Scottunder

Beautiful, terrible

From a post on Boing Boing, a link to a gorgeous time-lapse video of smoke from the Station Fire in Los Angeles. The music, "The Big Ship" from Brian Eno's Another Green World, is particularly well chosen.

Related post: a list of time-lapse videos.

Moving left to right in a dream

This lovely music video of the song Ljósið by the Icelandic musician Ólafur Arnalds...

...reminded me of this interactive music site for the song Soy tu Aire by the Spanish group Labuat. (Give the animation time to load -- there's a counter at the bottom.)

And they both reminded me of Super Cobra, which is also interactive but less dreamy.

These Are Radiohead's Twisted Words

My close personal friends Radiohead gave me a copy of their latest song, These Are My Twisted Words.

They're so sweet, they even sent along artwork, both in a tiff file (seen here) and in a multipage pdf so I can print it out on tracing paper to create my own 3D twisted forest effect.

Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs

I know nothing about this except that it's awesome.

Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs Inc. from Chris Cairns on Vimeo.

Go to their website for more info, including some production stills.

Adjusting our default settings

I really enjoyed the work of the novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace. I read a lot of his writing, to the point where his sentences seemed almost self-parody -- and yet, I understood them thoroughly. I understood the value of looking so closely at the minutiae of everyday life and letting it roll slowly off the tongue, off the typewriter. The short-story collection The Girl with Curious Hair amazed me when I read it, as if a whole new form of writing was now possible. And while reading Infinite Jest I went to a place beyond amazed. I felt like I was listening to someone's 9th Symphony, but only through one channel, because my brain wasn't properly set up to grasp the complexity and poetry on display.

So, anyway, he died, at his own hand, the result of many years of holding the possiblility at arm's length through powerful medications. After reading many remembrances of both his brilliance and his generosity, I have even more respect for him, and a sense of the deep loss felt by his family and circle of close friends.

All of which I say only to provide some context for reading his commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005, which is really worth your time. Its subject is the value of a liberal arts education once you leave college and face the frustrations of everyday interactions, but it ends up as a sort of minor manifesto for living life with attention, love, and compassion.

If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important -- if you want to operate on your default-setting -- then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars -- compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.

I can't say it better than this, but I'll add (thanks to my three-hour lunch conversation today with Ty) that it's this inability to see the world through others' eyes, to gather some sense of what life is like outside of your own head, to even care about these alternate realities -- this inability to see and incuriosity about seeing seems to be a hallmark of conservative politics. I feel these folks have heartfelt ideals and aren't solely operating from greed or righteousness. They truly think their actions will lead to a better life for all. But their idealistic blinders don't allow them to see how wrong they are, and how they hurt so many.

Though I've read DFW's speech a few times before, it was only a week ago I came across it again, and it resonated for me more deeply than before. I try to make my way through the world in the way that he describes, but as he says, it's unimaginably hard.

50 years, so what?

Fifty years ago today, Columbia released a jazz album, Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, who plays trumpet and composed all of the songs, mostly. The other musicians were Bill Evans on piano, except for one bluesy cut better suited to Miles's regular pianist, Wynton Kelly, John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley on saxophones, Paul Chambers on bass, and Jimmy Cobb on drums. This disc regularly features on lists of must-haves, jazz essentials, desert island discs, even best albums of all time, without regard to genre. That's because it's really good, and there's lots of reasons why that's true. Fred Kaplan in Slate explains the musical thinking that went into the album (with samples) much better than I can, but the article doesn't mention some background that I think says a lot about how great recordings -- all recordings -- are made, and, really, about the nature of effort and greatness in art.

For a more extensive source for the story of the album, I recommend Ashley Kahn's Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece. Kahn had unprecedented access to the master tapes and studio notes. He listened to all the studio patter, false starts, and second takes (there was only one complete alternate take). The book helps place the album in the context of Miles's and the other musicians' work before and after the sessions, as well as charting the origins of the modal jazz ideas the songs embody.

Kind of Blue was recorded in two sessions in 1959, a six-hour double session on March 2 for "Freddie Freeloader," "Blue in Green," and "So What," and -- six weeks later, on April 22 -- a three-hour session for "All Blues" and "Flamenco Sketches." Some of the tunes had been worked on during live gigs, but most of it happened right there in the studio, just ideas -- modal sketches -- turned into songs as the clock ran. (Except for Miles, the leader, the musicians earned scale, a little over $20 an hour.)

In between the two sessions, the musicians had other projects. Kelly, Cobb, and Chambers finished Kelly's album and worked with Cannonball on his album; Evans recorded an album with another pianist; Coltrane started a studio project (with Chambers). The sextet played a week at the Apollo, and, a month after the first session, recorded this national TV show for CBS, The Sound of Miles Davis:

What's remarkable is how unremarkable the sessions and even the concepts were then. Davis took his modal ideas from a few sources -- including Bill Evans, who doesn't get the composition credits he likely earned -- which later were seen as a turning point in jazz, but at the time just provided another unexplored avenue for jazz creation. Davis enabled this largly improvisatory work with a six-week window that in fifty years has turned into a sort of granite monument, conceived, planned, and executed by masters to be a timeless classic. Of course they knew they had created something good and even different, but it only seems like an entirely cohesive work from this distance. After that, the sextet broke up, the players moved off into different directions, and there was never even a follow-up. Miles recorded more classics, and this was one of his most fruitful periods, but a specific return to the ideas in Kind of Blue never occurred.

Five songs, nine hours, little preparation, few false starts and almost no do-overs, and six weeks of distance went into the creation of, what, music's Great Pyramids, Taj Majal, Chartres Cathedral? The comparisons are inapt, and a fifty-year celebration seems simultaneously inappropriate and entirely justified.

Bill Evans, who wrote the liner notes (themselves another classic of the form) once said, "We just really went in that day and did our thing." That's how it goes, you show up, you work, and so what? Sometimes you make a thing that means more in fifty years than you ever intended, ever could have intended -- because otherwise who could ever work under the burden?

Asterios Polyp

The first thing to notice is the cover: overlapping color panels, each with simple shapes cut out, serve for the letters of the title. The colors are cyan and magenta, half of CMYK, and neither panel's cutouts are sufficient to even suggest the letters -- only the combination makes "Asterios Polyp" whole.

Asterios Polyp is the name and title character of the first graphic novel by longtime comics artist David Mazzucchelli. Asterios is a brilliant professor of architecture, famous in the pantheon of 20th Century architects but only on paper -- in a marvelous example of the difference between theory and practice, none of his prize-winning designs has ever been built. His self-pleasing life allows him to order the world into a supremely dualistic aesthetic. Form follows function, and when it doesn't, it's useless decoration. His possessions are modern classics -- Le Corbusier, Eames, Breuer, Mies van der Rohe -- perfect, rational, minimal, if sometimes uncomfortable, examples of midcentury design.

The book follows his life from his fiftieth birthday on, starting with a cataclysm that sends him on a journey of rebirth, as he finds work in middle America as an auto mechanic, and is haunted by dreams of his stillborn identical twin brother, who acts as narrator, and reviews his life in flashback, remembering his wife Hana, an organically inspired artist who is in every way Asterios's opposite and complement.

Mazzucchelli has devised a brilliant thing here. The graphic novel often acts as a sort of cinematic vessel for storytelling, with visual devices unique to its form. But this is the first I've read that uses its tools to provide a different sort of depth to the narrative action.

A central theme of the book is that each person's perception of reality colors their experience in the world. A strong personality like Asterios can even color other people's perceptions. One early scene shows the professor in his classroom drawn as a schematic collection of 3D parts. Each of his students gets drawn in a unique style -- crosshatches, brushstrokes, color fields, even calligraphic forms -- except for the students who have come to resemble the professor's cyan schematic form.

Each section of the book is told using a simplified palette: in the Asterios and Hana sections, Asterios is cyan and Hana magenta (remember the cover?). At the party where they meet, each person is again drawn uniquely. Hana is a soft and hazy collection of magenta lines. As they begin to talk, his hard cyan outlines begin to define her shape, while her soft magentas fill his empty schematic. This clever blend continues throughout the book. At their happiest, he wears a magenta-pattern sweater, and she wears a cyan shirt.At the end, the colors begin to... well, no, let that be your discovery.

This attention continues to details like speech balloons and lettering, as each character has a unique shape and font that allow us to imagine a range of unique voices. In one scene, the speech balloons of Asterios and Hana begin to interact, cluing us into the overlapping nature of the conversation and its emotional progression beneath the surface.

Some story features get foreshadowed or echoed in subtle ways that only reveal themselves on rereading, and this is definitely a book that rewards a second and third pass through. In addition, some smart people have revealed aspects that eluded me (including this long but incomplete annotation). Allusions to Greek and Roman myths abound, from a small drawing of Romulus and Remus on young Asterios's wall to a wordless, one-color recreation of the myth of Orpheus. There are also parallels with the stories of Ulysses, the ancient one as well as James Joyce's. 

Asterios is a wickedly smart guy who has to learn to release his contempt for a world that is out of his control. The trouble with having a rock-solid, all-encompassing philosophy of how the world should work is reconciling that with the messy aspects of how the world ends up working. At one point, talking about astrology to his landlady -- an earth mother in touch with every worldview that is non-Western, nonrational, and non-Asterios -- he says, "I have trouble with the idea that objects whirling through the firmament have a direct impact on my daily life." That's a good idea in theory, but in practice sometimes they do.

More reading

Reading lately:

Books by the bedside include Robert McKee's Story (still; I've slowed down), George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant, The Human Fabric by Bijoy Goswami, and Jessica Abel's La Perdida, which I just shelved because everyone in it was pissing me off. I just finished David Mazzucchelli's amazing Asterios Polyp, but I'll review that separately, after I read it again.

The recent New Yorkers have been filled with good articles: Nicholson Baker on the Kindle, Ian Frazier's two-parter on a five-week roadtrip eastward through Siberia (which made me rent Dersu Uzala again but wasn't my favorite Frazier ever), Malcolm Gladwell on To Kill A Mockingbird and integration in the South, Joan Acocella on the history of Judas Iscariot and the portrayal of Jews, Kalefa Sanneh on Michael Savage (who, as Michael Weiner, was an alternative foods authority! And whose son started Rockstar energy drinks!), and too many more to list.

Field Guide to the Hypomanic: Hothead of State: a Psychology Today story about Obama's profane and hyperkinetic chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel and his two equally successful and motorized brothers.

How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity, an HBR article by Pixar's president about their corporate culture.

This slide presentation about Netflix's corporate culture exemplifies that companies can do well for themselves and their employees at the same time.

Lunch with the FT: Jared Diamond, in which the Financial Times talks with the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse.

A comic adaptation of the story behind Google's Chrome browser by Scott McCloud, whose Understanding Comics is one of the best books ever about anything.

A couple nice remembrances of filmmaker John Hughes, one from a high school-age pen pal that left me a little teary-eyed and another from a childhood friend who helped inspire Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

The always thoughtful Errol Morris's two-part conversation with the always deceptive Ricky Jay in the NY Times. Forget that poser on TV -- for me, Ricky Jay is the Most Interesting Man in the World.

A lovely 10-year anniversary reminder of Brad Bird's first film, The Iron Giant.

A good drummer is hard to find...

...but a good tractor will never miss a beat.

Drum machines get a bad rap, because they sound too perfect, and our brains reject the perfection. A human drummer makes microadjustments in timing that we actually appreciate unconsciously. That said, an idling tractor has a fine quality and it seems less robotic than the electronic versions.

Here is a Swedish guitarist playing "Sweet Georgia Brown" with a bass and guitar and a tractor. There's no credit for any of the musicians, or the tractor, but I believe the guitarist is the same as the following clips. Note the boom mic on the tractor

Olle Hemmingson is his name, and here he's overdubbed fiddle and guitar with a Volvo tractor for timing.

It looks as though Olle had fifteen minutes of fame at some point. Here he is, live in a TV studio astride a 1951 Deutz, playing guitar with a bassist hidden somewhere.

Not to say farm equipment can't rock. Here's a little traktorbilly from some other Swede -- I hear the word traktor in there somewhere.

Brian Boyce's Special Report

Oh, dear, this is particularly well done.