West Coast Adventures (feat. Will Grizzly)

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noreply@blogger.com (Will Grizzly) — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 02:44:00 +0000

I don't really plan on updating this blog anymore

But I collect pictures that you can see at raddamage.tumblr.com

Bye

...

Life Update

noreply@blogger.com (Will Grizzly) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:53:00 +0000

So I'm now more than halfway through my first year of grad school, and still figuring out what exactly I'm doing here. MATLAB is my new best friend.

I am awash in numbers.

I'm trying to learn how to paint. I bought a silkscreen but don't have the time/space to use it yet. I didn't realize the extent to which space itself is a commodity until I moved to California.

A cassette tape (!) of music I recorded under the name "Kid Wizard" was reviewed favorably in Cassette Gods and 20JFG. I also sent it to Foxy Digitalis but I don't think they ever listened to it.

I don't get out a whole lot right now.

And I definitely don't have time to write a blog about it!

(untitled)

noreply@blogger.com (Will Grizzly) — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 17:29:00 +0000

from MARK S [martians666]
to William Griscom [wgriscom]
date Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 12:27 PM
subject Re: Visual Aesthetics Experiment @ UCB

HI WIL MARK S HERE IN BERKELEY, NEXT WK, I GUESS, WEDS OR THURSDAY, JUST LET ME KNOW WHAT TIME SLOTS YOU MIGHT HAVE FOR THOSE DAYS, THANKS AND ALSO HOW LONG IS THE TESTING THANKS MARK@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

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from MARK S
to William Griscom
date Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 6:45 PM
subject Re: Visual Aesthetics Experiment @ UCB

so will mark s here so i will be by so anytime during thursday now 1hrs is just 10 dollars you get paid the same day for this small amount let me know thanks mark s in berk ca@@@@@@@

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from MARK S
to William Griscom
date Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 3:08 PM
subject Re: Visual Aesthetics Experiment @ UCB

HI WIL NEXT THURSDAY HOW ABOUT AROUND 12NOON LET ME KNOW AND YES MAY AS WELL DO 2HRS A LEAST THANKS MARK S IN BERKELEY CA @@@

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from MARK S
to William Griscom
date Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 12:21 PM
subject Re: Visual Aesthetics Experiment @ UCB

HI WIL SO YES THIS THURDAY AT HIGH NOON MARK S@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

News

noreply@blogger.com (Will Grizzly) — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 17:29:00 +0000

Hey, I am accepted to grad school!

Processual

noreply@blogger.com (Will Grizzly) — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 00:12:00 +0000

Berkeley Graduate School of Psychology interviews were last weekend, and everybody I talked to seems convinced that I'll be a great grad student next year. Positive reviews all around. I didn't get to meet to many of the other prospectives because they were all whisked away to Stanford at 3PM on the second day, but they seemed suitably neurotic and disheveled.

Research projects continue, life is stable (if a little boring). I am re-reading White Noise by Don DeLillo.

I have new glasses.

It rains a lot here in the winter.

Everything is a process.

Unexpected Network

noreply@blogger.com (Will Grizzly) — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:39:00 +0000

So my most recent project in the Vision Lab has been less than successful, and while I'm trying to figure out where to go next I've been wasting a lot of time reading blogs and generally procrastinating.

One of my favorite American new music/ethnomusicology blogs is Wayne and Wax, which recently featured a post on the Busta Rhymes song "Arab Money." That in and of itself isn't exactly unexpected, but it also features a lot of commentary from my former dorm-mate and fellow Oberlin sociology seminar student Marisol LeBron -- who apparently has her own blog as well. Small world, etc. etc. And damn if sometimes I don't wish I was still studying this stuff. I guess I'm having a crisis of faith in my chosen field, which is kind of bad considering that I'm not even a graduate student yet.

Anyway, I guess I've still got some priorities to sort out.

New Thing

noreply@blogger.com (Will Grizzly) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 19:44:00 +0000

STYLE//BITER

Pretty pictures, long load times. I really need to figure out how to embed fonts in HTML, or just bite the bullet and do everything in Flash.

New Gmail Themes Burn My Eyes

noreply@blogger.com (Will Grizzly) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:38:00 +0000

There are a number of basic 'palette swapping' variations that aren't too offensive (I can handle "Green Sky," or even "Marina") but way too many of these are just completely hideous and actually detract from the usability of Gmail. I don't want Ninjas or creepy Candy-girls dangling off of my Inbox, and as an old-school Linux fan I appreciate the Terminal theme, but again, it's almost impossible to actually use for checking email.

I'm not sure how to interpret the fact that outside designers contributed some of the worst offenders, but I guess it's a good thing that Gmail is funding our lab to study visual aesthetics -- it looks like they need some help.

Report from the Bomb-Proof Science Bunker

noreply@blogger.com (Will Grizzly) — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:27:00 +0000

So lately I've been reading even more Wonkette than I did when I actually lived in DC (something about an election coming up?), but there are also local internet scenes that have already earned sizeable packets of appreciation from me. Exemplars include The Lonely Seagull and the neighborhood-specific Mission Mission (which is probably where I would be living right now if I were more cool/clueless).

Meanwhile, I am still struggling to discover the more geographically-oriented, real-world East Bay scene, which may or may not be hidden somewhere in the eternally night-shrouded crack dens of Oakland. We'll see. During the day, I am spending most of my time in the concrete-walled fortress of science, where I remain largely immune to both violent theft and unintended fun.

Science Clash! feat. Visual Aesthetics

noreply@blogger.com (Will Grizzly) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 21:21:00 +0000

The lab I am working in now is raw. Here's a link to the website, which has been recently updated and re-snazzified after nearly a decade of pre-CSS Web 1.0 stylings:

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~plab/.

I am giving my first PP presentation on the new research today, and feeling totally jazzed.

(On a side note, the lack of seasons here in Berkeley means that instead of getting S.A.D. in the winter, everyone is just rapid-cycling bipolar, all the time. Awesome.)

Authority

noreply@blogger.com (Will Grizzly) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 05:13:00 +0000

After suffering through a year-long, "online-only" publishing limbo, the paper that I worked on with Joanne Ruthsatz two summers ago has finally been published in the journal Intelligence. In the paper we argue against Ericsson's theory that any normal person can attain professional-level skill with ten years of concentrated practice, which is an easy target theoretically but requires some tricky experimental design to actually disprove. Anybody who wants to can read the paper here.

Even more exciting (to me anyway), the paper was written up in a couple of psychology blogs (here and here) -- which means that not only was I published, but someone in the wider world actually read the article, understood what we were saying, and was moved enough by our arguments to write about the experience. Success!

Changes

noreply@blogger.com (Will Grizzly) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 03:54:00 +0000

New geography, new lifestyles, new contents for the blog. Stay tuned!

The West Coast is the Best Coast

noreply@blogger.com (Will Grizzly) — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 18:58:00 +0000

Still settling in, I suppose. And having daily anxiety attacks about making $0 a day. There's a lot of red tape around getting my job started up, what with the money coming from Google and being redistributed through the university, but the lab I'll be in is awesome and as soon as things get going I'm sure I'll have more to write about...

(Even More) Shirtless Marylanders Invade House

noreply@blogger.com (Will Grizzly) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 18:01:00 +0000

New housemate is overeager to replace us, moves in before we have even vacated. Drives a full-size van with the words "New Gospel Christian Community Center" stenciled on the sides. Brings along sweaty frat kids and second-degree relatives engaged in serious dress-code violations to help her move mountains of stuff into the house. "MoCo4Ever" tattooed on biceps.

*vomit*

We're out of here on Tuesday.

Rotator / Hakem

noreply@blogger.com (Will Grizzly) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:46:00 +0000

This Friday is my last day of work here in DC, and as such I've been packing up boxes and spending a lot of time with people who I may never see again after the next couple of days.

As a parting gift of sorts, Tera's boss took us out to dinner last night and then stayed out until 2 a.m. teaching us to play the Persian game Hokm at the Broadway diner in Rockville. I loved it, even as my memory and ability to concentrate were rapidly fading towards the end. I think Mahtab's concentration may have been going too, as she started randomly switching between English and Farsi names for the cards.

Hearts=Del
Diamonds=Khesht
Spades=Pik
Clubs=Geschniz (which also means coriander)

Also, my fellow museum employee Barb pulled together a great review of 20th-century Native American fiction, film and poetry, which you can read over at her blog. She sent me the link after I told her that the only movie I've ever owned on VHS was Smoke Signals.

I'll have to see if I can pick up a copy of Almanac of the Dead, as garish, unpleasant and overly long novels seem to be my kind of thing right now.

Strange Victory, Strange Defeat

noreply@blogger.com (Will Grizzly) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:24:00 +0000

"Cops, presidents, CEO’s, robber barons. They’re all clueless in 2008. Long term planning has virtually ended. There are no adults in charge."

I love this quote from Dave Berman. In his recent interviews he has displayed a decidedly cataclysmic outlook on the near future, but then I suppose it's hard not to right now. The world as we know it is falling apart.

I went out to see the Death Set and Mae Shi show at the Velvet Lounge last night, and as per usual the show didn't get started until right around when the last train leaves the U Street Station. But I did get to see the entire set from local openers True Womanhood, which was noisy and amateurish and probably more fun than anything I've done in a couple of months.

So it's not all negative zones and sugar-free candy.

Social Science is Fun

noreply@blogger.com (Will Grizzly) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:44:00 +0000

There is a really nice interview with sociologist Mito Akiyoshi (translated from the French) on Japanese cell phone culture over at Putting People First. She highlights some of the differences between Japanese and American culture with regards to technology and privacy, and lays out a new schema for understanding class divisions in a society where everyone and their mom has a cell-phone.

Also on the internet: Further evidence that animals have culture, and playing video games can make girls think like boys (!?).

Four Reasons Why I Will Probably Not Be Attending the 2008 DC Fringe Festival

noreply@blogger.com (Will Grizzly) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:43:00 +0000

Every year during the summer, D.C. has a "Fringe Festival" celebrating local theater and dance acts. Every year that I have been here during the summer (count 'em: two) I have not attended. But here are four fine examples of the kind of cutting-edge performance art that I'm missing.

You can find more of this stuff at capitalfringe.org.

1. "I Like Nuts: The Musical"

Horatio likes nuts. He really, really likes nuts. Join Horatio and a cast including a Robot, a Pirate, a Vampire, and two Squirrels on a musical quest for nuts, knowledge and Norwegian fish balls. Including the musical numbers "Girls Don't Like Adventure," "Everyone I Know is a Moron," and many others! July 16-July 27.

2. "3 Murdered Clowns"

A schizophrenic tour guide, a puppet with an attitude, the man who knows who killed President Kennedy and a U.S. Representative who committed pedophilia. Life doesn't get any better . . . or does it? Come see three clowns in a three act play with enough twist endings to keep the entire Fringe audience talking for days. July 11-July 26. World Premiere. Show includes profanity.

3. "Cox & Box"

Sergeant Bouncer has a scheme to get double rent from a single room. By day he lets it to Mr. Box and by night to Mr. Cox. His plan works well until Mr. Box is given a day's holiday and the two lodgers meet. They share more than the same bed. Cox is engaged to the widow Penelope Ann Wiggins - a fate that Box escaped by pretending to commit suicide. They gamble to see who keeps her. What happens when they hear Penelope is about to arrive? July 16-July 20.

4. "Manifesto"

Manifesto!
Art movement. Political movement.
MANIFESTO! is DADA. Clown is HAHA!
Three clowns, two punk visionaries, and an
impresario walk into a bar. This is not a joke!
This is a spectacular divertimento to launch the next great movement!
Inspired by the PAST, NOW is the FUTURE.
MANIFESTO! excites everything!
July 16-July 26. World Premiere.

Bhutan, Cheese, U.S. Health Policy

noreply@blogger.com (Will Grizzly) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:22:00 +0000

When I worked the National Folklife Festival two years ago, the featured region of the world was Alberta, and the biggest attraction was a yellow Caterpillar dump truck that they used to haul oil sand to the processing plant. This year was a little better than that, as the Smithsonian got some funding together to bring an entire Bhutanese temple and a busload of Hare Krishnas who chanted endlessly and handed out free food to befuddled tourists (especially befuddled were the ones who had just spent $11 for a sandwich at the official Smithsonian food kiosk).

One of the staple foods of the Bhutanese diet is Ema Datshi, a soupy dish of yak cheese and chilies - which struck me as odd, given that 98% of people in nearby China are lactose intolerant (or, to be more precise, lactase nonpersistent). This, along with a recent conversation with one of the security guards at work, spurred me to do some more reading about the genetic history and prevalence of lactose intolerance in humans. I don't think enough science has been directed at the genetics of the Bhutanese for anyone to accurately answer my questions about Ema Datshi, but there is a lot of other information about the history of humans and milk out there that not get adequately distributed.

For example, most Americans don't realize that 75% of the world's adult human population is lactose intolerant, because our health policy and medical science is primarily written by people of North European descent, who are lactose tolerant. This is an unfortunate and probably unintentional example of institutional racism in the U.S., and by extension in the world, as most lactose intolerant people are of Asian, African, or Native American descent (see here). Even among Europeans, lactose tolerance is much less common in Southern and Eastern European populations.

Something cool is that scientists have been able to trace the genes for lactase persistence as they travel through human populations over time. Adult lactose tolerance is a very recent genetic mutation which has only been beneficial to humans since humans started herding animals, less than 10,000 years ago (compared to the 200,000 years our species has been around). Scientists believe that several distinct groups of humans have separately evolved lactose tolerance, including Northern Europeans, Mongolians, and herding peoples of East Africa. Because the gene is so beneficial in herding societies, it has been strongly selected for within these populations and groups they have contact with. Nonetheless, as many as 1/4 of Americans and the majority of the world's population still do not carry these genes.

* * *

In the course of my reading I found this handy endangerment scale from the Wikipedia article on Homo sapiens:

Humans Conservation Status

(I'm glad to know that we're doing alright.)

Hydro on the D-Low

noreply@blogger.com (Will Grizzly) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:43:00 +0000

As I'm writing this, the WAMU bluegrass DJ is playing a highly dubious banjo-centric version of Anne Peebles' "I Can't Stand the Rain," the song which also served as the chorus to Missy Elliott's "Supa Dupa Fly." Stoned irreverent 90's hip-hop or gospel country? I guess it works both ways.

The 4th of July was crazy here in D.C. I got the day off and went down to the mall, equipped with some bargain-basket shades and a USA! bandanna, where I proceeded to get rained on amidst storms of teenagers. I wish I could say I had pictures but I don't. I caught the second half of the Hirshhorn's big 2008 video art series, which was not nearly as good as the first. The only standout piece was "Godville", in which the German director Omer Fast interviews actors at Colonial Williamsburg about their lives now and in the 18th century.

I also caught the Smithsonian Staff show, which was hidden in an underground gallery that you can only access from a tiny free-standing turret outside the Freer Gallery. Nonetheless, it was one of the better art shows I've seen in the last year. I always feel reassured, and almost vindicated, when non-professional artists are able to create art that's moving and innovative and frequently better than the stuff that gets hyped in the big galleries upstairs.

(...and after the museums there was some wandering around in the rain, and then some fireworks, and then some running into people I went to college with, and finally some going home. Tera's back from Costa Rica. Mentally I'm already in the Bay Area.)

Future West Coast Resident

noreply@blogger.com (Will Grizzly) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 19:43:00 +0000

So I haven't posted anything in a while because I've been in Berkeley, with limited internet access, scouring the local apartment scene. Not without success. Which, of course, means that this blogger's days on "The Red Line" are numbered... I also managed to score myself a research job in the UC Berkeley Visual Perception lab (first thing to change: the website), so everything is looking up.

Some reading for the arm-chair social scientist:

- Apophenia posts an insightful essay on status markers in online subcultures.
- The NYT on why bananas are the fast food of the fruit world.
- The blog of Nokia's in-house corporate anthropologist is surprisingly thought-provoking, if a little light on the explanatory text.
- And Savage Minds provides three different reviews of Tom Boellstorff’s new ethnography, "Coming of Age in Second Life".

A bag of chai and plastic cups.

Down

noreply@blogger.com (Will Grizzly) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:33:00 +0000

(Sometimes I forget that, as a rule, you should only ever say nice things about people on the internet.)

I was working at the Phillips Collection during the Dupont-Kalorama Museum Walk Weekend events yesterday, and I'm killed. Ridiculous numbers of people flooding the circle, mostly families with young children, 110 degree heat index, and it was my job to tell them that "No, you can't take that backpack into the museum." Passionate cursing ensues. The painting right above this paragraph was nearly body-slammed by an overenthusiastic 6-year-old art critic. And apparently the Textile Museum was encouraging people to make their own capes and hats out of materials like paper plates. At least I hope that's what happened, because I don't have any other explanation for the ill-advised headgear I saw wandering around the museum.

You morphodite.

noreply@blogger.com (Will Grizzly) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:23:00 +0000

I've just spent the last hour scrolling through old entries of the Brooklyn-based lit-blog Night Hauling and being consistently awed by what I read. The characterizations in the stories can sometimes fall a little flat, but the author is completely in love with language, and he makes the most of the various little twists and turns that give good prose its flavor. I find myself suddenly wanting to get lost in used book stores. And own a typewriter.

But also he writes a very good rant/essay on the obvious falsity of "post-race" and "post-gender" language in the media, which manages to articulate many similar feelings that I've had. Clearly, if we're still talking about the first "black presidential candidate" in U.S. history and polling voters based largely on ethnic demographics, we are not yet beyond racism in this country.

Bang on a Can Report

noreply@blogger.com (Will Grizzly) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 14:18:00 +0000

Tera and I went to NYC this weekend to see the Whitney Biennial and the Bang on a Can Marathon, both of which were awesome and invigorating and completely restored my faith in the abilities and talent of emerging contemporary artists.

One of my favorite pieces in the Biennial was Ellen Harvey's "Museum of Failure". Her work is lucid, critical, and well thought-out in a way that I rarely see in contemporary conceptual art, while also being technically impressive and moving on an emotional level.

The Whitney was also showing Spike Lee's "When the Levee's Broke" on the fourth floor, which Tera and I had actually just watched on the train up to NYC. It's by far the best documentary I have seen in years, and Spike Lee does a great job of stringing together the story of the hurricane and its immediate aftermath from found footage and interviews. Watching it brought back a lot of memories of the frustration and sadness that I and others felt when we traveled down to New Orleans to do reconstruction work in Spring 2006. The government response to the disaster was not even inept, in many cases it was downright predatory, as they forced residents out of their homes and out of the city so the land could be sold to redevelopers. It is an infuriating story to watch but it is one that needs to be told again and again if anything is going to change.

Oh! And Bang on a Can was great. The BOAC Marathon went from 6PM on Saturday to 6AM on Sunday, although I didn't actually arrive until about 8PM. The venue is a really strange choice - the World Financial Center's Winter Garden is basically a courtyard in the middle of a shopping mall, and was neither large enough nor acoustically appropriate for the performances. I imagine they chose it for the glass walls and high ceiling, which made for an amazing sunrise as the Marathon ended, but unfortunately I wasn't able to witness this--I was going strong through most of the performances until right around 3AM when the So percussion ensemble played a really amazing piece by David Lang, which I could tell was beautiful even as it rapidly knocked me into unconsciousness. Next time I'll remember to bring a sleeping bag. Other highlights included a Julie Wolf piece for double bass ensemble, Steve Reich at midnight, and Owen Pallet reading an original piece of science fiction before launching into a collaborative work with the Bang on a Can Allstars.

Newer Media

noreply@blogger.com (Will Grizzly) — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:23:00 +0000

From bekathwia's series of paintings of random CAPTCHA security codes.