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Review - Anarchy, My Dear - Say Anything

2012-01-25T23:31:00.000-08:00

This album is much softer than I expected. There's a lot of acoustic guitar picking, lots of breathy backup vocals, and of course, Bemis continues to sing like a sweeter, more refined James Hetfield – Hetfield and Bemis are both strangely prone to letting out little moans after their words. I don't know what's up with that.
And the whole album is probably – what – 20? 20 BPMS lower than …Is a Real Boy.
So it ain't what I was expecting. I'll give them that. And it works well with the title; fast anarchy music is so cliché, no? But about five minutes into the last track you'll find a short burst of 'punk'.
I always expect Bemis' lyrics to improve on the next album. He's got the word-choice down, he's got the topics down – he needs to work on the “show, don't tell” rule, though. He tries to have it both ways - overstatement and understatement. When he chooses one to go with it works amazingly well, but too often he tries to mix them together. there is a jarring disconnect between the flowering and purple language and the overtness of the topic he is tackling.
But Bemis still writes better than most.
Anarchy, My Dear kept my attention. More than that, it kept me interested – which is saying a lot. But there are some flaws. They should review Frietag's pyramid, figure out exactly what it was they did on ...Is a Real Boy, and try again in the morning.

David Comes to Life

2012-01-20T11:55:00.001-08:00

That David Comes To Life got Spin's album of the year is pretty crazy, I have to admit. But that could very well be a comment on the music of 2011, and not be so much about Fucked Up.

But Spin also wrote “could be the most epic punk album ever“ about David Comes to Life, which means, of course, that the album stands alongside Nevermind the Bullocks, Somewhere in the Between, The Monitor, Wild Gift, etc.
And that idea is just absurd.

For the most part I find this album bland. What isn't bland is vamping (up to nothing, really). I really don't like the way this guy sings. It is entirely too forced, and too up in the mix (more on the mixing in a minute). My favorite parts are when the girl starts singing. She reminds me of Claudia Gonson. It is the only thing on this album that has any dimension or life or even catchiness.

They've muddled up the guitars to the point of no definition. Strumming is nearly unheard. Instead, we get slight increases in the volume of the fuzz. That's alright; you can do that; you can pull that off. But Fucked Up does not.

So it isn't musically epic. I will give admit a certain literary epicness. It's a rather complex undertaking, one that I will not try to explicate here. So good job on that. I can't figure out if I think the differences between what he actually says and what's in the lyric booklet are important to the puzzle. I suspect that they are, but I can't quite tell you why. That, too, is very interesting.

Yea, so. There's a lot of interesting stuff in the lyrics: unreliable narrators, metafictive elements. All that good stuff. But the delivery is subpar.
A far cry from album of the year, and I can't imagine the kind of stretch you would have to make to think that this album was among the most epic punk albums ever. Hell, I'm not even sure David Comes To Life is punk. Feels more like The Who tried to play a set on the Strokes' gear. And their lead singer sounds like the love child of William Shatner and the guy from The Dropkick Murphys.

On SOPA - Daniel Mattox

2012-01-18T08:25:00.000-08:00

This is a guest-post from my room-mate, Daniel "LaToya" Mattox. He's a theorist/philosopher.
(edited by Jacob Kincaid)

The disappointment and rage I feel at the U.S. government at this time is unimaginable. I am not a politician or a free speech activist. I do not go to all the political rallys and protests that I should. I do not speak out against equally grievous injustices despite their frequency and my awareness. However, as a philosopher there is little I can do not to speak out against something that begins to dissolve the international marketplace of ideas.

There is nothing so precious in life as information.

The interconnected web of ideas and retorts which has become the internet stands as a light upon a hill to all of humanity. It is the key which will release us from our bonds and offer us to turn away from our shadows and echoes. The internet is not accessible to all people, but for those who do have access the internet offers a place where all ideas are met equally and each must be separately discerned. Credentials can be faked and no identity is so secure as to be trusted. All people stand anonymous and equal on the internet. The passing and enforcement of SOPA threatens to destroy this marketplace of ideas. It threatens to redistribute knowledge as it is crafted by the few and the powerful. As it is now, the internet is the only means of individual resistance. The diffusion of power throughout the structures of the postmodern world threatens to oppress, repress, and recreate knowledge as we know it.

Where knowledge is power it is also true that power is knowledge. If those with sufficient power begin to regulate and control the internet they will also begin to alter the public discourse. They will essentially break apart the global process that has occurred for years and culminated into websites such as Wikipedia and Google. If ever there were one thing that were needed in a republic, a rational society, or a world of free and rational agents it is the freedom of discourse.

Discourse may not always be equal but an anonymous outlet for the exchange of ideas and beliefs is close to an ideal. I will end here for the purpose of brevity, however, it should be known that there is no dollar public or private worth the sacrifice of free speech and the marketplace of ideas.

Review – That is All – John Hodgman

2012-01-11T15:00:00.000-08:00

I got this one for Christmas, too. I admit I started reading it before then, here in Morehead, at the bookstore and coffeeshop (mostly trinkets).
Hodgman's segments on the Daily Show, The Areas of My Expertise, his general demeanor – all tickle me in a certain way. Hodgman holds a place in my mind similar to that of Emo Phillips or Mark Twain or (young) Johnny Rotten.
Obviously I don't know the man John Hodgman, only a sort of exaggerated persona, or possibly a character. As I do with Phillips, Twain and Rotten. It takes a certain sort of genius to create something so strong and new and strangely sublime, so my hat is off to Hodgman.
The persona adapted is that of the bookish lecturer and snob, an extremely fallible intellectual. It deals directly with academia, the idea of “expertise,” and epistemology itself, all under a comedic, overstated guise.
But do I like the actual book?
Yes. I very much do.
A part of me wants to criticize Hodgman for using the same format three times in a row, but I'm so glad he didn't stop after the first one. That is All could very well stand on it's own. And there isn't a format that lends itself to this sort of material like the almanac.
There are a few occasions in which Hodgman backs away from absurdity and shows us what he can do. The voice remains the same – aritulate, deliberate, stuffy, aware – but the tone shifts slightly to accommodate this different inner exploration. These brief snaps back into reality make every word of what he's written worth it. Even if the rest weren't amazingly amusing, I would still applaud him for dropping these bombs after presenting himself as nothing more than a jester.
His first book was tied together by hobos, his second by molemen, and the last by ancient and unspeakable gods -a perfect material for the sci-fi nerd and exaggerator. The book is kept consistent by relating every bit of information it contains to Ragnarok, or the Apocalypse, or whatever you want to call it. The second book seemed to be shoddily put together, but this third one is a perfect ending, complete with the big bow and the cherry on top.

Concept – 10/10
Execution – 10/10

Review - The Witcher 2

2012-01-09T21:34:00.001-08:00

I got The Witcher 2 for Christmas, and I'd heard a lot of high praise for it, out here in the internets. So I had my expectations pretty high.
But at the same time I had my expectations pretty low. I'd just finished playing the first in the series. I finished it, even though the game was far from over; I quit only a few hours in due to clunky combat, overuse of cut-scenes and just plain terrible dialogue. I player much longer than I feel like I should have, but the ambition of the project kept pulling me in. I could tell that they'd put a lot of effort into the product, and it all had a lot of potential.
And I think The Witcher 2 is the result of them figuring out a lot of different things and honing their craft and style. The combat is smooth and intricate, with a number of subtle nuances. The dialogue is leagues better, as is the story's structure. In Witcher 3 I think they'll finally close the gap.
The plot is left largely up to Geralt and the player. In the prologue you get to choose which part of the frame story to do first, second and last. Does this choice change anything? No, not really. But it does set up how the story is going work. The player is going to get some choice. This one isn't too important, it's skin deep, but it is classy. Unless this was designed by sheer chance, it seems evident the designers knew what they were doing.
While I absolutely love how much of the story and Geralt's character is put into the hands of the player, I think the execution is slightly flawed. Cut-scene overload. There are only one or two choices of major import that aren't made during or around cutscenes.
There are just too many cutscenes in general, and I wish that they'd spread out the conversation over some of the crazy-long walks. For instance, when Geralt and Iorveth going to the last city in the game, why not have them walk and talk? Instead of a long conversation and a long walk, put them into one thing. It would be great if the game would go slow-mo in the same way it does when you are choosing sword, sign, etc. Learn from House.
I think some of this is just a resources problem, that they couldn't get everything into the game that they wanted. I understand that, but I think some of their desires were misplaced: I never used any oils or bombs, yet I found them everywhere. I rarely used potions, and when I did it nearly never mattered. And while their skill tree is an elegant one, I actually wish it had been smaller and that less levels were given over the course of the game. Geralt is supposed to be world-renowned at the beginning of the game, so how can he improve that much? If they'd made more subtle the equipment, the crafting, the levels and skills, completely removed bombs, traps, potions, trophies, then I think they
would be much closer to creating the game I think they wold have liked to make.
And I wish that Geralt had been a little less static. You can argue that because Geralt has to be flexible to account for the player's choices, but Iorveth, Roche, Saskia- they all seem to be pretty complex characters. I think part of the problem is that Geralt's voice-actor – or maybe just that voice – doesn't really work well with many emotions other than brooding or skulking. I do have to say, however, that they didn't make the mistake of confusion “brooding anti-hero” with “complete asshole.”
But again, I have to stress this: The Witcher 2 is not a bad game. The world, the characters, the politics, all of that stuff is really awesome, as is the combat. It's just that so much of the content in the game seems to be without cause, other than as fluff, at the sacrifice of the real meat of the game.

Concept (and the ambition behind it): 10/10
Execution: 6/10

Short Reviews: Theory of Fun, Game Design Workshop, The Art of Game Design

2012-01-08T01:10:00.001-08:00

Theory of Fun Ralph Kosterman
Read this on Johnathon Blow's recommendation. I like J. Blow, but I don't like this book and I don't know why he recommended it. Half of the content were poorly drawn doodles, which were never really that humorous. And the margins were just absolutely huge. Lots of filler, even in the writing. Could have been ¼ the size that it actually is, no kidding.
As far as what he actually says, there's some interesting things in there, sure. His definition of game also includes things like war. Not like War, the card game, but like World War I and World War II. He's also among the camp that argues games will never tell great stories, and unlike some people I could name, he doesn't even give good justifications.

I'm loathe to give a numerical value, but:
1/whatever large number you happen to think of.

Game Design Workshop -Tracy Fullerton
Not bad, but this book also feels like it's artificially inflated. It also seems like a good third of it is about how to market and sell a video game, which isn't really what I'm interested in quite yet, so I admit I skipped a big chunk of it.

3/5

The Art of Game Design – Jesse Schell

Schell fills this up with real examples from his work and that makes everything immensely more enjoyable. It isn't just unconnected theory, it's real evidence on what works and what doesn't.
He opens up with a chapter on the definition of “game” and takes a shot or two at “Fun,” and he makes a list of things a game needs to have to be a game, which I find accurate. Then things get really good, talking purely about game design: mechanics, controls, story, all of that kind of thing.
After those he gives chapter-long crash courses in anthropology, psychology, art, architecture, narrative, economics and business, probably some things I'm forgetting, and how they all relate to games. Throughout the entire thing he'll provide the designer with specific “lenses,” which I think are handy, even though also kind of obvious.
Then towards the end he starts to talk about how to sell games.

5/5

Poem - Synthetic Seraph

2012-01-05T20:30:00.000-08:00

I'm some kinda post-modern malady
a man-made miracle
an unnatural synthesis of flesh and metal
heart = furnace
intestines = pipes
lungs = billows
brain = circuitry
I can translate songs from dead languages in a matter of seconds, but a “song” is nothing more than a contrived series of frequencies.
I see every step in my own thought patterns; this puppet can see the strings.
I'm an artificial angel, a synthetic seraph,
I am a divine messenger and my message is the future and the future is now and now is about me and I
am
not
at all
like you.

Poem - Gangstas and Thugs

2011-12-29T21:12:00.000-08:00

I want a world where the jobs are worked less often than pulled
where we never knew the dead ourselves, but through friends of friends,
reputations whispered at back-alley bars,
sleazy joints
seedy joints
where you slide into the seats in the darker corner, concealing your faces and your guilt.
and the only light, that single lantern, reminds us of the stuttering banker we brought to a boil and beat to a pulp earlier that day.
I want a world where all my friends have loyalty to a local brewery,
I want to smash that brewery's bottles over the head of the guy who doesn't know when to shut up.
I want to pay off high level, low level civil servants to sell my stuff on the street while the sun is still shining
I want a world with old fat men smoking cigars who lie about their liabilities to yours truly, the sleuth that they hired.
I want suspicions of women whose voices get funneled through staticky microphones.
I want girls tied to train-tracks by mustaches and top-hats.
I want black-and-white vision.
And I want mobsters whose morals come only in grey.

-Jacob Kincaid

This poem was largely inspired by Jedidiah Berry's The Manual of Detection, one of my favorite books.

Madness is a pandemic – Daniel Mattox

2011-12-28T17:08:00.000-08:00

This is a guest-post from my room-mate, Daniel "LaToya" Mattox. He's a theorist/philosopher.
(edited by Jacob Kincaid)

Madness is a pandemic. It is not like swine flu or bird flu, it is spread by word. As Western industrialized nations such as America and Great Britain continue to export their culture and by-products around the world they have also begun to spread with it a sinister social and communicable disease. This disease is madness.
The meaning here is twofold: On one hand there is an export of image-type culture which has developed particular cognitive distortions which travel in social interactions and have increased the prevalence of psychological problems like anorexia, depression, and sleeping disorders among others. More than this, the spread of Western “civilized culture” has brought with it the definitions that it has laid out for madness. These definitions have been merged together into a basic set of laws known as the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual). These laws are a sort of expert style de jure division between the rational and the irrational. It has defined those behaviors which have been identified as deviant and have been placed under a medicalized sanction known as mental illness.
As the influence of Western medicine spreads so too does the place of Western psychological practice, which takes culturally contextualized definitions of madness from Western society and begins to universalize them. This spread of defined madness has started to erode cultures around the globe.
The entire process is undertaken in an unseen and silent act. It begins with the transfer of particular ways of speaking and particular language games. This change in games alters the rules of society and communication. As these rules change, so too does the ability to communicate. Each change in rules is a change in games. As the game changes from one to another so, too, do the norms of society that are expressed and engrained in language. A change in language is then a change in society. Eventually the acceptable and unacceptable ways of communicating and knowing information changes. The acceptable ways become reason. In the West science, or rather the invocation of science, exemplifies our reason-based explanations of particular phenomena. The identification of science as the main language game of knowledge then alters what can and cannot be known, and as such, so does the perspective of the player in such games.
If knowledge must be capable of being replicated (it must be empirical) then suddenly particular claims lose their knowledge status. If the player refuses to recognize this altered status they become labeled as being superstitious or foolish by the players of the grand narrative. However, if this initial sanctioning of the player does not change his or her participation in the language game then further sanctioning must occur; devaluation of the person resisting the primary grand narrative. The person begins to be labeled as “mad.” The epistemological value of a mad person's claims are cast in doubt, which leaves them powerless to resist the acts of outsiders upon them.
It is in this way that a change in language -from foreign influences, especially- leads to a change in culture, law and medicine; in the relationships of power; the ability of any native resistance to act against the foreign grand narrative.
This leads to a voiceless minority that is demonized by the majority and left incarcerated, untouchable, unwanted, and -worst of all- mad. The spread of madness is subtle, slow, and unseen, but as these definitions spread, so, too, do their consequences. Eventually resistance to this primary grand-narrative is only obscurantist madness.

Review: Childish Gambino - Camp

2011-12-26T10:50:00.000-08:00

Camp plays like “Black Culture for White People 101.” I find that listening to rap or watching television targeted at black people often puts me in this learning mode (I'm pretty white), but this is more than my own interest, this is the sort of hamfisted narrative that I just don't care for. Aaron McGruder's comics and cartoons, both titled The Boondocks has been accused of something similar to this, but The Boondocks never seemed aimed at me. Is McGruder didactic? Absolutely. But McGruder's intended audience is black people (or at least, he makes it look that way). Educating me about anything always seemed far from McGruder's mind, unlike Glover's.
Never a verse passes where he doesn't remind us that he is
A) Black
B) Accentless, supposedly nerdy, never quite accepted by black people
And yea, I'm certainly interested in this. But write a song about it. Don't try to slip it in to each song if those songs aren't about this stuff. Everything here is (I suspect) autobiographical, that's cool. But try to make each song focused on one aspect or moment and explore that really well, don't cover the same ground again and again and again. Or, if you insist on discussing the same things, try to go about it from different angles.
Glover goes about it, in each song, from only two perspectives:
Highly aggressive against those who are judging him
Extreme arrogance

Why he feels the need to defend his actions so thoroughly is beyond me. A song or two of “Fuck you, I'll do what I want, I'm my own person” - that's great. I can get behind that. But this smacks of an extremely fragile and inflated ego; a narcissism that needs constant feeding. While the constant bragging in so much rap easily gets old, this is even worse.
Increasingly common in music and literature is outright reference and allusion (Umberto Eco's discussion of post-modernism discusses this in great detail), and rap is no exception. Glover wants to do this, but it doesn't really add anything, I think it's just to show how intelligent and clever he is and to earn him some street cred. Which is fine; this can be done well, I've seen it done well, but this is just name-dropping for the sake of name-dropping, and what's worse – it often breaks his flow, which otherwise is really great.
Glover is obsessed with Asian women. I don't get why this keeps popping up. Again, write a song about it, don't pepper it in with everything else.
If you are going to spread this sort of stuff throughout the album, it has to be as an undertone. Think of it like garlic: you can't just put a clump of it on each slice of the pizza, you gotta spread that shit out.

There's also a lot of talk about the beats and how “fresh” they are. First off, I'm highly skeptical that anyone is going to think up a new 4/4 beat (rap should go in 7/8 and ¾ and shit, that would be interesting...). I'm even more skeptical that anyone is going to cook up a whole album's worth.
That being said, I didn't find any new beats.
Nor did I enjoy any of the singing. I find the hooks to be wildly out of place. The hooks can be nice in hiphop, but only as a layering effect. These sort of vocals CAN work GREAT in rap, since they feel incredibly minimalistic. But highlighting something so minimalistic rarely works, and it doesn't work here.
I don't know what people think is so great about this album.

His Stand-up is SO much better.

On the Perception of Video-Games and other Mediums

2011-12-15T22:51:00.001-08:00

Can we just move past this idea that some mediums are inherently worse than others?
This mindset is really starting to bother me, I see it so much. I'm not really sure where it comes from, but I suspect it's more an amalgamation of poorly formed ideas more than just one giant misconception. It usually comes in the form of “______ will never be as good as the written word.”
And while it bothers me to hear it come from anyone, it really annoys to see people I know play video games make that claim about video games. And when this sentiment pops up on video-game specific forums it absolutely boggles my mind. If you don't think you are getting something good, why are you doing it?

This happens to medium after medium and genre after genre. Starting at the most modern, we see reaction to:
Video games, television, comic book*, film, radio.
And it's happened to every single one of those genres. Hell, the entire English language was once widely deemed incapable of beauty or even articulation. This snobbish trend is especially prevalent in the widespread reaction to new genres of music:
Rap, hip-hop, Grunge, Disco, Punk, Rock 'n Roll (in general), swing, jazz.
Isn't it weird that Jazz was viewed as rebellious, and now it's something closer to pretentious?
But anyway, film was generally thought of as a weak medium until the mid 1960s, and I even have a literature professor now who thinks film is incapable of being high art. Comic books went until Alan Moore's The Watchmen before they were looked at as anything other than cheap pulp. Like I said before THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ITSELF was thought of as crude creole of French and Latin, muddled with Celtic and Viking, incapable of conveying a thought.
Let's look at this reoccurring mindset. There are three basic arguments against new mediums:

-It corrupts the youth.
This is usually based on a very shallow survey of the medium, if it can even be called a survey. The person who holds this view is informed by sensationalist mass media, who has focused on two or three examples that they have a problem with. The reaction to Grand Theft Auto 3 is applied to an entire span of art.
-It cannot accurately convey a message.
The snobs amongst us will base their argument on the articulation of themes. The new medium in question can't express a theme as well as the older mediums, if at all. This one is a little more complicated to tackle, but it's usually based on (frankly) ignorance. The new medium has a language that doesn't correspond directly with it's predecessors, and so the older generation doesn't know how to respond to it. It might as well be in another language because it is in another language. Worse than that, with video-games the language is still being worked out.
-It is too easy.
The other version of the youth corruption argument is based on the ease of consumption, real or not, of the new medium. For instance, film was seen as an easily watched book, and not wanting to promote laziness, people condemned it. Video games gets this even worse – it's for those who are both lazy and hyper-active. It's like a film, except you get to twiddle your thumbs!
Most people, even amongst those who play video games, have some combination of the three of these. Not unimpressively underthought, since all three of these are contradictory. How can a game corrupt the youth if it can't articulate a theme, however morally despicable? How can it not be used for a positive message if it's so easily consumed? How can ease of experience ever be a bad thing for art, if the art's purpose is to convey a message?

There are some misconceptions supporting the older mediums as well. These are less indistinguishable from one another than the ideas about new mediums I was discussing a moment ago so I can't really divide them up.

People can pick out “classics” from literature or film, but they are unable to do so for games, and so games are inferior, goes an argument. People can name Huck Finn, Romeo and Juliet, Dorian Grey, give a breakdown of the plot and a basic explication of themes. But if asked to name a classic video game, people choke. As they very well should.
Video games simply have not been around long enough to name any of them as classics. Ask a literature professor and a video game buff to provide classics from their mediums from the last twenty years and you'll get basically the same answer (assuming they aren't total fanboys). Even if it's easy for the individual to provide some examples of “good” stuff from the last twenty years, it's impossible for them to know which ones will someday be considered classics. This is a plainly unfair expectation of video games.
And on top of this, the technology that drives literature has changed pretty much not at all since it got past Cuneiform. Film, comics, video-games, have all been artistically evolving right alongside the technology that allows for them.
There's an apologist twist on this argument, though: human beings are actually less intelligent or creative than they were in, for instance, Shakespeare's day. I really don't know what this is founded on, and that downward-spiral meta-narrative would take a whole series of books to figure out, so I'll just skip attempting to tackle it for now, and just leave it at this:
If you buy into the idea that people are less intelligent or articulate or creative now than they were in the past, you are not arguing for or against any medium or genre of anything. You are effectively arguing that the average person from Shakespeare's day could make a better novel or video-game or whatever than the average person from today could. This has nothing to do with the potential of video-games or poetry or disco or anything else. Your argument isn't even related to this one.
You'll probably notice that I mentioned the literature professor and the video game buff a few paragraphs back, and I certainly hope this imbalance jars a little bit, because it really proves a point. Literature is academic, it's study is a discipline, unlike video games. But this is not because video-games are inherently bad, it's because they haven't been around long enough, haven't really proven themselves, and the vernacular for their discussion has not been very well established: Check out Wikipedia's entry on “Game.” There are eight definitions.
But the fact that it is studied? That leads us back to the first part of this half of the argument. People can only name “classics” of literature because literature is studied, and the canon the study creates is so pervasive.

The strange thing about the arguments about the weakness of new mediums is that they are incredibly counter-productive and at the same time self-fulfilling, depending on where you look.
For instance, some game designers might see some merit in the arguments, and attempt to adapt some of the language of film into their game, instead of helping game to develop its own language of storytelling. This is often the reason for cut-scenes, often the problem with dialogue menus, and the reason for so many jarring out-of-place elements.
For instance, video-games that want to garner the approval of these critics load up their games with cut-scenes in an attempt to be “Cinematic” and meet the standards of film. This sort of mentality almost admits that the criticisms against game is right and the only way to make a video-game high art is to make it more like film.
Next week I'll write up something about the narrative potential of game, and explain some things that games can do that other mediums can't (or can't do well, at any rate).

Interview and a short story.

2011-12-11T14:18:00.000-08:00

Hey guys, I wrote a short little western story (its Weird Western, I suppose, but never mind that), which I called Doc Hombre for reasons unknown to me. Check it out at:

www.artslag.tumblr.com

I might put it up here, later. But for now it'll stay there.

In other news, check out this interview with me and my brother Boone:

Sam Harris' "The Moral Landscape"

2011-12-08T10:17:00.000-08:00

Sam Harris' new book, The Moral Landscape, really left a lot to be desired. I was underwhelmed by the length and content of his argument, and the manner in which it was delivered. This review is somewhere between a literary and rhetorical look and a philosophical look and I'll try to keep those separate.
I read Letter to a Christian Nation sometime in my late high school career (I think my junior year; 2006) and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a handy tool for learning the rhetoric of both theists and atheists. At the time I read it I was agnostic, and while I don't feel I should credit Harris with my conversion to Atheism, he didn't hurt that mental motion, either. So I'm an atheist and when I began reading The Moral Landcsape I was already partly familiar with Harris' work (I've not read The End of Faith).

The literary critique:
Harris' writing style is very similar to that of Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, The God Delusion) or Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate, The Stuff of Thought). He is casual and comfortable writing in the scholastic style and discussing scholastic material. He is humorous when the topic allows, but serious when he needs to be.
But The Moral Landscape did not need to be a book. It was too short despite being heavily padded with scholastic landmarks ('in this chapter I will show' and 'as we will see' and 'as I have already discussed'), repetition and redundancy, and a slew of asides. Harris, as well as Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, have a bad habit of picking some individual and playing that person's perceived stupidity like a fiddle.
Occasionally I understand, for instance: Ben Stein's documentary Expelled truly was advocating ignorance and it needed to be pointed out. But when Harris sets his sights on a woman who asked him questions at a conference he gives no mercy (page 43-44). I understand completely that he wants to argue against her, but before he even begins his argument he tells you how stupid this woman is. He is so overbearing in his description of this woman's intelligence that I begin to doubt the account he gives is accurate. This woman asks the sort of basic questions people are confronted with in an intro-to-ethics class and Harris flips his shit. For all Harris knows, she didn't actually hold the stance her questions were coming from, but wanting to get Harris' thoughts.
These sort of questions should be expected at conferences, and the answers should not be so hard to come up with.
And even when I more-or-less agree with Harris, I feel that his attacks are largely unwarranted in the context of his book. Toward the end Harris discusses Francis Collins (The Language of God), who used to be in charge over at the Human Genome Project, and who now works under President Obama. I read this part twice, trying to figure out why it was here. I got nothing.
The best part of reading this book was hearing about the cool neurological disorders that people sometimes get, like Alien Hand Syndrome, and the snippets of psychological tests that reveal facts about the human condition. But these, in and of themselves, were often just more padding to make the text last longer.

The Philosophical Critique:
There are three or four major philosophical problems I have with The Moral Landscape. Most of these are not with the arguments Harris makes, but the premises on which they rest and the definitions Harris uses.
The first is Harris' definition of science, found in the footnotes:
“For the purposes of this discussion, I do not intend to make a hard distinction between “science” and other intellectual contexts in which we discuss “facts” - e.g., history. For instance, it is a fact that John F Kennedy was assassinated. Facts of this kind fall within the context of “science,” broadly construed as our best effort to form a rational account of empirical reality ... I think “science,” therefor, should be considered a specialized branch of a larger effort to form true beliefs about events in our world.” (195)
In short, Harris lumps all reason in with science. It is, in fact, rather “broadly construed.” In addition to this point, I would also note that the word “science” appears in quotations throughout this footnote. I do not know why Harris does this, other than to point out that his definition is different from the general sense.
Harris also writes “Science cannot tell us why, scientifically, we should value health” (37). At this point I gave up trying to understand what science could possibly mean to Harris. How science, an abstract concept, is supposed to do anything outside of what it is defined as is too crazy a concept.
This definition is incredibly vague and breaks the agreed upon rules of discourse. In short, Harris has skewed the definition of science so that he might more easily argue his stance. If this were a disentanglement puzzle, made of horseshoes and bits of chain, then he has replaced the important bit of metal with elastic rubber.
Furthermore, Harris believes that science, as a practice, aims to better human life. I do not believe this to be the case. Science is in the business of telling us more about the world that we live in. The study of biology tells us how the body works, and tells us what medicines or surgeries will do to the body, but not whether these medicines or surgeries are good. Anything beyond action and reaction is no longer the realm of science, including when and why to go through with medical processes, and is in the realm of value.
Of course, Harris believes that the separation of values and facts is a bogus idea. He believes that all values are based on facts about the world. At this point we can effectively spell out Harris' argument:

Premise 1: Science includes reason and fact.
Premise 2: Facts include values.
Conclusion: Science includes values.

While these are pretty bold claims to make, going against a lot of traditional philosophy and the common conception of the words “science” and “fact”, Harris does not spend enough time discussing them, especially considering that this argument is in the subtitle of his book.
His claim that values and facts are intertwined is based on two things. The first is that the only thing worth valuing is the well-being of conscious creatures, and that the well-being of conscious creatures is a fact. But of course what we value is going to be factual, whether it's pleasure, knowledge, justice, whatever.
Harris reports to his reader that mathematical truth and moral truth appear to function the same in the brain when studied in fMRI scans. The examples Harris gives are “2+6+8=16” and “It is good to let your children know that you love them,” and I agree with Harris that these claims are “most dissimilar sets of stimuli” (121).
Then Harris talks about the mental states, again studied by fMRI, for subjects given one nonreligious stimuli and one religious stimuli. The examples Harris gives are “Eagles really exist” in the first field and “Angels really exist” in the second. Harris would, no doubt, remind us after this study that just because the fMRI scans show highly similar patterns it does not mean that we should lump them all in together as the same thing (153).
The idea that because the human brain thinks of two separate kinds of facts in a similar way means these the two kinds of facts should be considered similar types of facts is absurd. Claiming that the brain works in a certain way, therefor the brain ought to work in a certain way is wrong.
Strange, since Sam Harris is so opposed to the idea of the naturalistic fallacy. This is partly because he equates facts and values, but mostly because he does not understand what he is talking about.
Harris' book, in it's entirety, is based around the idea that because something is a certain way it doesn't follow that said something ought to be that way. For example, just because some brains are a certain way, it doesn't follow that they ought to be that way. This example is right from Harris' book, and yet Harris is strongly against those who see the dilemma in the is/ought problem.
Harris dismisses the is/ought problem and the naturalistic fallacy with one move, by calling it a “verbal trap” and “easily avoided when we focus on human well-being.” (10) I do not understand what part of this is a verbal trap, and am inclined, after the slipperiness surrounding his definition of “science,” that his accusations and summary of the is/ought problem are wrong. He writes that it is the argument that “no description of the way the world is (facts) can tell us how we ought to behave (morality).”
Again a very slippery definition. He presents it, very subtly, as if the people concerned with the is/ought problem are concerned with the connection between one's perceptions and one's reality, and not concerned with the facts of whatever moral situation is at hand. At first glance he appears to have the correct idea, but the words have been tweaked ever so slightly. The subject of the is and the subject of the ought must match to catch the true spirit of the Naturalistic Fallacy
Later on he compares the naturalistic fallacy with the problem of induction, and discusses how people get past this problem. His answer? That it is foolish to take these problems seriously. And I agree with him. But here he is admitting that the naturalistic fallacy and the is/ought problem are not verbal traps, but just aren't worth his time. I sympathize and agree with this sentiment.
I am among those who fault Sam Harris “for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy” (197). The examples he gives- of words which he finds boring- are metaethics, deontology, noncognitivism, antirealism, emotivism. Yet Harris does not shy away from using terms like “intrinsically epistemic” (139) or “phenomenological glockenspiel” (104), terms he apologizes for using by saying that “some discussion of philosophy will be unavoidable.”
This book is a philosophical text. Despite the shoddy logic and the misconceptions and the loose definitions, Harris is still pushing a philosophical theory based on ideas of an obviously philosophical bent. Perhaps I should assume that because so much of philosophy is built on a system of logic that Harris includes philosophy in science.
But the part that really, REALLY intrigues me about Sam Harris, now that I've read his book, is that he believes his book is controversial.

The idea that we there is little-to-no relationship between is and ought? Not new.

The idea that the problem of induction should be ignored? Been done.

The idea that scientific advances could help people live better lives? Old stuff.

The idea that we respect conscious creatures? Buddha did it. Jesus did it. Kant did it.

The ONLY radical thing I found in this entire book was the idea that science includes history and all fact, and that fact includes value.

The argument isn't new. The argument isn't complicated. The argument isn't well explained.
This book was not worth publishing.

A Rant on music Criticism

2011-12-06T18:04:00.000-08:00

I'm not doing this music criticism thing because I think I have better taste. But I would like to talk about taste for just a moment. Specifically taste in music.
Film criticism, literary criticism and the criticism of video games only rarely suffer to this problem.

A problem I'm going to dub as the “different tastes, man” problem.
Somebody says, inevitably, “Hey, what do people like about Radiohead?”
and the Radiohead fans say “Hey, this isn't fair! You can't criticize my favorite band! It's just Different Tastes, man!”
This is a doublestandard and it effectively kills all conversation.
All that's left is:
“Hey, did you know REM is breaking up?”
“Yea, dude, I heard that.”

I say double standard because people can easily explain to you why they don't like a band.
I don't like Nickelback because Chad Kroeger sings like an idiot and a douchebag, in that predictable rock and roll voice
The guitarwork and musicianship is poor, predictable, and uninteresting.
The Chord progressions are copied are reused, and no effort is made to hide this.
The lyrics don't make me think about anything, nor do they spur me to any sort of emotion, other than “Yep, this is exactly what a rock and roll band sounds like.”
It doesn't feel like there is ANY attempt at creativity

But if were to say something like...
Radiohead's music works better as ambience, when it works at all. It is -as a rule- not catchy. The bass is repetitious, the lyrics are incomprehensible and pretentious, and Thom Yorke's singing is also incomprehensible and pretentious. Radiohead songs are generally about twice as long as they should be and any interesting dimensions given to them come from electronic effects on the instruments and not the actual musical structure.

Then the fans of Radiohead
COULD tell me to consider the ambiguity of some line of lyrics,
COULD say that Yorke's vocals produce an ethereal and atmospheric feeling lacking in most other bands
COULD point out that my criticism is directed at individual instruments, but not the music as a whole, and that I'm not really listening to the combined effect.

Which are all valid arguments as to why one might like Radiohead.
Nope, they'd fall back into “Different tastes, man.”

If I ask them to give those reasons then I might as well kick their puppy.

This isn't about persuading me or validating your tastes, this is about conversation.
I love music. I love talking about it, but there so rarely seems to be anything to say because as soon as I ask a person anything beyond “is it good?” they go on the defensive. And if I explain why I don't like something, everyone thinks I'm on the offensive. And I'm not. I'm trying to understand how music works.

Review - Andrew Jackson Jihad's "Knife Man"

2011-11-18T19:37:00.000-08:00

I like Andrew Jackson Jihad. A lot. I still like them but I did not like this album. It isn't that the musical style is different (it is), or that the lyrics go in a change of direction (they do). The faults of the album rest with the mixing.

So this is one of those reviews that brings the baggage of older stuff to the table, but I don't think it puts a bias on my view so much as helps me articulate it. Of course, they are MY biases, so what do I know?

See, in People who Eat People Are the Luckiest People in the World and Candy Cigarettes and Cap Guns the vocals are right up front and very clear. You can hear his voice crack and squeak very clearly. He sounds naked and honest and even as he explains and exemplifies his cowardice he has the bravery of a man with nothing to lose. I love that.

But here the vocals are treated with some kind of echoey gloss and down in the mix, losing all of that bravery I was hearing before. Which is sad because this album is much more self-exploratory (the others were self-aware, but not quite self-exploratory, more on that in a minute) than their other music, and would have benefiting greatly from that level of nakedness.

The emphasis isn't put on the instruments, either, despite there being a much larger composition behind most of the songs. There is no emphasis. It all just blurs together. The vocals dissipate and mix with the instrumentation, the instruments blur with each other, the whole scheme is lost. Is this new sound an attempt to be considered artistic?

Or maybe Andrew Jackson Jihad is hiding? I get the inkling of an impression that this is all some sort of meta-play, to give the impression that they are hiding, to tell us what the guy would like to do instead of putting anything out there in the open.

The idea of creating a sort of narrator that wants to hide, who doesn't like to get right up on the mic, is a brilliant idea, but it isn't pulled off well. I'm not sure how it could be pulled off well. More than any of that, though, I don't think that's what they are trying to do, I mean, just listen to this song from their new album played live:

God, I love that song. But I hate the official recording. It hurts to have to say it, but this album was boring.

With All Due Respect,
-Jacob Kincaid

First!

2011-11-18T19:15:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to introduce this blog; give an idea of what we are going to be doing here.

But I don't really know what it is yet. I'd like you to take that journey with me.

I hope that was cheesy enough.

I'll be writing about a handful of on-going projects of an artistic nature - my band, my comic, my game - And any topics that come to mind. You'll find reviews, ramblings and musings of a highly theoretical nature. Short stories, videos, maybe even some poetry.

I have no clue what's going to happen here, but I hope this stuff will be intriguing to other people as well.

Until there's any real content up, you can check out my band. There's a link in the top right.

With All Due Respect,
-Jacob Kincaid