Loth Beg

History Lesson

2011-09-11T16:22:00.003-05:00

Earl Hines made this a great historical/musicological monologue for Ralph Gleason's Jazz Casual, a series that ran from 1961-1968. As far as I can tell Hines doesn't embellish anything. In fact, he comes off as being quite humble and appreciative of his influences in the episode. The influence of the great bebop performers on Hines is particularly interesting to me (though I'd also be interested in the reverse relationship, especially on Monk). Hines's lack of ego is shown by his willingness to listen to the Bop players. Though it wasn't true by the 1960's it's place in Jazz music when it began was controversial, some condemning it for the same reason Hines praised it (bringing in more sophisticated harmony). Hines and Billy Eckstine were important bridges between Armstrong and Gillespie.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

That I've Been Doing When I've Been Not Posting

2011-08-19T10:03:00.009-05:00

Many apologies for not posting anything in months. After a change in jobs and home, I simply forgot that I had or ever wanted to blog. It would be interesting to know the role environment plays in life, since there is no obvious reason that physically moving should change my writing habits.

Well, since then I have found many things that are new to me. One of the best blogs online is Terence Tao's. It's neat to see the web of mathematics tied. In addition to wonderful expository notes, interesting alternative proofs and statements of open questions from all over mathematics, the simple shorthand created by being able to linking to Wikipedia to have explanations of a concept tangential to the author's point can turn a post into something the equal of a textbook. The broad range of topics covered by Tao also gives much to recommend.
If one wants a little more time wasting fun to math, then the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has some great articles. Popper has always interested me when I think about my physicist hat. There is good criticism to make about details of his approach. Namely, that Popper left out the importance of error analysis in both The Logic of Scientific Discovery and Realism and The Aim of Science and led poor Lakatos completely in the wrong direction. Take the following critique:

"Popper himself is fond of citing ... the anomalous orbit of Uranus posed for nineteenth century astronomers. ... [A]ssuming Newtonian mechanics to be precisely correct, the observed divergence in the elliptical orbit of Uranus could be explained if the existence of a seventh, as yet unobserved outer planet was posited. Further, they were able, again within the framework of Newtonian mechanics, to calculate the precise position of the ‘new’ planet. Thus when subsequent research by Galle at the Berlin observatory revealed that such a planet (Neptune) did in fact exist, and was situated precisely where Adams and Leverrier had calculated, this was hailed as by all and sundry as a magnificent triumph for Newtonian physics: in Popperian terms, Newton's theory had been subjected to a critical test, and had passed with flying colours. Popper himself refers to this strong corroboration of Newtonian physics as ‘the most startling and convincing success of any human intellectual achievement’. Yet Lakatos flatly denies that there are critical tests, in the Popperian sense, in science, and argues the point convincingly by turning the above example of an alleged critical test on its head. What, he asks, would have happened if Galle had not found the planet Neptune? Would Newtonian physics have been abandoned, or would Newton's theory have been falsified? The answer is clearly not, for Galle's failure could have been attributed to any number of causes other than the falsity of Newtonian physics (e.g., the interference of the earth's atmosphere with the telescope, the existence of an asteroid belt which hides the new planet from the earth, etc)."

Now, if this critique worked, it would be pretty devastating for the practicality of Popper's program - and Popper always emphasized this practicality (rediscovering and using the Pragmatic theory of truth? I kind of doubt it). But Lakatos's argument hinges on something that should not just be accepted as plain truth that "(e.g., the interference of the earth's atmosphere with the telescope, the existence of an asteroid belt which hides the new planet from the earth, etc)" would have been accepted. First of all, it requires proof that Galle could not control for deviations in the Earth's atmosphere (that is, a proof of his incapability of error analysis). The existence of an asteroid belt is not a neutral position at all, but a rival theory. Not only must it be tested but it must be tested in the same way!

In addition, Lakatos seems to be assuming that an ontological commitment to Newton's Laws is stronger than a practical commitment to empirical standards. Would the experimentalists give up a method to please us theorists? An interesting historical case for philosophers is the question of the existence of atoms. Chemists (playing the role of experimentalists) have believed in them since Dalton in 1803, while some physicists hoped they could be eliminated as mere intuition enhancing artifacts as late as 1908! This 105 year controversy should give an aspiring philosopher a good playground for testing proposals of standards.

Popper is also responsible for modernizing the idea of pseudoscience. Bad science is responsible for a lot of pain, like what Lysenkoism did to genetics and agriculture under the Soviets. However, I don't think it's as all-fired important as Popper does. Lysenkoism was bad because it was wrong, not because it was pseudoscientific. Isn't that enough? A more thorough study might look at how the Soviet structure supported Lysenkosim (or how the Catholic Church supported Ptolemyism or how Freudianism was supported by 50's corporate culture), but it would not be much help to a practicing scientist.

Oh, I haven't yet mentioned Popper's interesting work in the foundations of the social sciences (in his book The Poverty of Historicism), demonstrating the impossibility of genuine general social prediction, and by extension showing that this cannot be the goal for a social science. This part of his theory makes hogwash of many older ideas of history and has never been successfully rebutted. His books The Open Society and Its Enemies are nice books about social philosophy, making the novel argument that democracy's superiority over, say, a Voltaire-ian enlightened dictatorship is democracy's ability to do and un-do without violence. It would be interesting to test his ideas using theories of decentralized control (I cannot give a real analysis because I lack real knowledge of that area). Is the complexity of changing a democratic system a greater difficulty than regulating an country with the extreme information poverty that a dictator must be in? Is the question identical for centrally planned (i.e. Soviet) and decentrally planned (i.e. capitalist) economies? Popper thought so, though his friend Frederich Hayek believed that centrally planned governments with decentrally planned economies were superior.

Phew! That's enough damn Popper.

I've discovered that many of the old Charlie Chan movies are on YouTube! Charlie Chan at The Olympics, Charlie Chan in Egypt and Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo are all very fun. Some people think that Chan's sedentary and unassuming nature are a bit of a stereotype, but I disagree. In any case, you might notice that the actually Asian man in these movies - Keye Luke as Lee Chan - is vigorous and athletic.

This beautiful song by Billy Strayhorn is given an amazing performance by Johnny Hodges and a characteristically astounding arrangement by Strayhorn's great mentor Ellington. The world is full of wonderful music, and we moderns have more access to it than anyone in all history. Take this obscure piece by Mozart that must be performed on an instrument that went out of fashion shortly after his death. ~7,000 people have heard this one version. Do you think that anyone ever heard it in the century after his death? How many do you think heard it in his life?

Well, hopefully I'll get myself to post more regularly now.

David Kellogg Lewis's Convention

2010-09-11T19:52:00.013-05:00

American Analytic philosopher David K. Lewis wrote the book on convention. By considering the meaning of convention, Dr. Lewis brings insight into several important areas with particular interest paid to language. The book was inspired by a spirited attack on the idea that language is ruled by convention by Lewis's teacher WVO Quine. Quine's questions can be paraphrased: "If language is ruled by convention, what language was the convention in? If convention is not literal, what is meant by it? If this is a vauge metaphor, what makes us think it's the right one?". Lewis was also inspired by economist Thomas Schelling's analysis of Coordination Problems.

I do not envy the person who had to come up with a cover to a book titled Convention, but I cannot praise their total lack of effort.

The model that the remaining definitions is - unless stated otherwise - the Normal-Form Game of Von Neumann and Morgenstern. A normal form game can be characterized by it's demonstration of payoffs for different options. It represents each player as a dimension and each option as a row, column or higher dimensional axis. One of the classics is it's representation of the Prisoner's Dilemma:An alternate way of characterizing Normal-Form games is as functions. The set (lets say of size n) of players puts their choice into a n-tuple, which is then fed into the function. The function maps the decisions (which are integers) onto payouts (which can be real). In the case of the above game P(<"Player One","Player Two">) = <"bottom number","top number">. So to completely characterize this function P: P(<1,1>) = <3,3>; P(<1,2>) = <5,0>; P(<2,1>) = <0,5>; and P(<1,1>) = <2,2>.

Most of the mathematical details are inessential to the analysis - Lewis goes as far as to say that he could remove it entirely without substantially weakening his position. Lewis mainly uses Equilibria as his tool for insight, allowing for strong conclusions and good generality. Following Schelling, Lewis distinguishes a continuum between games of pure coordination - games in which the player's payoffs are equal in every square - and games of pure competition - games in which the player's payoffs are opposites in every square. Again, inspired by the work of Schelling Lewis restricts himself to games closer to cooperation.

An equilibrium is when each player has made the best choice given everyone else's choice. In other words, they could not have improved things by altering their and only their choice. In the Prisoner's Dilemma above, for example, Player One's payouts are either 3 or 0 if he chooses column one, and either 5 or 2 if he chooses column two. Thus column two is the better option no matter what Player Two does. Similarly, row two is better for Player Two no matter what Player One does. Thus <2,2> is the equilibrium.

Lewis is particularly interested in a subset of equilibria: coordination equilibria. A coordinition equilibrium is when each player would not have been better off if any player acted differently. That equilibria and coordinition equilibria are different may not be immeadiately apparent. In fact, in games of pure coordination they are identical (this is shown easily). However, they can be distinguished in games like the following example:In this game <1,1>, <1,2>, <2,1>, and <2,2> are all the possible moves. <1,1> is a equilibrium - Player One prefers to could not improve by altering their choice, neither could Player Two improve by altering their choice - and a coordination equilibrium - Neither Player would be better off if any player changed. <1,2> and <2,1> are not equilibria - in both cases, one of the players (Player One in the case of <1,2> and Player Two in the case of <2,1>) would have been better off had they chosen differently. Thus neither are they coordination equilibrium. <2,2> is different. <2,2> is an equilibrium: Player One could not have made their lot better by changing to <1,2> and Player Two could not have made their lot better by changing to <2,1>. However, it is not a coordination equilibrium: Player One would be better off if Player 2 changed their decision (i.e. at <2,1>), and Player Two would be better off if Player One changed their decision (i.e. at <1,2>).

After some interesting analysis, Lewis proposes that "We may achieve coordination [equilibrium] by acting on concordant expectations about each other's action." (p. 27).

The next concept is that of a Regularity. A regularity is a pattern of behavior, a repetition of a decision. For instance, Player One (a population of size 1) might have an arbitrary preference in repeated Normal Form Games to choose option 1. A regularity can be in an individual or in a population. Regularities are relative to Situations. A Situation is anytime a choice must be made - we are describing these in terms of Normal Form Games.

A regularity in a population is a Convention if and only if 1) everyone in a population exhibits the regularity, 2) everyone expects everyone else in a population to exhibit the regularity, 3) everyone has approximately the same preferences in options (in other words, the situation is more cooperative than competitive), 4) everyone in the population prefers to exhibit the regularity on the condition that at least all but one person in the population also exhibits the regularity, and 5) there exists another possible regularity that matches rule 4 and it is impossible for one to follow both regularities at the same time.

To return to our second example, "Choose row/column one" might be a convention. Player One will choose column one. Player One thinks that Player Two will choose the row with the highest number for their payout, and thus have reason to expect Player Two will choose row one. Both want the highest payout. Both would prefer to choose row/column two if the other chose column/row two. Player One prefers to choose row one in any situation (payoffs are 1 or 0, which is better than .5 or .2) and the same with Player Two - thus they prefer to choose row/column one if at least all but one person in the population also chooses row/column one. Thus if Player Two chooses column one, the players have formed a convention - and without communication!

This is Lewis's definition of convention. I'm working on a defence/critique of it, but it's more involved than my usual posts, so I'm going to separate it into a new post. Stand by, it might be done before the day is out!

Slogans

2010-05-22T11:57:00.003-05:00

Well, my boss is out of town and I finally thought of something worth writing about.

"How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!"
-Wittgenstein

What is a slogan? What is sloganeering?

I am not interested in advertising slogans.

One definition of a slogan is "thought stopping cliche". Like most attempts to define words with other words, this is both a failure and misleading. It is a failure as it gives no insight into the nature of slogans than Euclid's definition of a line as "breadthless length" gives us insight into the nature of the line.

But it is the misleadingness of the definition that makes it worthy of contempt. The idea that people who are our opponents do not think is noxious to our own thought. The idea that even those who have been duped by cults and other such things so not think is outright dangerous. The problem comes that when we are ourselves duped we can fool ourself further by noting that we continue thought. Surely this means we are not sloganeering?

A slogan must be a sentence like any other, capable of being evaluated. If a slogan is untrue, then it is bad because it is wrong, not because it is a slogan (e.g. "Slogans are thought stopping cliches"). If a slogan is true, then we can have no problem with it. A good example comes from Richard Feynman.Dr. Feynman was asked to see the work of Uri Geller. Mr Geller claimed to be able to manipulate matter without using matter, called "psychic power". His demonstration of spoon bending was particularly disseminated. The trivial use of what would be an astounding discovery suggested to many that what was happening was no more than a parlor trick. Feynman enjoyed the spotlight and acquiesced. When Mr Geller bent a spoon, Feynman was unimpressed. When asked to explain it he said "I'm smart enough to know I'm dumb".

This certainly is a slogan. Though Feynman was quite a free thinker, he did not explain Geller's spoon bending. This was an important decision, as if he had held out various hypothesis he could have fooled himself into thinking that there was no alternate hypothesis, which (since it is well known that anything true can be proven infinitely many ways) is almost always false. In fact, Dr Feynman's slogan is not quite correct. A talented - if amateur - magician, Dr Feynman was able to figure out how he did it and provided evidence of its truth. Feynman's explanation was that he was using prestidigitation to hide that he was bending the key with his fingers. When asked to bend a hard metal key, Mr Geller could not perform.

Still, Dr Feynman's slogan is obviously true if parsed correctly. We cannot fool ourselves into thinking we can out-think charlatans, for nothing plays better into their hands than hubris. I do not think that anyone can accuse our desire not to fool ourselves with the end of thought.

Some slogans, like some sentences, are vague. The slogan "Live for nothing or die for something" used by Burmese freedom fighters might express a truth, but it must be a vague one. "something" could mean anything from freedom to the love of a dictator. In it's original formulation it is a question, the information it wishes to gather is if the questioned prefers a meaningless life of oppression and poverty or a the danger of a life with meaning (and, admittedly, still poverty) casting off the oppression. In this case, it is still a slogan but it is not a vague one. "Is certain painful meaninglessness life worse than the risk of a painful death?" is not a question that has easy answers, but it is a valid inquiry.

I think that those examples suggest a generalization. The properties that they share are striking, despite the differences in formulation.

A slogan is a sentence, to be sure. It must be a pithy sentence. A slogan only exists in a general context - it must relay an aspect of a philosophy that is parsable within the philosophy. Both of the slogan's examples used contradictory imagery to convey a point, though I think it would be too hasty to claim that was a general property.

Further empirical study of this, even one equally amateurish as my own, could yield insight.I think that it is impossible to consider the manipulative powers of slogans without conjuring Geroge Orwell. Orwell's short novel 1984 asked us to consider a nightmarish world where an omnipotent government was able to control the sense of reality of it's people through propaganda, continuous warfare and even torture. Central to the government's plan is "Newspeak", a language in which criticizing the government is grammatically impossible. The value of the novel was our drawing of parallels between it's idealized totalitarian state and real states. But if sloganeering isn't formulated as "thought stopping cliche", then does the rest of his analysis hold?

The ultimate chapters of the book are a direct confrontation with a horrific terror, the concept that a person can hold ideas that they do not even believe - a constant self-induced rewriting of one's perceptions of reality until it matches what the government desires. As terrifying as this still is, I must admit that age seems to soften the blow. I simply cannot realistically believe that an actual dictatorship requires or even encourages this behavior. It is the case that people who are fooled are truly fooled.The servants of Kim Jong-Il truly believe in him. Doublethink is absent. Doublethink, which requires knowledge of his baseness, is illegal.

When we look at the behavior of the manipulative in the real world, we see that they often come up with world views that are self-supporting. Even if we do not think they believe it (irrelevant to it's truth as it is), we cannot prove this. Trying is a honeyed trap.

Though it is repetitive, I must remind you of the misleading nature of believing that a slogan is a thought stopping cliche. It turns a word into a barb, one's enemies are unthinking sloganeers that believe something patently untrue. It is almost impossible to apply this to oneself. But it is actually true that any mildly eloquent person speaks in slogans, because a good slogan says a true thing in an efficient way. We reduce other people to a word - "hypocrite" - and leave them. Is it not obvious that much is lost in this lonely path? Must we proclaim our own sanity so loud that we call the world mad?

Heaviside

2010-03-05T15:32:00.004-06:00

I noted this with interest recently, a short biographical essay of Heaviside by a descendant of his. Heaviside's primary contribution to science was simplifying the formalism describing electromagnetism developed by James Maxwell - Heaviside even popularized the term Maxwell's Equations.

Surprisingly to me, Heaviside was a controversial man in his day. His simpler, more beautiful formulation was attacked as being lobotomizing Maxwell. Heaviside was an accomplished engineer before, during and after doing his scientific work and indeed much of his work could be thought of as improving the efficiency of Maxwell's equations to the point that they became useful.

I suppose I should mention what these equations are, and though I am a mathematician I will try to use words in order to increase my audience.

Two of the laws are called both called Gauss's Law, after the genius Carl Gauss. Gauss (and unknown to Gauss, before him Lagrange) showed that the flow going out of a volume is equal to the flow leaving the inside. Gauss's 1st law says that the flow of electricity out of a closed surface is the electric charge inside. Gauss's 2nd law says that magnetism does not flow out of a closed surface.

A few things: 1) if there exist electric monopoles (northern compasses with no south, or vice versa) then Gauss's 2nd law would have to be amended slightly, 2) Gauss's Law is equivalent to Coulomb's inverse square law for electric force even without the other laws and 3) nobody likes that these laws are both called Gauss's Law but nobody does anything about it.

Another of Maxwell's laws is known as Faraday's Law, this time after it's discoverer. It states that electromotive force in a circuit is fixed by the rate of magnetic flow through the circuit. This law was discovered empirically by Michael Faraday who - in addition to being one of the greatest experimentalists of all time - was sufficiently handsome in his younger days to warrant his picture here.The final of the four canonical Maxwell's law's is Ampère's Law, which states that a magnetic field can be electrical current or by a changing magnetic field. This second fact was discovered by Maxwell, who used it to show that 1) electricity and magnetism are related and 2) light can be modeled as an electromagnetic wave.

It is too bad that figures as important and stolid as Heaviside are now more obscure than flashier figures such as Tesla. The life of science of their days was a deeply vibrant, if one is interested in such narratives. Faraday, for instance, was a fascinating and practical man, the image of the good scientist in the imagination of the time. His Christmas lectures aimed at young people show his astounding plainness of thought (I mean this as a high compliment, after all is it not often said to seek simplicity in all things?) and his respect for his countrymen.

Vicipeadia

2009-10-31T17:09:00.004-05:00

There's something about Latin. It has, to me, a distancing effect. There's not a joke on the page on the Iraq War, but I can't help laughing. Latin is so distant and dead, but here it is pretending it is contemporary. It's hysterical!

You know, I suppose this may seem like a good time to write about the wiki concept. The contrast between the dynamic modern idea of a wiki seems to contrast the old language. The fact is that the Library of Alexandria was smaller and held more errors, but we are allowed to celebrate it. Some people find it astonishing that there exist imperfect sources of information - it would be more rational to remember that there occasionally exist good sources of information. If Wikipedia is less reliable that, say, Encyclopedia Brittanica it must be remembered that the wiki dwarfs the print work. The Wikimedia community is an enormous source of information, and not just encyclopedia articles. Paintings, pictures of animals, court documents, plays, recorded music, and much more. If used in a mature way, Wikipedia is even better than good, it is useful.

It is pleasant to live in a world where there is such access to information that we can afford to be snobbish about sources. Could you imagine the reaction of Diderot to the French Wikipedia?

Limericks

2009-10-24T20:50:00.014-05:00

I've been addicted to limericks these past few days. They are simple fun, so I can write three in a lunchbreak! Because I'm not compelled by any standard of quality, here are a few of my pieces. Special thanks to Aaron Philby and The Medicated Cartoonist for their excellent work.

The mathematician Euler
was near blind far-sighted toiler.
He wrote with great haste,
but without making waste,
his mind as hot as a broiler!

alternate poem for english speakers:

Sitting the with his ruler
is the mathematician Euler.
Invisible to his eye
are gamma, sigma, and pi,
but to me there isn't anything cooler!

Euler's Student Lagrange,
Also covered a range.
His work in mechanics
cleaned up the antics
of many a model most strangeRichard Phillips Feynman,
liked to wine and dine them.
He'd meet a nice girl,
they'd go for a twirl,
digging those intellectual mines inMurray Gell-Mann discovered the quark,
Using the time honored method "hard work".
He now studies complexity
and adaptivity-
He certainly has made his mark!

I've fallen into a rut;
my poems just don't make the cut.
I start with a name
then play a game,
and never do anything butThere lives a man named Eddie Fizgerald,
a cartoonist/philosopher/actor/and/herald.
Well maybe he's never acted in a movie,
but he's done something equally groovy:
he's always been Eddie FitzgeraldIn Britain, on medication,
lives a maker of animation
He draws a cartoon
as he stares at the moon,
and thinks about emigration

This next poem was a tough one.
But pi is just way too much fun!
The number is gentle,
but quite trancendental
and the rhyming's a son of a gun.

The π sits a mite amazingly,
on adders shock and typey.
Ignoring beginners,
for to see againers
find novels of brains idly

I bid my readers adieu,
though I'll soon get back to you.
I have no gift for rhyme
and even less time!
And I'm trying to start posts anew!

What two posts on words in a row?

2009-10-11T19:39:00.004-05:00

W.C. Minoralso had a preoccupation with defining words partly because he was a madman.

In this post I'm actually going to define a word though. That word is: "deterministic". Why? I was asked to offline.

Given that at least one state of a process is known and that there are no further operators on that process, the process is "deterministic" if and only if this makes future states known with certainty.

Example of a deterministic process: A ball is dropped from a building on a given planet from a given height. Because we understand gravitational acceleration and air resistance, we can find all the information about the ball we need until it hits the ground.

Why does the process become non-deterministic when it hits the ground? Because the ground acts as an operator, altering the behavior of the system. If I added information about the ground it might become deterministic.

Example of a non-deterministic process: If a list of names is sorted, and two people have the same name which person goes first? The right answer ("Who Cares?") does not remove the non-determinism.

A process can be deterministic if all information is known about it, but non-deterministic with ignorance. A process can be non-deterministic if all information is known about it, but deterministic with ignorance. Can a process can be non-deterministic is all information is known about it but deterministic in ignorance?

The answer can be found by restating the question: Can statistical processes be deterministic? The answer to that question is Yes. For instance, in a bizarro world where you know the state of every quantum molecule in a system, you still cannot make good deterministic predictions about that system. However, by using statistics to turn dumb information into interesting information one can find some information with certainty! For instance, you know the macroscopic system will comply with the laws of thermodynamics whatever the behavior of individual microstates are. Since we happen to live on the thermodynamical level most of our lives, that the process is deterministic in many cases has been well established.

I hope that helps with word. As Confucius said:"If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything."

Confucius, incidentally is the all time master of the slippery slope. So to lighten things up, here is a funny picture of David Ben-Gurion using the Feldenkrais Method:

How Do You Define A "Definiton"?

2009-10-03T15:28:00.008-05:00

Still working on that larger idea, but here is something a little smaller to hold you over.

Defining words is rather difficult, especially in natural language. The rub of defining is there is no escape. Words are defined in words. Words are also non-monotonic, one often uses complex ideas to define ideas seen as being simpler!

Let's begin by going over a few intuitive solutions.

There is the Representation School. This theory is most associated with the analytic school, though few of them held a pure version (AJ Ayer held a very interesting version of this that I don't want to get into yet). In it's simplest most naive formulation this formulation holds that words represent things. If I wanted to define "art" for instance I could just say:or if I wanted to define comedy I'd utter:and indeed Moe Howard owned an encyclopedia which used an illustration of The Three Stooges illustration of the definition of comedy! However, it did not only use the illustration. It contained many words.

They say a picture contains a thousand words, but that isn't nearly the size of the average language (indeed, some natural languages allow recursive words making them theoretically infinite!). The Representation Theory isn't quite the worst thing out there. I would think that most people believe (including myself) that at some low level, most words are defined relative to an external object.

But it is incomplete. One thing it cannot do is define words like "like", "define", "is", "do", "cannot", and "and". What would you point to in order to demonstrate the idea of "to" to a strictly representational martian? Some have advocated the use of a English semi-variant called E-Prime that excludes "to be" from the language (for unrelated philosophical reasons). Is it possible that words like "these" are syntactic sugar capable of being removed from the language? As an exercise, try to write this paragraph using only words you can illustrate.

What the Representational School leaves out is imprecision. Not imprecision in the grammar school sense, but advanced engineering imprecision the kind that makes things possible. The imprecision that makes generality possible. Since this imprecision is a real and necessary thing (otherwise we'd live in a world of endless special cases) this is a flaw with the Representational School that has not a few implications. The biggest is the observation that We can take certain ideas as being atomic. I will explain that in a moment.

We have observed that there exist flaws in the Representational School. But perhaps we can plug the hole by doing another obvious tactic: defining words in words. In this view there are some words that are atomic and others that are built up. This is sometimes compared to a pyramid, though I find that the definitions almost always asks the reader to do something. In this way, words are much like Daniel Dennett's idea of Cranes. For instance, we can use textual substitution to get around some words like "is". E' claims that "is" is a synonym for "seems", but this doesn't really capture the flavor of the word - and purposefully so in that case. One can use context and substitution to rigorously define "is" as it is used in most, but that's not my purpose here.

What is the subject this time in is the existence of words which cannot be evaded by textual substitution or illustration, atomic words like "to do", "or", and "and". There's a finite set of atomic words, which is good because natural language is atomic. Since multiple words can use the same spelling (like the philosopher's concept of "to be" and it's more common use as a coupla and auxiliary verb) it is possible for a letter sequence to be simultaneously atomic and non-atomic, but by fiat we will define a "word" as having a unique definition.

The biggest debate in this school is "What do we get for free?" In other words, what are atomic concepts? Some, like Chomsky, go as far as to claim that the atomic words form a language (albeit not an easily spoken one) while others claim that nothing is free and thus all language is formed by experiences.

I personally am in the latter school, a newborn baby is incapable of organizing action and if one is not capable of formulating an idea like "do this" in what sense does one have language? I have read that newborns do not even have their senses under control yet, which would make understanding concepts of the outside world impossible.

Do we now have a good definition of "definition"? Is a word defined when it can be decayed into simpler concepts and experiences? I would say that is a definition, but not a good one. As humans have limitless ability for turning finery into pattern, I have little difficulty imagining that we are able to use the powerful machinery of the mind to understand words without difficulty.

Why? Because as Doug Hofstadter points out, we associate things with words that may not be in a strict definition. Because such a thing would be a language, but not English as it is written. Hofstadter uses the idea of a probability cloud to illustrate this.At the center is the tiny nugget that is meaning in the above dense sense, meaning that can be decayed to (sub)atomic ideas/experiences (much like how protons and neutrons are composed of quarks, "define" means to break down into component concepts) while the electron cloud is the flavor of the word, what it is associated with (just as the electron cloud decides how an atom reacts chemically, the associations cloud allows us to use flavorful concepts like "associations cloud" and "flavorful concepts"). Also like the atom, the two are fundamentally different things when separated. The whole was the object of this study.

Well, that's about all I have to say about defining. We all know from experience what tedious work it is to correct misunderstanding and how long it can take to explain what one means. I recently told a mildly dirty joke to an audience of non-native speakers and had to resort to a very embarrassing explanation. The composition of ideas in the joke was profane, even though the text was the kind of joke an uncle could tell a nephew. It was that experience that led me to write all this!

Finally, I want to acknowledge that not all meaning is mediated by words with a wonderful piece by Scriabin played by Vladimir Horowitz.

Mnemonics

2009-09-30T20:52:00.005-05:00

I haven't posted in a bit since I have had a couple large ideas for future posts. Working on them two of them really had legs and I'll post it soon. Until then, enjoy these mnemonics.

The Golden Ratio = φ = 1.61830988... = I primed a triangle ... but Sir Fibonacci finished.

Primes = 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, ... = We can write anyone's biographies.

Conway's Constant = 1.3035772690342963912570... = I see ... may agile escaped crewman ax rubber wrappings? But with an authority around few foolishly, I am, admit analogs. (Punctuation except commas represent zeros)

Fibionacci Sequence - 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, ... - A "A" to the right child.

2^(n-1)*(2^n - 1) - 1, 6, 28, ... - A little hepaticocholangiogastrostomy?

This one isn't mine, but it is the best number mnemonic I have seen:

e = 2.718281828459045235360287471352662497757... = We present a mnemonic to memorize a constant so exciting that Euler exclaimed: '!' when first it was found, yes, loudly '!'. My students perhaps will compute e, use power or Taylor series, an easy summation formula, obvious, clear, elegant. ('!' represents 0)

Modern Cryptographic History

2009-09-17T07:53:00.002-05:00

"Whitfield Diffie, a key figure in the discovery of public-key cryptography, traces the growth of information security through the 20th century and into the 21st. In the 1970s, the world of information security was transformed by public-key cryptography, the radical revision of cryptographic thinking that allowed people with no prior contact to communicate securely. "Public key" solved security problems born of the revolution in information technology that characterized the 20th century and made Internet commerce possible. Security problems rarely stay solved, however. Continuing growth in computing, networking, and wireless applications have given rise to new security problems that are already confronting us." - The Computer History Museum

I don't know the general tech-savvy, or history-savvy, of the people who read this blog. If you have any questions, post them in the comments section and I'll answer them as soon as possible.

Alan Turing, Britain Asks Forgiveness

2009-09-14T17:45:00.014-05:00

Britain has come to it's senses in at least small way and has issued a formal apology to Alan Turing for it's what it did to him - actions which led directly to his suicide at the age of 41. The apology can be found here.

It is happy that this apology has taken place. I hope that the British and American governments both apologize for the harsh treatment of homosexuals in various psych wards until 1973. Dr. Turing's death was a great blow to mathematics and computer science, yes, but it is the larger issue that takes precedence. It is not just sad that Turing was destroyed because he was so bright a light, it is sad because so many suffered and have become forgotten. I don't mean to cast aspersion on the British Government. Indeed, the Prime Minister recognizes this in the above linked statement.

However, I feel that I ought to explain Dr. Turing's work, in order to have people comprehend him as a man of incredible insight and rare genius rather than as a victim of society. To do this will require some scene setting. In 1900 David Hilbert (above) proposed a list of 23 problems, the solutions of which he proposed should take approximately a century of search. One of these questions (the second) asked for mathematicians to prove the axioms of arithmetic consistent. He was, in fact, referring to the work of Gottlob Frege, whose Begriffsschift had seemingly embedded the Peano Arithmetic in rock solid ground. All that remained to Hilbert was the asked for proof - and a century seemed plenty of time to write even such a non-trivial thing out.In 1901, however, the question changed. Bertrand Russell developed a formal paradox in Begriffsschrift. This paradox comes about through self-reference, and the importance of strange loops in these things is an interesting study that is beyond our scope. The point is that Begriffsschrift was as solid a foundation as a rollicking sea. The question altered suddenly in 1910. Luckily, a new system was written by Russell himself free of the paradoxes of the old kind.Unfortunately (or perhaps not) the mathematician Kurt Gödel proved that there were contradictions in Russel's work and these contradictions come not out of weakness but strength! Indeed every sufficiently strong mathematical system must bear the Gödellian problem.

Godel had proved that No Mathematical System Strong Enough To Hold The Counting Numbers Could Be Consistent And Complete. At this point, the only thing that remained of Hilbert's naive 2nd problem was this: the Entscheidungsproblem ("Decision Problem"). Could we build a mathematical device to simply throw out all the Godelian chaff and keep all the number theory wheat?

Enter Alan Turing, whose memory we are attempting to honor.

Dr. Turing was a student of the great logician Alanzo Church, who also did work on the Entscheidungsproblem (in fact, Church solved the problem first - but no one figured it out except people who had studied his λ-calculus extensively. Turing's beautiful and intuitive proof is the better and thus the wider known) and had figured out the basic problem was that no one really knew what mathematical machinery looked like. There were the systems of Russell, Zermelo, and Peano - but these were abstract set pushers. The sentences they made were dead, no one had ever bothered to define how someone could build a process in these languages.

Well, no one except Church and Turing. Turing's method is beautiful and simple, relying on only one even simpler idea. That idea is Finite State Machines.A Finite State Machine is a machine that when fed an input, changes state. The above, for instance, is fed an arbitrarily long binary number and bounces between states until it lands in S1 or S2. If it lands in S1, then the number has an even count of zeros and the machines accepts. Otherwise, the machine rejects. Try it and see!

Many "languages" (groups of acceptable strings) can be defined with finite state machines. But try to build one that can check if parenthesis are balanced. It is impossible, the machine needs some kind of memory in order to know how many layers deep it is!

And Turing began thinking about memory. What is a mathematician? A mathematician has a finite number of states (an enormous number, but finite) in his head and all the paper in the world to write on. And what is a Turing Machine? A finite state machine with all the memory in the world.

Anything in the world that can be done mechanically can be done with a Turing Machine. So Truing subtly re-wrote the question. He began to consider whether if one made a Turing Machine made to look over mathematical statements it could be the thresher aforementioned. His conclusion involved an insight into mathematics hidden deep in Godel's proof, an insight his explicit drawing has enriched every mathematician since.

This insight is deceptively simple "Turing Machines are a language," - more broadly "Metamathematics is a language." Since Turing Machines can define a language, then could not one be made to build Turing Machines? One could, this is the Universal Turing Machine. One can feed a string in to a UTM (we now call this "programming computers") and it can output any Turing Machine, which itself can do wonders. Dr. Turing's simple conceptions had struck to the heart of mathematics, which was so moved that it split and the new creature was dubbed "computer science".

And the Entscheidungsproblem? It's solution is simple: "No." Turing simply built an anti-Gödellian thresher and showed that it could not even thresh the program for an anti-Gödellian thresher! Yes, the Turing Machine turned the Entscheidungsproblem from a fearsome German phrase to a well-understood part of computation. Speaking of which, the Turing Machine becomes vital and powerful in the study of computational complexity; it gives the basis for the development of Artificial Intelligence while offer clarification on the intellegence of ourselves; his work on "Unorginized Machines" has given way to Neural Networking and Genetic Algorithms; his work crystallized the mathematical underpinnings of modern cryptography.These are perhaps Turing's deepest developments - the ones he will be remembered for when schoolchildren have to be reminded that Hitler and Attila lived at different times. These amazing feats did not slow Dr. Turing down as, famously, the writing of Principa Mathematica had done to Bertrand Russell. He remained a force of mathematical nature, working on ideas of practical, abstract, and computational nature until the end of his life. His service during WWII involved the most successful signals intelligence corp in history, and it is - as the Prime Minister of Britain notes - no coincidence that he was on the winning side.

In learning the story of the life of Dr Turing one becomes aware that the only essential thing Turing lacked was a society capable of accepting him, a society that would allow him to flourish. Instead he got one that took the best of his work and destroyed him in a fit of false moralistic madness. The society -not government true, but the society- that saved von Braun had destroyed Turing. If anything should be learned by the world from Turing's life (there is too much that must be learned from his work) it has nothing to do with homosexuality. What must be learned is the acceptance of deviation from the mean, the promotion of talent even if it comes with peculiarity, and the end of the wicked practice of the categorization of humans in a hierarchy of "moral correctness" that underpins all prejudice.

Back? (Also, a little essay on Einstein)

2009-09-13T20:20:00.009-05:00

I won't say for certain, but I'm pretty sure I have a steady job again and will have time and energy to post regularly. I've been both ridiculously busy and painfully un-busy (non-business doesn't pay) for the past few months, and I allowed this blog to stagnate. This is unprofessional of me, but it became a conscious decision over time that I can now rescind.

This post however, won't be entirely content free. Instead, I will explain why I love Albert Einstein.

"Einstein was a giant. His head was in the clouds, but his feet were on the ground. Those of us who are not so tall have to choose!" - Richard Feynman

Dr. Einstein is one of very few scientists whose fame is proportional to his greatness. Some would argue that the relative obscurity of Lorentz or Levi-Civita is a crime, but it is only the relative obscurity that such an argument looks at. Levi-Civita is (unfortunately) as well known as Satyendra Nath Bose, who even get's co-credit for some of Einstein's most important developments! Einstein's fame is, interestingly, almost inexplicable. Except towards the end of his life, almost all of his time was absorbed in his work. He was unattractive, not particularly charismatic, and regarded publicity with contempt. One man who has the inverse of all of these qualities was Bertrand Russell. Russell wrote much more non-technical work, he was more actively political (though Einstein had political opinions to my knowledge they were mostly very broad: for peace and individual freedom and against war and fascism), he lived a full fifteen years past Einstein. Why is Einstein clearly the more iconic man of numbers?

Unhappily, I must admit that the answer is scientific drama. The story of Einstein's building up of a great and beautiful architecture of physics so insightful that it took nearly a generation to show seams is perfect drama. The simplified popular view is that Einstein was the new Newton, and he is in this tale Blake's Newton.

Here, the popular Newton-Einstein image sits alone and uses geometry to explain the universe. Notice how Blake, a spiritualist to the point of being anti-scientific, cleverly skewer's geometry's cleanliness by contrasting the complex multi-hued natural world of the stone with the simple black and white curves of geometry.

I could tell you how this take is simplistic to the point of being untrue by way of describing his collaborations, studies of his predecessors and his very real social consciousness. But I suspect that you already understand this.

Instead I will contrast the scientific story of Bertrand Russsell.

Russell, who forgot his eyes but did bring his pipe.

Russell's most important technical work was the Principa Mathematica. He wrote many, many books and papers of lasting value, but he is as inextricably tied to that book as Einstein to the papers he published in 1905. It was the greatest possible defence of Russell's thought - it was the actual carrying out of a reduction of mathematics to formal typographical logic. It was in some senses a marvelous success, it formalized everything up to real numbers and it quickly becomes obvious that even powerful mathematics could be done with the system.

However, the primary lasting interest in this dense tome of typographical games isn't even in it! The mathematician Kurt Gödel proved that there were true statements that could never be proved in Principa Mathematica, for the first time drawing a line between proof and truth. The hero in this story is Gödel, and a great hero he deserves to be.

So Russell is well known among first year philosophy students as an archon of atheism who wrote an important book in logic rather than perhaps the most important mathematician in the world from 1903 to 1931. The moral of the story is that people may profess to disagree with Blake's image, the story they want is Blake's. Einstein is how people want to see their scientists.

But, I haven't even touched on why I love Einstein.

The reason is that the world is simple. Even a child or animal can survive in the world. A great scientist recognizes this. Feynman's quote above is as perceptive as any thing said about a scientist ever spoken.

I believe that there is a great deal of consistency in how a man conducts his business, even though there are often great differences. A scientist is not often an artist, and vice versa - and we don't expect them to be. However, the abstract process of making ideas and conveying them is sort of shared (I, a mathematician, am only dimly aware of how artists behave by themselves but I have heard stories). The obvious name is the paragon of musical structure, J.S. Bach. But I wish to take someone as feel oriented and unscientific as Claude Debussy.

In his music he uses the most abstract and sometimes dissonant of chords. He often allows an infinite slowness to overcome rhythm. His melodies are chromatic and un-oblivious. But even a child can recognize the beauty within, no one has difficulty listening to his floating works of art. In a phrase, Debussy was an artistic giant.All endeavors must reach a point where obviousness ceases. In learning to draw, there becomes a point at which drawing like a child, without plan or intelligence, becomes foreign. Occasionally you get a Rembrandt or a JMV Turner who can take the deepest most abstract bits and turn them into plain expressions. In learning music, the complex logic of chords, arrangements, fugues, et cetera must eventually be learned. Every once in a while you get a Bach or Debussy capable of turning deep magic into beauty.

In science and mathematics, principles must be decayed into more fundamental principles - at least it is if we want to explain anything. In the study of solidness for instance, first we noted that bricks were hard. We chopped them up and found them still hard. So we proposed solid brick-like atoms, which really explained nothing but helped a lot. Then we proposed atoms held by electrical forces, but the needed energy was lacking. Then we showed that atoms are made of nuclear forces. Fortunately, Freeman Dyson showed that in the study of solids this is as far as you need to go to get solidness. The Pauli Exclusion Principle is enough to explain why bricks feel hard. Fortunate or not Dysons, Paulis, and Einsteins are even rarer in science than in art - mostly because science is harder.

I am not denigrating the average scientist - essentially being one would make that difficult. The average scientist does good work. Denigrating this work would be a deceleration of principles against society. I am not prepared to do so. Heck, I would go far as to say the average musician sounds nice. I am just talking about the frequency of greatness.

And I will insist that if Einstein is better known than Debussy, it is because his work is more grounded and higher flying.

So, after much rambling we get to my appreciation of Einstein. The astonishing thing I discovered when I began to study Modern Physics is Einstein's use of geometry. The cleanliness and power of his geometrical arguments and thought experiments made the famously counter-intuitive relativity of mass, velocity, length, and simultaneity so obvious for a while I forgot that I had learned them. I was born in relative space after all and it's axioms and conclusions should be plain to any who payed attention.

During this time, I must admit, I did not love Einstein. I wrote the above section on the reasons for his fame not for your sake but mine. For a long time it galled me that Einstein should be better known than Riemann or Bolyai or even von Neumann (my hero at the time). I must have thought I was rebelling against popular culture by regarding it's beloved Einstein as a figure of greatly exaggerated importance.

It was a naive question that led me to the errors of my ways. I was asked to explain special relativity to a non-expert and I began thinking back to Einstein. I went and looked again and found a world of simplicity and wonder. I instantly recanted my jealousy of his fame. The concreteness of his mind astonished me as much as the wildest findings of contemporary work. Take On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies. Though Einstein erred in an aspect of this paper (indeed Einstein made many errors throughout his career, often over-estimating the reach of his geometrical intuitions), it is throughout a work of science as it ought to be done. In it's first sentences it points out observed problem with Maxwellian Electrodynamics and carefully erects a system to solve the underlying problem - and prop up special relativity. It is a paper that should be read by anyone with any mathematical skill, even if they already have a knowledge of more advanced theories.

It is the kind of paper that philosophers of scientists should debate over. It is a proof against Naive Falsificationism, after all it contains a few errors but is still correct. It is an argument against Kuhnian Paradigms, it was far outside the paradigm of it's time, yet Relativity survived.

My own explanation of this quality of science is: we relax our epistemology when trying to explain things and tighten it once some solutions are found. Perhaps it is the influence of William James, but I say that when proposing hypothesis one must be as bold as one is capable - not in spite but because one will often be wrong. In fact, I would argue that this fact flows naturally from the deeper observation that different situations often call for different approaches.

And it is this boldness and correctness together that made Einstein a giant, it put his head in the clouds and his feet on the ground. It is that he is worthy of fame that makes him so famous, and even his fame is great because it means that no one can take him from us.

Another Apology

2009-06-21T17:30:00.003-05:00

A computer implosion has robbed me of my computer for several days, and taken my only working pdf player. I've been trying to read a long FDA report to post on, but a bit more waiting is necessary.

Late Post Excuse

2009-06-10T11:58:00.001-05:00

I started working on something for this post, but then arbitrarily decided that the subject was interesting enough to do correctly. So instead of that, you're getting a half assed apology post.

To beg your forgiveness, I am going to offer John Fahey's performance of "Red Pony":

Taxi Driver

2009-05-25T21:30:00.007-05:00

Taxi Driver is one of the greatest movies ever made. Every time I see it, I'm shocked by it's power, leaness, beauty, and savagery. If you have never seen Taxi Driver I'm not going to describe the plot here but I am going to try to analyze it a little, so I'd recommend renting and watching the movie within the week before reading this analysis.

Taxi Driver is the self destructive impulses of a man without a society. It is hinted that he's scarred by the Vietnam War, but it's also hinted that these scars are yet another guise that Travis tries to put on.

Though the film is remarkably taught, the only scene that's just atmosphere is the beautiful final sequence, there are three scenes that I believe are the key to understanding the film.The first is Travis's clumsy first date with Betsy. When she picks the Kris Kristofferson song out of the air and connects him to it. Travis doesn't understand, and doesn't attempt to. It isn't the first time that it is clear that he can't adapt to his surroundings, but for the rest of the movie he attempts to make up for it. This scene is echoed in his very interaction with underaged prostitute Iris, his desperate attempts to seem both "cool" and "mature". His attempts to keep these masks on is as hilarious as Peter Boyle as the lying cabbie.Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a picture of what I think to be the pivotal scene in the movie. Travis has gone mad by this point, even if we allow that he didn't start there. He's begun his regimen, preparing to murder the people he blames for befouling the two women "in" his life - Palatine and/or Sport (we don't know which at this point). He's watching TV, and Jackson Browne is playing something soft on the TV. At the end of the scene he allows the television to fall to the ground (I don't recall him kicking it, but he might). This scene stuck in my mind for years, even beyond the iconic hyper-violent, self-destructive rampage just before the end it stuck with me. It shows his inability to comprehend his world, and his willingness to use violence to shape it how he wants it.

The third is, of course, the famous ending sequence, where Travis is seemingly beloved and rewarded for his actions. This final sequence is one of the greatest ever put to film, and I still can remember every glance that is made into the rear view mirror. In the end, Betsy fades out and all we see is Travis looking away at something. Finally, even Travis dissolves and only New York City remains. In his final act of self destruction he was only able to keep up his fantasy a few more seconds, and the world he could never understand envelops him.Wrapping up, I'd just like to mention Bernard Hermann's fantastic score which boils with ambiguity and indecision. Even in the opening scenes it melts between sleazy jazz sax and a foreboding base roar. It deserves a place in Hermann's great scores, which is no mean feat.

Peter Lorre

2009-05-18T21:41:00.007-05:00

Peter Lorre is one of my favorite actors of classical Hollywood. Along with Bela Lugosi, Vincent Price, and Boris Karloff embodied the classic Hollywood horror movie, but only Lorre was able to shake typecasting consistently. Well, maybe Price.Lorre was, by most accounts, an amiable man. his friendship with Humphery Bogart led to roles in The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. His performance in both movies steals every scene he's in - especially fortunate given his limited screen time but important role in Casablanca.Fat, bug eyed, and raspy voiced, Lorre was doomed to never be a romantic lead despite his acting talent. Sometimes, though, I think his stature was a blessing. He was one of the few people who could unironically make short, thin, pockmarked Humphery Bogart look like a physical god.Despite what I just said, Lorre could and did carry movies. The Mr. Moto series would not have flown without him, and his role in Mad Love is almost the only reason it's known today (the other two reasons:Karl Freund's last movie, and it's photographed by Gregg "Citizen Kane" Tolland).Of course, whenever one speaks of the past, the present becomes a looming topic. It is difficult to imagine Peter Lorre today. He is a man who I cannot imagine without the kinds of films he starred in, films of a style that no longer are made - indeed they were scarce even then! I do miss the classic Hollywood horror. I love many kinds of horror movie, and the self-similarity of the contemporary horror market should be thought of as unforgivable. Even the odd horror movie that does mix up the genre with fresh ideas - like No Country For Old Men - is now considered "not horror" because we expect such a mannered structure of cliches. True, the old Studio Hollywood was not a goldmine of innovation and creativity - but that does not forgive the sameness of today.Many thanks to the Peter Lorre Photo Gallery for contributing many of the photos in this post.

Big O-Notation

2009-05-09T18:06:00.011-05:00

While Donald Knuth didn't invent O Notation, my knowledge of it came from his work.

I was explaining Big O Notation to a non-mathematically inclined friend recently and I suddenly found that I didn't buy it! It makes it very difficult to explain something, when you suddenly don't buy the foundation. Upon reflection I recovered, and I found the recovery process to be very interesting even to the non-mathematician. I will put a picture of a dinosaur where the math begins and a picture of a spaceship where it ends. Feel free to skip if you are familiar or uninterested in the workings of Big O Notation.

First, what is Big O-Notation? Well, first let me give it to you in words, then abstract, then a couple examples.

Big O Notation defines a function with a certain vagueness. Absolute precision is nice, but often impossible and even more often pointless. It's a bit of a wastebasket, but a precisely defined and predictable wastebasket. It's so useful it actually does a lot more than collect numerical inaccuracies. In fact, it's so good at certain things that it is actually more used for one thing in particular that it overshadows the original usage!

This usage is in evaluating the efficiency of computer algorithms. The reason it is useful for doing so is outlined below, but non-mathematically it works like this: in order to function as a wastebasket it tells us the order of magnitude of things we can throw away. So, if we use it on a function of time efficiency, it will tell us how much time we are going to throw away.

So how does this wastebasket work? Well, let me give you a few loose particulars.

This is from a comic called Devil Dinosaur, which is a fairly accurate depiction of what creationists believe.

Let there be two functions f(x) and g(x) (I'll do it with actual functions in a bit if these letters don't grab your imagination).

f(x)=O(g(x)) as x→∞
iff |f(x)| ≤ M*|g(x)| for x>a for positive real M & any real a.

Formally speaking, that is read aloud like this: The function f of x has order g when x goes to infinity if and only if there exists some positive real number M such that the absolute value of f is less than M times g for all x greater than some number a.

Informally, you'd just say "Foo is Big Oh Bar".

If you're wondering where M and a come from, it's because I didn't tell you because they aren't important. The important thing is that there exists a function that is always greater than f if we look far enough. Also, I hope you noticed that the equals sign used isn't a real equals sign. Arithmetic around O Notation can be tricky, but it's often a necessary sacrifice.

Let's first build an example of O notation, then look at two more examples in the contexts of it's main uses.

f(x)=5x^9+3x+2.

Subbing our first line, we can see:
f(x)=O(g(x)) becomes 5x^9+3x+2=O(???)

So how do we fine our g(x)? Well, let's look at f when a=1.
f(1)=5*((1)^9)+3*1+2=10.

Well, we can see, that x^9 is going to be the real growing power. So, if we let M=10, then we can see anything times that growing to the nineth power is going to sit on top of our function - because it's growing at the same rate and has a power that equals them at x=a=1.

So since |5x^9+3x+2|≤ 10*|x^9| for x>1, 5x^9+3x+2=O(x^9).

But who cares and why?

Well, let's look at a "simple" function:

e^x=1+x+(x^2)/2+O(x^3) as x→0

This function let's us know that we cannot be off by more than some multiple of whatever we choose for x taken to the third power. Since that gets smaller as we approach zero, this function can be useful for estimating a not at all obvious value in a simple way. We simply ignore the O notated portion if it is small enough!

Let's try it out

x=0
e^0=1+0+(0^2)/2+O(0^3)
1=1+O(0)
0=O(0)

At this point, the O notated error outright disappears! Now, if it gets larger as we go away from it, then the function will be worked properly as a wastebasket.

x=.5
e^.5=1+.5+(.5^2)/2+O(.5^3)
1.64872127=1.625+O(.125)
.023721270=O(.125)

Error now exists. I am committing an abuse of notation here, saying O(.125). Standard practice is to factor out any constant and write O(1). Looking at the part of the definition after iff shows this is possible pretty easily. I'm going to conform to standard practice from here down.

x=1
e^1=1+1+(1^2)/2+O(1^3)
2.71828183=2.5+O(1)
0.218281828=O(1)

The error is almost a tenth of the result! This is really much to high. We can see the error function absorb more and more.

x=2
e^2=1+2+(2^2)/2+O(2^3)
7.3890561=5+O(1)
2.3890561=O(1)

I think it's clear that this wastebasket conforms to expectations.

So, just one last function before we can leave. A realistic computational efficiency function. Let's say we have an algorithm that requires a sorting a list and selecting the middle value. If the list is even, then average the two "middle" values.

So, the time to compute is the time to: sort list+check evenness+select middle values+divide by two half the time. How can we find the amount of time this process will take? Well, using O notation, we can find the order of each element. The vagaries of O notation show that - as our intuition suggests - that this will run about as fast as the slowest section. We can then estimate the overall efficiency of the algorithm.

This can be seen if we accept that the sum of a series of Big O functions is the same as the largest function in the sum, which is not difficult to prove. I'd prefer not to do it here though.

I'm going to write from this point on assuming that you read none of the above.

Again, O notation tells you the scale of a function even as it increases. As I was explaining this I suddenly found myself disbelieving in the value of our wastebucket. I must have been in an odd state of mind. Maybe I explained it poorly and was having difficulty believing my own words. Still I will try to recreate my difficulty and why I think it is worth reading about.

Say you have the function 50*x^4+x^2. The wastebasket for that is O(x^4). I was stricken with an inability to swallow that was large enough to hold our function!

Think about what happens as x gets very large. If we take a million (10^6), we can see already that leaving out the x^2 makes little difference. But is not 50*x^4 still 50 times as much as x^4? How can we fit fifty things into one basket? In my defense, I had no paper to write out a function to see how miniscule this difference is. If you find it yourself, you will see. Also, I was actually thinking of the function x and O(x), where such things are slightly less obvious.

I thought of a million. I found myself unable to believe that any multiple of a million is just about a million. I retried with a billion. Again, 2 and 3 billion seemed far too distant to be considered on a scale with a million. Even the difference between a one and a couple trillion now has too much political reality.

And then I thought of a quadrillion. That's a thousand trillion, 10^12, or 1,000,000,000,000. Suddenly, like a light turning on, I was able to again grasp Big O Notation intuitively and simply. This, you see, is almost the count of cells in the human body. And if our cells were a bit bigger or smaller, who would notice? Most of our bodies are made of various smooth substances, not rough things. The O Notation can be seen as the smoothing out over time.

So what makes this interesting to someone not interested the vagaries of my mind - an audience I assume you are a a member of. Well, it illustrates something very interesting about how we think about scale.

Scale is one of the most important ideas for a person making sense of today's world. The human sphere is expanding, and understanding things at a small level no longer confers sense on the global scale.

It's arguable if it ever did, but certainly in modern times with airplanes, the internet, and the immediacy of international commerce we can no longer consider ourselves informed if we try to think.

The paradox of thrift is a simple case of Macro vs. Micro level thinking. The paradox is as follows: "If everyone increases the amount of money they save during a recession, then aggregate demand will drop - worsening the depression." Since saving and thrift is generally good for the individual, it presents an interesting dilemma. I'm told something similar happened in Japan. However, Economics is almost a science, so few schools agree on anything. Luckily, this is immaterial, the questions of scale simply changes form.economists disagree as to what is going on.

Richard Feynman

Feynman once said: "There are 10 to the 11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers."

I wasn't thinking of this when I was pondering O Notation, but I did conform to it's pronouncements. To my mind, the instant I thought of a billion or a trillion the economic scale came to mind. It was impossible for me to allow such blurring as the O Notation creates to occur, as to do so would be to ignore real world problems.

But it makes me think of other questions of scale. The budget for The United States Department of Defense in 2009 is projected to be $786 billion. How much does that mean in real terms? Is this the right scale?

It is the case that we as laymen don't know the accounts of the various sub-departments in detail to know the exact value of Defense. So the only political question here that we are capable of considering: What is the "right" scale for spending on defense? What about health? What about education? Energy? Veteran's Affairs?

This questions are left as an exercise to the reader. There is some evidence they are difficult.

But Wait, There's More!

This is my first post on my new schedule. For the conceivable future, there will be a new post every Monday. I'll see you next week!

Humor And the Formal Narrative

2009-03-29T20:38:00.018-05:00

Yes, I am alive and well. After not posting for a while - and giving a load of crap posts - I feel compelled to write something worth reading. So this post will be about a particular kind of humor - the variety that comes from mocking "forms".

A form is a perceptual structure, an idea shape. Anything that has any kind of structure has a form. Often these forms are slightly fictitious. A piece of electronics has a corresponding circuit diagram as a form though the circuit and the diagram are two very different things. It is widely believed that there is a very high level form to both thought and reality (interestingly, the second would seem to imply the first).

Claude Shannon, information theorist, is useful as a human face for the concept of abstraction.

This form is generally considered to be mathematical in nature (to quote one man's opinion on it "Every science is a real science insofar as it is mathematics"), though certainly not necessarily mathematical in the ordinary sense - a system of closed form equations. It is possible very possible that the universe is better represented by iterative functions or differential equations or some other unknown process that may have no elementary solution.

But I digress... this post isn't about those implications except indirectly. Instead, I am going to write a little bit about humor. There is something both universal and intensely personal about humor. Humor can come from structure, charachter, and - even harder to define - aesthetics. Humor is difficult to encapsulate. There is a great deal of humor in seriousness. Is anything quite as funny as Robot Monster?

What precisely is the incongruity that makes this so funny?

Since this picture is certainly the only thing like itself, what are we comparing it to when we say it looks wrong? In fact, I don't think I would say it looks wrong but that it just looks wrong. As opposed to a subtle or complex wrongness, this is just laughable. One must always remember that functioning human adults made this movie. What led them to this ... aesthetic? Certainly, it wasn't mere poverty. There is a plethora of cheap black and white sci-fi movies which lacked this "aesthetic" and are now completely forgotten.

Are we imagining some sort of counter-factual image in which Robot Monster? What image do we have that a robot monster (which certainly the lead of a film called Robot Monster should be) should look like that this image is transgressing? Perhaps a more classical humor would help.

Classical Humor, but not the classic cast

Here The Three Stooges (Larry, Moe, and Curly-Joe) tussle with a more classic idea of a robot. It is large, gray, and highly unnatural looking. It is made out of simple euclidean shapes, in other words it looks engineered. Is this the idea we have of robots that makes Ro-Man so "unusual"? In a way it is very prejudicial of us.

I think we can agree at this point that comedy is a complex, mostly intuitive process. When one tries to pull it apart, humor only rarely arises. But this is by far from universally true! Indeed, one wellspring of comedy is the mockery of the various narrative forms.

A Sports Movie. Notice the deadly serious expressions on everyone's face.

There is probably a great deal of grammar for talking about this in art circles, but I am forced to develop my own out of ignorance. I have already defined form, it's close cousin formality comes next. Formality is the level of abstractness of the underlying form that one intentionally follows. Something with a high degree of formality is "very formal".

A sort of scale "exists": Monster A Go Go is as formless as Three Dimensional Random Walk. Coen Brothers movies are (mostly) fairly informal. Rock N' Roll follows strict forms, but mostly intuitively - leaving it at a sort of middle. Agatha Christie novels are pretty formal. Romantic Comedies are rigidly formal. Harry Stephen Keeler is formal to the point of incomprehensibility. I hope that this axis clearly indicates that there is not a direct relationship with formality and creativity or quality. There is more than enough room in any story structure to allow for play.

This is - as noted before - about a certain approach to formality, a perverse approach. I would call it being sly, some call it being subversive. Subversive is too political sounding for my tastes. When people mock sports movies they are not generally making a political statement about the role of sport or recreation in society. To be redundant, what they are doing is mocking sports movies. To do this one builds a sports movie but does it in a way that undermines the standard grammar of sports movies.

Though slyness is itself an approach, there are also many approaches one can take to being sly. The most obvious is the outright parody. In fact, one of the most common pitfalls of slyness is what could be called a "Shallow Parody", where rather than inventively mock the best parts and greatness of something one wallows in the underbelly. It results in a so-called slyness that is only as good as the weakest of the ideas stolen.

A good example of a parody is Screwy Squirrel - an almost pure parody of Tex Avery madness (done by the man himself).Generally, descending into self-parody is a Bad Thing. And truthfully, Screwy Squirrel isn't Tex Avery's high water mark. Screwy is so pure a parody that he doesn't really have a personality for himself.

It might behoove me at this point to define satire, which fortunately I have already done.

Anyway, Screwy Squirell also mocks the kinds of cutesy cartoons still being made at the time (or at least, only recently ended). They are abruptly dismissed, though there actually were some good ones. Avery's own I Love To Singa is the big cult classic there.Another point of Screwy Squirrel's mockery is the Cecil Turtle/Droopy Dog plot device that was a bizarre Tex Avery trademark.

Another method of mockery is the welding together of two genres so dissimilar that seriousness becomes impossible. In The Blow Out, (a long time favorite of mine - though I can never remember the name of the cartoon Lucille La Verne's evil voice is very memorable) Avery welds together a Pulp Fiction villain with a sanitized Little Rascals hero.

I just noticed that Avery again uses a bad guy mercilessly hounded by a good guy in this one. He must have found the whole idea hilarious.

Parody exists in music as well. Frank Zappa often parodied forms, he had a professed love of Doo-Wop. Zappa was equally capable of larger scale parody and out-right satire.

And now here's something you'll really enjoy!

Another type of slyness is the more general Rocky & Bullwinkle variety.Most fondly remembered was the self important Mr. Peabody and his boy Sherman.It is this kind of slyness that is perhaps the hardest to describe. It can't honestly be described as a parody. But it certainly isn't . It is a feigning of unintelligence while displaying obvious intelligence. Sometimes, it involves deliberate Camp, but not always. Like all forms of slyness is an approach, not a style. Ren & Stimpy had a similar slyness, but was entirely different in style.

This variety can also be found in music. Take the B-52s and Josquin des Prez also made effective use of imitation and humor.

This is Des Prez. You probably won't see the B-52s and Des Prez compared again.

The oeuvre of these musicians aren't really parodying something in particular. Rather there is a whole feel of play and humor that pervades the music.

It's interesting to think of the importance of words in these songs. While El Grillo is very light, Rock Lobster is rather perversely violent. Indeed, the fun of the song is in the contrast of the oddly serious surf-esque music with the absolutely kitschy imagery. We know that the music is humorous in intent - exactly how is what I'm driving at. Would a martian with no preconceived knowledge hear the song and interpret it as being much more violent than we with our shared ideas of kitsch? Would that make it less funny or more? It is difficult to say.

I don't want to imply that all musical humor comes from the spoken parts. Chopin's "Wrong Note" Etude (opus 25 - #5 in E minor), for instance is not only full of awkward dissonance, but is not quite rhythmically correct. Of course, playing it wrong perfectly is itself very instructive (it forces one out of finger ruts) - which is why it is in a lesson book. One bit that makes it funny is that it sounds like an amateur imitating Chopin - and an amateur exercise that could only have been written by a master is a funny concept indeed! I think the only time I've ever laughed out loud listening to a symphony though was during Charles Ives's Symphony no. 4 (I think it was four anyway). The way it blasted from outright incredible dissonance straight into an orchestral rendition of folk songs was hilarious! Absolutely Hilarious!

But as I was writing, we run into the same problem in music that we do in imagery - the Robot Monster Problem - how do we differentiate between "serious" uses from non-serious. How the question is framed is very important. We already can and do differentiate parody and non-parody. We can even tell the difference between Screwy Squirrel and non-parodic but also humorous cartoons, which is really quite the feat if one thinks about it.

Even on a basic level single word level we can find humorous names that seem to tweak something indefinable.What is it about the names Prescott Lowery or (Wal)ly Ballou that makes them so laughable? Both are fairly realistic smashing of syllables after all.

These are deep mysteries.

Sonny Terry

2009-02-13T17:41:00.003-06:00

There is no music in the world quite like Sonny Terry's. He was a harmonica player, most famous as part of a duo with Brownie McGhee.
If Sonny Terry had a trademark it would be his wild whoops and hollers. If he had a style it would be his rolling and rollicking wave of sound. He loved to play and loved to blow the harp he was always bouncing more sounds out of it - never less.There is a whole chock full of videos available on YouTube from when Sonny & Terry did a show for Pete Seegar.

I don't know what I could write to follow up Sonny Terry. I mean unless I just jam out something great I might as well stop.

Incredulity Toward Metanarratives

2009-02-06T10:12:00.008-06:00

Postmodern philosophies are any philosophies where a fundamental incredulity toward metanarratives exist - therefore either a general denial or a superabundance of metanarratives can exist inside a postmodern philosophy.

First, let me explain what a metanarrative is. To do that one has to understand what a narrative is.

A narrative is an ordered collection of events that happen. This is an example of a "narrative".

If a narrative is an ordered collection of events, an ordered collection of narratives is a metanarrative. The ultimate example of a metanarrative is the arrived in the late nineteenth century. It is a union of independent philosophies: particularly Marxism and Social Darwinism.

H. G. Wells exemplified one school of that popular philosophy.

Modernism is about architectonic systems like this. Recall Joyce, who believed he could - in a single unified novel - bring together the entire psychic (in the greek sense of psychic) world of Dublin.

Is that philosophical goal, indeed, possible? It is something to aim for, surely. But something can be a great and important accomplishment and not quite achieve it's goals. Another book that more concretely "failed" in it's philosophical goal is Russell and Whitehead's Principa Mathematica.

One of Russel's close friends Wittgenstien, a postmodernist thinker, made a very salient philosophical criticism. The Principa Mathematica was supposed to be the foundation of mathematics. It was to be the ultimate metanarrative - the explanation of all possible narratives in mathematics. But, if it ever disagreed with our everyday sense of numbers we would reject the Principa and not our everyday sense of numbers.

In essence, one of his criticisms is that the very idea of metanarratives is slaved to actual narratives. Our explanations are subservient to our observations.

Postmodernist philosophies in general take this as a strong principle - that metanarratives in general have a different kind of truth than narratives. Whether they are all untrue or which are relatively true is hotly debated.

I think one of postmodernism's most interesting relationships is with the philosophy of science, namely in defining whether science is a metanarrative or a generalized skepticism. but I'd like to collect my thoughts a little more before I write on that. Instead, let me look at something a little simpler: Entertainment!

What is postmodern entertainment? Let's play a little language game. I'm going to write the words I've been using, then try to turn them into something that actually has an intelligible meaning. You have to try to get ahead of me!

Postmodern Entertainment Is Entertainment That Demonstrates Incredulity Toward Metanarratives.

We know all those words, but what do they mean all put together like that?

I know what I think of: comedies like The Three Stooges or Ren & Stimpy. Comedies where plots can be ludicrously complex or simple to the point of abstractness and one couldn't tell the difference.

The originator of this "style" of comedy (Comedy Through Superior Firepower is an apt description), at least so far as movies or shorts are concerned, is W.C. Fields.He is, I think, The Three Stooges biggest single influence - though they never did outright imitations of Fields. Benny Hill definitely came out of Fields.

So, what is it about these pieces of entertainment that makes them postmodern? The unwillingness to tie the events of a plot to a formal structure. Most stories follow a general flow, but not these. They could be thought of Random Events Plot, but there is nothing truly random. They are all carefully constructed, just not with plot in mind but humor.

The Three Stooges would happily drop scenes that explained how they got somewhere or why they were doing something in favor of a better gag. Fields worked the same way.

Dramatic examples are harder to think of, because they tend to be more controversial. Even a small formal change can make people furious. No Country For Old Men was a very good Action/Horror movie, but it had the main charachter murdered off-screen. People flipped, even though such an action had been being set-up the entire movie. They did so because it disagreed with their memory of how stories are "supposed" to work, with their formal -though never stated- ideas of dramatic plotting. I wouldn't call No Country For Old Men postmodern, though.

What I need is an acknowledged classic with a chaotic plot structure. Citizen Kane, with it's subjective time travelling, comes to mind, of course. But there is nothing chaotic about Kane. It moves forwards, backwards, left, and right in time - but there is a careful structure. Besides, I don't want something artsy for this example. I want a good chaotic drama that anyone could enjoy.

Another good example that's still a bit to arty is Yasujiro Ozu. His hatred for melodrama brought him to making a long series of almost identical - though very wonderful - movies about normal Japanese families going through normal problems.

Here it is! Casablanca. Casablanca is one of the most inconsistent movies ever made, also one of the best. At it's genre core it's a romantic comedy/spy drama (or is a spy comedy/romantic drama?). There were a dozen writers, multiple directors, and a ton of crew changes on Casablanca and boy does it ever show. At one point, a hysterically funny scene of Humphery Bogart making fun of people in his bar goes straight into a scene of alchohol fueled melodrama. Peter Lorre is in the movie for about a minute, though he has the best scene in the film. Sydney Greenstreet is in the movie too, more because he's a great actor than that they really had a charachter for him to play.

But it's wonderful! The best scenes (well except the one with Peter Lorre) are the inconsistant ones! In fact, the inconsistancy and the fact that the narrative only occaisonally appears is what gives this movie strength!

The movie's only real flaw is the choice of the song "As Time goes By". The lyrics are perfect and when Sam plays it the song works. But the melody is just too sweet to be played by an orchestra (as it does during melodramatic scenes). The composer Max Steiner knew this and wanted to go back and change it, but it was too late.The Maltese Falcon had an almost identical cast, but was a much more consistent and narrative centered movie. It also had more Peter Lorre. I would rank the films as equals really, but watching both back to back will give one a good impression of the difference between a movie with a metanarrative and one without.

Red Dwarf

2009-02-04T10:00:00.006-06:00

It seems that Netflix has made some kind of deal with the BBC, a deal which allowed me to discover the sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf.

This is the third series cast, and I'm almost through with the second.

It's your basic sitcom really, "The Odd Couple in Space!" is the best way to describe it. It's nothing to write home about, but it's fun and often funny. I have an affection for complex time travel plots, so the series is right up my alley.

The show stars Craig Charles as Dave Lister, the Oscar Madison.

And Chris Barrie as Rimmer, the Felix Unger.

It has a few other charachters, but that's the core of the series.

There isn't really much else I can say about it without going into plot synopsis. It's not the greatest tv series - it's not even the greatest british science fiction comedy tv series - but it's a fun likable little sci-fi show. That's about it.

Unusual Instruments

2009-01-14T20:24:00.003-06:00

The timbre of an instrument, it's "color", is it's defining feature. This post will highlight some of the odder colors.

The Glass Armonica

Player Piano

Kazoo and Open Mouth

African Harp And Thumb Piano

A piece for custom instruments designed by Harry Partch (written, of course, by the same) can be found here.

Have you heard the new Flaming Lips album? It's a soundtrack to a movie Wayne Coyne (the lead singer) made in his backyard. The movie looks like a confused student film, but the music is as great as we've come to expect from the Lips.

Also, I've found some neat videos of John Fahey. Start here. The guy has enough interesting music on his channel to make the looking around worth it.

It's Over!

2008-12-26T11:27:00.005-06:00

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night! Last night that is, as of now Christmas festivities may officially end!

Well Christmas has come and gone, and I have come to regret something. You see, a few years ago someone sent me a summer sausage for Christmas, and I mentioned I liked it. Big mistake. Now I have no less than six logs of meat, and a jar of mustard or brick of cheese for each one. I like the stuff, I don't bow down and worship it!

I bought a few books:

Against The Day - Thomas Pynchon

A parody of various pre-WWI writing styles, in the famed Pynchon mold. Very funny.

Metamagical Themas - Douglas Hofstader

A collection of his columns from the Scientific American, a very engaging read. Reading his lengthy exposition about gender and language has inspired me to write a short article about linguistic aesthetics. It will be posted here soon.

I also got a couple video games:

Killer 7

A wonderful game of assassins.

Braid

A very interesting platform game.

Buddhism in a Nutshell

2008-12-01T20:26:00.010-06:00

In a comment on The Bitter Animator's blog, I made a quick jocular comment about Buddhism and enlightenment. Unfortunately, it deals with concepts that are difficult to elucidate quickly.

The simplest way to give context to these ideas is to begin with a brief biography of their initiator.

Queen Mahamaya Guatama, wife of King Suddhodana Gautama, dreamt that a white elephant with six white tusks and bearing a lotus entered her womb through her right lower abdomen. This, oddly enough, was interpreted as a good sign.

She gave birth to Siddhartha Gautama the usual amount of time later.

Several mystics and seers came and told King Suddhodana that his son would either be a great king or a spiritual paragon. The monk Kaundinya was the only one to claim only the latter. King Suddhodana would prefer the former. Suddhodana built three palaces and made sure that his son knew nothing of religion or suffering. He provided everything for his son hoping that he would take on his worldly role as King. When Siddhartha reached a marriageable age (16), Suddhodana got him a wife:A wife and son in tow, the Buddha served as prince for 13 more years.

Now 29, Siddhartha went on a tour of his city. Despite his father's care, this time Siddhartha saw suffering. A sick old man lay in the street.Astonished by the infinite potential for suffering in the universe, Siddhartha began leaving his home more and more. One day he comes across an ascetic monk who, to paraphrase, claimed that the solution to suffering was in dissolution. Siddhartha decided to leave his family to become an monk himself.
He practiced extreme asceticism, going on long periods without food or water, living on alms, sleeping on the side of the road, and practicing self-mortification. He was so weak after six years of this behavior that while bathing in a small river he collapsed and nearly drowned.

He crawled out of the river and walked back to town. He was so bony and emaciated that a young girl (Sujata) took him for a spirit and gave him some food. He finally realized that even the most extreme asceticism was helping no one. Siddhartha left Sujata's house and sat under a tree and started thinking, swearing to himself that e would not budge until he found what he was looking for.
He sat and thought under this tree for 49 days.
Finally, he hit on the answers he was looking for.

What he realized is often split into two parts for ease of explanation:

THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS

1. This is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair are suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.
--> In other words, everything can lead to suffering.
2. This is the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is this craving which leads to renewed existence, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there, that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for existence, craving for extermination.
--> In other words, suffering happens because people want the essentially impermanent (for instance, all of reality) to be permanent.
3. This is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering: it is the remainderless fading away and cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, nonreliance on it.
--> In other words, when it is realized that everything is impermanent and stop worrying about such things, suffering in the ordinary sense will cease
4. This is the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering: it is the Noble Eightfold Path; that is, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.
--> In other words, there is a structure to the proper way to go about Noble Truth Number 3.

So, you see, the Buddha says people are greedy and selfish because they think they are getting something out of it - which they ultimately don't.

When the Buddha says "He who has ten friends has ten ills, he who has no friends has no ills," what he means is that undue attachment to human beings (with their finite lifespan and unhappy nature) will eventually cause suffering to the one's so attached.

Tune in next time for "Christianity in a Nutshell"!

How Not To Do It

2008-10-16T19:49:00.005-05:00

Possibly the worst copywriting I've ever seen are the various covers of CBS Soaps In Depth. I can't seem to find the one in particular I remember. It read-in CBS-SID's trademark random Bold Inflation:

NEW Bed sheets SHOCK
Day Fans

Y&R
DNA Shocker!

And a few smaller subtitles, all of which offered shocking newness. And why?

This got me thinking about Soap Opera in general. People love long, labyrinthine, loose narratives. Dickens, Comic Books, Pynchon, Soap Operas, Epic Poetry-the list goes on. What is the appeal?

I feel that by robbing the possibility of reducing a story a conceit the forms mentioned above force the audience to grow attached to charachters. We want to see them go through every thing, and if things gets complex that's life.

Of course, as the stories get increasingly complicated one begins shutting out anyone who hasn't followed since the very beginning. This is why novels are so respected these days - there's no coming in at the wrong moment.

Rather than let this post end on a simple and definite note, I will go out with a bang:

The Wire

2008-09-25T21:27:00.007-05:00

The Wire was a TV series about crime in Balitmore. Due to poor ratings, the show was canceled in March of this year. In response to a glowing review, I decided to watch to see what all the fuss was about. I was not disappointed. So far, I've seen the first season, and basically know how the series ends (curse you Wikipedia).

I am about to write another glowing review. If you want serious criticism, look for it somewhere else.

First, the big facts. The genre the show works in is the Police Procedural, but it is not typical of the genre. Certainly, it is very far from Dragnet. It is a carefully researched recreation of life in parts of Baltimore. Series Creator and Main Man David Simon was a journalist in the area for many years, Number Two Ed Burns was a policeman and teacher in the same area. Many prominent (and, more importantly, not-so-prominent) Baltimore figures make appearances in the show. The emphasis on factual accuracy, a contribution of Jack Webb to this particular genre, is fairly legendary. Many of the stories told are real ones, or fictionalizations. The emphasis on realism is very interesting.

The structure of The Wire is influenced, in spirit if not in fact, by Tolstoy. If War & Peace is an epic in prose, The Wire is an epic in a televisual medium. It is a big story about a lot of people. About a lot of people caught up in a lot of stuff. Occasionally it can be difficult to follow, but if one pays attention everything is well drawn enough that following the overall narrative isn't difficult. Both Tolstoy and The Wire were considered realists by everyone but themselves. Both frankly and directly discuss what needs to be discussed. Both are just plain skilled enough to make the sociology seem completely unpretentious.

Issac Babel once said of Tolstoy "If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy." This is, in essence, the "style" of The Wire. The audience is never asked to identify (cinematographically speaking) with a character, unless one considers concepts (like the City of Baltimore or, more pretentiously, Humanity) charachters. We are always encouraged to look at people, look at the systems they live in.

Now back to genre for a second. Normally, in a Police Procedural "We" are the police. We will probably shown a great deal about the streets, but we are essentially the police. When the police discover something, "We" discover something. When the police turn and notice something the camera pans over to it. In The Wire, not so much.
But what about the charachters? As sharp and crisp as good cheese.

Incidentally, I don't eat a lot of fancy cheese, but there's this cheese called Double Aged Gouda that just tastes delicious.

But enough about delicious rotten milks, back to The Wire. The charachters are very distinctive, both from each other and from how charachters are usually written. This is doubly impressive when one considers just how many their are. One of my favorite examples is "Prez" Pryzbylewski.When you first see him, you are lead to believe he's an awful police officer who keeps his job for political reasons. When you next see him he shows that in fact ... he's an awful police officer who keeps his job for political reasons.

When confined to the desk, he suddenly starts making important contributions to the case. It is incredibly obvious, though unstated, that he has what I call a "street ego". When he is out and about, he is a horrible jackass. When chained down and given time to think, he's an efficient employee. I've seen it at least dozen times, though never to the extent of Prez. Some people can't think off the cuff. Some people have egos. Prez has both, but he gets better.

Mostly because Detective Lester Freamon is natural police. Everyone around Detective Freamon benefits from it. If you watch The Wire, you will respect Det. Freamon.Other than the incredible Mr. Freamon, the most consistently popular character is Omar Little, the homosexual drug thief. I can see why, he's "moral" to a fault, and tougher than tough. Omar is the star of the first real action scene (in episode 8), and is just generally an incredibly tough guy. Harder than diamond. There is an ocean more in The Wire, but that is enough of a taste that one can decide to commit or not to commit.

In short, I recommend it.

Cool

2008-09-02T22:10:00.009-05:00

Everybody's being forced to learn to use the completely retarded Microsoft Formula interface, and I've tied everything to macros, finished in five minutes, and declared myself superior to the little tech lady. The point is that this is a quick post. Also, read this one first.

A quick summation: The core controversy about coolness is whether it can be synthesized or not.

Is smoking cool?

Winston Churchill thought so. He rarely smoked (being enormously overweight hampered his breathing already), but would light up with a big cigar before a photo-op because he thought it made him look cool.

This is a strong point against my definition of coolness as being an aspect of someone's personality, and a point towards it being an artificial state. It implies that someone can put on and take off coolness (which is correct getting back to the African roots, but not in the sense I used it). Perhaps Churchill was cool, as Belushi et al. showed a genuinely cool person could parody cool without risk to themselves.
When I see this, it gets harder to justify that smoking isn't cool. In an abstract graphic way though. Hacking up phlegm isn't cool, Cancer isn't cool, coughing isn't cool, being short of breath isn't cool. Perhaps there is a difference between cool looking and being cool.This guy looks like a Nazi assassin. But one of the good ones, who does it for country. Then he refuses to assassinate the girl (that's the difference between movie assassins and real ones) and joins the fight against the ... Japanese. Because, you know fatherland and all that.

But my point is that he looks cool, despite the fact that he is trying to sell a stupid ridiculous novelty invention.Why do intellectuals look cooler smoking than others? I ask you, the reader to answer.Also, why are long coats so cool looking? I know they've become a bit of a cliche, but they still look cool! Look at this still from Once Upon A Time in the West and deny it.So I ask the reader two questions:

Why does smoking look cool if it makes a person act uncool?
Why do long jackets look cool?

My own guess is that they tend to exaggerate minimal movements, which makes an already cool person (cool in the sense of stillness and sang-froid) more look more dynamic, without making them appearing volatile in personality.

Define:Trivial

2008-08-27T09:54:00.004-05:00

Do you see that cartoon above? Is it funny? There is nothing else funny about this post. This post is not a comedy.
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Trivia in language according to WordNet:

* S: (adj) fiddling, footling, lilliputian, little, niggling, piddling, piffling, petty, picayune, trivial ((informal) small and of little importance) "a fiddling sum of money"; "a footling gesture"; "our worries are lilliputian compared with those of countries that are at war"; "a little (or small) matter"; "a dispute over niggling details"; "limited to petty enterprises"; "piffling efforts"; "giving a police officer a free meal may be against the law, but it seems to be a picayune infraction"

* S: (adj) superficial, trivial (of little substance or significance) "a few superficial editorial changes"; "only trivial objections"

* S: (adj) trivial (concerned with trivialities) "a trivial young woman"; "a trivial mind"
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I feel that it is important to inform those without any knowledge in this area that, though the mathematical definition descends from the informal one, it is completely separate. From now on I will be writing about the mathematical definition.
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Trivial in mathematics according to Wolfram MathWorld:

Related to or being the mathematically most simple case. More generally, the word "trivial" is used to describe any result which requires little or no effort to derive or prove. The word originates from the Latin trivium, which was the lower division of the seven liberal arts in medieval universities (cf. quadrivium).
----According to Richard Feynman, a theorem is trivial if and only if it has already been proved. This is actually a surprisingly useful definition in many contexts, but not in others (for instance pedagogically).

There is a famous story about triviality in mathematics. A mathematician and a student were discussing a theorem (in the version I heard it was number theory). The teacher makes a point, and calls it "trivial". The student stares at the teacher perplexed and says: "Are you sure that's trivial?" The teacher thinks a little while and then retreats to his office. An hour latter he finds the student and gives his answer:

"Yes."

What is and is not trivial matters a lot to me for philosophical rather than technical reasons. When thinking about Artificial Intelligence, one of the most difficult things to do is to define "intelligence", particularly for a Pierce-ian like me. The famous Turing Test is very good, extremely good, for one aspect of natural language. But, it leaves out many, many things (some of them much simpler) that a normal person would desire to consider intelligent.

Besides, I just find it odd that an interview would establish sentience. In my view, intelligence is not mostly linguistic skills, but rather creativity. Many would agree with me. But what is creativity? I have come up with a rather stupid definition, but one which I believe is functional:

Intelligence is the ability to create any non-trivial thing.

Really stupid, but let's see if we can't clean it up.

"the ability" refers only to potential action. So, by being of the same species (or having the same structure) of a creature (computer) with proven intelligence also proves your own.

"to create" means to print out, or to write, or otherwise make. This would ideally be a mathematical proof that is not a proof by exhaustion. There is nothing wrong with these kinds of proofs, but I don't consider them sufficient evidence for intelligence. A computer that can do 1,936 cases of the Four-Color Theorem is impressive (very impressive), but it is a tool not a thinking machine.

"non-trivial thing" is the hardest to define. This is the reason I don't allow proofs by exhaustion, because they are just considerations of a large number of individually trivial cases. In order to prove intelligence a creature (or machine) must be able to make a proof with "elegance".

All of this relies on essentially non-technical definitions of "triviality" and "elegance", which is a flaw I have yet to root out.

If anyone wants to chew me out or point out flaws in my thought process, please do so. If one could point me to a similarly minded philosopher or scientist, I would be thankful. And finally, if you liked that cartoon, it is called "Nu, Pogodi" and the entire series is available on YouTube.

Shogun Assassin

2008-08-25T20:05:00.012-05:00

What an awful advertisment!That's a little better...

I love Ronin Movies, and the crown prince of Ronin movies is Shogun Assassin. It was made out of the first two movies in the Lone Wolf and Cub Series, and it is a wonderful film. The King of Ronin Movies would be either Yojimbo (The Bodygaurd) or Seven Samurai, depending on how you look at it.

Incidentally, I hated Kill Bill. It is the kind of movie that someone wants to make after watching Shogun Assassin, but isn't nearly as good.The film stars Tomisaburo Wakayama as Lone Wolf (dubbed by Lamont Johnson) and Akihiro Tomikawa as Daigoro (dubbed by Sandra Berndhart). Yes, he leads his child into vicious and bloody battles.

The dubbing is surprisingly good, matching the mouth movements well. The only problem is the tendency to translate things literally. This makes for some weird grammar, but the voice acting is good enough that it seems almost like weird poetry.

The soundtrack is a really lovely analog synthesizer piece, much like the original Dawn of the Dead. I recently almost watched the remake of Dawn of the Dead, but when I heard Tyler Bates's ultra-generic soundtrack I couldn't stomach it. Where is that brilliant bass lurch from the original? Do you think you know more about horror that Dario Argento? I was suprised to learn that Dario Argento wrote the score for Dawn of the Dead too.
The film was produced by the genius Shintaro Katsu (who also let his brother star), most famous for his role as blind swordsman Zatoichi.

One last thing:

Ontology

2008-08-05T21:35:00.011-05:00

What exists? Man has been pondering this question ever since he has been able to write it down, and likely before that. This man is losing sleep over it:As noted in the title, the process of answering the question "What Exists?" is known as Ontology. The word is rooted in Ancient Greek, and in Greek the word means precisely what the previous sentence stated.

There are lots of hidden questions of Ontology. Does God exist? Now, one might bring up faith and all that, but no philosopher worth their salt is going to outright state that wanting something makes it true. So we have to define exist very carefully, as few reliable people have interacted with God. Unfortunately, no philosopher worth their salt is going to claim that valleys at the bottom of the ocean don't exist. People have only seen select parts of that, and only recently.

So we are left with a conundrum. There is at least one thing that we cannot trivially say exists or doesn't exist.

I have developed, stealing mostly from Peirce and Santayana, a simple and easy to remember Ontoglogical framework. This is a quick and dirty version:

First - everything that physically exists, exists.

Second - All statements exist, but their content is not necessarily true or consistent. All statements that accurately describe the physical world are true.

Third - Some statements that do not describe the physical world as is are true. For instance, a statement about the future might be an accurate prediction. All internally consistent statements have the potential to be true.

Finally - All internally inconsistent statements that do not accurately describe the physical world are false.

To alleviate the seriousness of the post heres: Sparks - My Baby's Taking Me Home.

Lupin III storyboards

2008-07-27T09:46:00.024-05:00

Another movie I recently saw is Hayao Miyazaki's Lupin III film: Castle of Caglistro. These are some of the storyboard from the very beginning (pre-titles).

Lupin III was developed by Monkey Punch, who was greatly influenced by Mort Drucker. On the DVD the animation director talks about how the leading artists (Miyazaki, himself, Monkey Punch, etc.) were influenced by various western artists. Apparently, he learned to animate by copying Preston Blair's Animation, "front to back, many times."This is a picture of my favorite character, Lupin's number 2 and team gunman Daisuke Jigen.

Here's one for all the Brits in the audience, Brian Blessed hosts a news show. The rest of the show can be found on YouTube.

Bruno S. & Heath Ledger

2008-07-18T21:26:00.022-05:00

Today I saw two movies. They were rather different, but both were wonderful.
The first was Werner Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. I came to the conclusion Kaspar Hauser had some form of Autism, and likely other neurological and psychological problems. Of course, this is not the center of the movie but peripheral. The movie is pure and simple, but also human.

I love Werner Herzog's movies, they are beautiful, they are interesting, they are large. As one writer defending another once said: "He is never dull, never stupid, never tired, and never pedantic!" The first Herzog movie I saw was Nosferatu, and his version is one of the definitive vampire stories.It may even be a better movie than Murnau's! Klaus Kinski and Bela Lugosi are the definitive vampires in my mind.

The other was a different sort of movie. It was The Dark Knight, the sequel to Batman Begins. I saw it mere minutes ago, so this will be more than a little longer. In case you had not heard, The Dark Knight is the latest and best Batman movie.The film that The Dark Knight replaced in my mind was 1966's Batman.You see I found the 1989 movie to be stupid. Not dull (except the mercifully short part with the Batplane), but just dumb. The 1966 movie wants you to think its dumb, almost demands you buy its guileless grin, but its not. Its funny which, as anyone whose talked with a truly stupid person will tell you, is the opposite of stupid. Silly yes, but fun and loaded whip cracking wit.

In my mind there are two Batman(s). There is the innocent Adam West inspiring versionAnd the current version, pioneered (in my opinion) by Batman: The Animated Series.People talk about the film being "realistic". These people are dirty liars. What the film is, is a return to the pulp fiction roots.
The character of Harvey Dent (obviously Two Face, but I have to point it out because I feel weird calling him Harvey Dent) has the incredible power of being a lawyer with a strong right cross.

It's a no-gun blockbuster salute to The Spider or The Shadow. It isn't "realistic", not in the heavy handed way everyone insists it is. It's pulpy, manly, intelligent and entertaining. And funny in parts, like every good drama. There is nothing done wrong in the movie, only good parts and great parts. The film is perfectly casted. I didn't really notice the score that much, but it didn't hurt the movie.

I like to think of the films charachters on a scale from most idealistic to most cynical. At one side, there is Lucius Fox.He is the great idealist. He has his principles and he will only break them for the greater good. And he will make things right after he breaks them.

In between there are the three (yes, three) leads: Batman, Two Face (Harvey Dent), and The Joker. I will elucidate their place on the scale one at a time.

Batman

Began as a cynic and moved towards idealism. What, oddly enough, he doubted was his ownability to endure as Batman. He looks forward to the time that he can just be Bruce Wayne, mega-billionaire. His reasons are both the obvious (being omega-rich is fun) and romantic in nature.

Harvey Dent

Began an idealist, but fell off the wagon. Unable to endure the deadly mind games that The Joker pulls, Harvey Dent's sense of fairness and justice end up being overworked. By the end of the movie, The Joker is playing him like a cheap fiddle.

The Joker

Extreme cynic. Doesn't move an inch on the scale either. He's the polar opposite of the basically good Mr. Fox. He's psychotic, manipulative, obsessive, and violent. He's Bad, a heavy, a classical villain. Oh, and just forget anything you have heard about the late Mr. Ledger's performance. It's better than that.

Just as a postscript, why is only Bob Kane credited as creating the charachters? Did Bill Finger's lawyers lose a case?

Picto-Images

2008-07-14T21:10:00.020-05:00

A Carl Van Vechten picture of legendary tap dancer John W. Bubbles.Same photographer, different subject. Joe Louis, boxer.Otto Soglow, a specialist in elegant wordless comics. The Little King is his most famous work.Al Hirschfield caricature of a well regarded entertainer. You're just jealous.Genuine ancient Greek political caricature from the city of Pompeii. Compare/contrast Mr. Magoo.There are many unexpected results of climate change.Moe HowardMy God! It's looking right at you!I really like most of Osamu Tezuka's various styles. Black Jack is particularly interesting, combining the famous Fleischer Brothers-esque caricatured style with a more realistic anatomical style necessary for a medical story.Enrico Caruso was a caricaturist. Also the greatest Italian opera singer of the recorded age. I will highlight the first.Enrico's conception of conductor Arturo Toscanini. When I look at this I can just feel the legendary perfectionist's exasperation at the bubbly celebrity.Genuine pictures of the above, for reference.Do you hope to have a bearing like Tolstoy's here when you grow old?

I don't explain my head

2008-06-30T19:51:00.009-05:00

From an interview of the great cartoonist/poet:
Question: "Why do you have a beard?"
Shel: "I don't have a beard. It's just the light; it plays funny tricks."

Question: "How do you think your present image as world traveler, bawdy singer, etc. combines with your image as a writer of children's books?"
Shel: "I don't think about my image."

Question: "Do you admit that your songs and drawings have a certain amount of vulgarity in them?"
Shel: "No, but I hope they have a certain amount of realism in them."
Question: "Do you shave your head for effect or to be different, or to strike back at the long-haired styles of today?
Shel: "I don't explain my head."
--(1965) from the album I'm So Good That I Don't Have to Brag.

See more of his work here and here.

Motiveless Maligninty

2008-06-16T21:56:00.015-05:00

Specifically, the portrayal of evil in various mediums (mostly movies). The idea of pure evil intrigues me, the idea that there are somethings, some people, who are just plain corruption. They cannot be converted, and there is no reason for their crimes.
There has been a tendency to sexualize the vampire. This is etymologically correct, but not necessarily the most interesting interpretation. Dracula had no back story in the original novel, and in the best films he needs none. Nosferatu (above) is one of the best films about the Dracula psuedo-legend.

One of the most bizarre things in the film is Count Orlok's lack of intelligence. Not meaning stupidity, but of humanity. He doesn't think to bring the plague with him; Count Orlok is himself the plague. He does not kill the crew to take the ship; he kills them because they are there. Finally, he has no sexual desire for Ellen Hutter, rather he drinks her blood because he is an animal that drinks blood.
Count Orlok is pure evil, a cruel and vicious animal. He has no glee, no loyalty, no humanity, and no desire but to feed. In darkness, he is invincible and terrifying. We praise Ms. Hutton for her sacrifice and we pray that the world never encounters another such evil again.

"I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too!"

Fascist dictator of the West, The Wicked Witch! About to murder her sister for her magic slippers, the Wicked Witch comes upon innocent Dorothy Gale. The Wicked Witch, threatens to kill Dorothy unless she gives up the shoes on her feet. Though thwarted temporarily, the Wicked Witch continues to cause havoc, threatening war with the munchkins and sending in terrorist groups to hinder Ms. Gale's progress.

What more can be said about The Wicked Witch of The West? I could do some kind of analysis, but it makes me feel dirty. Characters as pure as her deserve more respect than that.

"Not that you mind the killings! There's plenty of killings in your book, Lord..."

Does Harry Powell belong on this list? It is clear from the film that Rev. Powell kills out of a sexual phobia, but this is only one of the reasons for cruelty. He kills women that are attracted to him (apparently quite a few), but he also has a deep greed. His cruelty is boundless, his chase relentless, and his visage horrible.

But like Orlok, Rev. Powell isn't human. When he squeals in pain at the end of the movie, it becomes clear that he is a sick pig, an animal stuck in a place that couldn't help him. A place that kills him. Like Nosferatu and The Wicked Witch, Rev. Powell's death is the minimum reaction to their crimes, necessary just to end their meddling in the world.

"You Bastards! Why are you torturing me like this!?"

Ashley J. "Ash" Williams is not evil. All the evil in his soul has been removed. He is on this list because he is the most iconic character of "The Evil Dead" series. Lovecraftian horror, so built on impossible geometries and indescribable visions, have only been filmed correctly twice: "The Evil Dead" and especially "Evil Dead II: Dead By Dawn".

These films are that once. The villain in the series is Tim Philo - the camera man, a joke that only someone who has seen the films will get. He is relentless, unstoppable, sometimes invisible evil. If you haven't seen Evil Dead II, correct that now!

"...I feel g...o...o...d."

Speaking of Lovecraft, the final boss of Earthbound draws on the Lovecraft's idea of Azathoth - The Blind Idiot God. Giygas is normally sealed in the "Devil Machine" where his all-consuming cruelty and greed flows in diluted for throughout time and space. Your friend Pokey provides direction for the creatures power, acting as a agent of evil across time and space.

"I got here the same way as the coin."

Anton Chigurh, the villain of No Country For Old Men. Like Count Orlok Chigurh does not spread death; he is himself death. Mr. Chigurh's deterministic philosophy leads him to kill nearly everyone in the movie, including several he did not have to. Chigurh represents a connection between fatalism and death, a connection that disturbs even the charachters that survives. In the film he's called a ghost, and he can easily be seen as an incarnate spirit of death like Nosferatu.

Double Subject: Coolness & Manliness

2008-06-04T16:54:00.020-05:00

Note: Though I've lost a lot of weight, I am healthy again and will start posting regularly immeadiately. Today's post is about two subjects that are important in everyone's life, even though most people don't have either of them: Coolness and Manliness.

Cool

"Africa and Europe share notions of self-control and imperturbability, expressed under a metaphysical rubric of coolness, viz, notions of sang-froid and coolheadedness" - Robert Farris Thompson, Historian of African Art

Definition - Coolness is calmness in disquieting situations. A person is cool when they are superbly calm in a variety of situations.

Discussion - Being cool requires a certain amount of detachment and introspection. Coolness is the inverse of volatility. To illustrate, I will use Toshiro Mifune charachters to show the scale.

Mifune as Kuwabatake Sanjuro is coolToshiro Mifune as Kikuchiyo is volatile

The Samurai Trilogy is a series of films about Mifune as Miyamoto Musashi (a famous swordsman) slowly become cool. Or to put it another way, the evolution from a brash young soldier to a introspective samurai.
The Blues Brothers to represent coolness because they are actually parodying coolness, while remaining unironically cool. They are imitating the clothes and effects of various soul and blues singers; for instance, the sun glasses are John Lee Hooker's.This brings up the core controversy about coolness, can it be synthesized or is coolness inherently honest? Now John Belushi was earnestly pretty cool, as shown below:And Aykroyd had experience in the blues scene, I am not doubting their authenticity, what I mean is to question: is an affected cool cool? It is known that cool is very difficult to fake. This happens. Or this. Or, god forbid, this. But is this an inherent property?

The video has been removed to save on load times. Notice, Bruce Lee's punches don't always show up. The fact that he moved much to quickly to bee seen had to be corrected in many of his films. Here Bruce Lee talks about the relationship between physicality (martial arts) and philosophy. This is, essentially, also the place of manliness in life. The next video can be found within

The King In Yellow

2008-05-26T20:05:00.002-05:00

The King In Yellow is a collection of short stories surrounding the play "The King In Yellow". They are set in the distant future of 1925.

Two extracts exist from the play "The King In Yellow"

Cassilda's Song

Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink beneath the lake,
The shadows lengthen

In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies
But stranger still is

Lost Carcosa.

Songs that the Hyades shall sing,
Where flap the tatters of the King,
Must die unheard in

Dim Carcosa.

Song of my soul, my voice is dead;
Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed
Shall dry and die in

Lost Carcosa.

and the part excerpted in my "parody" below.

The King In Yellow is (within the book) a play in two acts. Many suggest that it is based on the satirical plays of Oscar Wilde. From its description in the first story, it likely is a satire on the royalty of Europe. Incidentally, anyone who reads the second act ends up insane; not ranting and raving but infused with cruelty.

The book can be found here.

I would like to apologize for the lateness and brevity of this post, but I have been very sick.

Hello, World!

2008-05-19T19:56:00.010-05:00

Let me apologize for not posting for so long! Let amends begin with a picture of a clown.Let me be unambigous: I LOVE CLOWNS. Yes clowns can be scary, but that's part of the fun! Humor has to have a little bit of teeth, when it comes down to it isn't the slightly scary or seedy parts of your childhood the parts that stay with you? There has been, especially in children's entertainment, a general sensitive-izing.Look at that. Innocent Mickey Mouse and playful (but less innocent) Roy 'Moose' Williams. The kids eat it up! Look at those smiles, those are real smiles. Roy , who told ribald stories to the boys when the cameras were off so that they would be ready for the more childish actual show, who stashed alcohol on the set, and who was a genuine artist (the only one on the show, oddly enough). Click the link for good biographies of the cast of the Mickey Mouse Club.
Now, the apology will continue with some music.

As Someday It May Happen (Gilbert & Sullivan):

Live Improvisation (The Boredoms):

Five Songs (The Minutemen):

Someone let me have a picture on the internet. Click to go to his blog.

Let me end my apology with a comic video. The Great One needs no further introduction.

I would like to advertise a future post (they will become regular again) on "THE KING IN YELLOW" by Robert Chambers. To recycle:

Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.

Stranger: Indeed?

Cassilda: Indeed, it's time. We have all laid aside disguise but you.

Stranger: I wear no mask.

Camilla: No mask? No mask!

Dearest Edward Ellington,

2008-04-29T21:04:00.011-05:00

Happy Birthday, Duke!

Sent With Love,
From Your Beloved Mistress,
And All Her Jealous Admirers

The Residents

2008-04-20T21:45:00.010-05:00

Instead of writing about New Wave music (which proved to be impossible to both define and remain interesting) I am just going to write an advertisement for a seminal band of the genre - The Residents.

The band and it's fans agreed at some point that these charachters can symbolize the band.

The band is made up of at least one and likely around four persons. Generally, it is believed that the original line-up of the Residents was their "managers" The Cryptic Corporation (originally Jay Clem, John Kennedy, Homer Flynn, and Hardy Fox but now only the last two remain), but all have denied it.

The Residents have worked many different genre's of music, but are often generally described as avant-garde or experimental musicians. As experimenters and formula-banes, they have produced some albums that are unparalleled works of brilliance and some outright disasters.

Some of their best albums include:

About half of Meet The Residents (especially the iconic Smelly Tounges)Their best album: The Third Reich N' RollDuck Stab! (perhaps the quintessential Residents Album)The Commercial Album (40 one minute songs, some good some bad)

Why Children love YouTube

2008-04-11T12:22:00.010-05:00

It's impressive enough that he made all the elements rhyme and scan, but that Mr. Lehrersings them with comic class is just unfair to the other parodists.

Baby Mia loves Felix the Cat; It's her new old favorite!

Nu Pogodi! too?

How could TV compete with Mr Five by Five? Nobody else can.

And that's why children love YouTube. So I tell all the parents out there discourage TV, and encourage the internet!

I hate to get political, but because of the tax refund, there is a post about New Wave music coming.

Yasujiro Ozu

2008-04-07T20:33:00.011-05:00

After seeing Tokyo Story, I must write a post about Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu.I have only seen Tokyo Story and trailers for later films, so my generalizations will not cover his early style (though he crystallized quite young). There are greater film scholars than me.

Yasujiro Ozu was born of acute conception in 1903 and died (on his birthday) in 1963.

He is acclaimed as the "most Japanese" of filmmakers and probably would have been the greatest Japanese film director of his generation if Akira Kurasowa didn't muck things up by being the single greatest filmmaker period.
He is most famous for his filmic/narrative style. He uses one (1) type of shot: the so-called tatami shot. The tatami shot is about three feet off the ground and totally still. All transitions are straight plainly visible cuts. He uses all of 360 degree space (ignoring the 180 degree rule). Like Kurasowa and Hitchcock, his training as a painter comes through in his compositions. He does not show the dramatic moments, but rather there aftermath (making his films highly elliptical). His films are not very plot heavy, nor are they particularly dramatic. He has, in fact, been accused of remaking the same film over and over again. He responded to this criticism by saying that he is a craftsman (specifically he compared himself to a tofu maker), doing one thing absolutely correctly (making delicious tofu).

His movies are all about families slowly dissolving as ordinary people doing ordinary things for ordinary reasons. The odd feeling they are suffused with is called 'mono no aware', a Japanese term meaning "an awareness of the impermanence of things". In other words, things change over the course of his movies, because things change in real life.

There is in this style an unrelenting logic and simplicity that drew me to the movies as a fly to honey. I often find older movies unwatchable due to the lack of certain things (particularly sound design) that would only later be perfected. But in Ozu's films are perfect in the sense of being impossible to change without lessening.

Blocking or giving direction? You be the judge!

Tokyo Story, shown above, is the story of an elderly couple's visit with their children in Tokyo. Their children, while not poor, are not as successful as it seems from far away. The children (except a widowed daughter-in-law) are not particularly kind, pawning off their parents on each other while paying lip service to social conventions. An unusually melodramatic movie by Ozu standards, by our expectation it is a calm highly elliptical film. Despite its simplicity, it bears repeat viewing and close attention.

Ozu was a minimalist in many ways, but he is minimalism done right. His films are very humane, his only interest is the conditions of Japanese life. This is not minimalism, but merely wrong.
The film reminded me of the symphonies of Jean Sibelius. To quote the great composer: Whereas most other modern composers are engaged in manufacturing cocktails of every hue and description, I offer the public pure cold water. So too with the films of Ozu. There is no melodrama in his films, despite the easy drama seemingly inherit in their theme.

Note too how the comparison of making cocktails with making tofu. What an odd connection. It reminds me of another Sibelius quote: If we understood the world, we would realize that there is a logic of harmony underlying its manifold apparent dissonances.

Not Edgar Allan Poe

2008-04-01T07:53:00.021-05:00

This is a picture of Edgar Allen Poe. This isn't be a post about Edgar Allen Poe. There probably won't ever be a Poe post. It's not that Poe isn't interesting, far from it. But I can offer no new insights into his writing. Try here. Poe is a romantic, but he is his own romantic (not a Romantic), not at all indebted to the European school. Some find his writing gaudy, some find it full of life.

Instead this will about Netflix. After less than a week of use it's already made itself worth it. Another post will come after using its mail system. I have to make a complaint, the Anime & Animation section is almost entirely anime, most western cartoons are under Children & Family.

The Watch Instantly system is easy to use and addictive; since getting it the time has mysteriously presented itself to watch:

The Bank Dick
Doctor Who
Kolchak: The Night Stalker
Murder By Death
Night Of The Hunter
And 2001: A Space Odyssey

Quick Reviews:

I had forgotten how much I loved the Ligeti chorus in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Also, everything else great about the movie. But, all the movies flaws.

The Night of The Hunter is one of the great movies of all time, and Netflix didn't burn the negative so it remains so.

I saw the supposedly incomprehensible ending of Murder By Death coming a mile away. As soon as the second act began (with a quick recap by the Nick Charles analogue) there wasn't a single twist in the movie.

Kolchak: The Night Stalker is a great series. Carl Kolchak is a reporter for a Chicago newswire that specializes in grisly stories, especially those that may involve occult figures. The X-Files payed its debt to it (on heresay, written having never seen the X-Files). Somebody had the great idea to hire lots of young writers, so the show is bursting with vigor and humor (until the murders start). In addition, the photography is excellent, far above 70's TV standards, and Darren McGavin gives excellent performances as Mr. Kolchak.

The first series of Doctor Who is mostly notable for being, like Kolchak, a well written sci-fi television show, but also notable for me for featuring what I call early BBC acting at its purest. Old (elderly) stage actors carefully thinking about their line readings exactly where the cinematographer blocked them.

The films I ordered (Our Hospitality/Sherlock Jr, The Short Films of Winsor McCay, and Tokyo Story) all arrived when advertised, but I will be taking a log to find if I'm being throttled, or given low quality DVDs. I am very wary and I will keep extensive records. An extensive criticism is available here. Be warned, I'm watching you Netflix.

Continuing, even Netflix has its limits on what it stocks. Come on, not even one episode of Nu, Pogodi?

Mother 2|Earthbound 1

2008-03-29T22:29:00.024-05:00

Earthbound was a video game for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.Mother 2 was a video game for the Super Famicom.
Really, Mother 2 and Earthbound are the same game.

They take place in "Eagleland", a parody of the kind of 1950's Leave It To Beaver-esque America (except The Beatles are already big). Oh, it is quite hilarious.This is Ness, the male lead and main character. You control Ness, but you aren't Ness (your you, but this never comes up until the very end of the game)

Something bad is happening. It isn't 100% clear what it is, but it's definitely bad. A meteorite strikes near Ness's house. You go to check it out, but the path is blockaded. Back home Ness's neighbor Pokey, above, gets Ness to help him (Pokey) look for his (Pokey's) brother Picky. Ness, his dog King, and his neighbor Pokey sneak out to check out the meteorite. Pokey is cowardly and mean (this becomes important later), but King and Ness fight off snakes and crows and eventually gets up to the meteorite where picky is. An alien fly with psychic powers named Buzz Buzz comes down from the heavens to try to stop the bad things that are happening. Soon after this Ness, Pokey, Picky and Buzz Buzz are attacked by a different alien Starman Jr.Buzz Buzz defeats Starman Jr. and the whole group goes to Pokey's house, where the P-pair (Pokey and Picky) get in trouble for sneaking out. Their mother slaps the fly in the air, killing Buzz Buzz. Buzz Buzz explains that you have to visit 8 sanctuaries to prevent a cosmic horror from eating the earth.

After that it gets a little odd, in funny and occasionally meta-fictional ways. A good explanation of a few of the subtler touches is available here. He gives away the ending of the game though, so don't read if you intend to play. Also, don't attempt to play without some sort of guide. The game was designed to be play with a guide.

A few stand out devices:
Ness can buy a house, which serves no purpose except to be a house
There's an optional quest that has no reward except a warm feeling inside
A traffic jam blocks a road, and then clears up (normally in video games things only happen by player action, making this almost disturbing)
Two bosses are unbeatable
Lots of music, images, and plots are only scene once and vanish (MacGuffins)
The Blues Brothers
Items that can only be used one obvious time (with a bizarre second twist if it isn't a McGuffin)

Anyway, this cosmic horror (called Giygas) has already infiltrated the world to a great extent, causing people, inanimate objects, and animals to go crazy. In addition to aliens and wild animals, on the way to defeat evil Ness will be attacked by:

ZombiesAbstract ArtAnnoying Old Party MenA cult leader obsessed with the color blue (named Carpainter!)
Loaded Dice

And many, many others. Fortunately Ness won't have to do it alone, Ness will be aided by at most three people at a time:

Poo, Jeff, Ness, and Paula

Also, the Blues Brothers (well, copyright friendly analouges) help you at several points.

Eventually you get to the end and discover that Giygas sacrificed his living form to be beyond time and invincible. Using the technology designed by:

Jeff's father, Dr. Andonuts
The Apple KidAnd the Mr. Saturns (a possibly alien race)

The four of you have to give up your bodies, enter robots and travel to the end of time to fight Giygas. Pokey, who has been manipulating people for Giygas for some time now, appears in a mecha-spider suit to kill you. Giygas had sacrificed its own body for omnipotence, and dwells inside the familiar looking Devil's Machine to keep from destroying reality.Pokey has taken control of the machinations of Giygas (taking control of the Starmen, several large corporations and the entire criminal world) and doesn't intend to give them up. The four of you, at this point armed with powerful weapons and great psychic powers attempt to wrangle Pokey.

Pokey opens the devil machine, and the blind idiot god Giygas emerges.
Giygas emerges from the devil machine a swirling red mass that undulates between being a skull and a fetus:Then things happen that someone who has not played the game can understand. Lets just say that beating the blind idiot god is impossible, but you still have prayer!Since this post is an obscure game on a dead console, it is not likely that you will ever play it if you have not. Suggesting that you play a ROM on an Emulater just wouldn't be right. So Loth Beg would like to recommend that you watch The Blues Brothers, the film version of magical realism, and celebrate their important role in Earthbound.

The Horror!

2008-03-26T20:59:00.055-05:00

Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.

Stranger: Indeed?

Cassilda: Indeed, it's time. We have all laid aside disguise but you.

Stranger: I wear no mask.

Camilla: No mask? No mask!

I hope that you do not mind my mixing of unrelated stories (Phantom of the Opera/The King In Yellow) above. It shows how there is very little more universal, yet wholly subjective, than fear. Fear, in real life, causes one to bolt irrationally and would make watching any sort of media impossible. Anyone who has been attacked, even comically, while watching something can attest to fear's jarring nature. So it is impossible for a work to create real fear, and the quality of a creep show comes with the stealthiness/revulsion of the approach.

There are essentially three kinds of horror, and a wise man should use them all:

Body Horror - creates the feeling that one has no role in the control one's body (ex: The baby in Eraserhead embodies this)Gothic Horror - creates the feeling that one has no role in the control one's mind (ex: Vincent Price inflicts this in Gaslight)Cosmic Horror - creates the feeling that one has no role in the control the universe (ex: Giygas in Earthbound)
Horrors draw on four distinct fears:
Fear of pain
Fear of implacable forces (paranoia/suspense)
Fear of loss of control
Sensory Deprevation

Cosmic Horror was initially developed by fire-and-brimstone preachers. Edgar Allen Poe designed his own brand of horror, stories were men went meant mad within a decaying (usually urban) environment. H. P. Lovecraft pioneered body horror (not cosmic horror, though he elevated that to a science by removing the silly idea of being saved) and more than any other writer elevated the fear of implacable (in his case genealogical/biological) forces to the forefront of horror.

Possibly the best films for watching the various types of horror is the Evil Dead trilogy. The third film (Army of Darkness) is the most famous proof of the Robert E. Howard Theorem - A horror story with a sufficiently competent protagonist becomes an action story. They are not necessarily the scariest films ever made, but they are rich with changes between the various varieties of fear.

Here is a quick overview of the history of written horror:
Horror Writer - one notable work (comment)
Mary Shelly - Frankenstein (not really, but close enough)
Washington Irving - The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (this time for real)
Edgar Allen Poe - Berenice (One of the first of many pioneering horror stories)
Bram Stroker - Dracula (the second modern vampire story)
Robert W. Chambers - The King In Yellow (The Gothic horror stories that anticipated and influenced Lovecraft)
Henry James - The Turn of the Screw (a psychological ghost story)
H. P. Lovecraft - The Colour Out of Space (gave the alien feeling back to aliens)
Robert Bloch - Psycho (based on the hobby of his distant neighbor Ed Gein)

The history of horror movies in stills:

The Golem (1915)Nosferatu [Dracula part one] (1922)The Monster (1923)Dracula [part 2] (1931)Cat People (1942)The Thing From Another World (1951)
Dracula [part 3] (1958)
Psycho (1960)
House Of Usher (1960)
Rosemary's Baby (1968)
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
The Exorcist (1973)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
Shivers (1975)
Jaws (1975)
Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Halloween (1978)
The Shining (1980)
The Evil Dead (1981)
The Thing (1982)
Evil Dead II (1987)

This list stops before the making of Child's Play, because that is too close to today. History will be added in retrospect. Horror movies include some of the best and some of the very worst movies ever made. There will be more posts going into detail about various author's and film-maker's style and techniques very soon, starting with:

My next post will, however, be on Earthbound (even though it is not a horror game, it has elements that will be discussed), which will make this post more sensible in retrospect.

"The post's ending...It hurts! It Really hurts Ness! You Can't Do THIS!"

"I feel

g o o o d

Noise Music Part 2

2008-03-25T22:34:00.018-05:00

Click pictures for links to music.

Unfortunately, reality is often cruel to neat historical trend-systems. So, though the plans dictated this post about "noise" music should begin with the wild cluster chords of Sun Ra, there are men who precede him that must be mentioned in his ranks.Charles Edward Ives did two things in his life that would be considered impressive separate and are amazing together. He founded Ives & Myrick (through which he funded modernism in America) and made the most radical music of his time. Even in the 30 years it took him to get his work published he was still a mile beyond his peers.
Henry Cowell, a friend and supporter of Charles Ives, was the second to last giant in this type of ultra-modernist music (behind only John Cage).

Among his students (warning-videos may not be typical of an artist's output):
George Gershwin
Lou Harrison
John Cage
Conlon Nancarrow
Burt Bacharach

And now, back to your previously scheduled post:

Sun Ra ("Herman Blount" 87 in this 1992 photo), began his carrier writing in a mix of Ellingtonian swing mixed with the then new harmonies of Bebop. At some point he started mixing in wilder timbres and completely bent orchestration. An unusual man with unusual religious ideas Sun Ra's musical ouerve covers a range in jazz music that is matched by few others. Only Duke Ellington himself and Charles Mingus come to mind in either range or depth. Compare the above arraignment with this solo! A man of musical contradictions, he introduced the synthesizer to jazz but spent his last years chiefly playing showtunes.I agonized over wether Davis belonged before Sun Ra, but I decided that I would do best to follow history's plan rather than invent my own. Miles Davis and his bands (which included nearly every notable jazz musician, most of which he discovered) emphasized space and texture as much as virtuoso runs. While Mr. Davis did not invent space, it is his bands's use of it that has become the canonical methods of playing jazz. Mr. Davis disliked most of the rest of the musicians on this page, but studied and absorbed what he thought to be their good ideas.Eric Dolphy had a heavily timbrel approach to his instrument and a distinct modernist classical approach to his arraignment that made him stand out from any crowd. And for a man who played with Coltrane, Mingus, and Coleman this was very impressive. He would influence Jimi Hendrix and even Albert Ayler, but that comes later.
Ornette Coleman elevated timbre ABOVE structure, inventing what is now called "Free Jazz". Obviously, it libre, not gratis! His compositional ideas would directly or indirectly influence many many musicians.Albert Ayler is what people are referring to when they say they don't like free jazz or noise music. His compositions are not un-structured-they are structure proof! He doesn't play the saxophone, he fights out sound with the hardest reeds he can find. He didn't come up through the Bebop ranks like everyone else, he played with R&B bands. He had a vibrato larger than most player's entire range. And he was so loud he could drown out Coltrane, and John Coltrane played LOUD.

Listen for yourself.Ayler directly influenced Pharaoh Sanders (who was given his nickname by Sun Ra, and was discovered by Coltrane who was discovered by Miles Davis, get it?) who gave the style a more exotic lyricism. I couldn't find any of his really explosive stuff on YouTube, but he definitely recorded it.Pharoah Sanders played with Sonny Sharrock, the first free jazz ("noise" music) guitarist. He didn't hear Hendrix play until years after he formed his style, and Jimi probably never heard any Sharrock, so there is a discontinuity. Sharrock is more openly jazzy than Hendrix, while Hendrix was harder rocking. Ask The Ages is a great introduction to the free jazz genre of "noise" music (as is the soundtrack to Space Ghost: Coast to Coast).And finally the gods themselves, James Marshall Allen Hendrix. There is little to add to the extensive analysis of his twisted chords, shockingly dissonant pop songs, and use of guitar timbres which still have yet to be rediscovered. His personal system for organizing his music was the tension between earth (low pitched, crunchy, and blues based improvisation) and space (high ringing, distorted, and abstract improvisation). Miles sought to work with him throughout Jimi's life. He was hoping to get Gil Evans to arrange an album. Every rock musician in the business (not just the guitarists) fell over each other trying to score a jam session with him.

What/Who could top Jimi? Well, we'll see if musicians bothered to even try soon...

Music & Music Videos

2008-03-22T18:15:00.009-05:00

Devo - Mongoloid
What does a music video do?
Devo - Jocko Homo
What should a music video be?
Louis Armstrong - I'll Be Glad When You're Dead You Rascal You
What is and is not a music video?
The Residents - The Simple Song
Why make a music video?

A short form music video is a movie that is intrinsically tied to one (1) piece of music of arbitrary length (popular song structures tend to top out around 3 minutes). Like any form of film making (an art in general) it has exactly the purpose that the artist set out for it.

Generally, music videos are invitations to buy a single (itself a promotion for a concert). The simplest, and probably most effective to these ends, music video is that of a live performance.
Dave Brubeck Quartet - Take Five
There are several reasons to use more complex methods. The first is a simple desire to be creative. As a rule an unusual sensation is more memorable than a typical one. As a result, an interesting music video is more effective than a uninteresting one. This music video (For Mr. 5 by 5 and the Count Basie Big Band single Take Me Back Baby, not Take Back My Baby as claimed) combines a simple narrative with a "live" performance.

This Residents single was un-performable live for various reasons. First, the synthesizer that forms nearly all the music could not be transported on The Residents budget. Secondly, it features an unusual lead break by guest Fred Frith, and The Residents usual guitarist (Snakefinger) was touring himself. This music video allowed The Residents to sell an almost un-performable album. In addition, The Residents had a standing interest in becoming filmmakers and the Commercial Album gave them an excellent opportunity to use and improve these skills.

This is only a very brief examination of music videos, but I haven't the resources to go any deeper at the moment.

Some final trivia: all of the videos in this post predate the invention of MTV. This was accidental.

Far, Far Away

2008-03-13T20:20:00.002-05:00

I hope you're not expecting any posts this coming week. Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone - Leon Redbone.

A Cartoon after a Long Post

2008-03-06T17:48:00.016-06:00

Video moved to a link.

This is a lovely Ub Iwerks cartoon. I wish I had a cable channel, because I really think a show like this could sell. There is definitely a popular audience for this, especially with the lovely nakeds. By the way, the FCC doesn't have any real power over cable, the networks are just scared of everything.

Incidentally, my birthday was a few days ago. I got me some movies (The Searchers and Castle of Cagliostro), some comics (Cerebus the Aardvark and Groo the Wanderer), some CDs (Eric Dolphy's Time Out and MJQ's Lonely Woman), and some computer gear.

Also I got a big pad of paper to draw on, so expect to see more of my awful doodles!

Taste/Criticism

2008-02-26T20:56:00.005-06:00

There's two kinds of music: good and bad. I like both. - Duke Ellington

In my other posts about the various arts I have always assumed or explicitly stated that ultimately, despite the existence of objective elements, there are some ultimately subjective decisions about art. That not only can some one just not like something, but that this is a rational. In fact, many would argue that it is irrational to try to convert someone from an old taste. There are three kinds of taste: one is literally tongue based sensation, the second kind is an unconscious decision of quality, and the third is related to artistic necessity. Because of the third definition an artist who adds elements that get in the way of a piece is said to "lack taste".

Tastes of the second kind are limiting, negative, irrational things. If they come up at all, then somewhere a flaw in conversation has happened. Tastes becomes pretensions, bitterness, and artistic conservatism. They turns our whims into dictators, robbing us of potential pleasure.

So why do tastes develop? We are not born with them, that is known. We develop our tastes before we are rational enough to see their (our) foolishness, that is obvious. I propose that we develop our tastes as teenagers, though they can be expanded beyond that an essentially conservative bone here is very dangerous.

Many would say I put the bar too late, that we develop our tastes as children or even as babies,
but they misunderstand. Taste is a LIMIT on what one listens to, an essentially negative (in the technical, not moral, sense) idea. A child does not know they are supposed to hate the latest crop of close harmony dance groups. They are informed of this later.

It is possible to explicitly define parameters and decide that you like all music like this, but taste is often more irrational than that. Inform me of a quality that you dislike about a genre and I will inform you of that quality in that genre you enjoy.

This brings up an odd point about criticism in general. How do we make our ideas about a work of art universal? Tastes exist in most people that are passionate about art or music.

A critic must understand the standards that an artist holds themselves to. A critic can say: "You hold yourself to low standards," or even that the standards are bad:The above is something I carved out to avoid boredom. It isn't very good by most standards. My only standard was that it be entertaining to draw. A critic can say "That is a low standard.", but they cannot say that the art failed, because it obviously worked. Whether they like it or not, the formerly subjective quality is now explicit and objective, and was a quality I succeeded at. If something meets the artists own standards it cannot be said to be a failure. One cannot say the doodle has any value beyond what I put into it (essentially none), either.

Why, then, does it follow that a critic cannot take an arbitrary set of standards and apply them to all they do? Because they will not then be a good critic. They will "miss the point" on a lot of work. For instance, take this. Now declare the best tenor sax present! You likely find it impossible, as the three (Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, and Ben Webster) are incredible musicians. By noting that the artist alone chooses their standards, we can then make actual observations about the relative merit of each performer without getting lost in simple minefields.
Now lets look at the above. They are painted by Ralph Bakshi. They are charachters, fictional people. The painterly technique comes out of post-impressionism (I call post-impressionist styles "acting with paint"). They are cartoon designs, removed from how evolution has chosen to tape the muscles together in favor of an expressionistic approach unique to cartoons.

Now these are Bakshi's standards. A critic can moan that no human ever looked like this and that they are grotesque distortions. But this critic has clearly missed the point, making a fool out of him or herself and possibly spreading there foolishness among others!

Instead of describing the art, they have described what they want to see. This is the opposite of what they set out to do, instead of enlightening people, including themselves, about a work of art they have obscured it.

Now, negative criticism, even harsh criticism, can be necessary when a work or body of art fails at its goals or does not live up to its standards.

Good examples of standards are:
To Be Funny
To Be Fun
To Be Beautiful
To Be Meaningful
To Be Interesting
To contain some message
To Expose
To Hide
To be in line with human nature
Et Cetera.

Note that I did not add "Be Ugly", "Be Unfunny". Uglyness usually comes from a neglect of beauty while one chases other goals. Unfunniness likewise.

And so we can see that with some thought we can avoid the shackles of personal taste and develop publicly intelligible ideas about art.

Stride Piano: Willie "The Lion" Smith

2008-02-22T21:46:00.001-06:00

I hate to clog the blog with so many videos but William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Bertholoff Smith (alias: The Lion, above) came to my house and demanded it. Listen to how he transfers between dissonance and assonance! He sounds like Hindemith! This is part one in a six part series. Part two is available here.

"Noise" Music

2008-02-21T17:22:00.001-06:00

Videos moved to links.

Before we begin we must define. What is "Noise" Music? Divide and conquer: What is music? What is noise?

Music is a group of sounds and silence that is defined in time.

Noise is vibrations propagating through a fluid (air, water, etc.). Noise can have many qualities. Pitch, loudness, and timbre are some examples.

Timbre is all the aspects of a sound that are not a different aspect. ANSI defines: "[timbre is] that attribute of sensation in terms of which a listener can judge that two sounds having the same loudness and pitch are dissimilar".

When the timbre of an instrument takes on a structural aspect, the music is "Noise" music. Today it is unusual to call any music where timbre is not the primary structural element "Noise" music. Historically, this is not true.

The first serious "noise" music composer was Luigi Russolo.Mr. Russolo wrote a book called The Art of Noises where he laid down his theories. He examines the history of music to begin. At first there was no music, he claims, then man made music. The Greeks based there music and tuning systems on Pythagorean geometry. The music was based on scales and was homophonic. Then the chord was developed. Musicians began to use wilder and wilder chords, reaching a height in the baroque era. Then people began using non-chordal notes and sounds in the classical era. Mr. Russolo proposed to take this further using machines and electronics, creating what he called noise-sound. He invented instruments and composed for several years.

Claude Debussy, influenced by Russolo, Gamelan music, and Wagner, brought timbre to the forefront in Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun.The second great "Noise" music theorist was Arnold Schoenberg. A good analysis can be found here. An educator as well as a composer, he developed theories (like 12-tone serialism, and Klangfarbenmelodie) that would come to define academic "Noise" music.You can hear that Schoenberg did not follow Russolo's desire for new music instruments, but surpassed Russolo by making new music.He was then himself surpassed by his more rules oriented student Anton Webern. As Stravinsky once said of Webern "Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge." Webern's serialism was much leaner and less influenced by German Romanticism. Despite it's quietness and clarity, Webern's compositions are intensely difficult to play because of his composerly approach to arraignment. Compare Webern arraignment:To the Bach original
Clearly one can see that Webern requires four extended techniques and a great deal of change in the softness, where the Bach original gives only a group of pitches.

Meanwhile, in the American South-
Joe "King" Oliver, building on the work of Buddy Bolden, was using several different mutes to control the sound of his instruments. Because New Orleans Jazz used very loose structure any way, Oliver helps bring timbre to the front of improvisation.Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton would compose (and improvise) with for jazz piano with orchestral timbres and his compositions continue to shock anyone who thinks early Jazz was folk music. Hear about his style here.
All these elements would join together in the Fletcher Henderson orchestra which included Louis Armstrong (A student of King Oliver) and Coleman Hawkins.
Louis Armstrong would also define small group jazz.Not his classic septet, but a good performance none the less.With such definitions in place, Edward "Duke" Ellington would transcend them. Armed with a melodic, but tonally shocking piano style and arraignments to kill for, Duke Ellington would re-create pop music with shockers as The Mooche, Jeep's Blues, and Concerto for Cootie. Each was created with various band members' trademark timbres in mind (The Mooche for "Tricky" Sam Nanton). He would also, with Billy Strayhorn, build larger structures for jazz, like Symphony In Black. Duke Ellington created one of the cornerstones of american music and directly influenced composers like Charles Mingus and Gunther Schuller.

This is range of "Noise" music's foundation. Cling to triads at your own risk.

Cartoons

2008-02-17T14:26:00.000-06:00

I have four cartoon related items to post right now.

I'd like to begin with a question. When you read The Adventures of Tintin do you see a scrappy young boy, or a tough short middle aged catholic? I am using an inclusive OR, for all you logicians out there.This image suggests a boy, but many other scenes make him look more like a tough short guy instead of a young man. I am thinking specifically of The Blue Lotus when I write this, but generalizations are recommended.

Perhaps the tough middle aged tough guy that I see is just Herge's actual personality asserting itself.Moving on, I have recently been watching a TV show and I have found it to be funny. The name of the show is Crayon Shin-Chan.
It is a about the mis-adventures of the rather unintelligent Shin (above) and his lower middle class family. The animation is done by Animax in Japan. Read more about the animation here. The dialog was recreated by FUNimation in America. Because Japanese humor largely rests on the rigorous rules of the Japanese language, the dialog has been changed to the favorite of English humor - second order obscenity. To me the real humor of the series comes from the plotting and charachterization, which improve even the occaisonal lame joke. The series is presented four loosely connected segments that vary from extreme comedic "realism" to abstract absurdity.

This reminds me of a pun. What did the man yell at the charging mythomaniac big cat? "Stop Lion!"

It did not remind me of a very good pun.

Continuing, This ad for self-portrait buttons of various comic artists were posted on another blog.My personal favorite buttons are:

and

And finally, this is arguably not a cartoon, but look at how attractive it is!Lovely and informative!

Tim Schafer

2008-02-13T17:41:00.001-06:00

To save on load times I have removed the video.

There are two schools of criticism in Video Games - narratology and ludography. As I have stated below, Narratology makes many objections that when looked at from a Ludographical perspective are absurd on their face. For instance, the claim that video games encourage violence would make sense to a pure narratologist.But violence in video games is, in fact, gameplay. In football, it is considered normal behavior to tackle men larger than yourself for purely tactical reasons.In real life, such behavior would be severely punished.A video game player not only knows this explicitly, but implicitly. The entire feeling and environment is known and felt to be separate from reality.

But, despite its seeming absurdity, narratology will remain a part of video games. The reason is that video game makers have, since Shigeru Miyamoto, been implementing stories into video games. As a result they have become influenced by film, animation, and books. It then becomes necessary to bring in critical ideas that were developed for those media and adapt them. Unfortunately, this gives rise to absurdities like the above.

But, fortunately, several excellent games have been made that benefit or even rely on narrative to entertain. There are two possibilities that can happen: one happened to Tim Schafer, the other to Hideo Kojima.

Today we look at one of the most artistically successful narrative centered video game makers: Tim SchaferTim Schafer is a Berkeley educated computer programmer, whose first major job was at LucasArts. He got a job as a playtester, and was promoted to Writer-Programmer for The Secret of Monkey Island. Along with Dave Grossman, he turned the game from a Tintin-esque to a farcical tale of a pirate wanna-be's attempts to ingratiate himself into pirate society.It was a basic, even simple, point and click adventure game. But it had one extremely distinctive feature: it was funny.

Not smug, not camp, not weird, but pure uncut funny. It features such marvels of wit as insult swordfighting:

I've Out-wrestled octopi with these arms!
I'm sure that spineless animals everywhere are humbled by your might.

My handkerchief will wipe up your blood
So you got that job as janitor, after all.

There are no words to describe how disgusting you are!
Yes there are. You just never learned them.

You make me want to puke.
You make me think somebody already did.

You fight like a dairy farmer!
How appropriate. You fight like a cow.

Rubber Trees, holding your breath for ten minutes, and loads of clever dialog. Brilliant, Brilliant humor. Then he did Grim Fandango. A pastiche of Film Noir and the Mexican Day of The Dead, Grim Fandongo is too great to be described here. Not with the length I want for this post. Incidentally, I haven't played it in years.

Unfortunately these kinds of linear strategy games were on the way out, and Grim Fandango was a commercial bomb.
While working on Grim Fandango, Mr. Schafer got an idea for a game about an Ostrich with Multiple Personalities and psychic powers. He scrapped this idea because he believes video games should be fantasies (like daydreams).So he created this new character. He runs away from the circus (!) to join a psychic summer camp. His incredible natural aptitude make some of the counselors bend the rules to get him to train there (at least until his father comes back to pick him up), and he comes across a conspiracy over the psychic plane. This is the back story to Psychonauts.

The game play draws from the 3D platforming developed by Shigeru Miyamoto, and his team, for Super Mario 64. Unfortunately, he does not have that series's trademark flawless gameplay. It unfortunately it suffers from what I call the Rare syndrome, after Rare's sloppy implementation of the collect the trinkets gameplay in Donkey Kong 64. Luckily only a modicum of trinket fetching is absolutely necessary.

The real draws of the game are hilarious charachters, genuinely funny dialog, and the mindscapes it has for levels. It is probably the most inventive direct artistic representation of minds since The Cabinet of Dr. Calagari! Let the game speak for itself.Now we have seen an interactive representation of a paranoid schizophrenic mind! Aren't you proud!

Truly this is the ideal to which narrative games strive!

I'm Back

2008-02-13T17:22:00.000-06:00

Video Removed to save on load time.

Look out soon for posts on, in this order:

Tim Schafer - His many contributions to the universe

Some interesting cartoon stuffs

A History of "Noise" Music - Four parts: From Futurism to Duke Ellington, From Sun Ra to Jimi Hendrix, The Residents to Flipper, and today

An Elaboration of the Armstrong-Trombley-Waller Theorem - Why riffs are great and why people who don't agree never will. Examples from Pere Ubu, Metallica, and Stravinsky.

And,

How tastes are acquired - an examination

All delivered with the probing analysis that this blog has maintained. Hear (here) the MJQ represent the cool analytical tone this blog aims for.

A bit of thinking about Art

2008-02-08T22:40:00.000-06:00

If we understood the world, we would realize that there is a logic of harmony underlying its manifold apparent dissonances. - Jean Sibelius

Man, if you have to ask you'll never know - Louis Armstrong's definition of Jazz
Lady, If ya gotta ask, then ya ain't got it! - Fats Waller's definition of Rhythm
Riffs are ineffable - The Armstrong-Trombley-Waller Theorem

I recently read a tossed aside sentence that claimed that "art is subjective". The truth of this statement is not straight forward. Let us briefly pull it apart.

0. Universal Axioms
1. There is a set called art
2. Statements can be divided into subjective and objective statements
a. Subjective statements express personal opinion and cannot be disproved with evidence. They describe the inner world.
b. Objective statements are observations can be disproved with evidence. They describe what is commonly called the external world.
3. Therefore the naive version statement of this statement is false.

The naive statement "Art's existence is subjective" is false because if there is a set of things called art then that set exists whether you like it or not.

The weak statement actual meaning within the original proposition is "Subjective statements about art exist." This is true. "I like NRBQ" is a subjective statement about art. "Popular 80's band New Kids On The Block are not very good" is a subjective statement about art. The Armstrong-Trombley-Waller Theorem states that it is impossible to describe the qualities of a good riff.

The strong version of the actual meaning behind the original proposition is "All statements about art are subjective." This is false. "NRBQ worked with a variety of genres" is an objective statement about art. "New Kids On The Block plays generic music" is an objective statement.

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

This poem is good - subjective
This poem has a variable meter - objective
This drawing is bad-subjective
This drawing is crude-objectiveI like this early drawing of Judge Dredd - Subjective
Judge Dredd's model would evolve over time - ObjectiveJean Sibelius writes very nice music - subjective
Jean Sibelius uses has severe orchestration style - objective

Now, a medium statement would be that "The core of art is subjective". This is itself a complex statement. Subjective statements are the application of personal tastes to objective things, for instance words (poem), image (picture), or sound (music).

In addition there are also complex statements. For instance take the above statement: "New Kids On The Block plays generic music". Now let us alter it to a stronger statement: "New Kids On The Block plays musical cliches". The line between generic and cliche is subjective, partly provable by external evidence (showing similarities to other songs) and partly opinion. For instance, some (like me) find 50's popular music to be overly reliant on the same few chords and tricks (made of cliches). Interesting orchestration, in the case of Phil Spector or Leiber & Stoller, can make up for this. Others would feel that sentiment or spirited performance, which is the appreciation of quality generic, makes this music great. Frank Zappa was in the later category.

It is obvious that different people draw different kinds of pleasure from different works of art. For this the Scott McCloud system is useful once more. The Iconoclast and Animist finds the subjective parts of art paramount. The Formalist and Classicist finds the objective parts more
interesting. Of course the truth is in unison: Art is neither completely subjective nor wholly objective.

However, if you cannot back up your subjective statements with objective statements, with the exception of the ATW and related theses, then you are only evading the truth. Therefore, I would make a formalist/classicist argument that though art varies between subjective and objective conversation on art rests on the objective elements.

Let me leave you with a more jovial picture of the great Finn:

How much he resembles the afore quoted poem!

Shigeru Miyamoto

2008-02-08T19:02:00.000-06:00

Shigeru Miyamoto is probably the most important video game designer in history. Mr. Miyamoto, and his teams, invented cut-scenes, narrative video games, designed the first distinct levels, and (arguably) the first video games that stand on "artistic" merit. He has maintained high standards of game design throughout his career. The only bad habit Mr. Miyamoto has is that he often polishes already well implemented concepts over multiple games. However, his games consistently feature extremely intuitive gameplay, highly refined controller mechanics, and imaginative world building.

Mr. Miyamoto's design is influenced by technological limitations, cartoons (Peter Pan and Snow White being his favorites), his childhood wanderings in the Japanese countryside, and a commitment to high quality games to the point of ignoring schedules to refine anything less than perfect.

Hear him in his own words here.For Donkey Kong, the development team used every storytelling technique in the book (except dialog) to tell the very simple story of "Rescue the Princess". Impressed by this massive success, Mr. Miyamoto would only rarely leave this story. The game play is chiefly of the first variety, Controlled movement into guarded territory, and the loose narrative was groundbreaking for the time, but today the game would be considered very game play centered.

Notice that adjacent body parts are contrasting colors. This allows the tiny moving characters to "read" without using anymore computer space to give definition to the individual parts.

The gameplay is upward, to allow for simpler programming within the Radar Scope engine. In video games direction is important, and in early games were mono-directional.In Super Mario Brothers, direction was rightward, setting a trend that would not disappear until the invention of 3D games.It's a varied art direction was incredibly innovated. Over time the worlds changed, not just above-ground/underground/underwater/castle, but also the gradually darker outdoor levels, etc. The difficulty slope is excellent, but Bowser/Koopa is an identical boss every time which can make the game anti-climactic. The storytelling in Super Mario Brothers is actually more primitive that the storytelling in Donkey Kong, probably to save room for larger more varied levels and art design.The Legend of Zelda was the first notable console Role Playing Game. It features a more complex multi-directional, though still linear, game play due to emphasizing jumping less. The game features arbitrary lock down of rooms, which is a feature of its time but is now dated. The simplified RPG featured dialog, which for me meant the first exposer to poorly translated dialog.Super Mario 64 was the first high quality 3d console game. It featured the most complex controls ever in a Mario game, but was so intuitive that I can't remember what buttons did what, just what to do.The level design was much more mature, with multiple paths and clear but non-linear goals.The game invented now standard "collect-the-trinkets" gameplay, which has never been done better. You collect a certain number of trinkets and then you are allowed to move forward. This is a combination of type 1 and 2 gameplay.If there are games more perfect than the two Legend of Zelda games for the Nintendo 64, I haven't been made aware of them. Varied, intuitive, and multidirectional gameplay; excellent, epic, and unpretentious story; varied, beautiful, and organic level design; imaginative and organic character design; interesting charachters; great music; beautiful graphics; and everything else great that could be great in a video game. The above is from Ocarina of Time. The below is from Majora's Mask, my nominee for greatest video game of all time:

Not Here

2008-02-04T20:53:00.002-06:00

Don't expect any posts soon. If you need to read something on the internet, then go here, and read The "Emotional Machine". Marvin Minsky is a very clear thinker and makes powerful arguments.

Ludography: Video Game Analysis

2008-02-01T16:02:00.000-06:00

Though technically invented in the fifties, Video Games are still early in their life cycle. Novels and movies have gone through the processes that I now see video games going through. It is unfortunate that many "academic" view of video games tends to treat them as one would treat a film. In this post I will detail some history and give cursory analysis.

A time line of the history of games:
1. Physical Games
2. Analog Games
3. Video games (which can be divided into seven generations based on console life)Video Games evolved out of physical games, such as baseball. Video Games based on physical games remain the most consistently successful games. The goal of physical games (and of later games) is to, via rules controlled movement, enter a guarded space. The rules governing movement are known as "gameplay".

The idea of games descend from animal territorial behavior. Animal games are youthful imitations of adult territoriality. Though baseball is a relatively recent invention, physical games predate the evolution of humans. In baseball, the goal is to run past enemies before a trinket is retrieved.

Because Video Games satisfy the desire to play, they can have an unintended negative effect on children's health. In my experience proper parenting is the only necessary step to prevent such a decline.In Football, the goal is to use teamwork and personal athleticism to take a valuable trinket through competitors to a safe zone.Out of physical games analog games developed. Like (in fact like all games) physical games, analog games are about controlled movement into enemy territory. In chess, the goal is to capture the alpha piece. It is known for the carefully defined trinket movements. Planning and knowledge of strategy is necessary. Chess is considered a fast game among experts, but a slow one for beginners. In Chess, position within a game can be decided by calculating a point value systems for different trinkets.
Gambling, and game theory in general, enters this level of game. It is believed that only humans have the capacity for abstraction necessary to create and manage a point value system.

At this point we have all existent elements of games explicitly defined and categorized:
1. Controlled Movement into guarded territory
2. Accumulation of abstract points
Go is a game developed in China, known for being highly abstract. In Go, the goal is to surround and contain enemy territory. Go ends when no player can advance or take enemy territory, so it is possible to (through intentional sabotage) play infinitely.Tennis For Two was the first game played on a computer. Digital computing had not yet been invented, this one of the uses of computers as recreation. It was designed by physicist William Higinbotham for an outreach program by the Department of Energy's Brook Haven National Laboratory, Tennis For Two has some resemblance to Pong (the first commercially successful video game) none of the programming or gameplay has more than a superficial resemblance.

In Tennis For Two the idea of the "avatar" was first forged. Though in truth deriving from Sanskrit word for the Hindu concept of the spirit of a god in a mortal, Avatar in this instance and in all future uses in this post will refer to the bit that the character controls. The idea of the avatar as an extension of the self dates to Tennis for Two, which pragmatically found the easiest way to simulate tennis.

At this point I will skip ahead to 1981. When one analyzes films, one does not spend long at the Lumiere Brothers. Rather one skips ahead to D.W. Griffith or Buster Keaton. And who is this early genius who established the language?
Shigeru Miyamoto, still considered one of the most creative active game designers, with a fortune's worth of games. His industry defining game, his "Birth of a Nation":
Donkey Kong, the real square one for video games. Older games are of merely historical or nostalgic interest. In Donkey Kong, "Jumpman" (later renamed "Mario") moves upwards. Mr. Miyamoto and his team gave the avatar a reason to go up, namely a desire to be with and protect Pauline.
Gameplay wise, Donkey Kong features stylized jump gravity to leap over obstacles and traverse disconnected platforms. The abstract platforms in this game gave the name to a whole genre of video games: "platformers". A Platformer is any game that stylized jump gravity to leap over obstacles and traverse disconnected platforms.The plot of Donkey Kong was inspired by the Fleischer Brother's cartoon adaptation of E.C. Segar's Popeye comic strip. Donkey Kong was inspired by Bluto, Pauline by Olive Oyl, Mario by Popeye. Using cut scenes (like the one above) and multiple distinct levels to tell a story, Donkey Kong is the first narrative video game.

Starting with Donkey Kong video games can be distinguished into two categories:
1. Narrative centered
2. Gameplay centered

It is at this point that narratological criticism (the kind of criticism that comes from books, plays, and movies) enters the video game field. I will mix some narratological criticism with mostly ludogaphical (gameplay based) analysis.

In my next few posts I will be analyzing on the following game designers:

Michel AncelHideo KojimaMore on Miyamoto (especially the Mario and Legend of Zelda Series)

John RomeroTim SchaferAnd Will Wright

Baroque Music

2008-01-30T19:49:00.001-06:00

To save on load times I have changed all videos to links to videos.

Baroque Music is very interesting to me, both philosophically and (more importantly) musically. Baroque music always expresses a single idea or purpose within a single piece. Baroque music was written by musicians for highly specific purposes, because both the amount and quality of musicians available was variable on any given day. As a result the melodic lines (or "voices") in baroque music could be quite variable from one instrument to another. The quality of instruments was more predictable: low. As a result anything that required a resonant tone above all else (like a held chord) was forbidden. This lead to Baroque music's famous note heaviness. Claudio Monteverdi was the first important Baroque composer. He applied his extensive knowledge of, and innovations in, renaissance choral polyphony to instrumental passages. This led to the core of the baroque style: note heavy polyphony.Domenico Scarlatti wrote chiefly for the harpsichord. His style (which included hand crossing, distant modulations, and daring chromaticism) led to the development of modern piano style.Bach is known throughout the world as perhaps the greatest composers of all time. Known in particularly for the massive architectural solo keyboard pieces he wrote for students, Bach composed in every style and medium available at the day. From a long musical family, Bach's sons would also have illustrious carriers. A bit from Art of the Fugue.Handel was Bach's personal favorite composer and the most popular composer of his day. Handel is deceivingly simple: he uses so little and writes so plainly that we simply arrive where he wants us to whether we are conscious of it or not. His simplicity of expression would greatly influence the development of the style galant or Classical music. I leave you with one of his most famous works.

In closing, some summarizing analysis. In the Scott McCloud system outlined below, baroque music appeals to the classicist and the formalist within us. The classicist loves the large scale, the quality of composition, and the pristine beauty of baroque works. The formalist loves the careful logic, the daring chromatic experimentation, and the abstract beauty of baroque works.

Folk Music

2008-01-30T18:44:00.000-06:00

To save on load time, I have exchanged videos with links to videos.

This is finger picker is "Mississippi" John Hurt on Pete Seeger's Rainbow Quest. Mr. Hurt is a brilliant finger picker, and his style have been studied by many serious guitarists for some time.Here Mr. Hurt lies next to the "younger" (though still quite elderly at this point) Nehemiah "Skip" James, a more blues oriented guitarist. Skip James's fingers were absolutely wild, fascinating and converting even classical musicians like John Fahey.

Mr. James hadn't held a guitar for almost thirty years before this video was recorded. I like this arraignment of his own song, even though he clearly made it up on the spot.

Folk music is very much like Baroque music in that it is very object oriented: a folk song has a message or a story or a purpose. This makes the idea of folk music appealing to me as a philosophical "pragmatist".

Related to the philosophy is the actual sound and music. Also like baroque music, folk music was designed to be played on sometimes inferior instruments, so held notes (or anything else that would highlight the lack of proper resonance) are next to non existent. Unlike Baroque music, folk music is very "light", not architecturally complex. As a result errors in interpretation are very audible.

On the Scott McCloud system, folk music appeals to the animist and iconoclasts within us. Animists like charachters, stories, and the lovely melodies. Iconoclasts like the personal nature, the passion, stories of wronged people, and the lovely melodies.

Pete Seeger is certainly an iconoclast, but he was also very sober and formal about his music; Mr. Seeger has written several books about the musical composition and instrumental styles/methods of men like Mississippi John Hurt and Leadbelly:Lead Belly's heavy, pianistic chord voicings are very influential.

Of course, it should not be assumed that folk music is entirely without experimentation. John Lee Hooker, an early electro-acoustic improviser, uses many extended techniques in his performance style, especially in the early solo recordings. Hooker's approach to folk/blues (Hooker played strophic folk songs with blue notes mostly in the voice) was so revolutionary that no one could play it when he was inventing it. Only people who listened to it since birth could understand Hooker's extremely organic free rhythm. Interestingly, eventually Pinetop Perkins and Walter "Shakey" Horton would join Hooker's touring band, two musicians who couldn't understand Hooker when he was still composing! Since this was when the men where well into their 50s and 60s by that point, I assume by that time the Hooker style entered the blues's blood.

YouTube is a great source for folk music. Comb its catalogs when feeling down!

Let me close with a suggestion. If you want to make an investment into folk music then I recommend one of the following anthologies:

1.Anthology of American Folk music
2. World Library Of Folk & Primitive Music
3. Treasury of Library of Congress Field Recordings

Osamu Tezuka's Broken Down Film

2008-01-27T11:23:00.000-06:00

I've removed this video to cut down on load times. It is available here.

This is an excellent example of Mr. Tezuka's artistic tendencies. A strange formalist film buoyed by it's simple humorous charachters. In the Scott McCloud system outlined below, Mr. Tezuka is defiantly a Animist/Formalist. This film (made in 1985) celebrates the early Disney/Fleischer cartoons that Mr. Tezuka grew up with and that informed his style.

A very brief analysis:

There are three charachters and two vehicles in Broken Down Film:

HERO
DAMSEL
BADGUY
horse
train

There are eight independent sequences in Broken Down Film:

1. Monty Python-esque credits
2. HERO riding on his horse
3. HERO saving DAMSEL from the train
4. HERO duel with BADGUY begins
5. HERO hides from BADGUY on the misaligned film bar
6. HERO and DAMSEL together in idealized environment
7. HERO and DAMSEL "embrace"
8. HERO rides into the sunset

Throughout the film the charachters are alternately plagued and aided by an unstable film world. The film within the short shows it's "wear" from age and the trip overseas. Mr. Tezuka's method of limited animation that evolved into anime is easily recognizable.

The music is Weeping Willie, an old Ragtime/Jazz piece. It is quite period accurate for the meta-fictional idea at the core of the film.

Voynich manuscript

2008-01-26T20:30:00.001-06:00

Click on it and see.

Last Night's Dream

2008-01-26T17:08:00.000-06:00

I had to share:

First, an extended fantasy western duel between a single man and a wagon of people in a forest. The wagon is the remnants of a failed colony. The sheriff orders the man to board the wagon to avoid the coming nor'easter. He sends his last loyal thugs to force the gunman. The thugs are both played by Charles Bronson. The gunman kills the pair without ceremony. The sheriff himself walks out to face the insolent gunman. During the ensuing duel, the single man becomes more and more supernatural until he is teleporting around and forces the sheriff (whose tyranny and incompetence helped lead to the end of the colony) to admit defeat without firing a shot.

Mr. Bronson invites me, the director of the film that the above was the ending sequence to, to a restaurant wrap party that we are filming near (no film crew is visible at any point). Once in the restaurant I lose track of Mr. Bronson (the restaurant is in a different time continuum/light cone than Bronson) to ask William S. Burroughs if he will appear in my film. Mr. Burroughs is sitting at the restaurant table with his handler. I was aware in the dream that I was traveling in time, because Bronson & Burrougs are both dead, but didn't find it odd. He agrees happily, even seeming excited to work with me. I sit down next to him and start to explain to him the movie (the backstory to the above western sequence), but he gives me a look that says “I don’t want to hear this right now”. I don't think he understands I want to cast him in a speaking role, not a cameo. Another man, a hipster, walks up to sit with Burroughs and I say something to make him dismiss cause and effect casually. Mr. Burroughs agrees with him. I begin to argue that cause and effect is not necessarily false and shouldn’t be dismissed so lightly. The hipster gives a rough explanation of Newtonian physics and claims that that clockwork universe was disproved by Einstein’s relativity theories. I note that this is not true; space-time is not symmetrical, rather there is a clear direction caused by thermodynamics: as time goes forward entropy increases. I woke up before I finished this argument.

Osamu Tezuka

2008-01-25T21:18:00.000-06:00

Osamu Tezuka is the father of Japanese comics and animation (also known as manga and anime respectivle), whose enormous high quality output (it is estimated that he published over 150,000 pages comprised of over 700 titles) has permanently altered the shape of world comics and animation. His work created both a new market and new industry for these goods that are now the worlds largest of their kind.

Osamu Tezuka was born in Toyonaka City, Japan in 1928. He had frizzy hair and had to have perms almost daily to tame it. His mussy hair, refracted through his shape-heavy style, inspired the unusual hair prevalent in his work. It also functioned as a easy way to have a distinctive outline. He trained as a doctor, but found the time to manage his first published comic (Diary of Ma-Chan) while 17.Crude, yes, but this pair of strips do display the roots of Mr. Tezuka's famous style. Character centered, broad, round stylization, and a mastery over rhythm. Rhythm is incredibly important to Tezuka's comics, and ranges from the extremely fast to the human to contemplative to extremely slow. With such a foundation Tezuka would grow to have an amazing relationship with the comics page and the comic panel to create new rhythms and effects.Mr. Tezuka had a very cinematic approach to comics, influenced by Ub Iwerk's innovations within the Disney corporation.Mr. Tezuka had a complex relationship with "realism" flowing from the simplicity above to the rich detailed panels below.A poly-genre gadfly, Mr. Tezuka worked in every existing genre and invented several. I have categorized a few of his most famous works.

Science Fiction (AstroBoy)Modern Day Action-Adventure (New Treasure Island)Fantasy (Monkey, adapted from the 16th Chinese Novel)Fantasy for Girls (Princess Knight, founded the genre)Horror (The Vampires, an arraignment of Macbeth)Religion (Phoenix, Mr. Tezuka considered this his life's work but did not complete the last volume before he died)Historical Epic (The Stories of the Three Adolf, one of whom is Hitler)And Medical Drama (Black Jack)

Osamu Tezuka had an obvious love of living things, a vitalism that gives his lightest stories a robust humor and introduces a true darkness to his blacker work.

As is unique to the internet, I will end this post with a nice piece of trivia. Stanley Kubrick fought to have Mr. Tezuka installed as the art director for 2001: A Space Odyseey, but unfortunately Tezuka was handling several series and couldn't afford to leave his office. Tezuka reportedly greatly enjoyed the film, and often blasted the soundtrack to keep himself awake during long nights.

Car Design & Nostalgia

2008-01-24T20:41:00.000-06:00

Karl Benz's Patent Motorwagon - the purpose-built (designed with engine in mind) automobile

Famously, the first automobiles were almost literally "horseless carriages"Though "steam wagons" is probably a more accurate term.The first gas powered automobile

Gasoline was slow to be adopted, for much the same reasons as hydrogen is slow to be adopted today.The Model A established Ford Motors as car manufacturer (note: no Model A ever looked this good when they were actually used)And the Model T established the automobile as an industry. The Model T was/is an ugly, inefficient metal bucket that cost almost nothing to manufacture. Once established, Mr. Ford put up his profits to develop an extremely capital intensive (but cost saving) system called Mass Production. Mass Production has it's roots in Hume's economic theory of 'partition of employments', which led to the development of the Armory System by Captain John H. Hall and refined by Eli Whitney (of cotton gin fame).
This is a 1953 Chevy 2103 4 door sedan. Like the Model T it is a heavy metal box. This one is pretty ugly, but they can clean up good. It does not even have the advantage of being efficient to manufacture, it was just a disgusting beast. The white stripe on the tires was there to make you forget that they are poorly manufactured, or at least a former public relations executive working for a tire company (Bridgestone, I believe) claims in a documentary. Anybody with taste and brains can see the gaudy exterior hides a basically poor body style.

Now what does this have to do with nostalgia? Well, I often read denigration of anything modern. Nostalgia is the appreciation of something due to it's age rather than it's merits. I recently read an article that asked why modern cars don't look like that anymore. This is terrible because today we have beautifully designed cars like the Porsche Carrera GT:and the Maserati MC12 (aka the Enzo Ferrari):
That should make the old chevys look like the piles of crap that they are. I know it isn't fair of me to compare these extremely expensive cars to the midrange Chevrolet, but I picked the prettiest pictures out of the first pages I found.

But, my point remains. When these cars (the old ones) where cheap then it was understandable to have a good amount of respect for them. They were functional, after all. But the reverence. There are few crimes of bad taste than nostalgia, because nostalgia is both pretentious and difficult to mock. Everybody knows the "Bring back that" and "why can't this happen these days" kind. Sometimes it is something that anyone who lived through would have hated or been annoyed by, but most often it is just some old piece of idiocy that the fool wants to smile at without considering what it actually is or does or what it would be like to be surrounded by it. I have nothing but contempt for this type of nostalgia.

Allow me to regain my humor.Much better.

A Scott McCloud Observation

2008-01-23T13:05:00.000-06:00

Scott McCloud is, as noted earlier, a great comic book artist and the foremost comics analyst. I read each of his books on comics in a single sitting, and his comics (both paper based and web based) are very entertaining.

In Making Comics, Mr. McCloud examines the ways that people draw pleasure from comics (and by extension media in general) a few categories. To this he divides the population into four distinct (but overlapping groups). Unfortunately, I am writing this post without the book in hand, so if I mischaracterize a statement, please let me know. Equally unfortunate is that I cannot at the moment use Mr. McCloud's illustrations and graphic examples of these categories.

The Categories, and examples are:
1. The Classicist - focus on craftsmanship, excellence and mastery - Classic Disney
2. The Animist - focus on characters, stories and effective storytelling - Jack Kirby
3. The Formalist - focus on forms (ex. comics) and figuring out what the forms are capable of - Gary Panter 4. The Iconoclast - focus on honesty, authenticity and showing the truth of something, warts and all - R. Crumb Each of these have specific reservations about the mediocre works of other three:
1. The Classicist accuses the animist of simplicity, the formalist of meaninglessness, and the iconoclast of ugliness
2. The Animist accuses the classicist of pointless overdrawing, the formalist of unnecessary density, and the iconoclast of pretentiousness
3. The Formalist accuses the classicist of artistic conservatism, the animist of pointlessness, and the iconoclast of self-absorption
4. The Iconoclast accuses the classicist of soullessness, the animist of dullness, and the formalist of meaningless abstraction

Of course these are broad categories: to some extent we all are each of these. But, in reality, we have preferences. Some combinations are more common than others (this was convincingly portrayed via graphics in Making Comics).

Some Typical combinations:
1/2 - The classic conservative taste - Milton Caniff
1/3 - belief in art for art's sake - Winsor McCay
2/4 - desire for something human - John Kricfalusi
3/4 - desire for something new - Art Spiegalman

Rare combinations:
2/3 - It is difficult to concentrate on vivid charachters when you are grinding new lenses - Dave Sim
1/4 - Classic models do not have warts - Jean Giraud (Moebius)

Scott McCloud and I both lean towards 3. Commercially the greatest successes have been from artists that lean towards 2, suggesting that 2 is the most common preference. And what is yours?

Note: it is easier to find your position by thinking what you don't like, what you think is over praised, and why.

More Pictures

2008-01-22T21:29:00.000-06:00

The original pitch for Dirty Harry

Will Rogers, who made fun of every important figure in his life but never met a man he didn't like

William S. Burroughs, a leading member of the literary avant-garde during his life. I am working on a post will be about one of his favorite writers: Jack Black.

Sitting in the first row far left (with the x above him) is Adolf Hitler, infamous the world over for beginning brutally genocidal purge of Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals; and instigating a disastrous war against a vague enemy with an unclear agenda that quickly became the deadliest war of all time

Paul Erdős, Hungarian mathematician. The first or second most prolific mathematician of all time, depending on how you measure

Blind Willie Johnson, early blues guitarist

Hector Berlioz, romantic composer. Here he is pictured shortly before his death.

Felidae

2008-01-21T21:39:00.000-06:00

Here's an internet treat. Felidae (1994) is a German animated film based one the novel by Akif
Pirinçci, directed by Michael Schaack. You may know Mr. Schaack's work; he directed several episodes of Sandmännchen: Or perhaps you are familiar with his work on what the machine translator insists on calling Small Asshole (Kleines Arschloch).Small Asshole is a delightful adaptation of some of the work of Walter Moers. I remember Mr. Moers well, because I once tried to buy his book The Thirteen and a Half Lives of Captain Bluebear it was bought before I could get the money a day later.
But this is not about wasted enthusiasm. This is about an odd animated film. Felidae was, essentially, an attempt to write an intelligent detective novel about cats. The film adapts the novel rather faithfully, the machine translator claims, but flopped due to graphic violence. It also killed any American box office ability with explicit cat-on-cat sex. The film cost 8 million euros (12 million dollars) and was a flop. The animation is very lovely. The cats are very cat-like, anthropomorphized a minimum amount to allow for a mystery plot to unfold.

The down sides are a painfully bad english dub and a Boy George song. I can understand that the dubbers were under a lot of time and money constraints. They were dubbing a film that flopped in its own country, much less American market potential! But this is what is technically refered to as a macekre (pronounced massacre) after infamous distributor of Japanese animation Carl Macek. The poor quality of the dub effects the film at many points, but if one stops the film four minutes before the film is over (just as Francis leaves the burning building) the tacked on psudeo-philosophical dismissal of all the questions that the plot raised, and you won't hear the Boy George song.

Here is Part one.

Stand-Up Comedy

2008-01-19T22:03:00.001-06:00

Stand-Up Comedy is a form of 'theater' or stage craft which is defined by extreme minimalism and a focus on humor. No sets, no music, no linear story, and one writer/performer. As a rule it is a difficult, lonely, and vicious experience. "Stand-Up Comics", as they are called, hate solidarity and thus each other. Anything joke that remotely resembles another will earn a comic widespread hatred of men and women who have never met them.

Historically, Stand Up comedy evolved out of the Borscht Belt yiddish theater. This style period was summarized well by George Carlin: "[it's about] crabgrass, suburbs, my wife shops too much, but every now and then I get to fuck her." Many who started in this style polished their acts beyond it's limitations either by leaving Stand-Up (Woody Allen or Mel Brooks) or personalizing their acts (Lenny Bruce).

Will Rogers's style was much more personal and political than this Borscht Belt style, which surprised me. But the genial warmth of Mr. Rogers was equally disarming.

Lenny Bruce's act emphasized improvisation. His style is often compared to Charlie Parker and Bebop. I've never really heard it.
The undisputed master is Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor III. The son of a prostitute, Mr. Pryor was largely raised by his grandmother and his mother's pimp LeRoy Pryor (also known as Buck Carter). His first experience of performing before a crowd came in school, where he convinced his teacher that he would stop making jokes in class in return for a set time for humor (once a week). After a series of odd jobs, he got a few jobs as an M.C. (a Stand Up Comic) for several clubs as a Bill Cosby-esque act. The story goes that one day he was opening up for Dean Martin in Las Vegas looked out over the audience and wondered aloud into the mic "What the fuck am I doing here?" His style was caustic and blunt, but brilliant and filled to the brim with life. His routines are full of charachters, often tough confrontational men and men that think they are tough and confrontational. The stories would be incredibly frighting if they weren't so funny. They probably were very frighting, in real life.
There's really nothing left to say.