Mom

My mom died on July 24th. She was 67 years old. As I try to reflect on her life, it only makes me wonder at the mystery of it. My mother wasn't given to telling long stories about herself, at least not to me. For example, I didn't learn until the day of her memorial service that she was born in New Haven. She was a private person. I got the impression that she didn't have a lot of good memories of her childhood, so I rarely asked her about it. She told me little bits and pieces - that her family was very poor, that she wore hand-me-down clothes and the other kids made fun of her and called her "Sand drain," that they lived across the street from the dump and had no hot water so they had to heat up water on the stove to take baths.

When I was very young, of course, my mom was with me all the time. But the older I got, the more I got interested in science and other things and she couldn't understand it all. So she let me go and do my own thing. Besides, she had my younger brother to take care of.

From the time I was 4 or 5 until I became a snotty teenager, my father became my hero, the smartest and the coolest person that I knew. My mom had to take a backseat to my dad worship. I don't know if it bothered her at the time, but I know in later years she would often get exasperated with the three of us - my dad, my brother and me - and wish, only half-jokingly I think, for a daughter to talk to, a little more femininity to balance the scales in her favor more.

As the years went by, my mother retreated more and more into herself and her world, which chiefly revolved around the television shows she watched. It was a slow and steady receding. My mother was queen of the VCR. She'd have two of them going at the same time while she watched a third program on one of the several sets we had (including one of those little tiny black and white ones in the kitchen). Later on, in the era of the DVR, she complained when she ran out of hard drive space and sometimes she *still* taped things on VHS. She had my dad downloading her favorite old movies and music to put on discs for her. This went on for quite a long time.

The last time I saw her, in her hospital room, my mom looked beyond gaunt, skeletal. It was heartbreaking. My dad had warned us, but it was still a visceral shock. To see someone dying is one thing, but to see your parent dying and in pain is a very singular experience. It isn’t something I’d wish on anyone.

I dream about her a lot now, and I know I will probably do so for a long time. Last night my unconscious tried to trick me into believing she had somehow survived and was still around. At first I simply allowed her to sit and smoke and drink her coffee. Then as the dream proceeded, and she gained strength, I began to be fed up with this deception. I told her that she wasn’t real, she was dead, this was some kind of hallucination. My words didn’t seem to do anything. I was barely convincing myself, let alone her. When the dream ended, she had retreated to the background, but was still there, stubbornly refusing to be gone.

Thinking about it now, I just miss her terribly and wish I could have her back. But it’s a selfish wish. If she were still with us, she’d be suffering. She had suffered enough. It’s only fair to let her rest.

I did my best to stay positive when we visited her. We talked, we made jokes, we told her we loved her. We watched America’s Got Talent on the TV in her hospital room. She told us how much she hated the hospital food.

In what turned out to be our final conversation, my mom asked me to tell her about my life. I told her about my job, about how I felt appreciated and cared about. I told her I had a best friend and we looked out for each other. I told her that I was trying to date and looking for someone special. I told her about how my cat was doing - still happy and healthy, but getting more snuggly and affectionate as she got older. She knew how I had struggled for years with depression and being unemployed for a long time, so I think it gave her some comfort to know that her child was getting along okay in the world as she was getting ready to depart it.

Before we said our goodbyes, she asked if we’d come back and visit again. We said yes, of course. We had every intention of coming back to see her. Ten days later, my mother died in hospice.

The following week, my father brought her back to Connecticut. At her service, I lost count of how many people showed up for her. It made it much easier to take when the pastor started talking about the afterlife and how she wasn’t gone. I was disappointed and a little bit angered by this, but it wasn’t my funeral, and at least her words were brief and they seemed to be a comfort to many of those in attendance.

The next day, my father, my brother and I took my mom out for one last drive. We brought the urn to a place in the woods in Cheshire and helped her to her final resting place. I watched my mother's ashes - gray like dryer lint - mix with the muddy, brown water of the Quinnipiac River, which flows through the town she grew up in and the city where she was born. She was home.

Random unedited thoughts on art

If we look at the history of Western art, I think there's a definite point at which the majority of artists changed their view of what they did from a mode of "excellence" to a mode of "originality" (see e.g. this page from Francis A. Waterhouse, "Romantic 'Originality'" in The Sewanee Review Vol. 34, No. 1, Jan. 1926), pp. 40-49). What was valued as excellent changed at various times, but it was still a striving for being "the best" at a certain skill set. Once the modality changes to originality, that whole idea of greatness gets thrown out in favor of "genius," which means being utterly unique and different than everybody else. Not surprisingly this also carries over into personality, so corresponds to the rise of celebrity. If you go to a museum that has art from many different eras, the older the art the less the artwork will be the reflection of a personality. It'll be more the reflection of a culture as a whole, often a highly religious culture. Personality only starts to emerge in the Renaissance and then really takes off during the Enlightenment and Romantic eras into the 20th century by which point artists are basically worshipped as divinely-inspired lunatics (because no personality is more interesting to us than one who is socially deviant. That's also why Showtime has a popular long-running show about a serial killer. And why we love anti-heroes. We love the idea of transgressing society's rules, because we are individualists and we all think we're special even though we deny this, as we must, if anyone asks. It's not that we think we're above the law so much as we think that if we ever broke the law, it would be because we had such a DAMN good reason for it, that it would have to be acceptable. The full implications and consequences of this form of post hoc self-justification/aggrandization are also the main focus of Breaking Bad.)

I'm sure there's plenty more to read on this topic, but the book I can't wait to get my hands on is Original Copy by Robert Macfarlane (obligatory Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Original-Copy-Plagiarism-Originality-Nineteenth-Century/dp/0199296502/). Just from peeking at the first couple of pages in the preview, I'm feeling like I might actually be legitimately onto something with at least some of the stuff I was blathering about in the above paragraph.

I got into this as an investigation into the nature of human creativity versus how that gets expressed in our culture (see my previous post for further thoughts on this). Now, I've heard it argued that consciousness itself is a creative act, and I have no counter-argument to that*. Reality as we experience it is generated entirely by our brains, so it is literally our creation (although, insofar as our minds are shaped through socialization, it might be better to think of this as a "group project"). Perhaps then, rather than a projection of the artist's consciousness, we can think of works of art as lenses through which we can focus the light of our consciousness in order to experience reality in some different way. Art then would be a tool like a microscope or telescope to help one see things one can't normally see (where "seeing" is just an analogue for any possible kind of qualitative sensation, including emotional states as well as sensations).

*There's no qualitative difference between dream-consciousness and waking-consciousness, for example. They both seem real while they're happening, but there's no objective way of determining which one has primacy in terms of an abstract notion of "reality." This goes back to Descartes and the idea that what the senses give us is mere illusion. But there's a problem with framing things this way. An illusion implies that there's an underlying reality. Kant postulated that there is such a thing as an underlying reality but that we have no access to it. (Given the religious underpinnings of his metaphysics, it seems like wanton cruelty on the part of God to instill us with insatiable curiosity under such circumstances.) I think perhaps a better term than "illusion" is "interpretation." Our brains interpret the data collected by our senses, synthesizing it into a construct that has both meaning and use for us. Surely this is a sounder notion than that our senses are somehow constantly fooling us with cheap tricks, almost as if we were rubes at a carnival sideshow or something.

Creation Myth

The following comment, which I've taken from a file-sharing website, exemplifies the misconception in our culture (common since at least the 19th century) of the nature of artistic creation (it's also Exhibit A of why fans are, in general, the worst possible people to review albums). The bare minimum of context you need here is that this reviewer has downloaded the new album by a melodic death metal band and is upset about the perceived "derivative" nature of the music:

Some examples how absurdly derivative this crap is:

Emancipate:
:20 Oh look, it's a Veil of Maya riff and accompanying awful keyboard sound!
:38 baby sounds and music boxes... awesome.
1:05 Hey, it's the ending of the Ancient Covenant minus the robot voice and interesting rhythms! It's even in the same key!
1:47 Holy direct quote of the first part of Devin Townsend's 'The Mighty Masturbator'! Not only is the music and texture (guitar+keys) identical, but even the lyrics and vocal delivery are the same.... I really hope this was deliberately meant as a direct tribute, because it is EXACTLY THE SAME THING.
2:28 Identical strumming pattern, tempo, and chord types to the chorus of The Eidolon Reality, accompanied by two-part vocal harmony in the same way.... yet the chord progression isn't quite similar enough to make it sound like he's establishing a recurring theme, especially since it only comes back in one other song. I'm thinking he's just short on ideas here.
3:30 Mellotron and Akerfeldt's guitar sound and solo style.... sounds straight out of an Opeth song.
3:40 How many times have we heard this kind of arpeggio in a Faceless song now?

Deconsecrate:
0:00 another Opeth solo
1:13 horror carnival bit, similar to the middle of Opeth's 'By the Pain I see in Others', complete with the 'God is Dead' lyric from Opeth's 'The Devil's Orchard'.... Mr. Bungle, Arcturus, Between the Buried in Me and others have pretty much turned the disturbed carnival music into a cliche at this point, and the silly 'la la la' vocals certainly don't help the situation (didn't BTBAM use those?)... the way he says 'my child' also recalls Townsend again, who used those exact lyrics and that exact expression on Deconstruction.
1:26 LOL @ the non-transition
1:36 Hey, it's the intro of The Ancient Covenant, only minus the awesome bass licks!
2:13 see 1:48 of The Ancient Covenant and the intro of Coldly Calculated Design
4:06 It's the outro of Sons of Belial!

Accelerated Evolution
The title is the name of a Devin Townsend album, so I guess it should come as no surprise when there is yet another melodic quote of The Mighty Masturbator in the chorus, this time over a Cynic riff!

In Solitude
0:00 Is this a Metallica cover?
1:58 No, wait - it's an Opeth cover!
2:09 Just kidding, it's a Cynic cover!

etc, etc, etc. In short, I don't think there's a single riff on this album that I can't name a very strong precedent for.

This is so myopic, overly reductive and captious that it almost beggars belief. And yet, although it reads almost like a parody, I chose to highlight this comment because it is typical of the kind of obsessive-compulsive picking-apart engaged in by fans of certain types of "underground" music, particularly certain subgenres of extreme metal. However, this condemnation of so-called "derivative" or "un-original" elements is also characteristic of our culture as a whole and its mythologizing of the creative artist. We think of the (true) artist as this semi-mystical being who communes with the celestial spheres and somehow, like magic, plucks original works out of the ether. They are essentially godlike creators with powers beyond mere mortals.

So powerful is this concept of the artist-deity in our culture that, even when given strong evidence to the contrary, rather than question our assumptions about what it is that artists do, we assume that it is the artist's fault for not living up to our lofty expectations. We dismiss them as ripoffs, charlatans or fakes. In certain cases we even prosecute them for copyright infringement.

Not only is it ludicrous to demand that every individual piece of content within an artistic work is so brand-spanking-new, so mold-breakingly original, that no one has ever seen or heard it before, it is likely impossible. If it were the case that artists were automatons who generated content randomly, regardless of any human concerns, then yes, it would make sense to expect every piece produced by such robotic "artists" would bear little or no resemblance to any other. I needn't belabor the point here: that, in fact, the concerns, thoughts, feelings and abilities of artists are decidedly non-random, for all of the obvious reasons as well as more technical, medium- and genre-specific ones.

That is all general enough. To take the specific example quoted above, the commenter is talking about a new album by an artist within one of his (presumably) favorite genres. He is objecting to the fact that he is able to hear what he considers similar or identical riffs and stylistic approaches, not only to that of other artists' riffs/styles/chord changes, but to riffs/styles/chord changes in other songs by the same artist.

Let's back up a moment here and discuss context. Metal is a genre of popular music with formal conventions so strict that some scene-specific websites (such as metal-archives.com) won't even recognize the existence of certain artists if their output is not deemed "metal" enough. The idea of anyone complaining about the "derivativeness" of such an inherently inbred and self-restrictive musical culture is almost laughable just on the face of it. But to also assert, as the above-quoted metal dude indeed does, that the artists in question are being derivative because of the similarity of their music to THEIR OWN MUSIC is one of the most dizzyingly silly arguments I think I've ever encountered.

The final irony, of course, is that the analysis he gives could be used as an aid to enhancing one's enjoyment of the album. Given that the nature of creativity depends on memorization (every genius you can name has in common the twin powers of enhanced memorization and concentration), the reality is that recombination of pre-existing elements is the main activity of the artist. That, in fact, is what creativity actually is. Creation ex nihilo is a myth. Even our intellectual property laws (which also date from the time in which artists began to be mythologized as some combination of rebels/prophets/deities rather than mere craftsmen as in earlier eras) reflect this superstitious belief. Rather than worship at the altar of artists in a naive celebration of their seemingly mysterious powers, we might try instead to appreciate the very human, very practical craft of what they do. Like a master blacksmith or tailor, a good artist works with the materials at hand to create superior goods. If you're not interested in the kind of thing the craftsman makes, you don't go to that craftsman. You don't blame the blacksmith for being "unoriginal" just because you're bored of horseshoes (or whatever).

As noted above, originality was not always prized in our culture*. Francis A. Waterhouse, in an essay published in The Sewanee Review while he was Professor and Head of Department of Romance Languages at Kenyon College, lays the blame on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote, "If I am not better than other men, at least I am different." Waterhouse continues:

With that famous boast, [Rousseau] started the sophistry that was destined to modify profoundly the basic standards of western civilization. The desire for celebrity is, of course, nothing new, but previous to Rousseau it had been effectively restrained--save in exceptional instances--by the stern necessity of achieving prominence through mastery of the difficult. If you wanted to be noticed, you had to do something better than others. The substitution, on the other hand, of 'different' for 'better' changed all this over night. Different being susceptible of elastic interpretation, people were not slow to realize that it could overlap more easily; if you could not do the thing better, or even as well as others, you could substitute something easier and call attention to its difference.

In other words, once the paradigm changes from excellence to originality, that whole idea of greatness gets thrown out in favor of "genius," which means being utterly unique and different than everybody else. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has noticed--say, while visiting an art museum--that older artworks are much less the reflection of an individual personality and much more the reflection of a culture as a whole. Personality only starts to emerge in the Renaissance and then really takes off during the Enlightenment and Romantic eras into the 20th century, by which point artists are basically worshipped as divinely-inspired lunatics.**

There are many examples in our culture of the vilifying of the act of copying. Even children make fun of "copycats." Cover bands, inkers, ripoff artists, plagiarists

There's also a neat trick pulled off by the advertising industry where they have managed to conflate the concepts of "different," "better" and "new." It's easy to see why this would be a 

If you still think there's something special about originality, try this example on for size: you start watching a film and are introduced to several characters. Do you automatically like the last character to whom you're introduced more than the characters to whom you were introduced earlier? Do you like the last thing that happens in the film more than whatever happened before simply because it's the last thing that happens? (Maybe you do if you hate the film and are happy it's over, but that's another matter). Perhaps you think that's a silly example, but that's really all originality is: it's the latest notion to work its way out of some human being's head. If that's good enough for you, then go ahead and worship at the altar of originality. But don't do so under the illusion that what you're celebrating has been something artists have strived for since the dawn of time, because that's absolutely not the case. 

Instead of pressuring ourselves to be startlingly original all the time, in this current embarrassment of cultural riches within which we find ourselves, we might try connecting the dots a little bit more. A little more synthesis and coalesence, a little less breadth and a little more depth. We needn't worry ourselves unduly about the latest (I had to restrain myself from adding "and greatest") cultural items to aggregate their way onto the front pages of all our favorite blogs and news sites. It may seem incredibly urgent to read and learn about and understand everything new, but remember that's just a bias, an illusion; and one that for most of us has become an addiction. The new has its place, but it doesn't automatically usurp the old until we make the decision to only pay attention to the latest shiny things that move the fastest across our collective field of vision.

Now, I've heard it argued that consciousness itself is a creative act, and I have no counter-argument to that***. Reality as we experience it is generated entirely by our brains, so it is literally our creation (although, insofar as our minds are shaped through socialization, it might be better to think of this as a "group project"). Perhaps then, rather than a projection of the artist's consciousness, we can think of works of art as lenses through which we can focus the light of our consciousness in order to experience reality in some different way. Art then would be a tool like a microscope or telescope to help one see things one can't normally see (where "seeing" is just an analogue for any possible kind of qualitative sensation, including emotional states as well as sensations).

*In Shakespeare's time, for example, audiences "favoured likeness: a work was good not because it was original, but because it resembled an admired classical exemplar, which in the case of comedy meant a play by Terence or Plautus" (The RSC Shakespeare - William Shakespeare Complete Works, Introduction to the Comedy of Errors p. 215). This might be an overgeneralization, but it's certainly the case that Shakespeare, like his contemporaries, borrowed most if not all of his storylines from existing texts.

**No personality is more interesting to us than one who is socially deviant. That's why we love anti-heroes, even serial killer anti-heroes like Dexter. We love the idea of transgressing society's rules, because we are individualists and we all think we're special--even though we deny this, as we must, if anyone asks. It's not that we think we're above the law so much as we think that if we ever broke the law, it would be because we had such a DAMN good reason for it, that it would have to be acceptable. The full implications and consequences of this form of post hoc self-justification/aggrandization are also the main focus of Breaking Bad, perhaps the only truly moral show currently airing on television.

***There's no qualitative difference between dream-consciousness and waking-consciousness, for example. They both seem real while they're happening, but there's no objective way of determining which one has primacy in terms of an abstract notion of "reality." This goes back to Descartes and the idea that what the senses give us is mere illusion. But there's a problem with framing things this way. An illusion implies that there's an underlying reality. Kant postulated that there is such a thing as an underlying reality but that we have no access to it. (Given the religious underpinnings of his metaphysics, it seems like wanton cruelty on the part of God to instill us with insatiable curiosity under such circumstances.) I think perhaps a better term than "illusion" is "interpretation." Our brains interpret the data collected by our senses, synthesizing it into a construct that has both meaning and use for us. Surely this is a sounder notion than that our senses are somehow constantly fooling us with cheap tricks, almost as if we were rubes at a carnival sideshow or something.

Confessions of a 13-year-old charlatan

I've always felt like a charlatan when it comes to writing music. When I started out, right around when I was 13 years old and having had no musical training or background, I couldn't figure out how anybody wrote anything that was any good. So after some frustrating attempts at trying to write something of worth and pretty much failing, I decided to start cheating. I took pieces of music that I hadn't written and claimed them as my own. I did this to impress my friends and peers. If I was ever actually caught doing this, I've blocked it out of my memory. But I did confess willingly at some point to lying about having written a few pieces. I don't remember much about that either but I do know it was quite a relief. So gradually I stopped trying to pass off other people's music as mine.

At some point, maybe a year or two after I had started writing, I started to be able to write things that were decent enough to claim as my own without feeling embarrassed. What's amazing to me now is the amount of pressure I put on myself to be a freaking amazing genius right out of the gate. I never considered that it takes time and lots of practice to become good at composing, just like anything else. I couldn't wait to be great because I needed to seem important and special and really cool right then. So I did whatever I could to cultivate an aura of specialness around me, trying to make it seem like this 13 year old kid had come up with these masterpieces out of nowhere. It must have reeked so hard of desperation.

That poor kid. I feel so bad for him. I wish I could travel back in time and tell him: I understand. You want to be great. You want to be amazing. That's good! But you have to be patient. It's going to take a long time to be as good as those great masters you admire so much. I know that's not what you want to hear. You think there's no time and the end of the world is right around the corner. But it's not. Just keep writing and don't worry about impressing anyone. People are going to like you because you're a good person who is comforting and fun to talk to and be around, not because some piece you wrote impressed them.

A first stab at a rational aesthetics; or, why reading Ulysses is better than eating fried chicken

We are living during a historical moment in which more people have more access to infinitely more information than has ever been possible before. Given that fact, it seems to me that it makes little sense to do what many people seem content to do, which is: find something you like and keep getting more of the same. What we should be doing is learning, about anything and everything, all of the time. Trying new things should not be seen as the pastime of the adventurous; rather, it should be considered the norm. This has nothing to do with recklessness - you don't even have to leave your couch to experience the unfamiliar. The only things you need leave behind are your preconceptions and prejudgments.

What we ought to desire is the best of everything. And by "the best" I don't mean someone else's idea of what that is. I don't mean what is critically acclaimed or popularly beloved. I mean those things (works of art, activities, interests, people, places, whatever) that are unique; I mean those things that are extraordinary either in themselves or in the effects they have; I mean those things that are masterfully crafted (or, in the case of nature, have the appearance of having been masterfully crafted).

I mean, also, those things that excel at being themselves, that have a mission or a set of goals or just a certain nature that is their own. If they have an aim, they might be successful or unsuccessful in that aim, but that's less important. The point is that they know what they are about and they go for it. To take a weirdly random example: a basket of battered, deep-fried chicken. Nobody who eats fried chicken thinks that it's health food. You can see the grease stains on whatever container the chicken is placed in. It's fried chicken! It tastes good because it's full of fat. You can decide for yourself whether you want to risk eating something so unhealthy, but there's really no way to say that fried chicken is lying to you about what it is.

Another example is the novel Ulysses by James Joyce. Both novel and author have been saddled with the derisive label "pretentious" since its publication in 1922. Pretentiousness is an affect that requires willful dishonesty regarding one's own nature: it is an attempt at seeming more important or interesting than one actually is. So here we have a work (and an author) that, unlike fried chicken, is being accused of lying about what it is. But there is a problem with calling a work of art pretentious: almost inevitably, some people will use this label to justify disliking something that is either beyond their intellectual abilities (the irony is that doing this is itself quite pretentious) or in some other way inaccessible to them personally. The more honest thing to do, of course, is to admit that some works are, in way or another, not for us ("us" being the particular critic or set of critics who can't find a way into the work in question). For, regardless of how "difficult" or "tedious" a work may be, how can we possibly know that something (or someone) is being dishonest about its own nature unless we have a thorough and accurate understanding of that nature? My point here is not to argue that Ulysses/Joyce isn't pretentious, only that the label pretentious, as it is most commonly used, is not so much a criterion as an excuse. In any case, we need to establish more fundamental criteria first, in order to decide whether something is, among other things, pretentious.

So how can we go about judging the aesthetic value of our two examples of fried chicken and Ulysses? Qualitatively, they are obviously quite different, as one can tell simply by noting the categories that each item belongs to: food and literature. You could eat a copy of Ulysses, but you would have to have an exceptionally perverse sense of taste in order to find the experience more pleasant than that of eating fried chicken. Conversely, you can't read fried chicken. There is no plot, no characters, no setting and no development. The fried chicken can't tell you anything about the experience of being Irish in early 20th century Dublin, for example. (There is a narrative of how the chicken ended up on your plate, just as there is a story about how a book ends up in your lap; however, what I want to discuss here is not the history of physical objects, but the nature of cultural objects in terms of their aesthetic value.)

We have to judge each type of object or experience on its own terms. It is not, however, simply a matter of assigning an aesthetic value to each cultural object and then deciding to go with whatever has the highest value. Aesthetics is not a quantitative science - not yet, anyway. It's also not a matter of deciding what is most pleasant or fun. Eating fried chicken is a very pleasing experience for many people, but that doesn't change the fact that it isn't a very healthy choice. This is not to say that certain works of art are bad for your health (although they could be), nor that one should choose to consume art based on whether it is somehow "good for you" like eating your vegetables (there was an article in the New York Times last year that pretended to take seriously the analogy between healthy food and "difficult" art, but I believe this analogy is flawed for a number of reasons I won't get into here). I believe there are better ways to judge the aesthetic value of an object or experience:

1. Is this allowing me to experience something new, and if so, is it unique in its ability to deliver this kind of newness to someone who has never experienced it before? (E.g., there is nothing quite like the experience of reading Ulysses, but eating one plate of fried chicken is quite similar to eating another.)

2. If this is not something new per se, is it an example of something that performs in an extraordinary way, or causes me to feel something extraordinary? (E.g., perhaps this particular fried chicken is special in some way - exotic spices or the use of some other rare ingredient.)

3. Is there a sense of quality craftsmanship in this object? Sometimes there is much to admire about something simply in how it was made, and in being a remarkable specimen of its kind. (E.g. Ulysses is a stellar example of the craft of writing. Some plates of fried chicken are cooked better than others.)

4. As discussed above, there is aesthetic value (which, by the way, we can probably admit essentially means beauty) in simply being true to one's own nature. Sometimes flaws - or even outright failure - can be part of what makes something beautiful.

I'm not sure whether the above coheres into a straightforward essay. It may read more like a transcript of a thought process. Be that as it may, I welcome your feedback. What do you think about these criteria for evaluating an object or experience in terms of aesthetic value? Do you agree that they are valid or not? What criteria would you add? Do you think it's a mistake to even try to create a rational theory of aesthetics? Is this all complete bollocks? Let me know.

Mac Mini: The Haunting

Last August, I made up a little short story on Twitter that I thought was mildly hilarious. Nobody saw it because I have about 12 followers. So I'm reposting it here even though it's going to seem odd to read a whole bunch of tweets as one long thing. You kind of have to imagine you're getting these one at a time. It also helps a whole lot if you have heard Ween's album The Pod. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this thing even 10% as much as I do:

Just put Ween's "Pod" album in my iTunes and the dock icon started jumping up and down like it was in pain.

Playing Ween's "The Pod" album. That's weird - usually iTunes doesn't stop after every song and ask if I'm sure I want to continue.

Playing Ween's "The Pod" album. The screen keeps getting darker and I have to keep turning up the brightness. Must be a new OSX bug.

The song "Pollo Asado" just ended. A dialog box came up in iTunes that just asked, "Why?" Had to click the "I'm sorry" button.

Listening to The Pod. All good. I guess iTunes got over itself. Although my Mac does seem strangely warm to the touch.

Went upstairs to get some lunch, left music playing. When I came back, my Mac was leaking. Some Macs have liquid coolant. Mine doesn't.

Just made it through "Molly." My Mac mini is now cold as ice to the touch.

These new Macs are so advanced! After playing Ween's "The Pod" album for 45 minutes, it's in a corner of the room making a cocoon.

Mac mini emerged from cocoon. Scurried under my bed - didn't get a good look. Ween album still blaring somehow. On phone now with Apple. 

Had no idea the Genius Bar did house calls, but I guess they're coming over. Also, is there a computer term that sounds like "exorcism"?

For those of you who missed my live tweets earlier today, I put on Ween's album "The Pod" and my Mac mini wept & became a giant insect.

Later on, some Genius Bar peeps came by. There was a lot of chanting and consulting of scrolls. I guess it was pretty serious.

It was touch and go for a while; a few of the geniuses were partially devoured. The blood… well, let's just say the carpet will never quite be the same.

But in the end, they managed to banish the demon possessing my computer back to the parallel dimension from which it came. And recover my data!

So I guess the lesson I've learned is: always go for the extended warranty. You just never know.

Google, Amazon and Apple all want you to stick your music in a cloud. Meanwhile, as we all know, Facebook has teamed up with Spotify to hook you into a cloud with music already in it. I can't tell who's gonna win this fight, if anyone, so I'm trying everything. Here are my reviews of each puffy cloud:

1. Spotify - Unlike Amazon, Apple and Google, Spotify doesn't let you upload anything. Instead, you can play anything in their library for free (plus anything it finds on your hard drive). As the partnership with Facebook would suggest, Spotify places a strong emphasis on social listening. You can see what your friends are listening to, subscribe to their playlists and even listen to music together with Soundrop (one of several "apps" now available from within Spotify, which is itself a stand-alone application). Spotify is a lot of fun, simpler to use in many respects than the other 3 cloud apps, and is particularly suited for exploring new sounds. It's also great in that, although you do have to download the app to use it, you don't have to spend any time uploading or "matching" songs. There is also a mobile app for Android and iOS, but you'll have to pay $10 a month to use it.

2. iTunes Match - To use this, you need to have songs in an iTunes library and you can't have more than 25,000 songs (not including iTunes Store purchases). Assuming you meet those two qualifications, for $25 a year you can keep all your songs in the cloud. Since the iTunes Store likely already has a copy of most of the songs in your library, it only uploads what it needs to. This can save a whole lot of time and is one of the cooler features of iTunes Match. Obviously if you don't like iTunes and/or don't have an iOS device, this is not for you.

3. Google Music - You're limited to 20,000 songs but unlike Apple, Google actually lets you pick and choose what gets uploaded. If you have more than 20,000 songs, you can still use the service - you can either let Google choose 20,000 for you or pick them yourself. Upload speeds are good but unlike Apple, you really do have to upload every single song. Of course, since it's Google they not only support Android devices but also iOS (via HTML5). Google also supports a decent range of filetypes: not only mp3 and aac but also wma, ogg and FLAC (although some of these get transcoded to mp3 format after uploading, which is a bummer). But probably the nicest thing about Google Music is that you don't need to download a separate app to play your songs - they'll play right from your web browser on music.google.com. Actually, scratch that - the nicest thing about Google Music is that it's completely free.

4. Amazon Cloud Player - This is marketed more like a side benefit of buying Amazon Cloud storage. If you plunk down $20 (or more if you want more storage) for 20GB, you also get unlimited music uploading. Plus, like Google you can play your music from any web browser. There's also an app for Android and iPad (although not iPhone, oddly). This would probably beat Google Music's sorry ass except for two things: 1. Fewer file formats are supported (only mp3 and aac, although at least there are no transcoding shenanigans) and 2. The Uploader app is a total piece of shit. This really disappointed me - I was all set to let the uploader run for a week or so, uploading my 80,000+ songs (what, you don't have that many? I guess you must hate music) but then I noticed every time it would finish uploading a song, it would sit there for 2-3 minutes before continuing to the next one! If you do a little multiplication, that means it would take somewhere between 160,000-240,000 minutes to upload all of my songs. That's about 3-6 months. I think I'll wait for them to fix that bug.

Some thoughts on the possible end of mass-produced art and pop culture

I wrote a post a few months back about why I still buy CDs (instead of buying/stealing mp3s/AAC/etc). This has very little to do with wanting to support artists (although I do want to) and much more to do with wanting the best possible value for my money. No matter what price you pay for a CD, the long-term value is much higher than that of the equivalent mp3 (or AAC, or Ogg Vorbis, etc.) files. See that earlier post for some reasons why I believe this to be the case.

Meanwhile, however, I'm more convinced than ever that music has to be free. It already is free, of course. But much of the music business is still in denial about this. The record companies are dying (or just getting swallowed up by bigger and bigger media companies) - when I worked at the Archive of Contemporary Music this fall, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of self-produced CDs being made with absolutely no label backing. At most, a band/artist will hire a company to promote their music, but there really is no need for the service that labels provide anymore. Recording costs have gotten so cheap that if you can afford a MacBook, you can make an album. There's no reason to sign a contract that forces you into five or six figures' worth of debt that you may never be able to pay back.

I see us moving from a model of music distribution based on mass production, the inheritance of 100+ years of mechanically-reproduced media, to a service-oriented one via digital distribution. And there's no reason to limit this concept to music. It applies equally to film and other audiovisual media. We're already used to this model via services like Netflix, Spotify, and Rhapsody. Even good old cable TV is essentially a service model, albeit a more old-fashioned one.

But even Netflix et al. are not going far enough for me. What I see in our future is a lot more fragmentation. We've already gotten to the point where it's impossible to keep up on every aspect of popular culture because it's superabundant. The sheer volume of new works being produced is overwhelming. If you love film and that's your favorite passion, I bet you don't know as much about the current music scenes, and vice versa. And you can't even keep up with everything new in your favorite medium. You'll have to pick a genre or a style to focus on, and even then you might not be able to watch/hear/read everything. The only thing holding us together enough to have any kind of relatable conversation about culture right now is that we're still relying on a lot of the old-model media corporations, for the creation of new works if not for their distribution. If/when those conglomerates finally die out, we'll have nothing left but a network of independent artists promoting themselves. It'll be interesting to see what the impact of that will be on society (assuming it does happen).

We've been living with a shared popular culture for so long that we forget it really hasn't existed for very long. In fact, it's largely a 20th century phenomenon. I can envision a time where culture becomes almost entirely a local thing as it once was. Except that with the internet, the whole idea of "local" could be transformed. Local might just be whatever you and your friends happen to glom onto. Or art could just become another service like personal trainers and psychiatrists. You might hear a song or somebody might refer you and you pay the artist to write and record more songs for you. It could even be collaborative, depending on the temperament of the artist and how demanding you are.

I would imagine this might be worrying to many consumers of pop culture who are used to the way things work now. But I think a lot of visual artists and composers of classical music are already used to being commissioned or given grants. I can't see any reason why the same thing couldn't work on a smaller scale with indie musicians and their laptops.

Perhaps eventually we'll just pay artists to create something for us and we'll be free to do whatever we want with it - copy it, give it to our friends, even claim we wrote it ourselves if we want to be assholes like that. The whole concept of copyright isn't terribly relevant if the artist gets paid directly upfront for creating a work. Won't some people make careers by ripping off other artists? Yes, but that's already happened. Besides, think about the alternative (i.e. the current reality) - the copyright term is extended beyond all reason just so a huge company (*cough* Disney *cough*) can continue to profit off of a cartoon mouse that a dead guy thought up almost a hundred years ago. Does that really seem better to you?

Copyright was never intended to be abused in such a manner. Like all intellectual property laws, copyright is meant to encourage and reward innovation in our society. The idea is that if you protect the ideas of artists and inventors, they will be able to make a living from continuing to create more and more ideas. Thus both artist and society directly benefit. Well, if I have one or two good ideas that make me rich and I know that the copyright will never expire, and that my grandchildren will still be collecting royalties off of what I did, how does that encourage me to create anything else? (By the way, it also rewards my lineage just for being born. It's basically creating a new class of IP royalty.)

Of course, the reality is more complex than this. Creative people will often be creative no matter what. However, when corporations own intellectual property, therein lies a bigger problem. It's no longer a matter of rewarding an individual for his or her contribution to society or culture. It's allowing a corporation to continue to profit off of someone's creativity in perpetuity (every time the copyright term is about to expire, they just hire lobbyists to convince Congress to extend the term another 20 or 50 years). Large for-profit corporations are inherently conservative entities. Why would they take a risk on something new when they can simply keep making money off the same thing that's always worked for them? It's entirely possible (and I think inevitable) for copyright, having been stretched unduly way past its originally intended limits, to have the opposite effect it was intended to have: that is, it can impede progress, slow the flow of new ideas into common culture, stifle creativity.

Bad Special Effexor

I was listening to Grizzly Bear's album Veckatimest today and kind of basking in the laid-back beauty of it, when I suddenly recalled the last time I had listened to the album. It was back in 2009, a few months after I had quit taking Effexor. In order to mitigate the unusually intense withdrawal symptoms (anyone who has ever been on Effexor can tell you about the experience of missing just a single dose - it's not fun), I had devised a clever little method of tapering my doses and had successfully gotten myself down from 225mg a day all the way to zero. This was done gradually, over the course of 7 or 8 weeks. I was very careful. Nor did I let my guard down once this process was over. I had originally been prescribed antidepressants back in 2005 for (believe it or not) depression, so naturally I was on the lookout for returning signs of depression in myself. I did not anticipate what actually happened, which was that I slowly but steadily transitioned into a state of near-constant high-level panic and dread. I lost my appetite and started to lose weight (which seemed kind of nice at first). Then I began to sleep less and less, until finally I was barely able to get any sleep at all. Every time I would close my eyes and start to doze off, I would suddenly think something like "I could die in my sleep tonight!" Immediately I would feel a jolt of adrenaline and want to jump out of bed as if awakened from a nightmare.

This thought didn't exactly come out of nowhere, but a somewhat lengthy digression is necessary in order to explain the origin and nature of my death-obsessed horror. I grew up without religion - my father had been forced to go to church throughout his childhood and despised it, so had no intention of putting his children through a similar ordeal - and apart from a mild fascination with the Bible when I was about 10 or 11, I grew up with a vague, wishy-washy idea of God as this benevolent, Santa Claus type figure. My Bible reading and a few religious friends spooked me just enough so that when I first discovered my father's Frank Zappa albums and played the song in which the satirical rocker intoned with trademark cynicism, "If we're dumb, then God is dumb - and maybe even a little ugly on the side," I immediately turned the volume down on my stereo and waited, cowering, for the lightning to strike me. Later on, after I had determined, through careful experimentation, that punishment for listening to (or reading) heretical words was not forthcoming in any kind of timely manner from God Himself, my doubts about his existence grew apace. While part of me clung to my childish notions of a supreme and loving deity, the rational part of my brain decided that religion was pretty much not worth wasting much thought over.

Since then, although I had thought about death often over the years and wondered about its essential mysteriousness, I found it hard to wrap my brain around the concept of non-existence, so I preferred to hold out hope for some sort of afterlife, although of what kind I couldn't really imagine. Fast-forward to 2009 and I found myself confronted with the reality of death in a much more intense way than I had ever considered it before. Right at the time that I was becoming more and more anxious, my father unwittingly loaned me the book that would send me over the edge of panic and fear. It was called The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. A rather succinct and straightforwardly-written thesis on how the brain creates consciousness and the "illusion of the self" by German philosopher Thomas Metzinger. After reading the first few chapters, I was both convinced that the very notion of any kind of life after death was ludicrous (consciousness itself being a mere illusionary construct of the brain, a tenuous bundle of nerve cells) and utterly terrified of the fact that my future non-existence was more or less the only thing in the world that I could count on with utmost assurance. This book, combined with my rapidly developing state of anxiety, pretty much destroyed my fragile psyche.

In a futile attempt to escape this terror-ridden mental state, I would go on long walks around my neighborhood. One day I put the aforementioned Grizzly Bear album on my iPod. Listening to it then, the songs felt to me like a meaningless rattle of strings and drums, an absurd noise to make in the face of overwhelming, all-engulfing, terrifying, eternal nothingness. I don't mean that I actually thought any of this while listening - I mean that I *felt* it, directly - as directly as you feel the warmth of the sun on your face, and as strongly and thoroughly as you love whomever it is you love the most.

I know this will sound strange, but I think of that person who suffered as not exactly me but some other person who lived inside of me, and I feel sad for the suffering of this other me. His ordeals over the course of a few months seem to me now, while not nearly as horrible as those of countless others I've seen, heard or read about, just as pointlessly cruel.

Although I had good reasons for going off of Effexor, it was still a unilateral decision on my part. I, ultimately, have nobody to blame but myself for what happened. Still, I couldn't have known what would happen, so I don't necessarily think of it as a stupid mistake. Obviously, it was unwise to go off of a medication without a doctor's supervision. But I couldn't afford a doctor at the time; this was, in fact, the main reason I was going off the medication (Effexor is quite expensive, although I understand a generic version is available now). Furthermore, despite having seen psychiatrists and other mental health professionals for years beforehand, nobody had ever warned me that anything like what I experienced could happen to me if I went off my medication.

In the end, I think what this experience showed me is that what makes each of us recognizably ourselves can be altered (and in some cases, permanently so) to an arbitrary degree, by chemicals just as surely as by physical traumas. We are all such fragile creatures.

Why I still buy CDs

Everyone knows CDs suck. They're lame, outmoded, plastic replicas with all the soullessness of digital and none of the warmth of vinyl or analog tape. And even if you did want to listen to those godless bits and bytes, once you insert the disc into your computer and rip all the tracks, that CD is reduced to a superfluous hard copy. CDs are relics of the past, destined for the landfill, soon to be forgotten as we upload all music onto our hard drives and into the cloud. Right?

Not so fast. There are still good reasons to buy CDs. In fact, I will argue that it still makes more sense to buy them instead of mp3s (assuming you care about what happens to the music you purchase/acquire over the long term).

The kind of data compression used to encode audio in mp3 format is "lossy." This means that some of the original information that was there when the music was recorded is gone forever from that mp3. According to the creators of the compression algorithm that encodes mp3 files, the missing information would've been inaudible anyway, but many people can in fact hear the difference between an uncompressed audio file and an mp3. In any case, to me it seems absurd to pay for what is, essentially, a deliberately damaged file.

The thing is, CDs are still the only means by which to acquire uncompressed digital reproductions of most music. I would settle for purchasing music in a "lossless" compression format such as FLAC or Apple Lossless; the data compression tricks used in such formats allows for full recovery of all the information in the original, uncompressed file. However, the iTunes store doesn't even give you the option of purchasing in such formats. Neither does Amazon, nor most other vendors, large or small. Occasionally I'll come across smart, savvy, independent musicians or labels that sell their music in FLAC (or even uncompressed WAV), but these are still very much the exception. So until most music vendors start selling FLAC (or Apple Lossless), I will be buying CDs.

But let's say you're perfectly happy with mp3s and the way they sound. What do you care if some harmonic overtones in a part of the spectrum you can't hear anyway are missing? Well, consider the possibility that in the near future, someone may develop a more efficient compression algorithm than mp3. Actually, this has already happened - in fact, software engineers are constantly coming up with newer and better ways of compressing both audio and video. With some of these newer lossy formats, you can get sound quality as good as or better than the mp3s you now own but that take up less disk space. Sounds great, right? If you bought mp3s, though, you're going to have to repurchase all of your music in the new format. If you'd gotten CDs (or lossless-compressed digital files), this would never be a problem, because you'd always be starting with the original audio file(s).

[Note: You might be wondering why you can't simply convert mp3s into one of these newer formats directly. This is called "transcoding" and it always leads to degradation of audio quality. It might not be obvious at first, but after you've converted from mp3 to Ogg Vorbis and then AAC, you probably won't like the results.]

What about vinyl? Don't get me wrong, it's a lovely format. Putting a record on can be a kind of ritual and can make a listening experience seem special. However, this doesn't make analog discs in any way superior to digital ones. All the disadvantages of vinyl that most people were happy to rid themselves of with the advent of the CD are still there. Polyvinyl chloride discs are still big, bulky, heavy, slow, inconvenient, prone to wear and tear, and sound inferior on all but the most expensive audiophile equipment. I know many people will swear that there is some magical "warmth" imparted by the vinyl format that makes it superior, but I believe this is a kind of delusion. If that's how you prefer to listen, be my guest. But let's please have no illusions about superiority of sound quality.

So until I see a big move toward lossless or uncompressed audio becoming much more widely available for download online, I am going to stick with the only format currently available that allows me to get as close as possible to the music as it was recorded. I am not alone in feeling this way; in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if CDs get a slight boost in sales over the next few years. It won't be a mainstream phenomenon, so the bump may be very slight indeed. I'm not saying I expect to still be buying them ten years from now (although it's not impossible), but for those of us who passionately collect music that is relatively outside the mainstream, I think CDs will stay relatively popular for the short-term future.