Post-Writing

It occurred to me the other day that there was never anything actually wrong with this platform. I moved on from it because the internet moved on. Every few years for the last decade-plus I have moved to a new platform: Tumblr, Medium, Substack. But the work of writing is the same -- the writing that needs doing is the same -- and I've found myself not doing it much over the last few years. I have trouble to write. Also, it is important that I write. The other day I realized the platform on which I do it doesn't matter at all. People who need to read this will read it.

Also, I think most people I know won't follow me back here -- really only the truly devoted. That will allow me to be a little bit more open than I otherwise would be. It's not that I mind people close to me knowing what I'm going to write about; it's just it isn't stuff I say to people other than my wife.

---

About 90 seconds ago, I did the following: rolled over my right hip and opened every glute muscle I have conscious control over -- as if I were melting them -- until I ran into a few right at the hip bone that I don't. Now I'm rolling around on them, trying to define them, see where they fit, see to what they respond. In a few minutes, I will have new muscle I didn't have those minutes before. 

This caused a chain reaction going up my body which eventually caused my shoulders to completely reset, and the middle of my spine to pop back (almost) into place. I've still got a little bit of a twist left at my core -- a little bit of a thing to think about. Not much. But not none.

It's possible you don't understand what I just said, or it's maybe that you can't picture it. What's happening is that my body is untwisting. It was very twisted and it hurt a lot, for a long time. I'm pretty sure this happens to everyone, eventually, to greater or less extent (it's what gravity does to bodies) and I'm pretty sure almost nobody knows it. Think about your body right now, physically. Does stuff hurt? Knees, shoulders, back, whatever? Do you have a name for it? You might call it Stenosis, or Arthritis, or Enflamed Something. Or you might not, you might just call it Pain. You know what that is? It's twisting. Torsion. Your body is twisted. 

To tell you why I know this I have to go back more than 25 years to two events. The first was meeting my wife; more about her in a moment. The second was when a guy I'll call Garvey walked drunkenly up to me at my 27th birthday and shoved a bag of weed in my pocket. Garvey was an erstwhile co-worker; he was cool and, under that, unfailingly kind. I haven't seen him in years but I think about him all the time. I realized at some point back then he must have looked at me, his coworker, and thought, "You know what that guy needs? That guy needs to get stoned." Garvey, that was a good thought. Wherever that thought came from, you should make note of it. That is exactly what that guy needed to do.

---

I met my wife at the University of Delaware English Department Christmas Party in 1999. We met in line at the drinks table; I was into amaretto sours at the time and she thought that sounded good so she ordered one too. You know that scene in Gilmore Girls where Lorelei meets early-career Jon Hamm in line for drinks at some gala and there's only one glass of red wine left and they banter over it? It was like that. She was living with another guy at the time, so it'd be another two and half years before we could date (we moved in together six months after that, and were married in another two. In retrospect I'm embarrassed that I didn't ask her to marry me, like, after our first date. It was obvious). 

Anybody who meets my wife can tell almost immediately that she's dynamite. She's funny and smart and cool and everybody likes her. We say now that we loved each other before we met. That is genuinely what it felt like (and it also felt and always feels like Destiny). I think a simpler (more plausible?) explanation is that we had friends in common, and they'd mentioned us to each other many times before we ever met and we heard within their words that they liked and esteemed the other one of us.  So we met with expectations high; in time high expectations were met. 

I should say (if you don't already know me and know who she is) that my wife is, now, kind of medium- famous (for being a novelist). There's a non-zero chance you've heard of her and/or know who she is. I should also say that the moment I met my wife I could see immediately who she was and who she would be and the only question I had to answer after that was how I could become worthy of her. 

---

The following May the bag of pot went into the bureau drawer at home and I forgot about it for awhile. I had done pot a couple of times in my life and it had mostly done nothing for me. Certainly not enough that I was willing to go through the necessary hoops to acquire any. Some time many months later I remembered it was there, and, I dunno, maybe I was bored. I started getting high on Friday nights and sitting in coffee shops doing crossword puzzles. It was glorious--seriously, some time do a crossword while you're high and observe that part of your mind working. It's amazing. In time, getting high was the way I did my work.

---

The other thing that was true when I met my wife was that I was in a lot of pain. My body hurt. I never said this to many people and even now I don't think most people understood what I was or am saying. I hope to your god that you don't know what I'm talking about. And if you do, hello. I'm really sorry. Also, welcome. You're in the right place.

My body had been hurting for about four years at that point, and by then I had long since realized that I was in for the long haul. Like, I had realized this was maybe the way I was going to feel for the rest of my life. Again, I hope you never have to contemplate this, at least not until you reach very old age. It's not a thing you should be contemplating in your 20s. 

Don't worry. This story is pretty long, but it has a happy ending. It's been 30 years and I've worked my way out of that pain. I've understood it. I can (I think) say some things about it. 

I can also get high like you wouldn't believe. This is going to be the story of all of that.

 

Hello Friend

Welcome back. I have not seen you in awhile. It happens that I continue to wax poetic on the internet here:

The Inquisitivists

Join me there. 

RELEASE: the lossless e.p. by The Calculus Affair

NOTES

My wife Laurie Frankel wrote a book called Goodbye for Now. 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 RPM Challenge, I wrote those ten songs for the book, and recorded a demo of them as my RPM Challenge album for 2012.

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.

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). The lossless e.p. 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.

TRACKS

• 1) The Bridge
• 2) Just This Once
• 3) Men of Luggage
• 4) I Take it Back
• 5) Men of Luggage (Acoustic Version)

CREDITS

• 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 Joralemon House, Seattle WA. Additional backing vocals on (3) by Gino and Jason Hyatt
• Sounds of cars passing on (1) from freesound, recorded by Corsica_S and volivieri.
• Mastered by Kevin Bressler at Whiney Cat Audio, Seattle, WA. 

LISTEN/BUY

• Listen on Spotify
• Listen/Buy on Google Play
• Sample/Buy on iTunes
• Sample/Buy on Amazon
• Listen/Buy on Bandcamp

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.

THANKS

• In addition to those happy few of you out there who are Calculus Affair fans (you know who you are)...
• Matt Gani, Jennie Shortridge, Garth Stein, Stevie Kallos, and Ben Bauermeister (a.k.a. The Rejections). It is thanks to you that The Calculus Affair is now my side-project.
• Gino Scarpino, Kevin Hyatt, and Mark Cooper for an endless, life-long stream of musical support and constructive criticism.
• And Laurie Frankel: all and everything beyond words.

"Well, They've Seen Us"

Back in March, Randall Munroe posted to his webcomic, XKCD, 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.

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 Math jokes, Linux jokes, Quantum Physics jokes; 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. 

And then there are the big things: a subway map of all of North America, a drag-able map of an enormous world of which the viewer can only see a tiny part at any one time, a log-scale drawing of the  height of the universe, a log-scale drawing of the depths of the universe, an exploded view of money, a map of online communities scaled by population circa 2007, then circa 2010 (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. 

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.     

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. 

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 Toessels. An initial read might be that the comic is nearing its end, but I suspect it's probably just the beginning. 

(a continuously updating visualization of the entire "Time" comic can be found here) 

Technical Note

If 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, http://theoddsareone.blogspot.com. As you were.

On Sabbaticals

MTG and I were in the car this evening 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.

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.

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.

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.

Lies, Gender, and Damned Statistics

On Slashdot recently I encountered another version of Martin Gardner's two-children puzzle. The original problem is this:

I have two children. One of them is a boy. What are the odds the other one is also a boy?

If you're a human living in the world, three things are probably true of you vis-a-vis 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.

The correct answer, if you've never encountered it, is based on the following a priori: there are four equally-likely ways to have two children:

• a boy followed by a girl
• a boy followed by another boy
• a girl followed by a boy
• a girl followed by another girl

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.

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 have two children, one of whom is a boy born on a Tuesday. What's the probability that my other child is a boy?"

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 literally anyone else in the world, 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 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.

(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).

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.

I leave you with a link to an XKCD cartoon, because it's literally impossible to make this point better than he has here.

New Releases

Two new releases for your Tuesday:

• A new five song e.p. from The Calculus Affair. It's available for free download from http://tinyurl.com/5songs-tca (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 RPM Challenge album, and it's a little bit on the weird side for The Calculus Affair. But it's still pretty good.
  
• 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.

And The Worst Part Is, I Never Learned How To Read

I 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).

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.

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.

Okay, fine

Everybody'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):

• "Clouds" - The Long Winters (Putting The Days to Bed - 2006)
• "Carousel" - Iron & Wine (The Shepherd's Dog - 2007)
  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.
• "Where I Am" - Westerly (Wild Wild Wind E.P. - 2007)
  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.
• "Joe Metro" - Blue Scholars (Bayani - 2007)
  Just your average major-label released rhyme about riding the bus down the Rainier Valley. Words do not describe how awesome this song is.
• "Overkill (Acoustic)" - Colin Hay (Man @ Work - 2003)
• "Start a War" - The National (Boxer - 2007)
• "Your Name" - Kevin Hyatt/Gino Scarpino (Badly Bare Demos - 2008)
  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.
• "Knife" - Grizzly Bear (Yellow House - 2006)
• "Flicks" - Frou Frou (Details - 2002)
• "Little Round Mirrors" - Harvey Danger (Little By Little - 2005)
  "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."
• "Blue Ridge Mountains" - Fleet Foxes (Fleet Foxes - 2008)
• "On a Different Shelf" - Jim Noir (Jim Noir - 2008)
• "Spacewater" - Dzihan and Kamien (Freaks and Icons - 2000)
  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.
• "People Are Like Suns" - Crowded House (Time on Earth - 2007)
  Is this entire album about the death of Paul Hester, or is that just me?
• "Greyboy" - Soul Patch (Sooner or Later - 2007)
• "You Can Have It All" - Yo La Tengo (And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out - 2000)
  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.
• "Paper Tiger" - Beck (Sea Change - 2002)
  I've never liked Beck all that much, but this is a great, stripped down album.
• "Such Great Heights" - The Postal Service (Give Up - 2003)
  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.
• "Carry Me Ohio" - Sun Kil Moon (Ghosts of the Great Highway - 2003)
  2005's Tiny Cities, which is a collection of covers of Modest Mouse songs, is also utterly worth your time.
• "Slipping Through the Sensors" - Fruit Bats (Mouthfuls - 2003)
• "A Fond Farewell" - Elliott Smith (From a Basement on the Hill - 2004)
  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.
• "Heartbeats" - Jose Gonzales (Veneer - 2005)
  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.
• "Casimir Pulaski Day" - Sufjan Stevens (Come On Feel the Illinoise - 2005)
  One of the best albums of the decade.
• "Que Sera" - Wax Taylor (Tales of the Forgotten Melodies - 2005)
  French cinemaphile electronica.
• "Your Hand In Mine" - Explosions in the Sky (The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place - 2003)
  Apparently Explosions in the Sky does not do the theme from Friday Night Lights. How this is possible I do not know.
• "Your Girlfriend's Car" - Throw Me The Statue (Moonbeams - 2008)
  I again tout the awesomeness of Throw Me The Statue. They are awesome.
• "Daily Mutilation" - Jon Auer (Beautiful Escape: Songs of the Posies Revisited - 2008)
  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.
• "Turn and Run" - Neil Finn (One Nil - 2001)
  Well, obviously.

Causal Loop

And 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.

I read about a thought experiment with pool tables and time travel in an article in Slate 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 which we here at the Odds Are One had figured out years ago, 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.

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.

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.

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, that has to happen (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:

1. 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)?
2. 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.

Discuss.

13 Songs With The Calculus Affair: Side Tracking

Sometimes 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 RPM Challenge. Another recent side-project was a cover of Roxy Music's "2HB" as part of a tribute record being released by Burning Sky Records. It's currently the main track in the player on their MySpace page.

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.


The distant future. The year 2000....

13 Songs With The Calculus Affair: Dialog II

The Stoat: I appreciate the lack of any Breakin' 2 references there.
Calvino: I was sorely tempted.
The Stoat: 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.
Calvino: 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.
The Stoat: Okay, go.
Calvino: Okay. Again, assuming that I am the creative force behind The Calculus Affair...
The Stoat: I have no problem with that.
Calvino: ...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.
The Stoat: Brand awareness.
Calvino: Exactly, though as mtg 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.
The Stoat: On whom you were already counting.
Calvino: Right.
The Stoat: So, what else?
Calvino: Well, I'm trying to get into the business via the Taxi 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.
The Stoat: Okay, what else?
Calvino: 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.
The Stoat: So you want to start a record label.
Calvino: 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.
The Stoat: What do you think that is?
Calvino: 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.
The Stoat: Well, in some cases I can do that. Lots of bands I like are signed to Barsuk Records. Lots of bands I like are signed to SubPop.
Calvino: 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.
The Stoat: 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.
Calvino: I believe the word you're looking for is "synergy."
The Stoat: Synergy is the greatest thing in the world.
Calvino: Never say that to me again.
The Stoat: Whatever. I'm sold. What form does this musical branding take?
Calvino: ...
The Stoat: ...
Calvino: ...
The Stoat: You seemed about to speak.
Calvino: 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.
The Stoat: Also, you hate market research. And also, apparently, synergy.
Calvino: Yeah, that's another problem.
The Stoat: So you're hosed.
Calvino: Pretty much.
The Stoat: Okay then. Good talk.

13 Songs With The Calculus Affair: Dialog

Calvino: 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?
The Stoat: An interesting and difficult question.
Calvino: 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.
The Stoat: Yes. Clearly a problem.
Calvino: 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.
The Stoat: I see...
Calvino: 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.
The Stoat: I have no problem with that.
Calvino: 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.
The Stoat: 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.
Calvino: 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.
The Stoat: Hmm...surely other people are thinking about this problem. What about this fellow? He's talking about the same things you are.
Calvino: Yeah, he's advertising for a seminar he's running. Did you read that article? Reading it was like watching that Simpsons episode where they introduce Poochie into the Itchy & Scratchy Show.
The Stoat: Oh No! Metadialog!

EXECUTIVE: 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.

KRUSTY: So he's proactive, huh?

EXECUTIVE: Oh, God, yes. We're talking about a totally outrageous paradigm.

Calvino: There are articles on the subject everywhere, all the time. Here's Trent Reznor on the subject. Another entry in the TuneCore blog. An article in Salon. 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."
The Stoat: Not to, you know, to mindlessly echo Trent Reznor, but you are kind of clever. Not all the time or anything, but occasionally.
Calvino: 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.
The Stoat: Perhaps it would be helpful to start with what you've thought of so far and go from there?
Calvino: Perhaps. We'll try that in Dialog part II, in order to mitigate the already extreme longness of this post.
The Stoat: Okay. Truncating in three...two...one...

13 Songs With The Calculus Affair: There is a lot of Math

Other 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 Tougo (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.

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?

13 Songs With The Calculus Affair: So Apparently Michael Jackson is Dead, Then

Like everybody in the universe who is my age, Thriller was one of the first cassettes I ever owned. I remarked not too long ago that I thought we were due for a major resurgence of interest in that album, and that's pretty much guaranteed to happen now.

I for one will be glad that Thriller will be cool again. Michael Jackson was batshit insane, but that's one great record.

13 Songs With The Calculus Affair: Roster

The album lineup changes from day to day, but as it stands is this (in alphabetical order, album order not in any way yet determined):

• Aleksandr (You Forgot to be in Time)
• Archer, The
• Bicycle Down The Hill
• Bone and Matter
• Crying Again
• Dukes of the Stratosphere
• Every Day
• Freight Train
• Man Who Used to Hunt Cougars For Bounty, The
• Men of Luggage
• Poor Young Man
• Prince of Tyre
• Threnody
  

Some songs that have been on the list, but are currently off it:

• 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 If You Lived Here....
• My High School Mind--it just isn't working for me right now.
• 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.
  

This post is not long on content. I'll get more specific about songs and construction next time.

13* Songs With The Calculus Affair

If you are a just-slightly-fanatical follower of the band The Long Winters (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 "13 Songs with John Roderick."

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."

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 The Fellows are Opening for Jon and Ken***. Stay tuned.

*actual number of songs subject to change.
**the child's, not mine.
***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 Everyone Will Dance instead. Thoughts?

Album Release Wednesday

We are pleased to announce the formal release of Control Of Electromagnetic Radiation, the 2009 RPM Challenge 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 http://www.kammalu.com/downloads/conelrad. If you're more of a preview song/download song kind of person, the album is available on alonetone as a playlist. Click here to check it out.

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.

In Other Musical News...

The Calculus Affair is today's featured artist on NPR's Second Stage podcast.

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.