would be, like some solar eclipse. . . . It’s been nearly a hundred years since our originals arrived and fifty plus since the final reconstruction and incorporation of what B-Mor is today, and for all that time we have kept up the community, curbstone by curbstone, brick by brick, we have not let our windows get dingy or our brass knobs spot, we are always after our children to pick up after themselves in the playgrounds . . . . B-Mor works because we work, our sense of purpose driving us that extra measure, that extra hour, and then, of course, the knowledge of what’s out in the counties and what it used to be like here before the originals landed refueling us whenever we flag.

Shortly after finishing the novel, I attended a reading by Lee, then director of Princeton’s Program in Creative Writing, at an independent bookstore in Baltimore. In the Q&A session, I told him of my family connection to North Milton Avenue and asked, how in the world he had discovered and settled on that specific street.

Lee said that several years earlier, he had looked out the window as he was traveling by train through Baltimore, just as I did last week, in roughly the same location. He surveyed the bleak urban landscape and eventually decided to research the neighborhood. And so was born Serenity Way in the 22nd Century.

I vaguely recall reading these opening lines of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (Burnt Norton) long ago:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

I’ve written before about my challenges, as an overly literal thinker, in understanding poetry, but my hunch (plus I’ll confess I’ve skimmed a few papers) is that Eliot views time as cyclical rather than a linear sequence of past, present, and future, so that, according to one source “past and present are not truly gone — they’re contained or echoed in the future.”

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

So, is place constant, but time somehow moves around it? Is the corner of Milton and Hoffman a “still point” around which my father and I and Lee’s imagination have “danced?” Another source speculates about the poem’s meaning, as follows: “Past, present, and future coexist — they’re dimensions of one continuous reality, rather than a sequence of separate moments.”

I wrote to Lee after his book talk to share a link to the Baltimore Sun crime story about the corner of Milton and Hoffman as well as the family pictures taken there. “In a sense,” I said to him, “I’ve ‘watched’ the neighborhood transform from the mid-1940s to the late-1950s to 2012 — and then on to B-Mor” 125 years from now.

Professor Lee replied with a kind and generous e-mail, saying in part:

Thanks much for your note and links. Amazing to consider the history of your dad’s neighborhood. Someday it will be something nice again, I bet -- time has a way of making right (and wrong).

And since time reportedly waits for no one, I left this column unfinished for a few hours, drove to East Baltimore, headed four blocks north on Milton from the Amtrak overpass, and parked across the street from what used to be my grandparents’ home (see photos below). There, I tried to feel the past and imagine the future, while being mindful of the present.

My dad died 20 years ago, leaving us a treasure of old photos and wonderful memories. He would have turned 100 today.

Left to right: My father standing next to his parents’ store in 1944 or 1945; me standing in the same spot a few days ago; extended family members, including my mother (second row, left), aunt, cousins, my paternal grandparents, and me, circa 1957; and me, on the very same stoop, a few days ago.

4) Eardrumbeat

When I was out of town last week, I attended a concert at the Barclays Center (home of the Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty), featuring Tame Impala, the psychedelic, synth-infused music “project” of Australian singer and multi-instrumentalist Kevin Parker.

I estimated the crowd to be around 15,000 — about 80% members of Gens Y and Z, 20% Gen X’ers, and me, a rounding error. My “OK, Boomer” brain figured that half the audience had taken MDMA (aka Molly), and I think the young woman sitting next to me was probably named Molly. Fortunately, I was not seated behind the guy dressed as a banana, with a rather tall stem (see photo below).

The heavily synthesized music was hypnotic (an accessible album to sample is Currents), the light show beautiful but intense (Parker, like other artists, has issued warnings that his light shows can cause seizures). Even though I could have made a quick exit from my aisle seat, I never once retreated, but I did have to avert my gaze several times. (Remember the scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark when the bad guys look directly at the light from the Ark of the Covenant, and their faces melt and eyeballs explode?)

I did leave my seat, however, when the warm-up group, an electronic dance band named the Fcukers (not a typo), took the stage. Their “retro-futuristic, slightly ironic vibe, combining ‘90s rave nostalgia with contemporary cool” did not appeal to me.

While they played, I stood near a concession stand, drinking a bottle of water to hydrate, but not because I had taken Molly. All of a sudden, a guy who seemed to be one of the older members of the Gen X cohort (born between 1965 and 1980) sidled up to me, and asked, “Hey, man, do you have any matches? I left mine at home. These kids only have vapes.”

“Sorry, man, I don’t,” I replied, adding “man” to try to fit in, but worried that he was actually some kind of match narc, ready to bust me if I handed him a pack of strikes. “I know what you mean. Like the old days. I feel you.”

“Thanks, anyway,” Older Gen X guy said. “I noticed you standing there and thought you’d be one of the few guys here tonight who might have some.” Cold.

Frankly, I can’t say I loved the show. There was “too much sound” from multiple synthesizers, a booming bass, and thunderous drums, all of which drowned out the instrumental finesse I’m used to hearing on Tame’s studio albums. But I was thrilled to be there for the experience and the energy of the crowd, even though my decibel app (I think a smirking Molly caught me looking at it on my iPhone) maxed out at nearly 112, which the program compared to the noise from a subway train.

You might wonder why, back in Baltimore three days later, I went to the Ottobar, a local joint with a capacity of around 350, to see Beach Fossils, an indie rock band from Brooklyn, known for its reverb-soaked guitar riffs and laid-back vocals.

Accompanied this time by my wife Julie, we reckoned that most of the crowd, largely dressed in 1990s grunge “fashion,” ranged in age from 25 to 45. Due to the smaller space, I guess, the decibels registered higher than Tame, maxing out at 117 (five ticks higher) and were characterized by the app as comparable to a diesel truck. What exactly is the auditory difference between the roar of a Mack truck and a subway train?

In case you’re worried about me, you should know that I also like less edgy music and have attended concerts by bands such as Dawes, Luna, and Wilco. I love singer-songwriters like Patty Larkin, Cass McCombs, and Sarah Jarosz, plus all types of jazz and, of course, old-timers like Jackson Browne, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell. This past summer, Julie and I saw Graham Nash, age 82, perform an open-air concert at the Payomet Performing Arts Center on Cape Cod. His high tenor was still crystal clear, and his touching stories (some about his relationship with Mitchell) were heartfelt.

But there’s something exhilarating about cutting-edge music, noise and all, although Julie finds it infuriating to watch TV and movies with me, as I repeatedly ask, “What did he say?!” I know it’s not healthy to subject myself to ear-splitting decibels and eye-piercing laser beams, but I have few other vices aside from unsolicited grammar and punctuation correction.

It’s also an enriching form of collective lifelong learning with friends and family who share new music. The most satisfying case is my own son, Will, for whom I played a wide variety of tunes when he was a young boy. Now, as the saying goes, the student has become the teacher; it’s Will who regularly turns me on to new bands, including Tame Impala and Beach Fossils, by sending me his Spotify playlists.

Below is a photo of us in November 2004, when Will was 9 years old, at, yes, the Ottobar, where we had gone to see Luna perform — “on a school night,” his grandmother noted pointedly at the time.

The Ottobar, Baltimore, MD, November 23, 2004. From right to left: Scott Sherman, Will Sherman, and Rick Rubin, a contemporary furniture designer not the music producer.

3) Slappa da bass, HAL

I urge you to listen to at least the first few seconds of each of the following audio clips. The first is me scatting (or am I beatboxing?) a bass line that popped into my head.

-0:07

Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade.

The second is a song based on that clip, generated in seconds by an AI music app called Suno, using just a few prompts. Herbie Mann meets Bobby McFerrin?

-1:42

Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade.

Would you prefer a Windham Hill version?

-3:17

Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade.

What hath Suno wrought?

According to news accounts, the start-up, founded in Cambridge, MA, in 2023, is in discussions to raise more than $100 million dollars at a $2 billion valuation, having recently raised $125 million at a $500 million valuation.

Generated by ChatGPT

You can easily imagine the dire implications for artists and record companies. The major labels are in negotiations with Suno and a competitor named Udio to resolve ongoing legal battles over copyright infringement.

I’m looking to join this litigation as an aggrieved party. You see, Suno quickly created a lounge singer version of my own original song called “ Meandering Tour” (I composed and recorded it long before I started writing this Substack). Here’s a link to my original. Click below for Suno’s version.

-1:06

Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade.

Each time someone streams my song, I earn $0.000006821, and yet I receive nothing at all for variations created by Suno, using my lyrics. This kind of ominous violation is an outrage, for which I — and Tame Impala — deserve to be compensated.

2) Sidetracks

Apostrophobia, Part 1: Make it stop.

Apostrophobia, Part 2: Kudos to Mpix for its 30% off Christmas card ad, including tips on "how to pluralize your last name.” NB: Tennises, Marcuses, and DuBoises.

• Which do you prefer?

Left: 2013 book about Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos; Right: Hi’s Variety Store, Fleet Street, Baltimore, MD

1) Ae$@(82#64f!&5DF

Researchers at Durham University in the UK have demonstrated the ability of a smartphone coupled with a “deep learning model” to pick up and decipher the distinctive clicks of laptop keystrokes. This “ side-channel attack” succeeded 93% of the time, even over Zoom.

In other words, if you’re logging on to your laptop at Starbucks, even if you cover your keyboard, your password, no matter how complicated, might not be acoustically secure.

As countermeasures, the researchers recommended typing style changes and sound interference, among other techniques.

I’d also recommend using this revolutionary password management tool (pictured below) while screaming at the top of your lungs.