WFMU Playlist: The Acousmatic Theater Hour with Jason G and Karinne from Nov 30, 2008
Playlist from The Acousmatic Theater Hour with Jason G and Karinne on WFMU, from Nov 30, 2008
Archive for November, 2008
SMELLS LIKE MONEY
Riding the train home last night, late, when two black guys board. Now, ordinarily this would be my signal to flee, but I decided to risk it because Obama, etc.
One of the guys was carrying a plastic McDonald's take-out bag, I guess because he's one of those people who are too busy to sit down and enjoy a nice meal in the comfort of a McDonald's. In his other hand he was holding a drink. It was some kind of brown liquid in one of those tiny, semi-transparent Dixie cups you get at movie theaters and pizzerias, as their way of shaming you for requesting tap water instead of Sierra Mist.
As the train bumped along, he took small sips from his Dixie cup. Finally, his friend asked, "what's that?" Mr. Sips slowly raised the cup in a toast, and replied, "Courvoisier. Smells like money, don't it?" His friend laughed and heartily agreed; I would have agreed, too, if I had been able to smell the Courvoisier over the stronger, headier aroma of Chicken McNuggets.
Here’s What’s Awesome: Mood-Based Travel, Solar Cemeteries
The four-day frenzy of food, family and football is about to conclude, and we at Here's What's Awesome aim to ease you back into the regular week with a few awesome links. Just a little something for our peoples.
But what if you feel like chicken tonight?
We, the people
portrait of gwendolyn
james schwarz (ftr that's a kazoo in his mouth)James Schwarz is an artist who captures and illuminates the paradox of the avatar through his Headshot Series. I first learned of his work through intrepid profile stalking. I noticed that profile pictures taken by Schwarz had more depth than any I had seen before. The faces materialize from twilit dusk and the eyes make direct contact with the viewer. His subjects gaze confidently, coolly, sassily – they’re a bit intimidating. One of his sitters admitted being a bit shy about approaching Schwarz for an appointment (I felt the same way) so it was refreshing to read his follow up comment that he too, may feel a bit of the same when meeting people for a photo shoot. The nervousness comes from mutual admiration. We respect his work, and he respects us for timidly offering ourselves up as subject. He cares for his subjects, smoothing and softening their angles. The portraits are the same in size and presentation, but include personal accoutrements - a ciggy here, a headband there. Some avatars are plain, some are elaborate, each one unique. Take a few moments to view his flickr stream showing the series. It offers a rare opportunity to contemplate and know these personalities who are typically roaming, dancing, shagging, building, or otherwise on the move. I had a moment to catch up with Schwarz and asked him about the Headshot Series. He made an interesting point:
James Schwarz: "SL is pretty much a whole different dimension. The diversity of people…it's like the way each avatar is represented it's not just the work of one person, the owner, but a work of several others. If you think about it, the way you look right now is the hours and dedication put into by the creators of your skin, clothes, hair etc."
I’d never thought about that aspect of an avatar; that each individual represents a communal effort. But this idea is essentially the essence of SL, working collaboratively to achieve your individual vision, which made me think of Thich Nhat Hanh:
“You are me, and I am you. Isn't it obvious that we "inter-are"?”
See Schwarz’s first project – 100 Avatars – a community profile of the metaverse. Schwarz may have expressed being shy, but his artwork is not - it reaches out to each of us with a welcoming embrace. Rad.
I overrate expensive wine and I will not apologize
A recent study shows that most people rate wine as tastier if it has a fancy label. Jonah Lehrer, from his forthcoming book How We Decide, writes:
Twenty people sampled five Cabernet Sauvignons that were distinguished solely by their retail price, with bottles ranging from $5 to $90. Although the people were told that all five wines were different, the scientists weren’t telling the truth: there were only three different wines. This meant that the same wines would often reappear, but with different price labels. For example, the first wine offered during the tasting - it was a cheap bottle of Californian Cabernet - was labeled both as a $5 wine (it’s actual retail price) and as a $45 dollar wine, a 900 percent markup…. Not surprisingly, the subjects consistently reported that the more expensive wines tasted better. They preferred the $90 bottle to the $10 bottle, and thought the $45 Cabernet was far superior to the $5 plonk.
Of course, the wine preferences of the subjects were clearly nonsensical. Instead of acting like rational agents - getting the most utility for the lowest possible price - they were choosing to spend more money for an identical product.
I think the wine preferences of the subjects were clearly not nonsensical. Maybe an unlabelled $40 bottle of wine tastes no better than a $5 unlabelled bottle of wine. But that’s why people don’t buy unlabelled bottles of wine! The utility of the wine you drink isn’t contained in the molecules striking your tongue and your nose; you’re enjoying the possession of something people have agreed to value. When you travel three hours to eat the best barbecue in Texas, the long drive and the long wait are part of what you’re paying for. If you think that’s nonsensical, you’ve got problems with people’s behavior that go way past their selections from the wine list.
Note also: subjects with an expertise in wine did recognize, and prefer, the pricier wines. So consider the following experiment: give a heterogeneous group of readers a selection of novels by Tom Clancy and F. Scott Fitzgerald, with the covers torn off. You might find that the 14-year-olds in the group rated the two groups of novels equally, while those with an expertise in literature preferred the Fitzgerald, even without the identification. Now suppose one of the 14-year-olds, with knowledge of these results, was offered the choice of a book by TC or a book by FSF for twice the price. And let’s say this 14-year-old reasons, “The experiment suggests I’ll like these books equally; but my teachers and my parents say that Fitzgerald is great literature and Tom Clancy is trash, so maybe I’d better take their word for it and try the Fitzgerald.” Is the teenager’s behavior clearly nonsensical?
Or maybe the example of JT Leroy is a little less scale-thumby. People are less interested in his books now that we know the author isn’t who he claimed to be — isn’t even, in fact, a he. Same books, same sentences. Is that nonsensical?
By the way, I’m not really imputing to Lehrer the view he asserts in his book: in an earlier blog post on a similar study, he writes
What these experiments neatly demonstrate is that the taste of a wine, like the taste of everything, is not merely the sum of our inputs, and cannot be solved in a bottom-up fashion. It cannot be deduced by beginning with our simplest sensations and extrapolating upwards. When we taste a wine, we aren’t simply tasting the wine. This is because what we experience is not what we sense.
which seems to me much more correct.
The wine experiment reminded me of GMU economist Robin Hanson’s blog, Overcoming Bias. I think I’ll write a bit more about this in a later post, but I’ll close with this question: do Robin Hanson and like-thinking economists think it’s rational to believe wine tastes better if you know it’s expensive?
Hodgepodge
At the Telegraph, Henry Hitchings offers an A to Z of word surprises. A good stretch:
N is for…
Namby-pamby. Nickname of the 18th-century poet Ambrose Phillips, coined by the satirist Henry Careybecause of his sentimental verses
O is for…
Onslaught, from the Dutch aanslag - related to a word in Old High German for a shower.
P is for…
Penguin, a compound of two Welsh words, pen and gwyn, which mean ''head" and ''white" - even though penguins have black heads. It is likely that 'penguin' was at one time the name of similar, now extinct bird which had a white patch near its bill.
Q is for…
Quack can be traced to the Dutch kwaksalver, literally someone who hawked ointments.
The Return
[Image: Heathrow Terminal 5, via Wikipedia].Back in San Francisco, after a 12-hour delay at Heathrow Terminal 5 in London. We sat on the first plane – there were three planes – for five hours before they realized that they couldn't start one of the engines; so we all filed back into the terminal while our luggage was loaded onto a second plane – which was, unfortunately, then hit by a truck (!); so a third airplane was conjured up out of the drizzling darkness of an otherwise abandoned international airport at midnight – I was reminded almost constantly of Iain Sinclair's description of Heathrow as "a Vatican of the western suburbs," a system of piazzas dedicated to geometric worship of the sky – and it rolled over to our gate to collect our bags, the lights in the cockpit still off. It was nearing 1am by then, we'd been given bags of sea-salted potato chips, and bad pop songs were playing on continuous loops though steel security grills pulled down in front of airport music shops. One or two obviously bored employees were performing day-end inventories on refrigerators full of Ribena at Boots, the guitarists for a band apparently based here in San Francisco were throwing an American football around with a kid called Nicholas, and if you stood at the edge of the glass-walled lightwells that cut all the way down to the ground in Richard Rogers's new terminal design you could watch under-oiled escalators squawking their way, from one side to the other, up the nearly five stories to arrive where we were all then sitting, filling out customer complaint forms.
So thanks, British Air, for that odd glimpse of anthropology amidst well-engineered 21st-century architecture after everyone else had gone home – although I would've preferred to arrive twelve hours earlier, on time – and thanks, as well, to everyone who came out to see the variety of BLDGBLOG events last week in London.
The other surprise worth mentioning is that, having landed at the misty, pre-BART hour of 4am, we had to take a taxi home – and as we drove up Fell Street our driver pointed out that gas prices have plunged to a somewhat unbelievable $1.79 a gallon.
post-tofurky torpor
Thanksgiving was low-key and fun--I think the best of the things I cooked (the only one that was all gone by the time we put away the dishes, anyway) was Brussels sprouts, snapped right off the stalk, trimmed, and braised in a little vegetable stock and some olive oil. As usual, we broke out the DVDs after dinner--in fact, one of them was the new DVD edition of my old favorite, James Brown's famous 1968 Boston Garden show. (Nice to see it and hear it in relatively high definition, but I'm not getting rid of my old tape, which unlike the DVD still has the Marva Whitney and Bobby Byrd performances from the show.)
Otherwise: I'm trying to figure out some kind of new design and/or purpose for this site. I currently operate or contribute to seven blogs, private and public, counting the Twitter feed that I keep obsessively adding to (and which has now been added to the sidebar). Mincing Up the Morning will probably be ending January 14, once I've completed a full year's cycle, although I'm not ruling out the option of adding to it thereafter, and Final Crisis Annotations will probably only have two more entries after January 28. I've got a couple of vague possibilities in mind for new projects to take up, some of them in accordance with my principles as a card-carrying member of the New Compulsives, some of them not. (Most of them, though, are more... reactive than I'd like them to be.) I might also try to integrate Circle the Globe into Lacunae--maybe the way Fluxblog has done it, maybe some other way. Stay tuned.
Thoughtcast: Robert Silvers
Back from Austin and trying to get caught up on various things… Jenny Attiyeh passes along her Thoughtcast interview with Bob Silvers, the founding editor of The New York Review of Books. I’m listening to it now.
Jenny asked if there were anything I would suggest as a question for him, and I said it would be interesting to have him comment on The Gangrene, a book about how torture by the French military in Algeria spread from the colony to the metropolis. Silvers translated it shortly after it appeared and it was published in 1960. It seems odd that it has never been reprinted. Here’s a recent article about it.
Anyway, she says she asked him about the book, and much else besides. Check it out…
“Vive l’Haggis!”
Miscellaneous links:
Caleb Crain on horse-drawn vehicles.
Alice Boone on the non-horologist's mindset.
And finally, 20 things to do with a haggis.
Caleb Crain on horse-drawn vehicles.
Alice Boone on the non-horologist's mindset.
And finally, 20 things to do with a haggis.
Next Door Neighbor Comics
Barbara’s story centers on our own very special neighbor friend, Glenna Evans, who must be beheld to be comprehended. Besides giving me the thrill of seeing my wife back at the keyboard, the story has renewed my faith in the future of web comics and even personal narrative.
Better Than Monopoly
Lou Reed meets the press in 1974:
An homage, of sorts, to this interview from ten years earlier:
Map Time
As you can see, time is very much on my mind. I was sad to miss Daniel Rosenberg’s talk at USC about the cartography of time in October.
I’ve been reading the posted excerpts from his forthcoming book about the ways the West has mapped time and history and I’m fascinated by the different graphical representations of time that humans have adopted.
I’d always assumed that historical timelines had always been been in use. I remember diligently making them in history classes from 2nd grade on to college. How odd to reconsider habits you’d taken for granted, never really questioning better ways of accomplishing the same aims.
Mapping time… what a new construct for me. I love to map space, so why not map time. Time in Los Angeles certainly needs regulation. I am convinced that there’s a space/time continuum breach here. How else to explain the 17 minutes that I always lose each day, making me late for everything. I don’t know if I lose it on the road or while prepping to leave the house, but I lose it. Do you?
Perhaps that’s why I am so fascinated by the L.A. “Unfolded: Maps from the Los Angeles Public Library” exhibit on view in the Getty Gallery at the library until January 22, 2008. It’s my current favorite time killer. I think it’s one of the best exhibits I’ve ever seen. Gloria Gerace and Glen Creason co-curated an excellent show and programmed really smart supplemental ALOUD conversations to go with it. Trevor Paglen’s talk on the secretmilitary operations hidden in the Southern California landscape blew my mind. I can’t wait to read newest book, Blank Spots on the Map: the Dark Geography of the Pengaton’s Secret World, coming out in February.
I love to stare at the beautiful maps of our city, marveling at the changes in typography, names and spaces. There’s a family fesitival scheduled for January 18th, from 2 to 4 pm, where folks can try their hand at map making.
“Multiple sticks of butter”
I.
At 46, Doreen Giuliano reinvented herself. She dyed her hair blond and tanned at a salon. She left her white seven-bedroom, colonial-style house for a spare basement apartment three miles away. She took on a new name, and for about a year, she said, she rode her bicycle around her new neighborhood, trying to attract the gaze of a young man whom she badly wanted to get close to.
This was no midlife crisis, though. It was a one-woman sting operation.
—Kareem Fahim, "Disguised Mother woos Juror in Bid to Free Son," NYT
II.
His writings were not the unpunctuated breathless screedlike verses you might expect, but on the other hand they weren't much better. He had apparently decided that the crime novel was the essential building block of literature, the constituent unit of its DNA, and he had set about reducing and recombining it—I could just about see the wheels turning in his head—much the way punk rockers had cloned and distilled and chopped up the standard Chuck Berry guitar riff. Each story, if that's what those things could be called, was a paragraph long, titled and signed, and each resembled a page of a crime novel if you were trying to read it while it whipped by on a conveyor belt. —Pinakothek
III.
I must now reveal my grievous shortcoming as a cuber: I never learned the algorithms — the sequences of moves that, when performed a set number of times, guarantee that the colored squares will line up right. I worried that these tools, borrowed from someone else, might interfere with the intense intimacy with nonverbal thinking that the cube affords. And when you solve it by your own lights: the relief! When it first clicked for me, in 1983, I allowed myself a moment of pure self-admiration: I had pursued the right roads, doubled back on the right occasions, executed the right programs, kept the right goals in my head and seen the thing through. It seemed amazing: my brain works.
—Virginia Heffernan, The Medium, NYT Mag
IV.As rents have moved up, however, and all I have done is move my bed to where my dresser used to be, those solicitous questions have grown fewer. It’s not rent control, but I am fast approaching the rent level known as “the steal,” the place where one becomes the object of envy.
I have earned this by doing nothing (much like a bottle of fine wine that improves by simply sitting on a shelf, or, more accurately, like the leak in my ceiling that always dries itself out eventually), but that is O.K. Every day in this city, people earn far more doing far less.
—Sloane Crosley, "Little Victories," NYT
V.
Spelt, to my eye, didn’t look like farro, and from a stovetop behavioral standpoint, it quickly distinguished itself. In a panic I called my personal farro expert, Jennifer DeVore, explaining I couldn’t find farro so instead I bought. . . . “Oh, no,” she interrupted. “You didn’t buy spelt.” Farro cooks in about 45 minutes; we cooked our spelt for four hours, and even then the result was extremely al dente. We threw in multiple sticks of butter, gallons of stock and $13 worth of grated Parmesan, but the spelt remained stoically flavor-impervious. We served it anyway. Contrary to the claims of Hildegard von Bingen, a 12th-century spelt enthusiast, our guests did not find that eating it “makes the spirit of man light and cheerful.”
—Heidi Julavits, NYT Mag
At 46, Doreen Giuliano reinvented herself. She dyed her hair blond and tanned at a salon. She left her white seven-bedroom, colonial-style house for a spare basement apartment three miles away. She took on a new name, and for about a year, she said, she rode her bicycle around her new neighborhood, trying to attract the gaze of a young man whom she badly wanted to get close to.
This was no midlife crisis, though. It was a one-woman sting operation.
—Kareem Fahim, "Disguised Mother woos Juror in Bid to Free Son," NYT
II.
His writings were not the unpunctuated breathless screedlike verses you might expect, but on the other hand they weren't much better. He had apparently decided that the crime novel was the essential building block of literature, the constituent unit of its DNA, and he had set about reducing and recombining it—I could just about see the wheels turning in his head—much the way punk rockers had cloned and distilled and chopped up the standard Chuck Berry guitar riff. Each story, if that's what those things could be called, was a paragraph long, titled and signed, and each resembled a page of a crime novel if you were trying to read it while it whipped by on a conveyor belt. —Pinakothek
III.
I must now reveal my grievous shortcoming as a cuber: I never learned the algorithms — the sequences of moves that, when performed a set number of times, guarantee that the colored squares will line up right. I worried that these tools, borrowed from someone else, might interfere with the intense intimacy with nonverbal thinking that the cube affords. And when you solve it by your own lights: the relief! When it first clicked for me, in 1983, I allowed myself a moment of pure self-admiration: I had pursued the right roads, doubled back on the right occasions, executed the right programs, kept the right goals in my head and seen the thing through. It seemed amazing: my brain works.
—Virginia Heffernan, The Medium, NYT Mag
IV.As rents have moved up, however, and all I have done is move my bed to where my dresser used to be, those solicitous questions have grown fewer. It’s not rent control, but I am fast approaching the rent level known as “the steal,” the place where one becomes the object of envy.
I have earned this by doing nothing (much like a bottle of fine wine that improves by simply sitting on a shelf, or, more accurately, like the leak in my ceiling that always dries itself out eventually), but that is O.K. Every day in this city, people earn far more doing far less.
—Sloane Crosley, "Little Victories," NYT
V.
Spelt, to my eye, didn’t look like farro, and from a stovetop behavioral standpoint, it quickly distinguished itself. In a panic I called my personal farro expert, Jennifer DeVore, explaining I couldn’t find farro so instead I bought. . . . “Oh, no,” she interrupted. “You didn’t buy spelt.” Farro cooks in about 45 minutes; we cooked our spelt for four hours, and even then the result was extremely al dente. We threw in multiple sticks of butter, gallons of stock and $13 worth of grated Parmesan, but the spelt remained stoically flavor-impervious. We served it anyway. Contrary to the claims of Hildegard von Bingen, a 12th-century spelt enthusiast, our guests did not find that eating it “makes the spirit of man light and cheerful.”
—Heidi Julavits, NYT Mag
It’s About Time
It’s December 1st already. The last month of the year. How did 2008 reach this point already? We all know that time flies but now scholars are actually documenting the process.
On December 1st at 2 PM, Cheryl A. Wells, Associate Professor of History at University of Wyoming, will discuss her essay ‘Suns, moons, clocks and bells: Native Americans and Time.’
Monday, 1 December 2008, 2-4 PM SOS 250,
University of Southern California
Podcasts > The Imagination is What We Are
Last June, I joined entheo-poet Dale Pendell, his bookmaker wife Laura, my oneironaut wife Jennifer Dumpert, and UC Berkeley prof David Presti for an excellent weekend workshop at the Ojai Institute...
Global Voices on Mumbai
Our friends at Global Voices have put together an extraordinary selection of blog posts on this week's tragic events in Mumbai. As armed terrorists stormed cinema halls, hotels, hospitals, and other public places in the Indian city, killing 195 and injuring more than 300, bloggers responded with real-time updates from the ground and responses from around the world.
History’s Greatest Conspiracy Theories
Here's a quick supply of rabbit holes to fill out your weekend. The Telegraph newspaper in the UK has an overview of the 30 greatest conspiracy theories of all time. Take your pick...Elvis lives...the moon landings were faked...Jesus was married...AIDS was made in a lab...there's something for everyone.
Is there really a secret supply of government coffins near Atlanta?
Tracking Trader Joe’s
We have declared a new financial sobriety in our household. Even though I am finally earning money again, we are still in debt and with the economy in the crapper we've got to cut back even more. So I have decided to brave the crazy lines at Trader Joe's Manhattan for some cheap food, particularly now that the farmer's markets have less and less produce.
Looking for some tips on the best time to go, I happened upon this very cool blog called Tracking Trader Joe's. Featuring recipes using TJ products like quesadillas, plus other random Trader Joe news, it's definitely worth checking out.
Moody fall photos
On Alberta, where I take many of my photos.
Ditto.
Allegedly, this is what “people in Portland” call rain. I have never heard anyone call it that without irony.