Happy Halloween

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Phish - 10/30/09 (Festival 8)

Set I: Party Time, Chalkdust Torture, The Moma Dance, NICU, Stealing Time from the Faulty Plan, Stash, I Didn't Know, Poor Heart, Cavern, Beauty of a Broken Heart, Ocelot, Time Turns Elastic

Set II: Punch You in the Eye, Down with Disease, Prince Caspian, Wolfman's Brother, Piper, Joy, David Bowie, Harry Hood, Golgi Apparatus

Encore: Character Zero

Keep America strong...

Supersilent - "9"

Here's what I'm imagining: There are three abandoned space stations in deep space--we're talking Alien-opening credits-deep space--and they're docking together in triad without a single soul aboard any of them. There are huge gears turning, lights and atmospheric equalizers blipping, chambers de-pressurizing, and air-locks hissing. The entire complex rotates ominously in the dark, silent vacuum of space, three interconnected parts locked in unison. Then, something goes wrong; something comes loose inside the metallic and airless structures. Or perhaps, some thing is loose within its dark corridors, wreaking havoc. The three entities slowly break apart in the entropy of a black, star-full facade, and drift slowly and forever into an endless abyss of nothing. Yep, that's what three Hammond organs will do to my brain.

I was curious as to how Supersilent would carry on sans drummer Jarle Vespestad--he was after all, the most sinister of metronomes in the electro-free jazz world--but I never imagined that the remaining three members would forgo their (super)natural instruments for a recording session exclusively comprised of Hammond organ explorations. There must be some other instrumentation on this album, I thought. No. Just Hammond organs. What I described above is what I pictured when I heard them for the first time on my headphones: space and planetary oblivion. It's not the best Supersilent album--not even close to the Rosetta-sounds of 8--but what 9 does is unfurl a mind-boggling new limb of this numerically-driven masterwork. No one knows how high the number of albums will reach, or even what they could possibly sound like, given the foreign amplitude of 9. The table in the sky is simply set up for the next excursion--should there be one--and it will certainly be out of this world.

Intelligence vs. musical taste

Cal-Tech graduate student Virgil Griffith has created a statistical comparison of intelligence and music taste by aggregating college students' Facebook data and their college's average SAT scores (via):


I never took the SAT, but I do listen to a lot of Bob Dylan and Radiohead, and don't listen to Ludacris or Kelly Clarkson, so I'm assuming I would have done alright.

"Whatever Works"

Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes are genius and uproarious because we get to watch Larry David fight and argue with interesting characters in interesting and taboo contexts. If we had to listen to him in any other context, we would want to bang our heads against walls and jump out of windows. Unfortunately, that "any other context" is Whatever Works, a ghastly and non-uproarious attempt to create an hour and a half-long episode of Curb minus all the things that make Curb great. It's David spewing a seemingly linear and uninterrupted misanthropic rant while nothing else happens.

MultiTouch Sphere

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Dematerialization

Tim Maly talks about dematerialization:

A good back-up/restore scheme changes your relationship with your gear. It changes a computer from heirloom to container. The loss, theft or destruction of hardware is transmuted from a crisis to an expensive inconvenience.

Five and a half years ago, I distinctly remember making two purchases: an iBook G4 and a pair of New Balance 991 tennis shoes. Today, I am still using my iBook exclusively, and am still wearing my all-time favorite pair of tennis shoes on almost a daily basis. Soon, however, I am going to have to look into upgrading in both areas, for operating system components became outdated, and rubber soles don't last forever. Strangely, the now ragged shoes are going to be more difficult to give up and replace. The iBook will eventually be replaced by a Macbook, but all the contents and files will be transfered to a new vessel. The color and design aesthetic of the computer will be the only thing that has changed.

But with the shoes, we're talking about something that has physically molded itself to my body; they are wrinkled and worn in ways that will never be duplicated. I've walked all over eight countries and two continents on those shoes, worn them in biology, anatomy, and pharmacology research labs, donned them for muddy and rainy music festivals and who knows how many other random walks through neighborhoods and campuses. They've been a physical part of me for so long, and suddenly, they will be gone when the 993s take their place (New Balance for life, man).

It's strange to think that our most powerful and technological tools are merely vessels waiting to be replaced. And maybe it's good that we can be detached from them in that sense, especially considering how fast the turnover rate is with such technologies. Maly, however, sees these technologies as only a first step, and believes that eventually clothing, plants, and animals will be replicated and replaced with the same indifference as loading a contact list into a new phone. That's interesting foresight--if not a bit frightening--and is seriously going to challenge our ways of assessing value.

The rich as separate species?

"Futurologist" Paul Saffo is theorizing that the extremely rich will eventually become a separate species of human because they will be able to afford life-lengthening technologies that the poor and middle-class won't have access to:

I sometimes wonder if the very rich will become a completely separate species. Imagine if the very rich can live, on average, 20 years longer than the poor. That’s 20 more years of earning and saving. Think what that means about wealth and power and the advantages that you pass on to your children.

This is, of course, bizarre and far-fetched, something out of a Kurzweilian nightmare. But maybe it's not so far off in terms of a metaphoric parallel to our modern healthcare crisis. Not so much that the rich are on their way to becoming a super race of robot overlords, but in the fact that there are huge gaps in terms of healthcare access which result in huge gaps in quality of life.

100 years of brains

This is a neat gallery of brain imaging and visualization throughout the last century. The image below is a nice representation of the confocal microscopy era, but I think my images are prettier (via):

Lotus - Turner Hall (10/24/09)

As far as the "jam-tronica" scene goes, Lotus is like that little brother who grew up in the shadow of bigger, more popular, and more talented older brothers like STS9 and the Disco Biscuits. While these big brothers were playing the Rave and grabbing lucrative and mind-bending late-night slots at music festivals, Lotus was playing to me and like four of my friends at Thai Joe's in Milwaukee, a venue that was so horrible it no longer exists. But then, as the "jam-tronica" genre started to move along through the early 2000s, and the contenders started separating themselves from the pretenders (e.g., The New Deal), suddenly Lotus was right there at the top, having snuck up on the entire family. And as a long-time fan of Lotus, it's been very cool to see their "rise." Their Saturday night show at Turner Hall was yet another step on the ladder within this niche genre that attracts fans from every walk of life (including fans who like to dance while seated on chairs; yup).

Their transformation has almost been funny in a way. A couple of years ago, you could already see it happening: the transition from dudes-in-band to dudes with rock star personas. Bassist Jesse Miller once sported flannel shirts and organic flowing locks of hair harnessed in ponytails, but now he has stringy Ryan Adams' hair and wears white v-neck t-shirts with one hell of a "v" that give him the semblance of someone who smokes 45 cigarettes a day (I'm sure he doesn't, though). They've pushed their rhythm section to the back of the stage and elevated them above the rest of the band--which I suppose is where rhythm sections eventually have to go when you want to relay more sound and play on bigger stages--a huge change from watching them sit in the midst of each other, all at ground level working in unison.

Sound-wise, they are so much fuller and louder. A Lotus concert used to be an event where you could converse while you groove because the jams were thought-provoking, trance-y, and mellow. But now they have found the "11" setting on the volume controls, and have turned those quiet and moving grooves into absolute monsters. "Travel"-- my all-time favorite Lotus song--was overwhelming, like a giant on-stage pulsing, and was probably the best indication of touring success and having more resources to buy sick gear (Did I mention Turner Hall was packed?). They even had keyboard-style light columns mounted behind the stage, which, although were fairly one-dimensional in the way they lit up, were a pretty bizarre sight considering that hanging fluorescent lightbulbs that I could hit my head on at Thai Joe's were once their lightshow.

Yes, this was Lotus, although a much different Lotus from the one I grew up on. All the changes--the hair, the sound, a crowd that now comes armed with thousands of glow-sticks--though hard to get used to, are for the best, both for the band and their ever-growing fan base. I suppose I will consider myself one of the lucky ones who got to experience both sides, as well as whatever sides are yet to come.

Beyond the apex of reading

In a recent Room For Debate post, Maryanne Wolf expresses concern that e-books--and digital reading technologies in general--could have detrimental effects on a child's cognitive ability:

I have no doubt that the digital immersion of our children will provide a rich life of entertainment and information and knowledge. My concern is that they will not learn, with their passive immersion, the joy and the effort of the third life, of thinking one’s own thoughts and going beyond what is given. Let us bring our best thought and research to preserving what is most precious about the present reading brain as we add the new capacities of its next iteration.

The "third life" Wolf refers to is the set of mental processes that occur in our minds milliseconds after reading text, including imagination, contextual digestion, critical analysis, and scores of other important cognitive skills. Or as Wolf puts it--and I love this term--the "apex of reading."

There's undoubtedly an immense amount of truth to what Wolf says here, and more research into electronic reading/learning will be critical. But I've always been on the side of practice driving theory, and now, more than ever, we need to simply push kids to read. We need to throw every text we have at them--books, Kindles, blogs, massive chunks of online text and code--because the real key to the upcoming generation's cognitive development is going to be the ability to harness multiple texts from multiple mediums. We need to teach kids how to squeeze every drop they can out of every little bit of information and how to construct broader pictures and ideas from these little bits. Reading will always be that gateway to the "third life," no matter what the medium. If we can just instill that one value in students, then I'm confident the rest will take care of itself.

Them Crooked Vultures

Dave Grohl, Josh Homme, and John Paul Jones...could be interesting.

Califone - "All My Friends are Funeral Singers"

I've always imagined Califone as a band that wears perfectly fitted suits while playing in murky swamps. It's a contrasting image, one that displays them as both regal minstrels and dirty hillbillies. But they fill both roles so well that it's impossible to see one without the other, and All My Friends are Funeral Singers is no exception. Listen to the ghostly "1928" and try not to get swept up in its graceful Dagobah scenery. Or take the album's namesake, "Funeral Singers"--this is one that whispers melancholy in the fog of an outdoor burial. As is the case with all of their albums, each track is dually wired to evoke this Califone aesthetic, causing them to grow on you like respected principles taught by some wise hermit who lives in a hut supported by a whalebone frame.

However, it is important to note that Funeral Singers is also, in some ways, a return to more linear forms. Roots and Crowns (2006), arguably Califone's masterwork, often took dizzy dives into experimentation that bent those swampy and twangy landscapes into bizarre soundscapes and poison-apple faces, but here we see them reeling that creative burst back in to focus more on the traditional song and melody. Opener "Giving Away the Bride" lurches on an uncomfortably similar path to Roots' opener "Pink and Sour," but you still immediately have a sense of normalcy and solid foundational craft. That's not to say that this approach is lesser in ambition; I just think they had some ultra-fantastic ideas cooking with Roots, and fortunately, pursued those ideas into fruition. Funeral Singers is simply more of straightforward project, and rewards in different doses than its predecessor. But those rewards are still rich and haunting.

A Day at the Office

"Eden Log"

Eden Log doesn't seem to be too well exposed, so for a quick comparative synopsis, think Cube meets The Descent meets Alien. It's actually quite a good flick, and strips away just enough context to drive you crazy with pointless, yet at the same time utterly important existential questions such as: where is this place? how did he get here? and what is that thing?

But for me, Eden Log was all about the architectural eye-candy. Not in terms of color or design--for there was very little color aside from the dark hues of green among the black and gray, and the physical spaces were so opaque and cramped that you really couldn't figure out an appreciation for the size of the setting--but in the combination of technological and biological environments. These places were sterile, metal structures of data and information that were corroded over by dirt, roots, and watery caverns. A crevice was just as notable as a wide video circuit board, a vine just as commonplace as twisted and corrugated tubing. Something about that unlikely hybrid happening deep below the surface of Earth(?) was very enjoyable and fascinating to watch.

"Super Hero"

I love the conflation of super heroes and old wartime photographs in Agan Harahap's work. They give a sense of safety and protection in troubled times:

Festival 8 Art

Jamtopia has a nice round-up of various art pieces that are popping up in response to Festival 8, including scratchboard panels from Rift cover artist David Welker, hand-painted 8 balls, and a whole slew of Halloween- (and Phish-) themed posters. The illustrious Jim Pollock is also confirmed to have a booth at the festival.

Colored water splashes

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Droid

The ergonomic physicality of a keyboard on a phone is a huge plus for me. There's still something about typing as a physical mechanism--rather than "touching" as a physical mechanism--that I prefer when composing text. If Droid can keep that aspect of a phone and its functionality alive, then I'm all for an all-out war with the iPhone.

Willing to Pay

A recent study at Duke University investigated why some students are willing to pay (WTP) for downloaded music while others resort to piracy by setting up a theoretical model of consumer behavior :

We find that a respondent's WTP, her subjective assessment of the probability that she will face a lawsuit, and her degree of morality all have a negative impact on the likelihood that her last song was obtained illegally.

Somewhere, Lawrence Lessig is screaming.

Philosoraptor

"Paranormal Activity"

OK...the "hand-held camera" genre needs to end now. Paranormal Activity was the last straw. We get it--you're trying to make the actors seem more like "real" people. But the thing is, real people don't carry a giant camera around and film everything while they are being pursued and accosted by a demon in their home. It's completely irrational. I think I could past it--as I did in Cloverfield and Quarantine--with the aid of cool special effects or terrifying on-screen footage. But the complete failure of Paranormal Activity in terms of a scary movie prevented any sort of cinematic appreciation. For example: the attic scene. Here was an opportunity, with a camera panning back and forth over dark piles of insulation, to scare the audience completely shitless. But instead, nothing happened. And nothing happened, again and again over the course of one and a half hours of my life. This one reached for the pinnacle of the mountain of bad movies I've seen. In fact, this was the first movie I have ever been to where there was booing and loud verbal pleads for getting money back after the film ended. Terrible. We've been tricked by the Internet and its hype once again.

Red Sky

(via)

DJ Hero

I saw the ad for DJ Hero (featuring Daft Punk) tonight, and couldn't help but think how much more sense this makes than Guitar Hero. To be sure, Guitar Hero (and its cousin, Rock Band) are a blast to play, but the guitars and drum sets still feel like toys, both in their physical shape, and in the unnatural way you play them. You don't *actually* feel like you are playing those instruments, because the input-to-sound just doesn't match up. But with the console in DJ Hero, you're playing the instrument--with the exception of physically spinning the vinyl--the way it was meant to be played: by manipulating buttons and switches that send out electrical impulses for a heady end result. I'm of course only speculating about the game play, but there's just something about the human/machine interaction afforded by this game that seems natural. If electronic music was ever meant to be natural, that is. Here's to fingers crossed for an Autechre edition; I couldn't imagine trying to play along to Draft 7.30.

Circulatory System - "Signal Morning"

I think what Circulatory System have developed with Signal Morning is a kaleidoscopic lens that looks back to a time when "tuning in and dropping out" was taken quite literally. Only this lens paints that picture with far fewer colors, mostly just whites, silvers, and blues. Gone are the reds, yellows, greens, and purples from that "far out" spectrum that was sprayed out before our eyes by the likes of Yellow Submarine or Magical Mystery Tour or Incense and Peppermints, for they seem to have been filtered out by a modern strainer that makes them more appropriate for today's world, a world filled with shiny, sleek technology and a penchant for plugging the mind into said technology rather than the abstractness of a lava lamp. Those free-thinking hyperboles of the aforementioned albums are still there--they are telling us to "breath with the universe" and "blast through" to the other side--but here, it's as if the Beatles have been dipped into liquid mercury alloys and have emerged more T1000 than Walrus.

Heterogenous

A gallery of photos featuring liquid combinations of food dye, vegetable oil, and water (via):

"Let the Right One In"

In a recent New Yorker interview with Sasha Frere-Jones, Karin Dreijer Andersson (aka Fever Ray) expressed disappointment that she was not chosen to write the music for Let the Right One In, a vampire film that Frere-Jones describes as "soaked with creepiness." Given how creepy Fever Ray is--and how much I like her music--I could not pass this up. You never once see a fang, but there is loads and loads of creepy that will come back to haunt you in subtle and terrifying ways.

Incomplete rooms

Check out the work of Esther Stocker; her rooms filled with abstract shapes give a sense of incompletion, as if some intricate framework just stopped developing (via):

Metaphor physicality (and digitality)

Recent cognitive research is revealing that our use of metaphors in both writing and thought is highly influenced by the physicality of our bodies and the world around us:

Drawing on philosophy and linguistics, cognitive scientists have begun to see the basic metaphors that we use all the time not just as turns of phrase, but as keys to the structure of thought. By taking these everyday metaphors as literally as possible, psychologists are upending traditional ideas of how we learn, reason, and make sense of the world around us. The result has been a torrent of research testing the links between metaphors and their physical roots...

Metaphors are only a minuscule part of the various aspects of language to draw from, but they are unique, because in light of this research on the physical, they offer a way to test that influence. For example, the article cites how researchers have found that sitting on a hard surface while solving a problem makes the problem harder to solve (I'm picturing a group of people in suits sitting in an uncomfortable conference room discussing complex financial strategies for a company).

But what I find more interesting--and perhaps, more relevant--is how this same research could be applied to digitality and how it is beginning to create links between the structure of language and thought. With digitality, you lose that physical influence, and are left with textual, visual, and spacial cues that can inhabit an infinite number of forms. Let's take our group of uncomfortable businessmen out of the conference room, put them into their comfy office chairs, and have them meet in a virtual room (I'm thinking something similar to Second Life) that is free from hard chairs, icy stares, and other physical influences. How is the task perceived now? Individually or collectively, what kind of metaphors would they draw from occupying a digital space? This is what cognitive research needs to answer.

Chad VanGaalen art

"Inherent Vice"

I've never been much of a fan of crime novels, and I'm still trying to figure out if Inherent Vice was actually a crime novel. Certainly there was crime, and a resolution to that crime engineered by a protagonist private investigator, but what connected those events and made them palpable and mysterious to a reader--hence, the crime novel tag--was more bumbling than it was intriguing narrative. In fact, the one area the book did succeed in was replicating a writing style that perfectly matched the late 60's hippie era it was set it. The dust jacket was right--Pynchon was in an unfamiliar genre; he should stick with the epic post-modernism.

STS9 - Eagles Ballroom (10/9/09)

This was my 11th Sound Tribe Sector 9 show--I've always enjoyed spelling (and saying) it out over the "STS9" abbreviation that they are more well-known for now--but my first in a little over three years. The last time I saw them was also at the feral Rave, towards the end of their heavy Artifact-support touring. This time around, they moved upstairs to play the larger, roomier, but equally feral Eagles Ballroom, a sign of both growing fan base and successful touring. To say that they have evolved musically since then would be an understatement, for STS9 have never been a group to stay stagnant for any stretch of time. With Peaceblaster still relatively new, and another album due out in a month, they are certain to make even bigger strides and directional shifts in the near future. None of this surprises me, because in terms of talent and ideas, they are up there. But what did surprise me--after a three year layoff from their concert scene--was the growth, err, mutation of their fan-base.

Now, I've been to quite a few shows of all sorts over the years, and am getting to the point of thinking that maybe I've seen it all. But I haven't seen it all. This was completely different, like returning after three years to a planet where civilization was decimated, and out of the smoldering ruins rose these people who sustained themselves on acid and other pharmaceuticals that they looted from drug stores after the collapse of their city's law enforcement and infrastructure. I saw people with their faces and chests painted white, a guy with an equalizer shirt that seemed to light up in response to music, making him appear half cyborg, and several varieties of things that were wearing botanical hats and facial hair that seemed more glued on than grown. In fact, I would go as far to say that this crowd out-did Phish crowds in terms of weirdness and possibly drug consumption. In the area I was standing in alone, I saw security guards confiscating pipe after pipe, baggy after baggy, to the point where their backroom stash of collected paraphernalia probably required some sort of strategic planning in terms of its removal and disposal.

Sound Tribe was awesome, by the way (I don't mean to neglect their contribution to their concert, but the surrounding environment was highly worth noting). I'm glad that they've upped the ante with their stage show by adding a LED light screen that has obviously been influenced at times by blank Sim City grids and other cool-looking abstract shapes. They're continuing to bridge the gap between electricity and the atmosphere ("Lion"--wow), and I'm pretty excited about what new direction they might take with their upcoming release. They are the perfect elder statesmen for this new race of people that has apparently sprung up.

Al's Run

Pale Air Singers - "s/t"

Pale Air Singers are one of those groups that are difficult to approach, no matter what angle you come from. For starters, this is their freshman album, and it came out of nowhere, leaving a listener with little knowledge of where it came from (which, again, is nowhere), what influenced it (???), or what is exactly happening with the album art (kinda hot in these rhinos). Then there is this sort of Western-Americana-bar room aesthetic going on that shifts around quite a bit, just enough to defy any sort of concrete categorization. Finally, Pale Ale Singers clocks in at about 29 minutes, which you would think would make it easily digestible and apt for multiple listening encounters, but this short stature actually acts to confuse and impede the listener. Just when you are about ready to make an assessment, the album ends, and you are forced to start over just to make sure you got it all straight, whereupon the album changes all sense of meaning and mood. Thus, you really have to take this one song-by-song to appreciate the differences that come from each listen.

For example, opener "Convict Escapes" is pretty epic--relatively speaking--at nearly five minutes, but seems to go on far longer than that. I think it's the way the spiraling acoustic guitar gives way to a soft crescendo of trumpets. That bridge of brass connects an eerie start to a pleasant melody, and this contrast creates extension (but only in your head; remember: this all happens in less than five minutes). Give "Convict" another chance (or more), and you might hear something else, something more foreboding that grew out of that initial sense of pleasantry. This time, I think it comes from a lyric: "If the world should fall/Then I won't flinch." Suddenly, worlds are coming to an end in the midst of what was just a little while ago something that seemed tranquil and peaceful. And herein lies that shifty-ness: once you begin to piece together the various compositional sections with the lyrics (or vice-versa), an entirely new realm of possibilities opens up in terms of interpretation. For me, that's hugely satisfying.

A Day at the Office

"The Wrong Plane"

A short-story, entirely written, edited, and designed by Robin Sloan while flying from San Francisco to New York (by plane).

"Brothersport"

Obama wins Nobel

Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts towards diplomacy and cooperation among people today:

"Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future," the [Nobel] committee said.

The only problem is that's all Obama has done: "captured the world's attention." The last time I checked, the country he is in charge of is still in economic shambles, and not everyone can get jobs or basic healthcare. I was initially excited about his administration, but unfortunately, what we've gotten instead of a President is a celebrity, one who is more well known for joking about his skin color with David Letterman and making off-the record remarks about Kanye West and inspiring other celebrity's horrible art (see post below) than his accomplishments in office. I feel that this is just another shining layer to that celebrity, and an additional cover-up to the real problems this country faces.

The "art" of Carla Bruni

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Contribute 2009

My friend Karen over at Between the Bars has a nice write-up on the Contribute 2009 project, which aims to stimulate local economic growth.

Barcode turns 57

Yesterday, the barcode celebrated it's 57th birthday, and in honor of one of the most important inventions to hit the supply chain, barcoding.com is giving folks a chance to create their own barcode, based on any number sequence they'd like. I've always wanted my own barcode, and here it is:

Best Phish jams

As if a Google Docs Spreadsheet of every Phish show on record was not enough, some Phish lunatics have compiled a Google Docs Spreadsheet of the best Phish jams ever. A nice reference if you are a Phish lunatic (although I'm absolutely shocked that the 11/29/97 58-minute "Runaway Jim" did not make the list).

ColorSplash app

The ColorSplash app turns your photos black and white and allows you to color-in select portions. The technique takes a little getting used to, but it beats paying $400 for Photoshop. Here's a couple more.

New STS9

STS9 will be releasing a new album--Ad Explorata--this November, and the story behind the album's name is wildly interesting:

A family member of ours has a shortwave radio that we have all been messing around with. We had been using it for sound effects and noises when one day it was left it on in the studio. Keyboardist David Phipps’ daughter Aya was playing around with the dials when all of a sudden it stopped on this voice on the super low frequencies of the spectrum. It was a woman’s voice, artificial we later found out, counting off numbers in a very clear and concise way. We became obsessed with what we had heard and for weeks we sat behind the dials trying to find more voices.

PhotoSketch

Click here for the heady research behind this thing.

Writing as performance

Over at Snarkmarket, Robin Sloan makes some interesting points about writing as real-time performance. When I first read the title of his post, I envisioned a writer on stage, with a laptop, in front of a large audience of people observing the text he or she created on a large projection screen. Seems boring at first, but when you consider the potential collaborative contributions through Google Wave or another similar medium, how cool would it be if the audience themselves were adding text, editing storyline, or contributing in other unique ways? At the end of the "performance," every audience member would leave with a copy of the finished product. Or something like that. It definitely seems to be a possible reality, a step towards the mass audience text-production that Sloan hints at.

My question now is: how does this affect authorship? In my line of work, there is already enough scuffle over having seven or eight authors listed as contributors to a scientific manuscript. How could we even possibly start to evaulate the individual value of hundreds, maybe thousands of writers contributing to a text? These are exciting (and challenging) things to think about, especially if Google Wave delivers the potential it promises.

New Chad Vangaalen EP

Chad VanGaalen has a new EP out--full of B-sides from 2008's fantastic Soft Airplane--and it's available for free here. At only 23 minutes, it still manages to breach a vast and utterly otherworldly plain of music. I've listened to it once through, and already feel a bit disappointed that it's not more extended or drawn out into those regions of Vangaalen's imagination--that's how good his leftover crumbs are.

Eel slap

Have you ever wanted to hit someone with an eel? Here's your chance...

The Social Media Guru

So true (via):

Warhol at the MAM

This weekend I went to check out the Warhol exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum and came away with two impressions: 1) Warhol's art makes most other art look compellingly boring, and 2) he was unknowingly ahead of his time in terms of Internet mash-ups. Long before Kanye-VMA absurdities were being mashed with Obama-Congressional Hall "You Lies!", or insert any other video you've ever seen on the Internet here___, Warhol was combining everything from General Electric to The Last Supper to vibrant camouflage colors in his canvases. It almost seems cruel that he is not around today to talk about the Internet.

The xx - "s/t"

The xx may be a little too solemn for my tastes. And by solemn, I mean I don't don black lipstick or eyeliner, or wear scuffed black leather held together by a series of giant safety pins, or have chains that connect nipple rings to nose rings to brow studs. Yeah, The xx definitely fall outside of my typical categorizations of music that I could consistently listen to, and probably deserve the "regret buying" tag that inevitably rears its ugly head every once and while when you sample new music often. Sometimes these first impressions can be reversed upon further, deeper review, and I have given The xx a fair shot by letting itself play out at night while reading, or while painting my fingernails black by candlelight (jk). But after a number of listens, I've determined--probably forcibly realized is the better term--that the bottom line is simple: this just isn't for me.

However, there is something to be said about the instrumentation on this album: it's crisp, and every note is perfectly executed. Opener "Intro"--which initially persuaded me to check out the album as a whole--and "Crystalised" are the best examples of this precision. I could probably live with these two songs on my iPod, because they are songs that are driven by the craft of skilled musicians. I think that I could find this aspect much more favorable throughout the rest of the The xx were it not for the constant glum, and the shifting conversational style of lyrics. That I cannot overcome.

The existential Internet

This could possibly be the best representation of the existentiality of the Internet. Or, it could just be blowing my mind.

Marquette interchange lights

The new Marquette interchange is fantastic--definitely worth the three years of pounding and construction I had to endure while living in the campus house that was closest in proximity to the series of paved throats to the Midwest. But, I think we need to do something about these purple lights that bathe the interchange in psychedelia at night. The psychedelia is cool, don't get me wrong; I just don't know what it represents. That's why, for the sake of name's sake, we should make those lights an alternating homage of blue and gold. We are Marquette Interchange.

Cletus and Shorty

Thomas Kuebler makes incredibly realistic, and incredibly bizarre sculptures of characters and creatures (via):

The bus is tweeting

While riding the bus into work yesterday, I tweeted a comment about how I just didn't feel that the bus was making the most environmentally conscious route while navigating the loop of the Medical College. To my surprise, a few hours later the bus tweeted me back, asking me how my ride was and what my concern was about the route (of course, it wasn't the bus tweeting, but I can't shake the vision of a Milwaukee bus with an iPhone or BlackBerry attached to it's windshield, tweeting). I found this convergence of Twitter and transportation pretty interesting, especially considering that the transportation side of it was reaching out to me, the passenger, through unsolicited feedback. I'm wondering what other implications this could have for public transportation, now that the bus seems to have a route map (Twitter) of people? I'm seeing some sort of dynamic, flexible, indeterminate bus routes that are completely driven by online networking, although that's probably still a ways off from the traditional 10 Route down Wisconsin Avenue.