odd duck
Paul likes cleverly-arranged a capella music. Paul also likes beautifully composed music written for video games made before 2000. In walks Smooth McGroove (and his cat), and my world is changed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfrsvfcZ8ZE
I wish Mr. McGroove great fortune, wealth, and additional free time to make more of these.
My hero.
It’s been a while since I last debuted a dumb song about a prehistoric reptile for the amusement of my toddler son, so let’s correct that right now.
Sung to the tune of “Macarena,” is a quick, stupid ditty for a certain pterosaur with a 40-foot wingspan.
He wanna keep things tidy, yeah he wants things to be spotless
And he might forget your birthday and you’ll think that he is thoughtless
But if your nose is running, give you a tissue make it snotless
Queeeeeetzalcoatlus! (Brr-AWK!)
Truth be told, unlike my songs for Euparkeria and Eustreptospondylus, my boy was less than interested in this one. Probably because he has no idea what the tune is in reference to, the lyrics go by too fast, and, you know, it’s stupid.
But god dammit it amuses me.
Andrew Sullivan has what at first seems like an alarming reaction to the death of his friend David Kuo, following a ten-year-long battle with brain cancer. Watch:
I feel a revulsion to this line of thinking, that someone has gone “to a better place,” or as Sullivan calls it, “home.” It obviously comes from the ridiculous idea that we all go to a warm, soft, fuzzy afterlife once we drop dead, a state that is allegedly better than the best of mortal life on Earth.
But I also find some of Sullivan’s position, apart from the theological stuff, refreshing, in that he casts a skeptical eye on life-for-life’s sake, the idea that it might just be okay to let go when all you know is pain. (And that there is a heavy dose of hypocrisy in many Christians’ maniacal avoidance of their beloved afterlife.)
As for me, however, I just want to live. I know it’s all I’ve got — this life — and it’s literally all I’ll ever have. So if it’s a choice between the pain, nausea, boredom, tedium, etc., and not existing at all, I will err on the side of staying alive.
So I guess that while I like Sullivan’s allowance for nuance and variation in how a human being deals with his or her own death, I part with him on both fronts for myself: Yes, life-for-life’s sake, because there’s no home but here.
I am known as something of a high-strung, ever-disappointed, self-loathing stick in the mud. Guilty as charged. So Hemant Mehta pointed me to a confection that could just possibly warm my cold, ashen heart.
Yeah, that’s a Captain Picard facepalm cookie. Make it so…delicious.
I was curious as to whether Robert Caro, he of the voluminous Lyndon Johnson biographies, might be on Twitter. Imagine my amusement when I found this:
To be clear: This account will almost certainly never be put to use. It has been reserved, however, “just in case.”
— Robert Caro (@RobertACaro) May 8, 2012
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The dude has written four 1000-page installments of the life of one guy, and is working on another. I guess the idea of 140 characters at a time just doesn’t even compute.
David Kuo, 1968-2013:
I have seen what happens when well-meaning Christians are seduced into thinking deliverance can come from the Oval Office, a Supreme Court chamber or the floor of the United States Congress. They are easily manipulated by politicians who use them for their votes, seduced by trinkets of power, and tempted to turn a mission field (politics) into a battlefield.
Billy Joel reminisces about producer Phil Ramone, who just recently died, and his anecdotes and reflections about him make clear in conversation what you can already hear in recordings. For example:
Phil perceived that recording hadn’t been fun for me for a very long time. The process was like pulling teeth. I don’t want to do 15 to 20 takes. I start to hate the song. If I gotta do more than a half a dozen takes, I’m ready to leave. I don’t wanna beat something to death. I just want to be as spontaneous and improvisational and free-wheeling and then I can walk away. I don’t think it’s a matter of laziness, it’s a matter of being in love. You gotta love what you’re doing. If you love what you’re doing, you’re gonna do a great job. If you’re starting to dislike the process, you’re gonna hear it on the recording.
The albums previous to The Stranger had always sounded so weak to me, and it’s refreshing to know that Joel felt the same way. (Same goes for The Bridge, which was the last album they worked on together, and which he also acknowledges isn’t all that great, but due to his own apathy, not Ramone’s production.)
I gave The Stranger a fresh listen tonight, and not only is the album sharp, but you can hear the balance between studio perfectionism and the joy of the work. It’s not slick, it’s not as tight as it might be, and some of it is even a touch muddy. But I wouldn’t change a thing, because the best of what Joel and his band had to offer comes through the speakers.
Also telling to me is how much better (and I mean way, way better) pre-Stranger songs sound on Songs from the Attic, a live compilation that was, now obviously, produced by Ramone, who, as Joel tells us, just got it.
Just listen to the studio version of “Miami 2017” and then compare it to the live version on Attic. No contest.
James Shakespeare on social media, which he calls “the curse of our age”:
The key thing to remember is that you are not enriching your experiences by sharing them online; you’re detracting from them because all your efforts are focused on making them look attractive to other people. Your experience of something, even if similar to the experience of many others, is unique and cannot be reproduced within the constraints of social media. So internalise that experience instead. Think about it. Go home and think about it some more. Write about it in more than 140 characters; on paper even. Paint a picture of it. Talk about it face to face with your friends. Talk about how it made you feel.
And then put those feelings on your blog and share the post on Facebook and Twitter and Google+ and OH GOD HELP I CAN’T STOP!
This bit from a Financial Times piece, ostensibly about how social media is improving people’s writing skills, explains so much:
“Major Memory for Microblogs”, a recent article in the academic journal Memory & Cognition, found that people were much better at remembering casual writing like Facebook posts or forum comments than lines from books or journalism. One possible reason: “The relatively unfiltered and spontaneous production of one person’s mind is just the sort of thing that is readily stored in another’s mind.” That’s probably why Twitter, Facebook and reality TV are successful.
Despite effort put in to erudition, it seems that even trollish comments are just, well, stickier. Not necessarily more convincing, mind you, but like a terrible fast food meal, that shit stays with you. Something to keep in mind, no?
When I donned the blue shirt of the Apple Store specialist not so long ago, one question came up an awful lot from customers. Whether they were deciding between MacBooks and iMacs, or trying to understand why they might want an iPad or iPhone, hardly a day went by that I wasn’t asked this question:
“Can I do Facebook on this?”
That’s who Facebook Home is for. For the many, many people who walk into a wireless carrier’s store and ask for it they have a phone they can “do Facebook” on, the answer will be, why yes, yes we do.
Oh, hi, Internet.
Angus Croll:
Writing online is so nearly effortless that reading (not to mention reflection, deliberation and thought) has become a chore in comparison. It’s easier to jot off a patronizing, indignant or self-aggrandizing missive than it is to take the trouble to read the whole article or give fair consideration to the author’s perspective. Thus the vicious circle sets in…
Why go to the trouble of producing a balanced or inquiring article for a medium that encourages rapid-fire feedback over deliberation and reflection? And why, in turn, respond to that article with any semblance of balance in a medium that rewards bite-sized bluster over nuance and accuracy? And why, for that matter, bother reading the article at all, when speed is everything, and you’d better get your soundbite in now because they’ll be new outrages to decry tomorrow?
The opposite extreme also causes me great agitation: Hyper-attention to a piece of writing for the sole purpose of mining it for things about which one can be righteously indignant, or errors (usually trivial) over which one can gloat. That leads to more of the same thoughtless/effortless writing Croll talks about.
My eyeballs have been filled with this of late. Filled.
I wonder if I’m doing it myself right now. Bah, thinking is hard.
The coming generations will make less than those that came before. Jerry Brito says, well, so what?
Today…we are in a position to derive much of our happiness from pursuits internal to our minds. We do this by blogging, watching House of Cards on Netflix, listening to a symphony from iTunes, tweeting with friends and acquaintances, seeing their pictures on Facebook or Path, and learning and collaborating on Wikipedia. As a result, once one secures a certain income to cover basic needs, greater happiness and well-being today can be had for virtually nothing. What is the point, then, of doing materially better than one’s parents?
I kind of love this idea. I don’t think it means progressives should take their eyes off the ball of rampant income inequality, but it is comforting to know that we might be making less because we’ve reached a point in society’s development at which we need less.
Just don’t tell the Republicans.
It irks me that we’re throwing around the word “timeless” all willy-nilly. At this point, “timeless” is hyperbole for something with a shelf-life of a couple years. This bag of Doritos? Timeless.
Our sense of time is all out of whack. When people link to older blog posts and articles, they’ll maybe call it “timeless” or say some other inane thing like, “Old, but good!” Two years old isn’t old! A two-year-old can’t even wipe his own ass.
Let me let you in on a little secret: if you are hearing about something old, it is almost certainly good. Why? Because nobody wants to talk about shitty old stuff, but lots of people still talk about shitty new stuff, because they are still trying to figure out if it is shitty or not. The past wasn’t better, we just forgot about all the shitty shit.
I think about this a lot: How even the best pieces of prose, just because they happen to be placed in a format called “blog,” lose so much of their perceived value mere hours after they’re posted. We need more ways of sifting the evergreen, quality material from the cloud of fleeting stuff.
Technology guru-turned-Cassandra, Jaron Lanier, thinks he knows why Obama won reelection. In a recent interview with UK’s Spectator, he said:
If you have the biggest computer and the biggest data, you can calculate how to target people with a political message, and have almost a guaranteed deterministic level of success. Politics then becomes about who has the biggest computer instead of what the agenda is. The way Obama won the last US election was by having the best computer strategy. That method of winning an election works, but if that is to be the future of politics, it will no longer have meaning. The path we are on is not compatible with democracy.
It is also not compatible with reality. Obama didn’t win because he was 3D-printed into a Mecha-Candidate based on a vote-maximizing algorithm. He won because his positions line up with a majority of the electorate’s, because he is more likable than his opponent, and because his opponent espoused views that many people found extreme. The Obama campaign’s tech operation surely aided his quest, and would have mitigated a razor-thin race by goosing turnout, and it will no doubt be of use down the line, but he won because the voters liked him best.
Now, Lanier’s horror scenario is, of course, highly undesirable and is certainly possible in the future. Indeed, had he not had to weather a Republican primary, Romney might well have been this computer-generated candidate. But that’s not what happened in 2012, and it’s silly to say so. Confirmation bias, anyone?
All that said, Lanier also has a neat idea about all that data that Obama, Romney, as well as Google, Amazon, and every other company and entity in the world is harvesting about you, and using for all manner of purposes, be it advertising, crowdsourcing, or what have you. You should get paid for it:
. . . this data actually comes from a large number of people who have been anonymized and disenfranchised. If there was proper counting of where the data came from we would see that even in this highly advanced hypothetical automated loom, there would be real people who make the data possible to create a design.
And you are suggesting that they get paid, right?
Yes. If there were micro payments made to the people who fed the big data . . . then there would still be an economy. It’s not as if the people have disappeared from the economy, it’s just that we pretend they don’t exist.
Well I’m all for that. It’s true, we are all, every day, contributing mostly-unwittingly to a vast number of companies’ knowledge of the world, of markets, of trends, of locations, etc. We are accidentally providing enormous value moment by moment, and other than in our use of some free electronic services, we get nothing in return.
If Lanier could dial back the paranoia, he might make some sense to people.
Previous posts of mine reacting to Lanier:
Richard Nash at the Virginia Quarterly Review has a long piece that is ostensibly about the business of literature, but really gets at the heart of what the book means to civilization. I just loved it.
The two bits I’ll highlight have to do with the book’s resilience as a piece of both technology and culture.
. . . almost one hundred years ago . . . the book [was] beginning to achieve what most technology will never accomplish—the ability to disappear. Walk into the reading room of the New York Public Library and what do you see? Laptops. Books, like the tables and chairs, have receded into the backdrop of human life. This has nothing to do with the assertion that the book is counter-technology, but that the book is a technology so pervasive, so frequently iterated and innovated upon, so worn and polished by centuries of human contact, that it reaches the status of Nature.
Like the air we breathe, necessary yet almost forgotten about.
But not only is the book (and not just the physical codex, but the package of text content regardless of whether it’s digital or paper) part and parcel of our culture, but it remains a power source for the generation of all other forms culture and technology. It is not an artifact of the conservative, but a tool for progress and radicalism.
A business born out of the invention of mechanical reproduction transforms and transcends the very circumstances of its inception, and again has the potential to continue to transform and transcend itself—to disrupt industries like education, to drive the movie industry, to empower the gaming industry. Book culture is in far less peril than many choose to assume, for the notion of an imperiled book culture assumes that book culture is a beast far more refined, rarified, and fragile than it actually is. By defining books as against technology, we deny our true selves, we deny the power of the book. Let’s restore to publishing its true reputation—not as a hedge against the future, not as a bulwark against radical change, not as a citadel amidst the barbarians, but rather as the future at hand, as the radical agent of change, as the barbarian.
I’ll save the last sentence for those who read the original. I hate spoilers.
pav alexander 