Today it occurred to me that I could make a mix CD of my all-time favorite pieces of music and I don’t know anyone who would want to listen to it more than once. I’ve always known that there is no one person who really likes what I like, but the distillation of that fact into the idea that my ultimate mix CD would appeal to no one is pretty depressing.
The USPS Is Doomed
Via a series of MySpace messages, I said to one of my old students the other day: “send me your address and i’ll mail you a box of blah busting materials.” She replied, “my mailing address is [whatever]@gmail.com.” Then I said, “I meant your snail mail address.” And she said, “snail mail? [whatever]@gmail.com is the only other email I have. Other than my Zune one and one I use for MSN messenger.”
So I sent her this MySpace comment:
“Snail mail” is a system whereby a guy in a little truck drives or walks from house to house delivering actual, physical messages inside things called “envelopes” or “packages.” He has a little office where he sells things called “stamps” that you affix to whatever you’re sending. Outdated and quaint, yes, but far more handy a system for delivering three dimensional objects than conventional internet protocols allow.
Gender and Class Divisions in the Toy Department
Experiencing the toy department in Dalhart’s Alco reminded me that, particularly when I was growing up, there were always the same divisions among the toy aisles. The Baby aisle, the Girl aisle, the Boy aisle, and…the Motorhead aisle. Technically also a Boy aisle, the Motorhead aisle is filled entirely with cars of various sorts. From what I recall as a youngster, the denizens of the Motorhead aisle were from the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum. What does it say about that demographic that their toys are entirely based on real-life objects? The Boy Aisle contains spacemen, pirates, talking animals, Lords of Rings, robots…all these fantasy characters. And these toys are more expensive. I guess it’s just another way that lower class kids are cut off from dreams and things larger than the day-to-day grind by lack of access. Not to say that they’re entirely prevented from having an imagination, there’s just no commercial support from toy companies. And Hasbro with its $8 Star Wars figures isn’t helping any lower-income parents. Of course having no money for toys certainly can force some kids to make their own fun and be more creative, but I’d wager that’s a much smaller portion of the total audience than those who just end up playing with cars and not using their imagination.
Yes I know this blog entry is rambling and thesis-free, but these are just thoughts running through my head that I’ve attempted and failed to organize and you’re the beneficiary of my failure.
Public Service Announcement
It has been brought to my attention that I have entirely omitted mention of Jessica and Josh Ebert, Our People in Tacoma. They accompanied me to the Space Needle (forewarning me of the photographic troll planted at the entry, with whom I regrettably tangled) and the EMP/Sci-Fi Museum. Sadly I only got to hang out with them for that one afternoon, but this should not in any way diminish the intense significance of Jessica in my larger existence. I also neglected to take any pictures of them[1], further establishing my status as foppish churl and itinerant mountebank. I hereby apologize unreservedly.
1.) Taking pictures of people is something I have to really work hard to remember to do. In fact, after having dinner with Odie and Mona in Arlington, we said our goodbyes, and I had made it almost to the edge of their neighborhood when I realized I didn’t get a picture of them, so I turned around and went back to snap this shot. Here is a list of people I neglected to photograph on this trip:
- Heath and Mary Beth in Oklahoma City
- Kevin, Michelle and Chris in Kansas City
- Cousin David in Los Angeles
The little mechanism in my brain that says “ooh grab the camera” is so attuned to the strange and unusual that I forget that my own friends need to be photographed for purposes of personal reflection and posterity. So I try to remember to do it.
Debbie Harry Eats Spiraling
So my friend Tom, frontman for Spiraling, got hired as Debbie Harry’s music director and keyboard player awhile back. He brought in his drummer Paul, and when I saw them on The Today Show last month[1], I noticed they had no bass player. But now I see by this picture at New York Magazine that bassist Bob has joined the group, thus making 3/4 of Spiraling into Debbie’s backing band.
These are the guys who make me want to move to NYC. Here are pics of them jamming in my music room last year.
1.) That was particularly freaky to watch, since I kept reminding myself, “these guys have slept on my living room floor. Now they’re on my living room TV.”
Dalhart, Texas
It has come to my attention that “The Texas Panhandle” is the northern rectangular protrusion, rather than the pointy western protrusion. I had always assumed it to be the latter, given that, if one were to make a pan in the shape of Texas, one would probably prefer to grip it by the El Paso end rather than the blocky, cumbersome Dalhart end. But people don’t name state panhandles by application, as so few people even bother to make pans in the shape of states. So it’s the top part, the part I had been referring to as “The Texas Stovepipe.” I think that’s a better metaphor anyway, but then it only causes confusion.
On Friday I drove from Laramie to Dalhart, Texas. Dalhart is by far the smallest of my various destinations, with only 7,000 or so souls in town. My mother’s family lived there in the late 1950’s. My grandfather was a civil engineer who worked on a reservoir and park south of town, so there is a street named after him. I wanted to take a picture of the street sign, and I thought it would make a nice diversion into smalltown America.
I stayed the night in a motel, and ate breakfast at the 50-year old Sands Restaurant. I had the ultimate greasy-spoon diner breakfast of my life here. I could not believe how great the coffee was – I asked the waitress and she just said it was Cain’s Coffee (a restaurant supplier so generic I couldn’t find a website for them). So I’m forced to assume there is a rich, dark, chocolatey magic in their mugs and carafes. I dare even say it was the second best cup of coffee of my trip. And the hash browns were fluffy. Fluffy! The eggs and toast were great as well. I set off to explore the town and found an Alco. Much like my A&W experience in Oregon, this was a trip back in time. Alco in Harrison closed around 1992 I think. It even smelled the same! I could’ve written Proustian volumes of the memories this place triggered in me. Even the price tags were the same. I really wanted to find something in the toy department to buy just to have something with the price tag. I couldn’t find anything worth buying though, although I did find some bargains in the music bins – for $4 each I got Spies Like Us on DVD, the remastered Police albums Outlandos d’Amour and Reggatta de Blanc as well as a lesser-known gem, Traffic’s Low Spark of High Heeled Boys.
I set out in search of John Todd Drive, to no avail. I asked three people, including a cop, who informed me that I was essentially standing on it. He pointed me toward the street sign, and theorized that it had most likely been removed for re-painting. Had I not experienced the joys of Alco and The Sands breakfast, I would have been greatly dismayed at having driven 8 hours to find a blank sign frame.
Laughing quietly in the face of misfortune, I set out toward Amarillo on some very rural north Texas roads – the kind of lonesome stretches of highway where the telephone poles blur into a low sine wave over the long rolling hills, and the towns you pass through only have one cash-only gas station if they have one at all. I actually enjoyed this a bit more than the Interstate at Amarillo. From there to Oklahoma City you can trace the route of the old Route 66, in a far less romantic fashion. I took a picture of this leaning water tower, which I later discovered makes an appearance in Wikipedia’s Route 66 entry.
I arrived in Oklahoma City on Saturday evening to hang out with fellow Pointed Stick founder Heath and his wife Mary Beth. Oklahoma City’s street plan, it’s worth noting, is a marvelously convenient grid, but its freeways make no damn sense at all. On top of that, I got stuck in a Heller-ish limbo[1] wherein I could not get back on the freeway after accidentally exiting, so I went to down to the next on-ramp, which also prevented me from going the direction I wanted.
Today I’m in a coffee shop in Kansas City’s Westport district. I’m staying with my old high school chum Kevin, and hanging out with fellow HHS grad Michelle as well. I have to get back to Little Rock for Superflux rehearsals on Thursday (I’ll be playing my last gig with them in Stuttgart on the 24th), so I think I’m heading back to Arkansas tomorrow, stopping off in Harrison tomorrow night. That will conclude the larger portion of this trip, which will resume the weekend after Thanksgiving, when I set out for New York with various stops along the way.
1.) I apologize for making two literary-figure adjectives in one blog post, but seriously I-40 in southwest Oklahoma City was a damned Catch 22 for me around the Portland exit. Plus there was a dead cow blocking traffic. Click here for a funny bit of Heller trivia I just read.
Devils Tower
For several days I pondered the prospect of making the 5 1/2 hour drive to Devils Tower. This is a distance greater than the trip from Little Rock to Dallas, and as I preferred not to stay the night in a motel, I would be going up and back in the same day. Fortunately, the magnificent desolation of Wyoming is infinitely more interesting than the featureless plains of Texas, or even the constant thick of Arkansas trees. I accepted the challenge and set out at 8AM.
The journey was mostly uneventful until I turned onto highway 59 outside Douglas. I cannot describe the magnitude of the roadkill, mostly rabbits in various states of decay, that I saw. In less than a mile, I counted more than 100 remains. For several miles, I could not drive 50 yards without seeing something dead. I noticed the lack of trees, and guessed that there was probably a lack of scavenging birds in this region to pick the roads clean. I’ve also heard that many animals choose to sleep on highways at night for the warmth the roads absorb during the day. And on roads so infrequently traveled, the animals are more likely to be taken by surprise. Not only was this somewhat traumatic to experience, I also was reminded of the scenes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind where the animals near Devils Tower have died as a result of the government coverup.
Fortunately the roadkill tapered off after a few miles. I did see plenty of live fauna along the way – mostly antelope, but also some bison and deer. I reached Devils Tower around 2PM. It was as freakishly magnetic as I had always imagined it to be. For awhile I just sat and stared at it. I went to a couple of different gift shops looking for souvenirs, and took pictures of some abandoned structures nearby[1]. I only stayed for about an hour. It is the geological equivalent of a question mark. Even geologists can’t quite agree about how it was formed, or why it is so rare. I get a peculiar enjoyment[2] out of shifts in my environment, particularly when something that is known for permanence changes – for example, when the full moon gets large in the early evening, or when clouds allow the sun’s outline to be made distinct at sunset, or even just unique cloud formations after a storm. Devils Tower is like that: it’s something that simply does not happen often, and it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen in life or books.
Not wanting to be tempted to stay very long, I didn’t pay the $10 to enter the park. I wanted to get as much daylight driving on the way back for fear of running into antelope on the roads at night. I got to see a spectacular sunset on the way back to Laramie. The sun is gone by 5:30PM up here, and I got back around 8PM.
1.) One building contained several documents: order forms from Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck, and canceled checks from the late 30’s and early 40’s.
2.) I think this enjoyment is the sense that I’m getting as close as one can on Earth to experiencing life on another planet.
Auditory Shapes
Daniel Levitin, the author of This Is Your Brain on Music, mentions that he once worked for a company that worked on audio recognition software for determining the content of differently labeled mp3 files. Back in the days of Napster especially, the titles of similar audio files would vary widely by user. For example, “One” by Metallica might have dozens of permutations of its title – one.mp3, metallica-one.mp3, one_metalika.mp3, etc. So the software was good at distinguishing identical audio files with different names, but there still is no software to do what the human brain can do, and that is to identify different versions of a song. Humans can recognize melodies irrespective of arrangement, timbre, key, or tempo. Computers have a really hard time with that.
It’s a complex task of course, especially given the vast range of interpretations that jazz musicians[1] offer us. But even when Ella Fitzgerald forgets the words to “Mack the Knife” we still consider it a legitimate version of the song. As yet, no computer can. There’s too much information to weed out, and the underlying question the book’s author presents is “what makes melody so special?”
As I drove back from the laundromat yesterday, I wondered if the answer is “shape.” A melody is a kind of shape. It’s a relationship between intervals, and not notes, or instruments or anything else. I think the brain might most easily process and store basic shapes before anything else. Visually, a triangle is still a triangle regardless of its color, location, shading or background. So the same is true with “Joy to the World” – you can change the instrument, key, arrangement, whatever, but as soon as you alter even one interval, it really ceases to be “Joy to the World.”
A similar visual parallel is CAPTCHA images that prevent spam. You can recognize the letters regardless of the colors, shape mutation and other visual distortions. But thus far computers have a hard time doing the same.
There’s still no solid consensus on how the brain does this. It actually ventures in the realm of philosophy and Wittgenstein’s famous problem with definitions and rules. We define things based on a loose set of characteristics, and computers just aren’t that loose yet. A great example came yesterday when Heath corrected my application of the term “tank” to this picture. It’s actually a self-propelled howitzer, although it carries all the conventional traits one would associate with a tank (treads, turret, armor, cannon). The key difference is their use. A howitzer is a long-range piece of artillery and it doesn’t perform the tasks that tanks perform. Still, there’s always a point at which strict definitions fail us. Nothing can ever be fully, explicitly defined.
So, how does the brain define anything? I wish I knew for sure, but I suspect from my own experience that the brain makes a vague constellation of features and works from that. The esteemed Dr. Odegard pointed me in the direction of what he referred to as “prototypes that represent the central tendencies of a category or stimulus set.” Not quite Platonic forms (one ideal against which all are judged), these are items that more or less resemble each other, and which may fit into multiple categories[2].
Complicating all this is the fact that our brains are great at filling in missing information and making assumptions based on previous experience. The famous email forward that points out that the brain can still read words whose interior letters have been scrambled is a great example. You can sitll udnersatnd tihs sentnece, for exmalpe. So, too, you might recognize “Mack the Knife” when the pianist has created an improvisational intro around the melody.
Simplistically put, I’m guessing our brains recognize general shapes first and add attributes later, factoring in variations from experience. Whether that shape is a triangle or a G# triad, maybe it’s still just a shape to the brain.
1.) Indeed, it seems as though the job of a jazz musician is to see just how much they can get away with in terms of playing around a melody or chord progression and still have people recognize the tune.
2.) This then reminded me of the shopping cart software that we used at Epoch Online. It allowed for the assigning of multiple categories to individual products, as well as various options assigned to each product that the user could select (color, size, version). The actual product exists in one place in the database, but has these variables attached to it.
Overheard
Today at the local coffee shop in Laramie, a young co-ed from the University of Wyoming was talking on her cellphone as she sat down to the table behind me. She said something to the effect of, “You went on a date? Who dates these days? It’s like chivalry and good housekeeping; nobody does it anymore.”
I didn’t get a clear indication of what has taken the place of dating in modern courtship, but I assume it has something to do with text messaging, Facebook and MySpace. I for one welcome our New Courtship Overlords. I was never very good at dating in high school or college. I’d just hang around groups of people until a particular girl and I felt mutually affectionate enough to kiss. It seemed to involve less pressure than the expectations and demands of proper dating.
I Wish to Register a Complaint
As I’ve traveled to places where my Internet connection is less than strong, I’ve noticed what a marvelous thing YouTube is when compared to nbc.com or the recently launched thedailyshow.com. YouTube allows you to see how much of the video has loaded, so if you’re on a slow connection, you can pause the video and come back to it when you see that it has loaded. For whatever reason, this is not how the videos at nbc.com and thedailyshow.com work. And it’s endlessly irritating. I’m trying to catch up on Heroes and The Daily Show and I’m constantly stymied by a buffering process that gives me no indication of when the video will resume. Get it right, people!