Edifice Wrecks

The steering wheel

2011-09-08T10:18:00.000-04:00

A familiar claim: our convenience culture ruins the spontaneity that our lives used to have. Before, you were forced to experience something new and deal with it, while today you can pretty easily avoid many new things. But that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. How about we flip this on its head and say, "media convenience allows us to adventure on our own terms"? Make it a new one if that's what you want, but feel free to stay in your shell.

Why is cultural stagnation always the technology's fault, and not the user's? Now instead of what's always on the radio (or the Christian talk station) or a small collection of albums, you could theoretically guarantee a new set of sounds every time you drove your car. If you end up choosing that same album over and over again, isn't that your choice? Having less CDs doesn't make new listening more likely.

We're caught up with this idea that technology frees us and holds us back. In reality, it doesn't quite do either of those things. It only gives a tool to become more the person you want to be. Do you want to be in constant communication with others? Done. Do you want to go off on your own, but make sure that you're reachable in an emergency? Also done. Do you want to listen to the same song everywhere you go, all the time? Can do. Do you never want to hear the same song twice? You got it. The point is, we choose our own paths, and it's a cop-out to blame the fact that you're becoming predictable on the gadgets that enable it. True, humans tend to adapt to the environment (app culture being one example), but the devices we're talking about do much more freeing than demanding.

The question that this really gets at is: what do we want? It's a simple question, but the answer to it is very difficult. Inevitably, it seems, the question leads to another one: do we even know what we want? Do we want our lives to be simple, challenging, or somewhere in the middle? If we're talking about something like music, most people would probably say that they don't want to be challenged too much, but also don't want to seem stuffy. But there are comforts and pleasures to in the already-known and self-approved choices. Every decision about what to do is one more thing to think about, and at some point the mind just gets tired of having to decide. It's possible that having 2,000 albums on an iPod makes this fatigue point come more quickly, but perhaps it has merely shifted the decision from "should I buy a new album or listen to one I already have" to "should I listen to something new or something I recognize".

There's also an age/time factor. It comes as no surprise to me that these types of posts are written by people with some decades under their belts. It's not because older folks don't "get" technology or are overly nostalgic for the olde days, but rather that people tend to get busier as they move into adulthood. Priorities take over, and business takes precedence over pleasure. This is one of the reasons why people tend to think that the best kind of music is the kind that dominated their young adulthood: the idle/party time spent finding new things dwindles as workdays increase. That's okay, but it's a phenomenon that often gets mistaken for a change somewhere else. It's not me, music just isn't as good any more. It's not me, this device just makes it too easy to listen to my favorite album. It's always possible to find more stuff that you like (case in point, the Mumford & Sons in the article); discovery just needs to be prioritized. Time is a commodity, and how we choose to spend it has a drastic effect on how we see the world.

In short: don't let the things in your life dictate what you do. Make that decision for yourself, and let those things take you there.

Hellhound on My Trail

2011-08-27T07:55:00.000-04:00

"Did Robert Johnson really sell his soul to the Devil?" is a great subject for an article. This one takes up that offer and turns it into a brief history of the Blues and the Devil, followed by some academic argument on the likelihood of actual soul-selling. It's pretty interesting, but suffers from a major problem: I think this guy is serious. In the discussion, blues scholars are divided into two camps: those who believe Johnson sold his soul and those who believe he made it up. There are accusations of attempts to sanitize the history and a brief critical analysis linking Johnson's death with a song he recorded a "mere" 92 days beforehand. Son House's story about Johnson jumping from a rank amateur to a master in no time flat is interesting, but, like the rest of the histories, impossible to verify. We'll never really know what happened, but it seems unproductive to argue about the mythology. Most likely, the truth falls somewhere between the two extremes: maybe Johnson thought he sold his soul, maybe it just made good material and then caught on, maybe he later took credit for somebody else's rumors. Cultural mythologies are fascinating, and worth understanding. But the way to go about that is to trace their histories to put them in historical context. Whether or not they are true is beside the point; it's the how and the why that matter. Say Johnson never sold his soul: does that part of the story no longer matter? The sections of the article that discuss societal and contextual threads are great, so it was disappointing to see it resolve into an expert debate on the technicalities.

Genre tetris

2011-08-15T23:03:00.001-04:00

I have here three albums described as electrohaze psych-dub, dark ambient italo, and psych-drone ragas, respectively. I'm almost embarrassed to say that I can easily imagine what each of those sounds like.

One thing that I like, though, is how genre words are building blocks but are not all cut from the same cloth. It's theoretically possible to combine any two kinds of music, but not all genre words fit together. Psych and ragas go together, especially if there's some drone involved, but an italo raga probably wouldn't work. Pop can be appended to most anything (pop rock, pop country, psych pop, etc.), but pop hip hop just doesn't work, nor does ambient pop (at least the way I'm thinking of it). Electro bluegrass sounds impossible. And jazz still lives in a world all by itself. I'd like to hear those gap-filling stuff attempted, though.

Sentences

2011-08-03T11:13:00.000-04:00

This is our culture:

Primary Colors for the social media era, the wildly profane, viral phenomenon that resulted from a fake Twitter account deftly satirizing Rahm Emanuel is the first significant Twitter epic in today’s digital age.

I guess "Twitter epic" is a thing now, then. If we're going to make that a genre, I suppose it's only right that there is a significant work in it.

Aleatoric

2011-07-29T13:18:00.000-04:00

When your work or hobby causes you to deal with certain approaches or modes of analysis, it's easy for that to bleed over into other areas of life. So it's not much of a surprise to see NYTimes music critic Anthony Tommasini writing about a baseball game as a concert:

For all the hubbub of constant sound it is amazing how clearly the crack of a bat, the whoosh of a pitch (at least from the powerhouse Sabathia), and the leathery thud of the ball smothered in the catcher’s mitt cut through the textures. And if the hum of chattering provides the unbroken timeline and undulant ripple of this baseball symphony, the voices that break through from all around are like striking, if fleeting, solo instruments.

For a musical mind, these sorts of diversions are common. In a city, constant noise coalesces into a pattern of mechanical and human sounds. On a country evening, trees and insects rise and fall. And so on.

For those who usually don't notice those things, this column is a great introduction to that world. It's also a good example of the importance of medium and attitude to outreach programs. In 1952, John Cage composed 4'33" with a similar goal: to show how music can happen in places other than the stage. He had visited a sound-proof chamber at Harvard, where he discovered that the human body constantly produces at least two sounds at all times. He wanted to bring this idea of perpetual sound to others. To do this, he used a piece of music that generated spontaneously from the audience rather than the instruments.

Unfortunately, he had a few things working against him. First, because he was working with a concert environment, he had to overcome the expectations of the audience that they would be played to, rather than that they would be played. He increased this expectation by putting a piano and a pianist on the stage. So, to this day, people think the piece is about "not playing" rather than "other types of playing". Second, because Cage was/is seen as avant-garde and spoke academically, his idea is lumped in with other things that people consider kooky and weird. Tommasini, though, takes the more populist approach of a newspaper article about the all-American sport of baseball, creating a Trojan horse of music criticism that may have more success getting into the minds and ears of the public.

(via kottke.org)

Borderlands

2011-07-20T11:22:00.000-04:00

Surprising nobody, Borders is closing its remaining stores and dissolving. It seems like people are taking this news to be a "big deal", either as a referendum on the way we purchase and reads books today (or don't) or a comment on the state of the publishing industry. Over on NPR, Linda Holmes does a good job of getting at both of those points by discussing the ripple waves of a large businesses failure and the communal nature of a bookstore.

On the first point, it's easy enough to see the loss of jobs, the loss of secondary jobs, and the debts that may never be paid. On the second point:

That said, the aspect of Borders' implosion that troubles me is that there will be 399 fewer places to take part in the communal act of book buying, which is a completely separate activity from reading . . .

Bookstores are very special places, even the behemoths. They provide a space for cultural dilettantism. You can get lost in them for hours, perusing covers and picking up obscure titles. They are dedicated to discovery and are curated by some of the most dedicated retail employees around (even to get hired at a large corporate chain, one is still required to exhibit a sharp passion for reading).

The assumption that people are making is that these stores are simply going to leave behind book-less voids inhabited only by zombies with the occasional Kindle. But presumably consumers who are buying books will continue buying books. If the big-box model wasn't working, that means that a smaller, more nimble local store (which Holmes hopes for at the end of the post) is ideally situated to fill that void. And unlike a Walmart situation where the bigger store undercuts the smaller, prices at new-book bookstores has always seemed to me to be list price across the board.

Perhaps I'm lucky to have Kramerbooks (which has a full-size bar and restaurant) around the corner and Politics & Prose (which hosts many book events) up the street, but well-run independent stores look good right now. I am always surprised by the number of customers in those stores. In places where Borders was the only source, there is now the opportunity to start up a smaller store and be creative. It's even possible for it to take advantage of the e-book movement by setting up a digital store of its own. Like other struggling industries (music, newspapers, etc.), a little bit of work can go a long way. In short, Borders may be gone, but there's no reason to think that books and book readers are somehow going to lose out here. In fact, the opposite may be true.

The color of Internet

2011-07-19T12:31:00.002-04:00

What is the color of the Internet? According to an aggregate of relevant Flickr photos, it's something like:

This is the perfect result. It has that "everything" flavor to it, but its most prominent feature is the Gesundheit scrawled across the top left. That's your Internet.

(via swissmiss)

Summer snows

2011-07-19T10:56:00.002-04:00

From the Smithsonian's Flickr collection, these photos were taken in the late 1800s:

Wilson A. Bentley first became fascinated with snow during his childhood on a Vermont farm, and he experimented for years with ways to view individual snowflakes in order to study their crystalline structure. He eventually attached a camera to his microscope, and in 1885 he successfully photographed the flakes. This photomicrograph and more than five thousand others supported the belief that no two snowflakes are alike, leading scientists to study his work and publish it in numerous scientific articles and magazines. In 1903 Bentley sent prints of his snowflakes to the Smithsonian, hoping they might be of interest to Secretary Samuel P. Langley.

If you're wondering, the first photograph (as we know it) was made in 1826.

Electronic evocations

2011-07-16T11:14:00.003-04:00

Science and technology combine to make very cool music things:
I'm guessing this has something to do with Hz and frame rates and whatnot, like how old computer monitors used to flicker on video. This would make for a great music video.

(via kottke)

Brazenhead

2011-07-16T11:01:00.000-04:00

The bad guy is not always who you think it is:

Secondhand bookshops have been banished from the city, there's no place for them.You know, and people say, "Barnes & Noble put you out?" No, no: real estate put me out.

I imagine that things may be harder for a firsthand bookstore competing with the big boxes and Amazon, but secondhand stores should be able to survive so long as they get the business side of things right. Also, this guy's bookstore looks amazing and like one of those uniquely New York-y things to do while in New York.

(via The Paris Review)

Demolitions

2011-07-14T10:48:00.001-04:00

If you have a business that does something cool, it's a good idea to make videos of it and put it on YouTube. It could be a good advertisement, and people might be impressed. But I'm kind of confused about what NYPD is advertising here:I guess they're hoping that people will want to hire them for their next fireworks demolition. Or maybe they'd like to be hired for your next fireworks spectacular? It's possible that they're just posting a appropriately-timed video for the Fourth of July, but that doesn't make a very good story.

(via Make)

Lionkiller

2011-07-13T14:15:00.000-04:00

On Friday, I'm hoping to see Cass McCombs on his stop here in town, so this interview with the A.V. Club caught my eye. And he says a few interesting things in it, like

AVC: It seems like one of those albums that weeds out casual fans.
CM: Yeah. Hopefully.

AVC: Is that something you were thinking about with the record?
CM: I don’t think I thought about that, but I think I try to do a lot of things to weed out casual fans.

AVC: Like what?
CM: [Laughs.] Well, subject matter, you know. Really, I’m not trying to write for the masses. I don’t care. I write for myself, and I write for my friends and people who I have a connection with. I try to give some dignity to peoples’ lifestyles that tend to be ignored.

and later

AVC: That said, I take it you’re looking forward to this current tour.
CM: Hell yeah, can’t wait. I don’t live anywhere, so that’s what’s fun about tours. I get to do something.

As weird as the attitude seems to me, I like to read things like that from time to time. There's a lot of talk about music business profits and physical vs. digital sales and all that stuff, so it's reassuring to hear from somebody who's really just making stuff because he wants to make stuff. I'm sure that a lot of artists care about their craft, but there's something extra to the fact that he seems to need only his music to be happy in the world. That said, being apparently homeless and working to alienate fans may be a bit farther than necessary to prove an artistic point, but to each his own.

(via @marathonpacks)

The ambiguous smile, or, the great stagnation

2011-07-13T10:45:00.000-04:00

Where are the modern Renaissance men? A theory:

Yet there is no escaping the fact that Da Vinci was able to achieve so much, so broadly, because so little was known. It was possible to make leaps forward in scientific understanding armed with little more than a keen eye and a vivid imagination.

Those times are long gone. Approximately 3,000 scientific articles are published per day – roughly one every 10 seconds of a working day. We can now expect that these papers will, each year, cite around five million previous publications. And the rate of production of scientific papers is quadrupling every generation. (All these estimates are based on data from the Institute for Scientific Information.) The percentage of human knowledge that one scientist can absorb is rapidly heading towards zero. This side of a new Dark Age, there will never be another Da Vinci.

Depending on whether you use the term Renaissance man or polymath, Wikipedia has some different suggestions for the modern answer. While some are certainly impressive, none of the modern examples seems to quite equal the achievements of da Vinci. A cynical response to this would be that scientists and intellectuals today are mostly ignored by the public, precluding them from rising to the stature required to challenge the old master. Perhaps we'll need to check the names once more in a century or two.

Regardless, the idea that science is not making grand leaps forward is surprising. The 3,000 articles published a day seem at odds with the theory that the process has stalled. We have the Internet and incredible new technologies every day, scientists are growing body parts in laboratories. Yet that is what this article and Tyler Cowen's new book are positing. I was a skeptic until I saw Cowen speak about his book about a week ago. The basic idea is that, yes, we are making a lot of advancements, but they are not yet value-adding innovations like the printing press, penicillin, or the engine. The Internet and medical technologies are promising, but they have not yet delivered, not to mention that so far they only benefit the parts of the world that are already better off. These breakthroughs will come in time; Cowen thinks they are a decade or two away, though I think it just takes one spark and could therefore be any moment (or never). But because so much has already been done, the problems left to solve are the most complex and will take longer to solve. This means that even a truly great mind such as da Vinci's may be filled up with a single task, rather than dabbling in many. Or maybe what we really need is to start teaching scientists how to paint.

(via @ezraklein)

Dream Baby Dream

2011-07-12T11:20:00.001-04:00

This video is a great reminder of the power that a song's genre exerts over it, even when it is competently transferred into a different genre:Here, Bruce does a great job of taking a very different song and making it his own, but there's something that just doesn't quite transfer over to his classic rock style. When he comes out from behind the organ and sings while swaying without even a mic stand to lean on, there's a discontinuity between the massive arena he's in and the fact that it really seems like he should be singing in a room with like five other people.

When I first saw the video, I was thinking that it was a bit weird to see him up there standing sort of awkwardly. I expected at least some of that rock assertiveness or a hint of climax or anything like that, but he really took the song as far as he could, which takes guts. While I was writing this, though, I've started to think that it's the disconnect that really makes it work by taking the huge stage and collapsing it into a one-on-one relationship where Bruce-Listener is elevated above all else.

(via)

Crystal balls and mirrors

2011-07-11T10:17:00.000-04:00

One of the hardest aspects of predicting the future is the gap between today's and tomorrow's technology and the accompanying change in the belief in what is possible. For example, in Godel, Escher, Bach, Hofstadter spends some time talking about early attempts to create mechanical intelligence. This involved large loom/abacus-like contraptions that performed only basic calculations. Still, because even the formative technologies of the computer did not yet exist, the early inventors couldn't imagine today's much more advanced system, even as they worked towards it. Instead, predictions are often constrained by the status quo of the time.

A similar effect is evident if you watch a movie with "cutting-edge" special effects from a past decade. Even relatively recent stuff: although you remember it being pretty good, at least some of the effects will just be laughable because we now know how much more is possible. This is also a problem that pops up in literature set in the near-term future, such as Infinite Jest. Although it doesn't harm the book's value, David Foster Wallace's heavy discussion of disk-based entertainment systems makes it possible only that the book occurs in an alternate history of this world rather than a future whose problems we must take care to avoid. Setting work in the future is always a risk.

My favorite implication of this idea is what it means for generations growing up with computers, Internet, and a constant stream of all sorts of new technologies. We often feel like masters of tech, especially since older generations tend to struggle to adopt these new things. But surely at some point technology will take the leap to a new domain, and it will be interesting to see if today's whizzes are baffled or if we're now better at adapting to the next new thing. I, for one, am excited to find out what it is that will be too paradigm-changing for me to comprehend.

Pockets pulled outwards

2011-07-05T22:09:00.001-04:00

What:

In a statement e-mailed to The Times, Tim Frank, a spokesman for the National Basketball Association, has disputed an analysis by Forbes Magazine suggesting that the N.B.A. turned a $183 million operating profit in its 2009-10 season. Instead, according to Mr. Frank, the league lost $340 million that year and has lost money every year during the current collective bargaining agreement.

It seems like, if that's true, nobody would want to be a team owner? And David Stern would have a hard time keeping his job? The practice of turning a profit into a loss to hide them from investors or employees who want more is actually kind of impressive in its creativity.

(via 538 via @tcarmody)

Metaphor

2011-07-05T12:00:00.005-04:00

From The Stuff of Thought:

Human intelligence, with its capacity to think an unlimited number of abstract thoughts, evolved out of primate circuitry for coping with the physical and social world, augmented by a capacity to extend these circuits to new domains by metaphorical abstraction. And sine people think in metaphors, the key to understanding human thought is to deconstruct those metaphors. People disagree because they frame a problem with different metaphors, and make a mess of their lives because of pernicious implications of those frames, which they use without awareness. A linguistically informed literary criticism is the key to resolving conflict and frustration, from psychotherapy and law to philosophy and politics. Call this the messianic theory. It is based on the idea that to think is to grasp a metaphor--the metaphor metaphor.

Of course, people disagree for other reasons, too, but this is certainly a central aspect of ideological debate. It also has some interplay with reference points and perception. We often find ways to categorize what we and those around us are doing, typically through the use of metaphor. For example, a think tank researcher may conceptualize himself as a crusader on behalf of his viewpoint, or a Congressperson may choose to identify as a protector of the district that elected him. This choice of words has an indirect impact on the thoughts that will follow it. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but more a phenomenon worth noticing and understanding.

Phases

2011-07-03T10:23:00.001-04:00

Here's a video of the moon, seen over the course of a year:

It's neat to see how it sort of wobbles back and forth in time with its phase, rather than spinning as I assumed it would. And watching it totter like that came through as a reminder that we're actually on a rock spinning through space.

Sine waves and me

2011-07-01T12:18:00.000-04:00

Generator 2 (Demo Video) from Keith Fullerton Whitman on Vimeo.

I post this not because I think that it sounds good (as it happens, though, I do like this one), but because I could see myself playing around with something like this for hours. There's something to twiddling knobs and plugging/unplugging that makes you feel like a sound chemist performing miniature experiments. It's a bit different than playing a guitar or other analog instrument in that part of the challenge is not just making the sounds that you want but even convincing the instrument to make sounds at all.

Disintegrating into nature

2011-06-30T14:24:00.001-04:00

Disintegrating into nature, a photo by s reilly on Flickr.

Treasure hunt

2011-06-29T22:22:00.000-04:00

Since I'm currently passing from reading Donald Barthelme's 60 Stories to figuring out what's going on in Donald Barthelme's 60 Stories, it was perfect timing to come across the syllabus of recommended books that he distributed to his students. A Believer article on tackling the list puts it in just about the same way that I would. Barthelme's method of spinning what he called "dreck" into collage-like stories on the border between realism and surrealism. They're captivating and insightful in a way that make his further reading suggestions and literary opinions seem essential.

It's the pleasure and the curse of the culture or information addict: each new thing leads to more things, down more rabbit holes. Luckily, I like that kind of thing.

(via Kottke)

The flying men

2011-06-23T15:11:00.001-04:00

What is happening here. WHAT IS HAPPENING HERE. That looks like a hard thing to do. I keep trying to find a way that this is fake, but it definitely seems real.

(via Stellar)

Go Outside

2011-06-22T15:05:00.000-04:00

Go Outside by Cults

This song just nails summer. Good thing the album's coming out just as the season gets going. (I do wonder how much the "seasonality" of an album affects its success.) It's good music for strolling, or jumping, or driving, or whatever else you do during summer. There's a churning bassline, chiming melodies, something you can sing along to. And then the reverb and the organ really fill out the space and push it over the top so that it's hard to actually listen to the song without wanting to be outside. I don't think it would work in a Bud Light Lime commercial, though, so maybe I'm wrong about all of this.

2001: An Internet Odyssey

2011-06-21T17:42:00.000-04:00

Reading a book about the Internet and free speech from 2001, it's strange to see how much we're still stuck on the same cultural issues (climate change and same-sex marriage are both mentioned), and also how silly some of the websites were back in the day.

I was also surprised at how negative the reviews are, seeing as how many of Sunstein's ideas have been borne out in the decade following publication (even if his solutions are all unsatisfactory). Polarization and reinforcement have been discussed more recently as the backfire effect, and filtering is once again a hot topic. Unfortunately, it remains difficult to measure the effect that this is having on democracy (as an abstract and practical concept), but my initial reaction is that the connection and its effects should not be underestimated.

Also, the example used for cyberterrorism is the Love Bug virus. Oh, halcyon days.

Muddied waters

2011-06-20T19:10:00.000-04:00

I was thinking about how to talk about Google shutting down its Translate API due to recursive loops because it seems like a funny machine problem, but then Tim Carmody went and talked about it AND James Joyce. So, obviously, that's better.

(via Snarkmarket)