A love haiku
This year, I thought, I'll tend my garden. That fall you were in my brambles.
we're not kids anymore.

No title available

★
styofa doing anything

Origami Around
cherry valley forever
Sade Olutola
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Jules of Nature
noise dept.
Xuebing Du
Mike Driver
Cosimo Galluzzi

pixel skylines
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me

@theartofmadeline

shark vs the universe

JBB: An Artblog!

JVL

ellievsbear
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Bolivia

seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Singapore

seen from United States

seen from Singapore
seen from Türkiye
seen from Malaysia

seen from Türkiye

seen from Brazil

seen from United States
@ported
A love haiku
This year, I thought, I'll tend my garden. That fall you were in my brambles.
A love haiku
We are two pulsars orbiting each other. From Earth we're seen as one.
A love haiku
But we are engaged. We share a home. We mingle our microbiomes.
An open letter about classical music to people who know far more about classical music than I might ever know
Last week, Alex Ross tweeted a link to an article on Gramophone magazine by Philip Clark whose headline asks "What's wrong with the classical concert experience in the 21st century?", and whose answer to that question is, essentially, not one God damn thing. Toward the middle of the article, Mr. Clark expands the applicability of that answer from the concert experience to the purported "image problem" of classical music in general: "there is absolutely nothing wrong with classical music", he writes, except for maybe the way we talk about it.
I don't know much about classical music---aside from a couple "music appreciation" classes in college, everything I know has been gleaned from magazine articles, reviews, podcasts, Wikipedia, and The Rest is Noise---so feel encouraged to disregard this as you would any other random opinion on the internet. But I like classical music, I'd like to know more about it, and I think there are a few problematic aspects of it beyond the way we talk about it. Though that is a big one.
Here are the things I'll discuss:
Digital players
Image, perception, and appeal
Concerts
Talking about it
Digital players
One frustrating aspect of listening to classical music has nothing to do with the music itself, but with the experience of interacting with that music on our digital devices.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, digital music players (Winamp, iTunes, VLC, etc.) presented songs in a sortable table with each row containing the song's name, album, artist, and maybe a couple other points of data. These players instilled a gross mental dissonance between music---our most vital, dynamic, and pervasive form of art---and a spreadsheet. The expansion of metadata to include composers, etc., made it easier to filter through this spreadsheet, which became the new face of your music library, and the addition of album art and psychedelic visualizations enhanced the presentation a little, but aside from that the experience has not substantially changed in fifteen years.
Physical formats allow for personalized interaction. You can read the liner notes as you carry the album to the player. You can face the best covers outward. You can arrange your albums in exactly the way you want them---a pile of new acquisitions, a pile of this week's favorites, a stack of recommendations, a stack containing songs you might include in a mix. You can sort them according to genre, according to how you learned about them, according to likeability, alphabetically, autobiographically. All these actions and associations reinforce our relationship to the music.
How will the Rob Gordon of tomorrow immerse himself in his misery / music collection?
Digital players, on the other hand, by necessity limit your interactions to the presentations and behaviors enabled by the player's designers and programmers. None that I know of allow you to order albums in arbitrary ways. Most will display the album art or tint the interface to match the art's color scheme. All of them provide a tabular interface. The iTunes of today is a much richer experience than the Windows Media Player of 1999 but the lion's share of that enrichment came in the form of the iTunes Store. Apple built an application for buyers, not collectors.
I'm not advocating physical formats over digital, but a revision of our players and an expansion of their interfaces and the interactions they enable. A great digital music application would be about 10% player, 90% library.
Streaming services provide great alternatives to broadcast radio stations but their organization and search features are often much more anemic than their non-streaming counterparts. For example---I'll pick on Rdio because I pay for their service---it doesn't appear that Rdio factors composer metadata into their search results at all. A search for "Morton Feldman" returns albums that list him as the artist or songs that include his name in the title---the album American Elegies appears because the eighth track is titled "Morton Feldman (1926-1987): Madame Press Died Last Week At Ninety". But a search for "Mahler San Francisco" does not return the San Francisco Symphony's Masterpieces in Miniature even though Mahler's "Blumine" is the second track. Rdio appears to give Mahler no credit whatsoever on that album. And when a composer's name exists, it is attached sloppily and unevenly.
No composer metadata. Instead, their names appear in the album title.
No performer metadata. "Various Artists" is not helpful.
Every composer on the album is credited for every track.
But it'd be absurd to blame these poor experiences solely on the software designers. Robust organization and search features require robust data models, but even if the model is robust it will appear weak if it's not given the data it needs. So if search results are weak, is it because the programmer's model is weak or because the label didn't provide the data? Who's to blame for all the gross grey squares in my iTunes---Apple, Deutsche Grammophon, or myself?
And if we wanted to blame software designers, we should reserve sympathy for those building streaming services. The survival of those services relies on subscribers, and it makes sense that the service provider would focus on providing the greatest possible service to the greatest number of their subscribers. If, statistically speaking, their subscribers don't much care about composer metadata, then justifying the expense of enriching their data models or filling in data where it's missing might be impossible. Apple and Microsoft don't get to use that excuse.
iTunes's album view. We can do better than this.
A few simple conditions could result in a much better presentation:
If composer or performer metadata is present, display it.
If all the tracks in an album are by the same composer, then display the composer's name near the album title. If there are multiple composers, display their names next to their tracks. Use the same procedure for performers.
If there is album art, display it. If not, fall back to nice typography. Maybe choose a typeface depending on the genre, if that metadata exists. If not, just choose a good one, or allow the user to specify their favorite in the application's settings. Anyway, do not display a big blank square.
When building an "Up Next"-style playlist, intelligently deduce whether the user wants to queue a song or the entire album, and whether the album they want to "Play Next" means "after this song" or "after this album".
Allow the user to organize albums and songs in any way they want.
The files in a digital album usually include the album art and all the metadata you'll ever need but they don't often include digital booklets. And even if they do, music players don't enable easy access to those booklets. They could.
The entire experience of digital music players could be much richer. In a historical view, we're still in the early days of digital media and graphical user interfaces. They'll get better. To use a video game analogy: our current players are platform games. We could have an open world.
By the by, if anybody wants to fund the development of a better music player, I'd be happy to build one.
But disappointment with our music players doesn't extend to the music itself---I'll love "Rhapsody in Blue" even if iTunes depicts it as a gross grey square.
Image, perception, and appeal
When someone says that classical music has "an image problem" I assume they're talking about its popular perception. But part of me suspects they're really talking about its popular appeal.
The popular perception is that classical music is for the old and intelligent, that playing it at a party will bore your guests but playing it for your babies might make them smarter, that talking about it might make you seem sophisticated, maybe a little aloof, definitely a little irrelevant. When you imagine a fan of classical music you see a grey man in a black suit, a grey woman with white hair, a middle-aged music instructor, or a teen-aged student who might some day perform for a crowd of those grey people. Overall, this is not a bad perception, especially compared to the popular perceptions of fans of electronic dance music or death metal. You'd probably rather be seen as a sophisticated geezer than a Juggalo.
The most intractable aspect of that perception is the irrelevance. In this context, here are four things relevance can mean:
The ability to relate to or feel something from the music.
The ability to relate to other people through or with the music.
The historical understanding of how that music relates to contemporary music.
How often you listen to or otherwise encounter the music.
Obviously, to someone who performs, studies, or writes about it (except for letters like this, of course), classical music would be highly relevant on all four counts. But for the rest of us, even for those of us actively expanding our familiarity with it, the decline can be fast and drastic.
For years I listened nearly exclusively to electronic music. On a good Saturday my friends and I would go shopping for records during the day and find a warehouse party that night. During the week we would make mixes, listen to taped radio shows, download whatever records we couldn't find at the stores from Napster. We could subject any fool to a lecture on the myriad minuscule differences between goa trance, psy trance, deep house, tech house, dub techno, Detroit techno, Miami bass, drum and bass, intelligent drum and bass, intelligent dance music, on and on, to stupidity and beyond. It was great. We were our high school's reigning experts on the scene.
These days I listen to a lot of classical music. I feel like a neophyte again. It's great.
The road I followed from the warehouse to the opera house was paved with music by Aphex Twin, Eric Satie, Arvo Pärt, Philip Glass, Rachel's, Brian Eno, Henryk Górecki, Stars of the Lid, Chilly Gonzales, and Nils Frahm.
From an interview with Rolling Stone:
Interviewer: Guys like Avicii, Calvin Harris and Zedd are all over the radio. Aphex Twin: It's a way in for people, isn't it? That's a start, the commercial things. And if you're really into it, you can look further, investigate and find people like me [laughs].
From Philip Clark's article on Gramophone:
... we need to ... refuse to accept the doublespeak that any of this pretendy classical music represents any future at all. We need to speak up for classical music, and defy the idea that video game music is, as I once heard a classical music exec say, 'the new classical'.
Mr. Clark uses the term "pretendy classical music" to describe the work of, specifically, Max Richter and Ludovico Einaudi, and, presumably, anyone signed to Erased Tapes. Mr. Clark knows far more about classical music than I might ever know but on this matter I need to express a respectful disagreement and side with Aphex Twin. There's plenty of value in pretendy classical music. The leap from goa trance to Gustav Mahler is far too great for mortal listeners---pretendy classical music can bridge the gap. It's easy to take the step from Rachel's Music for Egon Schiele to John Tavener's Towards Silence, from A Winged Victory for the Sullen to Górecki's Third, from Music for Airports to "Rothko Chapel". For the curious listener, these gateway records open doors to paths they might not have otherwise discovered. And if the record's great enough it'll open the door, pull the listener in, and quietly close the door behind them after they've gone charging down the hall.
For years my teenage brothers were (they still might be) obsessed with Minecraft. They'd listen to its music even when they weren't playing the game. One of them has recently branched out to other not-quite-ambient, not-quite-danceable electronic music. I look forward to introducing him to James Blake, The Orb, and Boards of Canada. Some day he might love the underappreciated masterpiece Drukqs almost as much as I do. But we'd never get there if it weren't for the garbage he's listening to right now.
I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Clark that video game music is not and should not be the future of classical music. And I don't think classical performers need to start compromising their performances with pretendy classical music solely in the effort of attracting new, younger audiences. Neither do I think pretendy classical music has no value aside from acting as gateway records (I love Erased Tapes). But video game music and pretendy classical music both, step by step, can increase classical music's relevance, at least the items 1, 2, and 4 from the list above. Pretendy classical music clearly has a popular appeal lacking by the genuine article.
Deutsche Grammophon albums on Rdio sorted by popularity. Rdio really likes Max Richter.
Well-designed compilations could help with item 3 on the relevance list---a curated collection of works that link the past to the present. Together with a booklet explaining the reasoning behind and connecting each selection, it could be edutainment at its finest. From Frahm to Brahms. This compilation includes Ellington and Gonzales and Messiaen and Cage and moves seamlessly between them. I play it often. My only complaint is that it includes no notes. It's common to see a compilation of string quartets---the trio of Debussy, Stravinsky, and Ravel seems particular popular---but less common, at least to my knowledge, are compilations that connect contemporaries with historical precedents, like Rothko Chapel: Morton Feldman, Erik Satie, John Cage.
We do not need more compilations like "Piano Chillout", "Top 300 Essential Classical Masterpieces", and "All-Time Best of the Baroque".
But, speaking of design, a lot of classical labels could use some help with album art and branding. When I see Deutsche Grammophon's gold stamp, in any of its variations, I know I'm probably in for something special. ECM New Series typically looks great---stark, but fitting. Naxos's design reminds me of Penguin Classics. I'm much more drawn to paintings by Matthew Ritchie, creepy trees, strong typography, and thematic variations than I am to smiling men, movie allusions, or numbers in lightning. If classical music has an image problem, then album covers present a simple, literal opportunity for renovation.
Concerts
But the headline of Mr. Clark's article asks about the concert experience. And I agree with nearly every point in his answer: the music should remain the focus, lame gimmicks are lame, and I'd never not go to a concert because I didn't know exactly when to clap. But I also agree with Yannick Nézet-Séguin, whom Mr. Clark quotes in his article: "It's all about communication."
Mr. Clark focuses on Tom Morris's idea, at a performance of Beethoven at the Bristol Proms, of projecting the faces of the performers so the audience can watch them emote while they play. This idea may not be the best but I wouldn't discourage Mr. Morris from considering others. Watching a violinist's face wouldn't teach me anything about the music or deepen my appreciation of it---it would just give me something to watch while the music played---but a brief discussion of the music could certainly increase its relevance. Especially if the speaker has the eloquence and sultry voice of Leonard Bernstein.
When digital technology enables us to listen to the highest-quality recordings of our favorite works anywhere we are, the challenge of the concert hall becomes how to draw us out of our homes, out of our headphones. And, though I agree with Mr. Clark that the music should remain the primary focus of the concert experience, it's undeniable that the other aspects factor into the experience.
So it's important to find a compelling match between music and location. Arvo Pärt's Alina is the first classical record I bought, and "Spiegel im Spiegel" remains one of my favorite pieces, but it might be a poor fit for a concert hall. And I can't say surely, even if it were to appear on a program, that I would make the effort to attend. But Mr. Pärt's "Credo" would be a must-see. The Metropolitan Museum's Temple of Dendur concert in celebration of his 80th birthday was a great idea, an excellent union of program, occasion, and location. I wish I could have been there.
As Mr. Ross showed us, price is not necessarily a prohibitive factor in attending a concert. But other economic factors, especially as they pertain to taste, might prevent the attendance numbers from growing. Especially in smaller cities, like my home of Portland, Oregon, I imagine that the symphony would rather invest safely and avoid potentially risky propositions like Pärt's "Credo". I have no right to blame the Oregon Symphony for their program choices, and a few of this season's concerts look appealing, but I'd much rather attend a performance of music that inspired movies than music composed for the movies.
Talking about it
Mr. Clark wrote this about about the term "classical music":
... we need to be far sharper in our definition of what classical music actually is. Just as the word 'jazz' has become an envelope term applied haphazardly to all points between Frank Sinatra and the wildest frontiers of free improvisation, 'classical music' has come to symbolise everything from Machaut motets to the musique concrète of Pierre Henry, from André Rieu to Pierre Boulez---it's all, somehow, 'Classical'.
And he's absolutely right.
Part of my experience with electronic music was to develop a robust vocabulary about it. It annoyed me that everyone just called everything "techno". There are names for every imaginable microgenre and there are terms for every component of a song, from the buildup to the amen breaks to the breakbeats to the drop. This vocabulary enhances our ability to relate to the music, to analyze and discuss it---our words make us better able to recognize any given song's structures, dynamics, adherence to genre norms and deviations. Our appreciation of the music grows in step with our ability to talk about it. We use these terms and invent categories not to diminish the music but to intelligently grow our love for it. As Richard Feynman said in a related discussion, "It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts."
When it comes to public appreciation, the number of words written on a subject is a much better metric than the volume of dumbstruck smiles. But as for which terms we should start using, I'll respectfully defer to the experts.
A view through broken glass.
Two love haiku
Exes used to burn things—a pyre for the loss. Now they click buttons.
This is the way our love will end—not with a flame but with an unfriend.
A love haiku
Love takes both those who jump into the volcano and those who get pushed.
On Indices
A directory doesn't look very interesting in your web browser.
It's just a list of that directory's contents. So, when you request a directory, a web server will usually look for a file within that directory named index.html. And if that file exists, you'll see that file instead.
Becomes:
But -- like you did, I hope -- I started reading books long before I started reading the internet. In a book, an index functions very differently.
In a book, an index helps you navigate by topic: topics are listed alphabetically alongside numbers indicating the page to turn to.
A table of contents functions similarly, except the list is of titles and they're ordered as they occur in the book.
So, on a website, a directory list functions more like a table of contents than an index. And the closest most sites get to an index is a tag page, or maybe a tag cloud. And index.html can be whatever you want it to be.
An index is part of a book's back matter. A table of contents is part of the front matter. Movies and records and magazine articles also have front and back matter -- a cover image, a credits list, a bio blurb and references to the author's best sellers. An article on a website will have front and back matter on multiple levels: the title and author's name are front matter for the article, the home page -- formerly known as the index page -- is front matter for the site, and the HTTP headers are front matter for the stream of data the server sends to your computer.
This splitting of information into preliminary, primary, and ancillary material operates fractally and transcends media, culture, and time. In a way, the first verse of the Song of Songs is front matter:
The song of songs, which is Solomon's.
So that's why there's no navigation on my new site beyond links to a table of contents and an index.
Play "Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments Pt 2"at 45.
Not very bright
As I was biking home from work today someone drove past me and yelled “get a bike light.” He then sped up and turned right. I didn’t need to turn right but I was looking for a fight so I did anyway.
He was driving a Ford Mustang, one of those models with the animated blinkers. So I thought maybe he just really likes blinking lights and wants me to share his joy. Maybe he was one of those kids that had a strobe light in their bedroom. Maybe he likes to spend his Saturday nights with ecstasy and special glasses.
He was also fat. This fact is irrelevant but it’s a fact so I’m including it.
So I pull up on his driver’s side. I look at him. He looks at me. He tells me again to get a bike light. I stare at him. My mouth is open and I’m breathing heavily not because he’s fat and I feel like mocking him but because I had just biked up a hill and I have the physique of a computer professional.
At night, Portland’s streets are lit by high-pressure sodium lamps. I’m not able to find exact figures for Portland’s lamps but this chart shows that high-pressure sodium lamps work in the range between 50 to 400 watts and produce between 3,600 and 46,000 lumens. And if you assume that the average automobile headlight operates at 35 watts and produces 2,800 to 3,200 lumens, then it’s safe to say that any object on a downtown street at night is covered by a wide-cast field of light ranging from 6,400 to 49,200 lumens. Your average bike light works on maybe a watt or two and produces a focused beam of around 350 lumens.
So I squint at this man in his Mustang. He tells me I should get a bike light because it’s hard to see me.
Earlier, when he yelled at me, he pulled up so close that we could have high-fived each other. He was on my right side, in the right turn lane. I didn’t see his car before he was that close because my bike lacks mirrors. But he was right behind me, the 2,800 to 3,200 lumens from his lights beaming my shadow on the street ahead. Plus, he slowed down, moved over to the right, and yelled at me. Clearly we were both well aware of each other’s presence.
I tried thinking of a situation in which a driver might be unable to see objects lit both by streetlights and their own car’s lights. I couldn’t think of one that wouldn’t also be a situation in which the driver would be legally unable to drive.
I tried thinking of a situation in which I collided with an unlit pedestrian or an unlit cyclist or an unlit car or an unlit tree or an unlit anything solely because it was unlit and in which the collision could have been avoided if only the thing had a light-emitting device physically attached to it. I tried hard. I couldn’t think of one.
So I’m still squinting at this man in his Mustang. I still haven’t closed my mouth and I’m still breathing like a champ. He tells me I should get a light because he wouldn’t want me to get hurt. So I salute him. The light turns green. He speeds away.
Dungeons & Debauchery
I don't remember who had the idea or why it seemed so good but somehow it was decided that we'd throw a D&D party. It turns out that D&D makes a great party game.
My friend Jason Edward Davis offered both to host the party and to DM the game. He and I talked about the adventure a little but he did all the creative work of fleshing out the story, building the dungeon, and generally making the game awesome.
I've always played D&D the normal way -- sitting around a table, talking, rolling dice, eating a huge bag of Doritos. But in the way Jason plays there are real-life interactions. At one point I had to arm wrestle another guy at the table. I won, my character won money, and his took a temporary hit to his charisma. Another house rule: if you fumbled a roll, then you had to take a shot. And if you rolled a critical, then you got to assign a shot to someone else. I'm pretty sure only one character survived.
One essential ingredient to any game of D&D is the character sheet. In case you're not familiar, a character sheet is a form where you fill in the details of your character -- name, race and class, level, alignment, stats, hit points, THAC0, armor class, languages and proficiencies, saving throws, weapons, armor, items, spells, that sort of thing. The character sheet is your ticket to the game. It contains all the information on the character you're playing.
But somehow character sheets are impossible to find. I have seen literally two fresh character sheets -- one each for a friend and me, given to us by our first DM. All the others have been copies of copies. Gaming stores don't carry them. They carry standalone adventure books, complete campaign sets, binders of monsters, reference books on everything from gnomes and halflings to the planes of existence, but character sheets? They told us good luck. And then I spent $30 on dice.
Also, creating characters isn't something you want to do at a party. There are so many dice to roll, so many soul-searching decisions to make. If you care about your character, it could take 20, 30 minutes. And it's a process you'll want to work through at home, alone. Pour a Chimay and light some candles. But if you don't, it could take 20 to 30 milliseconds.
So some friends came over and we created 40 characters. I wrote a Ruby script to generate the boring stuff and we had a lot of fun picking a name, an item, and a character trait. We wrote everything out, and then I typed everything back in. Yes, I'm an idiot.
But then I made my own character sheets. The Ruby script chomps through the file containing the character data and spits out HTML files. Those HTML files can then be styled, opened in a browser, and converted to PDFs. Those PDFs can then be taken to Kinko's and printed. Those printed sheets can then by cut up and stacked. Those stacked sheets can then by rifled through by your party people. Those party people can then select a character they like. And then you can play.
I left out a lot of things -- it's a party, we play loose with the rules -- but they fit the purpose well. And they look snazzy thanks to Hoefler Text and some icons from The Noun Project.
If you want a bunch of characters for your own game of Dungeons & Debauchery, get in touch.
Russ insisted I could avoid harm by assuming that every driver was "a mouth-breathing drug addict with a murderous hatred for cyclists."
via NYT
We'd like to believe we're too smart to think.
via "Putting Thought Into Things"
The Big Busk will be this Saturday. You can see the lineup and schedule at thebigbusk.info. Hope you can make it!
26 out of 45 customers spend an average of 3 minutes taking photos of the food.
14 out of 45 customers take pictures of each other with the food in front of them or as they are eating the food. This takes on average another 4 minutes as they must review and sometimes retake the photo.
9 out of 45 customers sent their food back to reheat...
27 out of 45 customers asked their waiter to take a group photo. 14 of those requested the waiter retake the photo...
...it took an average of 20 minutes more from when they were done eating until they requested a check. Furthermore once the check was delivered it took 15 minutes longer than 10 years ago for them to pay and leave.
8 out of 45 customers bumped into other customers or in one case a waiter (texting while walking) as they were either walking in or out of the Restaurant.
via Dineability
"I call people who are covering up NSA crimes traitors"
William Binney
Above is a screenshot from a photo story at The Oregonian on food carts that I would love to look though but I can't. The story is trapped in a dungeon of inhumane design.
There are 63 photos with captions. You get to see one photo at a time, one photo per click, with ads after every fifth photo. So to see all the photos and read all the captions and you'd need to click 70 times. That's ridiculous.
Interaction design, people. It's a simple thing.