CD Ripping: Done

October 27th, 2009 12:46 am

I have finished1 the ridiculous project of ripping all my previously unripped CDs before the move. This has resulted in the addition of exactly 9175 new MP3 files to the collection–a bump of about 1/3 in the overall size. That seems like a lot.

In celebration of that seemingly endless effort being completed allow me to present five tracks that I haven’t heard in a while, since they didn’t, for one reason or another, make the ripping cut previously. I’ve chosen five tracks from the thousands that are all performed by men2, that tie specifically to particular places or memories for me. These take me at least a decade back, and almost two decades in some cases–it’s pretty amazing the power of music to connect to memory.

Junkhouse – Jet Trash: This one takes me directly back to 1997–I was one year out of university, with an excellently paying job with a flexible schedule, and no responsibilities. That meant I could take in a lot of evening shows, and I can see exactly in my mind what Mrs. Robinson’s looked like on the night Junkhouse came to play there on the Fuzz tour. It was the first time I’d seen Tom Wilson live (although certainly not the last, as I’ve followed him for years since–witness that last post), and one of the first times I’d been to a show in my comfortable little university town where most of the audience looked like they could kick my ass, and wouldn’t think twice about it. It was awesome.

Odds - Oh Sorrow, Oh Shame: This one takes me to a couple of years later, when I’m living with Chef Paul and Mike Ditty. Paul was a huge Odds fan and turned me on to this particular album. I distinctly recall sitting on the deck behind the house, drinking Coronas with Paul–must have been his day off–while he talked about his fascination with the lyric about every town having it’s three-legged cat. After that, that visual was what always came to mind whenever his occasional nickname (“Chia The Cat”) was used around me.

Randy Newman – You Can Leave Your Hat On: I saw 9 1/2 Weeks (with French subtitles) during it’s first release at a midnight showing in a theatre in Lausanne. I was there with a Swiss girl I was totally in (unrequited) lust with. I know that the version in the movie has Joe Cocker singing Randy’s song, but it doesn’t matter–I hear it, and I’m instantly there, and the memory of being a randy (heh) teenager come rushing in. (Amusingly, this did not happen when the Tom Jones version of the song showed up in The Full Monty.)

Roger Waters – Amused To Death: I bought this album the week it came out, in the fall of 1992. I listened to it for the first time on headphones while working in nuclear research facility–about 200 meters from a reactor, which might be kind of amusing, given some of the album’s content–and when I got to this track, the closing track, it utterly hooked me. At first it was this sequence in the lyrics that caught me:

And the children on Melrose
strut their stuff.
Is absolute zero cold enough?
And out in the Valley, warm and clean,
the little ones sit by their TV screens.
No thoughts to think.
No tears to cry.
All sucked dry.
Down to the very last breath.

I thought it was a very piercing condemnation. Over time, though I’ve come to think that bit’s much too easy, and what’s really impressive comes later, in the masterful lyrical “long take” that runs from a cutting sketch of the media/consumer lifestyle, though to a satirical outsider look at how that has to end, from :

We watched the tragedy unfold.
We did as we were told.
We bought and sold.
It was the greatest show on earth.
But then it was over.

through to

But on eliminating every other reason
For our sad demise
They logged the only explanation left
This species has amused itself to death

Sure, Waters is bombastic, but tell me that the way he hits “Our last hurrah” in there isn’t perfect. I dare you.

Lou Reed – Cremation (Ashes To Ashes): The album this track is from, Magic and Loss, dates from that same “working at the nuclear lab” period of my life. Like Amused to Death, it was one of about 30 discs I had with me over four months of a situation where my lifestyle was forced to include long periods of being alone in my room in a shared accommodation. I listened to all of those discs a lot. This song doesn’t take me there, though. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it takes me to a funeral; one where the Lou’s perfectly affectless line “Nothing else contained you ever” kept running through my head. I think I probably would have liked what Lou’s done here more in the days when I couldn’t connect to it except abstractly, but I suspect I appreciate it more now.

And on that happy note, let’s call it a post.

  1. I in no way claim to have done this alone–Dr. Wife did a lot of the ripping on her machine, while I kept one of my work machines more or less in continuous ripping mode in my office.(back)
  2. No special reason.(back)

Posted in Music, Storytime | 1 Comment »

Why Old Men Cry At Night

October 16th, 2009 11:51 pm

Tom Wilson, doing one of the songs from the Lee Harvey Osmond project. ’nuff said.

Posted in Music | No Comments »

October 16, 2009 11:40 pm

You know, sometimes the right tool for the job makes problems remarkably simple to solve. For a lot of my small computer problems, the right tool is sed. I remember the first time I encountered it, and I estimate it’s saved me around an average of about an hour a week since then–which works out to something like 117 working days.

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The power of lowered expectations

October 14th, 2009 10:46 pm

Explainers On Government

What you’re seeing there is the first panel from a strip in Feiffer’s Explainers. Click to read the rest of the strip.

Then marvel at how exactly on point is appears to be for the current world (OK, that reference to the Soviets needs to point to China or somewhere, but setting that aside), considering that it was published in 1960–almost 40 years ago.

I had to look this up for a discussion today, and decided to share it with you guys. Go buy the book!

Posted in Political | No Comments »

Making Excuses

October 13th, 2009 11:21 pm

I see that the people over at Rotten Tomatoes have compiled a list of the worst reviewed movies so far this millennium.

I was pretty worried about how many of these I’d have seen–I’ve seen some pretty dodgy things this decade–but apparently I have only seen four of the 100 on the list.

Here are my excuses for those:

#79 – Pluto Nash. I have no excuse for this, and can’t even begin to imagine what I was thinking.

#62 – Serving Sara. The excuse here should be obvious. Liz Hurley is a very attractive woman, and she is also a great fan of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman books. That’s enough to get me in the door.

#27 – Battlefield Earth. This one I went to with friends, at the cheap cinema, specifically for the purpose of giving the movie the MST3K treatment. I still occasionally scream “split wipe!” when faced with multiple recurring instances of the same kind of incompetence over a short period of time.

#1 – Ballistic: Echs vs. Sever. Yeah, this is the “I’m a very shallow man” excuse again. Lucy Liu is hot. No one, though, is hot enough to justify this movie.

Looking at the rest of the list, well, I don’t quite actually weep for humanity, but…

How many have you seen?

Posted in One-and-done, Reviews | 10 Comments »

October 13, 2009 10:53 pm

A completely unsolicited endorsement: the combination of St. Ambroise Stout and Sartori Reserve Raspberry BellaVitano cheese is ridiculously yummy. That is all.

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October 12, 2009 11:40 pm

I note with some interest that the winner of this year’s Canadian Brewing Awards in the Stout category is the St. Ambroise Oatmeal Stout from McAuslan. Not news to me. I’ll have to look into Hockley Valley Brewing, and that Imperial Stout from Grand River Brewing as well–more reasons to look forward to the Ontario move.

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Missed Opportunity: Quantum To Cosmos

October 12th, 2009 11:27 pm

If I had been moving back to the KW area at the end of September, rather than the end of November, I certainly would have been hitting some of the events at the Quantum To Cosmos conference. I hope some of my pals in the area are planning to check it out.

I’ll be able to stream the lectures, and several of them seem things I’m not going to want to miss. There are lots there that interest me, and which I’ll probably eventually get around to watching, but a couple that I’ll probably watch right away, and would likely have gone to include:

I guess the lectures aren’t really a missed opportunity, since they will be available online, but the whole Science In The Pub track (which seems to be at the Huether!) seems tragic to miss.

And then there’s the film festival. I used to be a pretty consistent regular at the Princess back in the day (and I expect to pick that practice up again in the new year), but this selection in particular has some very topical appeal. I mean, I’ll usually take a chance to see Metropolis in a theatre, and I’ve been thinking Sarah might like E.T., and so on, but the real draw for me right now would be the chance to see Méliès‘ Le Voyage Dans La Lune.

Prior to this week I’d never heard of Méliès, or this movie–and apparently I’d been missing a lot of pop culture in jokes as a consequence. Until I happened to see a link to Lisa Goldstein’s Nebula finalist story Dark Rooms. Having read it, I now have a healthy curiosity about the man’s work. (Please allow me to take a moment to plug Goldstein’s work–I think I have everything she’s written, and it’s all pretty great. In particular you should read The Red Magician, The Dream Years, Tourists, and The Alchemist’s Door, but all the novels are worth your time.)

Anyway, missing the chance to see the movie for the first time in a theatre–in a dark room, as ’twere–is a missed opportunity. I’m 100% sure I can go watch a bunch of Melies’ movies on YouTube, but it would have been great to see it first in the cinema.

Part of my process for coming to terms with leaving Halifax is convincing myself that having access to this kind of event will be a big plus. Of course the scheduling could have been better here for that argument, but I suspect that the Perimeter Institute probably won’t only have one such conference.

Posted in Books, Science and Technology | No Comments »

Proud and Unrepentant: Part 4

October 11th, 2009 11:19 pm

A couple of years back I ran through several variations on the Lucifer character / story that appeal to me. You may recall Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

In doing some reading last night in The Eldritch Dark’s archive of Clark Ashton Smith’s poety1, I found another interesting variant. Or rather, two interesting variants.

The first is a sonnet, and as such is short enough that I can just throw the whole thing here:

Lucifer

A Vision of Lucifer

I saw a shape with human form and face,
If such should in apotheosis stand:
Deep in the shadows of a desolate land
His burning feet obtained colossal base,
And spheral on the lonely arc of space,
His head, a menace unto heavens unspanned,
Arose with towered eyes that might command
The sunless, blank horizon of that place.

And straight I knew him for the mystic one
That is the brother, born of human dream,
Of man rebellious at an unknown rod;
The mind’s ideal, and the spirit’s sun;
A column of clear tame, in lands extreme,
Set opposite the darkness that is God.

Aside from the all the obvious work with light/dark and sun/darkness imagery, and the whole moral inversion thing, what fascinates me here is the casting of Lucifer as a kind of Romantic ideal–something embodying the dreams of humanity rebelling against the notion of some unknown rod, and using the mind’s ideal to bring light into the darkness. I can almost read that as Lucifer standing in as the symbol of a kind of Enlightenment urge to set aside the comfort of faith, and willingness to live with ignorance–in the dark–and instead rebel against that by taming the extreme lands and bringing light to the darkness. Not bad for a couple of lines.

The other view of Nick that Smith’s poetry brings us is slightly different, in the much longer Satan Unrepentant. This one’s too long to reproduce here in its entirety, but it’s not epic or anything–you can see it all at The Eldritch Dark.

In this case the view of Satan is closer perhaps to Brust’s–no different in kind to God, but just less powerful, and not willing to cede that this makes the kind of difference that should grant rulership and preeminence. And, of course, like the other interesting cases, Smith’s Satan is unrepentant, and unbowed. “I still endure, / Abased, majestic, fallen, beautiful, / And unregretful in the doubted dark”. Yes, that’s how it should be, isn’t it?

Smith works the light/dark thing again here, and the repeating sun/flame imagery, although this time letting God have the rhythmic, perfect music of the suns, and giving Satan the “discords of the dark”. Don’t think that God’s the good guy in this case, though–we’re hearing Satan’s side of the story, of course, but the picture he paints of a tyrant, ravenous and insatiable for control, who built his throne on injustice, and rules whimsically by main force isn’t exactly a glorious one.

Satan claims to be equally strong-willed (if less powerful) and of the same essential nature as God, and since he has an “unsubmissive brow and lifted mind” the tyrant God keeps him trapped in darkness as a dreadful secret, because “All tyrants fear whom they may not destroy”. Apparently what Satan thinks God fears is just his rebellion: “strong in tyranny, / The despot trembles that I stand opposed!”

And so, he waits… bloodied, but unbowed, as ’twere, for something to bring God down “Whether through His mischance or mine own deed, / Or rise of other and extremer Strength”. Apparently the eventual, and Satan thinks inevitable, ending of God will justify the rebellion. Certainly were it to come about because of some other stronger power arising, that would justify a rebellion against one who holds power by main strength, but claims the strength provides legitimacy as Supreme–someone stronger coming along would rupture that claim, and with irony. As, of course, would being brought down by some lesser power, really.

There are lots of fascinating readings of this. You could take Satan at his word and read the poem as a statement of enduring principle from an unjustly exiled rebel. You could assume that the facts are more-or-less as presented, but with Satan playing the role of your stereotypical unreliable narrator–and who better for that role? Maybe he isn’t quite so unjustly exiled? He’s certainly arrogant and proud in his self-description. Maybe he’s wrong (either knowingly or unknowingly) in his claim to be of the same stuff as God–if that were a prideful mistake then lots of things would take a very different colour. God’s injust tyranny, for example, might be the kind of jailhouse complaint about righteous authority one always hears from criminals.

Satan

And then there’s the ways you can read that last section about the waiting–is he waiting patiently for freedom, or for his turn to rule? And if he is the unreliable narrator, and God’s not the tyrant, but the righteous jailer, then what does it mean that Satan waits so patiently?

I suppose I could argue that this is a horror piece, with the horror coming with the notion that Satan may be right that God’s number will one day be up, and the looming worry about what that might mean–especially if Satan’s turn comes next, and he’s not the hero of the piece that he paints himself.

I could equally argue that it’s an examination of Satan’s folly–that his inability to see the difference in kind between himself and the creator deludes him into thinking that his day will come, when it never actually will. And that this willful pride and self-delusion traps him in the darkness more than any tyrants actions.

And, of course, those are just the readings where we can’t depend on the narrator. There’s also the surface reading of the proud and unrepentant rebel cast out by a fearful tyrant who can’t stand the notion of rebellion at all.

Smith is neither Santayana nor Milton, but he does manage a few impressive lines, and he leaves enough room for some interesting interpretations of what his Satan is all about.

  1. I do that sometimes.(back)

Posted in Books | 3 Comments »

Friday Night Links

October 9th, 2009 11:26 pm

Collected from here and there about the networks, for your amusement or edification,

  • I would really like to believe the story of Denny & Peach is a vignette that accurately captures a bit of the wonder of the world. But even if it’s a fiction, it’s a lovely little one. Also, SWORD CANE!
  • Same thing with this “big catch” story. I prefer to believe I live in a world where this could happen.
  • Remember when the Chretien Liberals were just about to decriminalize pot? Think about that while reading this headline.
  • Reading about the marshmallow test, and how it correlates to success in later life only validates all my theories about the need for parents and the education system to focus more on teaching the connection between cause and effect, and the predictable consequences of our choices. It also gives me some license to taunt my child with future marshmallows.
  • You know what else the education system should focus on–providing an adequate basis for full participation in the public sphere. The primary goal should not be to produce people who are employable, but rather to produce citizens, in the full sense of that word, with their employability being a necessary byproduct.
  • Reading a librarian’s carefully thought out, but strong, explanation of why he was rejecting a bigot’s request to remove a book from his library has restored a tiny bit of my lost faith in humanity. Librarians–you gotta love ‘em.
  • More Hubble space porn.
  • I’m fascinated with this Youtube video of an Italian cellist’s performance for two reasons: it’s a great performance of the piece, and the video is the work of 5 months of desktop video editing. I love that putting together something like this is a matter of basic video equipment, time and a desktop computer, not requiring access to special purpose tools or editing suites, etc. Someone sufficiently dedicated could do this as a hobby.
  • Just in case it hasn’t sunk in yet that there’s more content available on the Internet than anyone could hope to consume a fraction of, go browse around the Free Music Archive.
  • Of course there’s lots of different kinds of free content–you can’t possibly listen to everything that archive, but you can absolutely view at least thumbnails of all the sleazy paperback covers in this collection, or all the labels in this collection of vintage poison labels, or all the images in this collection of 20s French Art Nouveau images from a particular book, and you could even conceivably look at all the images in the Museum Of Bad Album Covers.
  • I wish I had known where to find the Philosophy Pick Up Bar back when I was single.
  • Today’s xkcd doesn’t make me feel particularly old–I might actually be too old for the optimal response to that–but there’s a story in Rolling Stone that really, really does.
  • Sure we can pretend it’s all about getting people to do a little more exercise, but I’m all for it just from a perspective of putting a little art and fun into people’s lives. I especially like the idea of doing it as a transient feature–a bit of surreality that adds a tiny bit of beauty to the day.
  • Apparently the Kindle is finally going to be available in Canada and lots of other countries, kind of. I was already not interested, just on the DRM basis alone, but even if I had been tempted I think Charlie Stross would have ended that for me.
  • Yeah, I’m putting this story in my back pocket for use in comedic teasing of my Australian comrades when we all meet up in Boston next month.

Posted in General | No Comments »

October 8, 2009 11:00 pm

Yeah, so they’re making an A-Team movie. The more I think about it, the more I like Declan’s theory that Hollywood is clutching after any tiny remnant of things associated with a mass audience. I sadly also admit that I believe this is more effective on my generation than previous ones, because we are total suckers for anything that reminds us of our childhood.

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Metatextual Wonder

October 7th, 2009 11:14 pm

Alice At R'lyeh

Alice at R’lyeh.

You know you want to go look already

Here’s a snippet of Lovecraft and Alice talking to convince you:

“But this monster is merely the mask of what’s worse —
“The faceless monstrosity of the cold universe!
“The meaninglessness of our bleak situation
“The smallness of Man amidst dark obfuscation!”

“What you say,” ventured Alice, “may be true, in its way,
“Though with ‘nonsense’ for ‘meaninglessness’, if I may
“And for ‘bleak’, I’d put ‘curious’, for it seems so to me
“That the world’s full of wonders, not monstrosity.

It’s fun, and the metatext is lovely. Also, a twist ending!

Posted in One-and-done | 3 Comments »

October 6, 2009 11:44 pm

I have enough Australian friends that I usually don’t bother to trot out the tired old “nation of criminals” joke/insult (although I do like Moran’s “it’s a jail” line–but I can’t deliver it like he can). I’m tempted to do it this once, though, just to provide some kind of segue to linking to some vintage Sydney mug shots. Look at those shots–those are some characters, man.

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We have met the enemy

October 6th, 2009 4:19 pm

Safe Zones

What you’re looking at there is an attempt to visualize the results (so far) of a workshop run last year in Stockholm that attempted to define the boundaries of a “safe operating space” in which the ecosystem of the planet can operate without veering towards catastrophe.

The 28 scientists worked out nine categories that they were comfortable setting some safe boundary conditions on, and then attempted to see where we were now with respect to those conditions. So far they’ve evaluated seven of their metrics, and we’re outside the safe zone on three of them–significantly so in some cases.

They aren’t saying the game is over–the boundaries mark points where we are in danger of irreversible “tipping point” type change, but they don’t necessarily indicate catastrophe:

“The idea is to say, ‘Let’s put up some guard rails,’” says Robert Costanza of the University of Vermont. “Maybe the guard rails are for a slope we could have taken and survived, but maybe not. We owe it to human civilization to be more careful.”

I’m generally in favour of any attempt to define the ways we can effect our ecosystem, and to understand the potential consequences of those–at this point we as a species are already capable of making too dramatic a change without understanding what we’re doing.

Now, ironically, civilization has become so powerful that it can reshape the planet itself. “We have become a force to contend with at the global level,” as Johan Rockstrom of the Stockholm Resilience Center in Sweden, puts it. Humans have changed the chemistry of Earth’s oceans, lowering their pH and causing ocean acidification. We are shifting the composition of the atmosphere, raising levels of carbon dioxide higher than they’ve been in at least the past 800,000 years.

Whether or not these limits are defined right, or are the most important ones, I’m not qualified to judge, but at a minimum they should not be ignored, and focusing some attention on them in the context of what kind of changes might move the ecosystem from an elastic change into plastic deformation seems pretty useful to me.

There’s lots more information about the workshop, and some counter-arguments, in the Yale Environment 360 article I pulled the picture and quotes from. There’s an even deeper level of information in the Nature.com special feature that the Yale article is based on–if you want the full story go there. In particular note that there are detailed commentaries on each of the boundaries available.

Looking at the visualization, I can’t help but wonder if Bostrom’s Great Filter–what I black-humouredly called the Doom Constant–isn’t possibly something ecological… Is it possible that civilizations that reach a certain technological point always (or at least a very high “usually”) manage to collapse their local ecosystem by unintended ecological side-effects of their “progress” before they expand beyond their local area of space? Or back to the zoo theory, is it possible that they just won’t talk to us until we learn to live somewhere without destroying it–I could kind of understand that, based on how I feel about student housing now that I’m a grown-up.

(Oh, and the post title, in case you didn’t catch the reference is a Walt Kelly nod.)

Posted in General, Science and Technology | 1 Comment »

October 5, 2009 11:47 pm

To add to the list of things I’m really unhappy with the Obama administration about: letting the torturers get away with blatant destruction of evidence. It’s one thing not to prosecute, it’s a completely different thing to de facto endorse the obstruction of justice, and consequently send the message that it’s OK for things to operate this way; business as usual. Gordon Hewart must be rolling in his grave.

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