h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Thucydides came up in class just yesterday, actually, and what you just said about him just helped me understand what the prof meant. Thucydides, after all, is credited with being one of the first realists--in a nutshell, political thinkers who say that relations between nations are are power and security, and the rest just power and security thinly disguised--and that he got the ball rolling for the likes of Hobbes and, more recently, Henry the K. But I resent Thucydides being lumped in with them, mostly because I always thought there was a part of him that protested it, that saw it but didn't like what he saw. By contrast, I always imagine Hobbes drooling with glee when he talks about how men left to their own devices turn to the most savage, unlawful behavior, and the less said about the K. the better. At any rate, the lecturer, who I mildly disagreed with most of the way through the lecture, lost a lot of face in my book when he made this flimsy comparison between the destruction of the WTC (I know, I know, I'm moving on right now) and the kamikaze campaign during the Pacific War, and then tried to bolster his argument by making a series of claims about Japan at the end of WWII that were in some cases vastly exaggerated and in others, just plain false. My mouth just dropped open; I looked around and saw the mouths of other students open as well, in this same sort of startled disbelief. I thought about arguing with the guy at the end, but then I thought, oh what's the point?

About that monarchy in Afghanistan: that's some really tangled-up stuff. You probably know this already, but just so's we're on the same page: the king of Afghanistan, who hasn't been there since 1973 (?), is still considered the legitimate government of the country (his official status is government-in-exile, which is the same status held by Charles de Gaulle (sp?) and his cabinet during WWII--a government forced to flee its country, but expected to return, oh, any day now...). It is his representative that holds Afghanistan's seat in the UN, and presumably he's been making treaties and things in the last few years just to keep his hand in the game. Right now, Pakistan is the only country (I'm pretty sure) that recognizes the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan; curiously, other countries don't really know what to do with it. They don't have diplomatic relations with it, and aside from the US funding it back in the 80s, I don't think they've gotten much in the way of international support. I think the idea behind reinstating the monarchy is that it will be the smoothest transition possible if indeed the Taliban can be convinced (i.e. bombed into submission) to give up the country; the monarchy may indeed be what the Afghans want, but I'm really going out on a limb there. At any rate, while on a practical level there can be no doubt that the Taliban controls Afghanistan, its vague status on the international level probably should be straightened out before we inadvertently set some nasty precedent. Bush's contention about "states harboring terrorists" to justify bombing a country is suspect when he doesn't recognize the Taliban as the government of that state, and surely can't be blaming the poor monarch who's been twiddling his thumbs in Italy or wherever he is since before we were born.

There's nothing more exciting than atheists discussing religion, eh? Just to switch sides for a moment, though, one can't blame Christianity too much for imposing strict, boring order on a chaotic world. I'm horking stuff from Nietzsche now (Uh-oh. You know it's bad when his name comes up), but I like his observation that these religions were, in a way, necessary at one point in history (admitting that these beliefs were used as a form of political control, but that's a whole other argument). After all, for most people in Europe, the years 1000-1500, when the Church was at its height, were a rough time to be alive. You worked day and night for some ungrateful tyrant and were visited by wars, plagues and illnesses of all varieties. Each winter, you thought to yourself, "I, along with my family, may die of sickness and hunger this year." In such deplorable conditions, the Christian idea that your suffering in this world will be redeemed in the next, that you only have to spend thirty years in misery for an eternity of bliss--just so long as you don't kill yourself first--must have come as comfort, a source of strength, a reason to get up in the morning, that sort of thing. But times have changed. People now have far more opportunity to improve their lot in this life, and most Christian sects, with the possible exception of the Quakers and Calvinism, just never quite caught up with the times. It's, like, totally retro, or something. Whatever. I've lost control of my argument, so I'm going to stop right here.

Anyway. What does this week or weekend look like for youse guys? Want to come up/go out for dinner or something?

@!$@$! George Lucas, ripping off Taoism for money. In all seriousness though, I actually find that the Force does not really appoximate many religions I suppose. St. Augustine notwithstanding (and his falling sparrow metaphor), the big monotheistic religions seem to follow the Panopticon model where God's on high and watching you but not necessarily all around you. And the polytheistic religions don't really have much in the way of fields of lifeforce either. Instead of a field, it's just that there are Gods everywhere, which I guess could be a field if it accords with modern particle physics, where fundamental forces are equivalently represented by fields or particles. Sorry for going all Gell-Man on you. It's more like Taoism, but there's not really a good or bad side of the Tao.

Yes, there is something vastly amusing about atheists discussing religion. But I think it's interesting too, because we're not afraid of blasphemy nor are we driven to argue that one doctrine is correct. I personally must admit I prefer the old Gods nobody remembers and recovering their mysteries. We'll never really know all the stuff that was going on at Crete or even the early Cyclades. It's true that some faiths now seem a bit quaint, but the Unitarians at least have stayed on the cutting edge. Isn't Calvinism really predetermination, or am I confused? And I maintain that Christianity is a bit more bland than it was during the late Roman period and Middle Ages. Imagine how exciting it was when they were battling which scriptures to include in the Bible? I still for sorry for the Gnostics. They had the now-modern notion that God was inside all of us and got rewarded for it with exorcism. And let's not forget the Albigenesians with free love and happy times, until they were savaged in the Albigenesian Crusade (to which we owe the origins of the phrase "Kill them all, God will know His own.") It pains me when the conformists win.

I totally agree that Thucydides was probably an unhappy observer, who spoke what he saw but probably didn't take much glee in it like Machiavelli or Hobbes. Reading him, it seems like a warning for future generations to not romanticize some of the mistakes of the war. Not quite a "war is hell" stance (too early for that really), but really showing it wasn't the stuff of myth like the Trojan War.

Also, I watched the next Buffy episode. I had my concerns about the first two-hour episode, but it seems like the old magic is back. And the twist at the end is great. It's looking like people's roles are changing, and there will probably be some major tectonic shifts in friendships and authorities. Jessica thinks they foreshadowed changes to Spike's role this season in the dream episode at the end of the fourth season. I think she may be right, and it's pretty amazing to contemplate him thinking that far ahead. Or maybe we're just reading too much into it.

Good night, I'm off. Jessica bought a bunch of Eightball comics and I'm going to read some. Soon I'll be out-Clowesing you.

I know what you mean. Still, atheists discussing religion can sometimes feel like kids discussing baseball cards, or Hollow Earth dwellers discussing the miserable wretches on the surface who have to deal with the heat of the accursed sun. Did I say that? It's hard to get too into it when you're, well, not all that into it. One of these days I want to have a long talk about religion with a friend of mine who is going to be an Episcopalian minister. Smart people who are also religious for some reason really impress me. It's like they've worked out all those contradictions, have wrestled with them pretty thoroughly but some out of the other side with faith intact. Obviously they've got something I don't, and in the case of my friend there--whose name is Drew, in case I mention him again--it ain't self-delusion. Plus, he and his fiancee (also studying to be a minister) can tell lots of God jokes. I went to visit them one weekend and they were going off to church while I was sitting around reading. I waved them off and said, "say hi to God for me," and April gave me this mischievious smile, "why don't you just say hi yourself?"

And yeah, the Calvinists had that predetermination stuff but they also had that unorthodox idea that God rewarded his chosen by granting them success here in this life (thus tossing out all that meek and submissive stuff). At the time, that meant that all capitalists go to heaven. Neat idea, eh? Max Weber, my new favorite classic social thinker (he knocked Marx off the pedestal about a month ago) has an entire book linking Calvinism and Protestantism in general to the rise of capitalism, entitled The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. I wo't be surprised if you have already read this book, but I haven't, and I plan to be really popular with the ladies when they see me reading that page-turner on the subway.

Have you read another of Henry Adams's books, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres? As you can see, I went through a little Henry Adams kick at one point, but given your interest in the more obscure corners of Christianity in its heyday, I think you'd really like it. It's a wonderful hodgepodge of a book, written by a man who, at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, was one of those people who managed to be very, very broadly educated in a way most people today can only envy. It's part art and architecture study, part medieval history, and part study of religious thought, and it captures, more than anything I've come across, just how lively religious debate used to be, how actual careers could be made or lost tossing around the most esoteric issues in religious thought you could want. Kinda makes you wish for the good old days, minus the intolerance and smallpox. If this isn't enough to sell you, let me add that Adams is an excellent, excellent writer who knows when to take things seriously and definitely when not to.

We're catching up on Buffy-watching over here as well. Steph was reading over my shoulder when I was reading your message (she was scanning to find out if you were coming for dinner; if you're curious, usually I respond to you at school) and she agrees entirely with Jessica's thing that Spike is going to take more of a watcher role as per the dreams of seasons past. A credit to Steph: she had the twist ending of this episode pegged ten minutes into it. As soon as Steph said this, you could see it coming--which made it enjoyable in another way, wondering if Buffy would tell them she was in heaven or not, and how the viewers would find out if she didn't. Personally, I really liked the two-hour episode; I liked the marauding demons backdrop of the whole thing, even if (or perhaps because) it was based on a cheesy Hell's Angel's pun.

But I don't think Joss et al. are really planning that far ahead. They may have a vague idea where they want the thing to go, but ultimately I think they just write as they go along, and that's why it seems so rich and interesting--and also why it turns out often to be so tightly plotted. They've really set the show up right, in that it's just loopy enough that they can throw around all kinds of ideas, thus giving them several different avenues to explore. The ones they end up following will make previous episodes seem like foreshadowing; the ones that lead to blind alleys can just come across as random and funny. Few other shows have smart enough writers to pull this kind of thing off. Needless to say, it's shameful how silly so many shows seem in comparison to Buffy, which has almost certainly overtaken the X-Files as my favorite show, and is starting even to chase down the first sixteen episodes of Twin Peaks--although those sixteen hours are so godlike to me that it's very, very hard for me to imagine television getting any better than that.

Like Twin Peaks, though, Buffy teaches an important lesson to anyone who ever thought of telling a very, very, very long story: framing is everything. Buffy is now in the enviable position where the story is so cockeyed and strange that they can be really melodramatic and it comes across as tragic rather than sappy (e.g. "I know I'm a monster but you treat me like a man";"Is this hell?"). Smart thinking.

Is late. Must go to bed. Let me know what you think of those Eightball comics. I reread David Boring the other day just because I like it so much. It's so good--and after you-know-what, eerily prescient; like he's commenting on social effects before the cause has even happened. That Daniel Clowes. If he did novels instead of comic books, he'd probably have a tenured track in some English department somewhere. Thank God he does comics.

Man, do you ever sleep? In any event, yes, it's clear that Spike is taking a larger role in events and he now has a somewhat special bond with the Slaying one, mainly he's been dead before as well and he was never in on this ultimately selfish plan (the Scooby Gang is all convinced she was in Hell mainly because they don't want to have any doubts about being right). However, I think he wasn't let in on the plan for the opposite reasons, not that he wouldn't let them do anything if things went wrong but that he wouldn't let them do it in the first place, and he was strong enough to say no. But maybe that's just me. In any event, I think it's amazing how compelling this show can be despite the somewhat silly supernatural premise. When you explain all the backplots to people, it just sounds absurd, but it works somehow, and it works well. I didn't like the bikers though, and the first two episodes' rhythm seemed to be off.

I like the idea of there being religious trading cards with stats of the back. Like the Yahweh card would have smitings, manna, and miracles, etc. I also remember a joke myself, "How do you make God smile?" "Make a plan." Okay, it's kinda cheesy. I suppose I'm more an armchair theologist/philosopher, not a serious student. I'm shooting for Borges here, but I don't think I'll ever make it that far (I would need a library filled with more obscure tomes from the 1800s). And I like your sentence with the "good old days, minus the intolerance and smallpox." Although it seems a bit like some dialogue for Anya, the character who speaks in afterthoughts (as do I).

Sorry for not responding about dinner here, but I dispatched you a trusty email on that instead. In these days, I can never be too careful and have to avoid all my fanatical devotees. Nah, I'm kidding. I'm perhaps one of the few people in this country who doesn't even want 15 minutes of fame.

Actually, I slept quite a bit last night. And had the weirdest dreams I've had in a while. Here's one of them: Steph, me, and a bunch of other Eastern Europeans I don't know are in some sort of sanatorium/run-down dormitory. We're in one of the rooms, which has six or seven dorm beds--you know, singles, very thin and grungy mattresses. Some other couple comes in and starts *doing it* very flagrantly in an attempt to make us leave; then somebody starts throwing something at somebody else. Meanwhile, I am trying to fix the light fixture in the room. The glass cover is off, and I'm poking at it with a mop handle, and it keeps filling with water--except that the water in the fixture behaves as if it's on the floor and I'm on the ceiling. Explain *that* with your psychology.

Given the random nature of so many dreams, I've always wondered why it is that people have looked for messages in them. Even if a dream really does speak to you directly (I once had a dream in college where a character from a book I was reading explained the major themes of the book to me, the night before I was to start writing an essay on said book), why would you trust the advice when you have other dreams that are just obvious nonsense? (The character's analysis of the book, as it turned out, was pretty facile.) I mean, looking over the dream, I can see where many of the elements come from. Many of my friends at school are Eastern European, I am constantly trying to fix things around the house, and I think very often about how deplorable conditions probably are for many people around the world--but this dream here is just my life in a blender, it's not ordered in any way. Of course, a classic psychoanalyst (I've never gotten tired of the fact that the word "analyst" contained the word "anal") would underline the whole mop handle/light socket filling with water thing, but why? To me, the more interesting part of the dream is the general atmosphere of it, the dirt and chaos in it. But I would never claim that it, like, means anything. I'm sure I've hauled this quote out for you before, but I reminds me a good one from Harold Pinter when he was an angry young man instead of a bitter old one. After his first play, a man met him backstage and said, "But Mr. Pinter, what does your play *mean*?" and Pinter gave him a nasty look and said, "What do *you* mean?"

Another funny dream aside: apparently two nights ago I woke Steph up at 2:30 in the morning to tell her something about Colombia's economy. The funny part is that I have no recollection of this, and moreover, I don't know anything about Colombia's economy.

I had no idea that my thought processes resembled Anya's. Maybe I should pay more attention to what I say. Oh who am I kidding? That just takes too much energy.

No worries on responding via straight-out email--I got it as soon as I posted here, and I seem to remember saying that your plan was good. I did send that email, right? And yet anoher similarity: I'm with you on the 15 minutes thing. Somebody else can have it.

Well, it's been quite a few busy days since we last talked. I'm dropping you a line to see how things have been with you. I'm okay myself, although work has been somewhat frantic and life has been busy besides, but what else is new there. Yesterday, I finished my last batch of books and returned them to the library to pick up all my new holds. You'll be pleased as the bee's knees to hear I checked out a Gaddis book so I can give him a shot. I also got the new Sebald and the new Powers if you're keeping score at home. I suppose I could be one of those people who documents and logs every book I read, but the idea is too tedious to contemplate.

Anyway, that's all I have to really say now. I leave it up to you to respond and get the parade of nonsequitur topics rolling.

Hey.

Things have been pretty busy around here, too--I have midterms coming up this week so I'm running around like crazy trying to do that stuff on top of the normal work. And there's some jury duty I'm doing my best to dodge. It ain't easy. I mean, I can always postpone it, but I want to see if I can postpone it until the end of graduate school, which may be harder.

Which Gaddis book did you check out? The only one I haven't read of his is A Frolic of One's Own, though I already remember the first line from looking at it in the bookstore: "--Justice? You get justice in the next world, in this one you get the law." It can almost feel sometimes like he's writing an essay (JR's opening line, if I remember the punctuation right, is "--Money...?"; guess what the book is about). I'm just excited that they have him in the library.

A friend of mine sent me a neat article from the New York Times the other day, about a guy who reread the opening paragraphs of Moby Dick (where Ishmael is walking around Lower Manhattan) and, following Ishmael's trail today, he was struck by how different the physical surroundings are, but how very similar the mood is. For me, it was cool to remember that Lower Manhattan itself used to be one of the busiest ports in the world before the big ships moved over to Brooklyn altogether, and also that it used to be much shadier. I stumbled across a book about Five Points the other day and have every intention of reading it once I finish school.

But one thing I do like about this city is how, despite its constant tearing down and rebuilding, you can occasionally stumble across sections of it that haven't changed much in a long time. For me, the neighborhood that's like that the most is Red Hook in Brooklyn. Back in the day, it was another very busy part of the port in New York Harbor, and it had a series of warehouses and munitions depots that had their heyday in the Civil War era. Red Hook is much, much quieter now, but going there, you get the feeling that physically not too much has changed. Many of the streets are still cobbled; all of the munitions buildings are still there (though the artists are starting to move into them). Apart from the housing projects (which at one point were the worst in the city), the buildings are probably mostly as they were in Melville's time. With so many empty streets, it's easy to fill them in your head with sailors and prostitutes and that sort of thing. There's even a nice lack of streetlights, so one can imagine how dark the city used to be, before electricity.

That's something about American towns and cities I've always found interesting: the desire to brilliantly illuminate their streets at night. I didn't realize how much they did it--even relatively small towns--until I spent some time elsewhere. Of course, Livingstone in Zambia was quite dark at night, aside from the main drag, but it was also unpaved aside from the main drag, and part of the darkness was because many of the streetlights had been broken or dismantled and not replaced. But the few cities I went to in Spain were also quite dark at night. And Japan--again, off the neon-soaked main streets (if you stood next to a pachinko parlor, you could swear it was noon) was very, very dark: there were small lamps at the intersections of streets (which, you may be interested to know, collapse very quickly into a spiderweb of streets--outside of Kyoto there are almost no right angles--where some cars can't fit--hence the dominance of bicycles and mopeds) and occasionally one along a long stretch of road, but otherwise, it was either moped lights or the lights from houses. Though the lack of local light did not prevent cities from obliterating the stars, as the ambient light does here in New York; I think this has mostly to do with the sheer size of Japanese cities--the sense of sprawl here puts LA to shame. To see what I mean, grab yourself a map of Japan some time and look at the long river valley that has Kyoto at the top and Osaka at the bottom. Know that this entire section of the country--with a very small break in the middle that is sure to close--is really one gigantic city, where the maze of streets and houses covers the valley floor and goes about halfway up the hills. Pretty crazy.

Well, I should get to work. Let me know what you think of Gaddis--particularly if you dislike him, because it can lead to interesting conversation.

Well, we've reached a milestone in this rambling exercise in solipsism we call Mallomar Update. I was in the grocery store tonight when I noticed a familiar yellow box out of the corner of my eye. Yes, the Mallomars have returned, and I guess we no longer have to maintain this conversation to distract ourselves from the implacable yearning in our souls for dark-chocolate coated marshmallows with graham crackers bases. It was nice knowing you.

Seriously though, I must admit I have not gotten to Gaddis yet. I'm plowing through the new Sebald first, but he's next on the queue, although the New Yorker and New York Review of Books jump ahead in line when they arrive. And it should be clear now that my reading preferences identify me as one of New York's Chattering Classes, always reading to expostulate on any topic no matter how high-brow, low-brow, or no-brow it is. Which I guess is what I do here all the time.

It's pretty amazing to think that Five Points was one of the rowdiest areas of Manhattan, and now it's the relatively placid City Hall area. Likewise, 23rd Street was the heart of the theater district in the early 1900s. Washington Square Park was a cemetary and site of public executions. It's fascinating the transformations parts of this city have undergone. Of course, every city does that, but I think New York is interesting occurring right at the cusp of the change from spontaneous to planned city arrangements. Or so it seems to me on a few moment's thought.

Anyhow, must dash. I recommend you check out the International Dark Sky Association. They certainly have some fascinating maps of Global Light Pollution that really illustrate our fascination with poor lighting that leaks a lot of light into the atmosphere. Now, you can understand the frustration most astronomers feel.

Ha! I meant to tell you that I had seen Mallomars in the store, and felt like some cycle had come ot an end, but naturally, I forgot to say anything. This happens to me often. I have been meaning to email a friend that I have met another South Asian man who plays Dr. Dre stuff on an acoustic guitar (she introduced me to the first one), but I keep forgetting. Of course, when I met this guy, my first thought was that I was meeting the same man years later--after all, I met the first Dre-totin' South Asian while visiting Columbia, and here this man was a graduate student at Columbia also--but it turns out that he's a completely different man. He was a little disappointed to learn that someone else was doing his acoustic Dre thing. I find it startling that both men should be South Asian. I'm not suggesting a conspiracy here--remember, I'm beyond paranoid--but it seems like there should somehow be an underlying explanation; some sort of convergence of South Asian and Los Angeles ghetto cultural ideals that harmonize to create acoustic Dre. Incidentally, I'm using the label South Asian because I don't know if they are Indian or Pakistani, and I've learned that one really should try not to confuse the two.

As you can probably tell, I'm very tired. I have been doing much studying of international law, and some part of my personality is now rebelling against logic. I've been getting into non-sequiturs. You know Philip K. Dick. Well, I picked up a bunch of his short stories in the East Village there off some guy and have been reading them on the bus to and from school--you know, just a little morsel of fun for the day. The short stories are pretty great. I can see why he has such a good reputation. He's got this neat blend of pulp and pretty fierce intelligence that comes across as very genuine, very effortless--not like those pomo guys who are trying too hard to be lowbrow and end up being super highbrow. Naw, Dick's kind of a natural. His occasional misused prepositions add to the charm (though I'm surprised an editor didn't catch them). He has this neat way of approaching sci-fi that for me sums up very well what I like in many short stories, sci-fi or not. Dick says that the true protagonist of any sci-fi story is not a person or a thing, but an idea. If it's good sci-fi, that idea is new, or at least a new twist on an old one. Granted, this has been said before, but rarely has it been said so simply and with such concision. A real breath of fresh air after the pumped-up academic prose of literary criticism.

In many ways, Dick actually reminds me of Norman Maclean, a writer who I feel has been maligned somewhat just because his very good book got turned into a prosaic movie. The movie of A River Runs Through It is all right but it misses, I think, what makes the book great: Maclean's voice, the tone and the mood that he sets up. This is important because that tone really becomes the story: there's this sharp pang all the way through it, this acute sense of how much has been lost, how much will never be understood, and how life is just too d*mn short. He has a line that goes through my head perhaps every week or so that I'll share with you before I fall asleep here in the library. The setting is that he and his wife have just had this real knock-down, drag-out sort of fight, the kind where both have dug in and there's no reconciling it. I could say what it's about, but it involves most of the plot of the book, so it's too long to summarize and irrelevant now anyway. After a period, he and his wife come to an agreement--not that the argument is over or that it'll be resolved or anything like that, but at least to some sort of agreement, a settling of some sort. Here's the end of that scene:

"Let's just not lose touch with each other." Jesse said. And we never have, although her death has come between us.

Now that's a sentence. And there are dozens more like it. I also read one of his nonfiction books called Young Men and Fire, and it' s really great. Boy, am I tired. I'm going home.

Wow, it has been a busy week. To catch up, I think I will reply and make comments in shorthand sentences. Like Rohrschach. Or the Spartans. Whose terseness gave us the term "laconic" from their name Laconia. Or such. Digression: distracting at first reading Thucydides talking about Lesbians in battle. Remembered it's an island in Aegean.

Love Philip K. Dick. But you probably guessed that. Truly mindbending author. Need to read more of his novels. Always makes me pissed though that so much bad sci-fi tarnishes public perception of good sci-fi. Dick, Lem, and Heinlein deserve more credit than they get. Of course, good to see Borges finally getting attention. Still upset over only print of Borges "Book of Fantasy" I could find (out of print review of myths around the world) has trashiest fantasy-like cover. Grrrrrr.

Have you ever read Ben Katchor? Writes best weekly comic strip of all time ("Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer"). Evocative of immigrant New York, with weird business schemes, neat street observations, and subtle humor. You'd probably like him. I adore him. Has an exhibit at the New York Jewish Museum now it seems. Very cool.

Anyway, must run. Been fun. Have great weekend. Ciao.

Been busy for both of us. My class load is real light this week due to a short holiday, but really this just gives me a way to catch up on all the work I had to drop to study for midterms. It may seem as though I am drowning in work; I'm not really, but the better I do this semester, the better the chance that I get funding for next year, so it's worth it.

So, Steph has season whatever of Buffy on tape that she bought from the store, and it has interviews with Mr. Whedon on it. You'll be pleased to know that Whedon and friends do in fact make it up as they go along--so it just means that they're smart enough to make it seem planned later (for instance, watching Spike and Buffy ally against Angel and Drusilla in earlier episodes has an added resonance now that we know how those characters turn out). But it also means that the way we've been taught to read things, y'know, seeing patterns and that sort of thing, lends a sort of false veneer of symbolism to the show.

My first visit to a full-on club was really fun, by the way. The music was great. I used to not particularly like that sort of thing (I think you'd call it house music, but what do I know), but I really liked some of the stuff the guy came up with. One song (I guess you'd call it a song) in particular really grabbed me, because it had pretty much everything I want in music rolled into one thing. On the rhythmic side of things, it had a simple main beat complicated by a few cross-cutting polyrhythms (a sort of 3-on-2, 3-on-4 thing--not crazy fancy but good stuff all the same), and on the melodic side, a really nice sung bluesy line backed up by the sort of synth-string wash that I've always been a sucker for since I was a wee child (see Vangelis; see also Moby, particularly "When It's Cold I'd Like to Die"). It was gorgeous. Unfortunately, it was also sort of downhill for me from there musicwise; after that high, he didn't quite top it. Still, it was worth it--for that ten or fifteen minutes, I was downright giddy, you know the sort of thing where you can't help but wave your hands in the air and laugh like a maniac. Well, at least that kind of thing happens to me.

I've actually been spending the last few months trying to learn to play polyrhythms instinctually. I've been able to do 3-on-2 for a long time (think Carol of the Bells and you have an idea what it sounds like), but slightly more complicated things eluded me for a while. Luckily, the mbira taught me a couple more rhythmic patterns--also based on 3-on-2 but slightly more complicated--and a friend taught me how to do 3-on-4, which is about as nifty as I can get. The thing that's neat about playing polyrhythms is that to play them properly, you have to, in some sense, not listen to what you're doing. You have to detach yourself slightly, pay attention but not pay attention. If you concentrate too hard on it, you lose it; if you don't concentrate enough, you also lose it. But there's this happy balance in between, where you are held in suspense. It's almost like a place that you can't quite say how to get to, but you know when you are there, because suddenly the music gets very rich and exciting, and your hands seem to be operating of their own accord. On the mbira, this is easier to do because the instrument lends itself to that sort of thing. I am trying to get better at it on other things, but it involves relearning a couple things I thought I understood before. I'm sorry if I'm repeating earlier posts; I don't remember how much I have talked about this.

Good God, it's late. I'll see you later.

Been a long time since I posted here, eh? It's been a busy few weeks I suppose. Sorry about all that.

Well, I saw a promo teaser for Buffy on FX which claimed that references to Dawn's introduction in season 5 were made in the third season. Not having more specifics, I can't really verify how true this is, but I thought you'd find it interesting. That and the whole outfit Spike wore in the episode two Tuesdays ago. It's the exact same as the one he wore in the dream episode, where he claimed "Giles is going to make me a watcher. Says I've got the stuff!" It makes me wonder how much of that is going to happen. And then there's the "Something Blue" episode of the 4th Season where Spike and Buffy get together (a bit of magic). But I suppose there's a lot of stuff that's in there that never leads to anything else too. It's just afterwards they pick up on something and then say "See! We were planning it all along!". And thus concludes my pathetically-obsessed-sounding thoughts on Buffy.

Anyhow, I hope you had a nice little Turkey day. Keep it real.

Yeah, I still think Buffy is made up as they go along--it's just that they mess around so much that much of it seems planned later. For example, in a season 3 episode--the one where Anya is still a vengeance demon--an alternate Willow is made into a vampire. This alternate Willow shows up later and confronts the real Willow. Upon observing the alternate Willow's Sapphic behavior, Willow says, "I think I'm gay!" I am 99% sure that, at the time, they meant this as a joke; just one that turned out to be quite convenient later. There are innumerable examples of this, but I still think it points more in the direction of the writers being flexible and clever rather than having really long-term plot lines for the show. Long-term plotlines by season, sure--but over four or five seasons, I don't know. Realistically, I can't imagine a show would do that, if only because in the fickle world of TV, they're never sure if there's going to be a next season; they don't know when actors are going to decide abruptly to leave the show; these sorts of things get in the way of long-term planning.

Speaking of Mars Attacks!, I managed to catch this movie on TV last night when I got home from school at some abominable hour and decided to have a little vegging-out time before bed. Mars Attacks!, oddly enough, is becoming one of my favorite movies. The aliens, upon repeated viewings, get funnier and funnier because of their incessant quacking, and it boggles the mind that so many big-time actors agreed to be in such a movie (Jack Nicholson? Glenn Close?), and that people agreed to put up so much money to make it. All the scenes in the alien ships are just phenomenal. I used to think that Tim Burton's best movie was either Beetlejuice or Ed Wood, but Mars Attacks! is swiftly gaining on them. If I were still a lit-type guy, and if I had to write a paper, I would probably talk about how Mars Attacks! best sums up the way Tim Burton feels about people. The Normals, always a figurative target in his movies, are here rendered totally expendable, and it's only the total misfits--who diversely include Lucas Haas's burnout teen, his senile grandmother, a former boxer-turned security guard, and Tom Jones--who have the wherewithall to survive when the rules of the game suddenly change. The hegemony of the Normals, Tim Burton is saying, is based on a tissue of barely enforceable rules, and when those rules finally fall apart, it's the weirdos who will, um, rule the planet, reconstructing society, living in teepees, and listening to Slim Whitman. How did this guy ever get jobs at major studios?

The Slim Whitman is a nice segway into how I've noticed recently that yodelling has found its way into many musical styles. Offhand, I can think of four: there's the Alps kind of yodelling; there's the old-school country kind of yodelling; there's a sort of Colombian variant that counts as yodelling in the sense that you switch from normal to falsetto voice and back again, even if it's done at a slower rate; there's the Zimbabwean form of singing that accompanies mbira music. Just as the history of unusual instruments reveals hidden corners of history (the history of the banjo, for example, shows that poor whites and slaves in the Old South must have hung out more often than people typically think), one is tempted to see if tracing yodelling back will reveal similarly interesting stories. Though I doubt there is a connection between the Alps yodelling and the Zimbabwean yodelling, it's quite possible that Alps yodelling led to the old-school country yodelling--and that, just as the accordion was imported south of the border via Italian and German immigrants (ever notice the similarities between lots of Mexican music and polka? That ain't no accident), it's possible that yodelling crept from German immigrants in Mexico down th South America, where, along with the accordion, it made its way into some nascent Colombian musical style that I don't know the name of but have a CD of all the same. Maybe the Germans are the ultimate source of yodelling in the New World. It's things like this that make me almost late for class.

Must go,
Brian

Ah, the subtle nuances of the Buffy-verse could keep us going for days, which is good I suppose since it's the end of new episodes for a little while. Still, I'm using this as a good opportunity for catching up on season 4, thanks to the wonders of cable.

I too like Mars Attacks, but not nearly as much as I adore Pee Wee's Big Adventure, which answers your question of how Tim Burton got a job at a major studio in the first place. He was picked by another profitable weirdo out of obscurity to direct the picture. You can be a weirdo in Hollywood, as long as you're a weirdo whose films bring in money. Tim Burton is one of those directors (Spielberg and Lucas are other examples) whose name alone can sell a film. I have a book of interviews (Burton on Burton), where he basically confirms that point of yours: mainly that he often sets his films with a lone weirdo against a society of normals. Although in many cases the weirdo doesn't really change things or outlast, he just retreats back to his sanctum. Hence, our poor Edward Scissorhands or Ed Wood or Batman skulking back to his lair. The weirdo may try, but it's hard to find acceptance out there.

I like the yodelling theory, but I wonder if you've also considered ululating as part of the yodelling family. That's the high-pitched trilling noise often seen in footage of Arabic demonstrations and such. It seems vaguely yodel-rific in my mind.

I had not considered the Arabic ululation as a yodel, but I don't see why it couldn't fit. Though the more diverse examples you come up with, the harder it will be to trace connections between them. I suppose for the sake of precision, I would subsume "yodel" under "ululation" and instead talk about any singing style that alternates between the normal and falsetto voice, um, outside of the transition to puberty. Of course, such a broad definition also makes me wonder if that unearthly Mongolian two-toned singing could also be considered as a prolonged form of yodel, since the singer still alternates between his normal voice and the... well, the other voice (it's not exactly falsetto). Maybe the more interesting line of thought on the yodelling thing isn't whether or not there are connections between different styles, but rather how different cultures have responded to the natch'l abilities of the human voice. In particular, one might ask, how come the Mongolian two-tone throat singing is unique? Why does that particular trick not show up in other cultures--casting aside the popularly held belief that mastering that singing knocks years off your life.

Interestingly, when I think of Mongolian throat-singing, I think of Amsterdam, which is where I finally saw someone do it in person. They were street musicians, and were very good (I bought their CD--my souveneir from Holland...). Oddly, on the same day, I came across another street band that was playing none other than old-time fiddle music. As it turned out, the banjo player is famous as far as old-time banjo players go; the band was in fact on tour. They were kind of low-energy, but quite good. I did not buy their CD.

I've always been jealous of cities that have intricate networks of canal systems. I have never been to Venice, but Amsterdam and Ottawa both sport canal systems that are extensive enough to be a conduit for public transportation. Many of the canals in Amsterdam, in fact, are lined with houseboats, which seems like the most stylin' way to live in that city (though I imagine the hardships associated with living on a boat might get a little tiresome). And the idea of getting to and from work by boat--or better yet, by ice skating, as Ottawa businessmen and government employees can do in the winter--is just charming. A close second to a city webbed with canals is any society where boat travel is better than land travel--the towns in Newfoundland, for example, or the Channel Islands off the coast of California. I'm not sure why I'm so enraptured by the idea of water travel, but for some reason, like train travel, it just seems better for you.

I did some checking, and in the "Getting the Nickname in Quotes" thread, the first post is from January 2nd. This means we've known each other some 11 months now. Pretty insane when you think about it. I imagine we've generated enough tangents in our conversations to fill an entire geometry book.

I seem to recall that the Mongolian stuff is a special different singing technique (as opposed to just going to falsetto), called something like undertonal. On the other hand, the Bulgarian Woman's Choir is overtonal. Or it's some other term there...

I love canals too (as long as they're clean), and I wish New York had them sometimes. Maybe it's just the romantic notion of living on a barge and moving across Europe that gets to me. Maybe it's just the connection to water, watching the surfaces, etc. that I love. Or the ironic association of building solid structures right on water, fluid and unstable as it is. Funnily enough, I seem to recall that Amsterdam has more canals than Venice, although the latter is what everybody thinks of as THE city of water.

Listening to a new industrialish music release by this prolific German (no, not THAT one, another one I'm talking about). Thinking of one other Buffy thing, back when I was more of an industrial boy, I was always amused by the fact that everytime the bad guys had a lair, it was ALWAYS the popular conception of an industrial club, loud music blaring, corrugated metal everywhere, and cool leather and chrome outfits. You know, like in that scene in the Matrix (ugh! Rob Zombie!) or the Bronze in the Buffy episode with the alternate universe and the vampire Willow. I've been to industrial clubs, and they've never been like that (good and bad I suppose). Still, I guess if I ever need to play a bad guy, I can pull it off, and maybe even listen to better stuff than freakin' Rob Zombie. And it makes me appreciate the current season of Buffy where the evil lair is a dingy rec room in a basement.

But there I go again. Anyway, I had a fun time this weekend. We should do it again sometime. I think we're going to have a little party (or should I say par-tay to be hip like the kids these days?) at the homestead in two weeks, but I'll let you know more when the time approaches.

I did some checking, and in the "Getting the Nickname in Quotes" thread, the first post is from January 2nd. This means we've known each other some 11 months now. Pretty insane when you think about it. I imagine we've generated enough tangents in our conversations to fill an entire geometry book.

I seem to recall that the Mongolian stuff is a special different singing technique (as opposed to just going to falsetto), called something like undertonal. On the other hand, the Bulgarian Woman's Choir is overtonal. Or it's some other term there...

I love canals too (as long as they're clean), and I wish New York had them sometimes. Maybe it's just the romantic notion of living on a barge and moving across Europe that gets to me. Maybe it's just the connection to water, watching the surfaces, etc. that I love. Or the ironic association of building solid structures right on water, fluid and unstable as it is. Funnily enough, I seem to recall that Amsterdam has more canals than Venice, although the latter is what everybody thinks of as THE city of water.

Listening to a new industrialish music release by this prolific German (no, not THAT one, another one I'm talking about). Thinking of one other Buffy thing, back when I was more of an industrial boy, I was always amused by the fact that everytime the bad guys had a lair, it was ALWAYS the popular conception of an industrial club, loud music blaring, corrugated metal everywhere, and cool leather and chrome outfits. You know, like in that scene in the Matrix (ugh! Rob Zombie!) or the Bronze in the Buffy episode with the alternate universe and the vampire Willow. I've been to industrial clubs, and they've never been like that (good and bad I suppose). Still, I guess if I ever need to play a bad guy, I can pull it off, and maybe even listen to better stuff than freakin' Rob Zombie. And it makes me appreciate the current season of Buffy where the evil lair is a dingy rec room in a basement.

But there I go again. Anyway, I had a fun time this weekend. We should do it again sometime. I think we're going to have a little party (or should I say par-tay to be hip like the kids these days?) at the homestead in two weeks, but I'll let you know more when the time approaches.

Wow. Almost a year. That IS insane.

You may be right about the Mongolian singing style; I don't know enough about the way vocals cords work to say whether they're undertones or overtones (maybe they're harmonics?). It's all I can do to keep this kind of thing straight with stringed instruments, the mathematics of which are the easiest for me to understand. Not that I even understand that all that well, of course. And occasionally, it boggles my mind that a trombone even works. How does the sound even come out of that thing? Though nice going with another yodel-esque sort of style re: Bulgarian Women's Choir.

What are industrial clubs like, actually? As you know, while I like industrial music (as I like virtually all music), it ain't exactly the scene I'm in, so I've never ended up in one. Is there an aesthetic that many of them share, or do they differ as much as most clubs and bars differ from one another? And don't your ears hurt after a while? I've always found that while I like industrial music quite a bit, the musicians' general love of the very high treble range blunts my hearing to a sometimes appalling degree. Though I also happen to think that their exploitation of the dog-hearing range of frequencies is their major contribution to music making. There is so much going on in those very high frequencies in industrial music (at least what I've heard); to me, it's where the interest and complexity is. Industrial music programmers, I think, really understand how electronic instruments work more than anyone else does--which is probably how they manage to wring such wonderfully chaotic sounds out of what I know from experience are obtuse machines more apt to produce flat, textureless tones.

Now, say what you will about Rob Zombie (and I agree that most his stuff is super-boring), but I have to say that every once in a while, he hits on a big fat pumpin' groove. There's this one White Zombie song that I don't even remember the name of that I think is one of the better dance tracks of the last decade; it's a just a really driving piece of music. Remember: just because it's popular, that doesn't mean it's bad.

Ah--here's a tangent worth exploring. More and more often, I find myself defending mainstream culture. Whether I am coming to the aid of Brendan Fraser, the now defunct Backstreet Boys, Green Day, or some Hollywood movies, I think that those of our generation have turned their backs too quickly on that stuff, are too quick to accuse people of selling out, forgetting, of course, that stuff that we know think of as cool again--like Phil Spector or Sly and the Family Stone (I feel like I see references to them all the time these days, especially Sly, who deserves a renaissance)--was at one point about as mainstream as you can get. And I find myself more and more often admiring those who are able to produce books, movies, and songs that arise out of a deep tradition YET have really wide appeal. Chris Isaak is such a man: his songs are immediately likeable, and he is firmly grounded in that great rockabilly tradition. And I appreciate so much that Chris Isaak is not ironic about his use of rockabilly: he doesn't play rockabilly to cash in retro chips, he plays rockabilly because he really likes rockabilly music.

Where am I going with this? I don't know. I think I'm just responding to what I think is an identity problem for many people in our age group: on one hand, we're fed up with the jaded, self-absorbed, self-conscious, isn't-it-ironic-that-I-know-I'm-being-ironic-and-am-also-telling-you-about-how-I-know-that-I'm-self-conscious-about-being-ironic Gen X posturing; and on the other hand, we revolt from what I see as the intentional shallowness of many people a few years younger than us, the people that have made whoever that guy is that created all those boy bands into a millionaire (something Perlman?). Where is the rallying point for those of us who are caught between these two poles?

Industrial clubs are pretty lame in general. If you've been to the Batcave, Bank, or the Pyramid, you know what I'm talking about. Take a room, paint things black. Put murals on the wall. In general, it's usually Goth clubs that also spin Industrial music just to keep everybody's hearts from stopping due to the mopey moroseness of the music. The dream Industrial club would be Death Cube K described in Idoru. I would go there pretty religiously myself if it existed. That has actually grown to be my favorite Gibson novel at this point, and not just because it mentions Black Black.

I actually don't really notice much in the way of treble, but I do notice a lot of neat little sound tweaking going on. It's true that a lot of the bands really have wrested some weird and wonderful sounds out of their equipment, and a lot of the good stuff sounds fresh even today. And I like the whole use of samples too. I know that popular things can be good, but I think the problem is not that Rob Zombie is good, but merely that he can hire decent remixers. He basically is following the formula pioneered by a metal group called Fear Factory 8 years ago, where they got a good industrial band (Front Line Assembly) to remix their songs. They got a whole new reputation, but I don't think FLA really got much out of it. Not that they didn't cement a reputation for themselves, and now they're raking in loads of cash as the group Delerium with the wispy Sarah Maclachlan guest vocals.

I really should read more science fiction. As a guy who drifts from genre to genre now, I pop in and read a little bit of SF, and then pop out again. Because of this, I have only read one Gibson novel. Guess which one that is? Of course, I loved it. And I'm here to tell you that the sky over metropolitan Japan is as Gibson describes the sky in the first line of the book: "the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." It is the best description of such a sky that I have ever read: dark, yet emanating light. Actually, that line may rank among the top five first sentences of a book written in the 20th century for me, along with "A screaming comes across the sky", "It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love," "--Money...?", and "Your Excellencies, Your Worships, Your Honors, and Citizens! What is this Russian Empire of ours?"

What is Black Black?

I've never been to any of the clubs you mentioned, though I could be convinced to go if I was feeling, well, morbid. On the other hand, though, when I get all morbid, I don't get industrial, urban morbid; I get rural morbid, more along the lines of dried corpses in the barn, or drowning yourself in the deep pool under the abandoned railroad bridge. I think of dead trees. It only occurs to me now that I'm writing this, but this may be one of the reasons why I like industrial music but have trouble relating to it. Dock Boggs, on the other hand, I can relate. Or those lake-of-fire can't-wait-to-die gospel songs. Remember when we were talking about how Hank Williams weepers are still good-time weepers? Well, there's a whole other branch of old-school country that isn't trying intentionally to be depressing, but really, really is. It's not party music; it's hang-yer-wife-and-then-yerself music. This music I still really like--it's very powerful stuff--but it's not something that you want to play or sing all the time. And very few people are still able to write songs like that, though a band called the Horseflies managed to do it in the 80s with a great song called "Rub Alcohol Blues." You can pretty much guess where that one's headed.

How cheery is this posting? I want to end on an upbeat note, but alas, time forbids. I'm working on a paper about economic development where, having set up the problem, I now have to save the world in four pages or less. It's one really weird thing about writing papers about the stuff I study now: unlike my undergraduate papers writing about medieval English literature, when you write a paper about economic development what you're really writing about is how to try to improve the lives of millions and millions of people. It's almost best not to think about that aspect of it too much, because that kind of burden can paralyze your argument. It's pretty wild. But soon it will be done; my finals end next Tuesday, and then I have about a month to do a whole lot of something else.

Talk to you soon.