Four more bars

I saw the band Swans this past Tuesday. Swans are a New York band who spent most of the last 15 years broken up, and while this show wasn't a reunion gig, the band brought an extra-spiteful edge to this hometown performance.

Swans are one of the stranger bands that I listen to, which makes them really easy to write about. I could go on at great length about their performance. They've got a weird instrumental set-up, a quirky cast of characters behind the instruments, a deliberately confrontational set structure, and a range of unusual performance tics. They even had a heated argument onstage. These things all make for rock-writer wet dreams.

But one aspect of Swans' performance caught my attention more than any other: the communication between frontman/guitarist Michael Gira and the rest of the musicians.

Probably both

It's been a few weeks. Time for me to write about a Democracy In America post!

One today's posts was about the classic utilitarian thought experiment known as the 'trolley dilemma.' A couple of Columbia psychologists recently published an interesting study regarding this dilemma. The dilemma goes about like this:

"There are five railway workmen in the path of a runaway carriage. The men will surely be killed unless the subject of the experiment, a bystander in the story, does something. The subject (of the study) is told he is on a bridge over the tracks. Next to him is a big, heavy stranger. The subject is informed that his own body would be too light to stop the train, but that if he pushes the stranger onto the tracks, the stranger’s large body will stop the train and save the five lives. That, unfortunately, would kill the stranger."

The notion of this scenario is that it exposes the chief difficulty of utilitarianism: its greatest-good moral calculus dictates that you should push the fat guy onto the tracks, but our guts tell us otherwise. The Columbia shrinks tested their subjects for signs of psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and low valuation of human life before exposing them to this dilemma.

It turns out that only a handful (10%) of folks would push the fat guy. Unsurprisingly, most of them show signs of psychopathy, Machiavellian thinking, or something else of the same unappealing sort. "Utilitarians may add to the sum of human happiness, but they are not very happy people themselves," the Economist writer summarizes.

Über-hotness

I'm currently plowing through the archives of a webcomic called Sub-Normality. The strip is mostly episodic and frequently focuses on characters that don't return or even have names. To the extent that has central characters at all, its two protagonists are a nameless, ditzy Canadian who's struggling her way through her semi-employed 20s and...an irate, man-eating sphinx who's struggling through her semi-employed 3000s.

For me, the comic's primary draw is its art. Strip creator Winston Rowntree (a pseudonym) renders his blocky figures in bright Saturday-morning colors. He's mastered the cartoonist's art of drawing believable expressions on unbelievable faces--his characters never look uncanny. He's like a cheerier, less disgusting version of R. Crumb.

Rowntree also has a knack for identifying bizarre-but-common social behaviors. He typically uses the sphinx as a means to point out and lampoon such practices, as he does in this strip.

But Sub-Normality has its fair share of flaws too. Many of the strip's episodes involve unapproachable walls of text. Rowntree himself has lampshaded this tendency with Sub-Normality's tagline ("Comix with too many words since 2007"). More annoyingly, he slams readers with heavy-handed liberal talking points and social critiques in every third or fourth strip, as he does here, here, and here. I lean way to the left of center, so I often agree with the thrust of these strips. The problem is that Rowntree drives home the point so forcefully that he insults my intelligence. You don't need a megaphone to preach to a choir that's sitting three feet away from you.

And sometimes he just baffles me, as he does in the strip shown below:

Well, this pretty much sums it up for America

You can skip to about 0:18.

Material girl, revisited

As we go about our daily lives in our media-obsessed society, we absorb a great deal of information that we would never have sought out on our own. If you're me, you consequently find yourself forming nuanced opinions about subjects that you really, truly don't care about.

One such subject is Lady Gaga. I don't follow big-name pop at all, and I don't hear her music much. It strikes me as marginally less annoying than most music in its vein, but I mostly avoid it (Meshuggah mashups aside).

Gaga's persona, however, is so ubiquitous that I've settled on a fairly specific attitude towards here. In short, I think that her business model is impressive and even revolutionary in some ways. However, most of her 'freak' credentials—be it her music, her appearance, or her way of presenting herself in interviews—are old-hat. This is a minority perspective, so I was pretty surprised to come across a Slate editorial that captures most of my thoughts about Gaga:

Father Judge

I keep my clock radio tuned to NPR. The radio turns on as soon as my alarm goes off. I find that trying to process speech helps me get my brain working in the morning.

When I woke up this morning, the local NPR affiliate was broadcasting a piece on Father Mychal Judge, the Franciscan FDNY chaplain who was the first officially-tallied casualty of 9/11. Judge was something of a legendary good guy, and his funeral was attended by some three thousand people just four days after the attack.

The radio broadcast part of the service's homily, delivered by a fellow Franciscan named Michael Duffy:


"Mychal Judge’s body was the first one released from Ground Zero. His death certificate has the number one on the top. And I meditated on that fact of the thousands of people that we are going to find out who perished in that terrible holocaust. Why was Mychal Judge number one? And I think I know the reason. I hope you’ll agree with me. Mychal’s goal and purpose in life at that time was to bring the firemen to the point of death, so they would be ready to meet their maker...
 
Mychal Judge could not have ministered to them all. It was physically impossible in this life but not in the next. And I think that if he were given his choice, he would prefer to have happened what actually happened. He passed through the other side of life, and now he can continue doing what he
wanted to do with all his heart. And the next few weeks, we’re going to have names added, name after name of people, who are being brought out of that rubble. And Mychal Judge is going to be on the other side of death, to greet them instead of sending them there. And he’s going to greet them with that big Irish smile. He’s going to take them by the arm and the hand and say, 'Welcome, I want to take you to my Father.' And so, he can continue doing in death what he couldn’t do in life."

Dopamine squirt

I say again: screens on screens

Last night, my girlfriend forwarded me this blog post/op-ed from the Harvard Business Review. In it, a presumably successful "strategic adviser to CEOs and their creative teams" (whatever that means) talks about why he returned his iPad. My girlfriend correctly gauged that I would find it interesting, given the constant state of technology panic that I live in.

Peter Bregman, the CEO adviser, gives his reasoning for returning the iPad:

"It didn't take long for me to encounter the dark side of this revolutionary device: it's too good. It's too easy. Too accessible. Both too fast and too long-lasting. Certainly there are some kinks, but nothing monumental. For the most part, it does everything I could want. Which, as it turns out, is a problem...The brilliance of the iPad is that it's the anytime-anywhere computer. On the subway. In the hall waiting for the elevator. In a car on the way to the airport. Any free moment becomes a potential iPad moment."

I'm with Bregman up to this point. If you own an iPad or know someone who does, you know that iPad owners tend to cart the damn thing around everywhere, and use it whenever it is remotely feasible. You also probably know that you/they use it at moments that border on socially inappropriate—for instance, when you/they have a friend over for drinks. Maybe I'm just old-school before my time, but ignoring a guest so you can play Angry Birds or pore over a box score strikes me as somewhat rude.

Trust, Truth and Tora-Tora-Tora

As part of my deeply slothful Labor Day yesterday, my girlfriend and I watched the first "episode" (read: 140-minute block) of The War, Ken Burns' World War II documentary.

Over fourteen sprawling hours, The War tells the story of history's greatest war. Rather, it tells enough of it for Burns' audience to consider themselves better informed afterwards. The series was designed for an explicitly American audience, and it interprets history through the lens of four American cities and their occupants.

The episode itself mostly dealt with facts and events that I was already familiar with. That said, I found the attitudes of its American interviewees quite interesting at times.

Rotten pocket

For someone who's nominally a death metal musician, I don't attend many purebred death metal shows. In this day and age, most metal bills are heterogeneous. This state of affairs is probably for the best. It's hard to absorb four straight hours of any style of metal, and death metal tends to batter the ears into numbness more quickly than most others.

So last night's lineup at Gramercy Ballroom was an oddity. Grave, one of Sweden's most stalwart DM acts, headlined a package that also included Norway's Blood Red Throne, California's Pathology, and Florida's Gigan. Gramercy is a large venue for bands of this sort, and its excellent sight lines and mercifully restrained volume levels exposed the dramatic differences between four bands who nominally play the same style of music.

The above song demonstrates how heavily Gigan relies on texture. Their compositions are zany--guitars squiggle and chirp over jittery blastbeats and baroque fills. Gigan codify their sound with their liberal use of effects processors and noise washes. Those digital squawks and drones transform them from "technical death metal" into "alien death metal."

Safe at home!

I wasn't much of a baseball fan growing up. Since I wasn't terribly coordinated as a kid, the precision that baseball requires escaped me. On top of that, I was something of a chunker, so I was naturally drawn to sports where I could throw my weight around. I ended up playing football, learning the game, and becoming an avid NFL fan. Baseball was outside my realm of interest throughout middle school and high school.

Over the last four years or so, I've become more and more interested in baseball. Two factors contributed to this development. The first was the rise of the Philadelphia Phillies, my hometown team. Nothing dials up a sport's interest level than a wildly successful local franchise, and I gladly hopped on the Phils bandwagon. The other factor was my circle of friends, which has included a number of serious baseball fans during the last half-decade. It's a lot easier to decipher a sport's logic and lingo when you have well-informed guides at your disposal.

Whenever I mentally compare the two sports, I instantly think of the famous George Carlin sketch on the subject: