08.08.10
Posted in words at 12:03 pm by electricvishnu
the firework as metaphor of human phenomenon has most certainly been done before
(as fireworks themselves are one of the oldest inventions)
but i can’t help but slow and look and listen [with all windows/sunroofs down/open]
(and neither can the other drivers)
it’s a new perspective on the old trick – and i’m driving around it
(or should we use circumnavigate here – shall we be Magellanic? [firefox suggested that one, i can't take credit, but bad spelling => expanding vocabulary]
and the buildings in the (slightly) sub-urban almost-city by the bridge are causing new bounces upon the usual firework bang -
so can it be said?
the firework as a soul-collision in time-lapse:
the metrics of each and every axis that approximate ‘where it’s at’ ‘what we are’ mapped to sound and color, in three dimensional space – [which this writer now has a much greater appreciation for, post-circling of the fireworks]
only by the light emitted from the next one, however, can you really understand the shape and dynamics of the smoke that lingers and eventually disperses into midsummers’ night
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08.04.10
Posted in words, words about non-words at 12:04 am by electricvishnu
inception was not a very bad movie at all. if movies like inception arrived in theaters every week, no actually i’ll take once ever few months or years, that would be a very positive thing. and i can’t say inception really “fell short” or failed in its intended “mindf*#&” (as this seems to be the en vogue label)
however . . . inception left me feeling a bit like i had eaten only 3 or 4 courses out of the full five at a french restaurant. there were layers. there was savory meaty goodness. everyone at the table also had this savory meaty layery goodness. atop these rich and oft gamey layers, though, was the heavy heavy sauce that never once relented reminding me (and everyone else at the table) about the ‘point’ of dreams and their relationship with ones subjective reality and on and on and nom nom nom
i would warn of spoilers here, but i feel like our definition of spoiler would depend on the read we choose to make of this film, and whereas in most subjective Rorschach-esque splits, the Reality the viewer chooses to subscribe to illuminates something (read: some central idea, even perhaps a seeded “inception”) about the viewer’s philosophy, inception operates in a system where all roads lead back to that heavy sauce of “dreams certainly are weird and subjective aren’t they?” something must have been lost in the rush to get the film under 2:30; some of the dream-time spent playing out matrix-tribute fight sequences would have just as easily been used to flesh out some less physical character dynamics. likewise, while our dreams might be far from very verbal (and noone really dreams in kevin smith movie banter [or at least i hope not]) must the language in any sort of “thinking” movie really fall this flat? lastly, have we thrown ol’ uncle Siggy F so far under the bus that our video-dreamscape is now void of eros in all but its most clean-codified and (pg-13) drabness?
but after three courses – i must say it was sufficiently tasty. the ideas were there, and i’m feeling sort of full, but i still need dessert: notsomuch am i looking for specific questions to be answered as i am looking for a sweeter, more provocative non-answer to the questions they could have dreamt of asking.
it’s a solid B, 3 stars, whatever you might call it these days
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08.02.10
Posted in words, words about non-words at 7:43 pm by electricvishnu
The short answer might sound something like “it’s tiring.” I could stop there, but it might also a bit more subtle than that. Initially, this was not a well thought out hopefully-life-changing journey taken with great fanfare. I am not post-pop, and I am certainly not better than the 3 minute 15 second pop song.
But it’s nice to take a break from the things you love. Let me count the ways I love the pop song – one metric we could use is the number of times that I leave a station on when said pop song is playing: so on a twelve minute drive to work if i catch said three-minute-pop-gem (from now on referred to as TMPG) four times on four stations and leave tuner all four times, that TMPG would score a perfect 1 (for that day) on the scale. Before I get sidetracked in some cockamamie scoring scheme . . . let’s ask the question, should it be probable that one can hear the same TMPG greater than two times on any twelve minute drive? further more, should it be possible that on more than one of these twelve minute drives (within one year) one can jump from station to station and hear this TMPG for more than ten of the available twelve minutes? [with the only discernible difference between iterations being the each FM station's flavor of post-loudness-wars super-boom-over-compression]
so I am temporarily removing myself from this environment where pop horses are beaten relentlessly. In asking myself why I need this vacation, the question comes of why these top five or so songs must dominate the top 40 playlists. Does quantifiable demand spur the play-count or is it the other way around? Do the ratios of (Requests for song A / Requests for song B) approximate the (play-count of song A / play-count of song B)? Similarly, how does the proportion of (requests for song A / count of all requests), and its change over time, predict how lasting a top 40 song will be? These questions need fleshed out quantitative analysis that is outside the scope of this immediate post:
I will argue in a future post that the incidence of said TMPG relative to other top 40 songs can be modeled using similar methods to that of modeling infectious microbes.
The topic of Facebook came up the other night amongst some friends. One good friend of mine explained that he had to quit it because he was finding himself spending way too much time consuming information about friends (and friends of friends) that was ultimately very inconsequential. To put it shortly, it was a waste of time (something we all are pretty much aware of.) I’m not going to launch an argument here about how pop music is similarly a waste of time, but
<rant>
let’s assume for a minute (or a few hours) that we can re-appropriate the time previously spend consuming trivial kernels of information to some sort of creative process. What would you do? What percentage of the information one takes in within 24 hours is reprocessed and used in any creative process?
This leads to a monstrous potentially “soul-sucking” flaw in the Apple app-centric model of interface and computing. We use computers to consume and create. We consume YouTube videos. We consume Flickr photographs. We consume iTunes (DRM-laden, but that’s a whole different warehouse full of self-replicating worms) audio. We consume terabytes of Facebook me-gossip. At work, we consume documents that are relevant to the goods and services we are providing a whole new set of consumers. Plenty of these goods and services are physical incarnations of information, but more and more are strictly in the digital domain. On the other end, we are also creating this same media. And because of exploding availability of cheap digital storage, there is a seemingly limitless void into which we can spew the media we create. This map of the cycle can itself be written off as somewhat trivial: I mean, no shit, people create a whole bunch of stuff and then we consume it and that’s that; garbage in, garbage out . . . but stuff has always been not-that-easy to come by. Stuff has always come from raw resources. Even the great libraries of stored knowledge required trees for paper, oil for ink, and plenty of man-hours and know-how to put together those books. Now, however, outside of the oil, nuclear, coal, wind, and solar resources we use to keep the flow of electrons healthy, (along with the somewhat cheaper metals and plastics used for hardware) what natural resources are required to transmit and store information? Consequently, there are fewer limits on media-worthiness in the world (here I apologize for generalizing [dangerously] . . . here in the “free-world”) We rely on reputation (New York Times, CNN), democratization (digg, likes, thumbs up, and the quickly self-healing wikipedia), and our own intuition and (sometimes overestimated) sense of rationality. But as the sum of all information grows exponentially, we still have limited time per day to seek out and parse out relevance from the great tangled mess.
Already in this post about essential and meaningful information I’ve wasted a hell of a lot of time and space and haven’t reached any semblance of a point, so let’s wrap it up here. It’s less of an experiment than it is a vacation. I’ve heard it all before (”so don’t knock down my door” ???) and it doesn’t really add anything more than it did the first time I heard it. It’s not exactly white-noise (information-wise) but it doesn’t add anything new.
Just because you can get something immediately, doesn’t mean you should. Why is the Walmart open at 11:30pm so fucking crowded? Just because I can get product X for the cheapest possible price at any time of night, does it mean I should? Am I being completely hypocritical given that I think the ability to query the internet 24 hours a day from anywhere (i.e. glaciers in the middle of non-inhabited Iceland) and pull down relevant information is not only important but priceless? Aren’t the goods being sold at Walmart just physical realizations of some information? Might they be just as important to someone as the release date of “Modern Love” is to me? Perhaps. So I guess the real question is how we all value information relative to everything else.
So my prediction is that this week I will not starve. This week I will not fall ill. This week I will not wake up in cold sweats yelling the name of lost loves in major pentatonic melodies friendly to the I-V-vi-IV progression. I might have to stretch a little bit. Already today there was a bit more scrolling up and down artists names while looking for the next album to play.
The rules (which are stupid-simple: no recent pop songs, no 90s rock (or 90s rock run-off); if there is even a question the answer is no) already prohibit 4 out of 6 CDs currently in my car [the two exceptions being (CD 6) strangers wasted demos: which yes, could be called partially derivative of the 90s rock template, but no, they have not existed in that exact (or even super-approximate) form until we put them down as-is and (CD 4) a collection of indie songs . . . although on further thought I find that the only songs here that are exempt from the explicit rules are songs that seem to only follow the roadmap of where Pop-town is and make the turn that takes them furthest away. However, no matter how many dimensions this roadmap might be in, this strategy is still derivative and strictly-dependent on the Pop it desperately seeks to not be: If I say right here and now “I am not an elephant.” I have added no information whatsoever to the system. If every question you ask about me, I just choose the least-elephant-like answer, I still have said nothing unique about what I am and where I stand in the spectrum of being that is not 100% dependent on elephant-ness. As this is the current state one militant sect of Indie-ism, I’d have to rule all (anti-)creation from these camp as also prohibited.
</rant>
Ultimately, it falls on one’s attempts to add anything to a universal set of ideas where it looks that it’s all already been said and done. Instead of mining the hills of tried and true (or the exact opposite coordinates in spite and the name of individualism) unplug, pull up anchor, doze off, and begin wherever you may wake up, and let your memory of the better elements guide you, but remember that sometimes the maps (mental or printed) are very very wrong.
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07.08.10
Posted in words at 10:17 pm by electricvishnu
Via Data Driven and Flowing Data
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Posted in words at 8:03 am by electricvishnu
words and music by brian hawkins, john dimeglio, and the a-train player
down beneath broadway and 175th
there exists a man who only knows one riff
and he sing: whoaa oh oh oh oh
whoaa oh oh oh oh
bouncing down the a-train to that song from before
and johnny tell me bout it
but now i can be sure
that he sing: whoaa oh oh oh
and it’s a symphony that writes itself;
it’s these symphonies -
here’s to your health!
-with some help from the soulmen
you can never tell baby
or ever ask why:
sometimes it’s sitting on a beach reading
that bukowski guy;
sometimes it’s on and on and on without end
because it’s all about love
and starting again,
and it’s that symphony that writes itself;
it’s these street symphonies -
here’s to your health!
-with some help from the soulmen
(whoa oh oh oh oh)
yeah i’ll bring the ukulele if you bring the kazoo -
i’m on a downtown V and it brings me to you
dance between flakes that fall to pavement in a city that’s yours;
scarred hearts and flasks in pockets warm
to the one, two, three, four
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05.23.10
Posted in words at 10:54 am by electricvishnu
the enchantment under the sea ending: i think this one was pretty obvious. in the alternate 1985, i mean alternate 2005, everybody is going to some sort of event / concert. desmond jumps on stage and plays chuck berry songs until everybody’s split-existential crises are cured?
and
jack sacrifices himself to save the island / stop the smoke monster: it completes the tragic messanic-hero epic arc while simultaneously putting some resolution to the J/S/K triangle.
and
jack’s baby momma = . . . . . . ? the obvious answer here is juliet. almost a little . . . tooo obvious, no? so i’m hoping they throw us something random and sweet here
OR
scooby-doo ending? we haven’t seen that doggie for a few seasons have we?
———
lost has always been such a great show because its format allows it to rip off the essentials of just about every other show ever and act out those glommed melodrama nuggets within the uber-lush context of incredibly good looking geography and people. over the more recent seasons they have had to reach and hit (and miss) with buddy-cops, korean soap operas, quasi-real-time 24-ish bomb defusing, obvious and not so obvious sci-fi homages, and so on.
so whatever happens during the last episode – i hope they choose to ‘pay tribute to’ the finer and more elegant cinematic resolution tricks. maybe jack does the surgery on locke at the concert hall where his kid is playing frenetic classical music intercut with everything else happening all at once and everything get’s all fast and nutty a la Aronofsky or Lynch
or perhaps the Martin Scorsese classic-rock ultra-violent music montage: a paranoid freaked out hurley, smoke monster starts whacking everyone, the feds come and close down the island. all set to a stones or clapton song.
or we could get the seinfeld ending.
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02.22.10
Posted in words at 11:54 pm by electricvishnu
curling might be the ultimate (sport or game?) to watch will socializing in a bar or small house-gathering setting:
- the timing is just right. it’s rhythm is complementary to that of usual bar / twelve-pack banter.
- it has everyman appeal. like bowling, it can be played while smoking tobacco and/or drinking cans of molson. (and it doesn’t seem half as difficult as golf)
- there’s a good amount of excitement (especially on the last rolls [or pushes? what do you call them exactly]) but not too much where you have to be on your feet and freaking out and on seats edge like the end of a wild football or basketball game. -back to that timing thing-
- there are four characters to each squad. each fellow at the bar can choose his or her own winner, like bob from minnesota
- rocks on ice. with brooms! need we say more!
i’m completely serious. curling is great. and i’d like to play
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02.13.10
Posted in hot jams, words, words about non-words at 12:14 pm by electricvishnu
the top 3 albums overall from 2000-2009, ranked (by medal, in the spirit of the olympics)
- bronze | john mayer | continuum | 2006 | link
- silver | sigur rós | ( ) | 2002 | link
- gold | saves the day | stay what you are | 2001 | link
note: if hot fuss, by the killers, was released primarily on vinyl or cassette tape and therefore had two discrete sides, then side A (ending after “All These Things That I’ve Done”) might be the best side of all time. however, this is not the case, and the remainder (side B) is, as they say, “weak sauce.”
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01.15.10
Posted in words at 8:38 pm by electricvishnu
thoughts and prayers to the people of haiti
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