Now Tumbling

I'm moving my blog to Tumblr for the foreseeable future...I need to try something new. You can find it here:

http://purview.tumblr.com/

Beach House - "Teen Dream"

I happened to catch Beach House at the Pabst Theater a few years ago opening for Grizzly Bear...or maybe it was Califone? I don't exactly remember, and it doesn't really matter because I wasn't really impressed (with Beach House that is; Grizzly Bear or Califone were awesome). I just wasn't that into the whole dreamy, shoe-gaze pop deal that was emanating from the man/woman duo onstage, and spent the majority of their opening set shuttling back and forth between the theater and the lobby, loading up on PBR for the set of music I was actually there to see. Beach House was a prime example of the opening set that you don't know is coming, don't want to hear, and can't wait to get over with. I don't remember a thing from their set, other than a lot of recorded loops and vocal swooning.

Flash forward a few years: I still don't like the whole dreamy, shoe-gaze pop scene, and Beach House has released a new record (their 3rd) that is lining the "best new releases" shelves in record stores, garnering good reviews world wide web-wide, and pushing themselves into the collective conscious of American pop music. Sure, why not give it a try? I shunned them once, and I can always shun them again. Besides,that "Norway" song they started playing on 88.9 sounded tolerable and not too shoe-gazey.

Turns out, there is still a lot of swooning, recorded loops, and drum machines, but I'll give them credit for making an album that is completely relaxing and inviting. A "reading album," as I like to call them, one that is peppered with a few good songs to kick back to while you're doing something else: "Real Love"--a terrible title--is a great piano ballad; that chord change on the word "arching" during "Zebra" makes the whole song we worth repeated listens; "Silver Soul" swells back and forth in a just-right, pleasant sort of way. That said, there is probably not much lasting power here; I'll probably forget about Teen Dream just like I forgot who Beach House opened for at the Pabst. But at least we made amends in between. Sorry, Beach House.

"Transverse Temporal Gyrus"

Animal Collective debuted Transverse Temporal Gyrus at the Guggenheim Museum this week...try to decipher the rest of it here.

"Under the Dome"

King's pacing and detail have slowed and withered, respectively, tremendously over the years, and for a book that is 1,074 pages long, Under the Dome exacerbates both of these declines. But there is something to be said about the Dome itself--it contained a mysterious and unknown quality from cover to cover (much like the ship in The Tommyknockers) that made every page worth digesting.

Google Monster

Sketch by Asaf Hanuka depicting Google's plan to scan every book in existence into digital form (via):

Starbucks unleashes the Trenta

American coffee consumers feel they are not caffeinated enough, and Starbucks has heard their cry. The corporate coffee giant is now test marketing a 31-ounce coffee--the "Trenta"--in Phoenix and Tampa in response to customer demand for larger coffees. America, prepare thyself for caffeine.

Depression's upside

Great New York Times Magazine article on how the ruminative tendencies of depression are actually beneficial:

Why is mental illness so closely associated with creativity? Andreasen argues that depression is intertwined with a “cognitive style” that makes people more likely to produce successful works of art. In the creative process, Andreasen says, “one of the most important qualities is persistence.” Based on the Iowa sample, Andreasen found that “successful writers are like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but won’t go down. They’ll stick with it until it’s right.” While Andreasen acknowledges the burden of mental illness — she quotes Robert Lowell on depression not being a “gift of the Muse” and describes his reliance on lithium to escape the pain — she argues that many forms of creativity benefit from the relentless focus it makes possible. “Unfortunately, this type of thinking is often inseparable from the suffering,” she says. “If you’re at the cutting edge, then you’re going to bleed.”

And then there’s the virtue of self-loathing, which is one of the symptoms of depression. When people are stuck in the ruminative spiral, their achievements become invisible; the mind is only interested in what has gone wrong. While this condition is typically linked to withdrawal and silence — people become unwilling to communicate — there’s some suggestive evidence that states of unhappiness can actually improve our expressive abilities. Forgas said he has found that sadness correlates with clearer and more compelling sentences, and that negative moods “promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style.” Because we’re more critical of what we’re writing, we produce more refined prose, the sentences polished by our angst. As Roland Barthes observed, “A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem."

"Stylo"

It's stylish...

The Persistence of Sadness

The Persistence of Sadness by Rafael Rozendaal is digital, interactive art at its finest...click on the rocks (via).

Tacocat

My new favorite palindrome...

New measures of tastiness

A new study of "expert" wine tasters revealed that the tasters rated bottles of wine they were told were more expensive as "better" than bottles that were reportedly cheap. In their defense, though, the study also looked at a neurological component of the tasting:

Since reported tastiness is a poor measure of true taste experience in the era of fMRI scanning machines, the researchers were careful enough to take a peek into their participant's brains as these tasted the wines, and found something fairly surprising: When tasting the wine out of the $10 bottle, the medial orbitofrontal cortex - an area of the brain that is strongly related to experiences of pleasure - showed only very little activity. When the exact same wine was poured out of a $90 bottle however, this brain area showed levels of activation which indicate that the participants were indeed drawing much more enjoyment from the same wine this time around. In other words, the price tag seemed to have a real physiological influence on the taster's taste experience.

"Distinguished" palettes everywhere are screaming.

Atoms for Peace

Thom Yorke. Flea. Nigel Goodrich. Joey Waronker. Mauro Refosco. Coming soon.

Weaponizing Mozart

Britain has starting using classical music as a form of social control in its schools:

In January it was revealed that West Park School, in Derby in the midlands of England, was “subjecting” (its words) badly behaved children to Mozart and others. In “special detentions,” the children are forced to endure two hours of classical music both as a relaxant (the headmaster claims it calms them down) and as a deterrent against future bad behavior (apparently the number of disruptive pupils has fallen by 60 per cent since the detentions were introduced.)

One news report says some of the children who have endured this Mozart authoritarianism now find classical music unbearable. As one said, they will probably “go into adulthood associating great music—the most bewitchingly lovely sounds on Earth—with a punitive slap on the chops.” This is what passes for education in Britain today: teaching kids to think “Danger!” whenever they hear Mozart’s Requiem or some other piece of musical genius.

I wonder how this will affect their eagerness and interest in learning to play an instrument? An unfortunate Pavlonian side effect may be occurring here.

"Scissor"

Liars literally getting stoned on a boat...