Sunday, December 31, 2006

Sometimes I Do Listen To New Music (2006 Wrap-up Part 1)

So of albums that were actually released in 2006, these are some of my favourites.



Neko Case - Fox Confessor Brings The Flood

Neko Case was one of those artists that I kept managing to see live somehow, without ever really digging into her recorded work. Now that I have, I’m a big fan. Her new album is really rewarding as well, not just because it continues her tradition of great songwriting and singing, but because of the detours it takes. For example, one of the main pleasures of her albums is just the visceral pleasure of her voice, hearing her crank it out. But on the first track of Fox Confessor, she stays low in her vocal range, letting the words and instrumentation gradually build the mood. The understated nature of the first track makes the second track, “Star Witness”, even more effective, with its multiple, soaring vocal lines.



The Decemberists - The Crane Wife

I’m going to steal a line from Pitchfork’s year-end wrapup: “The Decemberists have always been an interesting band, but with The Crane Wife, they became a great one”. I think I listened to this album probably more than any other this year, which is probably untrue since I got it at the end of October.



Joanna Newsom - Ys

This was an album that came heavily recommended by a lot of the hipper-than-thou indie music publications, but I couldn’t decide for a week whether it was totally awful or totally awesome. It’s definitely not the most accessible of albums: five songs, each longer than seven minutes, sung by a frantic pixie in a child-like voice, accompanied only by her harp and a string section. Singing songs about meteorites, monkeys and bears, being milked from thistles at twilight, etc. Then one night when I was kind of lost in multiple ways, it all started to come together, and I decided on totally awesome.



Pearl Jam - Pearl Jam

Pearl Jam was my favourite band for a long time, and are definitely the band that I’ve invested the most in emotionally over the years. I was pretty disappointed with their previous album, Riot Act. I’ve always been willing to follow Pearl Jam down interesting detours (I still think No Code is their best album), but Riot Act was their first release that didn’t feel like it had been really worked on and polished. It felt rushed, and half-baked, and for the first time Eddie Vedder’s lyrics weren’t up to his usual standards (“Thumbing My Way” and “Green Disease” are the worst offenders).

But the new album, Pearl Jam, is a huge statement about everything that makes the band, and rock music in general, great. The first half of the album is filled with unrelenting rockers, capped off by the best song on the album, “Marker In The Sand”, while the second half steps back a bit, and thinks deeply about living. I think Pearl Jam’s best work is always when they’re in transition. Dealing with sudden fame on Vs. and Vitalogy, dealing with adulthood on No Code, and now figuring out how to still rock out, and still make a difference, when they’re all in their forties. It’s nice to have them back, and so vital, after so long.



M. Ward - Post-War

I went to see M. Ward at Sala Rosa earlier this year, and immediately became a fan. His most recent album careens between rock stompers and slow crooners, telling a series of stories about lovers, losers, dreamers, and dead men. One thing I like about his work is the amount of space he gives the slow songs to breathe, and the way his guitar dips in and out of things, commenting briefly then fading out again. This album will also be forever notorious to me because of the impromptu dance party it inspired at a family reunion, featuring pogoing Uncles and ten people with ten different ideas about just when the semitone bend happens in the chorus of “Chinese Translation”.

Honourable Mentions:

• Sparklehorse - Dreamt for Light Years In The Belly of a Mountain
• Bob Dylan - Modern Times
Calexico - Garden Ruin
Cat Power - The Greatest
• Midlake - The Trials of Van Occupanther

These are mostly albums that I just started listening to recently, or don’t really have much to say about except I like them a lot! Also, I can’t believe I waited for five years for a new Sparklehorse album to come out, then didn’t hear about it at all until a few days ago.

Saturday, December 30, 2006

Your Attention Please

We interrupt our regularly scheduled posting to bring you this important message - who’s that hottie just selected as the Georgia Straight single of the week?

Thursday, December 21, 2006

There's A Darkness On The Edge Of Town

As of about forty minutes ago, the sun reached its greatest distance from the Earth’s equatorial plane (for those of us in the Northern hemisphere). Happy Winter Solstice!

If I was in charge of things, the solstices and the equinoxes would be major holidays, mostly because they have great-sounding names. Solstice.

Saturday, December 16, 2006

I Wasn't Born Of A Whistle Or Milked From A Thistle At Twilight

And the moment I slept I was swept up in a terrible tremor
Though no longer bereft, how I shook and I couldn't remember

Then the furthermost shake drove a murthering stake in
And cleft me right down through my center
And I shouldn't say so, but I know that it was then, or never




Darling remember, when you come to me
That I’m the pretender
And not what I’m supposed to be
But who could know if I’m a traitor?
Time’s the revelator




And sometimes you don’t need words at all.

Friday, December 15, 2006

In Which I Rhyme "FitzRoy" With "hoi polloi"

...or, “$100 buys a lot of cucumber rolls”.

For the Biology Department Christmas party last night, myself and my friends Jeremiah and Jackie wrote and performed a song, and won first place in the skit competition along with $100 worth of sushi at Sho-Dan. Hooray! We tried to keep the details of the project top secret leading up to the party, with good success.

What we ended up writing was a bit of an adventure song, chronicling the famous Voyage of the Beagle, sung to the tune of “The Legionnaire’s Lament” by The Decemberists. Here are the lyrics, with a bunch of links for people who aren’t Biology geeks:



VERSE 1
I'm a clergyman, my name is Charles Darwin, hope my nose looks determined, for this voyage at sea
Sailing with Captain FitzRoy, ‘Round the world with the hoi polloi, trying to employ, Lyell’s Geology
And I’m writing down, all the new things that I have found, I pray we don’t run aground, so far from our homes
It’s been five years, so far, better check our chronometers, double-check using shining stars, as we sail through the night

CHORUS
We’re sailing on the Beagle now, the Falklands lie off our prow, Patagonias gone, Galapagos ahead
From Plymouth’s shores, sit back and hear the ocean roar, collecting fossil bones, finches, and new friends
And I don’t know if we’ll ever be back again, La Da Dum Dum La Da Da Dum

VERSE 2
Bleached bones lying in the sun, Megatherium and Glyptodon, eighteen pence buys a Toxodon, to send back to my home.
One might really fancy, from an original paucity”, from one species to a multiplicity, these finches and their beaks
Watching this tortoise cook, maybe I’ll write a book, on this gobbledygook, that mystery of mysteries

REPEAT CHORUS

INTERLUDE (With a slide show)

REPEAT CHORUS (GO TO OUTRO)

OUTRO
And don't know if we'll ever be back again,
be back again, be back again, O be back again.
Oh oh oh oh oh, la la la la, la la la la, oh oh oh oh



As well as being to the tune of a Decemberists song, the lyrics are very much written in the style of The Decemberists: as many ridiculous rhymes, and as much archaic language as possible. My favourite moment in writing the lyrics was realizing that a famous passage from “The Voyage of the Beagle” actually matched the rhyme scheme of the song. Here’s the full quote:


Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.


Keep in mind that this was written before the publication of “The Origin of Species”. Anyways, we had a lot of fun putting this together, and it seemed people really enjoyed our performance as well. I’ve currently got a pretty good cold, so I wasn’t able to sing at all, but Jeremiah and Jackie were awesome. I’ve been told that video exists of our performance, but for now here’s a picture of the three of us:

Saturday, December 09, 2006

Saturday is YouTube day

In lieu of actual content, I thought I’d start putting up some music videos each week. Something old, something new, and something weird. First up, in the “something new” category, here’s The Decemberists continuing their tradition of releasing one of the weakest songs on the album as a single. This also reminds me that I really did mean to write more about this band, because I’m still listening to them all the time:



Next up, for something old, here’s Sam Cooke, who shouldn’t really need any introduction at all:



Finally, for something weird, here’s Apocalyptica. I remember hearing these guys back in undergrad, but I think you really need the video to get the full awesomeness:

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

With A Little Help From My Friends

Hey, the last post has a happy ending. I found a mysterious box on my desk today, which usually means I have some new yeast-food or chemical to mutagenize myself with. Today, though, the mystery box had a brand-new 30-gig iPod in it!

!!!!!!!!

Some very awesome friends of mine gave me a very surprising, and very unexpected birthday gift. So to Scott, Tricia, Kyle, Lisa, Geoff, Anneli, Amy, Jackie, Helen, Greg, Erin, Jean-Sebastien, Geneviève, Jeremiah, and Taïca: Thank you. I have dubbed it “Starship Superfriends!”



Because, how do you feel at the end of the day, are you sad because you’re all alone? No, I get by with a little help from my friends.

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

No More iPod

Man, my iPod got stolen yesterday. That sucks!

With three of us sitting less than ten feet away, no less, on the other side of a divider.

So here’s to you, old iPod, you served me well for almost three years! I bought you back in the Spring of 2004, when all things flash memory, mini, nano, colour, video, and click-wheel were still just a glimmer in Jonathan Ive’s eyes. I’ll miss your glowing red buttons, and the way your battery would run out almost instantaneously when I tried to change tracks in the middle of a Montreal winter.

There was a line engraved on the back of you, “One by one, to one by one, forever be”, which gives me an excuse to quote from the song the line was taken from:

        One by one the teardrops fall as I write you
        One by one my words come falling on the page
        One by one my dreams are fading in the twilight
        One by one my schemes are fading fast away

From just the snippet posted here, it’s kind of depressing, but the song isn’t really, though it’s definitely melancholy. It’s more about how, in a big, lonely world, love is one of the few things that lasts.

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Guitars, cadillacs

There’s lots of things that I’d like to write about, but there’s never as much time for blog-writing as I’d like. Some of these entries may eventually be written. But since there’s about five people that read this, if you’re that interested in one of the ones that doesn’t eventually get written, just ask me! Anyways, here are some things that I thought I’d write about but haven’t yet:

• The new Decemberists album “The Crane Wife” is pretty incredible, and a real leap for them above their previous work
• I saw Sparta for the second time. Awesome again. They also have a new album out.
• Picked up new albums from The Tragically Hip, and the Be Good Tanyas
• Hey, I went to Vancouver!
• I saw the Bodyworlds 3 exhibit in Vancouver, and wasn’t really crazy about it, but that might have just been me
• I think some guitar chords are way over-represented in popular music because of the layout of the fretboard, and I thought that it was kind of like the spandrels of San Marco

Sunday, October 01, 2006

Me With Nothing To Say

Fall is here in Montreal. Falling leaves, crisp mornings, early sunsets, me waking up freezing cold because I’ve left the windows open again. I’ve probably said it before, but Fall is my favourite time of year here. To celebrate Fall’s arrival, here are my Top 5 6, all-time, desert island, favourite songs that are either about or remind-me-about Fall. In no particular order:

1. Iron & Wine - Sixteen, Maybe Less
2. Yo La Tengo - Autumn Sweater
3. Wilco - One by One
4. The Tragically Hip - Fiddler’s Green
5. Pearl Jam - Off He Goes
6. Nick Drake - Pink Moon

Monday, September 25, 2006

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Recent Shows

Jay and I saw two shows this past week, so here’s a post about that. We saw Mastodon at the Spectrum, then later that week we saw M. Ward at Sala Rossa. Both shows were excellent, but I suspect Jay and I were probably the only people to be at both shows. Videos below! Both bands featured really incredible musicians, albeit talented in completely different ways. Whereas the guys in Mastodon probably spent years in their bedrooms chained to ever-quickening metronomes, M. Ward has a much more jazz- and folk-influenced style.






Tuesday, September 05, 2006

All Is Quiet On New Year's Day

Today is the first day of the new academic year here at McGill. Time for all the undergrads to come back, to meet a bunch of new people, and to see everyone who’s been off in the field come back. I’ll be busy as ever this term, TAing courses in evolution and bioinformatics, and playing intramural ice hockey, volleyball, and Ultimate.

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

No More Bike

Man, my bike got stolen. That sucks!

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

More On Listening To Music: The Tragically Hip Edition

Or, “Moron Listening To Music”, if you prefer. A friend of mine paid me what I thought was a pretty nice compliment the other day. He wrote “Your opinion of an album a few days after you buy it is almost always the opinion I'll have of the album years later”. He was referring to the Hip’s album “Music @ Work”, which I thought was pretty good at the time, while he was quite disappointed with it.

So I was trying to think of why I actually liked the album. Most of the time, when I first form my opinion of an album, it’s strictly an intuitive thing. Does it have a good beat, and can I dance to it? (Aside: I tried to Google the origin of that phrase and was totally unsuccessful - anyone know?). Or more specifically, for me, does it make me invent some new stupid dance, or give me chills, or get caught in my head for days? Only after living with the album for awhile do I try to go back and articulate what it is about a song or an album that makes it work for me. This is something that’s always fun, and often surprising, in that I’ll usually realize I was completely misinterpreting a song. Or, more rewardingly, that the song had perfectly captured a moment in my life and I’d only picked up on it subconsciously at the time.

Listening to “Music @ Work” again today, there are really only four songs on it that make the album for me, and the rest is kind of forgettable. The lead track, “Music @ Work”, is just a great Hip rocker. But I think that “Lake Fever”, “Stay”, and “As I Wind Down The Pines” are some of the best things the Hip have ever done. I think what I like most about these songs is their intimacy. “Lake Fever” is basically “Bobcaygeon Part II”, which can’t be a bad thing. “Stay” is a fantastic, vulnerable love song that really captures loneliness and the need for companionship. Similarly, “As I Wind Down The Pines” is one of the few Hip songs where they manage to do more with less. Simple guitar lines and simple lyrics, but slightly out-of-sync with each other, forcing you to pay attention.

Gord Downie is always interesting as a lyricist, but I think that on the earlier albums he’s struggling a little to find his voice - trying to write big blustery “rock lyrics” without the Jagger swagger to really pull it off. And on the more recent albums, he’s descended into a bit of an obsession with words - to the detriment of the interplay between the words and the music. But on Phantom Power (unquestionably the best Hip album) and Music@Work he seems to hit a sweet spot.

And since I probably won’t write about the Hip here for a long time, if ever, my only two other strongly-held opinions about them are: (1) Gord Downie should not be allowed to play guitar live on “Wheat Kings” and “Nautical Disaster” because it absolutely murders his vocal delivery and (2) The Fully Completely / Day For Night album duo is over-rated.

Thursday, August 17, 2006

Back in the City

The yeast course is done, and I’m back in Montreal. I learned a lot, met some great people, and didn’t sleep much for three weeks. So here I am, trying to get back to full speed at work, find a new apartment, get rid of my old one, and catch up on sleep. Here’s a picture of the group (click for a bigger version), I’ll try to write more (ha!) and put up some more pictures later.



One of the events held at the banquet was a song competition, where each group would attempt to insult the others through song. Here’s one I wrote, set to the melody of “California Girls” by the Beach Boys, that I creatively called “Cerevisiae Girls. I’m not sure whether I should capitalize the ‘C’ in cerevisiae in this case, and I’m also not sure whether worrying about that or just the song in general disqualifies me from coolness. Here it is...


Verse 1


Well yeast are really hip
I really dig those genes we share
And with double-fusion PCR
I can knock any gene in there

Verse 2


With the green fluorescent protein
I can make any gene alight
And I know I’ll always have enough
A billion cells in just one night

Chorus


They wish they all could work on Saccharomy-
(Wish they all could work on Saccharomy-)
They wish they all could work on Saccharomyces

Verse 3


Expression people just watch lights shine
And nematodes are just so bland
The microscopists are only looking in
Without tetrads how can you understand?

Verse 4


I’ve been all around Cold Spring Harbor
And I’ve seen all kinds of work
So I couldn’t wait to get back to my yeast
Back to the greatest system in the world

Repeat Chorus 2x

Saturday, August 05, 2006

CSHL Day 12

Day Twelve, our first day off after eleven very long, very intense, very satisfying days. I had hoped to write and read a lot today, but ended up mostly sleeping.

I’ve learned a lot about yeast genetics, pulled some tetrads, met some great people, and heard some great science. The external support for the course is great also - I’ve had some surreal moments thinking “I’d better not spill my beer on this $100,000 microscope”. And since I need to leave now for more drinks, here are some budding yeast cells stained with calcufluor. The bright spots are the bud scars, I took the picture using a Zeiss Axio Imager system.

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

CSHL Day 1

Woke up. Went for a run. Finished writing a talk. Spent fifteen hours hearing about and fiddling with yeast. Going to sleep now.

Monday, July 24, 2006

CSHL Day 0

One thing this space is good for is for impromptu travel diaries. I don’t have a camera with me this trip, so unfortunately there probably won’t be any pictures. But anyways, after 11 hours of busses, borders, trains, and one van, I’ve arrived at CSHL.

One thing I find funny when travelling is getting so caught up in trying to catch the aforementioned trains, busses, etc., that when I realized the bus I was on went to the Port Authority, and not Penn Station as I had thought, I actually spent awhile trying to figure out elaborate transportation plans for how to get there before realizing that I could just walk ten blocks.

The CSHL campus is pretty gorgeous - a collection of hold houses re-fitted into research and teaching labs, nestled at the base of Cold Spring Harbor. Here’s a satellite view of the campus, I’m at the base of the inner harbour right now. It’s much less humid here than Montreal, and it feels really nice to get out of the city for awhile.

Now, time to write a talk for tomorrow! Updates in the future will probably be something like “Woke up. Spent Twelve Hours Fiddling With Yeast. Going to Sleep Now.”

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Back To The Ocean

Hey, I’m heading to Long Island for three weeks! I’ll be attending the Yeast Genetics and Genomics course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories. Three weeks of late nights in the lab, and lots of yeast talk.

Since I don’t really do any field work, I never get a chance to grow a cool field-work beard. So I’m taking this opportunity to give it a shot. Pictures may or may not follow.

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Speciation by Musical Isolation

One of the principal mechanisms thought to be responsible for the evolution of new species is the process of allopatric speciation. Simply put, populations that are capable of interbreeding are separated for a long period of time (by, for example, a mountain range or ocean). Out of contact with each other, each new subpopulation adapts to its new environment, while neutral genetic changes also accumulate. After enough time has elapsed, the two subpopulations may no longer be able to breed with each other, because of the accumulated genetic changes in each.

I’m kind of feeling this week like I’m undergoing a musical allopatric speciation event. I keep listening to music on my own, and if at some point I end up trying to talk about music with my friends, we’ll have nothing at all in common anymore. I mean seriously, how often can one person listen to Sweetheart of the Rodeo in one week, and still be able to interact with other people? I’ll have to move to South Carolina or something.

If future scientists are trying to decipher how I ended up here, I think it went something like Wilco -> Uncle Tupelo -> Gillian Welch -> Gram Parsons.

Monday, July 03, 2006

I Remember You Well

So there I was in my old blue raincoat watching the new Leonard Cohen biopic/concert film Leonard Cohen I’m Your Man. A lot of the artists in the film told their stories about how they first heard of him, so here’s mine. My dad used to play Leonard Cohen all the time, mostly the I’m Your Man album, and I thought it was the worst music in the world. I was probably ten years old at the time. He couldn’t sing! It was all cheesy eighties keyboards! One day, I thought I had a telling argument. In “Tower of Song”, he sings:

        I was born like this, I had no choice, I was born with the gift of a golden voice

This was clearly untrue! I thought I’d caught him in a lie, so we wouldn’t have to listen to it anymore! Aha!

This was also obviously before I’d heard of irony.

Anyways, the movie is pretty great, but probably only if you already like Leonard Cohen. It blends concert footage (from, strangely enough, Australia), interviews, and biographical footage collected from throughout Cohen’s life. The performances are a bit of a mixed bag - while some were incredible, some came off more like karaoke. I was surprised that I didn’t like Nick Cave’s performance of “I’m Your Man”, since I love Nick Cave and that song. There was also way too much U2. I’ve got more to say about the film, but I think I’ll save it for other posts.

Friday, June 30, 2006

Montréal Jazz Festival, Part I

Hey, the Jazz Festival has returned to Montreal! The Festival is one of the best things about summer here - two weeks of great, mostly free music. There’s a lot to say about the Festival, but for now I’ll just stick to a few things.

Each year, the Festival has a few big free shows, that typically draw tens of thousands of people down to Place des Arts. Sometimes they’re incredible, like Cirque du Soleil. Sometimes, like last night, it’s the Neville Brothers. I usually try to go to the big concerts, even when I’m not crazy about the artists, just because of the scope of the events.

So I tried, valiantly, to appreciate Aaron Neville’s crooning, but it just wasn’t happening (even after an afternoon of drinking and baseball). Luckily for us, there was a great band from France - Smooth playing at another stage. Billed as “an electro-jazz sung in English but grooving in the universal language of hip”, these guys were really good. Their sound was built up from their really funky rhythm section of a drummer and bass player, with a singer/guitarist/keyboardist on top.

That show was part of the Groove series at the Festival, which always has the best party music each year, and looks to be really solid again this year. Tonight, I’m going to try to see Gomez, but might not, because who starts a rock show at 6pm?

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

World Cup Predictions

I haven’t been able to watch too much of the World Cup so far because it falls during my workday, but here are some predictions anyways.

England will not win the World Cup. The only reason I say this is because their fans seem to have the same mentality as fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Charitably, blind optimism, less charitably, denial.

I’m rooting for Argentina again, which I think I’ve done since around 1994, when I was swayed by their cool blue jerseys, and old Disney cartoons that made me think everyone in the country was a cowboy.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Sushi and Tit for Tat

Since I’m ostensibly thinking about evolution a lot of the time, I started thinking about how I decide where to shop and eat in terms of game theory. I think that, when I’m in the process of deciding which restaurants to go to, or which airline to fly, or any decision like that, I play a pretty standard strategy of Tit-for-Tat.

A lot of evolutionary game theory is based on trying to answer questions relating to the evolution of cooperation. Cooperation at first seems counterintuitive from an evolutionary perspective: selection acts on organisms, and organisms that are selfish will generally end up with more resources than organisms that are unselfish, and so end up having more and better offspring. Selection should then generally favour selfish individuals over altruistic ones.

But altruism, and cooperation between organisms are quite commonly observed. How does this evolve? One classic, and tractable way of approaching the problem is the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Briefly, in an iterated game of Prisoner’s Dilemma, two parties are subjected to repeated interactions with each other. Each round, they are able to select a strategy of cooperation or defection. The highest possible reward is for defecting when your partner cooperates, followed by both individuals cooperating, then both individuals defecting, and finally the worst possible outcome, cooperating while your partner defects. The object of the game is to select a strategy that maximizes your individual fitness over time.

The story of the original Prisoner’s Dilemma competition is really quite interesting, but I won’t repeat it here (read about it here if you’re interested). The relevant question is, what is the optimal strategy? If you know that your opponent will always cooperate, the best strategy is to always defect. Similarly, if you know your opponent will always defect, you should always defect too. But what if you don’t have any advance knowledge? What if your opponent’s strategy changes in response to yours? It turns out that a remarkably good strategy is a very simple one: Tit-for-Tat. Simply, a Tit-for-Tat strategy involves cooperating on the first turn, then repeating your opponents last move. If your opponent betrays you, betray them back next time. Tit-for-Tat is an evolutionarily stable strategy (or ESS), implying that a whole population playing this strategy cannot be invaded by individuals playing any other strategy.

Back to me and shopping. I was thinking that I’m just very boring and stuck in a rut of only going to a few places. I’ll give new places a chance, and if I enjoy them, I’ll return. As long as I keep having good experiences, I keep returning. But, if I’m unsatisfied, I don’t get mad, I just never return. So if I’m really playing Tit-for-Tat, it would seem that to get me back as a customer, a business would have to do something for me - a free pizza, or something like that. But even if I was offered something, I might just cynically take their offer, then never return anyways. So perhaps my strategy is “Cooperate until defected upon, then always defect, regardless of whether the opponent cooperates or defects”.

I’m not sure the analogy completely holds up - as a consumer, I usually have quite a bit of prior knowledge about a service before I enter the store. So I don’t just go out and try everything once, then only return to the places I like. Also, I have the advantage of knowing how likely I am to interact with that business in the future. In an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game, the players don’t know how many times they’ll interact in the future, otherwise defecting on the last turn is always the best strategy.

So maybe I am stuck in a rut of having a few favourite haunts. But at least this lets me feel like I’m just being strategic.

EDIT: There was an actual point to titling this post "Sushi and Tit for Tat", though I forgot about it when I actually wrote the post. The sushi place I've been going to recently always tosses in a few extra cucumber or avocado rolls. Awesome! Last time, however, they didn't. Do I keep going back, or have they betrayed me?

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Thoughts on Writing About Music

I have a few entries on music that are stewing around in the back of my mind right now, and that may eventually get put up here. But thinking about those entries, and starting to write them, got me thinking about what I want to write about when I write about music.

I don’t think I’d be very good as an “objective” reviewer of music, and that’s not really my interest anyways. One of the writers that I’ve read for a few years online (Caryn Rose, formerly of 5h, now of jukeboxgraduate) once wrote something about how she wasn’t writing about music per se, she was writing about listening to music. That’s what I’d like to do here. Not an attempt at objectivity or ranking, but something much more subjective: how does it make me feel when I hear a song, what memories get dragged out, and does it make me tap my feet?

The first album I was going to write about was Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, but that one is cutting a little close to home right now. I’ve moved from “Simple Twist of Fate” and “You’re A Big Girl Now”, going briefly through “Idiot Wind”, and settled in now at “If You See Her, Say Hello” and “Buckets of Rain”, thanks for asking.

Instead I’d like to write about Pearl Jam, and their new album. This post will either eventually be complemented by a bunch of others, or will stand here alone mocking me! The plan is to go through the new album, track by track, with a few autobiographical detours thrown in as necessary.

Saturday, June 03, 2006

Buying me off: Cheap and easy!

A few friends and I received free tickets to see Al Gore’s new movie, An Inconvenient Truth, the other night. I think the idea behind giving free tickets to people working in the sciences is that we’ll convince all our friends and acquaintances that it’s a really important, compelling, and scientifically rigorous movie. Since I’m easily bought, and the movie really was good, I don’t feel bad saying: This is a really important, compelling, and scientifically sound movie. Go see it if you get a chance.

The film focusses on Gore’s efforts to educate people about the global warming crisis, mainly by depicting scenes from a slideshow Gore regularly gives on the topic. The biggest potential stumbling-block for the film is that it’s as much about Gore and his work as it is about global warming. The presentation on global warming is interspersed with vignettes from Gore’s life, and travels, including stories about his family, his political career, and his failed presidential campaign. While I (and my friends) thought this approach might be at best a distraction from the movie’s message, and at worst a campaign ad for Gore ‘08, it actually serves the film quite well. Each story from Gore’s life serves to underline just why Gore has dedicated so much time to the issue, and why warming really is a moral issue that should transcend political or economical concerns.

As someone who’s seen more than his fair share of talks on atmospheric carbon dioxide and global warming, it’s really easy for the material to come off as either terribly boring if it’s presented poorly, or terribly depressing if it’s presented well. One of the real achievements of the movie is in how it conveys the seriousness of global warming, while maintaining a sense of optimism and determination. Previous “insoluble” problems like ozone pollution have indeed been tackled, and at much less cost than doomsayers initially predicted.

The direction of the film is quite good, with many of the vignettes having a real autumnal quality to them. Though autumnal themes and 3/4 time are two of my main weaknesses, it’s still good. The most similar examples I can think of in tone are (cheesily enough) the voiceover monologues of Galadriel at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring, and Private Witt’s voiceovers from “The Thin Red Line”.

As several other reviews I’ve looked at have noted, it’s really easy to ask at the end of the film: What might have been? What if the US had a president who really did care about science and the environment? Though I can’t imagine how he did it, Gore seems to be at peace with himself, and ready to move on. He’s doing a noble thing.

Obligatory Mac nerdness: Gore uses PowerBooks and Keynote throughout the film, which makes sense, since he’s on the board at Apple. They’ve put up a key to "An Inconvenient Truth" at their site .

We Should Spend More Time Together in Crowds

Interpreting a person’s intent from email messages has always frustrated me. All sorts of nuances present in normal conversation are lost, and internet-speak only makes it worse. I recently learned a few of my friends have a pretty good triple-tag-team textual parsing thing going on to try to interpret some of the emails they get from guys. So I thought it would be fun to write ambiguous emails, specifically designed to vex them. Here’s my first shot:


From: Rod
Subject: We should spend more time together in large crowds
Date: June 3, 2006 8:26:13 PM EDT (CA)
To: X

Dear X,

        I've really enjoyed the time we've spent together recently. You're like a sister to me (a sexy sister!). We should definitely hang out more - do you like Indian food? I know a really great place, but we'd have to go in a group of at least eight. Do you have many cute friends?

        Oh yeah, I couldn't stop thinking about that story you told me the other day - It made me laugh, and I was thinking about you all day. The girl I was talking to at the gym thought it was totally hilarious too.

        Anyways, I do think we should get together sometime soon and talk - maybe coffee? Or maybe drinks? I don't want you to think I'm moving too fast, but...

Kind regards,
Rod

p.s. My old friends Pat and Terry might be in town too - would it be cool if they came along?

I Don't Know What I Expected

I had a bit of an “Arrested Development” moment yesterday in the lab. There’s this scene where Michael opens his freezer to find a bag labelled “Dead dove. Do not eat”. He opens the bag, closes it, and says “I don’t know what I expected”.

So there I was, opening a small container of dried salmon sperm. I don’t know just what I expected it to look like. But if you can imagine what a bunch of dried salmon sperm would look like, that’s pretty much it.

Monday, May 29, 2006

More hockey predictions

Okay, in this round Edmonton will beat Anaheim in 5 games, while the Buffalo-Carolina series will go to at least 6.

Also, I haven’t updated here in awhile not because of a lack of interest, but because I’ve been dealing with some personal issues at home. I think I’m ready to start writing here again, so we’ll see how it goes.

Saturday, May 20, 2006

Things I was wrong about, part one of many

So it turns out that “sad bastard music” is actually a reference to High Fidelity, which surprised me when I was watching it last night.

Also, I still suck at predicting hockey playoffs. Given a bunch of advance knowledge (2 games played in each series I think), I predicted only one correct result. The lesson, obviously, is that I need to wait til series are at 3-0 to make predictions.

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

And If I Could Find My Way Back Home, Where Would I Go?


Say what you will about the silly name, the new Nintendo console will feature a re-release of Duck Hunt, which erases any doubts I had about its awesomeness.

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Uniformed prognostication

Any hockey predictions I make should probably be ignored, since I always expect that the Canucks will win the Cup, and get frustrated every year.

But anyways, Ottawa will climb out its 0-2 hole to beat the Sabres in 7, while the Oilers, Avalanche, and Devils will all lose their series in 5 or 6 games.

Thursday, May 04, 2006

More Listening Commentary

Continuing from this entry, some additional thoughts on listening frequency charts.

1. It seems there might be some issues with autocorrelation going on in the data. For example, it’s not clear whether the high position of “Meadowlake Street” is due to me really liking the song, or just due to the fact that it follows “Sweet Illusions” on the album. But then “When Will You Come Back Home” is played more than either of those, and is the fourth track on the album. So who knows? Subjectively, I remember listening to those three songs as a block all the time last fall.

2. It also seems to me that “number of times a song is listened to” doesn’t (or shouldn’t be expected to) correlate exactly with how much I like a given song.

3. Man I’m a sucker for sad or slow music. Of the Top 20, only five or so are rockers. It could be that I tend to listen to a bunch of different rockers while only a few slow songs will really grab me. Or that I just like listening to “sad bastard” music, as Loring puts it.

4. A few albums I listened to obsessively last fall are heavily represented: Iron & Wine’s Our Endless Numbered Days, Ryan Adam’s Cold Roses, and the Iron & Wine / Calexico split EP In The Reins.

5. I can’t believe that when I saw Iron & Wine with Calexico, they played every single song from the EP except “History of Lovers”. What the fuck!

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Doodads and Whatsits

I’m still playing around with the format of the blog, but it’s starting to come together a bit. I’ve added a stats counter at Site Meter, and I’ve hooked up a Last.fm account as well. Both are down to the right on the sidebar.

The idea of the last.fm counter is that it listens to what I’m playing on my computer and iPod, sends it to their website, and then formats it into a chart that gets displayed back here. I’m not too worried about privacy issues here, but more worried about what people will think when they see that I’ve already listened to “Margaritaville” twice this morning. Once it’s got a bit more data to work with, I think I’ll switch to a weekly chart, rather than a “just-played” chart.

One drawback is that the count is only starting from yesterday, so it’ll miss out on a decade and a half of listening. But it does work well for getting an idea of what I’m listening to these days in general. For the sake of comparison, I looked at the data from my local copy of iTunes. This data goes back to November ‘04, when I started working on this machine. Here are the Top 20 most-played tracks:


Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Pearl Jam, Pearl Jam

Pearl Jam’s new album, cunningly titled Pearl Jam, came out today. First listen report: whoa.

I also picked up the new Tool album (both albums were only $10 today), and I can report that it has goggles.

Also, I didn’t die connecting the barbecue.

Thursday, April 27, 2006

Plan for Summer Bliss: Update

Just to reinforce how boring a lot of the content on this blog will be, here’s an update on the PSB:

The barbeque is now built. It took me over three hours, somehow. It may have been because I was watching the Canadiens lose in OT, and drinking Boréale. Now, I just need to get a propane tank and hook that up.

If there are no further updates here, feel free to assume that I’ve blown myself up.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

The Name of This Blog

The name of this blog is taken from a Gillian Welch song, called, funnily enough, “One Little Song”:

        There’s gotta be a song left to sing
        Cause everybody can’t have thought of everything
        One little song that ain’t been sung
        One little rag that ain’t been wrung out completely yet
        Gotta a little left

The last time I tried writing online, I got totally preoccupied with how the work would be perceived, and so shied away from writing about lots of things because I didn’t think I knew enough about them to have something intelligent to say. This time around, bombs away! Expect totally uninformed commentary on anything I happen to find interesting.

I’m trying to improve my writing skills by writing more. I’ve been writing a journal lately, but the problem there is that I’m only talking to myself, so I get all the inside jokes. With this blog, while I imagine I’ll be writing for about eight people, it’s still enough to make me concentrate on readability, and not fall back on some of my lazy writing habits.

The reason then, why I gave the blog the title I did, is that I hope this space does become my one little song. Not a huge song that the whole world will sing along to, but a song I can call my own, and I can share with my friends. Because everyone can’t have thought everything yet, can they?

p.s. If you haven’t actually heard Gillian’s albums Time (The Revelator) or Soul Journey, they’re awesome.

Crashing Cucurbita

So it looks like The Smashing Pumpkins (well, Billy and Jimmy at least) are going to record a new album. I’ll wait to actually hear the album before I say either “they were doomed from the start, trying to rehash their past success” or “Damn the nay-sayers, I knew they had another great album in them!”. But I did want to say something about the Pumpkins towards the end of their previous incarnation.

Lots of people seemed to view Adore as a big misstep for the Pumpkins: Jimmy was gone, and they abandoned their traditional wall-of-guitars sound for synthesizers and drum loops. The move was viewed by some as cashing in on the late-90s “electronica” bandwagon. Their followup album, Machina: The Machines of God was then hailed as a “return” to the classic Pumpkins sound, with lots of big guitars everywhere. Fairly soon after the release of Machina, the Pumpkins imploded.

In my own view, in rock as in life, you can’t go home again. Adore definitely had its weak spots - the first single, “Ava Adore”, is totally awful. But that song sticks out like a sore thumb on the album. The rest of the album is really quite good, but not in the same way Siamese Dream or Mellon Collie were. Where their previous work was epic, sort of like a soundtrack for conquering the Universe, Adore is a quieter album. While loneliness was always a predominant theme for the Pumpkins, the loneliness explored in the songs on Adore is much more mature. Whereas Billy is lonely on Siamese Dream because he’s a bit of a geek still, and people always thought he was a weirdo growing up, on Adore he explores the loneliness that comes from losing a parent, or facing death alone. There’s also hope, and redemption, and all that good stuff if you want to dig into it. The music is often quite beautiful also - “To Sheila” strips away almost everything we previously knew about the Pumpkins, using bare keyboard and guitar lines alone, while “For Martha” has Matt Cameron on it (no further explanation required). To my mind, Adore marks a transition for the Pumpkins similar to what Pearl Jam accomplished with No Code, or Wilco with Being There, two of my absolute favourite albums.

But as I said before, people didn’t really like Adore. So a few years later, with Jimmy back and D’arcy on the way out, we got Machina. The giant waves of guitars were back, and the openness in the lyrics of Adore was replaced by obscurantism - a story that listeners were supposed to decipher from the lyrics and booklet. I believe there was actually a contest - the person who could “most correctly” infer Billy’s vision won some prize. In sum, the album felt like a calculated attempt by the Pumpkins to recapture their former glory. Where Adore was risky, Machina was safe, and there’s nothing more dull than a rock band playing it safe.

Sunday, April 23, 2006

Plan for Summer Bliss

Plan for Summer Bliss Phase One: complete.

Phase Two: Operation Find Some Good Sandals.

iTunes is exposing my inner awful-music lover

I was initially skeptical about the iTunes music store. While I thought that selling music digitally was definitely the way the industry should move, I didn’t think I’d end up using the iTMS for a few reasons.

First, I love albums. I love reading the lyrics, I love having the artwork, I loved seeing all my CD’s next to each other (until they all got stolen, at least). I would spend hours sorting my albums, remembering where I was when I first heard it, though I don’t think I could pull off an autobiographical sort. While you can buy all the music from the iTMS, you lose out on some of the fun aspects of collecting music.

Secondly, the music sold on the iTMS is compressed as AAC files. While they sound fine, for the most part, I’m always worried that if I invested in a lot of iTMS albums, someday I’d buy an awesome sound system and hear all the artifacts.

Finally, music from the iTMS is protected by DRM. I’m not criticizing Apple for this - it’s the only way they could pull the whole thing off. So if I have the choice of paying ~$10 for a version of an album that comes without the case and booklet, in a lossy compression format, and is playable on only a few devices, versus a regular CD for ~$15, I’d still take the CD.

Unfortunately for my credit card, I’ve recently stumbled upon the facet of the iTMS that works for me. “Eye of the Tiger”. “The Final Countdown”. “The Gambler”. “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before”. All awful, awful, songs. I love them all. While I’d never want to get the albums these songs come from, I’m completely happy to pay $1 to be able to hear them. The iTMS is awful (and by awful I mean awesome) for impulse-purchases of one-hit-wonders, songs that were popular while I was growing up, or misadventures of Willie Nelson.

So while I think I’ll stick to CDs for most of my collection, iTMS is great for a rainy afternoon when you really need to hear some Boyz II Men.

Friday, April 21, 2006

Moving In Continued

I’m continuing to move into this space bit by bit. Today I’ve messed around with the sidebar, and tossed up a bunch of links. As will probably become a trend here, I’m shamelessly stealing from (or paying homage, if you prefer) to the late Douglas Adams. The link categories for now are Life, The Universe, and Everything. Links in the “Life” category are people I know who also have websites. “The Universe” has a bunch of science- and evolution-related stuff, and “Everything” is, well, everything else.

The next step in moving in is to modify the theme colour scheme and template a bit, so the site doesn’t look exactly like 10 million other Blogger blogs. Also, to actually write enough here so that the “content” isn’t greatly outmatched by the sidebar.

Thursday, April 20, 2006

Hello World

So here’s my new blog. I tried this once before, but didn’t really use it effectively or update it often. Last time around, I went really deep into the technical side of things: I set up my own Movable Type and Gallery installations, registered a domain name, got some shared hosting with my friend Greg, and even wrote a manifesto!

Things are a little more low-tech this time. I’m using the free tools at Blogger, and I’ll probably upload pictures later to one of the free online services (e.g. Flickr). I’m composing this entry with one of my favourite pieces of Mac software, MacJournal, which has a really nice export-to-Blogger feature.

I still have a lot of tinkering to do before I can really get comfortable with the site. For example, I’d like to create my own CSS layout for the site (or at least heavily modify an existing one). But for now, posting works, as should the RSS feeds.