thanks for not being a zombie

I've got blogger's block, dear reader.¹ This is a transitional period of my life, but I have no idea what the other side of this transition will be. I don't feel comfortable revealing what I'm thinking (which is all over the map). Don't get me wrong: things are good, for the most part. But in January, my research sabbatical ends, and I go back to KC for the semester while L stays with the job here. I've done long-distance relationships before, and plenty of academics maintain them just fine. I'm not sure I want to do this again, though.

One way or another, big changes are on the horizon. The problem is that I don't know what they are.

Although I plan to continue my online writing, I've decided that this blog's days are numbered. The last entry will appear on March 1, 2006, completing a solid three years.

1. I think I'm the first blogger to use this self-consciously archaic address regularly. Am I wrong? I see other bloggers using it, and I think, "Ha! I did it first!"

Posted by at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

I'm sure you've forgotten that Thanksgiving takes place this week. Have no fear. Check these out from two years ago. Still as delicious in 2005 as they were in 2003.

All the way from London, City Hippy mailed me these prizes for winning Starbucks Challenge 1: coffee, hot chocolate, and tea from Clipper.

Starbucks Challenge 2 is underway.

Posted by at 9:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

• Robot poachers foil moose.
• Foiled poachers moose robot.
• Poached moose foils robot.
• Foiled moose poaches robot.
• Moosed robot poaches foil.

Posted by at 9:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

There was never a Starbucks in College Park while I was in grad school, although they served SBX coffee in the student center. Now, however, there's one the size of a warehouse right on the "main drag." And wouldn't you know it? They have the same apathetic customer service that (almost) all College Park establishments have.

Location: 7338 Baltimore Avenue; College Park, MD
Date: October 30, 2005.

Barista: Hello.
Me: Hi, could I get a cup of Cafe Estima, please?
Barista: We don't have any brewing.
Me: So, I cannot get a cup of the Cafe Estima?
Barista: Nope.
Me: Okay, thanks.

It was not busy in the least, yet they couldn't wait to be done with me. Nice. Then, in the parking lot, a girl driving an enormous SUV while chatting on her cell phone almost ran me over. I can neither confirm nor deny reports that she ended up with half-chewed pumpkin muffin all over her back window. See what happens when you don't have fair trade coffee, Starbucks?

Posted by at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Kitchen Occupant 1: I fixed the kitchen sink.
Kitchen Occupant 2: Yeah? What was wrong?
Kitchen Occupant 1: There was a big chunk of thawed spinach stuck in the pipe.
Kitchen Occupant 2: How did that happen?
Pause.
Kitchen Occupant 1: You know, I know many people want me to play the blame game, or to point fingers. But I'm not going to do that. It's important that we focus on the recovery process. I have a live to live, and that's what I intend to do.
Pause.
Kitchen Occupant 2: Uh-huh.

Aaaaand....scene.

Posted by at 1:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

"i don't care if it hurts.
i wanna have control."

My inside sources tell me that this video is very popular in some quarters of the Purdue mechanical engineering graduate program.

Posted by at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

First of all, you simply must get the downTHEMall plugin for Firefox, which allows you to grab all the files of a particular kind on a webpage with one click. This allows you to go to a page like this one and easily open your ears to a wide range of new music that your local radio station is probably too busy playing the latest from Nickelback to notice.

Be on the lookout for the forthcoming album from Drag City recording artist and Chicago-based blogger Edith Frost, who has some free music available to give you an idea of her sound. Good stuff. This recent blog entry about touring with Calexico and Iron and Wine is an example of why Frost is one of my favorite bloggers. Frost's music is available at the iTunes music store.

Icelandic elfin musicians Sigur Rós will be touring the U.S. in 2006. You can find tour details (and buy tix) online. Free music and videos can be downloaded from their website. I'll be seeing them on February 22 in St. Louis, a five-hour drive from KC, it's true, but I dug my last music trip to STL, so...

Andy Baio's blog turned me on to Feist, a musician formerly with Broken Social Scene. The video for the song "One Evening," which you can download free from Baio's site, is awesome. It has a kind of clumsy sincerity to it that is just charming. Last night I went out and bought a physical copy of her CD Let It Die, which is also available in the more ethereal iTunes music store (hint hint).

Wilco has a new live album coming out, and you can listen to four songs online. Unlike a lot performers, they really do change things up live, rather than simply recreate the studio versions of songs. Well, it's not like they completely rearrange songs, but there are places where surprising differences are noticeable. Guitarist Nels Cline's filigreed guitar work on the live version of "Company in My Back" is one example. In this interview, Cline discusses the circumstances of joining the band after a decades-long career as a respected, if somewhat obscure, musician. This Rolling Stone profile of Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy covers a lot of ground, including Tweedy's battles with anxiety and migraines.

Son Volt's new album, Okemah and the Melody of Riot, has been widely reviewed, but I'll just link to what reviewers in The Washington Post and The New York Times have to say. Don't just take the critics' word, though. You can download a two-hour (!) live show at Washington D.C.'s 9:30 Club from NPR's All Songs Considered website and judge for yourself.

Wired reports that veteran rap group Public Enemy, whose current release is New Whirl Order have embraced the opportunities made available by the tools and habits of the digital age. The PE site links to Remix Universe, " a remix and production site for producers, beatmakers, artists, vocalists, and songwriters." Now that sounds interesting.

Lately I'm fascinated with mashups, where a DJ takes two or more popular songs and remixes them together to make something entirely new. Some are stupid, some are obvious, but some are jawdroppingly amazing. In the latter category I would put DJ Crook Air's combination of the Cure's "Just Like Heaven" and TLC's "Unpretty." (I bought both sings from iTunes to atone for getting the free mashup). (It appears the Crook Air's website is down.) DJ Dangermouse's Grey Album is perhaps the most famous. One place to start with mashups is The Weekly Mashup Podcast, and you might also check out the Mashmix download page. Although they're not DJ's, Beatallica's twisted combination of the Beatles and Metallica is clearly in the same spirit as the mashup.

And finally, although this is not music news, I'm very much looking forward to brilliantly profane comedian Sarah Silverman's forthcoming movie, Jesus is Magic. The official movie site has a postage-stamp sized trailer, but you can watch a larger one here. Read an interview with Silverman at Slate and a profile in the New Yorker.

Posted by at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

In a comment to the previous entry, Clancy writes of the Beastie Boys: "I find the beats and the delivery of the lyrics really abrasive, to the point that their music can make me anxious." As an extremely sound-sensitive person, I know where she's coming from. Yet I've also come to understand that there are many sounds I find distracting or irritating that others enjoy or ignore and a few sounds that I like that others can't stand. How do we learn to appreciate or despise different sounds? How much is explained by physical differences between us (ears, ear canals, density of bones)? And how much by the different experiences we have that condition our responses? Can we reprogram our responses to sound?

In a related story, there's a lot going on in this New York Times article,¹ of course, but the interesting thing to me is the disagreement about whether the sounds made by small children are euphonous or cacophonous.

Actually, that's somewhat reductive, isn't it? A number of different sound-related questions arise:

• Are people with children less likely to be annoyed with the sounds of small children than people without?
• Should children make one sort of sounds outside and another sort inside?
• Are the sounds expected from children in a coffee and pastry shop in the hip part of town different than those expected from them in a "family friendly" restaurant?

Where do our answers to these questions come from? Why do we have such a hard time resolving these sound-related social conflicts? Why do they evoke such strong responses?² Some, like R. Murray Schafer³ in The Tuning of the World, would argue that we should not pursue noise abatement strategies but rather should create acoustic environments in which the sound we experience is pleasing to us. It's interesting to imagine what Schafer might say about the conflict over children's behavior in coffeeshops. (Of course, I'm unpersuaded that the anecdotes related in the NYT story add up to any sort of meaningful, widespread trend, but that's journalism for you.)

1. "At Center of a Clash, Rowdy Children in Coffee Shops," by Jodi Wilgoren (New York Times; November 11, 2005); see Technorati's list of blogs linking to this article here and here.
2. See this blog entry from Dr. Virago for another example.
3. See the World Soundscape Project, founded by Schafer in the late 1960s. See also this entry in The Canadian Encyclopedia.

Posted by at 7:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

The Beastie Boys have a cappella tracks for download so that you can create your own remixes.

Here's my version of "Triple Trouble," which I've renamed "Zombie Trouble" (mp3, 3.3M). All the music loops are courtesy of Garageband.

(See also dj BC's The Beastles for an example of someone who really knows what he's doing.)

Posted by at 7:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Sound is both material and immaterial. A voice cannot be touched, but it can touch you. Sound waves push the air in the space separating speaker and listener until those waves make contact with the tiny sensors in your head. Sound penetrates. Sound persists.

You can close your eyes to block out light, but even if you had earlids, you could not establish silence. Sound is within and without.

Your heart, your lungs, your veins, your digestive tract are all constant sources of sound. Sound cannot be escaped.

Posted by at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Hands to keyboard before fully awake. Trying to break the blog writing block. Get the words out before the critical editor in your head notices what you're doing. Don't start reading. Yet. Don't get distracted. Write. What do you want to say? What do you need to say? Figure it out. Go.

Posted by at 7:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

On 11 November I was standing in a check-in queue at Heathrow's Terminal Three, on my way to Canada, when an announcement was broadcast, requesting 'cooperation' in the observation of a 2-minute silence. Few scenes in modern life are more redolent of a mechanical toy in action than a major airport during peak hours. The sensation of highly controlled, perpetual and repetitious movement is overwhelming. An atmosphere of fairytale entrancement suppresses the underlying panic that afflicts all sensible travellers (one reason I life artist Mariko Mori's projected work, Miko No Inori, or Shaman Girl's Prayer, with its plaintive incantation performed by Mori as plastic spiritual cyberbabe in the ultradesign of Osaka's Kansei airport). For those processing through this environment, a silence to honour the dead is reluctantly conceded (death may be imminent, after all), easily observed by those like me who still wait in a queue but almost impossible for the airline staff and travellers who have reached their moment of ecstatic confrontation at a desk. Almost imperceptibly, hush oozed downwards through Heathrow, a gentle slide that softened the outlines of jagged chatter, audio alerts, luggage belts and disembodied unwanted information speak. The mechanical toy took perhaps 128 second to crawl to a complete stop, then another 2 second to relocate its life force. (43-44).

Recent air travel entries by KF and Chuck resonate, for me, with this passage from Toop's book.

Posted by at 7:57 PM | Permalink

I'm City Hippy's choice as the winner of the Starbucks Challenge. I'd like to thank the academy...

And I still have 3 challenges to write up:

1. New Town: Fair Trade success.
2. Hyattsville, MD: Fair Trade success.
3. College Park, MD: Fair Trade failure.

Posted by at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

If you read only one scholarly work on soundscapes, it should be the introduction to Bruce Smith's The Acoustic World of Early Modern England. It has everything you need to get up to speed.

If you read only one book on modern music and sound artistry, it should be David Toop's Haunted Weather: Music, Silence, and Memory.

Posted by at 10:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)