Dr. Rat

Straight down Rt. 1. A beautiful place! I used to live in new brunswick, so I'm allowed to make fun! --eric ← Plainfield is not New Brunswick and isn't on Rt. 1. ← Damn. Plainfield's not New Brunswick. It isn't South Plainfield, either. But anyhow, as other folk's detailed directions point out, if you come down 1, you will find signs for South Plainfield which lies a very, very far 10 minutes to the west.

Straight down Rt. 1. A beautiful place! I used to live in new brunswick, so I'm allowed to make fun! --eric

Doctor, definitely. Some guy cleaned my clock at soccer one night and tore my trapezius (sp?) muscle, which hurt very bad. Stupid me didn't go to the doctor so I got three days of incresing pain and pulled all my vertebrae out of whack scrunching up. But the DO straightened out my back, gave me some wonderful pain pills and muscle relaxants. Along with a few days rest I was mostly recovered by the time the drugs ran out. Hopefully, you can be another miracle of modern pharmaceutica if only you'll go see a qualified gatekeeper. --eric

Nah, it's actually the same as the answer to the question, "why does the dog owner lick his balls?" Because he saw the dog do it, and figured even though the odds of success were highly unlikely, it wouldn't hurt anything to try... ← You could probably do it pretty easy if the dog was distracted by something that kept him still for a while, like a bone maybe. --eric

Burl Ives!

Well, I'd bet that if this is the last straw (which I doubt) Ben Ratliff will go down as perhaps the worst but deifnitely the last jazz writer employed by the Times. The reason why he's there in the first place is because respectability amongst angry letter writers means very little to them. They're obviously looking for someone who might develop a bit more interest and enthusiasm in the subject matter. A pretty obvious last ditch effort, in my opinion. --eric

This stuff is terrible for you, but if I buy it, I eat it all soon as I get home. Therefore I never buy it. But I guess its still my favorite. --eric

I might check him out since majority of world's big systems are complex systems but at first glance it looks like 99% is over my head. One funny thing is, he has these gorgantuan equations and at the end he says something like "Note to statisticians: Sorry I am being simplistic" ← Yes, some of it is not for your average bear, but he also writes intelligently about understandable things like evolution and politics as well. --eric

Next you'll be telling me that practically all statements beginning "There are two types of . . ." are highly dubious! --eric

That serrated stage edge was a bad idea! --eric

Personally, I was intrigued by Hippo, lost interest, then started to get intrigued again lately. Live at the Quick and Ten from Little Worlds, I'd say, are well worth checking out and are reason to hope that the elements he's fusing together can be meshed well. I very much like the "world music" musicians he's been working in lately--they give the feel of the music a much more organic texture than it had on early flecktone efforts. --eric

This is a blog that I've found to be really fascinating and enlightening: Three-toed Sloth By a youngish fellow named Cosma Shalizi who is a post-doc at the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan and has also studied at the Santa Fe Institute. Aside from knowing math, science and complexity theory really well, he's also generally well-read and really well-plugged into the scientific end of the blogosphere. --eric

This one? ← Yes, that does look familiar. So Laos, not Thailand. --eric

The record I was talking about is on Nimbus, which I think helped inspire the Jah Wobble "Molam Dub." http://www.30hertzrecords.com/molamdub.htm --eric

I rember this great disc that came out a few years back called Molam Lao, which had a bunch of guys mostly from Thailand, I beleive, playing these huge harmonica/accordion-like instruments on these very structured, minimalist but dance-like tunes (as I fondly but hazily recall). Really cool stuff. We actually got loads of play from the late night free-form people who usually play little else but rock and elctronic. --eric ← A yes, the khene. I once had a car acident to the tune of the CD, Jah Wobble - Molam Dub ← Yes! the khene! I hope you (and the record) came out OK. --eric

I rember this great disc that came out a few years back called Molam Lao, which had a bunch of guys mostly from Thailand, I beleive, playing these huge harmonica/accordion-like instruments on these very structured, minimalist but dance-like tunes (as I fondly but hazily recall). Really cool stuff. We actually got loads of play from the late night free-form people who usually play little else but rock and elctronic. --eric

In respect to the tiger, where is your belly button? --eric

A friend of mine got the Lowenbrau lion on his arm. --eric

Just stay where we can see you now, OK? --eric

We've added it here, and taken one track at a time, my complaints about the album fade in significance, which I often find to be the case--albums I wouldn't listen to straight through on a wage are OK or even good when they represent a bit of a change of pace. --eric

Some opinions here. --eric

Just reading this at lunch. The review struck me as kind of strange, not just in terms of the Seymour's tone vs. that of most folks around here, but in that this guy seems intersted in talking about Crouch on some basis that gets beyond his abrasiveness and physical/intellectual pugilism . . . but then he doesn't At which point, the reader will be tempted to shout, "Awww, man! Why'd you have to go there? You were doing fine up till then." This isn't the last time the stained-yellow underwear comes up, and it's at such points and others strewn throughout the book that one's threshold for Crouch's freewheeling attack gets pressed to the breaking point. Still, when Crouch is focused on the task at hand, especially in the title essay's slow-hand evisceration of David Shields's Black Planet, it is fearsomely thrilling to behold. To Crouch, Shields's highly subjective account of the 1994-95 Seattle SuperSonics season constitutes one of the bad things that happen when good writers grasp for authenticity or, as Crouch sees it, the notion of "being--or not being--what [shields] calls 'cool.'" Reading Shields confess his fascination, from his relatively secure, petit-bourgeois white standpoint, with flamboyant, often belligerent and wealthy black basketball superstars like Gary Payton, Crouch finds that Shields is avoiding, far more than confronting, his own bullshit. As far as Shields is concerned, Crouch writes: You probably have to read both the "Artificial White Man" essay and "Blues in More Than One Color: The Films of Quentin Tarantino" more than once to figure out why Crouch thinks Tarantino is a lot "cooler"--more authentic?--in his engagement with the black psyche than Shields. The Tarantino essay does cover a lot of real estate. (It's a raw, rambling and altogether remarkable virtuoso solo that started out, Crouch writes, as a letter responding to Daniel Mendelsohn's dismissal of Tarantino's Kill Bill in The New York Review of Books.) It might help to skip ahead to the part of the essay that deals with Tarantino's overlooked Jackie Brown (1997), which gets its most thorough and incisive appreciation in these pages. Crouch correctly sees that what had been hyped and is still seen in some quarters as Tarantino's homage to the "blaxploitation" movies of the 1970s was in fact a sly, humane subversion of those knockabout thrillers. Crouch's swaggering belligerence may sell tickets to the chattering classes. But critics should always be judged finally on what and how they love. And in the Tarantino essay and his appreciations elsewhere in the book of Jorge Luis Borges, Danzy Senna, Saul Bellow and ZZ Packer, his enthusiastic passion feels so genuine that it further diminishes the things and trends he despises.

Isn't Telarc owned by BMG/whoever they are? --eric

OK. The funny thing here is that I've always despised formalism, and for some reason I feel drawn to it at the moment as a better solution. But anyhow, here is a reformulation of formalism, tamed down Hanslick. Hanslick chose a bad enemy in Wagner, because Wagner was very good at imposing the terms of any argument, and forcing aopponents into extreme positions complimentary to his own. But anyway, domesticated formalism: The artistic has to be set off from the everyday in order for us to recognize it. There's something that allows us to, say, distinguish comprehensible speech from babble. That's form (structure, if you will). And if we work hard enough we can even distinguish between babble and speech we cannot comprehend--we can distiguish form even if we cannot distinguish content. A special case of speech, with even more highly developed forms, is eloquence--artistic speech. To translate this to music, we might distiguish between a five year old just blowing into a saxophone (babble), the alto playing of a Salvation army carol group (speech/competence) and Johnny Hodges (art). Can Mr. Salvo suddenly become inspired and create something on the horn that may be art? yes. Is it likely? no. Why not? Because he does not have the technical command to create the array of musical forms that someone like Hodges can. So instrument technique IS a means, but it is a means to creating and manipulating musical form, and it is this the apprehension and appreciation of this manipulation: representing established forms, juxtaposing them, breaking them down and recreating them . . . this is what we recognize as "beauty." In this formulation, beauty mainly lies in the art object itself, independent of any reference to anything else (be it commonality of human experience, the spiritual, whatever). Not that these other things may not lend to and lend profundity to the experience, but they are not essential to the experience. Profoundly wise observation of the human condition is not itself beautiful; even a lie can be beautifully expressed. So the artist is much more of a technician, not just in his technical manipulation of the admitted "means": her saxophone, his paintbrush--but also in his manipulation of form within his/her distinct medium/media. The details of the way this sort of manipulation works could, in principle, be apprehensible to science. Not sure whether I beleive this to be true myself yet, but it definitely has its appeal to me at the moment. --eric

Some stuff on Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy: Later Nietzsche became disaffected with Wagner and the wagnerian, and reformulated Dionysus to be more like "controlled passion" than the more unchecked (but by Apollo) sort of pasison he seems to endorse in BoT.