thieving bastard

Okay, I have officially anticipated an idea used by an actual conceptual artist: see this entry (and note the date), and then read the last paragraph of this entry from Lord Whimsy.

I really should do something other than sit around typing, apparently.

primarily

Here's an irony. One advantage often attributed to our system of primaries, and to the Electoral College as well, is that it encourages candidates to do more than merely focus on the most populous states, thereby ensuring that more of the population is exposed to the candidates.

Yet here it is, not even February, and on the basis of a handful of primaries and caucuses in several relatively small states, already Edwards, Kucinich, Giuliani, and Thompson have dropped out of the race - which means that even if there were massive support for any of those candidates in the majority of states whose citizens have not yet had the chance to express an opinion, effectively supporters of those candidates have been denied a voice.

Brilliant system.

Reich and the Dominos

In the '60s, Steve Reich experimented with various simple processes to generate a series of pieces: for example, he might have two performers playing the same part, but then after a certain number of repetitions one performer delays the part by one beat (putting the two performers one beat out of phase), after a certain further number of repetitions, there's another single-beat delay (two beats out of phase), and so forth...until eventually, the performers are back in unison again.

It occurred to me that it's very simple to create such a process piece using digital editing software: all you have to do is create a cell, replicate it, replicate the grouping, but then shift its beginning a certain length of time.

So, I decided to sample the opening guitar riff from Derek and the Dominos' "Layla" (I intentionally chose something very familiar). I repeated it 128 times - then I duplicated those 128 times, but shifted the whole thing forward by four bars and one eighth note. Every four bars, I added a silence equal to the length of one eighth note. (In other words, I took the length of the cell - a two-bar phrase, so 16 eighth notes - divided it by 16, and incremented everything forward by that length, every four bars.) Then I eliminated the material beyond the ending of the original 128 cells.

This was interesting enough...but once you got what was going on, the rest was predictable. So I decided that I'd then take the second set of cells, duplicate it, then insert it four bars and one eighth-note later - so after eight bars and a couple of beats, there were three Laylas playing. Doing this onscreen, the visual symmetry of what I was creating led me to the next step: I eliminated not only any cells that went beyond the original ending, but symmetrically trimmed off four cells at the end as well, in each track (so that at a certain point, the three Laylas would reduce to two). On the screen, what was beginning to emerge was an inverted pyramid, with each track having eight fewer cells than the one above it. Each track was shifted forward another eighth note. So I continued, until at the peak of the music (right in the middle), there are nine different "Layla" cells playing.

That's almost what you're hearing. Purists probably would have left it alone at this point (true purists would have been irritated that I'd used the re-balanced 20th Anniversary version of the song...then, those purists would have nothing to do with the whole project...). Although it was interesting to hear all nine versions pile up in the middle of the piece, I decided it would be fun to be able to hear a bit more detail - so I left tracks 1, 2, 5, 6, and 9 alone, but shifted tracks 3 and 8 three-quarters to the left channel, and tracks 4 and 7 three-quarters to the right channel.

So there you have it: "Laylaphase."

seasonal

Three songs that allude, however glancingly or metaphorically, to our periodic feverish national gesture at democracy:

Nothing Painted Blue "Campaign Song": Apparently, the album this one appears on (Power Trips Down Lovers' Lane) is out of print. This is a crime against the state of our love, baby.

Game Theory "Throwing the Election": Hell, this one's out of print too (2 Steps from the Middle Ages)...a long, complicated story involving rights and the whereabouts of masters. Ex-drummer Gil Ray describes the story for Game Theory's previous album - the underheard classic Lolita Nation - in this blog entry and this one.

"Complicated Game" (Andy Partridge, XTC): The demo, from Andy's enormous package (I phrased it that way just for him) of demos, Fuzzy Warbles (which - mirabile dictu! - is actually in print). The demo barely hints at the furious chaos of XTC's studio version: except for that oddly voiced second chord, it sounds like yr basic careless strumming. In his notes, Partridge notes that this version was recorded very quickly, essentially to aid his memory in remembering the song idea.

Nothing Painted Blue "Campaign Song" (Power Trips Down Lovers' Lane, 1993)
Game Theory "Throwing the Election" (2 Steps from the Middle Ages, 1988)
Andy Partridge "Complicated Game" (demo) (Fuzzy Warbles 1 - recorded 1978)
XTC "Complicated Game" (Drums and Wires, 1979)

actually fun "meme"

Courtesy of yellojkt - the Robert Pollard Memorial Faux Rock Album Meme (I've renamed it - and no, don't worry: Pollard hasn't died, you just need "Memorial" in there).

The obvious next step (as YJ points out) is to do up an album cover - so I spent a little while and came up with this for my random names, phrases, and image (click to embiggen and render the type more legible):


PS: I just don't like that the perfectly serviceable term meme has come to mean merely "quiz that gets passed around the internet." Sorry - I'm all fussy, and probably am one of those people who, one hundred years ago, would have complained that the word "automobile" is ill-formed, deriving as it does from mixed Greek and Latin roots...

Update: The Summervillain pointed folks to a random selection of Creative Commons Flickr images - so rather than use a copyrighted image, I've redone the meme with one of those. For the image choice, I chose the third image in the third row of the first page that came up. (The original image - by, uh, " >>> Silly Rabbit, Trix are for Kids <<<" - is here. Oh - and the full quotation from which my "title" is drawn runs as follows: "Be fit for more than the thing you are now doing. Let everyone know that you have a reserve in yourself; that you have more power than you are now using. If you are not too large for the place you occupy, you are too small for it." It's from the comic strip "Garfield" President James A. Garfield. My original selection - with copyrighted image by Evje Calling - may be viewed by dropping the "2cvr" from the image URL.

stay away from mirrors

One thing Robyn Hitchcock does very well - something very few other artists do as well, at least none I can think of off the top of my head - is a sort of lightly psychedelic, floating, unbearably pretty song, often tinged with a vague sense of regret or sadness. A handful of tracks on his classic I Often Dream of Trains fits into this small category, as do some on the similarly self-recorded (for the most part) Eye, but it's something he doesn't do often anymore. Perhaps as his voice has deepened over the decades (it's quite amusing to hear early live recordings of his stage chat - his voice then was much higher), it's harder for him to achieve the wispy upper register he frequently used on these types of songs.

Anyway, Sartorial Records in Britain has just released a compilation of previously homeless Hitchcock songs recorded from 1993 through 1999 (titled Shadow Cat, and available via The Museum of Robyn Hitchcock). "High on Yourself" is a fine example of this sort of tune, and its key line is both hilarious and deadly on target: "let's go shopping on painkillers," he sings, several times.

The younger Hitchcock, though, was an angrier, more cynical man, and to his ever-present trinity of Dylan, Lennon, and Barrett, add a strong hint of Captain Beefheart's knotty guitar algebra, one more ingredient that made the Soft Boys such an unusual act (did I mention the barbershop quartet singing?). This live recording of "Heartbreak Hotel" (made famous by Elvis Presley, but here using John Cale's reharmonization) shows what an intense gale of noise the Soft Boys could whip up in their early days.

Robyn Hitchcock "High on Yourself" (Shadow Cat, 2007 - rec'd 1993-99)
The Soft Boys "Heartbreak Hotel" (The Soft Boys 1976-1981 - rec'd at Lady Mitchell Hall Nov. 27, 1978)

a compromise

So they're going to build a bronze statue of Fonzie in Milwaukee. There's been some opposition to this statue from folks who don't want yet another reminder of the outmoded Happy Days/Laverne and Shirley image of Milwaukee...but the decision's been made, and we'll have to live with it.

My suggestion is that occasionally, we put the statue in a cheap suit and tie and proclaim it a Barry Zuckerkorn statue. That'll give it a hipper, more contemporary image, I think.

unbelievable

One of the classes I'm teaching this semester is in UWM's business building, which was built new about eight to ten years ago, and which came with a zillion bells and whistles: auditorium-style seating with built-in desks, everything carpeted (and with loads of signs informing students - who weren't asked their preference - not to eat or drink in the room), computers in every room, etc. etc....you know, The Future circa the late nineties. (I should note that the English department, since it serves more students than most departments, cannot hold all its classes in its home building. So no: I'm not teaching business thank god, only teaching in the business building.)

Of course now, the system not having budgeted for maintenance, the rooms look more thrashed than your standard boring classroom (which generally can look decent merely by cleaning it): the carpets are worn and fraying, and the rooms are all tiered and terraced, for no good reason except, presumably, to annoy disabled students, but the plastic step-guards are falling off and held in place with strips of duct tape, etc.

More irritating than any of that: my first class in the room was last Wednesday, and as I wander into the room, I see that only half the lights are on, and so I look for the light switch to turn the rest of them on (it was a typically gray, cloudy winter day, so they were definitely needed). There's a switch-looking thing by the door (of course it's all high-tech - no simple buy-at-any-hardware-store switches for future business leaders of America!), but it does nothing but turn all the lights off or turn on the ones that were on to begin with. I have no clue how to turn the rest of the lights on. I experiment with every other switch-looking thing in the room...nothing happens. (I'll get an angry letter from an elderly woman in Austria in a few weeks, saying "cut that out!" Thank you, Steven Wright.)

So I e-mail the classroom support people, feeling like an idiot as I ask, how do you turn the lights on? The answer?

They're controlled by the built-in computer. You actually have to log in to the computer network to turn the fucking lights on. (Was I given the password before the semester? Of course not! That might have been vaguely efficient.) So I suppose if the computer bluescreens, we'll just have to sit in the dark.

On the upside: the desk I sit at looks like something out of a science-fiction movie from the sixties (except it's covered in painted plywood - budgets, you know) and completely hides the lower part of my body from my students' view. So, if I wanted to neglect the wearing of pants, no one would be the wiser. Yeehaw.

Ted!

Four Ted Leo tracks, from Faith Salie's "Fair Game" on PRI, starting at this link.

a state takes refuge in superstition

I don't particularly care about the Packers...but Wisconsinites searching for supernatural explanations for the team's loss yesterday have a good candidate in the infamous Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx... Brett Favre, of course, having appeared on the cover of the magazine's January 21, 2008 issue...and then throwing an interception in overtime that led to the team's loss.

but serialously, folks...

I do not understand the vogue for dropping the serial comma - as if somehow its presence delays the reader, or its insertion takes precious time better spent on some worthier task - when its absence invariably creates unwarranted connection between the last two items of the series, and sometimes leads to even more confusion.

Here's the first sentence of Stuart Klawans' review of There Will Be Blood, as printed in the January 28, 2008 issue of The Nation:

By the time the boy lies moaning on the floor, spooned against a father who is helpless to soothe him, the earth has blasted open, fire has whooshed up through an oil derrick and a dozen roustabouts, dwarfed by their handiwork, have raced in all directions across the stony Central California hilltop, trying to contain the immense forces they'd set loose.

The first time you read this, did the main clause's figurative language cause you to ask "wait - is the fire whooshing somehow through [as in "among" or "forcibly separating"] the roustabouts as well?" Cuz it sure did me. Which meant that at first, I was slightly at sea on the question of what "dwarfed" was doing: verb? past participle? Ultimately, of course, it becomes clear that it's the latter, that it modifies "roustabouts," and that the phrase beginning "a dozen roustabouts" is the third in a series of clauses describing what happened "by the time the boy lies moaning..." (the first two being "the earth has blasted open" and "fire has whooshed..."

In a long, complex sentence like this one, what possible justification is there for omitting that comma, which would have gone a long way toward clarifying the sentence's structure?

None that I can think of.

uh...

Overhead at lunch:

"...it's called St. Valentine's Day because of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. You know - in Chicago!"

conceptual continuity

Record companies sometimes like to claim they were broadsided by the digital revolution - they're idiots if they believe that.

Plenty of people could see the future - maybe not exactly, but in certain respects accurately. I remember reading an article in Musician magazine in the early '90s suggesting that in the future, people would go to record stores not to buy pre-manufactured CDs, but to have CDs manufactured on demand for them via digital networks (clearly, the authors did not anticipate home CD burners).

Even more stunningly, here's Frank Zappa, in 1983, essentially modeling something rather similar to the iTunes Store (via Click Opera).

a trip to the record store

Yes, I do still do that. In this edition:

What did I go to the store to buy?

* The new Magnetic Fields CD, Distortion - which also came with a bonus CD with Stephin Merritt's "The Man of a Million Faces," which he wrote and recorded in two days for NPR.

What did I pick up from the used bin, as long as I was there?

* Bottom of the Hudson Fantastic Hawk
* Frank Black Fast Man Raider Man
* Marmoset Florist Fired
* Hot Hot Heat Happiness Ltd.
* Japan Obscure Alternatives
* Badfinger Straight Up
* Centro-Matic Triggers and Trash Heaps EP
* Damon & Naomi Within These Walls (I didn't know this existed...obviously a well-publicized release...)

What did I snatch from the counter and add to my pile, even though reasonable questions might be raised as to the legality of its sale?

* Radiohead In Rainbows disc 2 (CD-R)

(That last item have something to do with why I'm not naming the store in this instance...)

harbinger

Leaving the house and heading north on the freeway earlier this evening, I noticed that, for some reason, lights were on at Miller Park - and I realized that even though it's the deepest depth of winter, baseball season is less than three months away. I'm not at all a major sports fan...but I do like baseball, and it occurred to me, seeing the lights illuminating the arching roof of Miller Park on the horizon, that I really ought to get to a few more Brewers games this season.

To hell with winter - bring on the springtime!

Mickey Mouse's life flashing before his eyes...

People or animals in extraordinarily stressful or threatening situations, such as those that put their very lives at risk, can be expected to act in violent and irrational fashion, since anything is preferable to their being killed.

One must conclude from recent actions of the recording industry's mouthpiece, the RIAA, that it feels cornered, dangered, and can smell its own death at hand, as pungent and immediate as its own fear-soiled trousers.

In a case reported in the Washington Post recently, the RIAA initially argued that even copying one's own legally purchased music - such as mp3s on a personal computer, or a duplicated CD-R to be played in one's car - constitutes illegal copying. (The Post finesses this argument by its correction, at the top of the article as currently posted at its website, by saying the RIAA claimed only that mp3s in a shared folder are infringing...but as Utah law professor John Tehranian points out, the law as currently written makes no such distinction.) The same article points out the absurdity that Jammie Thomas, who was convicted of sharing songs online, was fined $9,250 per song. Where, exactly, does that number derive? The record industry releases thousands and thousands of CDs each year; even assuming an overall profit, that profit surely comes nowhere near $10,000 per song per person. The penalties are clearly excessive.

The absurdity of the Thomas case might seem exceptional - and so far, in terms of actual settlements, it is - but copyright law generally is wildly out of sync with common belief and practice. Tehranian succinctly sums this up in his article, in which he presents a typical day in the life of a hypothetical law professor. In the course of his day, Professor "John" infringes to the tune of $12 million dollars...merely by doing things that many, if not most, people do everyday.

Tehranian's examples:

* downloading e-mails - thereby "illegally" copying their content onto his computer
* distributing copies to his students of an online article summarizing a recent law case
* doodling "an unauthorized derivative of a copyrighted architectural rendering" in the form of a sketch of Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim
* reading aloud a poem to his class - an unauthorized public performance
* e-mailing copies of photos taken by a friend: even though the friend gave him the copies, copyright in the original remains with his friend
* publicly displaying an "unauthorized" tattoo of a copyrighted cartoon character
* singing "Happy Birthday" in a restaurant - again, unauthorized public performance
* videotaping that birthday celebration - and accidentally capturing an image of a copyrighted painting in the background
* having subscribed to and reading Found magazine...since copyright is automatically granted to the creator of any "work" (very loosely defined), Found could be held to infringe the copyright of those creators...and "John" materially contributes to that by helping fund the zine's endeavors

Tehranian's summary is worth quoting in full (even if my doing so might well fall afoul of "fair use" regulations...an area of law which, Tehranian points out, is highly malleable and provides little guarantee to users that they might not be held liable):

By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges). There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John’s activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, barring last minute salvation from the notoriously ambiguous fair use defense, he would be liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year.... Such an outcome flies in the face of our basic sense of justice. Indeed, one must either irrationally conclude that John is a criminal infringer - a veritable grand larcenist—or blithely surmise that copyright law must not mean what it appears to say. Something is clearly amiss.

Even singing along with a song on your car radio (if your windows are open, and anyone else can hear it) might technically constitute "unauthorized public performance" under the strictest reading of the law, Tehranian points out - a reading that, increasingly, the RIAA (to take one example) would like to see enforced.

Clearly, such damages are absurdly out of line with any actual damages sustained by the copyright holders. Equally clearly, if a law theoretically criminalizes everyday activities to such an extent, it is grotesquely out of touch with reality, and needs to be changed.

sheer genius!

I'm fairly well-persuaded that graphic design in concert promotion and flyers is at a bit of an ebb right now - or at least, the kind of poster designs you see miniaturized in ads in venues like local print editions of The Onion or in alternative weeklies tends toward the dull.

Often, it seems the images are sort of randomly chosen, sometimes with an arbitrary connection to the artist tossed in. A few months back, Iron & Wine came to town, and the poster image promoting the show was a creepy illustration of a barren tree whose branches had sprouted numerous iterations of Sam Beam's bearded face. Uh, okay - I can what that has to do with his music...

On the other hand, while being obscure can be annoying, frustrating, or an easy way out (i.e., can recycle image for other artists with no one the wiser), being literal is also a problem. Witness this image: The sound you just heard was the collapse of that image's designer's brain, sucked into the black hole-like gravitational vortex created by the image's mindbending obviousness. I mean, wow: I can imagine the thought process, the meetings, the endless e-mails that went back and forth until someone finally came up with this one: "Hey, the band's called 'The Walkmen' - let's use...a Walkman! And the opening act is called 'The White Rabbits' - how about...a clip-art rabbit image, and then we can just flip it horizontally so there's two white rabbits...geddit? Huh? Huh? Geddit?" SPLUSHHH! and they had to use a shovel to remove what was left of his brains from the office floor.

I'm only surprised the backdrop isn't a whitewashed denim texture - presumably, the band White Denim didn't have enough clout to get their name illustrated with such ox-stunning literality.

(PS: The Walkmen are still a great band.)

the thoughtful grandchild's gift

You know those foam beer cozies that are supposed to keep a can of beer cool?

I think a good seller would be one emblazoned with the phrase I'M DRINKING MY GRANDCHILDREN'S INHERITANCE.

myriad stew

For music geeks, it's always interesting to chart the evolution of a song...from the earliest demos, to various recorded takes, to later live versions. Some musicians are known for radically rearranging their songs live, while others are prone to cannibalize bits and pieces of several unreleased songs to build new ones (on the basis of the bonus discs on Elvis Costello's reissues, he's a champion at this).

So here are several versions of the New Pornographers' "Myriad Harbour." The demo version is almost exclusively acoustic, except for an electric lead that shows up near the end, with multiple Dan Bejars outlining the song in its basic form. The studio version on Challengers is, of course, more elaborately arranged, in keeping with that album's aesthetic. The multiple vocal parts benefit from actual multiple vocalists - especially since the lyrics mention "Carl" and "John" (one presumes Newman and Collins, guitarist/songwriter and bassist/producer respectively). The arrangement, particularly in the instrumental coda with its scraping cellos, recalls avowed Newman faves The Move in that band's latterday formation (around the time they were evolving into the Electric Light Orchestra).

The live version from a KCRW broadcast adds a new element, returning the song to its acoustic basis but playing the lead line now on a mandolin. The steady thump of the rhythm, along with the mandolin sound, reminded me of something...but I couldn't quite place it at first.

And then I realized what song the arrangement was heading in the direction of: Led Zeppelin's "Boogie with Stu." I wonder what that song would sound like with A.C. Newman on the vocals... (Or maybe Neko - given its rather extravagant higher notes.)

Update: Following up on some e-mail comments: of course I know Danny Bejar sings lead on this song...the comment about A.C. Newman singing the hypothetical cover came about because he has a higher range more likely to be able to handle that song's high-pitched vocal line.

t-shirt idea

Travel Anecdote #1: So, we're sitting at a restaurant and, as much of the conversation last week did (this is the way with parents of very young children), Tonia and Cason spent a lot of time cooing over how cute six-month-old Lanam is (and he is!). Tonia noted that people often think he's a little girl because he's so "pretty." That led to a comment about "pretty enough to be a girl," which led me - feigning hurt feelings - to claim that I too was pretty enough to be a girl. Of course, questioning looks all around - after which I modified my claim to "pretty enough to be an ugly girl."

I think you had to have been there - but I also think "pretty enough to be an ugly girl" would be an amusing t-shirt. Of course, very few people could or would actually wear it... (Tonia thought her friend Michael would, for sure - primarily because, as she said, Michael is sort of the gay version of me.)

a very expensive process by which your views are denied representation

It's rather pathetic when the media is thrown into a tizzy because one caucus (from a demographically atypical state) and one primary (from a demographically atypical state) haven't yet produced a clear winner for either Democrats or Republicans.

Heavens - that might mean people in the rest of the country might actually have an opinion we'd have to pay attention to!

Not very likely, with the megagiant ultrahuge multistate primary coming up early next month.

Sometimes I think presidential elections should be like orchestra auditions: each politician can stand behind a screen, and they can answer relevant questions (with their voices electronically altered), so people can actually vote for positions they agree with, rather than "who they'd like to have a beer with" or other such bullshit.

Of course, there are still only two parties, and still a winner-take-all, simple majority vote. And the electoral college...don't get me started. When the best argument to be mustered for a process is that it encourages politicians to actually pay attention to people (which is to say that they wouldn't do so otherwise), you know the system's broken.

Incidentally, while I think Larry Sabato, author of the article linked above, has some intriguing ideas, I disagree strongly that preventing the emergence of multiple parties has been primarily a force for, or motivated by, "stability" - if so, single-party rule would be even more "stable," no? Instead, the two-party system has made millions of Americans give up on politics, since their views aren't represented. It may not be efficient - but a parliamentary system, in which multiple parties, elected in proportion to the extent each one's ideas are popular among voters, must form temporary coalitions to get things done, is far more democratic and truly representative of public opinion.

stuck in Minneapolis with the rental blues again

So, we were scheduled to return from our trip to Dallas (photos here) Sunday evening, on a flight due in around 6 o'clock or so. As anyone who lives in Milwaukee knows, all flights to and from the city Sunday were canceled due to extremely dense fog.

We didn't find that out till we were in the line to check out bags at DFW, of course. What to do? Well, we had several options (one was not to fly into Chicago: no seats available). We could rent another car for another day and go back to Tonia and Cason's house...but that was risky, in that the forecast for Monday here was very similar to Sunday's (as it turned out, fog didn't come early...but it looks like it's coming now). It would also have been a pain in the butt for Tonia and Cason, who probably were glad not to have to entertain us as well as deal with a six-month-old child. (I know they were pleased we visited...but as we well know, it's also good to get back to the normal routine.)

We did a little thinking, and decided to fly into Minneapolis instead. (Note for the geographically clueless: first, Milwaukee and Minneapolis are not the same city. Second, they're about five or six hours apart by car.) We figured either we could rent a car one way that evening and drive back - or, if we were too tired or a car unavailable, stay overnight at my sister's place and then deal with renting a car.

So it was that we ended up on a flight leaving nearly an hour and a half earlier than our original one...which meant we had to OJ it (pre-'94) to the Northwest terminal (we'd been on Midwest) and barely had time to scarf down some not-all-that great food before the plane took off. (At this point, curiously, Rose actually became a bit nervous and flustered. That rarely happens: usually it's me who turns into a puddle of panic when stupid bureaucracy makes things unpredictable. She got better.)

One uneventful flight later (although we were worried: there were five or six under-six kids within three rows of our seats - which were, miraculously, together), we touched down in Minneapolis, took the amusingly short tram ride to the rental car area (amusingly short because unlike DFW, MSP was not built for fifty-foot-tall giants), and tried to rent a car. Struck out at the first place we tried (and at this point, can I express my displeasure with airports that charge for wireless access? I mean, c'mon: we've just paid hundreds of dollars for the privilege of taking off our shoes in public and walking through a metal detector: the least you can do is be as generous as your average coffee shop and give us free WiFi), but found one at Alamo. Of course, we paid a premium for a single-day, one-way, right-now rental...but we realized that no matter what we would have done, it would have cost money.

Apparently Alamo doesn't much care what car you use: we got to their area of the parking garage, some guy pointed at four cars in a row and said, pick whichever one you want. I decided that the black Avenger was a no-go - since it was probably designed and engineered to appeal to the kind of guy who wants to drive a car named "Avenger" (which meant we'd probably use another hundred bucks' worth of gas) - and the rest looked functionally identical. In fact, it wasn't until we stopped for dinner on the road home that I even knew what kind of vehicle it was, other than being a Chevy (obvious from the bowtie on the steering wheel). The key said "Intermediate" on it...so we were contrasting what kind of person buys an "Avenger" with the person who'd buy a "Chevy Intermediate." Turned out to be a Malibu. So that explained the stupid oblique angles of the numerals on the speedometer display: it's sporty!

After briefly getting slightly lost near the Mall of America, we were soon on our way. The fog didn't make itself known until about Black River Falls or so (I remember the Orange Moose being difficult to see) and really wasn't that bad except in patches...until we got to Madison. At first, it was just a little bit surreal: there was a truck about half a mile ahead of us whose taillights formed a perfect square, and because the fog obscured much else in the surroundings, if you focused on the square of lights, it was as if you weren't moving at all. (This is not something you actually want to do for more than a second or so, of course: I found that moving my eyes around and not focusing on any one thing for very long helped me stay unhypnotized by the lack of visible landscape.) When the fog got thicker, though, it was kind of weird, as if in some science fiction film where the sensation of motion was present, but very little was visibly moving. Fortunately, since this was kinda freaky, we found a friendly truck to follow for the worst of the fog. We were concerned to keep a good distance (far enough back, but close enough so our headlights actually reflected off the back of the truck to provide a bit more ambient illumination) - and as it turned out, that was a good thing. Around the point where 90 and 39 break off from 94 near Madison, there were a bunch of cop cars with their lights flashing, apparently blocking off some entrances and exits (fortunately, not ours). It wasn't until I got home and read the news online earlier today that I found out that earlier Sunday, about mid-afternoon, there'd been a huge pileup in the fog in which two people had been killed and several injured. Probably good I wasn't aware of that at that point.

We finally got back to Milwaukee a little after midnight (by which time, amusingly, the fog had almost completely cleared), parked the rental next to the garage, brought our luggage into the house and left it just inside the back door, fed and petted the cats - and immediately went to bed, exhausted.

Now we get to see if Midwest will reimburse us for any of our extra expenses. The last time one of our flights was canceled, they did...but that flight was canceled because of a mechanical problem with one of their planes. That is, it was their fault. The fog was not.

As I put it in an e-mail to Tonia, if Midwest fails to reimburse us because the fog was an "act of God," maybe a letter to the Pope would help.

Batman Begins...to tediously paulrusize*

It took me nearly a full year...but I finally have an answer to the question I raised in this post. We're visiting our friends Tonia and Cason in Dallas, and as it happens, Cason is a major fan of Batman (or, as he might insist, "the Bat-man") and, when for some reason my dumb little theory about the musical access code in Batman Begins came up, he felt compelled to check it out. So, courtesy a bootleg DVD of the Batman TV series (incomprehensibly, still not out on DVD - maybe it'll come out on Blu-Ray...) and a perfectly legitimate copy of Batman Begins, I can provide the following comments:

1. I theorized that the little three-note sequence of clusters Bruce Wayne plays on the library piano, which allowed access to the Batcave via an entryway hidden behind a set of bookshelves, might have been the same three-note sequence of clusters often heard as brass blats during fight scenes in the 1960s Batman TV series. While I thought I had a clear memory of how that brass blat sounded, as it turned out, at least in the couple-few episodes of the show we skimmed, those brass blats had no particular scoring: they seemed merely to be groups of two-note clusters (at the interval of a major second) overlaid on the underlying fight-scene score when punches were thrown...but which notes seemed variable and irregular.

2. In the first instance of the piano key (har...), the notes Bruce plays are as follows (and I haven't found a good way to put musical notation in these posts): the C and D two octaves above middle C; the B and C a seventh above that; and the F and a fourth down from the second cluster. Amusingly, one musical figure abstractable from this is D-B-G...a sequence identical in intervals to the well-known NBC musical call-sign. (This would be significant except that the TV series ran on ABC.) Neither of us was patient enough to listen closely enough to the second instance (during the fire) of this piano business to note whether it's the same as the first one - except that I did notice that the notes are detuned in the second example (presumably to indicate fire damage to the piano), implying either that the access is mechanical rather than sound-based, or that I pay far too much attention to detail and I should really just relax.

3. Still: that the TV series used a series of two-note clusters based on simultaneous seconds, and that the movie used the same musical idea as a key, is similar enough to suggest that this just might not have been an accident. Finally: the second-based clusters are a key sonic element of the well-known theme to the TV series (the various interjections that sound like "Batman...").

* a new verb, coined based on the image here, and derived from the "Paul Is Dead" craze and the way fans desperately squeezed the most vague traces of significance from the most recondite, trivial, and incidental atoms in the Beatleverse in order to support a patently absurd notion...

possible misapprehensions

I wonder if it's viable to claim any legitimacy at all for a genre of writing that intentionally goes off half-cocked. Via Franklin Bruno's Nervous Unto Thirst, I read a review he wrote of Julian Dodd's Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology, an examination of the ontology of music that, according to Bruno, asks two key questions: "the categorical question (what sort of entity is a work of music?) and the individuation question (how are works identified and distinguished?)."

These questions are, of course, much harder to answer adequately than one might think. I, however, haven't read the review carefully, but in reading through it (much as one might look through a windowpane), I found myself asking some questions about the questions Dodd raises. For example: Bruno notes that "Dodd's 'sonicism' (2) holds that 'work-identity consists in acoustic indistinguishability' (8)," contrasted with contextualism, under which "various properties not readily described in acoustic terms are also essential to work-identity." This seems similar to me to the old literary-critical argument between the New Criticism, which argued against any sort of extra-textual considerations and asked to read solely, and closely, the work itself, contrasted with numerous later (as well as earlier) schools of literary interpretation, which argued for the importance in interpretation of, variously, contexts historical, biographical, literary, sociological, psychological, and so on.

The example and question I'm thinking of initially raises the secondary question of what counts as a "work" not only under these considerations but also in terms of wholeness and integrity: what constitutes the boundaries of a musical event? Is a single movement of a symphony a "work"? Is a single song on a through-segued concept album? More directly to my silly little example to come: is a two-bar sample? Because there, context is clearly relevant. I'm thinking of MF DOOM's "Tick, Tick..." specifically - which samples the queasy string figure at the end of the Beatles' "Glass Onion." MF DOOM further distorts the source by altering pitch and tempo (further queasifying it, for that matter), but even assuming a particular two-bar segment in the identical tempo and key as that of the Beatles' original (that is, which possess "acoustic indistinguishability" relative to one another), clearly the acoustic context makes a huge difference in the effect of that two-bar segment. Now, granted, this isn't a case of a "propert[y] not readily described in acoustic terms"; but it's pretty easy to imagine examples which clearly would fulfill that criterion quite readily. Let's imagine a public-domain recording by a marching band of "The Star-Spangled Banner." In one context, it appears on a 45-rpm record in a flag-festooned package called "The Soul of a Great Nation," given away free to young men and women at an armed services recruiting center. In the second context, it is presented as the b-side of a single whose a-side is an incendiary piece of anti-nationalistic punk rock. Yeah, I'm weighting the example ridiculously - but equally obviously, the self-same acoustic phenomenon (tentatively, "work") is going to have a very different meaning in each context. How reasonable is it even to call the two acoustically-identical recordings "the same"? (Let's ask the renowned musicologist Jorge Luis Borges...)

Please note that I'm using a dense and technically written review of an even more dense and technically written text, a text I have not read, as a jumping-off point: I'd be very surprised if I'm saying anything at all interesting about Dodd's work. But I do think it's interesting to ask, regardless of that context (a context I can't claim to be able to work within), a different question, however tangentially related: what do we mean when we say that a piece of music is the "same" as another piece of music?

Carrying on with my attempt to sculpt a cube from someone else's sphere, I note that Bruno paraphrases Dodd's answer to "the categorical question" by stating that "works are sound-event-types, the tokens or occurrences of which are their performances," and that "an ontology of music [must] account for works'...audibility (works are the sort of things that can be heard [11])." This last raises an interesting question: is a work of music not a work of music until it is heard? If a fully fleshed-out orchestral score exists, but the musical performance that would render that score into an acoustical event has not yet occurred, does that mean the piece is not yet a "work of music"? I note that we're in some curiously murky terminological waters: it's fairly common for musicians to refer to scores as "the music," or in some senses to argue or imply that the score is, in some sense, music: the score is referred to by the title of the piece; or at any rate, it's hard to find a clear way to distinguish the work that comes into being only when performed or recorded from the representation or abstraction of that work which is the score. If a manuscript positively verified as being in Beethoven's hand were discovered, a manuscript which was a complete score to a tenth symphony, it would be very odd indeed to claim that this wasn't a work of music until it was performed, even in a very formal usage of the term in question - particularly since many musicians can hear, in their heads, a virtual performance as they peruse a score.

The questions get even more vexing when modern, studio-based popular music is considered. Take a remixed version of a particular song, constructed from the exact same recorded tracks as its initially released version, only with those tracks re-equalized, re-balanced, remixed, etc. Many non-professional ears would be incapable of hearing the difference between the two recordings; it seems odd to argue that the question of whether a "work" is distinct depends on who's hearing it, or on the readings of a carefully calibrated oscilloscope. Further: at what point does the work become a work, given the second criterion of "audibility," given in turn that the whole song doesn't exist until all the tracks are mastered in their final form? How many works of music are we talking about here?

Again: Dodd might well say I've utterly and completely misconstrued his point (entirely possible), but nonetheless I think the questions I'm asking are interesting, and (again) more difficult to answer than it seems. Consider: if, as I imply, it's absurd to talk about two near-identical mixes of the same track as two different works of music (one version, say, brings up the treble on the piano track, raises the volume of the bass drum slightly, and digitally reduces some tape hiss on the original recording; and the whole mix is compressed and increased in volume), it seems equally absurd to say they're the same work in other senses. Certainly, more experienced or subtler ears would hear the differences, and collectors would consider the two as different enough that, say, someone who lacked one or the other version would not be considered to have the artist's complete discography.

What constitutes a "work of music" - even to the apparently simple questions of when is it music, or what makes it different from some other work of music - is, then, by no means a simple question.

Which, of course, is why philosophers can write books on questions that most people would imagine are simple and obvious. Very little, it seems, is truly simple or obvious.

a tale of three buckets

2007 was the year of the LOLCAT...and, of course, the LOLCAT's buddy the LOLRUS and the sad tale of his missing bucket.

Before the whole meme becomes hopelessly last year (oh wait: it is), I found myself free-associating some of those ideas, which led me to make the following quick-n-dirty image - - which I think should be called I AM THE PAULRUS. (Okay. No, it shouldn't.)

Taking the other half of the walrus/bucket combo, I of course thought of this -

But here's the curious thing: seeing those two next to one another reminded me of another image, one that was in the Beatles' ill-fated Magical Mystery Tour television special, one that appeared in the accompanying album's booklet...one which seems an obvious predecessor to Mr. Creosote, especially given that the Python guys and at least one Beatle (George) knew one another by the time of The Meaning of Life -