Earlier this month, I commented that we need a way to distinguish between the first instance of times between 1am and 2am and the second instance on the day time switches back from Daylight Saving Time. And here's this item from "News of the Weird":
"In Cary, N.C., a woman gave birth to twins early in the morning of Nov. 4, one at 1:32 a.m. and the other 34 minutes later, at 1:06 a.m. (after Daylight Saving Time ended). [WRAL-TV (Raleigh), 11-6-07]"
11.30.2007
rewrite needed
An e-mail at my academic address began as follows:
"If you have recieved this email, please forward it to the graduate students and other interested parties in your department."
Never mind the irony that a letter originating from and sent to English departments manages to misspell "receive." What amuses me is that first phrase.
What, then, are we supposed to do if we have not received the e-mail?
(Uh-oh...I just realized that, in fact, all of you have not received the e-mail. Apparently, the answer is: witness it being mocked.)
(Thus endeth NaBloPoMo.37 38 posts - yr pwn'd!)
"If you have recieved this email, please forward it to the graduate students and other interested parties in your department."
Never mind the irony that a letter originating from and sent to English departments manages to misspell "receive." What amuses me is that first phrase.
What, then, are we supposed to do if we have not received the e-mail?
(Uh-oh...I just realized that, in fact, all of you have not received the e-mail. Apparently, the answer is: witness it being mocked.)
(Thus endeth NaBloPoMo.
11.29.2007
I'm under your spell
Finally got around to seeing Secretary (I'm going to wear a nametag that says HELLO MY NAME IS SEVERAL YEARS AGO), partly upon recommendations of friends (yes, some of them are just pervs) but mostly because of Maggie Gyllenhaal's performance in Stranger Than Fiction. Without doing a full-on review, I'll say only that I thought the movie was quite good, but I was curious, in reading several reviews afterwards, to find two points left unmentioned.
One triviality a lot of critics noted, as a sign of the oddness of James Spader's character, is his insistence that his letters be typed on an old IBM Selectric. While it's true that's eccentric, it's surprising that few critics seem to have noticed that, so far as I can tell on two viewings (one with commentary), no object in the film seems to be dated past the mid- to late-eighties (the cars are the most obvious instance) - which makes sense in a way, given that the short story the movie's based on (by Mary Gaitskill) was written in 1988. Granted: even in the mid-eighties that would have been a bit old-fashioned...but nowhere near as much as it would now.
The other is an extended sequence late in the movie (without providing spoilers, I will simply say that it involves Maggie Gyllenhaal's character seated at a desk) seems far more legible as at least partly fantasy than as reality. At least part of it is accompanied by the usual movie signifiers of fantasy - blurry slow zooms, overlaid exposures of Gyllenhaal's face and the faces of others - but mainly, the scenes involving large crowds, TV crews, and the like seem dramatically out of character with the rest of the film...as actuality. They fit quite well from Gyllenhaal's character's POV at that point in the film, though...which is to say that ultimately (and this is a point indirectly made in the commentary track by director Steven Shainberg) it doesn't much matter, since both diegetically and emotionally the scenes bring us to the same place. Some clever graduate student, by the way, has probably made a big deal out of the handful of subtle Christ references recurring throughout the movie...
Finally - and as a reward for viewers masochistic enough (ahem) to sit through the entire credits sequence - this shot just might illustrate the funniest closing credits bit ever:
(This will probably make no sense if you haven't seen the film...)
One triviality a lot of critics noted, as a sign of the oddness of James Spader's character, is his insistence that his letters be typed on an old IBM Selectric. While it's true that's eccentric, it's surprising that few critics seem to have noticed that, so far as I can tell on two viewings (one with commentary), no object in the film seems to be dated past the mid- to late-eighties (the cars are the most obvious instance) - which makes sense in a way, given that the short story the movie's based on (by Mary Gaitskill) was written in 1988. Granted: even in the mid-eighties that would have been a bit old-fashioned...but nowhere near as much as it would now.
The other is an extended sequence late in the movie (without providing spoilers, I will simply say that it involves Maggie Gyllenhaal's character seated at a desk) seems far more legible as at least partly fantasy than as reality. At least part of it is accompanied by the usual movie signifiers of fantasy - blurry slow zooms, overlaid exposures of Gyllenhaal's face and the faces of others - but mainly, the scenes involving large crowds, TV crews, and the like seem dramatically out of character with the rest of the film...as actuality. They fit quite well from Gyllenhaal's character's POV at that point in the film, though...which is to say that ultimately (and this is a point indirectly made in the commentary track by director Steven Shainberg) it doesn't much matter, since both diegetically and emotionally the scenes bring us to the same place. Some clever graduate student, by the way, has probably made a big deal out of the handful of subtle Christ references recurring throughout the movie...
Finally - and as a reward for viewers masochistic enough (ahem) to sit through the entire credits sequence - this shot just might illustrate the funniest closing credits bit ever:
(This will probably make no sense if you haven't seen the film...)
11.28.2007
and then Alexander Hamilton rains down hundreds of ping-pong balls on his head
Does anyone know why the new nickel features an image of Captain Kangaroo - clean-shaven, but who else would wear that haircut?
11.27.2007
[today only: you write the clever headline]
Although I don't know her recordings well at all (I've heard two or three songs), what I do know was intriguing enough that I thought I'd check out Nellie McKay's in-store performance at Atomic Records the other day. Things began somewhat inauspiciously: milling around the record shelves shoved into more crowded formation than usual to accommodate a piano and an audience, randomly checking out LP sleeves (it's been forever since I looked at them - and I must admit, with few exceptions artwork certainly looks better at LP scale: maybe the thing should be to release CDs with large-scale artwork...), I realized the store was playing McKay's most recent CD over the sound system...and I found myself thinking I didn't much care for for the production, to the extent that the music was actually sort of...annoying. I was toying with just ducking out the door.
I'm glad I didn't. A few minutes later, McKay arrived, resplendent in a pink dress and gold (I think) shoes (people who aren't dumb guys like myself could no doubt describe both items, in terms of style, far better), looking rather as if she'd stepped straight from the pages of a '50s fashion magazine. I'd seen photos of her before; she looked thinner in person, but her face retained the curious quality it has of being able to look both somewhat odd and quizzical at some moments, and quite lovely at others. (The lighting - two bare bulbs and one of those lights with the metallic conical covering, all shining down on her from directly above - did her no flattery: I now understand why stages also provide underlighting, to prevent one's nose and brows from casting shadows on the rest of one's face.) I mention that not because I'm a sexist goon but because one thing that made the in-store appearance so enjoyable was her facial expressions and her manner - simultaneously theatrical and off-handedly quirky yet genuine. Hearing her songs with just her voice and piano removed that offputting layer of production - which leaned a bit too heavily on the campy for my tastes - and let her wit, intelligence, and passion come through clearly. McKay's done some time as a stand-up comic - and some of her little asides between lines, as well as several of those lines themselves, were laugh-out-loud funny. I mean, since it was inevitable that someone someday would rhyme "Hannibal Lecter" with "Phil Spector," I'm glad it was her.
She's quite a versatile vocalist as well: she could move from an almost painfully piercing nasality (for effect) to an airy, light quality that suspended notes in the air - they sounded so right it was hard to believe anyone had just sung them. And her "Broadway" voice - with a vibrato that could down bees - was...well, Broadway.
I didn't go to her actual concert at Turner Hall - but on the basis of this performance, I think at least her live shows are worth my checking them out in the future.
Also: I finally met fellow Milwaukee music-blogger (and former Milk Magazine cohort) Don (from Timedoor), who proved to be a nice fellow. He recognized me - he says because he followed this blog's link to my Flickr page, but I think he's secretly a stalker. A blogger-stalker. (Which sounds great out loud. Say it three times in a row, like Zippy the Pinhead.) I'm surprised I hadn't noticed him before: how many folks can there be in this city with a pegleg and enormous poofy flaming red hair sculpted into a perfect cube, and who favor dressing from head to toe in that same shade of screaming yellowish green they use for firetrucks? Three or four at most, I'd imagine.
I'm glad I didn't. A few minutes later, McKay arrived, resplendent in a pink dress and gold (I think) shoes (people who aren't dumb guys like myself could no doubt describe both items, in terms of style, far better), looking rather as if she'd stepped straight from the pages of a '50s fashion magazine. I'd seen photos of her before; she looked thinner in person, but her face retained the curious quality it has of being able to look both somewhat odd and quizzical at some moments, and quite lovely at others. (The lighting - two bare bulbs and one of those lights with the metallic conical covering, all shining down on her from directly above - did her no flattery: I now understand why stages also provide underlighting, to prevent one's nose and brows from casting shadows on the rest of one's face.) I mention that not because I'm a sexist goon but because one thing that made the in-store appearance so enjoyable was her facial expressions and her manner - simultaneously theatrical and off-handedly quirky yet genuine. Hearing her songs with just her voice and piano removed that offputting layer of production - which leaned a bit too heavily on the campy for my tastes - and let her wit, intelligence, and passion come through clearly. McKay's done some time as a stand-up comic - and some of her little asides between lines, as well as several of those lines themselves, were laugh-out-loud funny. I mean, since it was inevitable that someone someday would rhyme "Hannibal Lecter" with "Phil Spector," I'm glad it was her.
She's quite a versatile vocalist as well: she could move from an almost painfully piercing nasality (for effect) to an airy, light quality that suspended notes in the air - they sounded so right it was hard to believe anyone had just sung them. And her "Broadway" voice - with a vibrato that could down bees - was...well, Broadway.
I didn't go to her actual concert at Turner Hall - but on the basis of this performance, I think at least her live shows are worth my checking them out in the future.
Also: I finally met fellow Milwaukee music-blogger (and former Milk Magazine cohort) Don (from Timedoor), who proved to be a nice fellow. He recognized me - he says because he followed this blog's link to my Flickr page, but I think he's secretly a stalker. A blogger-stalker. (Which sounds great out loud. Say it three times in a row, like Zippy the Pinhead.) I'm surprised I hadn't noticed him before: how many folks can there be in this city with a pegleg and enormous poofy flaming red hair sculpted into a perfect cube, and who favor dressing from head to toe in that same shade of screaming yellowish green they use for firetrucks? Three or four at most, I'd imagine.
11.26.2007
Go Figure Dept.
People get bent utterly out of shape by a tenth-second, 25-pixel glimpse of bare nipple on TV, flapping their arms wildly, crying "what about the children?"...yet in Wisconsin (and probably plenty of other states as well), it's perfectly okay to strap a gutted, bloody deer corpse to your car or truck and drive or park it anywhere, including where young kids get to see it.
Good luck explaining when some kid asks "what happened to Bambi?"
Good luck explaining when some kid asks "what happened to Bambi?"
11.25.2007
John Lee Super-Understander
In an article in yesterday's New York Times, Paul Davies claims that science is hypocritical in decrying faith, because (he says) it too is based on a different sort of faith. His argument, though, seems both disingenuous with its science (Davies is a physicist, so he certainly would know this) and rather slippery in defining its key terms.
Davies claims that "science has its own faith-based belief system" because it "proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way." He continues: "You couldn't be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order."
The problem here is a confusion of "expectation" with "faith." The reason no scientist is likely to think that "the universe was a meaningless jumble" is that, so far as science can determine based on its observations to date, it isn't - and that any such "meaningless jumble" would be, by the very fact that so many patterns and forces have been established, a local exception, probably ultimately explainable by a higher-order organization (science has done quite a lot to explain the seemingly random: see chaos theory). That's not "faith" - that's reason. There is no rational reason to expect a large-scale exception to what has already been plentifully established.
Davies goes on to argue that "the idea that [scientific] laws exist reasonlessly is deeply anti-rational. After all, the very essence of a scientific explanation of some phenomenon is that the world is ordered logically and that there are reasons things are as they are." Reason is a tool. It is a mode of understanding phenomena. It is not an originating principal. The world may be ordered logically, but that does not mean a logical being ordered it (one implication of Davies' ideas); nor does it mean there are "reasons things are as they are." Davies here switches the meaning of the word "reason" from "a mode of thinking" to "a cause" without noting the switch. The two meanings are not equivalent.
Davies makes a similar move concerning the notion of "laws." He writes, "a God's-eye view might reveal a vast patchwork quilt of universes, each with its own distinctive set of bylaws. In this 'multiverse,' life will arise only in those patches with bio-friendly bylaws, so it is no surprise that we find ourselves in a Goldilocks universe — one that is just right for life. We have selected it by our very existence." Uh, no: we haven't "selected" it - we exist because it exists, with conditions ripe for our existence. That's an odd definition of "selecting." The multiverse theory, however, addresses what some people perceive as a problem: the fact that had certain variables in the early moments of the universe been infinitesimally different, life as we know it would not have evolved. What are the odds, these people say, that all those factors would have come together at random? There must be a higher, ordering power, they argue - by which they typically mean God.
That's always seemed like an odd question to me. Let's say you program a calculator to come up with a random number between 1 and 1,000,000. The calculator comes up with the number 50,392. You fiddle around with that number for a bit, enumerating its properties, its multiples and divisors and so forth...and then you exclaim, why look, this number has all these particular properties! How likely is it that a random process could have coughed up just these properties? Now imagine (pretend it's an animated cartoon illustrating mathematical principles) that those various properties of 50,392 are presented as living beings. They're all running around exclaiming how amazing it is that they exist. But it's not extraordinary at all - or rather, that the number is 50,392 is exactly as extraordinary as if it had been 672,911, 15, 4,887, or 999,999: a million to one, each with its own set of properties. Even if there's only ever been one universe, obviously it's the one we have. You can call it 50,392 if you like. The multiverse theory makes this a little more comprehensible (in some ways): perhaps all those other universes once existed, exist in dimensions inaccessible to us, etc. Once again: we're here because this particular universe is conducive to our existence. For all we know, billions of other universes exist, have existed, or will exist which aren't.
Davies argues that the multiverse theory doesn't really explain much, since, he says, "there has to be a physical mechanism to make all those universes and bestow bylaws on them. This process will require its own laws, or meta-laws. Where do they come from? The problem has simply been shifted up a level from the laws of the universe to the meta-laws of the multiverse." Well, yes: but he's moved from the question of "why are we here?" (emphasis on "here") to "why are there 'heres'?" Those aren't the same question. Davies is essentially complaining that science has not answered, and likely cannot answer, every question. But science doesn't claim to be able to do that, so far as I understand it: science claims to provide answers - the best, contingent ones possible given the current state of data - to those questions that we understand sufficiently to provide workable theories (i.e., about which we can make predictable statements). When Davies asks "where do they come from?" he's implicitly suggesting that it's absurd not to imagine some Ultimate Source. He seems to be smuggling God, in an unmarked package, through the back door. At least I suspect this is how many readers will understand him (even though elsewhere he describes himself as an agnostic).
What I've never understood about this approach to religion is the belief of its adherents that it answers anything at all. "Where did all those laws and principles come from? They must have come from God!" Okay...so where did God come from? "God doesn't 'come from' anywhere: God is infinite, universal, and eternal, without beginning or end." In place of science's "I don't know," we have an "answer" that isn't an answer at all: it's a semantic gesture, in which "God" is defined as "that which evades all logical questions about origin or causality, being defined as beyond all that." But you might as well just shrug your shoulders and say I don't know for all the insight such a definitional gesture gets you. It's merely answering the question with a name, a name delineating attributes that deflect rather than answer the question.
Back to Davies. Confirming our suspicion as to the contents of that unmarked package, he writes that "the very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in a rational way. Christians envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, while physicists think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships."
First, I'm not sure that Christians typically believe that God created the universe "in a rational way" - I'm not even sure what that would mean. I suspect Davies means that Christians see the order in the universe as evidence of an order-giver. But in this passage, Davies is confusing "law" in the juridical sense with "law" as it's used in science. There's really only a coincidental similarity between the sort of "universal, perfect, immutable laws" some Christians might assert and scientific laws. The religious laws are more like juridical laws, in that they're envisioned more or less as God saying, it shall be so in this manner, and so it is. Gravity does what it does, electrons do their thing, because God ordered them so. But a scientific "law" is merely a description, derived from many repeated observations, of the way something is. It does not assert a lawgiver or anything else beyond the observable universe.
Some more linguistic sleight of hand: while Christians might indeed envision God as existing "beyond" the universe, the "transcendent realm" of mathematics is not "beyond" the universe in the same sense. Again: mathematical laws describe the universe. That doesn't mean they exist beyond or outside it. As well say that grammarians are positing something eternal and "beyond the universe" when they describe the grammar of a text: after all, the text itself says nothing about nouns, verbs, or dependent clauses.
I'm not so sure why it's such a huge problem to accept that we humans, living here in this physical universe, simply can't understand certain concepts: never mind "eternity," even understanding "a trillion years" is well beyond most people's capacity to imagine. Which is easier: to understand a universe that has no outside, has no beyond...or to understand the notion of an "outside" that's somehow not part of the universe? I'd say neither notion is very comprehensible within our logic. So we posit a Super-Understander, one who can make sense of all this, one who can grasp trillions of years and trillions of light-years - and we give it a name, so we can thereby embody it and bring it down to earth. That's understandable, and not what I have a problem with where religion is concerned (although it'd be nice if it were understood as happening that way). What I can't understand is the peculiar - and rather astonishingly hubristic - notion that we can take this inconceivable and infinite Super-Understander - whose very existence in our minds comes from a need to at least have something understand and comprehend what we cannot - and fold it between the pages of a book, put it on a leash, and use it to police our bounds, all the while imagining we know what this Super-Understander we call God wants us to do, how He wants us to worship it (a peculiarly human attribute for an omniscient being), and that we know exactly which little rituals and localized lists of sins He endorses. (There may be eminently human, and humane, reasons to do the things religions typically enjoin us to do - but that's a separate issue from whether God wants us to do them.) Does it never occur to religionists how arrogant they are - if the God they believe in exists, with all the attributes they imagine Him with - to pretend to be able to know His mind?
That is a far higher irrationality than science shrugging its shoulders and saying, you know, we just don't know yet. At least that answer is honest, and appropriately humble.
Davies claims that "science has its own faith-based belief system" because it "proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way." He continues: "You couldn't be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order."
The problem here is a confusion of "expectation" with "faith." The reason no scientist is likely to think that "the universe was a meaningless jumble" is that, so far as science can determine based on its observations to date, it isn't - and that any such "meaningless jumble" would be, by the very fact that so many patterns and forces have been established, a local exception, probably ultimately explainable by a higher-order organization (science has done quite a lot to explain the seemingly random: see chaos theory). That's not "faith" - that's reason. There is no rational reason to expect a large-scale exception to what has already been plentifully established.
Davies goes on to argue that "the idea that [scientific] laws exist reasonlessly is deeply anti-rational. After all, the very essence of a scientific explanation of some phenomenon is that the world is ordered logically and that there are reasons things are as they are." Reason is a tool. It is a mode of understanding phenomena. It is not an originating principal. The world may be ordered logically, but that does not mean a logical being ordered it (one implication of Davies' ideas); nor does it mean there are "reasons things are as they are." Davies here switches the meaning of the word "reason" from "a mode of thinking" to "a cause" without noting the switch. The two meanings are not equivalent.
Davies makes a similar move concerning the notion of "laws." He writes, "a God's-eye view might reveal a vast patchwork quilt of universes, each with its own distinctive set of bylaws. In this 'multiverse,' life will arise only in those patches with bio-friendly bylaws, so it is no surprise that we find ourselves in a Goldilocks universe — one that is just right for life. We have selected it by our very existence." Uh, no: we haven't "selected" it - we exist because it exists, with conditions ripe for our existence. That's an odd definition of "selecting." The multiverse theory, however, addresses what some people perceive as a problem: the fact that had certain variables in the early moments of the universe been infinitesimally different, life as we know it would not have evolved. What are the odds, these people say, that all those factors would have come together at random? There must be a higher, ordering power, they argue - by which they typically mean God.
That's always seemed like an odd question to me. Let's say you program a calculator to come up with a random number between 1 and 1,000,000. The calculator comes up with the number 50,392. You fiddle around with that number for a bit, enumerating its properties, its multiples and divisors and so forth...and then you exclaim, why look, this number has all these particular properties! How likely is it that a random process could have coughed up just these properties? Now imagine (pretend it's an animated cartoon illustrating mathematical principles) that those various properties of 50,392 are presented as living beings. They're all running around exclaiming how amazing it is that they exist. But it's not extraordinary at all - or rather, that the number is 50,392 is exactly as extraordinary as if it had been 672,911, 15, 4,887, or 999,999: a million to one, each with its own set of properties. Even if there's only ever been one universe, obviously it's the one we have. You can call it 50,392 if you like. The multiverse theory makes this a little more comprehensible (in some ways): perhaps all those other universes once existed, exist in dimensions inaccessible to us, etc. Once again: we're here because this particular universe is conducive to our existence. For all we know, billions of other universes exist, have existed, or will exist which aren't.
Davies argues that the multiverse theory doesn't really explain much, since, he says, "there has to be a physical mechanism to make all those universes and bestow bylaws on them. This process will require its own laws, or meta-laws. Where do they come from? The problem has simply been shifted up a level from the laws of the universe to the meta-laws of the multiverse." Well, yes: but he's moved from the question of "why are we here?" (emphasis on "here") to "why are there 'heres'?" Those aren't the same question. Davies is essentially complaining that science has not answered, and likely cannot answer, every question. But science doesn't claim to be able to do that, so far as I understand it: science claims to provide answers - the best, contingent ones possible given the current state of data - to those questions that we understand sufficiently to provide workable theories (i.e., about which we can make predictable statements). When Davies asks "where do they come from?" he's implicitly suggesting that it's absurd not to imagine some Ultimate Source. He seems to be smuggling God, in an unmarked package, through the back door. At least I suspect this is how many readers will understand him (even though elsewhere he describes himself as an agnostic).
What I've never understood about this approach to religion is the belief of its adherents that it answers anything at all. "Where did all those laws and principles come from? They must have come from God!" Okay...so where did God come from? "God doesn't 'come from' anywhere: God is infinite, universal, and eternal, without beginning or end." In place of science's "I don't know," we have an "answer" that isn't an answer at all: it's a semantic gesture, in which "God" is defined as "that which evades all logical questions about origin or causality, being defined as beyond all that." But you might as well just shrug your shoulders and say I don't know for all the insight such a definitional gesture gets you. It's merely answering the question with a name, a name delineating attributes that deflect rather than answer the question.
Back to Davies. Confirming our suspicion as to the contents of that unmarked package, he writes that "the very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in a rational way. Christians envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, while physicists think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships."
First, I'm not sure that Christians typically believe that God created the universe "in a rational way" - I'm not even sure what that would mean. I suspect Davies means that Christians see the order in the universe as evidence of an order-giver. But in this passage, Davies is confusing "law" in the juridical sense with "law" as it's used in science. There's really only a coincidental similarity between the sort of "universal, perfect, immutable laws" some Christians might assert and scientific laws. The religious laws are more like juridical laws, in that they're envisioned more or less as God saying, it shall be so in this manner, and so it is. Gravity does what it does, electrons do their thing, because God ordered them so. But a scientific "law" is merely a description, derived from many repeated observations, of the way something is. It does not assert a lawgiver or anything else beyond the observable universe.
Some more linguistic sleight of hand: while Christians might indeed envision God as existing "beyond" the universe, the "transcendent realm" of mathematics is not "beyond" the universe in the same sense. Again: mathematical laws describe the universe. That doesn't mean they exist beyond or outside it. As well say that grammarians are positing something eternal and "beyond the universe" when they describe the grammar of a text: after all, the text itself says nothing about nouns, verbs, or dependent clauses.
I'm not so sure why it's such a huge problem to accept that we humans, living here in this physical universe, simply can't understand certain concepts: never mind "eternity," even understanding "a trillion years" is well beyond most people's capacity to imagine. Which is easier: to understand a universe that has no outside, has no beyond...or to understand the notion of an "outside" that's somehow not part of the universe? I'd say neither notion is very comprehensible within our logic. So we posit a Super-Understander, one who can make sense of all this, one who can grasp trillions of years and trillions of light-years - and we give it a name, so we can thereby embody it and bring it down to earth. That's understandable, and not what I have a problem with where religion is concerned (although it'd be nice if it were understood as happening that way). What I can't understand is the peculiar - and rather astonishingly hubristic - notion that we can take this inconceivable and infinite Super-Understander - whose very existence in our minds comes from a need to at least have something understand and comprehend what we cannot - and fold it between the pages of a book, put it on a leash, and use it to police our bounds, all the while imagining we know what this Super-Understander we call God wants us to do, how He wants us to worship it (a peculiarly human attribute for an omniscient being), and that we know exactly which little rituals and localized lists of sins He endorses. (There may be eminently human, and humane, reasons to do the things religions typically enjoin us to do - but that's a separate issue from whether God wants us to do them.) Does it never occur to religionists how arrogant they are - if the God they believe in exists, with all the attributes they imagine Him with - to pretend to be able to know His mind?
That is a far higher irrationality than science shrugging its shoulders and saying, you know, we just don't know yet. At least that answer is honest, and appropriately humble.
11.24.2007
here is your throat back, thanks for the loan
If someone had told me, around the time of the first few Sonic Youth albums, that one day they'd perform quite possibly the best and most comfortably fitting cover on a collection of Bob Dylan songs, I don't think I would have believed you. But in fact, Sonic Youth's cover of the obscure (i.e., massively bootlegged but unreleased until now) Dylan song "I'm Not There" is a highlight of the soundtrack to the film of the same name. (I haven't seen the film yet, but I intend to.)
The world evoked by Dylan's music of the period this song comes from (1967, recorded at the same time as the songs later released as The Basement Tapes) is shadowy and carnivalesque: images of drifters, gypsies, and other dubious characters recur - the sleeve art for The Basement Tapes gives you a good idea. Dylan's music at this time tended to feature at least two guitars (electric and acoustic), both piano and organ, and bass and drums, along with Dylan's vocals and harmonica. The interplay among the instruments, and the circus atmosphere evoked by the garish organ and Dylan's wheezy, neon-blue harmonica, complemented that imagery so effectively that musicians still evoke it in their arrangements if their lyrics are particularly Dylanesque. Dylan's version of "I'm Not There" doesn't feature his harmonica, but the calliope-like organ wheeling away steadily in the background against the somewhat tentative mix of strummed guitar and loping bass (clearly an early take, since there are several clams in that bass part) suggests shady proceedings just outside the door or around the corner.
Sonic Youth's version, by contrast, has a slightly more threatening pulse in its rhythm, the heavy drum strokes seeming to stalk the beat. In the background, replacing that carnival organ, there's the ghostly, corroded, metallic code of distorted electric guitar. That sound evokes archetypal Sonic Youth of the late '80s and early '90s, when their music was steeped in the mise en scene of Bladerunner, William Gibson, and Philip K. Dick, an imaginary realm of iffy reality, multiple yet sketchy identity, infinite mobility beyond the physical, the guitar seeming far less embodied than Dylan's organ.
I think it works, though, because there are similarities between the old, weird America of Dylan's mid-sixties work, the underworld whose surrealistic menace seemed indebted both to Nathanael West and to the Marx Brothers, or an inversion of Whitman's exuberant and muscular democracy of the body. Gibson and Dick also seem concerned with limning the coded imaginary linking their everyday, underground characters with those from the powerful elite, and despite the way a wired interconnectivity extends characters' reach outside the bounds of their bodies, those bodies tend to reassert themselves, or be reasserted, in both writers' often pungently physical descriptions of sex and violence - a directness powerfully present in the music of Sonic Youth as well.
Though Sonic Youth is more aggressive in staking out such claims for itself and its listeners, both musicians explore a rootlessness, an absence and lack of home, in their music. I'd say it's no coincidence that the two recent film treatments of Dylan and his influence have been titled No Direction Home (Scorcese's 2005 work) and I'm Not There. And Dylan's role-playing - so at odds with the early '60s folk community's emphasis on authenticity and genuineness, and later at odds with mainstream rock's fetishization of the authentic - seems almost postmodern in advance, a public figure glorying in being who he's not: an Okie, a holy clown, a mystic recluse, and so on...all the while enjoying what would seem to be transparent attempts at "putting on" the press (most notoriously in Don't Look Back's "science student" scene). Sonic Youth don't overtly role-play in the same way (sometimes I think they'd be better if they did: when they're too sincere they approach insufferability), but the world of their music - both lyrically and sonically - certainly deconstructs the notion of a single, stable identity.
Sonic Youth's done a lot of cover songs over the years - but it's curious that my two favorites might be this one and "Superstar" (the Carpenters' song, apparently about a stalker, whose inherent creepiness Sonic Youth's version brings well forward). A curious side note: Todd Haynes, who directs I'm Not There, also directed Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (that's the one that uses Barbie dolls...)
Sonic Youth "I'm Not There" (I'm Not There soundtrack, 2007)
Bob Dylan and The Band "I'm Not There" (I'm Not There soundtrack, 2007)
These are DivShare downloads, so right-clicking won't work...
The world evoked by Dylan's music of the period this song comes from (1967, recorded at the same time as the songs later released as The Basement Tapes) is shadowy and carnivalesque: images of drifters, gypsies, and other dubious characters recur - the sleeve art for The Basement Tapes gives you a good idea. Dylan's music at this time tended to feature at least two guitars (electric and acoustic), both piano and organ, and bass and drums, along with Dylan's vocals and harmonica. The interplay among the instruments, and the circus atmosphere evoked by the garish organ and Dylan's wheezy, neon-blue harmonica, complemented that imagery so effectively that musicians still evoke it in their arrangements if their lyrics are particularly Dylanesque. Dylan's version of "I'm Not There" doesn't feature his harmonica, but the calliope-like organ wheeling away steadily in the background against the somewhat tentative mix of strummed guitar and loping bass (clearly an early take, since there are several clams in that bass part) suggests shady proceedings just outside the door or around the corner.
Sonic Youth's version, by contrast, has a slightly more threatening pulse in its rhythm, the heavy drum strokes seeming to stalk the beat. In the background, replacing that carnival organ, there's the ghostly, corroded, metallic code of distorted electric guitar. That sound evokes archetypal Sonic Youth of the late '80s and early '90s, when their music was steeped in the mise en scene of Bladerunner, William Gibson, and Philip K. Dick, an imaginary realm of iffy reality, multiple yet sketchy identity, infinite mobility beyond the physical, the guitar seeming far less embodied than Dylan's organ.
I think it works, though, because there are similarities between the old, weird America of Dylan's mid-sixties work, the underworld whose surrealistic menace seemed indebted both to Nathanael West and to the Marx Brothers, or an inversion of Whitman's exuberant and muscular democracy of the body. Gibson and Dick also seem concerned with limning the coded imaginary linking their everyday, underground characters with those from the powerful elite, and despite the way a wired interconnectivity extends characters' reach outside the bounds of their bodies, those bodies tend to reassert themselves, or be reasserted, in both writers' often pungently physical descriptions of sex and violence - a directness powerfully present in the music of Sonic Youth as well.
Though Sonic Youth is more aggressive in staking out such claims for itself and its listeners, both musicians explore a rootlessness, an absence and lack of home, in their music. I'd say it's no coincidence that the two recent film treatments of Dylan and his influence have been titled No Direction Home (Scorcese's 2005 work) and I'm Not There. And Dylan's role-playing - so at odds with the early '60s folk community's emphasis on authenticity and genuineness, and later at odds with mainstream rock's fetishization of the authentic - seems almost postmodern in advance, a public figure glorying in being who he's not: an Okie, a holy clown, a mystic recluse, and so on...all the while enjoying what would seem to be transparent attempts at "putting on" the press (most notoriously in Don't Look Back's "science student" scene). Sonic Youth don't overtly role-play in the same way (sometimes I think they'd be better if they did: when they're too sincere they approach insufferability), but the world of their music - both lyrically and sonically - certainly deconstructs the notion of a single, stable identity.
Sonic Youth's done a lot of cover songs over the years - but it's curious that my two favorites might be this one and "Superstar" (the Carpenters' song, apparently about a stalker, whose inherent creepiness Sonic Youth's version brings well forward). A curious side note: Todd Haynes, who directs I'm Not There, also directed Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (that's the one that uses Barbie dolls...)
Sonic Youth "I'm Not There" (I'm Not There soundtrack, 2007)
Bob Dylan and The Band "I'm Not There" (I'm Not There soundtrack, 2007)
These are DivShare downloads, so right-clicking won't work...
please rise for the Croatian anthem
Frank Zappa once wrote (with great wisdom), "a mountain is something you don't want to fuck with."
Well, apparently that depends: a British singer mangled a key consonant in the Croatian anthem, with results that pricked up the ears of the audience.
Well, apparently that depends: a British singer mangled a key consonant in the Croatian anthem, with results that pricked up the ears of the audience.
11.23.2007
ten reasons I will never become President of the United States of America
1. I did not eat turkey, stuffing, cranberries, or any other seasonally fetishized food items yesterday - not even a tofucken...uh, tofu turducken.
2. I went nowhere near a mall today, nor did I buy anything online for anyone's Christmas present. I did buy a sandwich at a locally owned restaurant (Fuel, to reward them for going smoke-free a month ago) and then replenished the diet soda supply. And Rose and I will probably go out to eat tonight somewhere. But shopping as such? The day after Thanksgiving? I shudder.
3. I did not willingly watch any football yesterday (my in-laws had the game on - but then we watched Ratatouille instead).
4. I no longer have a TV that works except to play DVDs - no network TV, no cable TV.
5. I no longer own a cell phone.
6. I haven't worn a wristwatch for years (and nowadays, with everyone owning cell phones, I'm not sure why anyone does) - there are clocks everywhere anyway. (Except for at the Post Office - where, a worker told me, they were actually ordered to remove them so customers didn't know how much time they were wasting standing in line. Yes, that'll work!)
7. Hardly any of my clothing promotes any brand of anything. There are some exceptions: band t-shirts, a couple of WMSE t-shirts, and a slew of Atomic t-shirts back when they were giving them away with $50 purchases (back at the heights of my CD-buying) - plus two sweatshirts for which I made exceptions: (1) a Leinenkugel's sweatshirt purchased during a brewery tour because we were camping nearby and it had gotten unexpectedly chilly; (2) a sweatshirt with the logo of a Central Valley winery in California...because several years ago, when we were touring wineries in that region, we came across one which shared my surname - of course, I had to buy the sweatshirt.
8. I don't attend church.
9. I have inhaled - although it's been nearly twenty years, and I never really enjoyed it. Don't have a problem with other people doing so, but it never did much for me.
10. Apparently, a friend of mine has a picture of my ass, mooning her.
2. I went nowhere near a mall today, nor did I buy anything online for anyone's Christmas present. I did buy a sandwich at a locally owned restaurant (Fuel, to reward them for going smoke-free a month ago) and then replenished the diet soda supply. And Rose and I will probably go out to eat tonight somewhere. But shopping as such? The day after Thanksgiving? I shudder.
3. I did not willingly watch any football yesterday (my in-laws had the game on - but then we watched Ratatouille instead).
4. I no longer have a TV that works except to play DVDs - no network TV, no cable TV.
5. I no longer own a cell phone.
6. I haven't worn a wristwatch for years (and nowadays, with everyone owning cell phones, I'm not sure why anyone does) - there are clocks everywhere anyway. (Except for at the Post Office - where, a worker told me, they were actually ordered to remove them so customers didn't know how much time they were wasting standing in line. Yes, that'll work!)
7. Hardly any of my clothing promotes any brand of anything. There are some exceptions: band t-shirts, a couple of WMSE t-shirts, and a slew of Atomic t-shirts back when they were giving them away with $50 purchases (back at the heights of my CD-buying) - plus two sweatshirts for which I made exceptions: (1) a Leinenkugel's sweatshirt purchased during a brewery tour because we were camping nearby and it had gotten unexpectedly chilly; (2) a sweatshirt with the logo of a Central Valley winery in California...because several years ago, when we were touring wineries in that region, we came across one which shared my surname - of course, I had to buy the sweatshirt.
8. I don't attend church.
9. I have inhaled - although it's been nearly twenty years, and I never really enjoyed it. Don't have a problem with other people doing so, but it never did much for me.
10. Apparently, a friend of mine has a picture of my ass, mooning her.
11.22.2007
do you feel mysterious today?
Okay, I've sort of been out of the Wire loop lately, because the loop seemed to have more or less closed...but my friend Miles, who manages the Wire mailing list, let me know that rumors of their demise were premature.
But I had still missed out that Wire have a new EP out. Haven't heard it, ordered it about two seconds after I heard it existed - but 'ere it is again, Wire - with Read & Burn 3. Another EP, this time (they say) no tracks to be repeated on the forthcoming album-at-work (more happy!).
Plus: Wire's official band website, Pinkflag.com, has some mp3s for download, including two that are unavailable generally.
But I had still missed out that Wire have a new EP out. Haven't heard it, ordered it about two seconds after I heard it existed - but 'ere it is again, Wire - with Read & Burn 3. Another EP, this time (they say) no tracks to be repeated on the forthcoming album-at-work (more happy!).
Plus: Wire's official band website, Pinkflag.com, has some mp3s for download, including two that are unavailable generally.
Happy Snakesgiving!
Today is the day we commemorate the heroic accomplishments of St. Samuel of Modderfock, who drove the snakes from the plains of Abraham during the Battle of Greenbier in 16116 (the proper pronunciation is "sixteen eleventy-six": people get that wrong for some reason), which allowed the native population to continue its colorful tradition of naming subdivisions after themselves so we, today, the descendants of their alien overlords, can fill the air with colorful displays of complex fluorocarbons and gorge ourselves in their memory.
At least that's my memory. There are few songs about this holiday. Here's one:
Arlo Guthrie "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" (yes, the full-length, fill-the-Watergate-tapes-gap version) (Alice's Restaurant, 1967)
(Oops! Too much bandwidth - had to withdraw this one. Drop me an e-mail if you desperately need to hear it.)
At least that's my memory. There are few songs about this holiday. Here's one:
Arlo Guthrie "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" (yes, the full-length, fill-the-Watergate-tapes-gap version) (Alice's Restaurant, 1967)
(Oops! Too much bandwidth - had to withdraw this one. Drop me an e-mail if you desperately need to hear it.)
11.21.2007
everything works a different way
Sometimes, music is most powerful stripped down to its essentials: stark, raw, straightforward chords, drums that sound like wood hitting skin, bass you could lay flooring on, and vocals that make the noise of a human actually experiencing something right at that moment.
This music isn't that. Because other sometimes, music is most powerful as a huge, seemingly chaotic, widescreen vision, full of organs and violins and horns and vocal harmonies and more chords than you can chart. That seems to be the premise of the Hidden Messages, a five-piece band, London-based band whose natural exuberance spills out all over the place (thanks, Neil!).
Curiously, the band has simultaneously released two EPs, both titled Animal Actors (subtitled "1" and "2" and for sale here) - I'm not sure whether to think of this as a single album, divided into two parts in the manner of your old-school LPs, or as two separate, shorter releases. Doesn't matter: what does is that I had the hardest time narrowing down which tracks to highlight here. Ultimately I chose three that represent the Hidden Messages' range (although one or two tracks also get a bit quieter than any of these). This is one of those releases that keeps tempting me to hit replay and diverts other music in my listening queue with its insistence on being heard again.
The Hidden Messages:
"Blue Sky" (Animal Actors 1, 2007)
"Today I Feel" (Animal Actors 2, 2007)
"Over" (Animal Actors 2, 2007)
This music isn't that. Because other sometimes, music is most powerful as a huge, seemingly chaotic, widescreen vision, full of organs and violins and horns and vocal harmonies and more chords than you can chart. That seems to be the premise of the Hidden Messages, a five-piece band, London-based band whose natural exuberance spills out all over the place (thanks, Neil!).
Curiously, the band has simultaneously released two EPs, both titled Animal Actors (subtitled "1" and "2" and for sale here) - I'm not sure whether to think of this as a single album, divided into two parts in the manner of your old-school LPs, or as two separate, shorter releases. Doesn't matter: what does is that I had the hardest time narrowing down which tracks to highlight here. Ultimately I chose three that represent the Hidden Messages' range (although one or two tracks also get a bit quieter than any of these). This is one of those releases that keeps tempting me to hit replay and diverts other music in my listening queue with its insistence on being heard again.
The Hidden Messages:
"Blue Sky" (Animal Actors 1, 2007)
"Today I Feel" (Animal Actors 2, 2007)
"Over" (Animal Actors 2, 2007)
11.20.2007
free lunch!
A key building block of a free market is the notion of voluntary exchange, in which both parties interact freely, without fraud or coercion. The strong implication is that in order for this to work, there must also be free circulation of information (this is, I believe, the typical linkage cited by those who argue that capitalism and democracy walk hand in hand).
So two things strike me as curious: one, the extent to which our nominally pro- free-market society limits that free flow of information, chiefly in defining it as "intellectual property," but also in failing to ensure equal and extensive education for all. The current administration seems rather allergic to openness and positively enamored of secrecy and control of information, for instance.
Even more to the point: set up a nominally free market economy, and the first things producers of goods and providers of services will do is find advertisers and marketers...not to tell the truth about their goods and services, but to do everything short of lie: twist, bend, and distort the nature of the product or service, and obfuscate, frighten, cajole, praise, and flatter its potential audience.
How "voluntary" can any exchange be under such conditions of enforced ignorance and near-fraudulent levels of information distortion?
So two things strike me as curious: one, the extent to which our nominally pro- free-market society limits that free flow of information, chiefly in defining it as "intellectual property," but also in failing to ensure equal and extensive education for all. The current administration seems rather allergic to openness and positively enamored of secrecy and control of information, for instance.
Even more to the point: set up a nominally free market economy, and the first things producers of goods and providers of services will do is find advertisers and marketers...not to tell the truth about their goods and services, but to do everything short of lie: twist, bend, and distort the nature of the product or service, and obfuscate, frighten, cajole, praise, and flatter its potential audience.
How "voluntary" can any exchange be under such conditions of enforced ignorance and near-fraudulent levels of information distortion?
11.19.2007
chocolate in your peanut butter
For no good reason I can figure, the last couple of days my brain's jukebox has been treating me to a mutant song that goes from the verse and chorus lead-in of Elton John's "Tiny Dancer" into the chorus of David Bowie's "Moonage Daydream"... It would work better if Bowie's song were a whole step lower ("Tiny Dancer"'s chorus begins on F, "Moonage Daydream"'s on G), but I like the lyrical juxtaposition: "Oh how it feels so real / Lying here, with no one near / Only you, and you can hear me / When I say softly...slowly... / Keep your 'lectric eye on me, babe / Put your raygun to my head / Press your space-face close to mine, love / Freak out in a moonage daydream, oh yeah!"
11.18.2007
my it
I've been informally participating in the Thing Whose Cutesy Name I Can Never Remember Right - the one where you're supposed to write a blog entry every day in November (lookee me I've got a few in reserve, having written more entries than there've been days...howzat possible?) - and, inevitably, one of the gimme-type entries has come my way. I refer you to the fourth comment on yesterday's entry: I'm supposed to write "seven random or weird things" about myself...and already, I'm like should they be random, or weird, or both? I'm not sure how I'd go about writing random things about myself - I suppose I could make a long list of things and then figure a way to randomly choose seven - so I think I'll go with "weird" instead.
1. I have a(n annoying) habit of interpreting certain words literally when I know damned well they're meant in the more elastic, everyday sense of things...like, say, "random" above.
2. I have an odd musical theory that people who lack technical knowledge of what's going on in music hear certain kinds of complex chords as, essentially, tone color...more or less as a second instrument, or as something differing from a simple chord on the same instrument as a muted trumpet does from a straight trumpet. (On that note, I'd like to say that I think music often discriminates, since we so seldom hear queer, bi, or transgendered trumpets.)
3. I have a more extreme than usual aversion to the sound of skreeking chalk on a chalkboard...and even thinking of someone skreeking their nails on a chalkboard gives me the willies. Eewwww...did, right there.
4. I don't like rolling up my sleeves. Literally, I mean: probably because I can never do it right, and they're always collapsing back down about my wrists anyway.
5. I always think I'm going to be more bothered by violence in movies than I actually am once I see them. (I do not interpret that fact as a challenge, however.)
6. I am annoyed when people insist on spelling their names with alternative cases. Relatedly, I am annoyed by parents who misspell their own children's names: I'm not talking about creative re-spellings (although those can be irksome too), but the dolts who name their kids "Jonathon" (or worse, "Johnathon"), "Micheal" (Gaelic speakers excepted), etc.
7. For no good reason, I am amused when people say "a" for "an" in trying to be funny. I trace this back to the NRBQ song "It Was a Accident," the saying of which phrase still makes me giggle.
Okay...you know, I've done several of these "weird things" posts, and people keep upping the ante: first five, then six, now seven. Anyway: now I'm supposed to "tag" seven more people. I'm pretty sure I've hit up nearly everyone I know for one of these...so my method will be to go to people I don't know well or at all but whose sites are linked from sites of people I do know. (So, annoyed taggees: blame the fact that your friend knows me.) And, of course, those folks are supposed to do the same...until one day, everyone in the whole wide world will know absolutely everything about everyone else, and we'll all collapse into an enormous Borg-like hive mind and laugh at the silly days when we were "individuals" who had "weird things" to say about themselves.
Here are my victims mwah-hah-hah-haaa!
The Midwestgrrrl, This Floating Life, Dazed and Bemused, Mooselet Musings, The Shy Turnip, BobtheKing Dot Com, Dynagirl 5.0
1. I have a(n annoying) habit of interpreting certain words literally when I know damned well they're meant in the more elastic, everyday sense of things...like, say, "random" above.
2. I have an odd musical theory that people who lack technical knowledge of what's going on in music hear certain kinds of complex chords as, essentially, tone color...more or less as a second instrument, or as something differing from a simple chord on the same instrument as a muted trumpet does from a straight trumpet. (On that note, I'd like to say that I think music often discriminates, since we so seldom hear queer, bi, or transgendered trumpets.)
3. I have a more extreme than usual aversion to the sound of skreeking chalk on a chalkboard...and even thinking of someone skreeking their nails on a chalkboard gives me the willies. Eewwww...did, right there.
4. I don't like rolling up my sleeves. Literally, I mean: probably because I can never do it right, and they're always collapsing back down about my wrists anyway.
5. I always think I'm going to be more bothered by violence in movies than I actually am once I see them. (I do not interpret that fact as a challenge, however.)
6. I am annoyed when people insist on spelling their names with alternative cases. Relatedly, I am annoyed by parents who misspell their own children's names: I'm not talking about creative re-spellings (although those can be irksome too), but the dolts who name their kids "Jonathon" (or worse, "Johnathon"), "Micheal" (Gaelic speakers excepted), etc.
7. For no good reason, I am amused when people say "a" for "an" in trying to be funny. I trace this back to the NRBQ song "It Was a Accident," the saying of which phrase still makes me giggle.
Okay...you know, I've done several of these "weird things" posts, and people keep upping the ante: first five, then six, now seven. Anyway: now I'm supposed to "tag" seven more people. I'm pretty sure I've hit up nearly everyone I know for one of these...so my method will be to go to people I don't know well or at all but whose sites are linked from sites of people I do know. (So, annoyed taggees: blame the fact that your friend knows me.) And, of course, those folks are supposed to do the same...until one day, everyone in the whole wide world will know absolutely everything about everyone else, and we'll all collapse into an enormous Borg-like hive mind and laugh at the silly days when we were "individuals" who had "weird things" to say about themselves.
Here are my victims mwah-hah-hah-haaa!
The Midwestgrrrl, This Floating Life, Dazed and Bemused, Mooselet Musings, The Shy Turnip, BobtheKing Dot Com, Dynagirl 5.0
11.17.2007
the blogger's friend: lists
Here's a list of 2007-release full-length releases I've acquired this year between July and September. *** means it'll likely be in my top twenty at year-end (note that there have been a lot of good releases this year), ** means it's doubtful but possible, * means it's unlikely to do so, and # means it's ineligible (live albums, compilations, EPs: my list, my rules).
Interpol Our Love to Admire**
Spoon Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga***
Testa Rosa s/t**
Githead Art Pop*
LCD Soundsystem Sound of Silver*
Von Südenfed Tromatic Reflexxions*
The Besnard Lakes Are the Dark Horse**
Andrew Bird Armchair Apocrypha*
Get Him Eat Him Arms Down*
La Cacahouette French for Peanut*
Parts & Labor Mapmaker*
John Vanderslice Emerald City***
Tegan & Sara The Con**
Anton Barbeau & Su Jordan The Automatic Door**
Art Brut It’s a Bit Complicated*
Call Me Lightning Soft Skeletons*
The New Pornographers Challengers***
Slaraffenland Private Cinema*
St. Vincent Marry Me***
Caribou Andorra***
Joe Henry Civilians**
Paramore Riot!* (actually, this pretty much sucks: it was a gimme from lala.com)
various OKX: Stereogum Tribute to OK Computer#
various Drive XV: Stereogum Tribute to Automatic for the People#
The Valley Arena sesso.vita*
Of this list: 11 were actual CDs purchased (only 3 of which are on major labels); 1 an actual CD sent to me for free; 9 were legal, paid downloads; 2 were legal, free downloads (the two Stereogum collections); and 2 were free downloads to which I was sent links by promoters.
Previous lists of 2007 releases are here and here.
Interpol Our Love to Admire**
Spoon Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga***
Testa Rosa s/t**
Githead Art Pop*
LCD Soundsystem Sound of Silver*
Von Südenfed Tromatic Reflexxions*
The Besnard Lakes Are the Dark Horse**
Andrew Bird Armchair Apocrypha*
Get Him Eat Him Arms Down*
La Cacahouette French for Peanut*
Parts & Labor Mapmaker*
John Vanderslice Emerald City***
Tegan & Sara The Con**
Anton Barbeau & Su Jordan The Automatic Door**
Art Brut It’s a Bit Complicated*
Call Me Lightning Soft Skeletons*
The New Pornographers Challengers***
Slaraffenland Private Cinema*
St. Vincent Marry Me***
Caribou Andorra***
Joe Henry Civilians**
Paramore Riot!* (actually, this pretty much sucks: it was a gimme from lala.com)
various OKX: Stereogum Tribute to OK Computer#
various Drive XV: Stereogum Tribute to Automatic for the People#
The Valley Arena sesso.vita*
Of this list: 11 were actual CDs purchased (only 3 of which are on major labels); 1 an actual CD sent to me for free; 9 were legal, paid downloads; 2 were legal, free downloads (the two Stereogum collections); and 2 were free downloads to which I was sent links by promoters.
Previous lists of 2007 releases are here and here.
11.16.2007
do their rap sheets come with a little stick of bubblegum?
Here's a thought: if Barry Bonds is found guilty of lying about his steroid use, it would seem likely that Commissioner Bud Selig would bar Bonds' admission to the Hall of Fame (or rather, bar him from being elected to the Hall).
And that would mean that the holders of baseball's two most prominent offensive records - most career hits (Pete Rose) and most career home runs (Bonds) - would both be barred from the Hall of Fame.
That's rather sad.
Certainly, Bonds' offense (assuming he's found guilty...which, of course, I would never do, of course not) is far worse than Rose's: it materially affected his and his teams' performance, whereas Rose's gambling did not. I've always felt that barring Rose from the Hall is pointlessly moralistic: the man hit 4,000-plus hits, and that he was a lying, unethical jerk has little to do with it. I mean, if we're going to include "character" as a consideration for the Hall of Fame, what's Ty Cobb doing in there? Unlike Rose, though, Bonds' offense directly facilitated his achieving the record - and therefore makes it rather less legitimate. I mean, if Roger Maris had to have an asterisk next to his name merely because there were a few more games to a season, surely Bonds deserves an even more prominent qualifying mark. As Steve pointed out, The Onion got it right...
And that would mean that the holders of baseball's two most prominent offensive records - most career hits (Pete Rose) and most career home runs (Bonds) - would both be barred from the Hall of Fame.
That's rather sad.
Certainly, Bonds' offense (assuming he's found guilty...which, of course, I would never do, of course not) is far worse than Rose's: it materially affected his and his teams' performance, whereas Rose's gambling did not. I've always felt that barring Rose from the Hall is pointlessly moralistic: the man hit 4,000-plus hits, and that he was a lying, unethical jerk has little to do with it. I mean, if we're going to include "character" as a consideration for the Hall of Fame, what's Ty Cobb doing in there? Unlike Rose, though, Bonds' offense directly facilitated his achieving the record - and therefore makes it rather less legitimate. I mean, if Roger Maris had to have an asterisk next to his name merely because there were a few more games to a season, surely Bonds deserves an even more prominent qualifying mark. As Steve pointed out, The Onion got it right...
11.15.2007
things about things
1. "Achewood" once again delights with Chris Onstad's knack for verbal brilliance: the most recent cartoon usefully (and accurately) describes a Cadillac Escalade: "it has the fuel economy of an oil fire and handles like a Best Western."
2. I don't get Mickey Mouse's clothing. Like so many cartoon characters, he apparently can't be bothered to wear both a shirt and pants (thankfully, and unlike Porky Pig, he chooses pants). But what pants! First, it looks like they'd rise all the way up to his nipples (if cartoon characters had nipples, and if mice had nipples arrayed like human nipples, and if human-nipple-bearing mice wore clothes...damn but this is confusing). Second, what are those two white circles supposed to be? Enormous buttons of some sort? Are they functional, or merely decorative? Have actual pants ever been made with buttons in that position, several inches above the wings of the pelvic bone?
And I'm not entirely sure why Mickey's wearing gloves, or why they come with a peculiar rolled-up area at the wrist. Perhaps he doesn't wish to leave fingerprints. (If cartoon characters had fingerprints, and if mice had fingers, and...) But perhaps the oddest aspect of Mickey's wardrobe is his shoes. They look as if they were molded from some sort of plastic, rather like cheesehead hats, and are oddly rounded and again feature a peculiar roll at the ankles. They certainly do not look as if they could be removed. They look rather as if someone dipped Mickey's feet in molten plastic, which hardened permanently around his feet. Walt Disney: animal torturer. Now the truth can be told.
(Sorry, folks who've arrived here by Googling for "nipples": nothing for you here. And doesn't "Googling for nipples" sound sorta like "bobbing for apples"?)
2. I don't get Mickey Mouse's clothing. Like so many cartoon characters, he apparently can't be bothered to wear both a shirt and pants (thankfully, and unlike Porky Pig, he chooses pants). But what pants! First, it looks like they'd rise all the way up to his nipples (if cartoon characters had nipples, and if mice had nipples arrayed like human nipples, and if human-nipple-bearing mice wore clothes...damn but this is confusing). Second, what are those two white circles supposed to be? Enormous buttons of some sort? Are they functional, or merely decorative? Have actual pants ever been made with buttons in that position, several inches above the wings of the pelvic bone?
And I'm not entirely sure why Mickey's wearing gloves, or why they come with a peculiar rolled-up area at the wrist. Perhaps he doesn't wish to leave fingerprints. (If cartoon characters had fingerprints, and if mice had fingers, and...) But perhaps the oddest aspect of Mickey's wardrobe is his shoes. They look as if they were molded from some sort of plastic, rather like cheesehead hats, and are oddly rounded and again feature a peculiar roll at the ankles. They certainly do not look as if they could be removed. They look rather as if someone dipped Mickey's feet in molten plastic, which hardened permanently around his feet. Walt Disney: animal torturer. Now the truth can be told.
(Sorry, folks who've arrived here by Googling for "nipples": nothing for you here. And doesn't "Googling for nipples" sound sorta like "bobbing for apples"?)
one night in November...
Over at the Robyn Hitchcock mailing list - a redoubt of mostly middle-aged guys with beards and glasses - we were discussing which Hitchcock songs we'd like to hear other artists cover. I mentioned that I'd always thought "Listening to the Higsons" had a sort of Gary Numan feel to it...and then I realized, wait - I live in the twenty-first century! There's no need to have Numan actually cover Hitchcock, or vice versa - we could simply defy the Republican zealots and marry them digitally. (I've discovered the mashup - partay like it's 2002.)
Und thus: "Are 'Higsons' Electric?" by Segway Army. You can ignore the rest of this post if you'd rather have tedious musical discussions disappear, or at least wait until after you've heard the song.
(Some complications: despite a similarity of chord structure, the songs were in two different keys a fourth apart. I experimented a bit with Strawberry Fieldsing them together, but the result made Hitchcock sound like a munchkin and Numan's track sound like it was being performed underwater. So instead, I realized: hey, the melody mostly works in its original key against Numan's key - just on different scale degrees. The "Higsons" I used was the until-recently-rare studio version (on the new Hitchcock box set), and that bizarre clanking (literally) underwater percussion became a bit of a noise problem (it fades out during the first verse in the original, too). My philosophy? Make the vocal track noisier, so it sounds as if it's coming through a trucker's dispatch microphone and one of those grease-stained plastic speakers from the '60s - noise to hide noise, hooray! Same thing with that guitar part, which was chopped and channeled from its original key and wrung through the tremoloizer partly to provide a sort of noise bed to disguise the leftover guitar bits dangling around the tweezed corpse of Robyn's vocals. I like it - but then, I like spicy music.)
Segway Army "Are 'Higsons' Electric?" (Numan/Hitchcock head-on collision)
Und thus: "Are 'Higsons' Electric?" by Segway Army. You can ignore the rest of this post if you'd rather have tedious musical discussions disappear, or at least wait until after you've heard the song.
(Some complications: despite a similarity of chord structure, the songs were in two different keys a fourth apart. I experimented a bit with Strawberry Fieldsing them together, but the result made Hitchcock sound like a munchkin and Numan's track sound like it was being performed underwater. So instead, I realized: hey, the melody mostly works in its original key against Numan's key - just on different scale degrees. The "Higsons" I used was the until-recently-rare studio version (on the new Hitchcock box set), and that bizarre clanking (literally) underwater percussion became a bit of a noise problem (it fades out during the first verse in the original, too). My philosophy? Make the vocal track noisier, so it sounds as if it's coming through a trucker's dispatch microphone and one of those grease-stained plastic speakers from the '60s - noise to hide noise, hooray! Same thing with that guitar part, which was chopped and channeled from its original key and wrung through the tremoloizer partly to provide a sort of noise bed to disguise the leftover guitar bits dangling around the tweezed corpse of Robyn's vocals. I like it - but then, I like spicy music.)
Segway Army "Are 'Higsons' Electric?" (Numan/Hitchcock head-on collision)
11.14.2007
because I promised...
Random hoodlum under ninja archaeopteryx absquatulant renders zygotes in quail inferno!
(You might see the comments here to make sense of this...)
(You might see the comments here to make sense of this...)
11.13.2007
8 2, Prince?
I've gotta admit, I've paid almost zero attention to Prince since he emigrated to Planet Purple sometime in the late '80s or so. Critics claimed to have spotted Prince returning to our own Earth a few years back with Musicology, and while "Cinnamon Girl" (of course it's not the Neil Young song!) was pretty good, it also sounded rather like the work of a talented Prince tribute act deciding to write an original song. So I didn't investigate further.
So it was that a few days ago, I heard a track on the radio from Prince's newest release (coincidentally titled Planet Earth). I knew it was Prince, because my car radio has that dealy where it spells out the artist and song title with some stations - but if you'd told me it was "Weird Al" Yankovic doing a Prince-like song - with a guest rap by The Onion's Smoove B yet! - I totally would have believed it. Seriously: the lyrics read like a parody of Smoove B, if you can imagine. The music was limp and unimaginative, and if that sounds like a vague description it's because it was also utterly unmemorable as well.
I'm kinda hoping this song is the worst one on the record, and that it's there solely as part of a hush-hush agreement wherein Prince was compelled to write a jingle for Moet, Raisinets, and Chocolat (all of which are product-placed in the lyrics) after some sort of product-oriented orgy-gone-wrong with a trio of backing vocalists resulted in a paternity suit.
So it was that a few days ago, I heard a track on the radio from Prince's newest release (coincidentally titled Planet Earth). I knew it was Prince, because my car radio has that dealy where it spells out the artist and song title with some stations - but if you'd told me it was "Weird Al" Yankovic doing a Prince-like song - with a guest rap by The Onion's Smoove B yet! - I totally would have believed it. Seriously: the lyrics read like a parody of Smoove B, if you can imagine. The music was limp and unimaginative, and if that sounds like a vague description it's because it was also utterly unmemorable as well.
I'm kinda hoping this song is the worst one on the record, and that it's there solely as part of a hush-hush agreement wherein Prince was compelled to write a jingle for Moet, Raisinets, and Chocolat (all of which are product-placed in the lyrics) after some sort of product-oriented orgy-gone-wrong with a trio of backing vocalists resulted in a paternity suit.
11.12.2007
my favorite stamp
I really haven't seen many of the new stamps since the Postal Service needlessly complicated its pricing structure - but this one's a beauty:
Of course, the cat factor helps - but I really like that blue color anyway.
I have no idea what the point of a 26-cent stamp is, however. I suspect the Postmaster General merely set up a dartboard to determine denominations.
Of course, the cat factor helps - but I really like that blue color anyway.
I have no idea what the point of a 26-cent stamp is, however. I suspect the Postmaster General merely set up a dartboard to determine denominations.
11.11.2007
meanwhile, in a Home Depot in Scottsdale, Arizona...
It might almost seem like the results of a game in which you're given three random nouns - say, "garage door," "Willie Mays," and "song" - and asked to write a coherent narrative using all three. But Joe Henry's "Our Song" is more than that - it's another one of Henry's short-stories-set-to-music. (If you want to know where this song actually came from, read this.)
It seems to me that one way to honor veterans is to remember the potential this country held. Or used to hold. Frankly, I'm not sure any more.
Joe Henry "Our Song" (Civilians, 2007)
It seems to me that one way to honor veterans is to remember the potential this country held. Or used to hold. Frankly, I'm not sure any more.
Joe Henry "Our Song" (Civilians, 2007)
11.10.2007
It was only a matter of time...
...until I used a picture of one of our own kitties to make a lolcat.
Thus:
Here's the same image at icanhascheezburger.com so you can vote on its wonderfulocity. [It would appear that either the site has not yet gotten to my image to judge its worthiness for voting display, or it has and has decreed it not funny enough. Bear in mind that this site does think it's funny to have all its FAQs, etc., rendered into lolspeak. Okay - you can let the bear out now.] And here's the original, non-lol'd version at flickr.
Thus:
11.09.2007
everything's coming up MiSTie...
Something funny must have gotten into the water up there in Minneapolis, because all of a sudden, the more-or-less dormant brilliance that was Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K to its friends) has made a reappearance...or rather, as if it had ventured into one of those scifi matter-duplicating machines, has made three reappearances.
Let's see if I can get this straight:
1. Original MST3K'ers Joel Hodgson, Josh Weinstein (now calling himself "J. Elvis Weinstein," which you've got to admit is a much better name), and Trace Beaulieu, along with slightly later crew Frank Conniff and Mary Jo Pehl, have a new bad-movie-mocking enterprise called Cinematic Titanic.
2. Another batch of MST3K crew - Kevin Murphy, Mike Nelson, and Bill Corbett (who did Crow's voice after the departure of Trace Beaulieu) - have four DVDs full of their own movie-mockery under the name of The Film Crew.
3. Finally, not to be left out, Jim Mallon (producer and voice of Gypsy), Paul Chaplin (writer and "Brain Guy"), and a guy whose name I don't recognize, James Moore, have teamed up with animator Maxeem Konrardy to produce a series of animated short online films featuring Tom Servo (now voiced by Moore), Crow T. Robot (now voiced by Chaplin), and Mallon. They apparently have rights to the MST3K name, since that's their URL.
Whew!
I have no idea whether these three groups are all throwing darts at one another, or whether it just happened that they got their own ventures going separately and are perfectly happy to hang out downing beers and scarfing cheese together - but hopefully more is better. The first animation from MST3K.com looked pretty good but didn't strike me as all that funny. I haven't seen any of the Film Crew's stuff yet - although one of their DVDs is sitting a few feet from me, probably to be watched this evening. I must admit I'm looking forward to the Cinematic Titanic thing the most - if only because I haven't heard anything about Joel or Frank for years, and in some ways their characters (and characterizations) were the most idiosyncratic of all the MST3K folks.
Let's see if I can get this straight:
1. Original MST3K'ers Joel Hodgson, Josh Weinstein (now calling himself "J. Elvis Weinstein," which you've got to admit is a much better name), and Trace Beaulieu, along with slightly later crew Frank Conniff and Mary Jo Pehl, have a new bad-movie-mocking enterprise called Cinematic Titanic.
2. Another batch of MST3K crew - Kevin Murphy, Mike Nelson, and Bill Corbett (who did Crow's voice after the departure of Trace Beaulieu) - have four DVDs full of their own movie-mockery under the name of The Film Crew.
3. Finally, not to be left out, Jim Mallon (producer and voice of Gypsy), Paul Chaplin (writer and "Brain Guy"), and a guy whose name I don't recognize, James Moore, have teamed up with animator Maxeem Konrardy to produce a series of animated short online films featuring Tom Servo (now voiced by Moore), Crow T. Robot (now voiced by Chaplin), and Mallon. They apparently have rights to the MST3K name, since that's their URL.
Whew!
I have no idea whether these three groups are all throwing darts at one another, or whether it just happened that they got their own ventures going separately and are perfectly happy to hang out downing beers and scarfing cheese together - but hopefully more is better. The first animation from MST3K.com looked pretty good but didn't strike me as all that funny. I haven't seen any of the Film Crew's stuff yet - although one of their DVDs is sitting a few feet from me, probably to be watched this evening. I must admit I'm looking forward to the Cinematic Titanic thing the most - if only because I haven't heard anything about Joel or Frank for years, and in some ways their characters (and characterizations) were the most idiosyncratic of all the MST3K folks.
is this some sort of first?
It has been brought to my attention that two Presidential candidates (okay, neither one of which has a chance) have wives who are young enough to be their daughters. Both are, in fact, rather attractive women. For the Democrats, we have Elizabeth Harper Kucinich:
And for the Republicans, Jeri Kehn Thompson: 
Yellojkt-style Blatant Comment Whoring: Who would get your vote?
And for the Republicans, Jeri Kehn Thompson: Yellojkt-style Blatant Comment Whoring: Who would get your vote?
11.08.2007
Pitchfork-bashing is a popular sport - but so long as they publish pieces like this wonderful interview by Amanda Petrusich with P.J. Harvey, I will consider it a valuable resource. In some ways the most important point Harvey makes is the idea that artists need to work through valleys in order to reach their peaks: I think of very major, long-term artists, and sure enough there are more than a few low points in their careers (hello, Bob and Neil...). But those low points were probably necessary to enable the high points. And as much as I tend to be critical of the role major labels play in music, Harvey is correct in being grateful to Island (sort of a boutique label swallowed by a major) in allowing her to do things her own way. Furthermore: for an artist, this is the best kind of interview - since it very much makes me want to hear Harvey's new CD. (Thanks to Matthew at Fluxblog for making me aware of this - and he's absolutely correct that Petrusich's investment in her questions makes this interview far superior to your run-of-the-mill so-what's-your-new-album-and-where-are-you-playing one-sheet-spewing hackery.)
este oro comemos
In one of the first narratives of European contact written by a native of America, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala presented the Spaniards as trying to eat gold. The notion that the Spaniards so hungered for gold that they would actually try to ingest it was probably received as a satirical comment, to somewhat similar effect as Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal."
But here we are in the twenty-first century - and what was once satirical absurdity is now some rich asshole's pleasure. Stephen Bruce of New York restaurant Serendipity 3 (I wonder how much he pays his dishwashers) has created a dessert, incorporating "28 cocoas, including 14 of the most expensive and exotic from around the globe" - and "infused with 5 grams...of edible 23-karat gold and served in a goblet lined with edible gold." There's more - including a golden spoon (I suppose he had to resist the temptation to use a silver one) - all for the low, low price of $25,000.
But Bruce is an enlightened man - witness the silken rhetoric with which he describes his more-expensive-than-a-semester-at-Harvard dessert's demographic: "I wouldn't be surprised if soon we get a call from a Middle Eastern prince or Shah willing to give something sweet to his many wives on his next trip to the city." Isn't that sweet? Brucey's multicultural knowledge seems derived from Hollywood melodramas of the forties. Perhaps we should send him off on a diplomatic mission to the Middle East, armed with his chocolate and gold.
Good kitchen workers everywhere know how to sully the meals of unpleasant guests, without the unsavory substances being detectable to the taste. (Of course, something tells me Bruce isn't letting any of your typical sub-minimum wage kitchen staff handle this particular menu item.) Still, I'm sure some of the folks toiling in Bruce's kitchen might wonder just who it is that can blow 25k on a fucking dessert.
There is another application of the trope of Spaniards eating gold. Having become aware of the Spaniards' cruelty and boundless avarice, the native populace, when Spaniards were captured, were said to tie their captives down, melt gold over flames, and pour the molten gold down their captives' throats, shouting "eat, eat gold, Christians!"
I believe this is known as "just desserts."
But here we are in the twenty-first century - and what was once satirical absurdity is now some rich asshole's pleasure. Stephen Bruce of New York restaurant Serendipity 3 (I wonder how much he pays his dishwashers) has created a dessert, incorporating "28 cocoas, including 14 of the most expensive and exotic from around the globe" - and "infused with 5 grams...of edible 23-karat gold and served in a goblet lined with edible gold." There's more - including a golden spoon (I suppose he had to resist the temptation to use a silver one) - all for the low, low price of $25,000.
But Bruce is an enlightened man - witness the silken rhetoric with which he describes his more-expensive-than-a-semester-at-Harvard dessert's demographic: "I wouldn't be surprised if soon we get a call from a Middle Eastern prince or Shah willing to give something sweet to his many wives on his next trip to the city." Isn't that sweet? Brucey's multicultural knowledge seems derived from Hollywood melodramas of the forties. Perhaps we should send him off on a diplomatic mission to the Middle East, armed with his chocolate and gold.
Good kitchen workers everywhere know how to sully the meals of unpleasant guests, without the unsavory substances being detectable to the taste. (Of course, something tells me Bruce isn't letting any of your typical sub-minimum wage kitchen staff handle this particular menu item.) Still, I'm sure some of the folks toiling in Bruce's kitchen might wonder just who it is that can blow 25k on a fucking dessert.
There is another application of the trope of Spaniards eating gold. Having become aware of the Spaniards' cruelty and boundless avarice, the native populace, when Spaniards were captured, were said to tie their captives down, melt gold over flames, and pour the molten gold down their captives' throats, shouting "eat, eat gold, Christians!"
I believe this is known as "just desserts."
11.07.2007
11.06.2007
the shoes that gaze at themselves
Thanks to lala.com (a startup leapfrogging from the trading of supposedly outmoded objects - namely CDs - into a portal for the exchange of nearly every format of music...), I picked up a copy of an album I'd had on an R.O.C. ("ratty old cassette" - I'm always calling them that, so I should just abbreviate) since its release in 1993, the self-titled album from Dutch band the Nightblooms. I think it was one of my sisters who'd bought the actual CD back then. Most of it is - well actually, most of it's pretty good, but the one song that stood out for me then, and still does, is "Butterfly Girl": eight minutes of a spacey, circular guitar figure embellished with ambient electronics, vocals forward and backward, and - not until about five minutes in - your more traditional shoegazery of beautifully corroded guitars. This is one of those songs whose words, even though they're in English, might as well be in Finnish for me: they work entirely as sound, and even though I pick out a word or two (the title phrase, something about rain), what the song means is entirely carried by its sound and mood. And what's that? Oh, it's much easier just to listen to it than for me to explain it.
As long as I'm dreaming of effects pedals, here's a more contemporary excursion into same, a track by Irish singer Nina Hynes called "Tenderness" which I found at Reverb Records' website. (I'd found the label searching for an otherwise-unavailable James Angell song...funny how that works.) This one has a light, almost tropical feel at times...but the textures gradually effloresce unusually, in case you were being lulled to complacency by the song's surface prettiness.
The Nightblooms "Butterfly Girl" (The Nightblooms, 1993)
Nina Hynes "Tenderness" (Staros, 2002)
As long as I'm dreaming of effects pedals, here's a more contemporary excursion into same, a track by Irish singer Nina Hynes called "Tenderness" which I found at Reverb Records' website. (I'd found the label searching for an otherwise-unavailable James Angell song...funny how that works.) This one has a light, almost tropical feel at times...but the textures gradually effloresce unusually, in case you were being lulled to complacency by the song's surface prettiness.
The Nightblooms "Butterfly Girl" (The Nightblooms, 1993)
Nina Hynes "Tenderness" (Staros, 2002)
11.05.2007
left foot blue, right hand green
One of the subtler, but more important, aspects of architecture has to do with creating legible, navigable space. (The second quality follows from the first.) If you walk into a space, you should be able to discern immediately how to get to wherever you want to go. And those paths should correspond to the most likely needs most users of that space are likely to have.
So, for example, when you walk into a restaurant of the counter-ordering variety, it should be immediately obvious where you go to place your order, where the menus are, where you go to get your food, drinks, napkins, etc. Those elements should be arranged in a logical order.
Here's an example of how not to do that. This image of a local restaurant is done from memory, so it's probably not 100% accurate - but it's accurate in its essentials (click to enlarge):
The dotted lines with arrows indicate one possible path through the restaurant. The heavy black dotted line indicates a portable barrier, one side of which is for people ordering salads, the other side of which is for people ordering other menu items. (And what if you or your party want both?) First problem: if you enter in the door indicated (which I did last time I was there), because of the table layout, a column in the center of the space, and that barrier, you have to circumnavigate the entirety of the restaurant (in fact, it would be quicker to go out the door and back in the other door). Then, once you've gone through the line and placed your order, you're faced with another minor quandary: there's no obvious space for people who've already ordered but are still waiting for their food. In practice, this means that when you're waiting, every other person passing you by asks whether you've ordered yet. Once your food arrives, you have to walk past the self-serve soda machine to the cash registers to pay. Once you pay and get your soda cup, you have to double back to the soda machine (which also doubles up the crush of waiting people). Finally, if you'd prefer to drink your soda with a straw, the straws are clear over on the other side of the room - once more, past the cash registers.
This place seems to have been designed in an utterly piecemeal, arbitrary fashion. Yet if the space for the soda machine (and dessert display, not shown) were simply switched with the cash register space, almost everything would make sense and flow smoothly: order food, get food, pay for food, get beverage, get straws and napkins, go to table.
Another thing about that barrier: the logic is that it takes the staff longer to make sandwiches than to give customers the (pre-made) salads. Okay, fine. But the signage indicating where people should line up leaves something to be desired. At the end of the barrier there's a sign, about three feet tall by two feet wide, telling people which side of the barrier is for salads and which is for other stuff. But perhaps in an effort to avoid the clumsy look of a big sign standing upright directly past an entrance, the sign was tilted downward about 60 degrees. This made it pretty legible if you were right in front of it - but approaching from any side (and given its position relative to one entrance, and with the other entrance requiring that roundabout approach), it wasn't very visible. This explained why several customers ended up in the wrong line - and in fact, part of that was that only one or two of them wanted salad, while the majority wanted sandwiches etc. - and so, new people coming in and not seeing the sign naturally went into the shorter line. And of course, if they passed that sign without seeing it, they'd have no way of knowing they were in the wrong line. This led to confusion among the folks working the counter, since they were expecting salad orders and getting sandwich orders instead.
I think the salads should be somewhere near where the soda machine is now, between the sandwich-ordering area and where the cash registers should be - so while sandwich people are waiting for their orders, salad people could merely go up, order their salads (which, being pre-made, could just be handed to them), and go pay for them directly. Other places allow this sort of thing to be handled intuitively by customers: one person at the bagel shop is ordering a dozen mixed bagels and a sandwich that has to be made up, the other person who just wants to grab a chocolate chip cookie just goes ahead of the ordering area and grabs a cookie, placed next to the cash register, then pays for it and is gone before the complicated order is done being made.
So, for example, when you walk into a restaurant of the counter-ordering variety, it should be immediately obvious where you go to place your order, where the menus are, where you go to get your food, drinks, napkins, etc. Those elements should be arranged in a logical order.
Here's an example of how not to do that. This image of a local restaurant is done from memory, so it's probably not 100% accurate - but it's accurate in its essentials (click to enlarge):
The dotted lines with arrows indicate one possible path through the restaurant. The heavy black dotted line indicates a portable barrier, one side of which is for people ordering salads, the other side of which is for people ordering other menu items. (And what if you or your party want both?) First problem: if you enter in the door indicated (which I did last time I was there), because of the table layout, a column in the center of the space, and that barrier, you have to circumnavigate the entirety of the restaurant (in fact, it would be quicker to go out the door and back in the other door). Then, once you've gone through the line and placed your order, you're faced with another minor quandary: there's no obvious space for people who've already ordered but are still waiting for their food. In practice, this means that when you're waiting, every other person passing you by asks whether you've ordered yet. Once your food arrives, you have to walk past the self-serve soda machine to the cash registers to pay. Once you pay and get your soda cup, you have to double back to the soda machine (which also doubles up the crush of waiting people). Finally, if you'd prefer to drink your soda with a straw, the straws are clear over on the other side of the room - once more, past the cash registers.
This place seems to have been designed in an utterly piecemeal, arbitrary fashion. Yet if the space for the soda machine (and dessert display, not shown) were simply switched with the cash register space, almost everything would make sense and flow smoothly: order food, get food, pay for food, get beverage, get straws and napkins, go to table.
Another thing about that barrier: the logic is that it takes the staff longer to make sandwiches than to give customers the (pre-made) salads. Okay, fine. But the signage indicating where people should line up leaves something to be desired. At the end of the barrier there's a sign, about three feet tall by two feet wide, telling people which side of the barrier is for salads and which is for other stuff. But perhaps in an effort to avoid the clumsy look of a big sign standing upright directly past an entrance, the sign was tilted downward about 60 degrees. This made it pretty legible if you were right in front of it - but approaching from any side (and given its position relative to one entrance, and with the other entrance requiring that roundabout approach), it wasn't very visible. This explained why several customers ended up in the wrong line - and in fact, part of that was that only one or two of them wanted salad, while the majority wanted sandwiches etc. - and so, new people coming in and not seeing the sign naturally went into the shorter line. And of course, if they passed that sign without seeing it, they'd have no way of knowing they were in the wrong line. This led to confusion among the folks working the counter, since they were expecting salad orders and getting sandwich orders instead.
I think the salads should be somewhere near where the soda machine is now, between the sandwich-ordering area and where the cash registers should be - so while sandwich people are waiting for their orders, salad people could merely go up, order their salads (which, being pre-made, could just be handed to them), and go pay for them directly. Other places allow this sort of thing to be handled intuitively by customers: one person at the bagel shop is ordering a dozen mixed bagels and a sandwich that has to be made up, the other person who just wants to grab a chocolate chip cookie just goes ahead of the ordering area and grabs a cookie, placed next to the cash register, then pays for it and is gone before the complicated order is done being made.
11.04.2007
advice to Milwaukee journalists
Look: if you want to convey the idea that Milwaukee is no longer a city of [insert stereotypical Milwaukee-associated thing here], then stop bloody writing articles whose lede is that Milwaukee is no longer a city of [insert stereotypical Milwaukee-associated thing here].
If someone keeps telling me over and over again that they're no longer insecure and lacking in self-confidence, am I going to believe it?
(PS: I just noticed this is my 200th post of the year. Go me! Also: as you've probably noticed reading other blogs, someone has designated November with another one of those cutesy abbreviated phrases - I think this one is NaSoBloMe, or National Blog Posting Month. You know, it might be easier to post at least 30 blog entries if I weren't busy writing a novel, recording an entire album, and sleeping with 30 different people this month also. There are eleven other months in the year - can't we spread out the OCD a little more evenly?)
If someone keeps telling me over and over again that they're no longer insecure and lacking in self-confidence, am I going to believe it?
(PS: I just noticed this is my 200th post of the year. Go me! Also: as you've probably noticed reading other blogs, someone has designated November with another one of those cutesy abbreviated phrases - I think this one is NaSoBloMe, or National Blog Posting Month. You know, it might be easier to post at least 30 blog entries if I weren't busy writing a novel, recording an entire album, and sleeping with 30 different people this month also. There are eleven other months in the year - can't we spread out the OCD a little more evenly?)
history repeats
As we finally return to "standard" time (the word's in quotes since now, it's Daylight Saving Time for more of the year than standard time), I find myself wondering whether there's some official terminology used when it's necessary to indicate a time between 1am and 2am on the day of the switch back to standard time...since in fact, there are two of all clock-moments between those hours, since at 2am the clocks switch back to 1am.
Say, a police report that needs to establish the time and sequence of an event: how does it differentiate between the first 1:03 am and the second one? Is it necessary to append "Central Daylight Time" or "Central Standard Time" (or any other time zone) to any mention of a time within that clock-hour?
(If anyone's wondering: I'm posting at 1:03 am CDT, not 1:03 CST.)
Say, a police report that needs to establish the time and sequence of an event: how does it differentiate between the first 1:03 am and the second one? Is it necessary to append "Central Daylight Time" or "Central Standard Time" (or any other time zone) to any mention of a time within that clock-hour?
(If anyone's wondering: I'm posting at 1:03 am CDT, not 1:03 CST.)
11.03.2007
in which he actually leaves the house, makes a public appearance, and spills beer all over himself
Being only a number countable on the fingers of one hand away from eligibility for AARP membership (which I plan to decline by setting the application alight on Wisconsin Avenue and Water at high noon on the appropriate birthday), I rarely bother to go out to concerts any more. There are two main factors conspiring to keep me in my comfy couch (or less comfy computer chair): one, having to get up early in the morning after late shows and, two (far more annoying), no longer wishing to inhale the equivalent of several cigarettes just to hear a band. So, when I found out that long-time favorite Robyn Hitchcock was playing Shank Hall, at a non-smoking show with an 8pm start, well that was sufficient.
Rose and I went out for dinner at a nearby Indian restaurant beforehand (I was half-hoping Robyn, missing his native British cuisine of curry, might have spotted the joint and popped in for a nice vegetarian meal before the show), but the place was busier than we'd anticipated, so we got to Shank a little later than I'd hoped. All the old-people chairs and tables were occupied, so we took up residence behind the bar. Actually, that would have been a perfectly fine place to stay - Shank's sound is excellent, and from where we were we had excellent sightlines - except for a trio of extraordinarily yappy middle-aged (i.e., older than me) gentlemen at the end of the bar, who reminded me of nothing so much as the living embodiment of the characters sketched out in the Costello-penned lyrics to Was (Not Was)'s "Shadow and Jimmy": two guys who never quite figured out how the rest of the world works and just went on their merrily blabbing and oblivious way. During opening act Sean Nelson's set - just Nelson and a piano - they were talking so loud they were probably audible clear up at the front of the room, to the extent that one of the bartenders actually told them to be quiet.
So we decided that for Robyn's show, we'd move elsewhere. We took up a convenient spot along the wall, from which we could see Robyn perfectly except when the occasional straggler returning from one of the restrooms (the wall's between them) stood in front of us for a few seconds. Plus, there was an oh-so-convenient ledge at perfect height for the resting of beer.
Ah, but here's where things get tricky. I was unprepared for the perfidy of a certain structural aspect of this ledge which, in the dark, I'd missed - and that is a projecting bit of moulding (which I will henceforth refer to as "Colin") at the back of this ledge. It seems that if you place a beer glass with its front edge on the ledge itself and the back edge on Colin, the result is a glass which, for a brief instant, rests at a 45 degree angle relative to that ledge. Beer is unstable at this angle - and it therefore splattered all over my jacket, my sweater, and my jeans. (My theory? Peter Jest put Colin there intentionally to drive up beer sales: "damn - better refill that beer I just poured all over the floor.")
Anyway, my misadventures with beer notwithstanding, it was a very enjoyable evening. Hitchcock started a bit slowly (he later noted that his vocal monitor was off), missing a few notes on the guitar during the opening "Ghost Ship" and forgetting the ending to "City of Shame," but after that he settled in quite nicely. He was in good voice - which had worried me, since a few years back it seemed as if his voice was on the road to being thoroughly toasted, and he'd have to finish his career with a croak like Dylan's voice nowadays. He played a nice range of songs from throughout his career, including one new track (from a movie about Brian Epstein, apparently to be called Fifth Beatle) - and his between-song chats seemed spontaneous and were even more hilarious than usual. An extended bit about Tom Hanks as an astronaut spotting a "glyph" in space, and Roger Waters selling crystal meth from an enormous column on the dark side of the moon, reached particular heights of free-associative mania.
After a broken string and an early switch to electric for "Raymond Chandler Evening" and "The Lizard," Robyn called Sean Nelson back onstage to sing harmonies for the remainder of the show. Highlights of this part of the show included a lovely take on "Alright Yeah" and (after a difficult time retuning his acoustic to open E tuning - during which Robyn improvised a monologue about "courting swans"...which means that I'll have to have that image in mind every time I tune my own guitar) "Sometimes a Blonde."
The encore set was particularly nice, featuring Hitchcock and Nelson on an affecting take on "N.Y. Doll," a heartbreaking cover of the Velvet Underground's "Candy Says," and, leaving everyone wanting more, a propulsive version of "Adventure Rocket Ship."
No summary of a Hitchcock show is complete without the Shirt Report. He was wearing purple trousers but, because he kept his dark jacket on all night, it's a bit hard to describe the shirt. From as much of it as I could see, it was a multicolored number made up of large splashes of bright colors.
We emerged back onto the streets, hoping Milwaukee had been kept safe from marauding Canadian land clams for at least another evening.
Here are two live Hitchcock tracks from my collection: an acoustic version of Dylan's "Not Dark Yet" featuring John Paul Jones (yes, that John Paul Jones) on mandolin, and a piano-based version of "The Lizard" from 1990.
(PS: Amusingly, the first item that comes up in a Google image search on "carpentry moulding" is for something called "Robyn's Nest, Inc." I blame Tom Hanks.)
Rose and I went out for dinner at a nearby Indian restaurant beforehand (I was half-hoping Robyn, missing his native British cuisine of curry, might have spotted the joint and popped in for a nice vegetarian meal before the show), but the place was busier than we'd anticipated, so we got to Shank a little later than I'd hoped. All the old-people chairs and tables were occupied, so we took up residence behind the bar. Actually, that would have been a perfectly fine place to stay - Shank's sound is excellent, and from where we were we had excellent sightlines - except for a trio of extraordinarily yappy middle-aged (i.e., older than me) gentlemen at the end of the bar, who reminded me of nothing so much as the living embodiment of the characters sketched out in the Costello-penned lyrics to Was (Not Was)'s "Shadow and Jimmy": two guys who never quite figured out how the rest of the world works and just went on their merrily blabbing and oblivious way. During opening act Sean Nelson's set - just Nelson and a piano - they were talking so loud they were probably audible clear up at the front of the room, to the extent that one of the bartenders actually told them to be quiet.
So we decided that for Robyn's show, we'd move elsewhere. We took up a convenient spot along the wall, from which we could see Robyn perfectly except when the occasional straggler returning from one of the restrooms (the wall's between them) stood in front of us for a few seconds. Plus, there was an oh-so-convenient ledge at perfect height for the resting of beer.
Ah, but here's where things get tricky. I was unprepared for the perfidy of a certain structural aspect of this ledge which, in the dark, I'd missed - and that is a projecting bit of moulding (which I will henceforth refer to as "Colin") at the back of this ledge. It seems that if you place a beer glass with its front edge on the ledge itself and the back edge on Colin, the result is a glass which, for a brief instant, rests at a 45 degree angle relative to that ledge. Beer is unstable at this angle - and it therefore splattered all over my jacket, my sweater, and my jeans. (My theory? Peter Jest put Colin there intentionally to drive up beer sales: "damn - better refill that beer I just poured all over the floor.")
Anyway, my misadventures with beer notwithstanding, it was a very enjoyable evening. Hitchcock started a bit slowly (he later noted that his vocal monitor was off), missing a few notes on the guitar during the opening "Ghost Ship" and forgetting the ending to "City of Shame," but after that he settled in quite nicely. He was in good voice - which had worried me, since a few years back it seemed as if his voice was on the road to being thoroughly toasted, and he'd have to finish his career with a croak like Dylan's voice nowadays. He played a nice range of songs from throughout his career, including one new track (from a movie about Brian Epstein, apparently to be called Fifth Beatle) - and his between-song chats seemed spontaneous and were even more hilarious than usual. An extended bit about Tom Hanks as an astronaut spotting a "glyph" in space, and Roger Waters selling crystal meth from an enormous column on the dark side of the moon, reached particular heights of free-associative mania.
After a broken string and an early switch to electric for "Raymond Chandler Evening" and "The Lizard," Robyn called Sean Nelson back onstage to sing harmonies for the remainder of the show. Highlights of this part of the show included a lovely take on "Alright Yeah" and (after a difficult time retuning his acoustic to open E tuning - during which Robyn improvised a monologue about "courting swans"...which means that I'll have to have that image in mind every time I tune my own guitar) "Sometimes a Blonde."
The encore set was particularly nice, featuring Hitchcock and Nelson on an affecting take on "N.Y. Doll," a heartbreaking cover of the Velvet Underground's "Candy Says," and, leaving everyone wanting more, a propulsive version of "Adventure Rocket Ship."
No summary of a Hitchcock show is complete without the Shirt Report. He was wearing purple trousers but, because he kept his dark jacket on all night, it's a bit hard to describe the shirt. From as much of it as I could see, it was a multicolored number made up of large splashes of bright colors.
We emerged back onto the streets, hoping Milwaukee had been kept safe from marauding Canadian land clams for at least another evening.
Here are two live Hitchcock tracks from my collection: an acoustic version of Dylan's "Not Dark Yet" featuring John Paul Jones (yes, that John Paul Jones) on mandolin, and a piano-based version of "The Lizard" from 1990.
(PS: Amusingly, the first item that comes up in a Google image search on "carpentry moulding" is for something called "Robyn's Nest, Inc." I blame Tom Hanks.)
11.02.2007
he has no words...
For some reason, "Mad Went the Barber" by Mabuses popped into my head the other day (maybe it was a promo for the Sweeney Todd movie...). Anyway, I realized that my copy of that song was a quaint little reminder of a forgotten moment in the music industry, because it came my way on a promotional CD put out by a long-gone service called unwrapped.com...whose idea was that, wow, they'd burn your very own mix CDs for you, and then mail you the CD! This was in 1998, before Napster - I suppose it seemed like a good idea at the time. Then home CD burners became cheap, and the quality of mp3s rose (more accurately, typical bandwidth and speed increased so that higher-quality, larger mp3s were feasible to use) - and the point of such a business model was utterly lost. I still recall an issue of Musician magazine, from the early '90s, peering into a crystal ball in which, rather than buying manufactured CDs at record stores, you would go to the record store...and a machine could burn the CD for you right there! Again: unanticipated changes in technology rendered that scenario absurd.
I suppose there's a cautionary note there for those who confidently forecast the complete disappearance of CDs: things never quite evolve as you'd expect. And while I think it's likely that a Web 3.0, where applications and storage migrate from the desktop to the web, will come about in some form (who wants to pay a couple hundred bucks for a pointlessly bloated version of Word, complete with obnoxious and unusable new file format, if you could just access a word-processing site online that allows you save documents in any format you want, and either store them online or locally?), there's no predicting what will actually happen.
Anyway, there were a couple of other interesting tracks on that unwrapped.com sampler - some Simon Joyner, some Modest Mouse before most people had heard of them - but I'm posting a long psych track from the first release by the Asteroid #4, entitled "The Admiral's Address." The Mabuses' track has a slightly psych edge too, along with a sort of classic British pop sound that more or less contemporary (yet unjustly obscure) acts like Statuesque were exploring at the time. (Statuesque is still active - see the myspace link - and the Mabuses have just released a new CD as well.)
Mabuses "Mad Went the Barber" (Mabuses, 1993)
The Asteroid #4 "The Admiral's Address" (Introducing the Asteroid #4, 1998)
I suppose there's a cautionary note there for those who confidently forecast the complete disappearance of CDs: things never quite evolve as you'd expect. And while I think it's likely that a Web 3.0, where applications and storage migrate from the desktop to the web, will come about in some form (who wants to pay a couple hundred bucks for a pointlessly bloated version of Word, complete with obnoxious and unusable new file format, if you could just access a word-processing site online that allows you save documents in any format you want, and either store them online or locally?), there's no predicting what will actually happen.
Anyway, there were a couple of other interesting tracks on that unwrapped.com sampler - some Simon Joyner, some Modest Mouse before most people had heard of them - but I'm posting a long psych track from the first release by the Asteroid #4, entitled "The Admiral's Address." The Mabuses' track has a slightly psych edge too, along with a sort of classic British pop sound that more or less contemporary (yet unjustly obscure) acts like Statuesque were exploring at the time. (Statuesque is still active - see the myspace link - and the Mabuses have just released a new CD as well.)
Mabuses "Mad Went the Barber" (Mabuses, 1993)
The Asteroid #4 "The Admiral's Address" (Introducing the Asteroid #4, 1998)
11.01.2007
move over big bad wolf - it's the year of the horse
The spate of wolf-oriented band names seems to have given way to names referring to horses. Here's a list from my music database of bands whose names refer to horses or ponies - many of which are relatively new:
Ass Ponys
Band of Horses
Chris D & the Divine Horsemen
Crazy Horse
Horse Feathers
Horse Ing Two=Hit
Horse the Band
International Pony
Neon Horse
New Young Pony Club
Nine Horses
Poni Hoax
Ponies in the Surf
Pony Pants
Pony Up!
Red Pony Clock
Sixteen Horsepower
Snowpony
Sparklehorse
Telstar Ponies
Tex & the Horseheads
The City and Horses
The Dark Horse Project
The Golden Palominos
The Ponys
The Rocking Horse Winner
The Seahorses
The Silver Horseshoes
The White Horse Hillbillies
The Workhorse Movement
They Shoot Horses Don't They
Ass Ponys
Band of Horses
Chris D & the Divine Horsemen
Crazy Horse
Horse Feathers
Horse Ing Two=Hit
Horse the Band
International Pony
Neon Horse
New Young Pony Club
Nine Horses
Poni Hoax
Ponies in the Surf
Pony Pants
Pony Up!
Red Pony Clock
Sixteen Horsepower
Snowpony
Sparklehorse
Telstar Ponies
Tex & the Horseheads
The City and Horses
The Dark Horse Project
The Golden Palominos
The Ponys
The Rocking Horse Winner
The Seahorses
The Silver Horseshoes
The White Horse Hillbillies
The Workhorse Movement
They Shoot Horses Don't They
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