Wojit World

Incorrect Pokemon Portmanteaus

2011-04-15T23:10:00.003+01:00

Well here's my blog post for the quarter. I just found a mysterious note next to my bed, which I really can't remember writing, and which only reads "Incorrect Pokemon Portmanteaus." So, for your viewing pleasure, and with apologies to any philatelists, I made a couple.

Square Turtle

Rapper Dash

More words on a blog

2011-01-19T02:03:00.002Z

So I've been back in Australia for weeks, mostly spent wandering around the city, and my house, looking at things and saying "Oh yeah, I remember that." Well one of my favourite rediscoveries of the moment is this old collection of Micallef writingses, which I though I'd lost well before I left the country, called Smithereens. It's mostly a collection of old columns he wrote for The Age, or something, plus a few sketches, etc etc. Anyway, it contains this pair of paragraphs, which are great, and I feel like sharing:

It will come as no surprise to learn that my uncle was an ostler. In fact, I defy you to have any reaction whatsoever, short of befuddlement. True, the grains of time have grit-blasted 'ostler' from common usage, but even way back then we had a hard time working out what one was. Even my uncle wasn't sure. 'How was work?' Auntie would ask as he appeared in the hallway at day's end, suspiciously light attaché case in hand. 'Good, good - yeah,' he'd mumble guiltily before changing the subject. You just let things along in those days.

But I was a curious kid. I snuck into my uncle's study one night and found him sitting at an empty desk, scratching his head and muttering, 'What am I? What am I?' When they took him away less than a year later he had taken to getting about on skis wearing a Viking helmet and a lion skin. 'Look at me - I'm ostling!' he was shrieking as they loaded him into the van. The neighbours watched sympathetically as my aunt waved him off. Good people, I remember thinking - although later they returned under the cover of darkness to spray-paint the word 'Weirdo' on the front of the house. Halcyon days.

So yeah, I remain quite fond of Micallef's comedy stylings, and would fork out for a Newstopia DVD if I saw one around, topical though it was. I also got a copy of this Novella he recently wrote, so hopefully that will be awesome, as I will find out as soon as I read it. Then there's that Other TV Show he recently made... Well, I reserve opinion about that until I see it, preferably in some kind of Ad-free medium.

More about that guy I sometimes go on about.

2010-11-17T11:35:00.004Z

Two years ago I wrote that I would be afraid of running around screaming "Robyn Hitchcock is friggin' awesome!!," as there was every chance that I'd suddenly discover that he actually wasn't that good, and so would "find myself severely embaressed [sic] in a month or two." Apparently I couldn't spell two years ago.

Well two years later I'm still completely in the thrall of this artist, and continue to find new, excellent music by him (most recently devouring his early work with The Soft Boys). He is easily, if last.fm is to believed, which it may as well be, my most-listened-to artist since I learned of his existance. Existence. Apprently I still can't spell.

In 2009 I wrote "I wouldn't exactly recommend Robyn Hitchcock to anyone that I know. I like a lot of his music, but I can't straightforwardly see any reason that anyone-in-particular else should."

In 2010... I suppose I mostly still think this is true. He often seems to fit into this certain niche of music such that no one I know really enjoys that type of music as much as I do, namely the folky niche and the poppy niche. Still... Still... I suppose I still feel this urge to put some kind of recommendation out there, a general recommendation, a registration for posterity that this music is incredible, just so no one can turn to me in 2015 and ask "Why did you not warn me earlier, why did you deprive me of this for the last five years?"

Of course, then there's the problem of what to recommend. His output is pretty diverse in style and (sometimes) quality, though usually on the spectrum between poppy and folky, and usually on the spectrum between good and superb. For someone who suspects they might prefer his folkier side, you can't go past Spooked. For Hitchcock in more of a (restrained) Beatleseque Pop mode, Jewels For Sophia may impress. For an incredible, more punky, or perhaps rather post-punky sound, the Soft Boys' Underwater Moonlight approaches perfection. But I suppose I'm most inclined to recommend the first album of his that I heard, the strange, genre-shifting psychedlic masterpiece, I Often Dream Of Trains. It certainly hooked me.

So yeah, in conclusion I'd say to most of my readers: If you trust I have a good sense of your taste of music, you probably won't be as into Robyn Hitchcock as I am. But just in case I'm underestimating you, it might be worth giving him a listen. Just because I happen to be listening to it at the moment, here's him in an unrepresentatively Rocky moment:

Minor joys

2010-11-13T17:43:00.003Z

One thing that I really thought I'd never get any pleasure from is casual interactions with strangers. Being in Canberra a fair amount a couple of years ago, after living in a city all my life, I remember getting totally freaked out when random people passing in the street, or in parks, would say crazy things like "Good morning" and "Hello." Naturally, I was all like "WHAT'S GOING ON WHO ARE YOU ARRRGH." I'm still pretty sure that's the right response.

Still, since I moved to a more out-of-town area of this already tiny town of St. Andrews, it's been happening to me all over again, on my daily walk to town. But the scary part is that I've started doing it myself. Or, at least, rather, I've started responding to the greetings in kind. Maybe (maybe) even started preemptively greeting the people I recognise as having greeted me in the past. But what I find really weird is that I get some kind of pleasure from this. Like, afterwards, my mood increases. I feel slightly happier for a few minutes. My affective state improves. And to a pretty severe degree too, though it doesn't last very long. I'm not really sure where this joy comes from. Maybe it's just some kind of "Hey, you managed to navigate that social interaction with aplomb!" feeling, or rather a "That's not something you do usually, well done!" thing. Maybe it will wear off.

Similarly, today I actually sustained a conversation with the person behind the counter at the supermarket. Moments before it happened, I would've thought this was pretty much something I would never do, let alone enjoy. I actually disliked it when people tried to talk to me when I worked in a supermarket, but in this case I did not intiate the conversation, so I'm pretty sure I didn't make an already horrible job that much worse today. Anyway, yeah, again, this gave me a pretty substantial boost to my mood, for a good dozen minutes. WHAT'S WRONG WITH MEEEEE!?!?

In unrelated news, here's a song I like too much by a musician who is too excellent for words:

Events, happenings, and transpirations.

2010-11-12T00:21:00.002Z

I have become a PhfD student. I've finally embarked on this grand project of defending a hedonistic theory of well-being... Or perhaps I should rather say a Mental State view. That is, for those who may not know, I am concerned with arguing that what makes a life good for the individual leading that life can be cashed out purely in terms of the quality of that individual's experiences (that is, emotions, moods, feelings, sensations... Those kinds of things.) It's not a popular view, though it once was, and it's been getting quite a few defenders recently. Or maybe it just seems that way because, you know, getting into the literature inevitably leads you to notice people defending a view and then you can be all like "Oh wow, look at all these people defending this view."

I've been unusually busy so far in the semester, mostly writing up Some Stuff about Nozick's Experience Machine. These past two weeks I've been more generally trying to have some Interesting Thoughts on the relationship between well-being and desire, and more or less failing. I might try tomorrow to have some uninteresting thoughts instead.

In other newses, I've moved in to a lovely new place of residence, with a lovely new housemate. I've met a lovely bunch of M. Litts, those who are doing the lovely course I did last year. I went on a lovely reading party to the lovely village of Strontian, after which the lovely element Strontium is named. It's been getting lovely and cold here, but I'll be getting some lovely Australian Summer Action around January. Which is lovely.

Well, now you're up to date with a bunch of facts. And now I should probably be getting some sleep. Fare thee well, every one of you, whoever you may be. Until next time!

Life Updatez

2010-08-31T14:43:00.007+01:00

So, what's happening in my life? Well, I just finished my dissertation; handed it in today. It's pretty... It's pretty okay. To echo sentiments I have heard from more than one other student, I expected a lot, and ended up with not so much. I hoped for a grand unified argument about The Dualism of Practical Reason, about how our practical reasons are incommensurable leading to a fundamental indeterminacy about what an agent "ought to" do when his self interest conflicts with moral demands, and all this kind of stuff, but I ended up with a small collection of barely related arguments leading to a "Well, we just don't know" conclusion. Still, arsetastic as that makes it sound, I'm still pretty happy with it; it has its moments. Like... Everything I say is more or less good, but it doesn't lead anywhere exciting. I was considering linking to it here somehow, but I'd have to work out... How to host it. Hm.

I and James also managed to (almost definitely) finally organise some accommodation for next year, which is good. I'm not entirely clear on when we're moving in and all that, but he, and maybe I, are moving some stuff in today. To that end, I've been cleaning my room, for the first time in a year, so as to pack up all my stuff for the move. It was in so doing that I found, amongst my class notes, a comic, which I suspect was meant to illustrate how the standards for what counts as knowledge may change in a high-stakes situation. I found it amusing, so I copied it. Here it is:

Hilarious, innit? No? Yeah, it probably looked better on paper. I really need to get a tablet or scanner or something. Eh, probably not worth it.

Another Victory for Genre Tags!

2010-07-17T14:59:00.004+01:00

So my earphones have been pretty broke for some time. The kind of broke where the left speaker makes an awful buzzing noise now and then for reasons that I'm not astute enough to completely pin down. This is extremely annoying, as I use them to listen to music whenever I go anywhere. This has possibly made me even more reluctant to ever go anywhere than I ordinarily am.

However, I have discovered this!: For whatever reason, the haphazard collection of tunes that I happen to have tagged as being "Dream Pop" cause the buzzing to happen substantially less. I'm sure there's a reason for this, probably something to do with... Less bass? Maybe? Eh. Anyway, the upshot is that now I can once again go places, so long as I'm happy to be carried along by a wave of ethereal soundscapes and indecipherable wailing. Which, of course, I always am. Here's some:

That said, I ordered some new earphones last night. Specifically some of those crazy gross ones that, like, go right into your ears. I've been wary of them before, but I'm sick of my other earphones being crappy* and dying on me all the time. And I'm not sure I can commit to carrying actual headphones around, and I worry about them pressing my glasses right into the side of my head. As can happen. Still... I'm worried about my ears going "Ow, what are these gross things in me, go away," and of being hit by a car while I wander around unable to hear anything but Elizabeth Fraser's ethereal wailing. So let's hope both and either of those things don't happen!

Am Using.

2010-07-12T22:44:00.004+01:00

This Thing, which purports to look at a piece of your writing and tell you who you write like, is quite amusing for a while. (I discovered it via Mighty God King.) Sadly (judging by the MGK comments thread) it seems to have a really limited amount of authors to compare you to... But it appears to have discovered something:

With a very few deviations, the vast majority of my philosophical writing is compared to H. P. Lovecraft. Who I've never read. If not him, it tends to be either Stephen King or Edgar Allan Poe. So yeah, apparently I write philosophy like a horror author. Same goes for my blog posts.

The results for my (old and crappy) fiction is much more varied, but tends towards Joyce or Atwood, which I don't believe for a second.

This post, incidentally, also gets likened to Atwood. Even with this addition.

(Speaking of writing, I should do more of it. On this blog. And on my dissertation too, actually. *sigh*)

This was a better idea in my head

2010-07-06T19:55:00.002+01:00

househousehousehousehousehousehousehouse

London, Gigs, Dead, Dance.

2010-06-10T23:12:00.005+01:00

So despite my original vague plans to spend a week or so in London, I'm now coming to the end of my third week here, thanks to some folks showing up. Thankfully, I now have some internets to keep me company. So I figured I might exploit said internets to give some thoughts about the gigs I've seen while here.

The first was fun. I was already rather fond of them, having apparently, probably in retrospect undeservedly, declared their album the 6th best of 2009. It was pure pop action, among an absurdly enthusiastic audience much of whom seemed to know all the words to all their songs. I'd be inclined to suggest that the frontman, Nate Ruess, was one of the most egoistic musicians I've ever seen on a stage, but frankly it might just be that the audience loved him, and he kinda knew it. They played possibly all of their album, plus an entertaining but fairly conservative rendition of Radio Gaga. In the end, my opinion of fun. was pretty unchanged; I left thinking I would've loved to have seen The Format live, and convinced that while fun. are not nearly as good as Ruess' former band, they could really become something quite excellent.

The second, the following day, was a bit of a gear shift, a classical concert. And maaaan am I going to get dirty looks for this, but I've totally forgot the name of the person playing. I've also forgotten what she played. I remember there was some Rossini played, though not by the violinist who everyone was there to see... And I prefered the Rossini to the... Whatever else was played. Man, I'm really not very good at this bit, am I? Anyway, I enjoyed it enough, but as tends to be the case with me and classical music, it failed to really grab me.

The third, the next day, was a mathcore band from Sheffield called Rolo Tomassi. This was kinda insane and intense, featuring a tiny girl screaming in a demon voice, a throbbing moshpit, and some kind of epic guitarwork that I can barely work my brain around. I loved the experience, even if I couldn't totally appreciate the music on the same level as most of the audience. I definitely noticed prefering what I gathered was their more recent stuff more than their less recent stuff... But that's about as insightful as I get on this one.

The fourth, the day after, making four in a row, was planned well in advance, Bobby McFerrin at the Barbican. Now this was quite a thing. A room full of people who loved him on so many levels... Probably no one there who would have the reaction of most people I mentioned this to, of "What else did he do other than Don't Worry Be Happy?" I suspect I was into the concert less than most of the audience, as... There were parts that didn't totally thrill me. In brief, I loved it when he really involved the audience, getting everyone singing (filling that part of my heart that loves singing in large, anonymous groups), or having little duets with random audience members... I also really enjoyed the choral pieces from his most recent album. What didn't thrill me, though it may've been the primary attraction for some, were many of his solo, purely vocal improvisational pieces. Eeeeeh, I don't know, I'm sure that musically he was doing some good things, and on a virtuosity level his voice is definitely amazing... But there wasn't much there for me to really get emotionally involved with, besides maybe just... Joy. He's big on that particular emotion.

The final gig, 2 weeks later, from which I have just returned, was Brendan Perry. This was great. The audience was about 50% aging goths and 45% ex-goths, but Brendan Perry... He plays the good kind of Goth Rock. Or Dream Pop as I prefer to tag it. The set was comprised of about 50% songs I recognised, some originally by Dead Can Dance, some from his first solo album, and 50% new stuff from his latest album (which sounds like it'll be top notch). His stage banter was lousy/non-existent, which really stood out when an instrument died and he should've been filling for time, but all of the music was excellent. I've always thought I'd love to see a Dead Can Dance concert, and... Well, I'd still love to, as the other half of that band, Lisa Gerrard, does a very distinct, and also very excellent thing. Anyway, it's fast coming to my attention that, having just seen this performance, I am far too gushing to actually say anything worthwhile, so let's just say that I am so glad to have heard Brendan Perry singing The Carnival Is Over live, and can cross it off my list of Things To Hear Before I Or The Concerned Parties Die. My hypothetical list of that nature. Here's a strange video of The Carnival Is Over. Maybe it's not for everyone, but it's certainly for me.

(Next week: back to St. Andrews, back to doing some gorram work...)

Windy

2010-03-30T13:09:00.000+01:00

While I'm in my bedroom, the wind sounds like "wwwweeehehhhhehwwehwwehhhhehhwhehhheeehhehhhh!"
When I'm in the kitchen, the wind sounds like
"vwiiiiieeeieieeeeeeieeeeeeeeeeeieeeeieieiieee!"

It's a good thing I went into the kitchen early enough to hear the vw, or it would've just sounded stupid.

A thoughtless post.

2010-03-19T00:04:00.003Z

Two essays handed in, and a presentation given. The most stressful pair of weeks in my life has come to a close. I used to pride myself on not ever being particularly stressed. I sailed through the HSC without getting particularly worked up about it (it helped that my sights were set relatively low, on the entry mark for an Arts Degree). Studying for my undergrad degree never really got to me, except for when I had to give the occasional presentation. I spent my honours year laughing at all the maths and software types going crazy around me. I was a little terrified before I started teaching, but got used over it surprisingly quickly. These weeks, though, it finally all really got to me. I worry; I can't tell whether it was just because there was a lot to do, or if I'm finally losing my... Relaxation... Waves. Is this a sign of things to come? Eh, probably not, it was probably just an oddly large amount of work all at once. Yeah, that'd be it.

Plans for now: Relax, sleep, laundry, party, computer games, movies, internet, books, Ace Attorney Investigating. Whatnot. So given nothing else interesting to say here, I'm going to get started on that second item.

That cat sees itself as an exception to a universal law.

2010-03-04T15:47:00.003Z

Kant, Kant, Kant Kant Kant Kant Kant!

I have an essay to be writing, on Internal Reasons and Williams and Parfit and Reductionism and Michael Smith and... I'm not sure I've ever found a philosophy essay such non-easy going. Maybe it's just a total lack of motivation, maybe it's an overwhelming desire to be watching Battlestar Galactica... I don't know. I suspect that it's just all really vague and unclear and; look, what I want to argue is that...

Parfit has this argument that we shouldn't be Normative Reductionists. We shouldn't try to reduce claims like "X has a reasont to ϕ" to non-normative, purely descriptive claims, like "X has certain desires and natural certain facts are the case and yadda yadda yadda". He argues that any attempt to do so will inevitably leave something out of the picture, something called Normativity. And so what is Normativity? Well, he can't tell us that, because that's ALSO irreducible. So how can we know that it's missing in those earlier cases? Damned if I know.

My point is... This might just be a totally methodological debate. I demand clarity. I demand to know what stuff is. He tells me we can't expect to know, in any more basic terms, what this stuff is. I ask why not, and he tells me that he can't tell me. It's just... You know... Basic.

And all this really annoys me, but at the same time, I realise that we can't be reductionists about EVERYTHING. Some things HAVE to be basic, of course, so they can be the things that other things get reduced to. And maybe there's no particular reason to suspect that there must be only one thing, or some minimal set of things, that all other things are reduced to. So maybe it's just him putting the irreducibility in one place, and me putting it in another. In which case, maybe this isn't purely a methodological issue.

I guess what I'm saying here is that perhaps the reason I'm finding this essay so hard to write, is because I don't have the slightest gorram idea what I want to say. Or how to say it. Or if it's right. BUT I FEEL STRONGLY ABOUT IT.

This kinda sucks. And yet, for some reason I refuse to give up and try something else. Perhaps because I only have, like, a few days to write this thing.

Well, anyway, I better get back to it. Also, I may be totally misrepresenting everything and everyone here, so don't take my word for anything. Actually, that should be a standard disclaimer for this blog. It'd certainly save me a lot of worry.

Edit: Also, yes, to a large degree this essay does feel like me trying to take on one of my philosophical heroes. I have adored Parfit, and his Reasons & Persons, since my first year of university, and still hold him up as a model of clarity, precision, charitability and comprehensiveness, all huge virtues in my idea of philosophical methodology. I just happen to also think that he's totally wrong (and uncharacteristically vague) on this particular point (and a few others). This desire to take on my hero may be blinding me to the fact that the real strength of my essay will probably be in my comments on Michael Smith, and so this should be my focus, rather than, as it will probably end up, a rushed conclusion.

Lyrical Observations

2010-02-18T14:22:00.005Z

Here's a problem that I've been having, illustrated through examples:

In this meta-ethics class today, we were discussing the Buck-Passing Account of value. This is the idea that statements about value can be translated into statements about reasons. Thus, our esteemed lecturer kept using expressions of the form "to say X is to say Y." For example, "To say that dancing is good is to say that there are reasons to bring about dancing." That kind of thing. There was a lot of it, and it ran all through a one hour lecture. Unfortunately, every time he said anything of this form, I started thinking of the Sunset Rubdown lyrics:

To say the war is over is to say you are a widoooooooooooooow!
You're not a widow yet!

Yeah, that got pretty annoying. I totally had that song in my head... Until the next class.
The next class was a moral theory class, taught by a pair including Jonathan Way. Now around Jonathan I've had the same problem since a class last semester. Whenever I see him, I start thinking of the Wolf Parade lyrics

Jonathan, Jonathan!
Waterfalls are running thin, you know
Here's a holy grail for you to hold
Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!

Yeah, also not particularly helpful. Maybe a bit distracting. So given these examples, you can see what my problem is. That's right, Spencer Krug is taking over my brain.

I regret not actually making the Bromst tent, and leaving it in Sydney.

2010-01-15T15:21:00.003Z

I don't think there has been a single essay that I have written, since this course began, such that I have not listened to Bromst while writing it. But not in a distracting way, in a Listening To This Album Actually Makes Me Work Better way. Both because I sometimes actually read and write while listening to the album which is like unheard of, and because if I stop reading and writing in order to listen to some of it, I nonetheless get some serious thinking-about-relevant-essay-related-stuff done while listening to it. Look, this may not sound that exciting, but the prospect of music that actually helps me do work, rather than just distracting me from it, or (for more menial tasks) just occupies my brain while I do it... It's... It's very exciting to me.

That said, taking the time out from writing this Smith essay in order to write this blog post... Not so productive.

FIRST POST OF THE YEAR YEAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

Nonetheless

2009-12-07T23:33:00.001Z

This remains the greatest album cover of all time.

It Says Right Here I'm Always Right! Part 3.

2009-12-04T11:00:00.000Z

Why is this page short than the last two? That seems silly. I could ponder this, but that would be Further Ado:

3. Ramona Falls - Intuit: Apparently Ramona Falls is the side project of some guy from Menomena. Of course, I have no idea what Menomena is, but I do know I love side projects. This album is some incredibly beautiful, moderately exciting dream pop. We're talking... Really good. Like, with the instruments, and the playing, and the musics. It's all good. The more ears you have, the more you should use them to hear this album. I loved it instantly. It surprised the heck out of me, and naturally it won't be as surprising for you, as you trust my opinions wholeheartedly.

2. Andrew Bird - Noble Beast: Oh yeah! Another great Andrew Bird album. Maybe a little more eclectic than the previous few, a little more Doshy, but... But... Man, I find it really hard to talk about Andrew Bird, because he is A GOD AMONG MEN. Given this, I also find it hard to work out why I'm putting it at number 2. I suspect it may have something to do with it being released at the beginning of the year, and, so, being extremely familiar by now. But really, every song on this album is great. Ouo and Unfolding Fans not being songs, of course. Some are even greater than great, like, oh, say, ANONANIMAL! I like that song. It makes me EXCITED. I have programmed my computer to make it AUTOMATICALLY RANDOMLY ACTIVATE MY CAPSLOCK whenever it is played. Look, let's just say it being at #2 is completely arbitrary, because this album is EXACTLY AS GOOD AS:

1. Sunset Rubdown - Dragonslayer!: Yeah, Dragonslayer. Obviously it was going to be these two at the top. Dragonslayer is pretty much exactly the album I've been waiting for since I heard Random Spirit Lover. It's like a perfect realisation of what Sunset Rubdown can and should be. Which is... Epic. Like, Epic lyrics, Epic songs, Epic themes, Epic volume. Epic album art, if you're into maniquins posing next to crystal balls while perched on some kind of bird sculpture thing covered in Christmas lights. And who isn't?!? Listen guys, that album art is amazing, but the album is Even Better Than That. Yes, yes, I know it's hard to believe, but it is. Actually, Dragonslayer was a bit of a slow-burner for me. Perhaps because I had already heard other, different versions of some of the tracks. Perhaps also because I didn't have the volume high enough the first time I heard it. Also, because it's less varied than their previous album. But it's more consistent. It seems to have a kind of thematic coherence which is very attractive. The theme in question being EPICNESS. Look, it's just rad.

Listadaisy Spats! Part 2.

2009-12-02T11:00:00.000Z

Without further ado ado:

6. fun. - Aim And Ignite: I was slightly annoyed when The Format broke up a few months after cancelling their Australian concerts. Well, now one of the two primary members of The Format, Nate Ruess, has a new band, called fun. And they have released this album, Aim And Ignite. Frankly, it sounds a lot like The Format, only 12 times more over the top. Which is really rather over the top. This album is good for much the same reason that Dog Problems was amazing: It presents a kind of excitable pop music that owes a lot to classic pop bands, but still advances on them, doing something new and interesting. By which I mean, it has a timeless appeal, without sounding unoriginal or dated. Which is a fairly rare thing to do these days, methinks.

Sadly, Aim And Ignite isn't quite as awesome as Dog Problems. It's just a little less coherent, and also a little less varied. The lyrics are a little less clever, and a little more obscured by the music. The songs are a little less catchy, and... quite a lot less affecting. Plus there are two really quite annoying songs. Still, it's definitely worth listening to, certainly enjoyable, and reassures me that Nate Ruess will continue to produce great music. And I would totally be dancing around the room to it, if only I had some decent speakers.

Okay, we're getting to the part of this list where we're talking about really, very excellent albums, which I would unreservedly recommend.

5. Mumford & Song - Sigh No More: I heard about this album from Lydia, and immediately sought it out. I am almost embarrassed to like it as much as I do. It is like a laundry list of all the things that I tend to love in music: folky melodies, gratuitous vocal harmonies, slightly-out-of-place brass, jangly instrumentation, song structures that tend to start out soft, mellow, and calm, before slowly ramping up in intensity, then finally going completely batshit nuts with walls of noise and emotive, screaming lyrics. And... And is that a banjo? I think it is, yes, Mumford & Sons just won the prize.

Still... I have reservations. I almost need to force myself to have reservations in the face of such raw, compelling excellences, which play so directly to my aesthetic biases. Firstly, the songs can be just a bit samey. I mean, they really ALL have basically those same above-mentioned features. Still, despite the sameiness, the album does not overstay its welcome for me. It's just a lot of similar songs, that are sufficiently enjoyable that I don't get sick of them. Maybe I will if I listen to it more. Another issue: the album really isn't that original. Like, it's not breaking huge ground or anything. I sometimes think originality might be a bit overrated, and that there's a lot to be said for an excellent instantiation or combination of old concepts. But still, you know, it's always nice. Another reservation would be that... Okay, I maybe haven't listened to it carefully enough to make this judgement, but I worry the album might be a whole lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing. As in, I'm not sure I get the point of it all. Like, Fleet Foxes produced an in-some-ways-similar album last year, but that album created a consistent image for me, a consistent message vaguely along the lines of "Hey, let's all go be neo-hippies and live in a freakin' forest or something." All I really get from Sigh No More is something like... "HEY LOOK! WE'RE REALLY EXCITED AND/OR ANGRY ABOUT STUFF! THINGS ARE SO IMPORTANT, IN WAYS!" Anyway, I suspect I'm only not putting this at #1 because I don't want to be a total slave to my passions... But then, in my more charitable moments, I maybe suspect I will just eventually get sick of Sigh No More, in a way that I won't with:

4. Dan Deacon - Bromst: BROMST! It's by Dan Deacon. Dan Deacon is pretty cool. I was excited for this album before, during, and after seeing him play live, which is an amazing... Thing... To do. Bromst is kinda like Dan Deacon trying to be more serious than he was on Spiderman Of The Rings. And it kinda works! At least, there is less chipmunk voice.

Honestly, at first I don't think it really impressed me that much. I would let the album play, while doing something else, and then realise after an hour that I'd been hearing a whole lot of noise and excitement, and now it was over. It's hard to really have a strong opinion about that kind of experience. But only relatively recently did I really listen to the album closely... And that really pays off. For reasons I can't fathom. I realised the album is excellent, energetic, engaging, ecentric, ecstatic... Pretty danged good. It has less immediate impact than Spiderman Of The Rings, and it is kinda disappointing that you can't find yourself singing along to it, as the vocals are less common, and completely indecipherable. But nonetheless, it may actually be a better album. Hard to tell. They're a bit different. Anyway, as with that former album, it's one that you have to be in the mood for. Surprisingly, turns out that when you're reading Hilary Putnam is a good time to listen to Bromst, if you don't mind dance-reading.

In sad news, I left my Bromst Tent in Sydney. What was I thinking!?! FIND OUT ON FRIDAY!

OMG It's A Thing! Part 1.

2009-11-30T11:00:00.000Z

So I finally got around to putting together a BEST ALBUMS OF 2009 LIST (or rather, I finally settled on one)! Yes, just what everyone was anxiously waiting for, don't I know it. It... It was really hard. Not because every single piece of music released this year was astoundingly awesome, no, more because, at some point, saying that one piece of music is better than some other, entirely different piece of music is extraordinarily arbitrary. But these are familiar issues. Oh yeah, I decided to split it into three parts in order to waste everyone's time. WITHOUT FURTHER ADOOO:

10. Islands - Vapours: This album STARTS with a reasonably obscure Kate Bush musical reference. Man, I was impressed. Other than that, it's a (merely) pretty good album. Much more mellow that I might've expected from Islands. It's pretty good for chilling out and making myself some dinner. Pretty good for taking a break while making myself dinner in order to write this. Pretty good for burning down the house from some hideous kitchen mishap born of a well-established maladroitness regarding ovens. Pretty good for I better get back in there. Pretty good for I wrote this blurb, like, a week ago, so I'm not actually going into the kitchen right now. Pretty good for Next Album Please!

9. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavillion: Yeah, I know, I'm totally failing to be an experimental indie rock hipster dude by putting this album so early. But... Argh, I don't know. Some of these songs are great. My Girls and Brothersport are really superb, and they totally get me dancing, get me singing along with the indecipherable lyrics and Adobe Slabs. But I feel like the only song on the album with any actual emotional resonance is Bluish. And most of the songs on the album besides those three are merely... Alright. Yeah, I really just can't place my dissatifaction with this album. It's good! I mean, yeah, it's good, it's on my list, isn't it? But it doesn't really do that much for me. It's just some songs, you know. Incidentally, I have pretty much exactly the same things to say about Set 'Em Wild, Set 'Em Free. SPOILERS!

8. Bat For Lashes - Two Suns: Oh man, I totally forgot about this album. Just before it came out, when I'd just heard a few of the tracks, I was very excited. It sounded like... Like Bat For Lashes previously had hints of some amazing potential awesomeness, but now it was all going to come out in a torrent of ethereal Kate Bushesque whimsicawesomeality. So yeah, excited. Then when I actually heard the album, it was inevitably just a little bit of a let down. But you know, listening back to it again, after quite some time, it's still actually a /really/ good album. Sure, its heights soar far above the rest of the songs, but said rest of the songs are still solidly enjoyable.

7. The Mountain Goats & John Vanderslice - Moon Colony Bloodbath: So, I'm cheating already, this is only an EP. It's a collaboration between the Mountain Goats and John Vanderslice. Both of whom released their own, seperate, entire albums this year, both of which actually rather disappointed me. This, on the other hand, is excellent. Exactly the kind of music I like to hear from The Mountain Goats, exactly the kind of music I like to hear from Vanderslice, all in one terribly convenient package. This provides me with clear evidence that John Vanderslice needs to continue to be The Mountain Goats' producer. It would totally be higher, were it longer.

To be... CONTINUED! On Wednesday!

I haven't blogged in weeks, yeaaaah!

2009-11-20T13:21:00.008Z

So many essays to do, Yeaaaah!

I wrote a Philosophy of Mind one last week, which I think was surprisingly good. Or I suprisingly think was good. One of those. Unfortunately right now, I'm working on one about about George Campbell's account of belief in testimony, and it is woeful. I seriously don't know how to write historical philosophy. Or history of philosophy. One of those. I seem to be rambling on about how his account doesn't make much sense, and all the while I have this voice in the back of my head saying "Of course it doesn't make much sense! It's 300 years old! This is not a particularly current view!" It doesn't help that not many people in the literature seem to think his essay is even worth objecting to. No one mentions it. Aaah, I don't know what I'm doing.

In other news, I'm getting excited by inappropriate uses of the word "Yeaaaaah!" recently. As in, in the last 10 minutes. Here's two examples:
a) The always classic:

b) An excellent Robyn Hitchcock lyric from the song Filthy Bird:

Look at the massacre on cable.
But you know it won't happen here.
We're all too busy watching massacres on cable.
Oh Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

I can't think of any other examples. I'd better get back to this essay.

Okay, here's a clip of Filthy Bird. Mostly.

Aaah, I love Robyn Hitchcock. I gather this is from the Jonathan Demme directed concert film, Storefront Hitchcock. I would like to get my hands on that. Though I suppose it's all on Youtube.

Thought for the day.

2009-11-06T17:01:00.000Z

Being in a sock store is a good context in which to say "ahh, yes, socks, I think I'll need some socks."

The Critique Of Best Thing Of Time Lists

2009-11-03T11:17:00.009Z

At the end of a year, and the end of a decade, it's obviously going to be a big time for Best Things Of The Time list. Of which the most common, or at least the most salient to me, seems to be Best Album lists. Like this one, this one, etc. Naturally I'm tempted to make one myself. But I start to wonder about the point of them. Like, what's the purpose? What are they trying to do? What would I be attempting to achieve by constructing and publishing such a list?

Obviously the answer is going to be different for me, just some dude writing on a blog primarily read by friends, than it is for something like Pitchfork, a widely read review site which represents more than the tastes of a single mind.

The most immediate and cynical answer is that they're about showing off how excellent your own taste in music is. I think this is the kind of answer that is presumed by some comments I got regarding my anachronistic top five list last year, that it displayed (and perhaps parodied) a certain standard exhibitionist structure, having a slightly surprising choice at number 1 (to be attention grabbing), an obviously great album at number 2 (to reassure audiences that I do have tastes that it is possible to relate to), something completely obscure at number 3 (to show of my obscure music cred), etc. My most immediate reaction to this comment was just "But, no, I actually think those were the best albums of that year, in that order." My more measured reaction was to think maybe I did not-so-consciously construct it that way.

A second answer, and one that particularly appeals to me, is that they are a purely self-indulgent, self-investigatory exercise: I've listened to all this music, I have some vague opinions about their values, and their relative values, and I'd like to just make it all a bit more explicit by ordering the albums, and writing a bit about each of them to justify my choices to myself. On this way of seeing it, actually publishing the list here on a blog is completely incidental; the real audience is myself, and actually writing it up, and apparently addressing it to an external reader, is just a way of ensuring that my thoughts are coherent, orderly, fairly argued, and understandable. This answer appeals to me because I already do plenty of things that look like this. For example, I construct iTunes playlists just of those songs that have brought me to tears, or those by Canadian artists. There's not much use to such lists, to me or anyone else, it's just that I like the idea of having access to reliable information about this. You know, for implausible emergencies? Again, what the hell is the point of using something like last.fm if not to gather pointless information on myself; it's not like anyone else would look at that information as much as I do. But the problem with that kind of information is that it's all purely descriptive, and unjustified. The end of year list thing is so interesting to me because it is a more evaluative form of this same kind of activity, and so, I think, much more valuable in itself.

Another purely self-interested answer to the question, and a related one, is: By resolving to make such a Best Of Year list, I thereby give myself some motivation to actually listen out all the albums in the year that I may've missed, that I have vaguely heard might be good, or that I've listened to, but not quite carefully enough. So with that list from last year, I actually went out of my way to hear all of This Year's Model, Excitable Boy and Peter Gabriel's first self titled album, just for the purposes of writing that post, which was a totally worthwhile exercise.

Another less solipsistic answer is the friendly suggestion that a good reason to make such a list is just to recommend awesome albums to everyone who might read the post. This obviously looks like the most noble answer, so it'd be nice if it were true. Unfortunately I'm not convinced that it is true, or if it is that it's particularly sensible. I mean, why wait until the end of the year, instead of just recommending stuff as it comes? Why try to recommend some set of 10 albums to everyone, rather than tailoring your recommendations to individuals? Why make such a list when there are already so many other people making such lists, such that if everyone was doing it for this purpose it would be collectively self-defeating, as everyone would have too many recommendations coming in all at the same time to possibly heed a significant number of them? Why force recommendations into such an unnatural format as an arbitrary amount of albums over an arbitrary period of time? The best answer to all these questions is probably just "it being the end of the year gives one a decent excuse to do it now, rather than never. The arbitrary format makes it doable without too much creativity." Also, despite all those issues, I can't deny the thought going through my head when I write such a list, "Man, everyone should totally love this album as much as I do." Though if I were to believe (and correctly understand) Kant, this may just be part of the idea that, in making an aesthetic judgement, I universalise it.

Finally, there is the possibility that the making of top 10 type lists at the end of a year is just some arbitrary Music Nerd tradition. Problem with this answer, of course, is that plenty of music nerds don't do it, so you're still going to need something like one of the above answers to account for those who do.

But then, of course, the most obvious conclusion is that all of the above considerations/motivations go into the construction of such lists. Still, I am still inclined to say that, for myself, the self-justificatory reason is still my strongest. Anyway, all that said, I will now go on to not end this post with such a list!

Try as I might, I could not stop them entering.

2009-10-28T13:53:00.002Z

I have a certain problem.

In Scotland, there is a not insignificant sheep population. 7,131,000 sheep, according to some random internet source, which would make one sheep per person. This is admittedly somewhat less than Australia's equally dubiously estimated five sheep per capita. The difference, though, is that in Scotland, I seem to see the sheep all the time. They line the roads to Stirling, and roam the hills of Skye. I literally can't walk to the supermarket without passing a small flock (well okay, literally I could if I changed my route).

"But," I hear you say, "sheep are awesome. What's the problem?"

Well, I was getting to that. The problem is that whenever I see a bunch of sheep I instantly get the Robert Wyatt song Heaps Of Sheeps stuck in my head. I barely even noticed this song hiding in my library a month ago, but now rarely a day goes by that I don't think of it.

Now, of course, it must be said that it is a pretty great song! Dreamy and atmospheric... Lyrically amusing... Catchy, but in a Robert Wyatt kind of way. Which seems to be a good thing. So yeah, sure, it's fine. My only worry would be... If this continues. If six months from now I'm still humming Heaps Of Sheeps, secluding myself in some abandoned Folly, hiding from civilised society and the prying eyes of the ubiquitous sheep, clad only in a blanket ironically constructed from the very wool of the very sheeps that haunt me still. I would find myself clutching to my one remaining hope, that someday I may be free from the harrowing influence of the demon sheep, as Global Warming will have shrunk them down to nothing.

Of course, all that is pretty unlikely to happen. So I don't really know why I brought it up.

Skye? Hi!

2009-10-25T22:13:00.000Z

So I went to the Isle of Skye with the St. Andrews Philosophy Reading Party last weekend, and it was excellent. Unfortunately, I don't feel I have much to say about it, basically because a certain James has already said it all, with greater vividity and thoroughness than I suspect I could muster (and that may be the first time in my life I have spelt "thoroughness" correctly without assistance).

Still, I suppose I could just point out the two major points of departure between our experiences!

1) I went there and back via the minibus, rather than in Simon's car. This was probably a less exciting affair, as my inability to go for extended periods of time without filling my ears with music, and my tendency to get carsick if I tried to turn around to converse with the Americans behind me, combined to incline me towards listening to my iPod much of the way up. Of course, that was kinda awesome, because the music was great. Just felt a taaad anti-social.

2) Sadly I did not join Konrad's acclaimed car trip to Talisker Rock, as I was heartily losing a game of Munchkin when it began (fun fact for Munchkin aficionados!: during this game I reached level 7, but then lost to the Wright Brothers. Back to level 1! Awesome). I did, however, later join a six-person stroll to said rock, and encountered the returning Konrad-Car en route, plus one rambling Skorupski. It was bracing, but involved significantly fewer seaweed-swords. Took about 4 hours there and back.

All in all, an excellent time! Rocks, waters, foods, conversations, sheeps... All one could possibly want from life. Or five things one could possibly want from life, anyway.

Glasgow and Richman. Mostly Richman.

2009-10-12T22:56:00.008+01:00

So, I went to Glasgow to see Jonathan Richman. It was pretty good, the whole thing!

I took a train up from St. Andrews, which was cheaper than I expected (about £16 pound return), took about as long as I expected (around 3 hours each way, with a quick change at Edinburgh), and about as pleasant as I might've hoped (listened to musics the whole way, looked out the windows).

Glasgow was... Glaswegian. You know, city, pretty, nice. I visited Forbidden Planet and bought myself some more Scott Pilgrim for whatever reason. I had an excellent Goats Cheese Salad. I checked out some galleries and museums. Continued to be uninterested by classic art, continued to be excited by modern art, continued to... Be in transport museums for some reason.

Speaking of classic art... I saw Jonathan Richman! This is a valid segue, as he sang a song about Vermeer, and another about Pablo Picasso.

I suspect no one I know who is reading this blog listens to Jonathan Richman, possibly despite my occasional prompting, so here's an intro: He's an American musician from Boston, who made an excellent, classic Punk-inspiring album in the early 70s, then decided he didn't want to do that any more, and started making naively innocent, childlike music, then deeply affected sentimental singer/songwriter type stuff. For lack of a better description. That wasn't a great introduction. Anyway, the point is that he has this certain nerdy, sensitive, innocent persona, and a few metric tons of sincerity to back it up. He also has a certain history, with a catalogue of hits that are stylistically very disjoint from his current way of writing and performing music. Luckily, I think most in the room (which was nicely packed) were very familiar with all his work, and there to see the modern Richman, not the early 70s one. Incidentally, the average age would've been... Early 40s probably. I have such old-man tastes.

Anyway, the performance was great. Purely joyful. Never have I seen a performer smile so damn much while on stage. Never have I heard so much handclapping and singing from an audience. The band consisted of him on guitar, plus one Tommy Larkins on drums. Occasionally he would put down the guitar to pick up a cowbell, or just dance awkwardly. Or to strike this pose:

Yes, that is a terrible pose, but he did it, like, 4 times, and it always got a bit of a cheer. By which I mean Audience Going Wild. He was very capable of creating such a reaction. It's something to do with Absurdly Endearing Sincerity, I think. Also, he had a few techniques like... Well, the mid-song banter was always enjoyable (like in the middle of Egyptian Reggae, "Who would've thought this would be a hit record?"). And he has a way of encoring individual songs, which I've never really seen before. As in, when a song gets a particularly good reaction, he picks up his guitar again and runs through the chorus a few more times. Which tends to just create an even bigger reaction. He did it twice with No One Was Like Vermeer, and gave the delightful impression that he would never finish with his last song of the night, My Baby Love Love Loves Me, which had most of the audience singing along (fairly incompetently, which really didn't matter).

Anyway, in case anyone cares, or at least for my own memoryification, here's what he played!:
1) I Was Dancing In The Lesbian Bar (An insanely good choice of opening, as it immediately encourages both singing and dancing)
2) Pablo Picasso (With a great spanish guitar kind of sound, which made it extremely dissimilar to the punky original)
3) Springtime In New York
4) Keith Richards (New. Excellent.)
5) Egyptian Reggae
6) When I Dance
7) Because Her Beauty Is Raw And Wild
8) Girlfriend
9) Time Has Gone By So Fast
10) Let Her Go Into The Darkness (My least favourite of the night, for whatever reason)
11) Mr. Sorrow (?) (New? Pretty good!)
12) Old World (This is pretty interesting, because it's on both his first, and his latest albums. Back then he says he "stills loves the Old World," these days he wants to "say goodbye to the Old World." Time seems to have made him less nostalgic.)
13) Stultified (?) (New. Rather good!)
14) No One Was Like Vemeer (Best song of the night, for my money)
15) Le Printemps Des Amoureux Est Venu (So French.)
16) Es Como El Pan (An excellent song, even if it's twelve times too Spanish for me to understand.)
17) My Affected Accent (New? Look, no online video is going to capture how great this concert or this song was, but I'm going to embed one below anyway)
18) This Romance Will Be Different For Me
19) My Baby Love Love Loves Me

So yes, this was one of the greatest concerts I've been to, and well worth excellent-anyway trip to Glasgow. It's made me somewhat more optimistic about the idea of travelling to another city in order to see a gig now and then, even though it was quite a bit more expensive than, you know, just living in the same city. Maybe it'll be easier going to Edinburgh, but they don't seem to get quite so many good shows there, alas. Here is some kind of video!:

Parfit, Sidgwick, and Kant.

2009-10-04T18:59:00.009+01:00

As may be clear to people who know me well, or long time readers of this blog, I'm rather fond of the philosopher Derek Parfit. His book, Reasons & Persons, is one of the greatest I have read. Despite this, I have for a long time put off reading the draft manuscript of his (maybe) soon-to-be-released book that has been floating around the internet for so long, originally titled Climbing The Mountain, now apparently called On What Matters. I usually figure I might wait until it comes out in book form, thinking that I'd prefer not to read something of such length online, and that it is, after all, still a draft. But after reading a paper in which this draft manuscript is actually cited, I thought I might check it out again. I downloaded the latest draft (approximately 600 pages long), and read the introduction.

This is how it begins:

While describing how he came to write his great, drab book The
Methods of Ethics, Sidgwick remarks that he had ‘two masters’: Kant and Mill. My two masters are Sidgwick and Kant.

I have already fallen in love with this book. Though it is early days yet (Parfit explains that he came to Kant in the 90s, well after having written Reasons & Persons), I am inclined to say that my two masters, at this point, are Sidgwick and Parfit. He goes on to discuss his two masters for the rest of the introduction. His quote-heavy musings on Sidgwick echo my own; the man is a brilliantly clear, careful writer, always precise, rarely wrong, frequently dry. And, of course, to the right kind of temperament, very inspiring.

His thoughts on Kant, of course, struck me somewhat harder. As you may also know, I am not a man who is fond of Kant. I can't say I've read much of his work, I probably haven't even got through The Groundwork Of The Metaphysics Of Morals (I actually can't remember). Parfit claims "It is Kant who made really bad
writing philosophically acceptable." (I have recently heard it claimed, by a German, that he is actually easier to read in the English translations). Parfit portrays Kant as a really angry man, who is at his best when he calms the hell down. He shows Kant to be a self-contradictory, frequently incorrect extremist, redeemed by the occasional profound truth.

To be honest, I am not overwhelmingly convinced to make the leap into Kant's oeuvre just yet. In coming to St. Andrews, I had the option of taking a course on Kant, but quickly opted for Philosophers Of The Scottish Enlightenment instead. However, I have again heard the familiar claim that there is something a bit odd in reaching this point in a Philosophical career without having taken a course about Kant. Perhaps I shall take solice in the thought that Parfit himself came to Kant only rather late in his Philosophical career, and after producing at least one masterwork. He writes: "...unlike some [of] Kant’s other readers, I never hated Kant, and I have now made my peace with him." I am not sure this could ever be true of me: I think I may just already hate Kant.

So, St. Andrews eh?

2009-09-30T18:12:00.014+01:00

I'm in St. Andrews! How about that. It's pretty good here. Good weather, a decent supermarket (Morrison's?) not tooo far away (though some kind of Harris Farms type place would be delightful (UPDATE!: I just had a salad made of stuff from Morrison's, and it was Delicious! So, good stuff. Their range isn't huge (fresh fruit/vegwise), but their produce is good!)). The uni is good, the classes are good, the people are good, the Good is good, the good good good good. Everyone I meet seems to think I'm English. Or occasionally American. Or, in one case, German. No one yet has managed to guess that I'm Australian. Until I tell them, I mean. Then they guess it, on the basis of fairly strong evidence.

Here's where I'm living, a flat in a university-housing-complex-thing by the name of Albany Park:

It's a rather horrible looking building, and not that much prettier on the inside, especially since I've already made a mess of my room:

Also, it can be kinda loud, especially when people... Open doors. It was also incredibly hot, until I worked out how to turn the radiator down. Anyway, the surroundings are much prettier. Here's the view from my window:

See, a view of the ocean! If you can look past the Other Horrible Albany Park Buildings, and Car Parks and whatnot. Still, pretty awesome walking along the beach to and from uni. In fact, here's some shots of the beach! It has a sandy part, and a rocky part. The rocky part rocks. The sandy part... Also has its merits.

And because I can't think of anything much witty or interesting to accompany it, here's a picture of Albany Park/St. Andrews from atop a hill:

And here's a picture of my feet, which were frickin' cold after taking these photos.

I don't think I'll be walking around barefoot any more, at least until Winter's over.

Trainzzz

2009-09-25T14:11:00.002+01:00

So I'm in St. Andrews! Have been for the last few days. It's pretty good! Great weather, great scenery, great uni, great etc. I might go into more detail later, but right now I want to go on about how I got here. Namely, via Train!

Trains!

Trains are awesome. Like, I'm thinking Best Way To Travel. Here's why I caught the train: for a while, with everyone going on about how much cheaper it is to fly, I thought I'd be catching a plane up here. But then I discovered that the price to get my baggage up here via plane would be more than double the cost of the ticket. Then, with discounts from my under-25 railcard, and random only sudden discounts for no apparent reason, the train from London to Leuchars (the nearest station to St. Andrews) came out much cheaper. We're talking, like, £35, including all my baggage. This is a pretty good deal!

But leaving price aside, I'm pretty sure I'd prefer the train. Sure, it takes much longer, like maybe 3 or 4 times as long. But so much easier! Leaves from the middle of town, no frickin' getting to and from the airport with huge amounts of bags (Okay, so I got a cab to the train station, which was a good £20, but still). None of this checking in crap, none of this trying to find your way around a confusing airport thing. I like it!

The train was pretty full, but, even though the seat next to me was booked, the dude who should've been sitting there never showed up, so I had a pretty sweet, spacious journey. There was free wi-fi, but my laptop was a bit too big to make use of that without a table-seat, which I did not have. I spent most of the trip listening to music or reading Scott Pilgrim (Good times!) I did sometimes get a tiny bit motion-sickly, especially if I tried to play DS, but then I would just take a quick break. The country-side was great. Cliffs, oceans, trees, absurdly stereotypical British villages. Nice.

I think I'll conclude this by saying: Trains don't suck! Yessss!

London! So much London!

2009-09-20T13:02:00.003+01:00

So I'm in London! Actually, my week in London is ending; I am catching the first (actually 2nd) train out of here tomorrow morning. to Leuchars (near St. Andrews) via Edinburgh. Still, London, it's been nice. London, in case you haven't heard, is an awesome city. Great transits, good weather (this week anyway), heaps of peoples... Whatnot. Decent food... Pretty noisy. These last two points are not so much positive. Though the former might just come from my unfamiliarity with the locales, and my lack of cereal. I miss cereal. Oh, but the Porridge!

I arrived in Heathrow on Friday morning, got a train to Paddington, met my sister and travelled to Liverpool St. Station, where I had the best porridge of my life so far. It was all oats and berries, with a bit of maple syrup. I may've just been hungering from the plane trip (Singapore Airlines, with their apparently relatively fine food, accidentally gave my order to my neighbor, thus leaving me to eat some weird seafoody dish. For breakfast. Not so great), but yeah, that porridge was damn great. I probably was just hungering from the plane trip, because I had it again a few days later (while perusing The Guardian. Ohhhh yeaaaaah), and it was a bit less extremely spectacular. But only a bit!

Other things I did in London? Well still on the subject of fooderies, I got a bit attached to this random French cafe in Hackney, with a name along the lines of l'au de la Bouche, which seemed to play nothing but Iron & Wine and Fleet Foxes, and served delicious tea, and toasted baguettes. There was also an excellent foodfilled market outside said cafe on Saturdays, of which I was able to witness two.

What I mainly did was wander. One fateful day, I and Julian walked from Hackney (where my sister lives, and I was staying) to Chelsea (on the other side of the city), via The Gerkin and The Globe. This is quite a long walk. Took us about 8 hours, including some random diversions and some sitting outside a pub by the Thames.

On the subject of The Globe, also very memorable was seeing a play there. Troilus & Cressida. An unusually hilarious tragedy, with a confusing ending. Some of the lead performances were uninspiring, but (some guy called) Matthew Kelly as Panderus completely made the play, by being absurdly hilarious. Also excellent were Thersites, Ajax, and an oddly gothy Achilles. Greeaaaat times. And all for only £5! Hurrah for standing-room tickets.

Same day, I explored the Tate Modern. I loves me some modern art. The huge Poetry & Dream gallery, being entirely devoted to my favourite variety of visual art, Surrealism (and reactions to Surrealism) was more than I could've ever hoped for. I muchly enjoyed the arts, and fell in love with all the people sitting around sketching what they saw, which somehow just felt like a completely awesome thing to be doing. Other galleries were less excellent but still enjoyable. Particularly the States Of Flux one, which apparently dealt with Cubism, Futurism, Pop Art, Russian Propaganda... Etc. There was actually a special Futurism exhibition on, but I wasn't willing to shell out the £10 or whatever to get in. :(

In less successful artventures, I saw the National Gallery and Portrait Gallery. The former mostly bored me: turns out my art-brain pretty much switches off for anything before 1900. The Impressionists were all right, and there were a few others that particularly caught my attention for one reason or another (such as this kid with a kid), but most everything else failed to cause a reaction in me.

The Portrait Gallery was a bit different... Insofar as they had some more modern stuff there. But they also had buckets of same-old-same-old pictures of Old Dudes. Plus, just in entering the Portrait Gallery, one couldn't help but feel somewhat stuck by the worshipping of celebrity that the place seemed to encourage. Portaits of random popstars and sportspeople, though nicely made, led me to think... "why does this dude get to have a portrait here..." Still, there was a competition exhibition of random dudes, which was pretty good, and much less celebrity-worshippy (unlike the Archibald, which is totally celebrity-worshippy). Still, my favourite thing in that particular venue was this room full of Fabiolas. Just hundreds of almost-identical, kitschy portraits of the same person, in the same pose, wall to wall. This reminded me of The S cience Of Cosby, and the observation that if you ask for a portrait of Bill Cosby, you're fairly likely to get one looking like this:

Continuing the theme of my less than impressive ability to enjoy certain buildings full of stuff, I was extremely excited by the prospect of visiting The British Museum. Unfortunately, upon finding it, I wandered its halls for a while, stared unmovedly at bits of the Parthenon, looked for, found, and glanced at the Rosetta Stone, then decided I was totally bored, and left. This all took about 20 minutes. I might've just been distractedly hungry, but I rather suspect this might be part of my general inability to enjoy rooms full of Old Stuff.

This is pretty much all I did in London, besides boring stuff like buying a laptop and wandering the streets aimlessly (lies, that last thing was much fun). In fact, it was while wandering the streets aimlessly that I came across, down by the Thames, some kind of Thames Festival! Featuring loud music played by people in colourful clothing!

Also, assorted dancers with enormous dongs.

Both these pictures actually come from the rehersal which I wandered into, which is why they are bright and unpopulated. I saw a decent chunk of the actual festival, which was... More festive.

Oh, there was also my visits to bookstores! Waterstones, Foyle's, and a host of random second-hand outlets. Didn't find much to interest me there. But then, Forbidden Planet! A rather large cult and science fiction specialty store! Nice! I was pretty sure I would be able to finally live my dream of visiting a bookstore with more than two Roger Zelazny books! And here's what I found, an entire shelf-marker for him!:

Oh, wait, turns out that they still only had the same two books that every store in Sydney had. Dang. Anyway, I bought some Scott Pilgrim for some reason, then fled.

And thus ends my tales of adventure in London!
Next stop, St. Andrews.

Weird surprises

2009-09-09T14:48:00.002+01:00

So I'm leaving to the UK tomorrow. I cleaned out my room, and here's a collection of some of the interestingish things I found while doing so:

This is a picture I made (using my insanely fabulous drawing skills) during Julian's D&D campaign. It contains most of the PCs, members of the Seven Sails. I'm still pretty happy with it.

For some reason, I picked up this envelope from the floor of The Annandale when I saw Robyn Hitchcock there. For some possibly related reason, I kept it. Pretty sure I threw it out today.

A random comic. Hard to read, but the dialogue is:
"And what seems to be the problem?"
"I have a crippling fear of couches."

On the same page, another random comic. Clearly, this one reads: "My beard is so long that I can no longer leave this cliff side." I have no idea when I drew these.

There were a few other random notes, probably scribbled in the dead of night, mostly containing terrible ideas, embarrassing thoughts, and hastily transcribed dreams. But apparently I'm too ashamed to post about any of them. Well, except for this one: A single, A4 piece of paper, with the following written on it:

"Worst pickup line ever:
They say it is better to regret something you did, than something you didn't do.
How would you like to regret me?"

Yeah, yeah, I'm sure someone's thought of it before.

It's Talk Talk's Life

2009-09-04T14:28:00.013+01:00

To that end (see previous post) here's an album review:

Talk Talk - It's My Life (1984)

Talk Talk are a rather interesting band. They started as a Duran Duran clone¹, tossing out a non-spectacular album of decent but unoriginal New Wave pop. They ended up producing a pair of radically original (and excellent) albums, frequently claimed to be the progenitors of Post-Rock. Somewhere in the middle they released It's My Life, probably the greatest Synth Pop album I've ever heard. And yes, you don't need to tell me, Synth Pop is a terrible genre, but this really is an excellent album, miles beyond anything else in the stylistic vicinity.

So why is it so good? Well, I'm glad you asked, even though I do not excel at actually articulating why I like something. Most obviously, every song on the 9 track album is really good; there're no crappy filler tracks here. Now this might not seem like a huge achievement, but keep in mind that this is a genre completely dominated by one-hit wonders. Thomas Dolby, Gary Numan, A-ha, A Flock Of Seagulls, The Vapors, Ultravox, The Buggles, Soft Cell². In this company, it's quite an achievement for Talk Talk to produce an entire album of good tracks.

Of course, that doesn't really answer the question of why they actually are good. But what can I say? The songs are all catchy. They are evocative, each creating a distinct mood, by turns ethereal, disorienting, defiant and desperate. They benefit from hints of some of the effects that will characterise Talk Talk's later albums - the mumbling vocals, the ambient textures, and the shifting volumes - without thereby sacrificing any of their catchy poppiness (which slightly mars their not-quite-as-excellent following album, The Colour Of Spring³).

So I shall conclude. If you want to hear songs - like, actual, coherent pop songs, with comprehendible lyrics, catchy tunes, and straightforward structures - then this album is excellent. If you're looking for long, esoteric, jazzy, pseudo-ambient masterpieces, then this album is entirely the wrong place to be. Personally, I'm increasingly longing for both.

And because everyone loves ratings:

9/10

¹ Apparently. According to, say, Allmusic. I thankfully haven't heard enough Duran Duran to confirm this.
² Soft Cell actually have a pretty good album in Non-Stop Erotic Caberet. I have seen no similar evidence for any of the other mentioned outfits.
³ Though The Colour Of Spring would be perfect if every song were as good as its closer, Time It's Time. Sooo good.

Postscript: I'm sure this post will do no good to dispell the vicious rumours that I listen to too much terrible 80s pop.

Today I met a post.

2009-09-04T14:10:00.003+01:00

Going to Scotland in a week!

How about that?

The idea is to blog more. This may happen, due to some kind of desire to maximise communication, however unidirectional, with a few of the myriad people-I-will-extremely-miss in Sydney. However, though some new, exciting things might happen on my trip, I may nonetheless have to get used to blogging about more mundane stuff.

As it stands, my posts tend to be: majorish events, philosophical rants, and stupid jokes.

To this repertoire, I feel I should add: minorish events, personal and musical rants, more stupid jokes.

Let's see how I go!

Jeez, I can't find my knees.

2009-08-07T04:34:00.004+01:00

I just scrobbled my 100,000th song at Last.fm. Of course, for all the predictable disclaimers about this being a totally arbitrary listen of a song, given that 100,000 is a fairly arbitrary number, and last.fm hardly captures absolutely every song I ever listen to. But it still feels nicely momentous.

It happened as I was sitting by my computer playing Picross on the DS, but I can't pretend I didn't see it coming. It could've just as well been any song by Robyn Hitchcock, who I've been listening to all morning, who is my most listened artist for the last 3, 6, and 12 months, and who I saw at The Annandale in March. But to be precise it was (what I have tagged as) "Visions Of Johanna [2]," a cover of a Bob Dylan song, and the second cover of that song on an album entirely comprised of live performances of Bob Dylan songs, Robyn Sings. Interesting factoid: I have 1,641 scrobbles for Robyn Hitchcock, and 51 for Bob Dylan. I'm really not a fan of Bob Dylan... performing his own songs. But in the hands of others, they can fairly superb.

Anyway, I don't really think I have much else to say about the event. Ciao!

Using Diaspora As A Verb

2009-08-04T03:43:00.004+01:00

So, turns out I've been in stasis for the last month or so. However, somehow while in stasis I managed to read a few books, play a few games, see a few dugongs and pat a few duck. One duck. One is a few. I also got a visa. A visa to go to the UK. In about a month I'm off to study at St. Andrews, for at least a year. That's right, you heard it here last!

Actually, I'm reasonably terrified about the whole thing. I have never before lived away from home for any large length of time, so that's going to change. I have been incredibly, amazingly academically lazy for the last year, so that's got to change. I haven't even been overseas in the last 13 years, so that's going to change. I'm terribly apprehensive about leaving all my friends here. I fear losing the closeness of my relationships with them (you) all. I fear I could not possibly meet such a wonderful bunch of people. I fear my housemates (I'll be in a university-run sharehouse with 3 other students) might be douchey, or I might be douchey to them. I fear that it won't be easy to go to concerts. I fear that I'll be bored, or that I'll become even more reclusive than I am here.

I don't fear that it will be too cold. I am really looking forward to the change in climate. Of course, I say this now... But it seems like so long since I've been really, reaaally cold. And I miss it. Gonna be awesome. Probably.

I was going to make a list of things that I don't fear, to balance out the other list above. But that's all I can think of. I don't fear that it will be too cold. I fear just about everything else.

So then the natural question to ask would be: why the hell am I going? To some extent it just feels like the natural thing to do. Ever since I left Britain at the age of however-old-I-was, I felt like I'd end up coming back some day. Then, after she finished uni, my sister headed for London with what seemed to me a sense of natural inevitability. Heading to England also always seemed to be on the horizon for my brother, though he hasn't made it out there yet. Then so many friends from my year of uni diasporaed around the world, John, Julian, Mitchell, etc. So many stayed in Sydney as well, but somehow they seemed to be the anomalies.

So yes, it is with a sense of natural inevitability, rather than driving enthusiasm, that I find myself heading to Scotland. There is plenty of excitement, plenty of optimism. But much more fear and apprehension. That said, I'm pretty sure it'll be awesome. I have yet to meet anyone who could tell me that their going overseas was a huge, regrettable mistake. It seems to be almost universally a cherished or enjoyable experience. So despite my worries, I strongly suspect I will find it the same. Still, my worries remain.

Vivid Finale

2009-06-15T04:41:00.010+01:00

So in the end, despite my initial enthusiasm, I didn't end up seeing much of Vivid Enofest. However, yesterday was the last day, so I thought I'd do some last minute checking of it out. I got to see Fire Water, some of the light shows, and the big finale Pure Scenius.

Fire Water was reminisent of Pyrophone Juggernaut, the big outdoors fiery musical spectacle I saw at the Sydney Festival, insofar as they were both... Big outdoors fiery musical spectacles. They were also both very arty, and both had people wearing odd costumes in a not so subtle effort to get fire-retardant outfits on the cast and crew. This one, however, had more of a plot. Thematically, it was some kind of tribute to the early convict settlers of Sydney, and to that end it started with some people yelling a list of names, and transportation sentences. Seems most people got 7 years, though being stuck in Australia at the end of those 7 years couldn't be much fun. The plot was, more specifically, a dramatic recreation of the Three Bees incident, when a convict ship caught fire in the harbour, and the guns inside it went off. I can't help but compare it to Pyrophone Juggernaut, and it doesn't really compare favourably. The music wasn't quite as good, though similar in style, and I felt that a lot was lost by the audience not really being able to feel the heat of the fire quite as vividly, due to the boat being a decent way into the water. Still, it was enjoyable, and the decorations around the event were pretty cool:

Barrel of fire! As seen in the apocalypse.

The aftermath. My attempts to actually capture the boat on fire
before it sank failed, as I am shite at photography.

After Fire Water, I checked out some of the random light sculptures around the MCA and the Quay. I didn't have much time before Scenius, so I didn't go right into The Rocks or up to Observatory Hill, but then I wasn't so amazingly impressed by what little I did see to feel that I was missing out. The only thing that really impressed me was this awesome druids sculpture.

Because druids are awesome.

And so then there was Pure Scenius. This was an improvised three-part concert of which I only bought a ticket to the third part, which I now moderately regret. When I walked into the concert hall, I recognised Brian Eno and Jon Hopkins sitting around on some couches set up at the front of the stage with their fellow musicians, just "having a yarn" as some audience member behind me put it. Once the audience was full, the light went down, Eno stood up, a violinist played a weepy solo, and Eno lamented the end of this great tour which had taken him "from one side of the Opera House stage to the other." After some more random banter, he went to his laptop and started making some music, as the other musicians got up from their couches, one by one, to join him on their respective instruments. The music was amazing, variously ambient, minimalist, and trancey. Then a bit over an hour later there was a somewhat awkward standing ovation during which Eno claimed they weren't planning on an encore. He eventually relented, on the grounds that there were so many bald heads in the audience who had come to lend him their support, he just couldn't let them down. They then proceeded to blow everyone's mind.

So it was pretty good! For quite a long time Eno has been one of my greatest musical heroes, so it was a pure joy to have had this opportunity to see him, and for the experience to be even more spectacular than I might've hoped.

Inappropriate intrusions on emotions - An appropriate response.

2009-06-14T02:17:00.001+01:00

The problem with starting an INTERNET WAR with someone like Rishi is that he is likely to respond. This naturally means that I have to respond to his response, which may lead him to respond to me, and so on and so forth, until everything we both have to say is either: a) common ground or b) acknowledged fundamental difference of opinion, attitude, or assumption. Hopefully that will be the case after my response here.

So Rishi wants to change something from a logical question into an empirical one. I'll confess straight up, I'm not sure what the logical question was meant to be. Perhaps it is something like "is it logically (though I might rather say Conceptually) possible to evaluate emotions?" Now I would love it if I could score some cheap argumentative points by saying: "I think we both agree that the answer to this is Yes, considering that Rishi immediate goes on to positively evaluate some emotions, when he suggests that the not-murderer, who spends all day indulging in pleasurable thoughts of killing, derives positive utility from doing so, and so these emotions should be seen as good in the eyes of a Utilitarian."

Unfortunately, Rishi doesn't go so far as to positively evaluate these emotions. He rather just claims that the Utilitarian shouldn't object to these emotions. Problem is, I totally agree with him there. In this (I feel) somewhat unrealistic case, where a person frequently indulges in highly pleasurable fantasies of anti-social behavior, but then has absolutely no increased inclination or likelihood to actually engage in such behavior, and (crucially) feels absolutely no displeasure from the thwarted desires to engage in such behavior, then, sure, I agree we shouldn't judge those emotions negatively. Hell, I would indeed go further than Rishi and claim that, in this unrealistic situation, we should judge those emotions positively. These are totally awesome emotions for the person to be having, given his actions.

Problem is, the fact that I agree with what Rishi has said there is a pretty good indication that the example is flawed, it doesn't get to the heart of the problem. The example that would be relevant is this: Imagine some person spends all day thinking of terrible horrifying fantasies of murder and pain and general gruesomeness. Said person derives a large amount of pleasure from these fantasies. After time, they become increasingly inclined to actually engage in the activities depicted in their fantasies, and become upset when this inclination is thwarted, whether by fear of censure, fear of punishment, or moral convictions. Their fantasies start to come to them at awkward times, leading to some kind of retreat from society. Eventually (perhaps, though this isn't necessary to the example) they go and murder someone. They would have never murdered someone, nor felt the pain of frustrated inclination, had they never indulged in these fantasies. Additionally, there was some course of action that some person, including perhaps this very person, could've taken, which would've prevented them from ever indulging in these fantasies, without thereby causing worse results. THEN I would, indeed, negatively evaluate those emotions. And, even as it is much more detailed, I happen to believe that this is the much more likely scenario. (And this, I suspect, is what Rishi would call the empirical question).

Rishi has a few of these examples, where a person harbours bad-looking emotions, but no bad external action results from them. He claims "I don't [believe] utilitarians can relevantly object to me having these emotions, as repugnant as they may be." So yes, I totally agree. Well, not totally... Because I don't think the Utilitarian even has any grounds to call these emotions Repugnant. These racist, murderous, fire-bomberous, computer-gamerous emotions are actually awesomefunpartytimes, precisely because nothing bad is resulting from them. So anyway, this seems to be common ground.

So what isn't common ground? Well, Rishi claims that "As someone who leans consequentialist, I'd much rather have good things happen, than be overly concerned about how those good came about." I also lean consequentialist, to understate matters a bit. I also want to have good things happen. Really, that's all I want, morally speaking. Thing is though, I don't want to just sit around and have good things happen, I want to make good things happen, or at the very least I want to know how to make good things happen. This mean that I need to be concerned with how good things come about. To claim otherwise is... It's like saying "We need a bridge over the Sydney harbour. However, I'd much rather have a bridge than to be concerned with how bridges come about. So I'm just going to focus on making a bridge be there, rather than look into the causes of bridges." This is dumb. You usually can't make things happen without some kind of awareness of their causes, at least not with optimal efficiency.

This bridge example looks absurd, but I don't think it is an inaccurate representation of Rishi's argument. He explicitly says "Utilitarianism... should focus more effects/outcomes, and to a lesser extent, acts. Intentions should be given minimal, if not negligible, concern." To a certain extent, as usual, I agree with him, especially in the familiar Charity case that he mentions. If the results are equal, then the intentions are unimportant. But what Rishi misses is that just as acts cause outcomes, which is why we need to care about acts, so too do intentions, desires, emotions, and mental states generally, cause acts. So we have at some reason to care about Emotions. If we need care only about our ultimate goals, and not the potential causes of those goals, then sure, we don't need to care about Emotions. But then, nor do we need to care about acts. If we lived in some strange fatalistic world where, no matter what actions people actually performed, by some divine manipulation the exact same results always came about, then we wouldn't need to worry about acts either. Unfortunately, we don't live in such a world, neither with regard to Acts, nor to Emotions.

Rishi may grant all this, but insist that although we could care about emotions, we shouldn't do so as a matter of efficiency. "We are much better at [dealing with] outcomes and acts, then we are at dealing with intentions and emotions." I'm generally inclined to agree here, but let's interrogate this a bit more. First off, we don't really "deal with" outcomes in any relevant sense, rather outcomes are just the results we get, and the things that we are aiming at. We deal with acts insofar as they cause outcomes. And we are rather good at this. Straightforward science-type investigation can show us what the outcomes of our acts are, or potentially will be. Our investigations into civil engineering have revealed that building a bridge out of bubbles will tend to result in catastrophic failure. Economics might tell us that arbitrarily issuing a whole lot of currency will result in huge inflation. Physiology, and a tiny amount of mostly common-sense psychology, will tell us that stabbing a dude in the face will result in a whole lot of pain.

As I've suggested, just as I see acts to be a fairly immediate cause of outcomes, I see emotions to be a fairly immediate cause of acts. And insofar as we are primarily concerned with outcomes, it is no wonder that we are worse at dealing with emotions in this regard. They are further up the causal chain, further removed from our immediate concerns. Even besides this, our way of dealing with emotions will be primarily through Psychology. Whether or not you call Psychology a science, it certainly seems to be a lot more fuzzy, a lot less definite, than our more prototypical sciences. The main problem as far as Utilitarian calculation is concerned is that psychological results seem to be a lot less generalisable. We can't seem to find nice convenient laws to connect emotions with actions, like "fantasising about murder every day will lead to acts of murder." There will be exceptions, some unexplained. These problems will make evaluation of emotions less appealing to a Utilitarian. However, not to the point of negligence.

Evaluation of emotions would be of minimally, or negligible concern to Utiltarians just in case there were no decent empirical ways of predicting behavior from emotions, or if investigation into these ways did not yield enough results to justify the effort. This seems unlikely though. For example, psychologists, even if they can't give us iron-clad, infallible laws, could nonetheless tell us what emotions are primarily felt by those who then go on to kill themselves, or others, based on self-report. Again, yes, this isn't infallible, but if it gives us a statistically significant link between emotion and action, then this is some grounds for the evaluation of emotion. However, it is not, in itself, yet a reason to act upon such evaluation. Which brings me to Rishi's final point, and the one that I am tempted to think is most strongly motivating his response.

Paternalism. It's the boogie-man of modern ethics, no one since Mill wants to be Paternalist. Thankfully, I usually don't either. Thing is, I don't think anything I've suggested is paternalist. Paternalism is typically interfering in someone's autonomy for their own sake. Now, generally the evaluation I'm discussing is in terms of the interests of people other than the individual whose emotions we are evaluating. It is not in terms of their own interests, and so isn't really paternalist. But much more importantly, if, as I've said, this rough system for the evaluation of emotions is considered just as that, a system of evaluation, rather than a set of recommendations for action, then there is no interfering involved, and as such no paternalism, nor, I would think, anything particularly objectionable.

Of course, there's not much point to a system of evaluation unless we're going to do something with it, so I'll say there are a few times when I do think it would be justified to interfere with autonomy. And it's the cases that are actually generally accepted:

a) Not many people object to interference in the autonomy of children, even paternalist interference. As I suggested in my original post, I think the best use of this kind of system of evaluation will be in regards to moral education, working out the most appropriate kinds of emotional responses to encourage and promote. As I apparently didn't stress enough, I mean here the moral education of children.

b) I don't know if a person can be said to interfere with their own autonomy, when they exercise it... Okay, so they can't, but that's my second case anyway. This system of evaluation of emotions I also see as being most useful for people who think to themselves "I know what acts are right, but I find myself often acting immorally. I, for whatever reason, desire to be a more moral person. I also happen to know roughly how to alter my emotional responses to certain things. So now I need to know exactly what I should alter my emotions towards." As this is just a matter of individual acting on themselves, there should be no scent of paternalism here.

I think I'm done here. But as for Nitpicks!
Nitpick The First: Yeah, I totally agree with you there Rishi. In fact, that was my point.
Linguistic Nipick: The reasons can be good even if the link is only probabilistic. Like, the fact that seatbelts increase your probability of surviving an accident give you a reason to wear them. They don't give you a probabilistic reason to wear them. In fact, I don't even know what a probabilistic reason is.

Some Things I Tend To Thank When Playing Team Fortress 2.

2009-05-31T09:18:00.008+01:00

In decreasing order of sensibleness.

Medics, for healing me.
Engineers, for teleporting me.
Allies, for helping me kill to opponents.
Spies, for sapping sentries.
Snipers, for throwing urine on my enemies.
Allies, for... Me helping them to kill opponents.
Medikits, for giving me health.
Supply Cabinets, for having Medikits in them.
Allies, for... Thanking me for any reason.
Enemy Soldiers, for blowing themselves up.
iTunes, for starting to play a particularly excellent song.

Gonna make a mint...

2009-05-28T01:11:00.003+01:00

Given the success of such filmic treatments of philosophical concepts as The Matrix ("What if the Brain-In-A-Vat scenario was true, but then suddenly wasn't") and Bladerunner ("What if Speciesism was justified, but then suddenly wasn't"), I have decided to write my own screenplay for a feature length film entitled:

The Stoppening! Aka: What If Occasionalism Was True, But Then Suddenly Wasn't.

The Stoppening

EXT. A CITY PARK - A SATURDAY MORNING

A typical morning scene. People are jogging through the park, walking their dogs, playing with their children, and picnicing. A YOUNG MAN is running through the park, flying a kite.

CUT TO:

EXT. HEAVEN

GOD
What a beautiful mor- *ERK!*

GOD clutches at his chest and falls over.

CUT TO:

EXT. CITY PARK

Everything is exactly as it was in the opening shot. Absolutely nothing moves. This shot is held for approximately 97 minutes.

CUT TO:

TITLE CARD READING: "The End...?"

Sidgcandle

2009-05-25T02:46:00.010+01:00

Lately I've been reading me some Sidgwick. Henry Sidgwick. For those unfamiliar with the name (most people), he was a Victorian ethicist, sometimes thought of as the last of the early Utilitarians, or perhaps the first of the modern Utilitarians. His great treatise Methods Of Ethics is among my top 2 favourite works of philosophy, and formed the basis of much of my honours thesis. According to Wikipedia, John Rawls called it the "first truly academic work in moral theory," which probably hints at both the book's great strengths and flaws. On the one hand, it is a wonderfully clear, precise, well reasoned, and fair piece of work. On the other hand, it's widely held to be incredibly dull in style. In fact, Sidgwick probably puts it best: "... it is essentially an attempt to introduce precision of thought into a subject usually treated in a too loose and popular way, and therefore I feel cannot fail to be somewhat dry and repellent." Thankfully, I like my Victorian moralists the way I like my wit: Dry.

In actual fact: a) I find Sidgwick fairly easy to read, at least in comparison to other authors where I have to puzzle over what exactly they mean every couple of sentences (but then, I put a high value on clarity), and b) I think that Parfit later showed with Reasons & Persons that it is possible to write a very intellectually precise treatise on ethics while at the same time being engaging and imaginative, though he did have the advantage over Sidgwick of there already existing a well developed tradition of academic ethics behind him.

Anyway, despite leaning so heavily on Methods Of Ethics for my honours thesis, I actually never read anything else by Sidgwick, until I recently borrowed a collection of his shorter essays. It's pretty good. Here's a few Sidgwick quotes which I quite enjoyed:

"I hate the History of Philosophy even more than any other history; it is so hard to know what any particular man thought, and so worthless when you do know it." - This is from a letter he wrote when only 27, and he later went on to write a history of ethics, so I suppose he mellowed a bit. Still, I do appreciate any support for my own distaste for the history of philosophy

"No difficulty of any other writer can convey the least conception even of the sort of difficulty I find in Hegel. My only consolation is... that every other philosophical work I take up seems to be easy. But no amount of difficulty alone would distress my spirit if there was not added the paralysing doubt whether, after all, I am not breaking my head over highly profound nonsense." - I knew that Sidgwick was heavily into Kant, but I was surprised to learn that he also studied Hegel. Sounds to me like he nailed it, too.

"It is a horrid nuisance to have to put one's principles into practice." - I couldn't agree more. This is in reference to the major ethical dilemma of Sidgwick's life, which prompted the writing of the Methods. He was a fellow of Trinity college at Cambridge, and one of the conditions of this fellowship was that he believed in the articles of the Church of England. However, in the 1860s, he realised that he no longer could believe, and spent much time deliberating whether or not he should resign his position. He finally did so in 1869. Then parliament scrapped those requirements in 1871, apparently owing in part to Sidgwick's reputation, and so he got his job back. So... Not such a nuisance after all, I suppose.

"It is said that an undergraduate once, being asked in examination to describe the economic conditions of the inhabitants of the Hebrides, stated that they 'earn a precarious livelihood by washing one another's clothes.' It has often seemed to me that... That phrase would aptly describe a considerable part of the industry of modern metaphysicians." - Double Lols.

Some other amusing quotes, by others, about the Methods Of Ethics:

"I have never found so dull a book so absorbing" - John Maynard Keynes (Edit: Actually, turns out this quote is refering to a memoir compiled by Sidgwick's brother and widow, and not refering to the Methods. As compensation, here is another amusing Keynes quote about Sidgwick: "He never did anything but wonder whether Christianity was true and prove that it wasn't and hope that it was.")

"To most types of reader, Sidgwick is irredeemably dull, while writers with far feebler intellectual powers who speak in terms of prophecy, like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, are listened to with a respect they ill deserve" - Brand Blanshard. Buuuurn!

"He read The Methods Of Ethics as a young man and found it so stodgy that he had been deterred from ever reading any book on ethics since" - Said of... Alfred North Whitehead. Because formal logic isn't stodgy at all?

"Sidgwick's account of the methods of ethics misses questions beyond those which he explicitly discusses" - Alasdaire MacIntyre... What!?

Appropriate Emotion, part 2.

2009-05-18T15:20:00.000+01:00

So, I was going to check out what might count as appropriate emotion in a Utilitarian theory. I'll do that, and then maybe postempt a response that I have already heard.

My answer should be somewhat familiar to anyone who subscribes to Douchey Moves Performed By Utilitarians Quarterly, as it is just another instance of the general tendency of Utilitarians to try and incorporate all possible human action under the domain of Utilitarian calculation: It seems to me only plausible that a Utilitarian would want to say that the appropriate emotion to feel in any given circumstance is that emotion which will tend to maximise worldwide pleasure.

So to take this ultra-simplified version of last week's example, someone kills your father, and you may respond with either anger or love. Which would be more appropriate? Well, we do a Utilitarian analysis of the two options. So, not pretending this is complete or well thought out: Love would have the advantages that it is an inherently more pleasant emotion (let us assume), and that it would motivate such positive action as striving for understanding, reconciliation, etc. With anger on the other hand... Well, it's probably a less pleasant emotion, and may motivate nasty actions of vengeance and whatnot... But on the other hand, it may also motivate actions towards achieving justice, which, if the surrounding institutions are working well, will have positive results of deterrence, public safety, and rehabilitation.

Much more important though, and I suspect tilting the balance in favour of Anger, is this: It may simply be psychologically impossible to feel love towards the murderer without precluding certain other goods. So, assume we ordinarily get some pleasures from deep, loving relationships. Furthermore, assume these pleasures are particularly strong, unique, and efficient (that is, we don't have to put much effort/resources into achieving them in order to get a lot of value out of them). So now we have extremely good reasons, both self-interested and moral, for maintaining such relationships. But now it may simply be the case (and it seems likely) that it is psychologically impossible to be in such a relationship with a person, or in anything quite as good as such a relationship, while still being disposed to love a third party who murders said person. Which is probably all just a convoluted way of saying: If you could love a stranger who just killed your loved one, then they probably weren't really your loved one after all. So, for the sake of allowing such relationships to exist, we must allow for anger being the appropriate response to the murder of one's father.

Still, all the specifics of this overly simplified case as beside the point, I just wanted to demonstrate the idea that emotional responses may be open to the same kind of Utilitarian analysis/calculation as external actions are. Also, it's probably not so radical to attempt such analysis. I vaguely remember it being done before with guilt:

So the ordinary understanding of guilt would probably be that it is appropriate to feel guilty if, and only if, you have done something immoral. But of course, if a Utilitarian believed that, then he would be in trouble, as Utilitarianism tells us that we are acting wrongly (to some degree) whenever we failed to maximise the good, which is just about all the time for absolutely anyone you would care to name, no matter how saintly they may be. So must you feel guilty pretty much all the time? That would be a fairly disastrous conclusion, especially considering that guilt is ordinarily a fairly unpleasant feeling, and so feeling guilty all the time would have fairly terrible hedonic consequences.

So when should a Utilitarian feel guilt? Well, probably roughly when:
1) She believes that she has violated some psychologically simple rule of thumb X.
2) Acting in accordance with X tends to produce good results.
3) She knew of no clear, genuine, utilitarian justification for violating X in this case.
4) Feeling guilty about this violation will likely reduce the incidence of further violations in the future (of X, or other efficacious rules), and there is no better, mutually exclusive method of reducing said violations. (This criterion becomes particularly powerful when we note that, the more guilt one feels about a range of subjects, the less effective is is liable to become.)
5) The likely benefit of reducing future rule-violations will outweigh the immediate disutility of guilt, which I take to be an inherently displeasurable experience.

Now this analysis is going to have a lot of counterintuitive results, some of which will echo standard objections to Utilitarian conceptions of punishment:
1) It may be right to feel guilty when you believe that you have done something that is immoral, even though you have not, in fact, done that thing.
2) Similarly, it may be right to feel guilty for your actions even though there was a perfectly good justification for those actions, just in case you aren't aware of that justification.
3) Your own self-interest in not feeling guilty may outweigh the interests of others in your feeling guilty.
Etc. Frankly I'd probably bite the bullet on these kinds of counter-intuitiveness objections, as is my wont, but then there might be genuine issues with my slapdash analysis up there.

Anyway, by now you surely get the picture, that the standards of appropriateness for emotion according to a Utilitarian theory should probably be the degree to which having that emotion produces positive effects. This feels to me like both a natural and plausible move to make, which may be a sign that I've been thinking within Utilitarian theory for too long.

I said I'd postempt an objection, and so, if I may, here is a caricature of Rishi's response to this, and last week's post: "Ohhhhhhh, I don't like it when people start to evaluate emotional responses! It reeks of Thought Police to me! Take your stinking theories off my emotions, you damn dirty Utilitarians! Etc!" Soooo to put it another way, this is the objection that emotions, which are purely internal, as opposed to actions which manifest externally, should be immune to moral critique. There seem to be two main arguments for this that I can see:

1) We can't actually change our emotional responses to stuff, rather they come to us unbidden, uncontrolled, and unwilled. They are Passions, in contrast to Actions; they are things that come over us rather than things that we wilfully do. Furthermore, you can't morally judge someone for something that is beyond their control, as ought implies can, and so cannot implies oughtn't.

To this I would respond... There is a point here. It should be neither neglected, nor exaggerated. We should not pretend that we have complete, absolute control over our emotions, and so morally require responses that are impossible. But nor should we insist that our emotions are completely beyond our conscious control. It's clear to me that most emotions can be stifled or cultivated. We can form and act on intentions such as "I will get less angry around idiots in the future." We can also promote certain emotional reactions in others. Without much empirical expertise, I'm inclined to agree with the Virtue Ethicists here, that moral education would probably best proceed by inculcating certain emotional responses and tendencies (if they do indeed (still?) say that).

2) Our emotions matter only to ourselves, not to others. The fact that I am randomly angry does not effect anyone else, only myself, and so I should not be morally answerable for it. I should only be judged for the externally-manifesting actions that I perform, such as the punch that I throw. I can think and feel whatever I want, so long as I don't act on it inappropriately.

I tend to think this is a fairly flawed objection. For it to provide complete immunity to the moral judgement of emotions, you would have to assume some kind of super-powerful will, some amazing Kantian faculty to produce any kind of action that rationality/morality dictates, independently of the emotions that you are feeling. This seems implausible to me. Emotion, broadly construed, is probably the strongest, if not the only motivator of action. Imagine an angry person, who may either throw a punch or give a handshake. Now it's clearly not the case that every angry person would throw a punch. He may be a particularly peaceful angry person, or he may have some other strong desires, perhaps second-order desires, overriding his inclination to throw a punch. But it still seems true that in any given situation, all else being equal and given no further information, an angry person is more likely to throw a punch than a calm one, whether or not we are talking about the same person in these two cases. That is to say something like: there is a strong probabilistic link between the emotion, anger, and the action, violence. So unless there is some other, more direct & effective way to reduce instances of punch-throwing without having to go through emotional proscription, then it seems we have perfectly good reasons to morally worry about, judge, and critique emotions.

I suppose there may be another argument 3), which takes that Thought Police comment much more seriously, and goes: I don't want the government/moral experts/paternalists/etc punishing me and blaming me for my emotions, because this is my own, special, most private sphere of behavior, etc etc.

However, I think that this argument, at least applied to Utilitarian critiques of emotion, will not work simply because Utilitarians don't think of punishment and blame in the relevant ways. That is, as with Guilt above, simply because you have done something wrong does not automatically mean that you should be punished, or blamed for it. As a matter of fact, precisely because emotions are essentially private, and only external actions are publicly accessible, it does seem likely that punishing or blaming individuals for their emotions would never be appropriate (except perhaps in special circumstances, such as those of moral education). But this does not mean that we may not theoretically critique them, and analyse their value.

There's also perhaps an objection 4): Oh please, please don't start morally judging my emotions, they are the only morality-free domain of human behavior I had left! If I have to start worrying about the morality of my emotions, there will be nothing left to not morally worry about any more!

However, this just strikes me as another instance of the Too-Demanding objection to Utilitarianism, and all the usual responses would apply, so I won't bother going over it.

I'm going to wrap this up there, but feel free to yell at me if you have any major objections with what I've said, or if I've totally failed to give your favourite objection a half-decent rendition.

Appropriate Emotion, part 1.

2009-05-07T01:05:00.003+01:00

I've been thinking, briefly, recently, about Virtue Ethics. As I tend to do, I've been thinking about it through the perception that virtue ethics as an entire ethical theory seems sorely lacking, incomplete, and indeterminate, but may serve as a useful companion to some other ethical theory, like, oh, let's say, Utilitarianism.

Specifically I've been thinking about the idea that, according to virtue ethical theories, our emotions should always be appropriated directed. So to draw this idea out by contrast:

Some kind of simple Christian teaching might tell people to love everyone. This is the whole Turn The Other Cheek, Love The Sinner thing. Some dude punches you in the face? Love him. Some dude kills your father? Love him.

Virtue Ethical theories, on the other hand, very much don't say this. According to most virtue ethicists, as I understand it, if some dude kills you father? Hate him. Hate him quite a lot. Hate is the appropriate emotion to feel towards someone who has killed your father. Vengeance might also be appropriate. Love really isn't, and it would be the sign of a morally deficient agent that he loved someone who killed his father. That's right, to love in this case would be an evil/immoral act, to hate would be appropriate, and so good/ethical.

Maybe there's something to this thought, maybe. But the point where I bring in my "virtue ethics can't really supply us with a totally satisfying, complete theory of morality" thought is where I ask "so what exactly makes for appropriateness?" Before I say anything else, I should disclaim: Maybe some virtue ethicists have an answer to this. I'm really not all that familiar with the literature here, and so there might be some totally satisfying answer to that question that I am unaware of. But, as I say, I am unaware of it, so I will go on:

In the case I've mentioned, it does seem intuitively plausible that hatred is appropriate. Father-killing is a pretty big deal, it seems kinda normal to hate people who have wronged you or others you care about, etc, etc. There might be arguments on the other side, like that hatred only leads to more hatred, which is a bad thing in the long/short run. But these arguments are unlikely to outweigh the pure intuition. Hatred in this case will still intuitively feel quite justified, blameless. There will still seem like something kinda wrong, or emotionally deficient about a person who just says "My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. This upsets me, but I am prepared to overlook it for the sake of our relationship."

But... But on the other hand, Christian theology does straightforwardly suggest an answer to the question of what makes for appropriateness in this case, an answer that is totally justified and necessarily given by the theoretical commitments of the belief system as a whole. And that answer is "It is never appropriate to hate a person. The appropriate emotion to feel towards a person is always, and under every circumstances, love." And, crucially, someone who is deeply immersed in such a Christian theory will probably not, or not so strongly, feel the above intuitions (I could be wrong about this, but it comes from my inkling that a person's intuitions will be at least partly determined by the results given by the theories that they subscribe to.)

I suppose all this is just to say: If Virtue Ethics and Other Theories of Ethics are to stand in contradiction to each other, and so Virtue Ethics is to be believed as its own, complete theory of morality, then it leaves us with no decent guide to the appropriateness of emotions other than intuition, which may differ from person to person (though may want to say of the Christian above that their intuitions are invalid insofar as they stem from belief in an incorrect moral theory).

If, on the other hand, Virtue Ethics is meant to be a mere companion to some other ethical theory, then our account of appropriateness will probably simply fall out from that other theory. This leads me to want to check out what will count as appropriate emotion in a Utilitarian theory, but I'm going to leave that for my next post.

Vendor Buy Bank Guards!

2009-05-06T01:11:00.004+01:00

In today's Moderately Odd Thing To Do Showcase, we would like to present a sketch entitled Rehearsing What You Will Say To The Shopkeeper For The Five Minutes As You Approach The Store.

Blue Concession Travel Ten.
Just a Blue Concession Travel Ten, thanks.
I'll just have a Blueconcessiontravelten thaaaanks.
...
Could I get a Blue Concession Travel Ten?

Thank you, thank you.
In next week's episode, we have Running Your Blog Post Through Your Head For The Entire Night Before Writing It Up.

(A rant about) Video-game Storytelling.

2009-04-15T16:00:00.000+01:00

I didn't really expect anything wonderfully interesting to come out of the Game Developer's Conference, but I actually really like this quote which a few people are talking about, or rather were talking about when I started this post a few weeks ago:

“Basically, and I’m speaking to the Blizzard guys in the back: we need to stop writing a fucking book in our game, because nobody wants to read it... We need to deliver our story in a way that is uniquely video game."

– Jeff Kaplan (Former Director of World of Warcraft)

This guy from Stardock has a spiel about this idea which basically amounts to: Game developers need to learn to be concise, just as movie directors need to know what to cut. It's no good putting entire shitty novels in your game as Optional Side Things, or Unnecessary Background Information, as at least some players will feel obligated to read that stuff, and so, if it's no good, that'll just ruin the game experience to some degree.

I'm not too inclined to care that much about this point, personally: Yes, if you can tell the same story in a more natural, entertaining way, without taking the player out of the game, then kudos. But otherwise, I've long since learned to ignore all the crappy optional stories hanging around in these games. I'm thinking here of Morrowind, Baldur's Gate, and even Arcanum, in which there was all these books lying around, containing terribly written stories, about which I couldn't care one iota. In fact, there was even a competion when I hung around the Arcanum Inn forum, where the developers had fans write some stories, and the best one would be put in a book in a library somewhere in the game, and the fan would get a free copy of the game. This just brought home to me that most of these in-game-books are basically just fan-fic quality material that can be safely, and beneficially ignored. If I want a good story, I'll read an actual book. My point here is: I don't care if developers put this crap into the game, because I'm not going to read it anyway.

This guy, who is either called James or Pentadact, has a spiel which I find much more interesting, focusing on the second part of that quote: he talks about the features with which video games can uniquely tell a story, which are roughly Gameplay and Nonlinearity (for a loose enough definition of Uniquely, or a broad enough definition of Video Game). I find the former a pretty interesting topic of thought, but I tend to think a lot more, and more specifically, about the latter.

When I talk about nonlinearity I feel like a total Fallout nerd, but here goes: It seems to me there are two distinct types of nonlinearity that appear in computer games. There is a kinda of macro-nonlinearity where the player has the freedom to go anywhere, see everything, do anything. Morrowind exemplifies this for me. Right from the start of the game, you can travel all over the damn world, talk to everyone, become the leader of all the guilds, check out all the cities, learn all the spells, read all the in-game books. This is a kind of nonlinearity that is potentially great fun for those who love to explore a world. Take the world as given, and you can totally check it out.

Unfortunately for me, I hated Morrowind. This is at least partly because this kind of nonlinearity is actually anathema to good storytelling. Give the player the ability to do anything, and they're liable to lose sight of what they need to do to advance the plot. Let them wander around for game-months, and it makes a nonsense of any sense of urgency in the central plot (as in Oblivion, where Demons were apparently invading the world precisely as slowly as the player was getting around to dealing with it). Now I think of it, this might actually not be a problem if there were other little stories populating the game-world that were equally interesting for the player, but this certainly wasn't the case in Morrowind.

However, my bigger problem with Morrowind was that it doesn't display any of the second kind of nonlinearity, which I will call micro-nonlinearity. This is the ability to make decisions on the level of "should I give this magic sandwich to party A or party B?" and furthermore for such decisions to actually matter in the gameworld.

An obvious game to talk about in reference to this would be Fallout, but first I'd rather mention Deus Ex, as it draws a starker contrast. Deus Ex has absolutely no macro-nonlinearity. You go through the levels in a set order, you always start in the same place, and right up until the last few moments, you're always doomed to end up in roughly the same place. You can't go and check out Hong Kong as soon as the game starts, nor can you choose not to defect to the terrorists. But it does occasionally give you the freedom to make choices that having lasting effects on the story. The most obvious is when you can choose to either stay back and defend your brother from some dudes, or to flee and let him die. Whichever you do, you get shot and captured. But if you leave, your brother dies. If, however, you stay, then he lives. And then, importantly, he proceeds to show up again and again throughout the entire game. This gives you the impression that your choice has had a lasting impact on the gameworld, and on the story that you are being told. I Think This Is Cool.

However, I know a few people who seem to genuinely dislike nonlinearity, in both guises. In the case of macro-nonlinearity, some people apparently get paralysed by the choice. They can go anywhere and do anything, so what the hell should they do? To this I'm just inclined to say: Suck it up and make a damn choice. You're not a friggin' donkey tied between two delicious bales of hay.

I think there's something more interesting to be said in the case of micro-nonlinearity. Another person I know got extremely annoyed when he found out that, by killing a character early in Bioshock, he was then unable to get into that character's bedroom later in the game. Now there was basically nothing exciting in that room, but the problem here was that, due to a choice that he made, he was potentially missing content. (Let's call this kind of attitude Completism... For now). As in, there was Stuff in this game, put there by the developers, which he could no longer see. I find this feature extremely cool, and a necessary result of my character's decisions having meaning within a story. It's tempting to say that this is cool because it promotes replayability: I have to play the game again in order to see the other stuff that I missed. But I'm actually more tempted to say: screw replayability, I like the fact that making a decision closes other options off for me, because were this not the case, I could not possibly feel that my decisions matter, and this is a wonderful feeling for a story to give me.

This truely is a kind of uniqueness to computer games (also tabletop RPGs and Olde Timey Storytelling and Choose You Own Adventure books, and maybe a few other mediums, but you get my point). You may miss content in a novel or a movie because you skip part of it, or because you aren't paying much attention, but it's never going to be the case that a decision that you make necessarily closes other options off to you. But it's worth mentioning that, contrary to the quote that started this spiel, this isn't so much about telling a (set) story in a way that is distinct to the medium, but rather could be about telling a story that is distinct to the medium. As in, interactity gives us the ability to tell a story that no other medium could, one that changes in response to the decisions of its audience. An obvious point, but one that no major game has really made much of. Also, it seems, one that players and critics might not really... Care about?

Think of the greatest story ever told by a computer game... I strongly suspect that many gamers would think immediately of Final Fantasy 7. Now I admit that was probably a pretty good story, with the... Things... Brothers, or something. Okay, I don't really remember it. My point is, that game was utterly linear, in both senses. On the macro-level, there was a tiny bit near the end where you could wander all around the world. On the micro-level, you had pretty much no choices. I think you could influence who Cloud would go on a date with at one point, that's about it. I don't deny the game had a good story, but I would deny that it is a story distinct to the medium, and that it is told in a distinctly game-like way.

My own thought isn't much better. I'd think of Planescape: Torment. That game had some nice micro-nonlinearity, at least near the start, but nonetheless the story unfolded in a fairly set way, and you always ended up in the same place. Perhaps you could say of that game that, because much of the story was about uncovering your character's past, and you character's past is completely set, the bulk of the story was set. But your character's present behavior, and the story that unfolds from your actions in the game, is somewhat more open, unlike in FF7. But either way, my point here is that this, too, was a story that you could pretty much tell in any medium.

So for an example of a game that actually does produce a story that is adaptive to the player's actions, mutable in response to the actions of the controlled character, and so (perhaps) unique to this particular medium, I'd recommend Facade. This game tells a Who's-Afraid-Of-Virginia-Woolfish story, which will always be quite different depending on how the player acts. Certain things will or will not be spoken of, certain results will obtain for the central characters, etc. All of this is under the control of the player, insofar as their choices determines what will happen, but not under the direct control of the player, insofar as it's never entirely clear what exactly the results of your choices will be.

Now in the case of Facade, the developers do encourage multiple playthroughs. But this is not in order to see all of their possible content, there are simple too many ways the action could go for that to be viable. Rather, this is just to experience fully how interactive storytelling can work, and how different your results can be from even minor changes in your behavior. However, at the end of a single playthrough, you are presented with a script of everything that happened in that session. This suggests to me that a single playthrough should be considered a full experience, a single complete story. This is why I am perhaps not entirely happy with the term "completist" for someone who wants to see all of the possible programmed content of a game. To call this Completism suggests that someone without this attitude, someone who is merely happy with a single, straightforward playthrough has somehow failed to get a Complete experience. I would rather want to suggest that a single playthrough of a non-linear game, insofar as it produces and tells a single, coherent story, can be considered a complete experience. But anyway, that's all nomenclature.

This has been a bit of a rant, and so I'd like to end by huuuuugely recommending this game that I just played, which partially convinced me to finally dig up this old post, an Art game called Pathways. I don't want to spoil anything about it, so I'll just say that I love it, and that it works on some of the ideas I've been talking about in this post, though not necessarily in a way that supports or exemplifies what I've been saying, nor one that repudiates it. Whatever else it does, it really delivers a story in a way that is uniquely video game.

My Elf Sorcerer has a flush.

2009-03-30T15:20:00.004+01:00

I'm writing a bit of a spiel about interactive storytelling, which I may finish off tomorrow, but I just noticed this hilarious ad at RPG Codex:

Do you play a lot of RPG-games? Then you might have a bright future in the world of internet poker as well. Learn poker rules and use your ability of getting into character when you bluff your opponents.

Blogging? Again?!?

2009-03-27T22:58:00.004Z

Saw Jeffrey Lewis last night. Actually, he was support for Darren Hanlon. The latter was pretty much what I expected, which was pretty good, but the former really surprised me. I'd heard a couple of his songs before, but I hadn't really listened to what he was saying, and had trouble getting past his voice. But I can honestly say I've never laughed so much during a musical performance. But, there's also an element of heartfeltness and sincerity to his act as well, which is also awesome. Anyway, I found this song to be particularly excellent, check it out:

Someone mentioned something about him playing again at the Hopetoun on the 7th of April, so I am inclined to maybe see him again for a full set.

Dubious facts that I learnt from Robyn Hitchcock's ramblings.

2009-03-25T13:26:00.003Z

1) The little metal thing that fell out of the oblong black thing on his blue guitar really belongs on the ceiling, where it would've ended up, were it not for gravity

2) People only noticed the world economy collapse because it happened.

3) Similarly, people wouldn't've noticed anything if the economy went instantly from Overblown to Empty, because they would be all be dead.

4) Jim Morrison doesn't grow any older, may not be dead, and parts of him may be preserved in a jar somewhere.

5) Many classic rock songs are much slower than you might expect. For example, an actual bumblebee is much faster than Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's piece Flight Of The Bumblebee.

6) The Sex Pistol's Anarchy In The UK and The Damned's Neat Neat Neat exist solely for the sake of their Japanese album sleeves. The same is true of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight Of The Japanese Album Sleeve.

7) The fact that the little metal that fell out of the black oblong thing in his blue guitar then reappeared in the black oblong thing is a divine sign, and a true miracle, to which we must all bow down.

8) Not many great rock songs were been written in A Minor, except for those that were.

Also, the music was great too.

Bloody red bats, squelching offal! Foaming mutilations in the kiss of death!

2009-03-24T22:55:00.006Z

I'm looking forward to seeing Robyn Hitchcock at the Annandale tonight!

I don't fully know what to expect though. I mean, he's got a lot of folky music, and a lot of... Neo-psychedelic pop. I expect this performance will contain more of the latter, as he is touring with his band, the Venus 3, and his last 2 albums have been more of that flavour. I suppose I hope to see a nice balance struck between two different styles, as I've seen both Fleet Foxes and Okkervil River manage in the past.

Anyway, I'm sure there'll be some awesome tunes, and a couple of rambling monologues, which will leave me totally satisfied. But we'll see tonight! At least, I will. You may too, I suppose, whoever you are (though I know that no one I know has ever heard any Robyn Hitchcock, I do feel I should add that there will probably be tickets at the door, it doesn't look sold out).

(After adding that, I also feel I should probably add that I wouldn't exactly recommend Robyn Hitchcock to anyone that I know. I like a lot of his music, but I can't straightforwardly see any reason that anyone-in-particular else should. I'm going to plead agnostic on this one.)

Vivid Sydney? More like Vivid Enofest.

2009-03-19T13:07:00.004Z

I don't know when this Vivid Sydney festival dealie thing got announced, but I'm fairly prepared to be excited about it. The most obvious reason is, of course: Brian Eno. I love Brian Eno. Yeah, I know, I love his Music more than his Conceptual Generative Visual Artworks and whatnot, but I still love the man. And there still is a musical element to the whole deal, even if there's no hope of him personally pulling out the warm jets (musical artists mentioned so far include Battles, who I might actually see this time, and Ladytron, who... Well, they have that one song...? Eh. Also, Reggie Watts? Wasn't he just here?)

Other reasons for excitement are:
1) I'm a sucker for light shows.
2) I'm a sucket for pyrotechnics.
3) Well, look... I love the Sydney Festival. I really do. It's great times. But I would have one major complaint about it, one thing that I just can't forgive, and that's this: It's in Summer. I don't like Summer. It's too damn hot. Now actually, this partly makes me appreciate the Sydney Festival more, for giving me something to actually look forward to during summer, even for allowing me to actually look forward to summer itself. For the past two years, my dethusiasm for summer has actually been outweighed by my enthusiasm for the Sydney Festival. But still... Still... If there could be something like that in WINTER?

I love winter. It's cold, and I like this. But I also like winter at night. Because it's reaaaaally cold. And dark. I like cold and dark. Look, the point is I think I'll appreciate this Vivid Sydney business for giving me some excuse for being out at night in winter.

Information on this thing is kinda sparse right now. I suspect it was only really announced todayish or something. Maybe there won't actually be much to the whole deal. Honestly, I'm not expecting that this will be anything like comparable in scope and awesomeness to the Sydney Festival, especially not in its first year. But on the other hand, if this becomes a thing... Well, I figure they're off to a friggin' good start bringing Brian Eno in to curate. Anyway, we'll see.

Trapped In A Box!

2009-03-13T03:16:00.001Z

In today's news, I am TERRIBLE at photography.

Also, don't worry, they are no longer trapped in a box. Rather they are playing outside in some kind of open tent-like construction.

Just a link.

2009-03-07T00:46:00.007Z

88 Constellations For Wittgenstein.

Much like Wittgenstein himself, I'm really not sure what to make of this, but it's certainly very classy. Check it out. (I should note that it's bandwidth-heavy.)

(I'd recommend, if you can find them, the Poker constellation, which is nice and enjoyable in an anecdotal way, and by way of total contrast, the Doubles constellation, which is more arty.)

(Okay, I've been browsing this thing for an hour now, time for elsethings.)

Comics? I like comics!

2009-03-04T05:51:00.004Z

How did I miss these hilarious MySpace Wondermark comics?

Well, except the obvious answer: "They're hosted at MySpace so you couldn't actually consciously see any mention of the comics, but rather only got a vague sense of uneasy lameness whenever anyone tried to link to them."

(There's a great but short Kate Beaton one too.)

Raaaaage

2009-03-03T02:01:00.001Z

Turns out Minotaur China Shop is as fun as the name suggests, and illustrates why you should not offer insurance policies against Minotaur Rage. I suspect there's some kind of Moral Hazard here, or something.

In the spirit of Glasnost

2009-03-02T01:14:00.003Z

I figured I'd respond to Rishi's post about how people write with a post here, rather than a comment, because it's a subject that quite interests me too. And because I refuse to give a nice short answer. And because I haven't posted here in a while, and this is a good excuse.

Basically, the way I write depends largely on what I'm writing. However, given the question, "how do you write?" I'm most inclined to think immediately of writing essays, theses, you know, academic work. In this case I'll tend to be sitting upright, at my (desktop) computer, surrounded by clutter, with a stack of books lying on my bed beside me. I try to leave the floor around me reasonably clear so that I have some wheeling-around space.

It will usually be afternoon or earlyish evening, rarely after dinner. The window will be open (it usually is) and the blinds will be up (they usually aren't). I won't be playing any music (my putting on a song is usually a sign that I've given up working), but I will have MSN Messenger and Steam open for random distractions, as well as Facebook, webcomics, email sites, and, more recently, Google Reader, all on hand for obsessive checking. I'll usually be pretty much njude, or, if it's cool, wearing a bedsheet, or, if it's quite cold, wearing a blanket.

However, when I'm trying to structure a complicated thought, or searching for the ideal way to phrase something (which happens a lot, as I'm a bit of a perfectionist), this changes quite a bit. I tend to get up from my computer, throw on a dressing gown, and pace up and down the corridor outside my room, usually talking my thoughts out loud. I might work a few hundred words ahead in this manner, making notes on my arms with a pen, and trusting myself to be able to reproduce everything when I get back to the computer... But if I happen to hit upon an absolutely perfect, irreplaceable way to phrase something, or just an incredibly brilliant idea, then I tend to sprint back to the computer and slam it down as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, as the corridor is rarely obstacle-free, and getting from my door to my computer involves dodging a huge iron bed... Well, sudden bursts of inspiration are my leading cause of work-related injuries. I also do a fair amount of this composition-kinda-thing while in the shower, and in bed while trying to sleep. In the latter case, I'll tend to handwrite whatever I come up with, as my computer is off.

Blog posts, on the other hand, are rather different. I'll tend to write them in a semi-reclined position, with my arse on my chair but my legs on my bed. It'll be either after dinner or, occasionally, before breakfast. And I'll often be playing music too. Like, right now, I've got some Dan Deacon going on. Ohhhhhh yeaaaaaaah. Okay, so things aren't quite that different. Everything else is probably more or less the same.

Tooooootally different, though, is when I write poetry or personal letters (though thankfully I haven't done the former in about 3 years; I'm godawful at it). These I'll do exclusively after 10 pm, sitting up against some pillows in bed, handwriting on individual sheets of A4 paper, resting against a nice, large, hard book... Usually The Story Of Philosophy by Bryan Magee. I will have no music playing, but may occasionally take a quick break to play some pertinent song on my EigenPod. Barring that, I'll keep writing either until I'm done, or until I'm stupidly tired, at which point I'll usually brush the pages off my bed, hope they land in some not-totally-scrunchy way, and fall asleep.

So now you know!

Puppiespuppiespuppiespuppiespuppies

2009-02-16T09:43:00.005Z

Puppiespuppiespuppiespuppiespuppies.

Puppiespuppiespuppiespuppiespuppies

Puppiespuppiespuppiespuppiespuppies.

Also, I went to a seminar today and learnt about the Eleatic Principle, which roughly states that all properties are causal properties.

...
...
Puppiespuppiespuppiespuppiespuppies.

Why am I posting at 1 am? Get off my back!

2009-02-08T14:03:00.002Z

"The explanation of heterozygote superiority in the case of sickle cell anemia is not a matter of people competing with each other in a great malaria tournament." - Daniel Dennett

I think I would like to observe this... Great Malaria Tournament.

Seriously though, this Dennett piece, replying to Fodor's frankly bizarre objections to the Theory of Natural Selection, is one of the snarkiest pieces of philosophy I've ever read.

Why am I reading it when it has nothing in the slightest to do with any kind of philosophy that I ever engage in? Get off my back!

Probably shouldn't post here while halfway through trying to read a paper, but...

2009-02-06T01:54:00.005Z

"When we ask real deceived people whether they would like to always know the truth, we can reasonably suspect their positive answer is a hope that they will find out that their illusory beliefs are true" - Joseph Mendola

I quite like that line, for some reason. I also like this guy because he's arguing for Hedonism. Woo! Hedonism! (On the other hand, now, a bit further in this paper, he's making me feel like I can't quite understand him as I am insufficiently familiar with Berkeley, which is not a good thing.)

Speaking of Hedonism, I've been spending too much time not working, and playing Fall From Heaven. It's a Civ 4 mod. I've played it before, and it's always been fun, but now it has scenarios! Scenarios! Maaaan, it feels like HoMM 3 or something. (Not in gameplay, or anything. Just insofar as it... Has scenarios.)

Gooood times.

(Also from Mendola: "I find it hard to believe that the presence or absence of false barns in one’s vicinity... could plausibly be held relevant to one’s well-being")

Don't you miss it! Don't you miss it! Some of you people just about missed it.

2009-02-02T11:58:00.004Z

In fact, everyone I know missed it. David Byrne last night, at the Opera House, was superb. He was performing The Songs Of David Byrne and Brian Eno. Now naturally this excited me enormously, being a total Brian Eno fanboy, and extremely fond of David Byrne too. In fact, I'd hypothesise that David Byrne has got more mentions on this blog than any other artist, probably because I was particularly into his solo stuff when I started it, in 2005.

So yeah, show last night, incredible. The music, naturally, was excellent, and gave me a stronger appreciation for the recent album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. But I can't deny that I was much more excited by the opportunity to see David Byrne performing so many classic Talking Heads pieces, and he really didn't disappoint, with over half the set being Talking Heads material.

The atmosphere, surprisingly, was also incredible. I say surprisingly because it was being performed at the Opera House Concert Hall... But nonetheless everything about it was right. I was very pleased to note that David Byrne still has that kind of nervous energy for which he's known, but there's also this overlay of suaveness which is... Kinda cool. In stark contrast to Leonard Cohen, his... banter... came across as underrehersed. Like a kind of guided ramble. He was also nicely conversant with the audience, whenever he could hear them over the solid wall of applause that filled the space between every song.

Of course, what really made the atmosphere was the audience. Now as I said, this was at the Opera House, and the average audience age was around 40 (I'm working my way down to my own age group). By the time David Byrne got to Life During Wartime, about a third of the audience was on their feet and dancing, and by the end we all were. This gave me the amusement of observing the guy next to me trying to desperately remember how to dance. Seriously, it was all pretty exciting.

Of course, what was greater than the dancing in the audience was... The dancing on the stage. Without a doubt, this was the best choreographed concert I've ever been to. The first song, Strange Overtones, was fairly straightforward. But the second song, I Zimbra, started with 3 dancers coming on to the stage and stealing the microphone stands from the backup singers. And moving them to random locations around the stage. Then dancing for a bit. Then they did it again. Meanwhile David Byrne was randomly pacing, backwards, around the stage. Yes, this is what I like to see from a David Byrne concert. By the end of the song, one of the backup singers was lying flat on her back, singing, while a dancer held the entire microphone stand to her mouth. Anyway, there was some kind of choreography for around 3/4s of the songs, and it really added to the experience.

Favourite Moments? Well, I Zimbra was great. Help Me Somebody was amazing; it's from My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, Byrne & Eno's 1981 album (masterpiece) which was very sample-heavy. That particular song features some preacher yelling things like "You need to take a good look at yourself and see if you're the kind of person God WANTS you to be!" They weren't using samples for this performance, so Byrne just yelled these things himself, and did so perfectly. I loved it.

Crosseyed & Painless, Life During Wartime and Once In A Lifetime were all particularly amazing. I was rather happy to see, during Once In A Lifetime, the dancers paying reference to the weird hand-arm-chop-thing that Byrne did in the original video clip. Take Me To The River was great, but not as great as I might've hoped, for reasons that I no longer remember. The Great Curve completely blew me away; it was the first Talking Heads song that I really, really loved.

Perhaps the greatest moment, though, was during the second encore, when the lights went down, and some kind of prerecorded atmospheric music came on... And we could vaguely see everyone leave the stage (the all-white outfits made it a bit hard to hide)... Then they all came back on, the lights went up, and... They were all wearing tutus. Like, even the drummers. Then they burst into Burning Down The House, and this one blew absolutely everyone away. It was the greatest finale imaginable. Or it would've been, were it the finale. They actually played one more song, Everything That Happens. Which is a much slower, gentler piece. I have no idea why they opted for that to end with, but it was still kinda cool.

Biggest disappointments? Well most obviously there is the fact that the support act, The Church, pulled out. I'm no big fan, but I would've quite liked to have seen them. The Opera House replaced them with some random string quartet playing in the foyer, which didn't really excite me that much, so I spent the time wandering around the Botanical Gardens, trying to use my newish camera. So that was alright.

The only other slight disappointment was that they only played the one song from My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. As I subtly and undetectably weaved into the thread of the above discussion, I think that album is a masterpiece, and, as I said, Help Me Somebody really impressed me. Now obviously a lot of the album would be unplayable without samples. Like, Qu'ran would be impossible, The Jezebel Spirit would not work at all... Mea Culpa would be awesome, but difficult... America Is Waiting would be worth a shot... Welllll, it was no grand loss.

Anyway, using my ultra-secret technique of Furiously Scribbing On My Ticket In The Dark, I managed to keep track of the setlist. In case anyone cares, here it is!:

Strange Overtones
I Zimbra
One Fine Day
Help Me Somebody
Houses In Motion
My Big Nurse
My Big Hands (Fall Through the Cracks) (From the album The Catherine Wheel)
Heaven
Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)
Poor Boy
Crosseyed And Painless
Life Is Long
Once In A Lifetime
Life During Wartime

First Encore
I Feel My Stuff
Take Me To The River
The Great Curve

Second Encore
Air
Burning Down The House

Third Encore
Everything That Happens

Help me somebody!

2009-02-02T07:04:00.001Z

GoingtoseeDavidByrnegoingtobelateunlessIleaverightnowBye!

Laugh, and cry, and cry, and laugh about it all

2009-01-31T02:04:00.006Z

Leonard Cohen was amazing. And I don't use that term lightly!

In fact, I probably do use that term lightly, so for the purpose of this statement I am temporarily reconfiguring my usage of the term "amazing" to something particularly powerful, and then applying my newly reconfigured, non-lightly-used term, to Leonard Cohen. He was Amazing₁.

He played for about 3 hours, including a 15 minutes intermission. He played the span of most of his career, from Suzanne to In My Secret Life, via Chelsea Hotel and The Future. It's hard to really pick out the particularly brilliant moments, because each song really does its own thing, has it's own thing to say, it's own effect to create... And all that.

I'll settle for saying these two things: The most emotional moment, for me, came at the end of the first half, when he performed Anthem. It helps that I probably already found this one of his most powerful songs. The music complements the lyrics perfectly, and the lyrics are among the most beautiful I've heard. The name, Anthem, is truly appropriate for the song, which seems to singularly encapsulate and enunciate everything that Leonard Cohen's work is about, and, on the night, Cohen introduced it as though it were a manifesto. In short, throughout his performance, I resembled Rob in this comic.

The funniest moment, on the other hand, was the performance of Tower Of Song. Now that song clearly has its funny moments, but I never really saw it as a humourous song before this performance. It probably helped that it is a song about growing old, and he was singing it to a huge audience, the average age of which was probably about 60. But in particular, he managed the most perfect delivery imaginable for the lines

I said to Hank Williams: how lonely does it get?
... Hank Williams hasn't answered yet.

... You... You probably had to be there. I, for one, can say I am damn glad I was.

In between songs, he was incredibly charming. He had this way of coming across as the most kind, humble, respectful, gracious presenter that I have ever seen. Perhaps this has something to do with spending 5 years secluded in a Buddhist monastary, I don't know. Much of his banter was clearly rehearsed, carried over from one performance to the next, but it was still entertaining, and funny. I can kinda forgive him for this, as any genuine audience interaction probably doesn't work too well in a venus like the Entertainment Centre. I could have more complaints about the venue, but frankly it probably wasn't too bad for a show like this. I could hear everything, even with not-too-good seats, and, though the music certainly didn't seem to fill up the space or anything, I'm not sure it really had to.

Anyway, long story short, Leonard Cohen: Amazing₁.

The Semantics of (a) Superlative Aesthetic Judgement.

2009-01-29T03:50:00.007Z

Obviously I'm in the mood for talking about Leonard Cohen, what with my excitement and all. Here's a statement that I heard somewhere about the dude, with which I am inclined to agree: "Leonard Cohen is the best songwriter of his generation." It sounds plausible. But then, of course, having done too much analytic philosophy, I begin to wonder what exactly that means. What claim am I assenting to? What does this statement mean? Or... To narrow it down a bit, who is his major competition? How long is a generation, and where do we measure it from? Well, assuming that we're talking about a Cultural generation, and that a cultural generation is around 10 years, then...

If we measure it from his birth, 1934... I really don't know many songwriters from around that time at all. The only that really spring to mind are Jacques Brel and Serge Gainsbourg, born 1929 and 1928. The latter I'm really yet to appreciate at all, and the former... Well, he could probably give Cohen a run for his money.

Unfortunately I feel I can't really compare them that well, as much of the greatness of both Brel and Cohen is in their lyrical talents, and obviously I'm very poorly situated to assess the lyrical talents of Jacques Brel. Anyway, I'd be inclined to give it to Cohen just because... Brel songs have a tendency to be just a little samey. Like, he has the slow, softish, melancholy songs like Ne Me Quitte Pas, and the constantly building, triumphant songs, like L'âge Idiot (and I love both styles, of course, but still) (Edit: In retrospect, all that is total lies.). Cohen seems to do a lot more to play with genre and style, alter his instrumentation and delivery, and cover a wider range of moods. Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if I'm still being misled by the translation gap here.

On the other hand, if we want to claim that an artist belongs in a certain cultural generation by virtue of their first work in the medium under question being released around a certain time, Leonard Cohen will be in a very different place, as he only came to songwriting relatively late in life, with his first album being released in 1968, when he was 33. This would put him in company with which I'm a lot more familiar, like Frank Zappa and John Cale, Van Dyke Parks and David Bowie. Perhaps even Brian Eno and Jonathan Richman, if you wish. I'm sure you can make up your own list, my point is just that, in this company, I would be much more reluctant to declare him the best of his generation. But, truth be told, I would still be tempted...

Which bring me to the next part of the statement that needs analysis, "best songwriter." Well for starters, in case it isn't obvious, I'm taking "best" to mean something fairly subjective. Something like "my favourite," but, in a vaguely Kantian way, really more "my favourite, for strong aesthetic reasons beyond mere attachment, bias, positive associations, familiarity, etc... And in such a way that I think he should be YOUR favourite as well, whoever you may be." Though to be somewhat unKantian, I might restrict that last bit to "assuming you are relatively similarly culturally situated to me," mainly for reasons mentioned above to do with translation. I think I'm also putting an implicit "that I know of" after "best." Or perhaps after "songwriter." You get my point.

But anyway, I think the fact that this statement is assessing him as a Songwriter is what gives it such credibility. I would not be so inclined to suggest that he is the best Performer of his generation, or the best Musician. In fact, I think the reason the claim is framed in this way is... Well, frankly it's probably because most people these days probably know Jeff Buckley's cover of Hallelujah better than any actual performance of Leonard Cohen's. Which naturally I'm inclined to think is disappointing. Especially because Jeff Buckey's cover owes more to John Cale's cover than to the original.

Obviously to speak of the best songwriter rather than, say, the best musician, shifts attention away from... Away from individual performances, and on to... Some kind of isolated idea of the song... Itse- When I think about it, I'm not sure how much sense this makes. I mean, maybe on some theoretical level I can understand the idea of the song as a completely distinct entity of which there are multiple instantiations, but, perhaps just because I'm not a musician myself, I certainly can't really operate with that concept in making a judgement about relative merits. I mean, to use that above example, the John Cale and the Leonard Cohen renditions of Hallelujah are so utterly different, I can't see how I'm positioned to see how much of the value of each comes from the songwriting, and how much comes rather from the cluster of features associated with "musician," "performer," etc. This is especially so when I'm personally terrible at identifying which aspects of a song come from its production, or even following individual instruments unless I try really hard. I'm terrible at noticing hooks, identifying riffs, and all that.

In the end, I suspect the only thing that I can really, distinctly, unambiguously pick out as being attributable to the Songwriter is the lyrics. And if the focus is put on the lyrics, then naturally Cohen has a huge advantage. Still, this is not to say that the lyrics are dominating this judgement, as I would get very different results from "greatest songwriter" judgements and "greatest lyricist" judgements. I mean, besides anything else, Elton John wouldn't be eligible for one, and Bernie Taupin wouldn't be eligible for the other.

Anyway, I suppose in the end I really have nothing as firm to say about the semantics of "songwriter" as I hope I do about the semantics of "his generation" in this statement. I suppose in the end my conclusion to all of the above is that, while I'm inclined to agree that Leonard Cohen is the greatest songwriter of his generation, I am nonetheless not quite sure what I mean by agreeing to that, and I am well aware that, were the statement to be more fully specified, I may no longer find myself agreeing.

Snarky Comment Of The Day!

2009-01-29T02:32:00.002Z

“We do have an organ for understanding and recognizing moral facts. It is called the brain.” - Paul Churchland.

In related news, PhilPapers is online. And this is the best news ever. There's a bit of work to be done with Categorization still, but, even in this underdeveloped state, it's looking like a freakin' useful resource for finding philosophy papers.

Also, I see Leonard Cohen tonight! Tonight!! I'm rather excited!

Trouble In Dreams

2009-01-27T02:30:00.004Z

I feel like I had a really insecure dream last night.

Like, anyone could've just broke into it and downloaded all the delicious, unencrypted content.

Anyway, in other news, recent fun things include: The Longest Journey, Liberal Crime Squad, Multiplayer Civ 4, and a surfeit of 1970s British folk rock.

Recent unfun things include: Awareness of having done insufficient work, occasionally inclement weather, missing meals due to Multiplayer Civ 4 (clearly I need to get me some corn flakes), and lack of a fourth item to make this list balanced with the previous one.

With stirring emotions

2009-01-21T10:19:00.003Z

I'm still in the mood for talking about David Byrne! Probably because of the seeing him in a few weeks.

The first David Byrne solo album I heard was Grown Backwards, which I heard shortly after it came out in 2004. And there's a song on this album, Empire, of which* I'm growing increasingly fond.

Anyway, this song is like an anthemic paean to the Republican party, a manifesto even. Thus, obviously, coming from David Byrne, it's completely, thoroughly** ironic, in the good ol' fashioned sense of the word. But what really gets me about this song... Well, there's the way the music perfectly accompanies the lyrics, such that an entire style of music is satirically skewered along with the contents of the lyrics. Though also, the fact that the song can become so singable after a few listens is probably also an insightful commentary on the power of this kind of music to inculcate its attitudes in a moderately receptive audience.

But what I was going to say is that what really gets me about the song is how relatively reasonable the lyrics are, for an ironic satire. As in, there's very little in the lyrics that you couldn't imagine a not-far-from-mainstream conservative wingnut saying. Byrne doesn't feel the need to grotesqueify his targets by suggesting they're baby-eaters or anything. He rather, more or less, uses their own words.

One of the more absurd sections goes:

Young artists and writers, please heed the call
What's good for business is good for us all

Now maybe I've been reading too much Sadly, No, but I don't find it too hard to imagine some right-wing American pundits lamenting the lack of pro-business attitudes in the artistic community. Of course, these lines take on a certain absurdity within the context of what is more or less a pop album, but, well... If it wasn't for that context, and if I didn't know this was by David Byrne, I would probably take this song completely seriously, and thus never listen to it. This is what I find so interesting.

To be fair, probably the least immediately believable section in the song goes:

And as it is in nature, so it is in life.
The weak among us perish, the strong alone survive.

Even that, though, doesn't seem too unlikely to come from the mouth of, say, an Objectivist.

Anyway, I think I'm done. I just felt like sharing those thoughts, and my fondness for that song. As a matter of fact, David Byrne has said much the same stuff himself, here, making this post fairly redundant, but... Err... Bye!

* I'll try doing that uploading it to a place so that other people can hear it thing here, but I don't know how that'll go.
** I wish I could learn to spell "thoroughly" without a dictionary.

Rising like a stone?

2009-01-15T02:26:00.003Z

As you have probably suspected for some time, today's post will be about song lyrics that employ strange similes to describe the way that something rises!

Our first competitor is, of course, Africa, by Toto. This one is an interesting case, because although I could always tell that Kilimanjaro was rising like something above the Serengeti, it took me a while to work out exactly what comparison was being made. At first, I was fairly sure the line was

I know that I must do what's right,
As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like a Memphis above the Serengeti

Now obviously that doesn't make much sense. I suppose, as Wikipedia tells me, Memphis was briefly a Confederate stronghold in the American Civil War, so presumably it "rose" against the Union... But that's stretching it a bit. Anyway, I think the degree to which that made no sense made me switch my interpretation of the line to

As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like a Phoenix above the Serengeti

This interpretation makes much more sense. You know, Phoenixes, with their Rising from the Ashes. They rise. Things can therefore rise like them. I'd buy that. Unfortunately... Objection! The word(s) in question, upon listening, actually sound nothing like "A Phoenix." I suspect I only ever got this version in my mind by confusing Memphis and Phoenix, as two American cities, and sticking to the latter due to its making more sense. It was only relatively recently that I discovered what the lyrics actually were:

As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti

Yep, those are the actual words. You can see how I made my mistake; Olympus... A Memphis... They sound kinda similar. "So anyway," you say, "there's nothing really strange about that simile, is there?" Well here's what gets me... Toto obviously want to employ some kind of evocative descriptive technique to conjure an image of how a mountain rises out of the ground... So they do so by comparing it to... The way a different mountain rises out of the ground. What the hell kind of simile is that? Frankly, I would've prefered "A Phoenix."

My advice to Toto: try studying Genesis. I mean, the band, not the book. When they want to describe the way a mountain rises, they do it with style, as in The Fountain Of Salmacis.

From a dense forest of tall dark pinewood
Mount Ida rises like an island.

See, that simile actually does some kind of evocative work. Bit of a cliché perhaps, but I'm still giving it kudos.

Our next strange simile to describe the way that something rises comes from a song I haven't actually heard, alas. Namely, Fresh Air For My Mama by 10cc:

The cost of living in dreams
Is rising like a crime wave

Now, I'm inclined to give them some credit for making the simile relate to the themes of the song as a whole, but this still looks a little strange to me. Do crime waves really rise? I would've thought that, like actual waves, they would more Sweep or Crash or something. But then, maybe I'm not really up to speed with my wave collocations. Google has quite a few hits for "wave rising," so I'm probably off base here. You win this round, 10cc!!

My final simile, however... I'm fairly sure this one makes no sense. If someone wants to explain it to me, knock yourself out. It's from David Byrne's Glass, Concrete & Stone. The lines are

The Moon
Is rising like a discotheque

...
I think that one wins.

Sydney? Festival!

2009-01-12T11:11:00.006Z

The Sydney Festival has started! Woo, in principle.

Personally, on the opening night, I was... Off having a (delightful) dinner in Eastwood. But then, when the dinner was finished, I scooted off to the city, to catch as much of the festivities as I could. I got there only a bit before 10, so naturally, as much as I could was not much. Still, I really love the whole Streets Full Of People Wandering Around Being Festive thing. Streets Full Of People Wandering Around Being Festive is one thing about which I really can't be cynical.

Naturally I was trying to get into the Domain to see Grace Jones, about whom I know precisely nothing, but it was full by the time I got there. Still, wandering around Macquarie Street and Martin Place I stumbled upon the Pyrophone Juggernaut. Which, as that picture may indicate, was pretty awesome. They played a short, 20 minuteish set, which I ended up seeing twice. I'm torn between saying "Because it was that good!" and admitting that I probably wouldn't've stayed for the second performance if I had realised that I actually came in right at the start of the first. Anyway, it was good enough that, after 15 minutes of it, I hung around to see some more.

Of course, when I say it was that good, it's worth keeping in mind that I really have a thing for fire. Which I find odd, because this seems to be a relatively new thing. I didn't play with fire much as a kid, I still have trouble lighting matches... I found Wheeler annoying. I suspect it goes back to playing Dungeons and Dragons in 2nd year, when I started playing with the candles that our DM had spread all over the table. But even then, it was actually more the wax that I enjoyed playing with. Oh, and burning my hair to make that delightfully horrible smell.

Okay, so maybe I don't really have such a fondness for fire. In which case Pyrophone Juggernaut must've been good on their actual, non-spectacle-based merits! Oh, as for what it actually was... Well, basically they played music, while flinging a whole lot of fire around. I gather the idea was that some of the music was made by blowing fire up huge pipes. Unfortunately, that sound was mostly drowned out by excellent percussion, with the steel drums and the pipey things and the whatnot. Still, the pyrophone looked snazzy, and occasionally produced some nice warm blasts of heat.

The music itself was very... Well, we all know how annoying this term is, but I'm just going to say it, the music was very world-musicy. Which, along with the spectacle, the presentation, the atmosphere, and my mood at the time, rubbed me exactly the right way. But here's the best thing about the whole event: While walking to the bus stop at the end of their last performance, I thought "I really want to hear more music like that now." So I went to my iPod and started playing some Dead Can Dance. I hadn't heard Dead Can Dance for ages. I have a heap of their music, but somehow it all got itself a 0 star rating, and so rarely came up in Party Shuffle. And you know what? It's damn good. Like, really good. Like, I really really like it. I mean, again I was in perfectly the right mood for it just then, but still.

Oh, and of course, listening to Dead Can Dance got me thinking "I should watch Baraka again." Baraka, in case you sadly haven't seen it, is an awesome Koyanisqatsi-like film. I can never quite decide which of those two films I prefer, but I can decide that I really love them both a lot. A few pieces of music in Baraka are by Dead Can Dance, hence the connection. In related news, turns out Ron Fricke is making a sequel to Baraka, about which I'm pretty dang excited.

So I was thinking about Baraka... And that got me thinking about Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. You see, much of the footage for the Secret Project movies in Alpha Centauri comes from Baraka. So I played that a bit yesterday. Instead of watching Baraka. Anyway, it was awesome. I don't know if they're making a sequel to that.

Tomorrow, I see Bill Callahan at the Famous Spiegeltent. Will he also be awesome? Only time will tell! About 21 hours of time!

(Special Bonus Condensed Version Of Above Post!!!:

Pyrophone Juggernaut: Awesome.
Dead Can Dance: Awesome.
Baraka: Awesome.
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: Awesome.
Bill Callahan at the Famous Spiegeltent: Awesome?

Not my greatest post ever

2009-01-08T11:57:00.010Z

I told someone I was going to write a defence of John Vanderslice against his RELENTLESS ATTACKS, but now I can't really be all that bothered. I mean... Ma... Maybe he really is only an 8 after all.

But, on the other hand...

You see, my problem with Vanderslice, beside the fact that his extremely awesome name blinds me to his actual quality, and the fact that my bitterness at barely being able to hear him over the chattering louts at the Metro when I saw him in 2007 naturally rallies me to his support, is that this sentence is too long.

I'm not particularly fond of much of his early stuff, like his work with MK Ultra, and much of his first three albums. But, on the other hand, I really like a lot of his most recent three albums.

Also, the most salient criticism of him is kinda true; he really does have an obsession with the World Trade Centre attacks. Emerald City seems to be pretty much entirely about it, and so do a number of songs on his previous albums. But, on the other hand, I think I have a certain appreciation for his ability to constantly write about the same thing from a wide range of perspectives, and with significant differences of style. Also, I think I generally get a little bit annoyed at the apoliticism of much modern indie rock. I mean, it seems like in the 80s everyone had something (nasty) to say about Thather or Reagan, in song format... There were the Punks getting pissed off about everything, and before that a whole lot of politically charged Folk music. But then, though I know I'm listening to the wrong genres for it, it seems like everyone clammed up during the Bush & Blair era, which are hardly slim pickings for political rage. Really, I think my favourite political song of the last 10 years is Sovay, by Andrew Bird, and that took me quite a bit of listening just to realise he's singing about the Iraq war. I miss the blatentness of Margaret On The Guillotine. Back when I was 3.

But that's all a bit of a side-rant, considering that even Vanderslice doesn't seem to be straightforwardly critical in any way that I can obviously determine. But I figure I'm probably pretty bad at picking this stuff out. I'm probably missing the blatent political rage in... Like... The Shins, or Beirut or something.

Anyway, just to confirm this, he does actually have SOME songs that's AREN'T about 9/11. Like Angela. Which is about him losing his friend's rabbit. And then, apparently, trying to make up for it by suggesting they leave the city and "get some land out in the middle of nowhere." Real classy there, Vanderslice.

I think I'm getting off the point again. This is a problem with Vanderslice, he makes me get off the point.

Ah, that's right, I should mention his qualities! Well, musically he... Does some stuff with harmonies and electronicy things and whatnot, of which I heartily approve. I guess I just think... I think he's very good at creating moods. I may as well mention my favourite example, his song Up Above The Sea. Both lyrically and musically, I feel the song does an excellent job of evoking a kind of terrible, foreboding paranoia. It's something to do with... The percussion, I suppose. And his voice. Actually, there's not much else in the song, so that would be it.

You know, in the end, I'm pretty sure I'm not actually going to convince anyone of anything here. Give him a 7 if you want, see what I care. I'm sticking to an 8.5, at the least.

:(

A Nanecdote.

2009-01-05T12:57:00.000Z

Something just gave me a brief inclination to change my facebook status to "Brendan is wondering about wonderful things, such as himself."

But then I thought "before I do that, I might look up the definition of Wonderful, to see if that status makes any sense."

So, I did a Google search for "Definitions."

WHAT THE HECK?!?

Any old lie will do

2009-01-04T13:44:00.009Z

Avocado Juice! Delicious! Who'd've thought it? To be fair, it was more like a kind of sweet avacado flavoured dessert beverage. I mean, obviously if you just tried to juice an avacado you wouldn't get very far.

Anyway, that's what I had for dinner last night. Also, some kind of plate of miscellaneous eatables, called a "Vegetarian Delight," a bowl of dry noodles in shallot sauce, and 2 Vegetarian Buns. Am I doomed to eat foods with "Vegetarian" in their names for the rest of my life? Anyway, I probably haven't made it sound like much, but it was truly the most delicious meal I have had in months. Though I do have a short memory for food. If this was actually a food-blog, or I was actually a foodie-type, I'm sure I would've taken a photo with my new camera. Before I ate it. Oh, and the meal was at Din Tai Fung, in World Square. Recommended!

In related news, immediately after the meal I saw The Dodos and Fleet Foxes. The former exceeded my moderate expectations, the latter met my extremely high expectations. Still, that's all the review I'm giving it. If you want more then, as per usual, this guy has more. Or, you know, ask me some time. But don't expect much coherence. Hell, even that guy is hardly coherent. I think I am a little skeptical about the ability to be, all at once, coherent, expansively informative, and evaluative in a concert review. I mean, an album review, sure, but... Well, I can't imagine myself giving much more than a "OMGFLEETFOXESARETEHWONDERFUL" after a concert. Maybe a "THEYPLAYEDINSTRUMENTSWELL" if you're lucky. But then, that's probably just me. And actually, it's also probably just me now. Like, at 1 am the following night. Maybe I'll give it a real try after David Byrne in a month's time, considering I suspect no one else I know will be seeing it for themselves. Or caring.

I'm damn excited about David Byrne.

Start of Anecdote

2009-01-02T13:08:00.002Z

I've been listening to a lot of Destroyer lately. But today I noticed the lyric "Was it the movie or the making of Fitzcarraldo where someone learned to love again?" And I was all, like, "I've seen Fitzcarraldo!"

End of anecdote.

(Bonus non-anecdotal fact!: Destroyer is awesome.)

(Bonus reporting of mood!: I'm damn excited about Fleet Foxes tomorrow.)

Morning has Tom Brokaw.

2008-12-29T19:26:00.005Z

I believe I have developed a new, fool proof plan to avoid getting mugged.

This is, when confronted by persons demanding my goods, simply wake up. This has worked the last couple of times!

Though exactly why my assailant this morning was a John Flansberg look-alike with a cricket bat, I'm not quite sure.

Also, I suppose a good tip-off to the irreality of my situation this time should've been the fact that earlier in my trip I encountered antiques littering Parramatta road, that started flying around and attacking people who held one, thus causing their toenails to fall off. Also, the fact that I was apparently coming home from high school, where my uncle was the network administrator.

Also, what, it's 6:30 am? I'm going back to sleep.

Quite bearable

2008-12-27T07:46:00.001Z

So, I just cleaned my room, to some extent...

And I found 6 empty gummy bear tubs.

I like gummy bears.

Best Albums Of The Year!

2008-12-24T02:36:00.005Z

The year in question being 1978.

1. Kate Bush - The Kick Inside

Kate Bush's first album, and, you know, a friggin' masterpiece, even without the requisite amazement for her being 19 when it was released. Though I don't listen to as much Kate Bush as I used to, and I tend to prefer some of her later albums, this album nonetheless perfectly encapsulates what makes her such an awesome and unique musician. You know, the epic narrative lyrics, soaring vocals, complex arrangements, unashamed romanticism, obscure and not-so-obscure literary references... What's more, though some are better than others, all the songs on the album are really quite top notch, presumably because she wasn't yet so much into the kind of experimentation that increases the variance on her later albums. She also released her second album in 1978, Lionheart, which was unfortunately rushed, and so among her worst.

2. Talking Heads - More Songs About Buildings And Food

Talking Heads' second album, which I tend to mentally combine with They Might Be Giants' third album, to form "More Songs About Buildings And Flood." Anyway, it's certainly not my favourite Talking Heads album, but still, you know, it's a Talking Heads album. It has its great moments, and is pretty consistently funky, but Take Me To The River is the only really amazing song on the album. Talking Heads are really a band that I feel got distinctly better over time. Incidentally, this was the first Talking Heads album to be produced by Brian Eno. Which brings us to...

3. Eno/Moebius/Roedelius - After The Heat

Yep, I'm a Brian Eno fanboy, but truth be told I actually strongly prefer his rock albums (like, 1974 to 1977) over his ambient stuff. Much as I like the idea of ambient music, and appreciate that someone in the industry is being sufficiently theoretical to ramble on about generative music and all that, I'm nonetheless rarely in the mood to listen intently to ambient music, or in the kind of situation to have it playing in the background. Besides that, I just really, really like Brian Eno's voice, and his lyrics. After The Heat, however, is somewhere between his rock stuff and his ambient stuff. I really don't know how else to describe it. I suspect it tends to make me a bit tense, and I think right now it's giving me a headache. An AWESOME headache! Anyway, for these reasons it beats out the more conceptually awesome Music For Airports, released the same year.

4. Captain Beefheart - Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)

I have a tragic confession to make: I don't much like Trout Mask Replica. Obviously this means I fail music. But I do quite enjoy Shiny Beast. I like to think of it as Captain Beefheart: Easy Mode. It has its weak moments, and stylistically jumps all over the place (which is kinda the point I suppose), but Beefheart's singing is wonderful, and some tracks are just excellent. Tropical Hot Dog Night is particularly fun.
- Way to like the most accessible song on the album there, Brendan!
- Bah! Enough of your music snobbery, OtherBrendan! Go listen to your precious Xiu Xiu and Animal Collective!

5. Warren Zevon - Excitable Boy

Aaah, Warren Zevon... He's like a classier, deader Elton John, one who you don't have to feel slightly embarrassed to like. Naturally, containing both Werewolves Of London and Lawyers, Guns & Money, this could not but be an excellent album. Those two tracks are definitely the highlights, but the rest of the album is very listenable as well, with no real low points, unless you're allergic to soulful ballads. Anyway, I have a terrible weakness for both piano music and harmonies, so that's why this album is here. Also, ROCK ACTION.

Mentions (honourable or otherwise)

Elvis Costello - This Year's Model

I can't help but believe that if I was some kind of theoretically inconceivable perfectly unbiased arbiter of musical quality, then this album would've made my top five... But personally, I find Elvis Costello fairly hit and miss. On this album, (I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea is an amazing hit... And there are a few other minor hits, but a few too many misses. Anyway, feel free to consider this #6.

Neil Young - Comes A Time

I would definitely say that I really like folk rock, and I'm also very much inclined to say that I don't much like country music. But then, I often suspect that there's really no strong generic distinction here, and that there's just one genre of music, such that I call instances of it that I enjoy "folk," and instances of it that I dislike "country." Well, here I'm inclined to do this on an intra-album scale. Comes A Time has a few songs that I really enjoy, and a few more that I find extremely annoying. The former are folk, the latter are country.

Peter Gabriel - Peter Gabriel

I actually went out of my way to hear this album for the first time in research for this post... I expected it would make the top 5... But I was pretty disappointed. You might think being disappointed by Peter Gabriel is liking being disappointed by SIDS or something, but I actually really like a lot of his stuff... Just... None of this stuff. I'm inclined to say that Peter Gabriel is just a little bit ahead of his time, and unfortunately that puts this album right in the middle of the 80s.

Devo - Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!

Jocko Homo is pretty damn good, but I'm generally more of a Freedom Of Choice man. Incidentally, this is another album produced by Brian Eno. What a dude.

The Cars - The Cars

Generic pop crap! No seriously, I really, really liked this album... For about a week.

Japan - Adolescent Sex

I used to really enjoy Adolescent Sex, but then I ~~ceased to be an adolescent~~ got a bit sick of Japan for reasons that still elude me. This led to one of those Furiously Deleting Half Of My David Sylvian Songs moments. I still quite like the song Television though. Like a really angry version of Roxy Music.

(Okay, if you really want my top... 8 of 2008 they'd probably be Fleet Foxes, Hey Ma, Heretic Pride, Trouble In Dreams, Shallow Grave, Dear Science, Exotic Creatures Of The Deep and Arm's Way, in roughly that order.)

Innconceivable

2008-12-21T07:46:00.005Z

I haven't made a post since the 7th! So, to make up for it, here's a long one. (Ha! As if I'd even be capable of anything else.)

And because everyone likes reacting to things, and because the issue seems to be coming up a lot lately, I thought I'd react to this. That is, that UN taking declarations about equality for all, regardless of sexual identity. Or more specifically, I thought I'd react to the pro-bigotry declaration, sponsored by the Vatican et al. Even more specifically, I want to talk about this one particular argument that is made, an argument that quite possibly shits me above and beyond any other argument I have ever heard, that rights & respect for gays can lead to “the social normalization, and possibly the legitimization, of... pedophilia.” And because I really have nothing new or insightful to say politically, or even on the logical merits of the argument itself (this guy demolishes it pretty soundly near the end of that post), I'm instead just going to segue into this personal anecdote:

Back when I was new to the Internet, around year 9, I posted for a short while on a developer's forum dedicated to the computer game Planescape: Torment. And that was fun. But then the game was released, and there wasn't anything in particular keeping me there, and so I found my virtual way to this other forum for a game in development, The Arcanum Inn. And that was much more fun. Great friendly people, great times. Naturally there wasn't much to discuss about the actual game, and we could only talk so much about other RPGs, so the discussion was primarily completely off-topic. The forum was hosted by IGN, but there was absolutely no official moderation (until there was, and the entire forum picked up and left for another host), so there was the nice, natural feeling of a self-governed community. After a year or two that game also got released, but the place and the people were good enough that I hung around for a few years more. It was what I mainly did on the internet. I probably spent more time on that forum and its associated chatroom than I do now on Facebook, Google Reader, or even Team Fortress 2.

But anyway, to get back to the original point... As any internet location must have, the Arcanum Inn had its resident fundamentalist. And I really do mean resident. Checking out the original forum now, he had over 5,000 posts before we all left for the other host, to my mere 4,500. I say this to establish that he wasn't just a random troll, a total stranger, that inevitable person who just wants to take over a forum to argue about Young-Earth Creationism. He did want to argue about Young-Earth Creationism, but he also wanted to talk about Arcanum and RPGs and whatever else we were rambling about that day. And if I ever found anything odd about a hardcore Christian also being a hardcore roleplayer, I got used it to. Even though the things that he said occasionally appalled or terrified me, I could like him well enough when the conversation was not about religion.

But, as you may've guessed, a certain argument he made eventually made me leave the entire community behind. He started a new thread, about DC's then recent decision to recreate Batwoman as a lesbian. Naturally he disapproved, and was especially upset at the idea of essentially heroic characters, up to whom we are meant to look, having, as he saw it, sinful sexual perversions. I'll avoid the obvious comment about them being psychologically crazed vigilantes who take the law into their own hands and all that. But what he said which really got my goat was along the lines of "What next, Clark Kent is revealed to be a pedophile?" I suspect this was among a list of incestuous Green Lanterns and whathaveyou, but it's too long ago to recall.

As I've said, I don't feel the need to point out how bad this implicit argument is, nor do I feel the need to register my abhorrence and disgust at these kinds of self-propagating, and probably really damaging attempts to mentally link homosexuality with genuinely harmful, and therefore immoral, practices. Take that as given. But actually, on that last point, I think there's an interesting thought to be had here by trying to get behind a fundamentalist's thinking, as shoddily as I expect I would do so:

...
Actually, fuck it. I was going to try and make some kind of point about how the fundamentalist would see both acts as sins, having in both cases the same kind of effect on the God/Sinner relationships, and so essentially morally on par... And then I could go on to praise consequentialist approaches to morality for being able to principledly compare the actual relative levels of immorality of any two immoral acts... But actually, screw the principle of charity, I'm not so generous as to believe that any fundamentalist actually DOES think that homosexuality and pedophilia are on par, rather they just know that society at large isn't going to buy their "homosexuality is a perversion" crap, at least in public discourse, and so they want to tie these together for purely rhetorical purposes.

Anyway, to return to my narrative... If it was just this one person making this kind of claim, I suspect I could've just ignored him, and continued posting at the Inn. And actually, it kinda was just the one person making the claim. But here's what really shat me: No one else, in a population of dozens, many of whom were posting on that thread, was willing to stand up and say "No, actually, what you're saying is disgusting, bigoted, and dangerous bullshit." And when I say no one else, I'm lying. There was one other person. But he too left in the fallout.

As to whether merely registering an objection then buggering off was a noble move, or whether it would've been better to hang around and argue at him, I don't know, or particularly care. I'd seen how the Evolution/Creationism threads went (namely, 'on forever'), and so I knew there would be no changing his mind. And everyone else just didn't seem to care (charitably, because they just figured "oh, another fundie on the internet, what's new," but to take this attitude with a member of a tight community of 'internet friends,' in the best possible sense of that worrying term, seems a little much). Besides, I had been posting less and less up to that point anyway, and I suspect this occurred around when uni work was starting to demand more of my attention than internet shenanigans.

Anyway, that's about the entire story. More recently I've revisited what little remains of that community. Many people have left, including the fundie... And surprisingly the other guy that left at the same time as me has recently returned. These days, though there are a very few people I have a strongish, purely online relationship with, there are none from overseas, let alone a whole community from all around the world (well, all around North America and Europe anyway). I still, looking back, really enjoy the dynamic that existed in that community for so long, and find it hard to imagine anything quite similar enough anywhere online. But, you know, that's probably a common enough feeling.

Anyway, I think this post is done, but I can't help but trying to end by coming back to something like the original point, and giving a link to this piece by Jeremy Bentham. As the site claims, it is the first known argument for the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, written (though sadly, I think, unpublished) in 1785. Go Bentham! Of course, he's not going to stop calling it a perversion and an abomination, but hell, it was 1785. Also, it contains one of my favourites quotes:

"It is wonderful that nobody has ever yet fancied it to be sinful to scratch where it itches, and that it has never been determined that the only natural way of scratching is with such or such a finger and that it is unnatural to scratch with any other."

Live in a swamp and be three dimensional!

2008-12-07T10:17:00.003Z

I just finished watching L.A. Story, probably for only the third or second time. I would've last seen it... Probably a decade ago. But I remembered it throughout that time as among my favourite movies, and upon rewatching it, I'm still very fond of it. I also now have an explanation for my really liking Richard E. Grant despite only remembering him in Gosford Park, which utterly failed to interest me. And yes, I will get around to watching some Posh Nosh when my internet rejuvinates itself. And, my God, I still haven't seen Withnail And I...

Anyway, yeah, L.A. Story. It's written by Steve Martin. Now for some reason I always find myself feeling the need to defend Steve Martin - possibly because of Cheaper By The Dozen and films of its ilk - so maybe if I just do it here on this Blog thing that I can just verbalink people to it in future.

Now I'm probably pretty biased towards Steve Martin in a I Grew Up Watching His Films kind of way. Actually, on reading through his filmography at wikipedia, the only film there that really stands out from my childhood, besides L.A. Story, is ¡Three Amigos!, which I must've seen a billion times, but haven't revisited, again for about 10 years. I have a sneaking suspicion that that one will be a little crappier with age, but I'd be willing to give it a shot. Others of his films that really stick out in my mind, like Little Shop Of Horrors (so good), Roxanne, Parenthood, Housesitter, and The Jerk, I think I saw only a... half dozen years ago. In particular, Dead Men Wear Plaid, an excellent film noir homage, I saw, and wrote about, for the HSC.

I suspect my feeling like I saw more of his films when I was really young comes partly from my early habit of getting Steve Martin confused with Leslie Nielsen, in whose movies I really did overindulge as a youth. As to why I got them confused... Well, I was young and foolish, and they both have white hair. I also got James Bond mixed up with Indiana Jones until late high school.

Anyway, Steve Martin. Good times. I suppose that's the best defense I can really come up with. Yes, he's been in some crap movies. Yes, trying to fill Peter Sellers' shoes in The Pink Panther was probably a bad idea. But he's also really rather clever, pretty damn funny, and none too terrible at genuine, well executed Sentiment now and then.

Anyway, what's really the best defense I can come up with is this: If you haven't, read The Pleasure Of My Company. It really does stand out in my mind as one of the best books I've read. I'm often itching to reread it, but unfortunately I can't find it. Thus, no, I can't lend it to you. Louise, if you have it in England: I can't really complain, because you bought it in the first place. I actually haven't read anything else by him, mainly because Shopgirl got turned into a film that I didn't end up seeing, and I only just remembered, during the composition of this Proust, that he wrote Born Standing Up, a book of memoirs. Still, as I often tend to randomly repeat to strangers in the street, I would give anything to see a production of Picasso At The Lapin Agile, provided that anything was of equal value to a theatre ticket.

Next week, a defense of Leslie Neilsen! (Spoilers: It boils down to "watch Police Squad!"). (More Spoilers: I won't actually write a defense of Leslie Neilsen).

I wrote a run-on sentence.

2008-12-07T06:30:00.004Z

Hey, looks like this might be my 250th post.

Unfortunately I don't have much to say... In this post.

Hey, I am the only one who is frequently tempted to substitute "Proust" for "Post"?

Also, should the ? have gone inside the quotes there?

Hey, told you I didn't have much to say. But, you know, it's been a week since I posted anything, and even that didn't make much sense. If you must know, that previous post was prompted by the dim memory of some No Republic logo I saw a decade or so ago.

What did I do for the last week, you ask? Well, in roughly reverse chronological order, I listened to some Lee Hazlewood (right now), I applied to U. Michigan, I thought about a blog post I could write, I worried about miscellaneous stuff and was paranoid about strangers while walking home at 3 am, I went to a housewarming which was pretty dang enjoyable, I saw Quantum of Solace which was as extremely mediocre as I has been led to expect by reviews, I did something on Fr- Oh, that's right, I saw The Mountain Goats in the greatest gorram concert of the year, I played some Bass in Guitar Hero 3, I played some tennis, I played some Advance Wars: Day Of Ruin, I watched some Wire, I played some Sam & Max games, I applied to Oxford, I played some Left 4 Dead until I got annoyed at it crashing all the time, I played some Munchkin, I played some Guitar in Guitar Hero 3, I bought a ticket to TV On The Radio and David Byrne (separately), I worried a whole lot about letters of recommendation, and I felt rather guilty and disappointed about not going to a picnic that was by all accounts pretty damn awesome.

So now you know.

It's time to take a stand!

2008-11-29T04:51:00.001Z

No more countries, no currencies at all

2008-11-27T06:10:00.000Z

I like the idea of a subjective trivia night. I've been thinking of how it would be organised.

It could be split into sections, like an ordinary trivia deally, along the lines of Films, Musics, History, General ~~Knowledge~~ Opinions, etc. Then, instead of questions like "What film won the oscar for Best Picture in 1976," you'd have "what film should've won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1976?" "According to legend, how was Harold II killed in the Battle of Hastings" could become "Which historical personage should've been shot in the eye?"

Now the way I see it, each section would be judged by 2 or 3 people, each of whom would write one answer. Anyone giving one of those answers would get a point. Also, awesome answers would get a point. Terrible answers would either lose, or get a point, according to the whims of the judges. Some kind of penalty could also be given for answers that don't fit the factual constraints of the question, like claiming that The Queen Is Dead was the best album released in 1976.

Also, exactly who is judging each section would be revealed only after answers came in, so people can't tailor their answers to the judge. And then everything would devolve into this insane meta-game where people try to guess who the judge will be based on the style of the questions, or whatever. And this would be awesome. For everyone except the players. And, possibly, other people involved.

I'm not sure I could get this trivia game past an ethics board.

Come to the front of the class and we'll measure your brain

2008-11-24T04:46:00.003Z

Throughout the HSC, every year of uni, working on my honours thesis, and worrying about taking tutorials, I think I have never been quite as stressed as I am now. Now being when I'm trying to work on applications for overseas PhDs. All this writing of statements, looking for recommendations, gathering of supplementary material, figuring out deadlines, figuring out requirements, tailoring individual responses, negotiating websites, distinguishing between what can be submitted online and what must be mailed, figuring out how to even use the mail system... I'm really not good at any of this stuff. I'm out of my elephant. I can't breathe.

On the subject of which, next week The Mountain Goats will make everything better. They always do. Or, at least, have once before.

Also, it's plausible that I only feel this all to be more stressful than those other times because, you know, this is now, those were then. The bias towards the immediate, and all that. Though I think I was genuinely not at all stressed for at least those first three items.

Insincere musings.

2008-11-21T08:43:00.006Z

Today, I'm wondering how much of a filtering role the kidneys perform when it comes to everyday food. I mean, we all know that the kidneys have big important business to attend to when we consume copious amounts of Alcohol, or other, you know, poisons...

But, imagine that we are a big head of lettuce. When some git eats us, and we reach his kidneys, do said kidneys go to work scrubbing away all our tiny bacterium and parasites, or rather are they all like "What? Oh, it's just lettuce again, forget this for a lark," and lettuce straight through?

Also, did I write all that just for that pretty bad, and maybe unoriginal pun? Probably, because I sure as hell don't give a damn about how the kidneys actually work.

If you want to know what got me thinking about all that: I just woke up from a midafternoon nap with a pretty bad taste in my mouth, so I went to the sink, sucked up a big gobful of water, swished it around, then swallowed. Then I thought, "heywait, maybe that stuff was lining my mouth for some reason. Maybe it wasn't meant to go past my gullet." Then I thought, "wait, no, I'm pretty sure the mouth doesn't perform any kind of filtering function."

Brendan Markey: Mildly grossing you out since... Whenever you met him.

In retrospect, I suppose the mouth kind does perform some limited filtering function, insofar as it stops me from swallowing things that are Huge, and things that taste godawful, like cyanide laced with eggplant.

Also, no matter how woeful my puns become, they will never compare with this. At least not for sheer gratuity.

All you see are zeroes, all you see are zeroes and ones.

2008-11-19T10:48:00.004Z

I so can't be bothered doing all this applicationing stuff... Personal statements, writing samples, letters of recommendation, miscmiscmisc... So much stuff... So much dull...

In other news, I suspect that my starting to use Google Reader is the direct cause of everyone in the world ceasing to update their blogs.

Okay, okay, so I suppose the more reasonable explanation would be that the fact that I now excessively check whether there are any new posts anywhere makes it seem like there are less of them in total... Like, a subjective kind of dealy.

Actually, an even more reasonable explanation would be that I somehow failed to subscribe to Crooked Timber. Well, I'm not sure I missed it, but what the hell, let's add that again.

EXCITING POST BY BRENDAN TIEMS

Mediocre news ahoy!

2008-11-17T10:43:00.002Z

Woo! I just got an Star rank in the 150cc class Special Cup on Mario Cart DS! Eat that Rainbow Road!

But as for ACTUAL accomplishments today...

Ummm... Drawing a blank here...

Ummm...

Well, Roger Crisp sent me an email, that's pretty cool.

Yeah, I got nothing else.

In the declining years of the long war

2008-11-16T02:15:00.003Z

Blaaarg!
Marking, applications, coughing, whatnot!
I gotta email that guy... Oh, and that other guy, with the crisps...

Incidentally, the Vincent Price episode of The Muppets was as excellent as I expected. Man, that guy has a voice and a half. And such a flair for self-parody...

Bork bork bork

2008-11-08T12:23:00.005Z

I bought the first season of The Muppet Show about a year ago. I'm not sure if this requires justification, but I can say that I am a big fan of The Storyteller, Labyrinth, various other Jim Henson productions... Also, it was rather cheap, and I'd always wanted to see some. I've been informed that I watched the show when I was young, but, unlike The Storyteller, I don't at all remember it.

Anyway, I watched a bit soon after I bought it, and it was excellent, but then my viewing got interrupted. I just restarted this week, figuring it would be something nice to return to after finishing Twin Peaks... And it's still excellent! It's not quite so juvenilely-targeted as I suspected before buying it, but then I'm probably not the greatest judge of that, seeing as I have been known to enjoy such shows as The Fairly Odd Parents, Angry Beavers and Danny Phantom.

Every episode features a different guest-star, and that is often the weakest part, especially when they start singing or dancing. On the other hand, there's also always a scene of Kermit casually talking to the guest star, which is often pretty good. Either way, it varies depending on the person in question; the episode I just finished watching contained Candice Bergen, so naturally it was excellent. Paul Williams and Bruce Forsyth were also pretty good, and there's a Vincent Price episode in this season, which I'm rather looking forward to.

Other awesome things include Statler and Waldorf (who appear fairly hilariously in the DVD menu), and Rowlf the Dog, who is wonderfully charming. I'll embed a particularly excellent clip of Rowlf, if I can pull off the embedding thing.

Unfortunately, one of the worst things about the series/DVD is... Laugh Track! It's pretty hideous, often inappropriate, and just a bit too loud. Stilllll, what can you do.

Anyway, I recommend you watch this, whoever you are:

Obligatory "How's abouts that election, eh?" post

2008-11-07T02:25:00.002Z

So, to hide the immensity of that post below: How's aboust that election, eh?

How's aobust that Obama, eh?

How's ausbot that Franken, eh?

How's Proust that electoral college, eh?

Shame about those California ballot propositions though. Oh, and all the others ones too, of course, but, you know, we expected better from California.

It's not as flat as we had feared.

2008-11-07T00:01:00.008Z

It's been a week since I posted something!
UNACCEPTABLE!

So here's some commentary about this album I bought a few days ago, Exotic Creatures Of The Deep, by Sparks.

This is apparently Sparks' 21st studio album, with their first coming out in 1971. So that's a pretty long career. Now as you could see from my last.fm profile, I've listened to a lot of Sparks. It helps that there is a lot of their music to listen to, and that their style changes so significantly over time, that it doesn't get too sameish. But, that said, I haven't listened to them all that much for the last year or so, for whatever reason, so I didn't exactly rush out to buy this album, as I did with their previous, Hello Young Lovers. This helped keep my expectations somewhat reasonable, and so, basically, I'd say the album probably meets them. Though I can't quite tell yet whether the album will grow on me (as Lil' Beethoven did) or start to irk me (as Hello Young Lovers partly did).

Musically, it's moving away from the faux-classical-pretensions of Lil' Beethoven, and the occasional metal-inflections of Hello Young Lovers, and introducing a few more... Electronicish elements. It still uses a lot repetition, as in those last two albums, but perhaps... Not quite so much. I feel I need to resist the temptation to just go through all the 11 major pieces on the album and comment on them all... But maybe I won't.

No comment on the album art.
(Because I can't work out whether it's Alright or Woeful)

The first piece on the album (besides a short intro) is Good Morning, and it's probably my favourite (at the moment). It's kinda poppy and interesting and reasonably clever. It also clearly highlights two major differences between this album and Sparks' previous two. Firstly, Russell Mael's falsetto is back. The vocal style of Sparks was really marked by that falsetto for most of their early career, but then it completely disappeared in 2002, on Lil' Beethoven. It came back a biiiit on Hello Young Lovers, but mainly in the occasional backing vocals. But it's returned with avengeance on Exotic Creatures Of The Deep, which I am tentatively going to call A Good Thing.

This song also shows the direction the album is going to take lyrically, which is again a return to their habits of old. Sparks have always been known as writing comic lyrics, little witty lines, that kind of thing. It's this that unfortunately sometimes gets them pegged as a novelty act, which I maintain is pretty unfair. But again things kinda changed with Lil' Beethoven, in which they discovered repetition, and so their lyrics were often very simple. They still had this hint of humour; for instance, take the song Your Call Is Very Important To Us. Please Hold. Now obviously there's something comic in the idea repeating that line a few hundred times, but it doesn't constitute their classical wit or cleverness. But on this new album there's something of a return to form. Obviously, if I try to pull out any lines to demonstrate this, they'll sound completely lame... But how about this bit anyway:

Please spare me derision
I'll do my rendition
A lengthy recital
Of every song with foolish in the title

It helps if you imagine it being sung in intense falsetto, I assure you.

Anyway, I'm inclined to call this lyrical direction a Good Thing too, but here's the confusing part: in both these cases, I'm seeing that Sparks are moving away from what they did in Lil' Beethoven, returning to an earlier style, and I'm calling this a Good Thing... But then, I think Lil' Beethoven is the greatest album they've made. In fact, I'm still fairly inclined to think that it is one of the best albums ever made (by anyone), certainly in the top 10. These last two albums have been slightly disappointing insofar as they aren't as brilliant as Lil' Beethoven. So to see a move away from that as good is weird. But then, part of Lil' Beethoven's brilliance was that it was so different to their preceeding work, so to just do the same thing would also be disappointing. Anyway, whaaaatever. To some of the other songs:

Strange Animal: It's got some interesting, self-referential lyrics... And some nice sounds... But it's just a bit too repetitive, the chorus is dull, and the melody is... What's the word... Rollicking? But in a bad way. Anyway, it's not too bad, but I see this song getting on my nerves before too long.

I Cant Believe You Would Fall For All The Crap In This Song: This is the biggest disappointment on the album for me. It's a good concept, but the song ought to be so much more subtle than it is. The main problem, I think, is that it only works on the level of the lyrics, which could be so much better anyway. It basically just juxtaposes a whole lot of trite romantic lines like "I'll be true, forever true" with... The title line. The problem here is that most songs of the type that are being critiqued here are not composed merely of trite romantic lyrics, but also contain trite romatic melodies and musical hooks. So basically there isn't as much crap to fall for in this song as there should be. This brings to mind I Married Myself from Lil Beethoven, which comes across as a perfect parody of excessively romantic music, while still sounding awesome. Anyway, enough unfavourable comparisons to that particular album!

Skipping a few (pretty good) songs, we get to (She Got Me) Pregnant: In Practical Ethics this semester, Caroline West mentioned a game that can be played with a issue of Cosmo, where you read everything in the letters section, switching the masculine and feminine pronouns. The humour arises as the letters completely stop making any sense, as they run against all our most basic beliefs about gender roles. Anyway, lyrically, this song is kinda like that. Musically, it has this wonderful intensity, with overlapping harmonies and angry pianos, thus making it the song most liable to be stuck in my head for the last few days.

Lighten Up, Morrissey: Best song name on the album, and actually not just a cheap-shot at The Smiths. I suspect it was written in response to the revelation a year or two ago that Morrissey is actually a fan of Sparks. It's sung from the perspective of a man who is unable to impress some girl because he fails to measure up favourably in comparison to Morrissey. This actually makes it thematically similar to a 1982 Sparks song that uses Sherlock Holmes in place of Morrissey... Though on relistening I suspect that song is more about a person who desperately wants to be Sherlock Holmes, and so wants his partner to pretend that he is. Anyway, both pretty cool songs.

This Is The Renaissance: Amusing and sounds great. My second favourite on the album so far.
The Director Never Yelled Cut: Not great, though I've just realised I'd been missing the point of the lyrics.
Photoshop and Likeable: Pretty good.

So yeah, I'd give that album a 3.5 stars, or something.

I also bought the newish Jonathan Richman album, Because Her Beauty is Raw and Wild, but I haven't given that much of a listen yet. Hooray for buying new albums by artists from the early 70s!

(Hey, turns out there's an actually decent Exotic Creatures Of The Deep review at this Coke Machine Glow site that everyone goes on about. It even uses the word Contrapuntal. That kind of thing is beyond my prowess.)

A three-pointed ramble.

2008-10-31T03:24:00.001Z

I tend to use song rating in iTunes, systematically. I use everything from 2 to 5 stars, with the majority getting 3 stars (about a quarter of my library, at the moment) and a lot getting 5 stars (about 1/6th at the moment, but hypothetically a lot of them belong in 4 star land, because of rating-reshuffle). A bit less than half my library is unrated, which is not really a rating in itself, but just means that they are... Pending rating.

I can understand the arguments against this kind of thing; that it's distressingly arbitrary, that it only works at a song level, even though some pieces can only be properly judged at an album level, that there's something denegrating about trying to encapsulate all the qualities of a song in a simple numerical rating system with limited range, that it's just too much bother, etc.

But I do use the ratings in a practical way. I tend to shuffle a lot, rather than listening to an album at the time, or even sticking to a genre. But I can't be arsed switching songs all the time, and there's a fair amount of bumf in my library (though I do try to clear it out), so when I'm, say, walking to or from uni, listening to my iPod, I often just stick on the 5 Star Playlist, on the expectation that nothing really dull or distressing will come up. It works pretty well. Also, when I'm playing Civilization or Team Fortress 2 or something, where I have music playing but can't switch to iTunes too easily, I find it handy to use Party Shuffle with the weighting for higher rating songs turned on.

Anyway, the point of all that dull backstory was mainly to say: The one song in my library that has had the greatest shift from not-so-fond to absolutely-loved has to be Fatal Flower Garden, from Andrew Bird's album The Swimming Hour. It's a rendition of an old, kinda creepy folk song (I've heard the version by... "Nelstone's Hawaiians," on Harry Smith's Anthology Of American Folk Music. It... Wasn't as good as Bird's version? The... Quality of recording equipment has improved?). This fact already makes it really stand out on The Swimming Hour, which, though it seems consciously written to span genres, is nonetheless largely marked by the kind of jazzy, swingy style that Bird has moved away from since Weather Systems.

When I first heard it, I'm pretty sure I gave it 2 stars. I honestly can't remember what I didn't like about it now. After I'd had it for a while... I distinctly remember sitting in Victoria Park one fine day when it came up on my iPod, and I gave it a real, close listen. Like, you know, focusing on it, rather than just letting it wash over me as I concentrate on not making an astoundingly dumb move in Freecell. And this led me to think: "wait, this song is actually really good." It jumped up to 4 stars. A movement of 2 stars in a single listen? Unheard of!

Over time, even as a few other tracks from The Swimming Hour, such How Indiscreet and Core And Rind, slowly shuddered downwards in the ratings, Fatal Flower Garden moved up to 5 stars. And just then I added it to my Loved tracks on Last.fm, which is like the pinnacle of musical accomplishment in my lame, complusively quantified world. I thought I'd added it ages ago, but apparently not.

Anyway, the moral of the story is... Sometimes I'd like to be one of those people who, upon hearing a song for the first time, knows how much he'll like it forever and always. I could thus feel confident that I haven't given up on a song that is secretly awesome. I could also feel confident that if I run around saying "Robyn Hitchcock is friggin' awesome!!" today, I won't find myself severely embaressed in a month or two. (Seriously though, Robyn Hitchcock is friggin' awesome.) Last.fm stands as a horrible testament to the regretable musical obsessions that I have harboured, and discardboured. Like, seriously, XTC: 2,399 plays? What was I, tone deaf? I mean, on some level I can still appreciate that they were a fairly original band, pretty good popsmiths, reasonably influential, and have a few almost-great songs. But they aren't 2,399 plays good.

On the other hand, I figure there's probably some merits to songs growing on me as well. Maybe this is just a secret suspicion that the degree to which I like a song like Fatal Flower Garden is currently greater than the degree to which I would like the same song in the alternate Possible World where I really liked the song the first time I heard it. Which doesn't clearly make sense. Also, in that Possible World, I can magically shoot chocolate flavoured rainbow-beams out of my eyes, so clearly I'm being ripped off over here.

The other moral of the story is that Fatal Flower Garden is an excellent song.

The final moral of the story is that this post was a bit of a ramble, wasn't it? Also, moral-of-the-stories probably shouldn't consist of questions... Should they?

I'm done here.

Blogging? My foot!

2008-10-28T00:17:00.005Z

So I figured this might happen. I decide to start making more posts here for the first time in half a year... And then I start too high. I mean, I don't mean to suggest that that previous post was Earth-Shattering, and it's really just sometime that had, for some reason, been on my mind quite a bit of late (hey, I can't spend all my thinking time thinking Philosophy). But it was a pretty well-crafted post, reasonably well worded, edited, proof-read... I even put together that imagy thing. All up, the post probably took me, like, an hour. (An hour? Seems right, even though I loathe people who write "an historian"). But of course I can't keep up that pace. If I want to write here semi-regularly then I'll need to set my sights lower. I can't have a blindingly brilliant idea like that every few days.

So instead it's time to tell everyone what I did to my foot yesterday!

Basically, in the morning, my foot looked like this:

Then, by evening, it looked more like this:

So yeah, that hurt quite a bit.

Actually, those images aren't strictly accurate. Besides the fact that my feet aren't obsidian black, that my toeses aren't mere sticks, and that stars don't appear and become labelled as I wound myself, there is also the fact that my displaced extremities were in bandages by evening.

Anyway, it's looking much better now, thanks for asking.

The Kitsch Stewart Theory

2008-10-23T10:07:00.008+01:00

I was recently advised to maybe consider updating my blog, so I thought this might be a good place to put forth a thesis I have recently been developing. It concerns Al Stewart.

Al Stewart is a singer/songwriter from... Oh, let's say... The 70s. He plays a guitar, or something. If you've had the misfortune to have heard of him at all, it was probably in connection to his big hit, Year Of The Cat.

I first heard (of) Al Stewart when some music blog or such mentioned his song Sirens Of Titan. "A song based on what is possibly my favourite book by my possibly favourite author, Kurt Vonnegut?" I mused, "this Al Stewart must be good times!" I got my ears on it, and... I mean, yeah. It's alright...

Okay, so I have to admit, I take a great amount of guilty pleasure from Al Stewart. Like, everything about him should be terrible; his annoying, calm, cultivated voice, his inoffensive melodies, his predictable, poppy songs, his mediocre lyrics and apparent utter lack of humour... But for some reason, I keep finding myself listening to Year Of The Cat, On The Border, Broadway Hotel, Apple Cider Re-Constitution, and, of course, Sirens Of Titan.

Check out that random lens flare!
Okay, so I admit I added one thing to this cover art, but it wasn't the lens flare.

Anyway, I was wondering today whether Al Stewart's mid-seventies work could be thought of as a kind of musical kitsch. Now I am no expert in the field of kitsch studies - I would tend to defer to my sister in this area - and so I have no idea of how original or unusual this thesis may be, but, without having a clear account of what it is to be kitsch, something about his songs scream kitschianity to me.

It is screamed by the all-too-smooth vocals, as they throw a sudden emotional plea into an inappropriate location:

"In the village where I grew up
Nothing seems the same.
Still you never see the change
From day to day!"

What exactly about the line "From day to day" calls for a sharp raise in pitch, increase in volume, and oddly sustained, vibratto singing? Who knows? But it sure has a nice effect.

Kitsch is screamed by the randomly tinkling piano thrown haphazardly into a song like Sirens Of Titan. Composing a song entirely based on a brilliant work of black comedy, and managing to make it neither black, nor comedic? This strikes me as a kind of demented kitsch genius.

Kitsch is screamed by the cloying sentimentality in a song like Year Of The Cat, the poetastic pretentiousness of a song like On The Border, the village-green nostalgia in a song like Modern Times... The overwhelming sense of bland inoffensiveness that permeates his oeuvre, at least from this particular era.

As often seems to be the case when I try to make a point in a blog post, I thought there was more to this idea when I started, but perhaps all I can ultimately say is that listening to his work creates a particular impression in me, an impression I associate with floral wallpaper, lawn gnomes, tiny plastic terrapins, babushka dolls, and ducks on the wall. I also see, on reflection, that he is perhaps not so unique in creating this impression, nor would he be the earliest musician to do so; The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society gives me much the same feeling, albeit with a lot less accompanying pleasure, guilty or otherwise.

As a final note, I feel compelled to raise the possibility that Al Stewart is perhaps not so terrible as I may be suggesting. After all, as Wikipedia tells me, some guy called Broch referred to kitsch as "the evil within the value-system of art." To see Al Stewart as aesthetically evil is probably just a bit harsh.

Perhaps, feeling, for whatever reason, that he is a guilty pleasure, I then feel the need to disassociate myself from the pleasure his music can give me, reason it away, broadcast my disapproval, paint myself as an innocent, captivated victim... But perhaps, rather, the best response would be, as I have long ago done with Elton John, to simply reevaluate the artist's genuine merit, assert the excellence of his popcraft, and remove all sense of guilt from the pleasure. After all, he did write a song about a Kurt Vonnegut book.

Rargh.

2008-01-29T07:37:00.000Z

So, I bought this DVD, right... "The Expurgated Micallef Tonight." And it's pretty funny. You know, it has all those good memorable bits from the short-lived series. And it also cuts out most of the really, really terrible bits from the short-lived series, those being most of the interviews. Anyway, I was enjoying it... Until near the end of the first DVD it just locked up, and wouldn't play past a certain point, either in VLC player or Windows Media Player. Same thing happened about halfway through the second DVD. I really can't imagine what would cause that kind of thing to happen.

So anyway, I returned it, and the nice kind folks at the ABC centre in the QVB gave me another copy, even though I lost my receipt. I just got home, tried this replacement... And the freaking thing locks up in exactly the same place! Like, seriously, what the hell!?! Get it right, Shock! That's right, I'm naming you and hopefully shaming you, Shock Entertainment DVDs Company Place! You have reduced me to angry peeve-blogging! Rarrgh! That's the last time I buy your shoddy products, unless you release something else I want to see!

Anyway, not much chance I can return it again, as this time I ran a wheely chair over the case within an hour of getting my hands on it.

On a much brighter note, I'm totally going to Canberra tomorrow... Mmm... Canberra...

Freedom!

2007-12-29T02:08:00.000Z

So, I decided to stop importing my blog into Facebook, in the hopes that it might actually make me post stuff again! You see, when it was being imported, I think this voice at the back of my head kept insisting that I only post something if people might actually be interested in it, because everyone would have it plastered all over their front page. Except those that told facebook not to bother telling them stuff about me, of course. But this way, I can just go back to rambling about life, myself, and other random pieces of crud.

In today's random piece of crud!!!: I have Hiccups! I rarely have hiccups. I have them now. I had them this morning. I had them at 4 am last night. I WANT TO DIIIIIIE.

But the next week is going to be pretty damn awesome, for reasons including New Year's, Lydia, and Andrew Bird, so I'll put the dying off for a bit. And hopefully the hiccups will be gone after all that anyway.

In other news, when I got my uni results back, I was informed I had picked up something called the "John Anderson Prize for Best Thesis in Philosophy IV." I may've already told you this, but I really just can't help bragging. I'm pretty damn chuffed. So chuffed as to use the word Chuffed. That's pretty chuffed.

I am less chuffed about the quality of my artwork.

Productive!

2007-11-23T00:04:00.000Z

Yeah, so, turns out that I've completed a thesis and some bonus essays since my last post, blah blah blah.

More importantly, I made THIS!!: (You may, optionally, want to click on it so you can read it properly.)
THIS!!:

Yeah, I'm pretty satisfied with that.

Newstopia.

2007-10-10T13:39:00.000+01:00

I just watched the first episode of Micallef's new show, Newstopia. Wednesday, 10pm, SBS, all that. Or apparently one can just watch it at its site. Which I may stick to doing in the future, because I can't think of anything to watch between it and The Chaser. (Maybe I should give Summer Heights High a shot, but... Something about that guy just annoys me.)

Anyway, I'd have to say: Interesting show! Occasionally pretty damn funny! I think the editing hurt it a bit. As in, the camera work. Too much flipping around. I felt disorientated. But then, I always do by that kind of thing.

The whole concept (satire about the week's news. Hardly that original, but no one else in Australia is really doing it, except possibly The Chaser, who seem to focus much more on pranks and recurring skits nowadays) is generally pretty strange, considering that Micallef has blatantly admitted in the past that political satire is really not his strong point. And that was rather evidenced by the fact that about half of the jokes weren't really... Satirical... But were more just using a piece of news to set up a silly pun, a piece of clever wordplay, some of his usual surrealist genius, or a slab of awkward anti-humour. Still, it was frequently pretty damn funny. Though it did occasionally fall a bit flat, certainly more often than anything from The Micallef P(r)ogram(me).

The Inspektor Herring ad was particularly hilarious. Anyway, I'll definitely keep watching it.

I think my favourite line of the show was "In late news, Marcel Marceau died a few weeks ago."

(In unrelated news, I finished the first draft of my Thesis last night. Woo!)

My hatred of corporate magazines.

2007-09-28T12:29:00.000+01:00

So, a few days ago I received my copy of the first issue of the illustrious content magazine, The Freaky Jason. I should note that my sister is among the editors of said publication, but, nepotism aside, it's great. This issue, the first, is about Jesusy Boys, that class of fellows with glorious, flowing manes, and typically some degree of facial hair, of which I have occasionally counted myself a member. I was set to write some kind of article for it early this year, but laziness and uninspiration intervened. Still, they somehow managed to do damn excellently without me, with some fine articles, random asides, and an interview with Warren Ellis.

He... Plays with Dirty Three. Err, and Nick Cave. He... He has a beard.

Anyway, awesome. But, all that said, it's not been distributed in Australia anywhere yet. Just London. So if you have a particular compulsion to read any of it, you'll have to harass me. Unless the content goes up on that website any time soon, which My Sources reliably inform me it may.

Excessively needy.

2007-09-22T03:59:00.000+01:00

iTunes' new "Album Rating" feature is snazzy and all, but sometimes I wish I could make some true convoluted Smart Playlists. Like a list containing all the songs such that:

a) Their Album Rating is 5 stars, and
b) I have every song from that album.

or, to put it another way, such that:

a) Their Album Rating is 5 stars, and
b) The amount of tracks I have with the same Album Title as the track in question is equal to the second element of this track's "track number" tag.

But... But yeah, I'm pretty sure I can't do that.

(Also, one month until my Thesis is due. AIE!)

Qudote!

2007-09-18T04:56:00.000+01:00

This is probably my favourite quotable (as in, stirring, and not overly technical) philosophical passage, which I came across when I was studying Hume last semester. I was going to shove it in my Facebook Favourite Quotes section, but it's a bit long.

"What philosophical truths can be more advantageous to society, than those... which represent virtue in all her genuine and most engaging charms, and makes us approach her with ease, familiarity, and affection? The dismal dress falls off, with which many divines, and some philosophers, have covered her; and nothing appears but gentleness, humanity, beneficence, affability; nay, even at proper intervals, play, frolic, and gaiety. She talks not of useless austerities and rigours, suffering and self-denial. She declares that her sole purpose is to make her votaries and all mankind, during every instant of their existence, if possible, cheerful and happy; nor does she ever willingly part with any pleasure but in hopes of ample compensation in some other period of their lives. The sole trouble which she demands, is that of just calculation, and a steady preference of the greater happiness." - David Hume.

A wonderfully flowery defence of Utilitarianism, years before Bentham came along and... Formulated Utilitarianism.

Into the bin!

2007-08-25T06:08:00.000+01:00

Ooh, apparently they're going to be releasing a DVD of the short-lived Micallef Tonight soonish!
Anyway, I just found this:

I think I'll refrain from viewing any more, just to preserve the hilarity for when I inevitably get said DVD.

Avast ye scurvy Symbolic Logic!

2007-08-13T10:34:00.000+01:00

(Ax(Mx & O2xm -> F2ux) & Ex(Fx & T2ux) -> Ax(Ay(Lx & D2xu & O2xm & Jy & O2ym -> B2xy))) -> (Ru -> R2mu) & (Hu -> Im & Iu)

Ax(Mx & O2xm -> F2ux) & Ex(Fx & T2ux) -> Ax(Ay(Lx & D2xu & O2xm & Jy & O2ym -> B2xy))
----------------

(Ru -> R2mu) & (Hu -> Im & Iu)

Where:

Fx means x is a flower
Hx means x says "hide"
Ix means x hides
Jx means x is a heart
Lx means x is love
Mx means x is an arm
Rx means x says "run"
B2xy means x breaks y in two
D2xy means x is directed at y
F2xy means x falls into y
O2xy means x belongs to y
R2xy means x runs with y
T2xy means x trembles like y
m refers to me
u refers to you

Pardon me, apparently I just felt that David Bowie was in urgent need of some logical analysis. It's not perfect, but I'm sure you get the idea.

Special exclamation marks.

2007-08-01T12:21:00.000+01:00

"If now I generalise my previous statement and say, "Stealing money is wrong," I produce a sentence which has no factual meaning--that is, expresses no proposition which can be either true or false. It is as if I had written "Stealing money!!"--where the shape and thickness of the exclamation marks show, by a suitable convention, that a special sort of moral disapproval is the feeling which is being expressed."
- AJ Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic.

It seems no one can write about, or talk about Emotivism without sounding absolutely hilarious.

(Incidentally, though its kinda tempting, I'm definitely more of a Subjectivist than a Emotivist. I'm also not a Logical Positivist, but this book is surprisingly good anyway.)

It's a post!

2007-07-14T04:00:00.000+01:00

A few random thoughts so I can pretend I still have a blog. And because Yue hypocritically told me to.
(After adding "Yue" and "Blog" to the Firefox dictionary.)

Firstly, reading Creatures Of Light And Darkness has reminded me of how much I like Roger Zelazny. Actually, I've been reading a lot of fiction (all sci-fi and fantasy, as is often my wont) in the last month - mostly Harry Potter and Philip Jose Farmer - but Zelazny, the only one I opted for without a specific recommendation, has outshone the lot. I'm planning to get my hands on some Robin Hobb Liveship action next.

Secondly, listening to covers of Radiohead songs apparently makes me want to listen to Sunset Rubdown songs and Xiu Xiu songs. And Sunset Rubdown covers of Xiu Xiu songs. Ayup.

Thirdly, maybe I'll post something else within a month or so. But I don't think I'll bother using this "labels" feature.

Fourthly, I really do like that banner I made, if I do say so myself. Which I do.

My distinguished colleague is a doofus.

2007-05-03T08:06:00.000+01:00

One of the greatest joys of philosophy has to be reading philosophers take cracks at each other. I just came across a nice one in Spinoza's Ethics. After quoting Descarte's opinion that we can always control our passions through sufficient excerise of the will (via the Pineal Gland, of course) he opines:

"If [this passage] hadn’t been so clever I would hardly have credited that it came from so great a man. Descartes had firmly decided to draw conclusions only from self-evident principles and to affirm only things that he perceived clearly and distinctly, and had often scolded the scholastics for trying to explain obscure things in terms of ‘occult qualities’; yet here he is adopting a hypothesis that is more occult than any occult quality! I am astonished at this performance by a philosopher of his calibre."

I just love that wonderful balance of utter respect and open ridicule.