tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-148405422024-03-07T11:10:49.069-08:00The Odds Are Onephenomena observed occur with 100% probabilityTransient Gadflyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.comBlogger230125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post-39072475793224342472015-11-22T16:37:00.002-08:002020-06-04T15:03:19.442-07:00Hello FriendWelcome back. I have not seen you in awhile. It happens that I continue to wax poetic on the internet here:<br />
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<a href="https://medium.com/@inquisitivists">The Inquisitivists</a></h4>
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Join me there. </div>
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Transient Gadflyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post-4218704237024101662013-11-28T11:55:00.000-08:002013-11-28T12:04:04.203-08:00RELEASE: the lossless e.p. by The Calculus Affair<h3>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcFZbvSAatciEwXja7K40GlLLl2qjt77wYnilKbPeqayoxhLuETA3_CWH8n-R11AfRsEja8kiUBhbsaxl7TgWL5FP48S5wvLnH-JqzoWnYt7S1RRBGh5ffyw35X-OzxriEIxdF/s1600/losslessCover2500sq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcFZbvSAatciEwXja7K40GlLLl2qjt77wYnilKbPeqayoxhLuETA3_CWH8n-R11AfRsEja8kiUBhbsaxl7TgWL5FP48S5wvLnH-JqzoWnYt7S1RRBGh5ffyw35X-OzxriEIxdF/s200/losslessCover2500sq.jpg" width="200" /></a>
NOTES</h3>
My wife <a href="http://www.lauriefrankel.net/" target="_blank">Laurie Frankel</a> wrote a book called <i><a href="http://www.lauriefrankel.net/books/goodbye-for-now/" target="_blank">Goodbye for Now</a></i>. I might have mentioned it before. When it got picked up I thought a nifty cross-promotional thing to do would be write an album to go along with it. Since February was nearby and I always produce ten songs as part of my yearly go-'round with the <a href="http://www.rpmchallenge.com/" target="_blank">RPM Challenge</a>, I wrote those ten songs for the book, and recorded a demo of them as my RPM Challenge album for 2012.<br />
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After listening to the demos once or twice, I came to an inescapable conclusion that those ten songs sucked. Well, they didn't all suck. One was good. I threw out the other nine songs and wrote ten more. Of those ten, nine sucked and one half-sucked. I threw out the original plan and decided to take the one and a half songs that didn't suck and with them re-record some of my old material--because really, who has heard any of my old stuff?--and that would be the album.<br />
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Time went by and none of that happened; I missed both the release of the hardback and the paperback and now it's two years later (life, man, I tell you what). <i>The lossless e.p</i>. is the salvage of this project: it contains the two songs (nos. 2 and 4 on the e.p.) and a couple from my back-catalog. It's also the first formal release of "Men of Luggage," which, while ten years old, has never appeared on anything besides compilations released by other entities.
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TRACKS</h3>
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<li>1) The Bridge</li>
<li>2) Just This Once</li>
<li>3) Men of Luggage</li>
<li>4) I Take it Back</li>
<li>5) Men of Luggage (Acoustic Version)</li>
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CREDITS</h3>
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<li>Written, performed, recorded, and mixed by Paul Mariz at The Cowslip's Bell, Seattle, WA. Additional recording and mixing for (3) by Gino Scarpino at <a href="http://www.joralemonhouse.com/" target="_blank">Joralemon House</a>, Seattle WA. Additional backing vocals on (3) by Gino and Jason Hyatt</li>
<li>Sounds of cars passing on (1) from <a href="http://www.freesound.org/" target="_blank">freesound</a>, recorded by <a href="http://www.freesound.org/people/Corsica_S/" target="_blank">Corsica_S</a> and <a href="http://www.freesound.org/people/volivieri/" target="_blank">volivieri</a>.</li>
<li>Mastered by Kevin Bressler at <a href="http://www.whineycataudio.com/" target="_blank">Whiney Cat Audio</a>, Seattle, WA. </li>
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LISTEN/BUY</h3>
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<li><a href="https://play.spotify.com/artist/4AuhtoUgpWIMh0gDf50HId" target="_blank">Listen on Spotify</a></li>
<li><a href="https://play.google.com/store/music/album/The_Calculus_Affair_the_lossless_e_p?id=Bcuffoz64nd7jqvuzbtr6nyg2rq" target="_blank">Listen/Buy on Google Play</a></li>
<li><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/the-lossless-e.p./id757457109" target="_blank">Sample/Buy on iTunes</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/lossless-p-The-Calculus-Affair/dp/B00GRGXGFW" target="_blank">Sample/Buy on Amazon</a></li>
<li><a href="http://thecalculusaffair.com/album/the-lossless-e-p" target="_blank">Listen/Buy on Bandcamp</a></li>
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As of this writing there's no place to buy a physical CD; there may be at some point--updates as events warrant. If you know me and ask nicely, I'll burn one for you. Otherwise, go listen on Spotify (or Google Play, if you're a subscriber). It's free, and I get, like, $0.0015 every time you play a song. Also, when you listen there, it associates The Calculus Affair with other music you listen to and that's good for me. If you're a downloader, my net from any of the four stores above is roughly the same, so support the marketplace of your choice.
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THANKS</h3>
<ul>
<li>In addition to those happy few of you out there who are Calculus Affair fans (you know who you are)...</li>
<li>Matt Gani, Jennie Shortridge, Garth Stein, Stevie Kallos, and Ben Bauermeister (a.k.a. <a href="http://www.facebook.com/thelettersofrejection" target="_blank">The Rejections</a>). It is thanks to you that The Calculus Affair is now my side-project.</li>
<li>Gino Scarpino, Kevin Hyatt, and Mark Cooper for an endless, life-long stream of musical support and constructive criticism.</li>
<li>And Laurie Frankel: all and everything beyond words.</li>
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Transient Gadflyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post-80753285077213072282013-07-08T12:05:00.003-07:002013-07-18T10:48:23.478-07:00"Well, They've Seen Us"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/time/b69578076ee90a852d5d672bd5863eb890f466f835fad1a340ea48b4c10221cc.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="142" src="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/time/b69578076ee90a852d5d672bd5863eb890f466f835fad1a340ea48b4c10221cc.png" width="200" /></a></div>
Back in March, Randall Munroe posted to his webcomic, <a href="http://www.xkcd.com/1190/" target="_blank">XKCD</a>, an unassuming drawing of two stick figures, a boy and a girl,
sitting on a slight incline. The comic was titled, "Time," and the alt-text (what you see when you hover your mouse over the image) said only, "Wait for it." I clicked it a couple of times, stared at it for a little while--maybe it was a slow-moving animation of some kind?--but nothing happened. A couple of hours later, though, the picture had changed--now the two people appeared to be building a sandcastle. A quick look at the source code of the page revealed the trick: every half hour, a javascript call was updating the picture, creating an ultra-slow motion animation of two people building a sandcastle on a beach. So after a day or so the cartoon showed a partially built sand castle; a few days later the sand castle was quite elaborate--the two builders created a scaffolding so they could build higher. They went away and came back with a mini trebuchet so they could play Sand Castle Siege. I thought it was cute. I assumed eventually it would reach its natural end and the cartoon would start over. I thought that because I'd forgotten that Randall Munroe doesn't do anything to any scale that's not epic.<br />
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XKCD is one of the most popular web comics out there, and one of the few that allows its creator the luxury of making a living doing his art. The "art" portion of his art is at first glance very simple--stick figure people, black and white drawings, basic outlines of things. The subject matter of his cartoons, which are posted every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, are anything but. He constructs <a href="http://xkcd.com/435/" target="_blank">Math jokes</a>, <a href="http://www.xkcd.com/149/" target="_blank">Linux jokes</a>, <a href="http://xkcd.com/967/" target="_blank">Quantum Physics jokes</a>; ofttimes a deep knowledge of coding, science-fiction/fantasy tropes, and/or general nerd culture are required to have any idea where lies the humor. </div>
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<a href="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/height.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/height.png" width="50" /></a>And then there are the big things: <a href="http://xkcd.com/1196/" target="_blank">a subway map of all of North America</a>, <a href="http://xkcd.com/1110/" target="_blank">a drag-able map of an enormous world of which the viewer can only see a tiny part at any one time</a>, <a href="http://xkcd.com/482/" target="_blank">a log-scale drawing of the height of the universe</a>, <a href="http://xkcd.com/485/" target="_blank">a log-scale drawing of the depths of the universe</a>, <a href="http://xkcd.com/980/" target="_blank">an exploded view of money</a>, a map of online communities scaled by population <a href="http://xkcd.com/256/" target="_blank">circa 2007</a>, then <a href="http://xkcd.com/802/" target="_blank">circa 2010</a> (in which you learn that Farmville is only the second-biggest farming-based social-media game in the world). And it goes on. Every now and then Randall Munroe will completely blow you away with the scale of his effort. </div>
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<a href="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/time/33178d176c0e5181b70b89a11000bd148913f1a28cc907cdc10b8d771c5bb8c1.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="142" src="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/time/33178d176c0e5181b70b89a11000bd148913f1a28cc907cdc10b8d771c5bb8c1.png" width="200" /></a>It is, as of this writing, 106 days after frame one of "Time" was posted. More than 2500 drawings have come and gone, now at a rate of one an hour. There is dialog--in individual frames one of the two characters will have a word balloon and a frame or two later, the other character will answer back. After they had built their fantastically detailed sand castle, had a little bit of fun destroying and repairing it, and resting a bit, the couple started to notice the sea level rising. It began to eat up their castle, but it also caused them to wonder what was going on in the world they were in, a world they seemed not quite to understand fully. So they left and began hiking; mostly they seemed to be searching for some kind of answer about that world and what was happening to it. They have been hiking for months now. They have climbed mountains, seen far off seas, and come across buildings long abandoned. Night fell and it was stunningly beautiful--black and white drawings of the sky and Milky Way, slowly rotating through the sky. </div>
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XKCD is, according to its own epigram, a "webcomic of romance, math, sarcasm, and language." I've always thought "romance" was an awkward word right there at the front--a better word might be longing--but it's also not wrong either. XKCD's first read may be as a comic about math jokes, but it also can't help but reflect the author's ongoing awe with all the things he finds in the world and his attempts to convey that awe to a broader audience. You might get a good chuckle from reading one of his comics, but read them continuously for months and you will find that you are following along something bigger, more profound, and more (literally) awesome. </div>
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<a href="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/time/979fe4c7da5c87c32c643ca7197611fd504d3159e4c8fb2023f3b32a0844778b.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="142" src="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/time/979fe4c7da5c87c32c643ca7197611fd504d3159e4c8fb2023f3b32a0844778b.png" width="200" /></a>Today, for the first time in three and a half months, the explorers of "Time" have come across some other people--they seem to be wearing <a href="http://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/jon/family/jos/toessel/toc.html" target="_blank">Toessels</a>. An initial read might be that the comic is nearing its end, but I suspect it's probably just the beginning. </div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">(a continuously updating visualization of the entire "Time" comic can be found <a href="http://xkcd.aubronwood.com/" target="_blank">here</a>)</span> </div>
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Transient Gadflyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post-70190546508904373822013-05-03T17:02:00.003-07:002013-05-03T17:02:54.428-07:00Technical NoteIf anyone out there is still paying attention, I decided not to renew my custom domain for this blog, because why would I do that? You may find all of your favorite Odds Are One content at the original blogger URL, <a href="http://theoddsareone.blogspot.com/">http://theoddsareone.blogspot.com</a>. As you were.<br />
<br />Transient Gadflyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post-41570758567426651032012-12-22T19:09:00.001-08:002012-12-23T06:38:07.047-08:00On Sabbaticals<span style="font-size: large;">MTG and I were in the car this evening</span> talking about something I would once normally have blogged about (the universe being a computer simulation in somebody else's universe--maybe I'll get to it sometime soon) and I remembered with fondness the act of blogging. Then I went and read some old comments and remembered the pleasure of the whole experience--the presence of a virtual intellectual community and the discussions that went on.<br />
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I may or may not be, at heart, an academic, but I came to a true love of ideas and of thinking them through and writing about them too late in life to really become one. It's not that I was too old to go (back) to graduate school, but that by then I had gotten used to, you know, not starving or living in a crappy apartment with a bunch of other starving academics, and finally not having the best-case-scenario result of my life pursuit be a series of one year posts at the University of Northwest Indiana at Gary. So, in any case, I never became one and it went onto the list of things that I did as a hobbyist while I made a living at my day job. As, it happens, almost all of us almost always do.<br />
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<a href="http://work.chron.com/DM-Resize/photos.demandstudios.com/getty/article/18/228/78295369.jpg?w=600&h=600&keep_ratio=1" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="http://work.chron.com/DM-Resize/photos.demandstudios.com/getty/article/18/228/78295369.jpg?w=600&h=600&keep_ratio=1" width="320" /></a></div>
One of the ways my life has, however, been like an academic's is that I've been lucky enough to have sabbaticals. I took about six months off working in my early-mid 20's and another few months at age 29, and now another one again here ten years later, which has so far lasted nearly a year. In the first one I didn't accomplish a whole huge ton. I learned to program in PERL, which now that I think of it might be the single most profitable skill I have ever acquired (I'd listen to arguments about my math degree also, but following this thread will take me too far down the rabbit hole. I frequently feel a sort of kinship with David Foster Wallace--I think of things while writing about other things and then I want to write about those things before getting back to the thing I was writing about originally. Besides, it turned out my original point was invalid anyway. First sabbatical: highly successful). I could make similar arguments about the second, I guess: I made an album and in so doing learned how to make one in the modern way that one does, and that skill has followed me around since.<br />
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This third one has been really, really great. It has reminded me of a thing I know when I'm on sabbatical but forget when I'm done--one is on sabbatical not to refresh or recharge in order to go back and continue to do what one was doing. One leaves to do or create something new such that oneself is changed. One never returns from sabbatical. Whatever one returns to is something new. The one who returns is someone new.<br />
<br />Transient Gadflyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post-66134914694968993942010-07-03T17:50:00.006-07:002010-07-03T20:01:12.619-07:00Lies, Gender, and Damned StatisticsOn Slashdot recently I encountered <a href="http://sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/60598/title/When_intuition_and_math_probably_look_wrong">another version of Martin Gardner's two-children puzzle</a>. The original problem is this:<br /><blockquote>I have two children. One of them is a boy. What are the odds the other one is also a boy?</blockquote>If you're a human living in the world, three things are probably true of you <span style="font-style: italic;">vis-a-vis</span> this puzzle. 1) You've heard it before, 2) you got it wrong the first time you heard it, and 3) the correct answer still seems wrong to you.<br /><br />The correct answer, if you've never encountered it, is based on the following <span style="font-style: italic;">a priori</span>: there are four equally-likely ways to have two children:<br /><ul><li>a boy followed by a girl</li><li>a boy followed by another boy</li><li>a girl followed by a boy</li><li>a girl followed by another girl</li></ul>You look at that graph, you find all of the rows where both children are boys (1), and divide it by the number of rows where at least one of the children is a boy(3), and you get the answer: 1 in 3.<br /><br />Mrs. Transient Gadfly will tell you that Mr. Transient Gadfly's position on all questions of this nature is that it is not a math question, it is a language question. And, moreover, it is an ill-posed one. The nature of how poorly this question is posed is laid bare by the variation linked above: <i></i><blockquote>"I have two children, one of whom is a boy born on a Tuesday. What's the probability that my other child is a boy?"</blockquote>If you follow the logic of the original problem (which, being that I am a human in whose true nature you will find the compunction to write this blog, I did) you'll write out all the days of the week your first child could be born, followed by all the days of the week your second child could be born, look at all of those that have a boy born on a Tuesday in them, count the number of those that have a second boy, and come up with the answer (it's 13 in 27, if you write out the table. Do not write out the table). If you are <span style="font-style: italic;">literally anyone else in the world</span>, you will come up with a much better answer: 1 in 2. The crux of the issue, which the linked article almost hits on but then fails to, is that there is no universe in which the given answer (13 in 27) is correct. It would require the asker of the question to <span style="font-style: italic;">randomly chose a day of the week and a gender, and then only pose the question if he or she had a child that matched those criteria</span>.<br /><br />(Here is one of those moments where Transient Gadfly has an existential crisis about the nature and purpose of The Odds Are One: should I explain why what I just said is true? It would take, like, seven paragraphs and still nobody reading would understand the logic. I'm not going to do it this time. You'll just have to take my word on this one).<br /><br />If you're anyone else, you look at that question and understand the only way someone would pose the question: he or she randomly chose one of his or her children, and listed two characteristics of that child: his gender, and the day of the week of his birth. And you will come up with the correct answer to the question, because when you randomly chose one of your two children, the gender of the other one is a coin-flip. So, you might well ask, what is the difference between the original question posed by Martin Gardner and the question involving the day of the week? And the answer is, absolutely nothing. There is no way to tell, from the way it is stated, whether the asker, a parent of exactly two children, randomly chose one of his progeny and told you his gender, or a parent of exactly two children, of whom at least one is a boy, told you that fact. And it matters, because in the former case it's a 50% shot that the other child is a boy, and in the latter it's a 33% chance.<br /><br />I leave you with a link to an XKCD cartoon, because it's <a href="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/words_that_end_in_gry.png"><span style="font-style:italic;">literally</span> impossible to make this point better than he has here</a>.Transient Gadflyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post-71660943489051794632010-06-01T14:10:00.000-07:002010-06-01T14:13:28.119-07:00New ReleasesTwo new releases for your Tuesday:<br /><ul><li>A new five song e.p. from The Calculus Affair. It's available for free download from <a href="http://tinyurl.com/5songs-tca">http://tinyurl.com/5songs-tca</a> (this link expires in two weeks, so if for some reason you're reading this after the 14th of June and you want a copy, leave me a comment or something). It's culled from my 2010 <a href="http://www.rpmchallenge.com">RPM Challenge</a> album, and it's a little bit on the weird side for The Calculus Affair. But it's still pretty good.<br /></li><li>My nephew, Alex Dean Trendler, arrived this morning at 6:12 a.m. MDT. 6 lbs. 1 oz., 21 1/2 inches. A big fan of The Calculus Affair, no doubt. </li></ul>Transient Gadflyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post-88492951967363007322010-04-28T16:44:00.000-07:002010-04-28T19:39:25.292-07:00And The Worst Part Is, I Never Learned How To ReadI just got my first pair of reading glasses. My left eye doesn't quite make it around to the thing I'm focusing on, which causes me to work harder to make a reasonable stereo image of something close to my face (this condition has a name, but I can't remember what it was). I've apparently been compensating for this problem without really knowing I had it. At the beginning of my last visit my optometrist did a couple of checks and then asked: Do you find it difficult to focus, or that sometimes you see a double image when you read? Do you get tired while reading? Yep. All my life. I'd never really noticed the first thing until Mrs. Transient Gadfly pointed out that I close one eye when reading in bed, which was apparently my main compensation mechanism (it works only passingly well, as I fall asleep almost comically fast while reading anyway).<br /><br />So now I have glasses with a slight prism in the left lens (the other option was 12 weeks of vision therapy, which I'll probably try some day when I don't have an 18-month-old). The other thing my optometrist mentioned, almost in passing, was that this would help my reading comprehension. As long as it has mattered (a little bit in high school, mostly in college), I've known that I don't absorb anything by reading it. I can follow a narrative, but my reading comprehension is for crap. I have adapted to this fine in life; on the verbal portion of standardized tests I read the questions before reading the paragraph; I figured out that I have to write down notes on the material if I want to know anything about it when I'm done.<br /><br />Are these two things related? I haven't had the glasses long enough to know if they're going to help me glean new meaning from the text. But I'd always assumed that my brain just wasn't wired to learn by reading, never once thinking that it might be because my eyes were draining all my battery power just trying to stay focused on the words in front of them.Transient Gadflyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post-30803146846244925082009-12-19T10:30:00.000-08:002014-01-31T12:34:23.035-08:00Okay, fineEverybody's doing a Songs of the Aughts. Following Fronesis' lead, and observing the same rules, here are selections out of my music player at work that were released this decade and made it into my favorites playlist (notes as appropriate):<br />
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: bold;">"Clouds" - The Long Winters (<span style="font-style: italic;">Putting The Days to Bed</span> - 2006)</li>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">"Carousel" - Iron & Wine (</span><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">The Shepherd's Dog</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> - 2007)</span><br />This whole album is great--it's got a very post-CSNY vibe to it. This song, like the Fleet Foxes entry below, makes me forget what I was doing and start staring out the window when it comes on.</li>
<li style="font-weight: bold;">"Where I Am" - Westerly (<span style="font-style: italic;">Wild Wild Wind E.P.</span> - 2007)<span style="font-weight: normal;"><br />Mrs Transient Gadfly found these guys playing at our Farmers Market one Sunday and bought this five song E.P. They've since released two more albums and seem to be touring around the country these days. This is still their best work. </span></li>
<li style="font-weight: bold;">"Joe Metro" - Blue Scholars (<span style="font-style: italic;">Bayani</span> - 2007)<span style="font-weight: normal;"><br />Just your average major-label released rhyme about riding the bus down the Rainier Valley. Words do not describe how awesome this song is. </span></li>
<li style="font-weight: bold;">"Overkill (Acoustic)" - Colin Hay (<span style="font-style: italic;">Man @ Work</span> - 2003)</li>
<li style="font-weight: bold;">"Start a War" - The National (<span style="font-style: italic;">Boxer</span> - 2007)</li>
<li style="font-weight: bold;">"Your Name" - Kevin Hyatt/Gino Scarpino (<span style="font-style: italic;">Badly Bare Demos</span> - 2008)<span style="font-weight: normal;"><br />A collaborative effort by two friends of mine. I find this song to be highly compelling, it's a rhythmic acoustic folk song with an organic mellotron and a funky 808 beat.</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: bold;">"Knife" - Grizzly Bear (<span style="font-style: italic;">Yellow House</span> - 2006)</li>
<li style="font-weight: bold;">"Flicks" - Frou Frou (<span style="font-style: italic;">Details</span> - 2002)</li>
<li style="font-weight: bold;">"Little Round Mirrors" - Harvey Danger (<span style="font-style: italic;">Little By Little</span> - 2005)<span style="font-weight: normal;"><br />"A shooting star is/a little piece of/cosmic debris desperately wanting to fall to the Earth/It doesn't get too far/(it's not a real star)/it's hardly worth the footnotes in your memoir."</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: bold;">"Blue Ridge Mountains" - Fleet Foxes (<span style="font-style: italic;">Fleet Foxes</span> - 2008)</li>
<li style="font-weight: bold;">"On a Different Shelf" - Jim Noir (<span style="font-style: italic;">Jim Noir </span>- 2008)</li>
<li style="font-weight: bold;">"Spacewater" - Dzihan and Kamien (<span style="font-style: italic;">Freaks and Icons</span> - 2000)<span style="font-weight: normal;"><br />This electronica album has never been my favorite album at any one time, but it's been at the top of the list for ten years now. </span></li>
<li style="font-weight: bold;">"People Are Like Suns" - Crowded House (<span style="font-style: italic;">Time on Earth</span> - 2007)<span style="font-weight: normal;"><br />Is this entire album about the death of Paul Hester, or is that just me?</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: bold;">"Greyboy" - Soul Patch (<span style="font-style: italic;">Sooner or Later</span> - 2007)</li>
<li style="font-weight: bold;">"You Can Have It All" - Yo La Tengo (<span style="font-style: italic;">And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out</span> - 2000)<span style="font-weight: normal;"><br />Yo La Tengo is a (relatively) new discovery for me. I listen to this album and wonder how they aren't more famous than they are. </span></li>
<li style="font-weight: bold;">"Paper Tiger" - Beck (<span style="font-style: italic;">Sea Change</span> - 2002)<span style="font-weight: normal;"><br />I've never liked Beck all that much, but this is a great, stripped down album. </span></li>
<li style="font-weight: bold;">"Such Great Heights" - The Postal Service (<span style="font-style: italic;">Give Up</span> - 2003)<span style="font-weight: normal;"><br />I'm pretty sure this one's on everybody's list everywhere. There's a band called "Owl Town" that had the number one song on the Billboard charts a couple of weeks ago. I listened to it. It was the Postal Service, except about half as good musically and not even in the same universe lyrically. Man, Ben Gibbard...that guy is a genius. </span></li>
<li style="font-weight: bold;">"Carry Me Ohio" - Sun Kil Moon (<span style="font-style: italic;">Ghosts of the Great Highway</span> - 2003)<span style="font-weight: normal;"><br />2005's </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: normal;">Tiny Cities</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">, which is a collection of covers of Modest Mouse songs, is also utterly worth your time. </span></li>
<li style="font-weight: bold;">"Slipping Through the Sensors" - Fruit Bats (<span style="font-style: italic;">Mouthfuls</span> - 2003)</li>
<li style="font-weight: bold;">"A Fond Farewell" - Elliott Smith (<span style="font-style: italic;">From a Basement on the Hill</span> - 2004)<span style="font-weight: normal;"><br />This album is hard to listen to. It's unfinished and it's pretty raw and Elliott Smith was in a lot of pain. And of course it has moments of transcendence, too. </span></li>
<li style="font-weight: bold;">"Heartbeats" - Jose Gonzales (<span style="font-style: italic;">Veneer</span> - 2005)<span style="font-weight: normal;"><br />That song from that commercial with the colorful bouncing balls. His cover of Massive Attack's "Teardrop" from 2007 would also make this list if I didn't have that one artist rule. </span></li>
<li style="font-weight: bold;">"Casimir Pulaski Day" - Sufjan Stevens (<span style="font-style: italic;">Come On Feel the Illinoise</span> - 2005)<span style="font-weight: normal;"><br />One of the best albums of the decade. </span></li>
<li style="font-weight: bold;">"Que Sera" - Wax Taylor (<span style="font-style: italic;">Tales of the Forgotten Melodies</span> - 2005)<span style="font-weight: normal;"><br />French cinemaphile electronica. </span></li>
<li style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">"Your Hand In Mine" - Explosions in the Sky (<span style="font-style: italic;">The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place</span> - 2003)</span><br />Apparently Explosions in the Sky does not do the theme from <span style="font-style: italic;">Friday Night Lights</span>. How this is possible I do not know.</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: bold;">"Your Girlfriend's Car" - Throw Me The Statue (<span style="font-style: italic;">Moonbeams</span> - 2008)<span style="font-weight: normal;"><br />I again tout the awesomeness of Throw Me The Statue. They are awesome.</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: bold;">"Daily Mutilation" - Jon Auer (<span style="font-style: italic;">Beautiful Escape: Songs of the Posies Revisited</span> - 2008)<span style="font-weight: normal;"><br />Here is the coolest I have ever been: Mrs. Transient Gadfly and I were at the Posies show that doubled as the release party for this album, and after it was over we went down to the merchandise table to say goodnight to the guy who owns the record label, and he gave me a gig poster that he was having all the artists on the record sign for his collection. I was signing it as Jon Auer walked up. I handed him the pen and the poster and he looked at me as if he should know who I was. </span></li>
<li style="font-weight: bold;">"Turn and Run" - Neil Finn (<span style="font-style: italic;">One Nil</span> - 2001)<span style="font-weight: normal;"><br />Well, obviously. </span></li>
</ul>
Transient Gadflyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post-56573856138817344402009-11-30T17:49:00.002-08:002009-11-30T23:49:02.240-08:00Causal LoopAnd now, with no fanfare or reintroduction, The Odds Are One resumes its original charter of blogging about Odds-Are-One-y things. For at least this one post. Maybe.<br /><br />I read about a thought experiment with pool tables and time travel <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2225223/">in an article in Slate</a> a couple of months ago (several other interesting ideas about the current thinking on time travel in there as well--for instance, they've pretty much dismissed the idea of multiple futures branching off <a href="http://www.theoddsareone.com/2006/01/particlewave.html">which we here at the Odds Are One had figured out years ago</a>, and they seem to think that time travel requires an entry and an exit portal--kind of like a tunnel--such that people from the future can't come back to tell us about the invention of time travel until somebody invents a time machine for them to come back in. So that explains why we don't see those time travelers from the future wandering around. I guess). The idea behind this experiment seems to me to throw a wrench in our thinking about free will, which is always fun to contemplate.<br /><br />Imagine a pool table with a little time-traveling tunnel on it. You shoot ball into one end of the tunnel, and it goes back in time one second and comes out the other end. So you see your pool ball roll out of the far end of the tunnel a second before you shoot it into the near end (if I had this setup I'd probably sit there for a while trying to fool the tunnel into making the pool ball roll out without actually rolling it in in the first place. That'd be awesome. Except that it wouldn't work, but whatever). Then you'd realize that if you lined up the two ends of the tunnel, you could make your shot interfere with itself: you could make it so that the ball would come out from the future right as your shot was going towards the entrance to the tunnel, knocking it out of the way so that it didn't enter the tunnel...so that it would never have gone back in time in the first place. You'll have created a physical paradox: if the ball goes in the tunnel, it would knock itself out of the way and never go into the tunnel. But if it doesn't go into the tunnel, then it wouldn't be there to knock itself out of the way, so it would roll into the tunnel. And so on.<br /><br />Some people spent a lot of time thinking about this and figured out that what would happen is that you would always knock your ball askew such that it went into the tunnel at a different angle than you planned, making it come out of the tunnel in the past at a different angle than you planned, making it glance off its future self at a different angle than you planned, etc. etc. They further noted that this is a sort of simplified model of the Going-Back-In-Time-And-Killing-Your-Own-Grandfather paradox: the implication being that no matter how hard you tried to do it, you would fail. You'd go back in time and try and kill your Grandfather and someone would stop you, or it'd turn out your Grandmother had already conceived, or you'd kill somebody you thought was your Grandfather but it turned out there was a family scandal that you'd never heard about and that guy wasn't really your Grandfather. No matter what you did, the fact would remain that you had already been born, and you therefore couldn't prevent yourself from being born.<br /><br />In this thought experiment there are clear limits on the exercise of your free will. Do what you like, but you will not kill your biological grandfather before your mother or father is conceived because it didn't happen that way. The same is true of the pool-table experiment: if you've got, say, a five minute tunnel loop set up, and you see a pool ball roll out of the from-the-future end of the tunnel, you now know that in five minutes you (or someone) is going to have to roll the ball into the other end of the tunnel, and no matter what you do in the intervening five minutes,<span style="font-style: italic;"> that has to happen</span> (I don't know about you, but that would creep me the hell out. Imagining a psychotic murderer entering the billiard room, killing me (with the lead pipe), and then becoming curious about what the tunnels on the pool table do and rolling a ball in, I'd stand there in a cold sweat looking over my shoulder for five minutes and then roll the ball into the tunnel). Anyway, two questions:<br /><ol><li>can you construct a similar experiment that demonstrates such limits on the nature of free will that doesn't require time travel (I suspect, but can't yet prove, that you can)? </li><li>can free will instead be salvaged by an advanced understanding of cause-and-effect? The Odds are One sides with the Buddhists on this (there's no such thing as cause-and-effect) but lacks a better model to explain pool balls from the future or, really, anything else.</li></ol>Discuss.Transient Gadflyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post-56929566120051964982009-08-12T09:15:00.000-07:002009-08-12T09:15:00.878-07:0013 Songs With The Calculus Affair: Side TrackingSometimes you're just to busy making music on the side to actually, you know, make music. In February I stopped making an album to make an entirely different album as part of the <a href="http://www.rpmchallenge.com/">RPM Challenge</a>. Another recent side-project was a cover of Roxy Music's "2HB" as part of a tribute record being released by <a href="http://www.myspace.com/burningskyrecords">Burning Sky Records</a>. It's currently the main track in the player on <a href="http://www.myspace.com/songsofroxymusicrevisited">their MySpace page</a>.<br /><br />I've lately become more fanatical about trying to get forwards from Taxi listings, and in the last month or so I've tried to be a lot more focused about the material I submit--instead of taking songs that I've already recorded and looking for matches in the listings, I've been targeting specific listings and writing and recording material for them. In some cases, the results have been...strange.<br /><br /><embed src="http://www.jeroenwijering.com/embed/mediaplayer.swf" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" flashvars="height=20&width=250&file=http://alonetone.com/stoatboy/tracks/god-or-the-devil.mp3&frontcolor=0x666600&lightcolor=0xFFFF66&screencolor=0x999900&showstop=true&showdownload=true" height="20" width="250"></embed><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">The distant future. The year 2000....</span>Transient Gadflyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post-31111754711569482612009-07-18T15:30:00.000-07:002009-07-19T08:01:38.338-07:0013 Songs With The Calculus Affair: Dialog II<span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat</span>: I appreciate the lack of any <span style="font-style: italic;">Breakin' 2</span> references there.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino</span>: I was sorely tempted.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat</span>: You were going to tell me ideas you'd had so far about how to "market" (for lack of a better word) popular music in the digital marketplace, assuming that you do not have an entrenched power broker (i.e. record label) backing you.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino</span>: Right. I'm mostly going to just throw out some thoughts. They aren't really organized. Maybe they will become so as I toss them out.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat</span>: Okay, go.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino</span>: Okay. Again, assuming that I am the creative force behind The Calculus Affair...<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat</span>: I have no problem with that.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino</span>: ...what I'm doing here right now is thing number one, obviously. I'm advertising the fact that I'm making an album by blogging about it. Every time I post one of these things, it goes into my Facebook feed and presumably some number of the hundred-odd people I'm friends with sees it, and most of them don't read it, but that doesn't matter--it goes into their head. They know that I have a band.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat</span>: Brand awareness.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino</span>: Exactly, though as <a href="https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=14840542&postID=6756535637307213407">mtg</a> points out, this is pretty much just first- and second- degree of separation. That is, it's only brand awareness for people who know me directly. There again I run into the same problem--some percentage of those people wind up checking out the album, and some percentage of those people are, like, wow this is awesome and tell their friends to check it out. But by then we're down to a small percentage of a small percentage of a percentage, and since we started with only 100-odd people, I'm pretty much down to Sam and Aunt Madeline at that point.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat</span>: On whom you were already counting.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino</span>: Right.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat</span>: So, what else?<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino</span>: Well, I'm trying to get into the business via the <a href="http://www.taxi.com/">Taxi</a> route--trying to get songs placed in tv and film. I've gotten some things forwarded to publishers, but so far no phone calls (it is, relatively speaking, early yet on that front). And while it's sort of a side-project as far as the main question of releasing an album is concerned, I've gotten some pretty useful feedback from it. A couple of months ago I saw a listing asking for songs with voice and guitar only and thought, "I bet I can get a forward just by following instructions." I wrote a song in an hour or two, recorded it in a couple more hours, mixed it, and submitted it, and sure enough it got forwarded. I was pretty proud of that.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat</span>: Okay, what else?<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino</span>: Well, I've been thinking about the last listing to which I submitted, actually. It was a return (those are the two outcomes of Taxi listings, forward or return); they give you feedback either way, and the screener clearly liked the songs--it was more complementary than most of my forwards--but he was also looking for something different. The Calculus Affair leans into retro-pop and they wanted something...sonically more recent, I guess. Anyway, I thought of the lesson you'd learn as an actor--if you have a specific thing that you do, and you're good at that thing, but nobody is casting for that thing, what you do is start your own theatre company.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat</span>: So you want to start a record label.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino</span>: No. That would be insane. Record labels are a losing proposition all around these days. I want to start whatever record labels are going to morph into in the near future.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat</span>: What do you think that is?<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino</span>: Well, here is where it gets really disorganized. As we talked about in part 1, you don't need a label--you don't need the financial backing to make a record and you don't need a distributor. What you need is something that sets you, as an artist, apart. What you need is something that enables people to find you. What you need, instead of a label, is a brand. Think of your ten favorite bands. Now tell me the label to which they're signed.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat</span>: Well, in some cases I can do that. Lots of bands I like are signed to <a href="http://www.barsuk.com/">Barsuk Records</a>. Lots of bands I like are signed to <a href="http://www.subpop.com/">SubPop</a>.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino</span>: Yeah, great examples of small labels that do exactly what I'm talking about. Big labels--Sony, Universal, Virgin, Columbia, etc., aren't musical brands because they haven't had to be. Small labels, if they want to survive and thrive, need to conjure to mind music when you hear their name. In the late 80's and early 90's, when you though of SubPop, you thought of Nirvana, Soundgarden, Mudhoney--the Seattle sound. It was a label but it was also a sound. Same with Barsuk today--if you know the label, you think quirky indie rock when you hear its name.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat</span>: What I like about it is that idea is that the brand becomes a filter. As you talked about in part one, there's a huge abundance of music. Creating a brand creates a shorthand for finding music you like. And it works for both sides of the partnership--good music builds the brand, and the brand helps the music find an audience.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino</span>: I believe the word you're looking for is "synergy."<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat</span>: Synergy is the greatest thing in the world.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino</span>: Never say that to me again.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat</span>: Whatever. I'm sold. What form does this musical branding take?<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino</span>: ...<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat</span>: ...<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino</span>: ...<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat</span>: You seemed about to speak.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino</span>: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it starts with a website, but after that I really don't know. There are tons of analytics tools out there that would help you, but then you start talking about market research and targeted ads and crap like that, and then you run into my main problem: it's taking all of my spare time just to make an album.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat</span>: Also, you hate market research. And also, apparently, synergy.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino</span>: Yeah, that's another problem.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat</span>: So you're hosed.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino</span>: Pretty much.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat</span>: Okay then. Good talk.Transient Gadflyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post-67565356373072134072009-07-09T15:02:00.005-07:002009-07-10T17:28:32.567-07:0013 Songs With The Calculus Affair: Dialog<span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino</span>: Tell me, Stoat: if I were going to release an album in the brave new world of digital music, how should I do it? What would minimize the chances of it not immediately being swept into the oblivion of all the music being released digitally today?<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat</span>: An interesting and difficult question.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino</span>: Yes. Yes it is. It seems like the internet plus digital distribution would democratize the world of music for the musician. But if that's happening, or happened, I haven't seen it. Obviously, music has the problem of volume--now that anyone can record an album in their basement and get it onto iTunes, everyone does. Anyone can get their record in the store, but the store is huge, so that's no real benefit.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat: </span>Yes. Clearly a problem.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino: </span>So there's the theory/metaphor/whatever that the cream should rise to the top, that even though the proverbial mine of potentially popular music is much larger, the gems in that mine will still stand out and be discovered. But in following music these last several years, I have discovered something: there is a staggering amount of competence out there. A profoundly huge pile of pretty-goodness. So in order to be a gem amongst that, you basically have to be, well, fucking awesome.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat</span>: I see...<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino</span>: Let's, for instance, take the example of The Calculus Affair. Just for the purposes of ease of reference, let's pretend that I am the musician behind this band.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat</span>: I have no problem with that.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino</span>: I have, if I am The Calculus Affair, accumulated a fair amount of objective evidence that I am producing pretty good music. As a close listener to music in general I can also tell that lots of people with far less...let's call it ability...than I are doing well by it. So if I were, say, 22 years old and hot and out there touring and building a fan base, I'd probably be doing pretty well myself. But I'm 36 and I have neither the time (nor really the willingness) to tour around promoting myself, so my music just has to stand on its own. And so it comes to this: my music is good, maybe pretty good, but it just isn't fucking awesome.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat</span>: Sure. And there are some people who might disagree with that last sentiment, and if they ruled the music business, you would be obscenely wealthy. But I acknowledge the point.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino:</span> Now, that shouldn't necessarily be the end of it. There ought to be a space for the pretty good to succeed. Maybe not, you know, a definition of success that includes professional musicianship and fortune, but one that involves selling some records to people who aren't already ones friends. And this is the thing I can't find, or that doesn't exist, in this new democratic world that has a nearly infinite quantity of competent music in it.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat</span>: Hmm...surely other people are thinking about this problem. What about <a href="http://blog.tunecore.com/2009/07/the-failure-of-the-internet-by-tom-silverman.html">this fellow</a>? He's talking about the same things you are.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino</span>: Yeah, he's advertising for a seminar he's running. Did you read that article? Reading it was like watching that <span style="font-style: italic;">Simpsons</span> episode where they introduce Poochie into the <span style="font-style: italic;">Itchy & Scratchy Show.<br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat:</span><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span></span>Oh No! Metadialog!<span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span><p></p><blockquote> <p><span style="font-weight: bold;">EXECUTIVE</span><span style="font-style: italic;">:</span> We at the network want a dog with attitude. He's edgy, he's "in your face." You've heard the expression "let's get busy"? Well, this is a dog who gets "biz-zay!" Consistently and thoroughly.<span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-weight: bold;">KRUSTY</span>: So he's proactive, huh?<span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-weight: bold;">EXECUTIVE</span>: Oh, God, yes. We're talking about a totally outrageous paradigm. </p> </blockquote><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino:</span> There are articles on the subject everywhere, all the time. Here's <a href="http://forum.nin.com/bb/read.php?30,767183">Trent Reznor on the subject</a>. Another <a href="http://blog.tunecore.com/2009/07/making-your-release-unique-by-jake-smith.html">entry in the TuneCore blog</a>. An <a href="http://www.salon.com/books/excerpt/2009/07/06/scott_rosenberg/index.html">article in Salon</a>. That's just from this week. As far as I can tell, the advice boils down to, "Have you tried being clever? You should try being clever."<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat</span>: Not to, you know, to mindlessly echo Trent Reznor, but you are kind of clever. Not all the time or anything, but occasionally.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino</span>: Perhaps. But times seem to call for more than clever. They call for innovation. I haven't seen the innovation yet. Or I can't think of it. Or something.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat</span>: Perhaps it would be helpful to start with what you've thought of so far and go from there?<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Calvino</span>: Perhaps. We'll try that in Dialog part II, in order to mitigate the already extreme longness of this post.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Stoat</span>: Okay. Truncating in three...two...one...Transient Gadflyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post-42383489609788673312009-06-27T08:57:00.004-07:002009-06-27T23:07:12.100-07:0013 Songs With The Calculus Affair: There is a lot of MathOther than from friends, I find out about more good music from the playlists of baristas than probably any other source. It's how I found Sufjan Stevens, The Kings of Convenience, Dzihan and Kamien, Neutral Milk Hotel, and a bunch more things I can't remember right now. After breakfast on the mornings that I get up with the wee child, I take him and the dog on a walk to any one of the roughly 47 coffeeshops within a ten-block radius of my house; on Friday morning that Talking Heads song that goes "Hi! Hi-Hi-Hi-Hi-Hi! Hi-hi!" was playing when I walked into <a href="http://www.blogger.com/www.tougocoffee.com/">Tougo</a> (which is by far the best of the 47 coffeshops I can walk to). Right after it was this instrumental song I had never heard before, it had sort of a 60's-70's jazz-rock vibe; the lead guitar was really present in the mix, but at the same time had a whole bunch of reverb on it, with the rest of the band unusually quiet. The guitarist was playing this really simple, really catchy melody which tied up at the end of each phrase in a way that I can't describe other than to say it was incredibly satisfying to listen to.<br /><br />My college math professor Shahriar Shahriari once remarked as an aside during class, "there is a lot of math in the world. People don't realize how much math there is." He meant that most people's awareness of math essentially encompasses arithmetic, algebra, plane geometry, trigonometry, and calculus, which is the rough equivalent of someone's awareness of literature being comprised entirely of Greek tragedy, some medieval Islamic texts, and 17th century British novels that some people argue were actually written by Russians. Similarly, it frequently boggles my mind how much good music there is that I'm totally unaware of. It makes me both happy, for all the good music there is, and sad, because how on earth could one listen to it all, or ever compete for attention with all the rest of it?Transient Gadflyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post-1032574821665371172009-06-25T19:09:00.002-07:002009-06-26T22:36:38.119-07:0013 Songs With The Calculus Affair: So Apparently Michael Jackson is Dead, ThenLike everybody in the universe who is my age, <i>Thriller</i> was one of the first cassettes I ever owned. I <a href="http://www.theoddsareone.com/2009/01/harder-better-faster-stronger-daft-punk.html">remarked not too long ago</a> that I thought we were due for a major resurgence of interest in that album, and that's pretty much guaranteed to happen now.<br /><br />I for one will be glad that <i>Thriller</i> will be cool again. Michael Jackson was batshit insane, but that's one great record.Transient Gadflyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post-50646545604271127532009-06-24T19:11:00.002-07:002009-06-24T19:12:04.566-07:0013 Songs With The Calculus Affair: RosterThe album lineup changes from day to day, but as it stands is this (in alphabetical order, album order not in any way yet determined):<br /><ul><li>Aleksandr (You Forgot to be in Time)</li><li>Archer, The</li><li>Bicycle Down The Hill</li><li>Bone and Matter</li><li>Crying Again</li><li>Dukes of the Stratosphere</li><li>Every Day</li><li>Freight Train</li><li>Man Who Used to Hunt Cougars For Bounty, The</li><li>Men of Luggage</li><li>Poor Young Man</li><li>Prince of Tyre</li><li>Threnody<br /></li></ul>Some songs that have been on the list, but are currently off it:<br /><ul><li>The Bridge--a fine song, but has been on two other albums and I really don't have anything else I want to get out of it. I've also drawn a mental line that this album should only involve songs written after <i>If You Lived Here...</i>.</li><li>My High School Mind--it just isn't working for me right now.</li><li>Pipe Dream--The only reason it isn't on this album is because I thought it was going to be the seed of the next album. That's increasingly seeming like a bad reason to leave it off, but so far I haven't added it.<br /></li></ul>This post is not long on content. I'll get more specific about songs and <i>construction</i> next time.Transient Gadflyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post-52352716546101142652009-06-22T10:30:00.002-07:002009-06-22T15:26:31.029-07:0013* Songs With The Calculus AffairIf you are a just-slightly-fanatical follower of the band <a href="http://www.thelongwinters.com/">The Long Winters</a> (which I am) you will know that their next record is currently mired in creative limbo as John Roderick attempts to, well, write the songs. It's "Chinese Democracy-ed", if you will. This slog through the creative mire is being documented by a videographer on YouTube in an ongoing work titled "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/13SongsWithJohn">13 Songs with John Roderick</a>." <br /><br />If you are follower of The Calculus Affair, you may be dimly aware that I promised the release of an album in "Spring of '09." Yesterday I officially missed that deadline, so now this record too resides (if far less notably) in the annals of AWOL rock and roll. Now, in fairness to me, during the "Spring of '09" I also "became" a "parent." This tends to put a strain on ones free time. On the other hand, I probably worked more on the album (during nap times**) in the last month and a half than I had in the previous six, so there was progress. There was also, I dunno, something like regress as I listened to what I'd done and thought, "Hmm...not quite." <br /><br />I would like, when he is older and can read, for my son to continue speaking to me. So while he is occupying a lot of my brain and I have many revelations about parenting and such, I'm not going to publish any of them for the sake of our future relationship. Ergo, The Odds Are One will now commence documenting the only other thing which I can think of to write about, which is the ongoing progress, or lack thereof, on the record tentatively titled <i>The Fellows are Opening for Jon and Ken</i>***. Stay tuned. <br /><br /><div style="font-size: 80%"><br />*actual number of songs subject to change.<br />**the child's, not mine.<br />***mtg does not like this album title. She thinks it does not stick in the mind, so to speak. I've lately been flirting with <i>Everyone Will Dance</i> instead. Thoughts?<br /></div>Transient Gadflyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post-87868631794749913712009-04-15T00:25:00.006-07:002009-04-15T14:51:52.666-07:00Album Release Wednesday<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRwGf-IXvoQQVkbWo1kpmhC5hT4-09sp-W0K2o-JGg9IF4kaAh1GPKO__Y4QSXRh2JbmvzJc3r-B3JtRFjldsefrl8Ux7ghQHVt-rbetEPn3E-Wfs9KKWCGXzxm5UA-OtDfOvs/s1600-h/AlbumArt.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRwGf-IXvoQQVkbWo1kpmhC5hT4-09sp-W0K2o-JGg9IF4kaAh1GPKO__Y4QSXRh2JbmvzJc3r-B3JtRFjldsefrl8Ux7ghQHVt-rbetEPn3E-Wfs9KKWCGXzxm5UA-OtDfOvs/s200/AlbumArt.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5324819962346305666" border="0" /></a><br />We are pleased to announce the formal release of <i>Control Of Electromagnetic Radiation</i>, the 2009 <a href="http://www.rpmchallenge.com/">RPM Challenge</a> album by The Calculus Affair. You can download a .zip file containing mp3's and cover art via Kammalu by clicking or pointing your browser to <a href="http://www.kammalu.com/downloads/conelrad">http://www.kammalu.com/downloads/conelrad</a>. If you're more of a preview song/download song kind of person, the album is available on <a href="http://www.alonetone.com">alonetone</a> as a playlist. Click <a href="http://www.alonetone.com/stoatboy/playlists/control-of-electromagnetic-radiation">here</a> to check it out.<br /><br />I had lots of grand ideas about making this album better than it was on February 28th, but actually doing that would have taken a lot more time than I have, and in the end what I've posted this evening isn't materially different from what I recorded in February of 2009. There is more to do, and I'll come back to these songs someday. But not today. In the meantime, The Calculus Affair hopes you download and enjoy, and thanks you for listening.Transient Gadflyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post-2544661501888397632009-04-06T15:38:00.005-07:002009-04-07T13:28:05.739-07:00In Other Musical News...The Calculus Affair is <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102794336"> today's featured artist on NPR's Second Stage podcast</a>.<br /><br />There's a little checkmark to recommend the article, and if enough people click it, it shows up on the front page of NPR.org. I'm just saying, that'd be cool.Transient Gadflyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post-74077931306369112712009-03-13T10:59:00.002-07:002009-03-13T11:09:18.721-07:00"The Mother Of All Funk Chords" -- Kutiman (Thru You)<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/tprMEs-zfQA&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/tprMEs-zfQA&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br />From <i><a href="http://www.thru-you.com/">Thru You</a></i><br /><br />Really only a couple of things to say about this. It's not that you haven't seen or heard this kind of thing before. The wow factor comes not from total originality so much as just simply doing it better than anyone has done it before. Second, the lo-fi-ness of YouTube in an HD era is a clever echo of the DJ's of the 90's mixing records in a CD era. <br /><br />I hereby announce that we are formally Post-Web 2.0; you will now aggregate or you will be aggregated.Transient Gadflyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post-79892976504552722042009-03-12T14:21:00.002-07:002009-03-12T14:22:59.186-07:00"Tangled Up in Blue" -- Bob Dylan (Blood on the Tracks)<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn3iybtxNZw&feature=related">Dylan...boy, I dunno</a>. I really don't, actually. It isn't that that I don't like Dylan--"Buckets of Rain," from the same album is another song on my completely imaginary all-time top-20 songs list--I just don't <span style="font-style:italic;">get</span> him. I think he's somehow untimely. So let me now be the <span style="font-style:italic;">n</span>th person to take up the question, "What is it about Dylan?" (where <span style="font-style:italic;">n</span> is a very large number). <br /><br />The song is an interesting story, told idiosyncratically, atemporally. <a href="http://www.theonion.com/content/magazine/how_did_this_man_come_up_with?utm_source=featureband">Onion satire notwithstanding</a>, the man could construct a rhyme. It's 1975, so the accompanying 12 string guitar sounds good (the 80's 12 string sound is...it's bad). There's an entire other point to be made about his voice, though I don't know if I have an opinion about whether he's a good or bad singer. The only thing I've got to add is that he's unapologetic about the way he sings, and he sells it. <br /><br />Is the point here that I, who was 2 in 1975 and thus have no experience of the cultural context in which this song was released (and, you know, never will) and, unable to hear this song in context, will never actually understand what made it a popular song? I might be able to appreciate it/like it/love it/form some totally new association with it because my girlfriend put it on a cd of narrative songs that I listened to on a drive across the country/whatever, but I'll never <i>get</i> it. Similarly, I didn't grow up in the 60's and I didn't get Dylan in context, so I'll never get Dylan. <br /><br />Is there an even larger point about context that I am missing? Possibly, but it will take me in another direction, so I'll leave off here for now.Transient Gadflyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post-15424672006561748682009-03-03T11:20:00.003-08:002009-03-03T12:00:55.013-08:00"Flagpole Sitta" -- Harvey Danger (Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone?)A short programming note: for those of of you <i>figuratively</i> champing at the bit for the release of <i>Control Of Electromagnetic Radiation</i> (the brand new E.P. from The Calculus Affair! Woo!), there will be a brief delay for some editorial work before I release it to the world (Also, I didn't want to step on today's release of U2's <i>No Line On The Horizon</i>). It's not that it turned out badly--I can't really tell at the moment because I'm incredibly sick of it, but I think it turned out pretty well. But I also think it could be better. So, yeah. <br /><br />How to become an overnight rock sensation: step one, cut a hole in a box. No, step one, form an über-crunch power-pop band. Step two, write songs that set a twee-intellectual sensibility against hyper-fuzzed up guitar and bass instrumentation. Step three, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aidySmZpaE">have one of those songs be incredibly catchy</a> (okay, and what's up with the actual video being pulled from YouTube? Must we go through this again?). Step four, have a DJ on the local alternative radio station start playing your song. Step five, MTV.<br /><br />"Flagpole Sitta" seems to be one of those occasions where the world somehow shifted and a perfect Harvey Danger-sized hole opened up in popular culture, and Harvey Danger was there to fill it. There's a lot to say about why that hole didn't stay open, but maybe it's as simple as: their second single flopped, they recorded a follow-up album that was (and remains) frickin' awesome, but record-label machinations and the cluster-fuck that is the music business insured that it was a failure before it was released. That's all probably outside the purview of this blog, though. <br /><br />There are a bunch of things this song does well. It rocks like punk, it has a bubble-gum pop chorus, but the lyrics are "I'm not sick but I'm not well/And I'm so hot/'cuz I'm in hell." That's it. It's simple and the 2/4 march beat gives it a lively bounce. And then it's just <i>cool</i>. Cool like you can't even quite define how cool it is. Cool like it's smarter than you and it's mocking you a little bit but you don't realize it. It's sort of like the <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113537/">Kicking and Screaming</a> of pop songs.<br /><br />It's this last attribute--it has distilled what I've referred to above as Harvey Danger's twee-intellectualism to it's purest form, where it just kind of nibbles at you ("I wanna publish 'zines/and rage against machines" is about as spelled-out as it gets)--that might be what put it over the top. Compare it to the single from <i>King James Version</i>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTnLVX689fE">Sad Sweetheart of the Rodeo</a>. Some days, today for instance, Sad Sweetheart is my favorite H.D. song of all time (I mean, the video stars Ione Skye. COME on). On the other hand, maybe it's just too smart for its audience. And it's not that "Flagpole Sitta" wasn't also, it's just that it was clever enough to sneak it by them.Transient Gadflyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post-17783139312790624022009-02-26T09:17:00.006-08:002009-02-26T09:27:23.824-08:00Some Advance Single Action"Pipe Dream" from the forthcoming Calculus Affair E.P., <i>Control of Electromagnetic Radiation</i>:<br /><br /><embed src="http://www.jeroenwijering.com/embed/mediaplayer.swf" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" flashvars="height=20&width=250&file=http://www.alonetone.com/stoatboy/tracks/pipe-dream.mp3&frontcolor=0x666600&lightcolor=0xFFFF66&screencolor=0x999900&showstop=true&showdownload=true" height="20" width="250"></embed>Transient Gadflyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post-83705476894995160312009-02-19T16:26:00.006-08:002009-02-19T16:45:20.452-08:00"Viva la Vida" -- Coldplay (Viva La Vida)Were I a Coldplay fan, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5TNK-TvIcI">this song</a> might make me a little worried. It's hyper-glossy and produced, the edges rounded off, and the lyrics verge on unpleasantly reminding me of Sting when he gets pathologically Sting-y (you know, when he starts singing about churches and his <i>his soul</i> and the epic sweep of something or other).<br /><br />There are some things to like about it. First off, Chris Martin and his Chris Martin-y voice, which combines the high tenor wail that's been popular for the last ten years (was Jeff Buckley the first one on that field, or just the first person I noticed?) with a little bit of British thickness. The repeated, "that was when I ruled the world," in the lyrics is definitely catchy, and hyper-produced though it is, the bouncy orchestral motif definitely keeps everything moving.<br /><br />That's not why I'm writing about this song, though. It's the fact that Joe Satriani is suing Coldplay, claiming they stole the melody from his song, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMcjXo8ZuqE">If I Could Fly</a> (let it get to about 0:50 and you'll hear the section in question). Musically there are a several things of note here. The two songs are in virtually the same tempo; while not in same key, the chord progressions are almost the same (both are four chord riffs, the first chords differ but essentially one is a jazz-substitution of the other); finally, and probably of most interest to Satriani, the melody that Chris Martin sings indeed sounds perilously similar to the main guitar solo that Satriani plays.<br /><br /><a href="http://secondamericano.blogspot.com/">Fronesis</a>, bringing this to my attention, put it this way<blockquote>I don't make music, so it's hard for me to calculate odds of:<br /><br />A. Intentional purposive stealing.<br />B. Accidental 'influence'.<br />C. Completely independent works that coincidentally sound the same.<br /></blockquote><br />I'll say straight off that musically speaking, there's pretty much no such thing as C. Nobody making music lives or composes in a vacuum, and if you're creating popular music, you're actively trying to emulate a particular sound--you're only going to be successful if you're creative within certain, limited, parameters. One of the things that became obvious to me very quickly was that the path to success in popular music is to sound exactly like everyone else who's already popular, except slightly different.<br /><br />I'll also say that it's not that I think that A. never happens, I think it happens a lot. Whether or not it's okay depends probably on a lot of things. While in writing the line between quoting and plagarism is pretty bright and well-defined, the same isn't true for music. Musical quoting is more in the same family as putting an unattributed quote from Shakespeare in your novel: nobody accuses you of plagarising because it's so screamingly obvious that you did.<br /><br />More importantly, though, in music <span style="font-style: italic;">everybody is stealing from everybody else all the time</span>. Much of the time they're freely admitting it--musicians call it "having influences." As long as you don't run afoul of the law (which, <a href="http://www.theoddsareone.com/2009/02/bittersweet-symphony-verve-urban-hymns.html">as we've seen before</a>, has rules about what belongs to you when you write a song that are both sweeping and narrow, specific and arbitrary, and...well, I just hope that I myself never have to navigate them), the rules seem to be simple: only steal from the famous, change it a little bit, and announce to everyone who will listen exactly from whom you're stealing.<br /><br />As for this particular case, I think it's pretty well impossible to sum things up better than this guy has:<br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/De3lvudmOAw&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/De3lvudmOAw&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>Transient Gadflyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14840542.post-79978515922991661762009-02-09T13:04:00.000-08:002009-02-09T13:05:02.097-08:00"Somewhere Only We Know" - Keane (Hopes and Fears)<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmXY2MSrguE">This</a> is the kind of song that I hear and think, "what happened to the days of the great melodies?" I latched onto it after hearing it a couple of times in the satellite radio playlist of our brunch place (I don't listen to top 40, so the only time I hear popular music is when it's playing in the background). And I latched onto it immediately--it's a beautiful melody, with lyrics that actually seem to be talking about the melody itself: "Oh simple thing, where have you gone?" (Mmmm...delicious self reflection). For the longest time, from hearing it at a distance, I thought it was a Coldplay song, and that in fact hindered me from figuring out who and what it actually was. I might therefore conclude that this band sounds kind of generically fin-de-siecle alterna-rocky. And I would probably be correct, but 1) they're doing it with just a piano and drums and some overdubs (and, you know, a lead singer with the voice of an angel), and 2) gauging the sound of the current era and emulating it (if indeed that's what they're doing) is a demonstrably rare and difficult-to-master skill. <br /><br />Still, man, that's a great melody. And I think the days of the great simple melodies were never here, it's just that the songs that have them tend to stick around.Transient Gadflyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10313323030838183737noreply@blogger.com3