Gifts from Twitter.

@resnikoff: Mo' money, mo' money. #raptautologies

@resnikoff: I got 99 problems, but 1 less than 100. #raptautologies

@dlind: Narcissus by the stream. #raptautologies #badlyparsedhashtags

Blog stats.

Conjecture: Number of pageviews divided by number of non-author comments is a better proxy measurement for quality than pageviews or comments alone. (If there are no comments, don't try to divide because you're sure to regret it.)

Not that I'm saying it's a good idea to try to measure quality with blog stats in the first place. Just that long comment threads skew pageviews.

"I am not playing a game with you."

This epistolary narrative / photoessay at Triple Canopy is great; it works as a short story and a meditation on desire in the internet age.

"Although this life is a game, I am not playing a game with you - I'll give you everything - my love, my body, my mind and my entire life, be sure I know how to be faithful!"

-ketybell

"Ye sacred Muses..."

In 1585, William Byrd wrote "Ye Sacred Muses" as an elegy for his friend and teacher Thomas Tallis. Here are the lyrics:

Ye Sacred Muses, race of Jove,
Whom Music's lore delighteth,
Come down from crystal heav'ns above
To earth, where sorrow dwelleth,
In mourning weeds with tears in eyes:
Tallis is dead, and Music dies.

Chopin.

With rock music, there are certain expected structures in chord progressions, melodies, rhythms, and harmonies that make the music exciting. You can point to certain bands that managed their own primal versions of these structures: Nirvana and the dynamic verse-to-chorus transition, Neil Young's epic solos over minimal chord changes, GBV's potent distillations of melody. If, like me, you come of age on this stuff, it's your first musical language, but it can fail you in other genres

The first music outside the pop/folk/rock idiom I "got" was Baroque music -- Bach, to be specific. Only later did I consciously realize that the key to the music was the elaboration of the lines that the composer pulls through rough harmonic territory on the journey back to the tonic. Curiously, this metaphor also helps with jazz.

For Mozart and Beethoven, the idea of distance from the tonic ended up being the gateway, only now the music is conceived in terms of tall vertical chords rather than lines.

I have trouble with Chopin; I'm not quite sure what he's doing. A friend suggests that the ebb and flow of harmonic complexity in his music provides a sort of second-order melody: an elaboration through time of a single harmonic idea. I'm still trying to get my head around this, but this video seems like evidence for the theory.

Little Match Girl Passion.

[Crossposted to that League. Bonus for this blog: see a choir sing some of this on YouTube.]

What I like most about the An die Musik performance space in Baltimore is the low stage, which to me represents the basic spirit of the place. It's no more than two feet high, and it extends wall-to-wall across the full forty-or-so foot width of the yellow room. There's no curtain, for this stage is neither display-case nor pedestal. When I go to symphony halls or other elegant classical music spaces, I sometimes feel like an intruder in the courts of the the cultured. An die Musik is different: you don't have to be high-class; you just have to like music.

Last night I went there to see a performance of David Lang's Little Match Girl Passion, which was being performed as part of Judah Adashi's thus-far excellent Evolution Music Series. It's a choral work that on a first listen sounds to an untutored ear like something Arvo Pärt might have written. The piece is a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's short story in recitatives, interspersed with choruses inspired by Bach's St. Matthew's Passion. On the Carnegie Hall website (where, incidentally, you can stream a good recording of the piece), Lang describes why he chose the story of the match girl:

"What drew me to The Little Match Girl is that the strength of the story lies not in its plot but in the fact that all its parts—the horror and the beauty—are constantly suffused with their opposites. The girl’s bitter present is locked together with the sweetness of her past memories; her poverty is always suffused with her hopefulness. There is a kind of naive equilibrium between suffering and hope."

I have a feeling that, had Lang not been so careful to maintain this equilibrium, this piece would have struck me as incredibly mawkish, as the story alone does. Yet the meditative interludes, especially "Have Mercy, My God" and "When it is Time for Me to Go," gives the listener a relationship to the music than the reader couldn't have with the text.

As for the performance, I thought all the singers were wonderful, but then again I haven't spent much time listening to vocal performances. The mezzo-soprano gracefully handled the phrasing in the recitatives as the other musicians , and I noticed the tenor had an exquisite high range. Beyond that, I can't judge. There was a deceptive simplicity to the staging. The musicians didn't come to the stage as a group; they just kind of ambled up there in ones and twos, sat around for a minute or two, then stood up and started. They also played some sparse supplemental percussion. I've already described the effect An die Musik's stage setup has on me; this sort of performance in this sort of space makes me feel like I'm watching highly skilled DIY indie musicians rather than Professional Classical Vocalists. (But of course these singers are in reality highly trained.)

The one sour thought I had during the oratorio had nothing to do with the music itself. In Baltimore, we've just settled into winter temperatures in the last week or so. Here I was, in a warm room full of music appreciators, listening to an artful evocation of a poor person suffering in the cold. Surely there is something wrong with this scene, and though I will try to ease my conscience by donating to a charitable organization this week, my conscience isn't really the issue here.

UPDATE: Tim Smith at the Baltimore Sun reviewed the concert. He says: "The only disappointment, given the roughly 40-minute duration of the composition, was that it didn't get performed twice. I'm sure the sold-out crowd would have gladly stayed for a complete encore." I can't speak for everyone else, but, yes, I would have stayed for that.

Twenty year olds.

I am prejudiced against twenty-year-olds. Because at nineteen you're still your parents' fault. At twenty, you're technically an adult, but you still haven't done anything. Like, twenty-year-olds are like, "this job sucks"--yes, that's why we gave it to you. Because you're twenty. You're twenty years old. You haven't done anything. You've just been sucking up resources: you've just been taking food and love and education and iPods, and just taking it and judging it: "yeah, I like that, uhh, that sucks." You're like a big orange on a tree that's rotting, and the tree's like "get off!" and you're like "I don't wanna!"

-Louis CK on The Tonight Show

Agreeing with Steve Sailer.

So Freddie's online read-through of The Name of the Rose starts today. Since this week's dedicated to the first day in the narrative, I decided to go ahead and read the preface and prologue last night so that I'd be able to start with the body of the narrative on this morning's train ride.

Steve Sailer -- notorious for stances that his friends would describe as "non-PC," his enemies as "racist" -- left a comment on Freddie's blog, and it turns out that I can agree with this comment, and I can do so without reservation or qualification:

"The fictional preface is a pretty hilarious Nabokov/Borges parody."

True. Sample:

"If something new had not occurred, I would still be wondering where the story of Adso of Melk originated; but then, in 1970, in Buenos Aires, as I was browsing among the shelves of a little antiquarian bookseller on Corrientes, not far from the more illustrious Patio del Tango of that great street, I came upon the Castilian version of a little work by Milo Temesvar, On the Use of Mirrors in the Game of Chess."

-Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose. trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994. (3)

My (pop) culure life.

It's kind of weird to be listening to Shostakovich and reading about Ke$ha, huh? Didn't even realize that's what I was doing for a minute.

"While searching for night lodgings…"

“While searching for night lodgings, I passed a drive-in. In a selenian glow, truly mystical in its contrast with the moonless and massive night, on a gigantic screen slanting away among drowsy fields, a thin phantom raised a gun, both he and his arm reduced to tremulous dishwater by the oblique angle of that receding world,—and the next moment a row of trees shut off the gesticulation.”

-Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita.

Beer fan typology.

My friend Cam provides another addition to my typology collection. He describes the three types of beer connoisseurs: the disciple, the snob, and the advocate. Here, the virtue lies between the extremes: the disciple is so inclusive as to be weird and off-putting, while the snob rejects the unworthy. In the middle, you have the just-welcoming-enough advocates.

The interventionist flip.

This section of a Ross Douthat column describes something that shaped the way I think:

In the 1990s, many Democrats embraced Bill Clinton’s wars of choice in the Balkans and accepted his encroachments on civil liberties following the Oklahoma City bombing, while many Republicans tilted noninterventionist and libertarian. If Al Gore had been president on 9/11, this pattern might have persisted, with conservatives resisting the Patriot Act the way they’ve rallied against the T.S.A.’s Rapiscan technology, and Vice President Joe Lieberman prodding his fellow Democrats in a more Cheney-esque direction on detainee policy.

But because a Republican was president instead, conservative partisans suppressed their libertarian impulses and accepted the logic of an open-ended war on terror, while Democratic partisans took turns accusing the Bush administration of shredding the Constitution.

I found this so confusing when it happened.

Notes on video games as culture.

[Cross-posted at The League. Bonus for this blog: my favorite Zero Punctuation video is the review of 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand. Also, I thought Gravitation was a neat little game with some emotional pull.]

My co-Gent Barrett, in his post “Computing in virtual worlds,” writes:

“…there exists a faction represented by such people as Roger Ebert who believe that one may refer to one’s self as cultured while knowing almost nothing about the state of gaming…”

Some thoughts from a gaming outsider:

1.) Gaming is worth taking seriously, but this also means being ready to criticize. Plenty of what gamers do is, from my perspective, a waste. There’s a common perception that gamers spend a lot of time trying to get away from reality, to lose themselves in worlds which aren’t this one. There’s truth in this. It’s sad to me when someone masters Guitar Hero instead of actually learning to play guitar. On the other hand, judging gaming culture by its best-selling franchises would be like judging film by Michael Bay or contemporary literature by James Patterson. That is to say, it’s an exceptional community where the most interesting stuff doesn’t happen mainly on the fringes.

2.) Barrett’s exactly right to zero in on “sandboxes” as the most impressive sector of gaming culture. About once a year I go on a Conway’s Game of Life binge, marveling at, say, the Universal Turing Machine built on the grid. This “game” was one the earliest demonstrations of gaming culture’s impulse to wring as much complexity as possible out of constrained environments. I’m continually amazed by what happens when game designers set up open environments and let players loose to create. I’m delighted to see what talented puzzle-makers come up with when they pick out an interesting scenario — say, playing with time in a 2D platformer.

3.) However, games often stumble when it comes to narrative. There’s at least one sharp critic on this point in the gaming community: Ben Croshow, a.k.a. Yahtzee, the verbally dextrous and consistently NSFW voice of Zero Punctuation. While Croshow has a handful of examples of effective game storylines (e.g., his write-up of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time), he spends a lot more time lambasting games for awful writing, stupid characters, and contrived events. My limited experience with major-release games is that there’s a constant give-and-take with interactivity: the story-driven game may or may not give you choices, and if it does you’re going to be constrained and herded toward the handful of endings the developers had in mind anyway. The stories work better for me when they’re minimal, more suggested than spelled out, as in, say, Shadow of the Colossus. One caveat with regard to stories and games: I’ve never played a MMORPG, so I’m not sure what it’s like to be part of one of these huge game-wide narrative events.

4.) Another major tension in story-driven games is the tension between the story’s requirement for a protagonist and the gameplay’s demand for continual violence. This got quite comical in Grand Theft Auto IV, where you were expected to somehow summon sympathy for Niko Bellic’s emotional turmoil between tasks that required you to guide Niko to commit mass slaughter. To return to the film analogy, you get a lot of the video-game equivalent of Michael Bay, and sometimes, if you’re lucky, you get Peckinpah or Miyazaki. But could you ever have an Antonioni? I’m not at all sure if this will hold up, but I’d posit for the sake of discussion that in film the relevant axis is stimulation-meditation, whereas in games the relevant axis is destruction-creation.

5.) The fanboy approach to gaming will continue to keep knowledge of gaming from functioning as cultural capital. If the gaming community wants to be taken seriously by the Eberts of the future, it should generate more of its own thoughtful critics.

6.) I would seriously love to play Miegakure.

An argument and a typology.

(using this blog as an expanded memory)

I. The argument

Alexander Pruss has posted the nine-step "consequence" argument against Calvinism. The consensus in the comments is that the fourth premise (sixth step) is the one to argue about.

II. The typology

From Adam Kotsko at AUFS:

In the center, you have liberalism, for which capitalism is here to stay and must simply be managed (and sometimes that “management” is held to consist in leaving it to its own devices). The attempts to get rid of capitalism can be classified as either trying to replace it with a system of similar universality and universalizability (left-wing) or retreating into a particularity that will shield us from its effects (right-wing). That really is how the situation is laid out: you have socialism (left-wing) or capitalism (liberalism), and the only place for a “third way” to land is on the right wing (whose exemplary form is fascism).

In the comments, where there's a lot of noise but also some helpful clarifications, Kotsko explains a little further.

What I reject is local-ism, which makes the irreducibility of the local a starting place and rejects universalizability in principle — i.e., people who will say “the whole problem with capitalism is that it’s universal; universalism is oppressive in itself; we need local/particular strategies that can never become universal and hence oppressive, etc.” I think we need models that are universalizable, that can be applied (while making adjustments for local circumstances) everywhere, that think through what it would look like for something to be applied universally...

It goes without saying that if you don't think capitalism is the problem, you'll be in the "liberal" category here. Anyways, "universalizability" is a useful concept.

One more thing: I have to admit it was a little bit disturbing when Kotsko broke the fourth wall in the comments and started talking about the disagreement being a performance for the lurkers, of which I am one.

Nina and Yeezy.

On the other hand, maybe I don't like My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy quite as much as I think I do. I bought Nina Simone's Baltimore at the same time, and as soon as I finished writing that last post, I switched over. It was like a sunrise.

Ludwig und Yeezy.

(Cross-posted at The League. Bonus question for William Writes readers: how could I have written this without feeling like I'm an insufferable poseur?)

I'm at my desk listening to the new Kanye West album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. I'm not going to argue with the pop critic consensus: it's good. When the staff of the music review website Pitchfork named rap duo Outkast's "B.O.B." the best track of the last decade, they praised the song for its "obliteration of the boundaries separating hip-hop, metal, and electro," thereby expressing a culturally democratic hope for a world where genres exist only as objects of play. It takes imagination to crack through the rigid marketing categories of pop music without losing focus; Kanye's got an excess of that kind of imagination. Who else would imagine that you could successfully juxtapose a hook by Justin Vernon, the quiet pretty voice of indie band Bon Iver, with a rap verse from Nicki Minaj that reminds me of O.D.B.'s insane vocalizations on Enter the 36 Chambers? Kanye throws his tender heart in a blender, along with pretty much the entire landscape of pop music, and out comes a classic album.

Classic, that is, insofar as pop music can be classic.

This weekend, I spent some time working through Beethoven's Eroica symphony. I know, I know, it's one of the basic texts of the Western musical tradition, but I'd never sat down with the score before. As you might expect, there's a lot going on, and I'm barely past the surface. And so I was interested to read through David P. Goldman's First Things essay "Why We Can't Hear Wagner's Music." I won't try to sum up Goldman's essay, but he makes good use of the approach to music theory first elaborated by Heinrich Schenker. Schenkerian analysis is a way of identifying deep harmonic structures in tonal music; its most devoted proponents — including, perhaps, Goldman — take Schenker's analysis as describing the heart of Music Itself. Rhythm, timbre, and dynamics are surface phenomena, albeit important ones (and I expect a real Schenkerian analyst could make good use of these concepts).

Though I can't do this kind of analysis, I'm starting to make sense of the foreground of the Eroica. The harmonic motion, even on the surface, is subtle, seductive, propulsive. You don't need me to tell you this, though. It doesn't take much time with Beethoven to make bad pop music sound unbearably repetitive, to the point where I want to say that pop music becomes indistinguishable from sound effects in the computer age.

Listening to Kanye, it's hard to sustain the extreme opinion. Of course the harmonic sense is more or less lobotomized, but we've still got rhythm (lots), timbre (a little), dynamics, and — perhaps most of all — glorious allusion. To understand the achievement of the Eroica, I've had to read up on symphony and sonata forms in the time of Mozart and Haydn: out of context, the third theme in the Allegro, the use of a funeral march, or even the very heft of the symphony lose force. It's fun in a similar — though less intellectual — way to catch Kanye riffing on Black Sabbath, or borrowing ideas from old Jay-Z lyrics, or bringing his predecessor-in-production the RZA in to take a verse. And, since there's rappers everywhere, you get some delicious wordplay to boot. To me, these things aren't merely ornamentation over a harmonic essence. (I could be badly mistaken here: David Goldman, for example, has a strong theological reason for connecting beauty and truth, and his emphasis on the harmonic structure of music in part falls out of that.)

Which isn't to say the limitations in harmonic vocabulary don't handicap the album; it's just that this is true of so much pop music that you can't really single Kanye out.

Also, I'd appreciate moral vision, but that might be too much to ask.

(Also relevant: Peter Suderman muses on why pop music critics converge on Kanye.)

Kubrick the machine.

Though I know I shouldn't talk about Kubrick until I see Barry Lyndon, it's funny that in this 1969 interview the famously "cold" director keeps talking about people as being "essentially" objects:

"Actors are essentially emotion-producing instruments, and some are always tuned and ready while others will reach a fantastic pitch on one take and never equal it again, no matter how hard they try."

And later:

"A director is a kind of idea and taste machine; a movie is a series of creative and technical decisions, and it's the director's job to make the right decisions as frequently as possible. Shooting a movie is the worst milieu for creative work ever devised by man. It is a noisy, physical apparatus; it is difficult to concentrate -- and you have to do it from eight-thirty to six-thirty, five days a week. It's not an environment an artist would ever choose to work in. The only advantage is has is that you must do it, and you can't procrastinate."

Via Kottke.

By the way, I'm finally going to watch 8 1/2 this weekend.

Hipster.

"The hipster is that person, overlapping with the intentional dropout or the unintentionally declassed individual—the neo-bohemian, the vegan or bicyclist or skatepunk, the would-be blue-collar or postracial twentysomething, the starving artist or graduate student—who in fact aligns himself both with rebel subculture and with the dominant class, and thus opens up a poisonous conduit between the two."

-Mark Greif, "What was the Hipster?"

I love you, Mark.

Wait, what?

For years, the federal government bought the [dairy] industry's excess cheese and butter, an outgrowth of a Depression-era commitment to use price supports and other tools to maintain the dairy industry as a vital national resource. This stockpile, packed away in cool caves in Missouri, grew to a value of more than $4 billion by 1983, when Washington switched gears.

-“While Warning About Fat, U.S. Pushes Cheese Sales,” New York Times, 7 Nov 2010