Observations in the aftermath of Sandy

1. The traffic in the blackout areas of Manhattan is lawless in the most literal sense: the traffic lights aren't working, so the law cannot be applied as usual. But "lawless" doesn't seem to be a fitting description; the driving seems better-behaved than usual. We're so used to seeing people act under a system of government rules that it's easy to assume that without the rules, everything would descend into chaos. But perhaps free people are generally capable of acting decently on their own. Of course, that's never going to be universal; but then, people break the law too. In fact, a dense set of rules tempts people to see how close to (or how far across) the borderline of legality they can go without being penalized. In the absence of governmental laws, people might focus more on other kinds of laws: social norms and ethics.

[Added: There actually is a law that applies when the traffic lights aren't working, but people probably don't know about that law, and they definitely aren't following it. We never get the chance to do a pure experiment on how people would act in the absence of any government, but this is closer to such an experiment than we usually get.]

2. Whenever there's a high-profile disaster, whether it's a storm or a mass murder or terrorism, so many people's instinct is to declare that their political ideology has been vindicated.

3. I like Adele, but the people who work at Starbucks must get tired of listening to nothing but Adele.

Thoughts on playing sad songs and easy guitar parts

I'm working on a major project that involves me playing cover songs. I hope to eventually release it to the public once it's finished, but that won't be for a while (maybe years). Of course, I'll post something on the blog if and when I do release it.

(If you want to receive an email alert once it's released, send me an email with "album alert" in the subject heading, and feel free to leave the rest of the message blank. You can find my email address in this blog's sidebar. I won't use your email address for any other purpose.)

A couple things that have come to mind while working on this project:

1. The easier a guitar part sounds, the harder it is to play. The audience expects perfection in the seemingly easy parts — which are often clean and exposed. But they'll overlook flubs in the seemingly hard parts — which are usually blurred with distortion.

2. Every good sad song has an ironic subtext: "Yes, life may be miserable at times, but hey — at least we're making this great music about it." Happy songs are more straightforward: they're supposed to make you feel roughly the same feeling expressed by the music.

That second point was prompted by covering this song:



I saw the Zombies in concert recently, and I highly recommend seeing them if you get the chance. Their normal show has the full five-piece band, though the two in that video are the only original members. The keyboardist, Rod Argent, is the genius who wrote "She's Not There," "Tell Her No," and "Time of the Season."

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (1925-2012)

The New York Times obituary describes Fischer-Dieskau's experience as a German in World War II:

[I]n 1943, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and assigned to care for army horses on the Russian front. He kept a diary there, calling it his “attempt at preserving an inner life in chaotic surroundings.” . . .

“Lots of cold, lots of slush, and even more storms,” read [one entry]. “Every day horses die for lack of food.”

It was in Russia that he heard that his mother had been forced to send his brother to an institution outside Berlin. “Soon,” he wrote later, “the Nazis did to him what they always did with cases like his: they starved him to death as quickly as possible.”

And then his mother’s apartment in Lichterfelde was bombed. Granted home leave to help her, he found that all that remained of their possessions could be moved to a friend’s apartment in a handcart. But as early as his second day home, he and his mother began seeking out “theater, concerts, a lot of other music — defying the irrational world.”

Instead of returning to the disastrous campaign in Russia, he was diverted to Italy along with thousands of other German soldiers. There, on May 5, 1945, just three days before the Allies accepted the German surrender, he was captured and imprisoned. It turned out to be musical opportunity: soon the Americans were sending him around to entertain other P.O.W.’s from the back of a truck. The problem was, they were so pleased with this arrangement that they kept him until June 1947. He was among the last Germans to be repatriated.

Here's Fischer-Dieskau singing "Gute Nacht," from Schubert's Winterreise (with Murray Perahia on piano):



Many of the comments on that YouTube video were posted today, echoing the song title:

Gute Nacht, meine freund ;(

(The third movement from A German Requiem by Brahms.)

How did art evolve?

E.O. Wilson explores the question. The article is about visual art, literature, and music; here are some of his thoughts on music:

The utilitarian theory of cave art, that the paintings and scratchings depict ordinary life, is almost certainly partly correct, but not entirely so. Few experts have taken into account that there also occurred, in another wholly different domain, the origin and use of music. This event provides independent evidence that at least some of the paintings and sculptures did have a magical content in the lives of the cave dwellers. A few writers have argued that music had no Darwinian significance, that it sprang from language as a pleasant “auditory cheesecake,” as one author once put it. It is true that scant evidence exists of the content of the music itself—just as, remarkably, we have no score and therefore no record of Greek and Roman music, only the instruments. But musical instruments also existed from an early period of the creative explosion. “Flutes,” technically better classified as pipes, fashioned from bird bones, have been found that date to 30,000 years or more before the present. . . .

Other artifacts have been found that can plausibly be interpreted as musical instruments. They include thin flint blades that, when hung together and struck, produce pleasant sounds like those from wind chimes. Further, although perhaps just a coincidence, the sections of walls on which cave paintings were made tend to emit arresting echoes of sound in their vicinity.

Was music Darwinian? Did it have survival value for the Paleolithic tribes that practiced it? Examining the customs of contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures from around the world, one can hardly come to any other conclusion. . . .

Anthropologists have paid relatively little attention to contemporary hunter-gatherer music, relegating its study to specialists on music, as they are also prone to do for linguistics and ethnobotany (the study of plants used by the tribes). Nonetheless, songs and dances are major elements of all hunter-gatherer societies. Furthermore, they are typically communal, and they address an impressive array of life issues. The songs of the well-studied Inuit, Gabon pygmies, and Arnhem Land aboriginals approach a level of detail and sophistication comparable to those of advanced modern civilizations. The musical compositions of modern hunter-gatherers generally serve basically as tools that invigorate their lives. The subjects within the repertoires include histories and mythologies of the tribe as well as practical knowledge about land, plants, and animals. . . .

It is self-evident that the songs and dances of contemporary hunter-gatherer peoples serve them at both the individual and the group levels. They draw the tribal members together, creating a common knowledge and purpose. They excite passion for action. They are mnemonic, stirring and adding to the memory of information that serves the tribal purpose. Not least, knowledge of the songs and dances gives power to those within the tribe who know them best.

To create and perform music is a human instinct. It is one of the true universals of our species. To take an extreme example, the neuroscientist Aniruddh D. Patel points to the Pirahã, a small tribe in the Brazilian Amazon: “Members of this culture speak a language without numbers or a concept of counting. Their language has no fixed terms for colors. They have no creation myths, and they do not draw, aside from simple stick figures. Yet they have music in abundance, in the form of songs.”

. . . To the same degree as literacy and language itself, [music] has changed the way people see the world. Learning to play a musical instrument even alters the structure of the brain, from subcortical circuits that encode sound patterns to neural fibers that connect the two cerebral hemispheres and patterns of gray matter density in certain regions of the cerebral cortex. Music is powerful in its impact on human feeling and on the interpretation of events. It is extraordinarily complex in the neural circuits it employs, appearing to elicit emotion in at least six different brain mechanisms.

Music is closely linked to language in mental development and in some ways appears to be derived from language. The discrimination patterns of melodic ups and downs are similar. But whereas language acquisition in children is fast and largely autonomous, music is acquired more slowly and depends on substantial teaching and practice. There is, moreover, a distinct critical period for learning language during which skills are picked up swiftly and with ease, whereas no such sensitive period is yet known for music. Still, both language and music are syntactical, being arranged as discrete elements—words, notes, and chords. Among persons with congenital defects in perception of music (composing 2 to 4 percent of the population), some 30 percent also suffer disability in pitch contour, a property shared in parallel manner with speech.

Altogether, there is reason to believe that music is a newcomer in human evolution. It might well have arisen as a spin-off of speech. Yet, to assume that much is not also to conclude that music is merely a cultural elaboration of speech. It has at least one feature not shared with speech—beat, which in addition can be synchronized from song to dance.

It is tempting to think that the neural processing of language served a preadaptation to music, and that once music originated it proved sufficiently advantageous to acquire its own genetic predisposition. This is a subject that will greatly reward deeper additional research, including the synthesis of elements from anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology.

Why do people say "colorblindness" is racist?

The Church of Rationality lists a few possible reasons why people so often express this odd view. My favorite point:

You're not much of a punk rock insider if you like the Ramones. Everyone likes the Ramones. If you're an expert concerning some Portugese band whose whole output consists of flexidiscs published with Greek fanzines in the late 1980s, then we're talking. Likewise, you're not much of an anti-racist if you're simply against racism. Even the conservatives are against racism these days. You'll have to offer a little more. The more extreme, the better.

The pop music fallacy

(From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weiner.)

Is "I Only Have Eyes for You" (the Flamingos version) the best song ever?

While at a cafe in the West Village the other day, I posted this status to Facebook:

John Althouse Cohen is at 'sNice, where they're playing pop songs from the '50s and '60s. Runaround Sue, You Can't Hurry Love, I Only Have Eyes for You, Signed Sealed Delivered, etc. Such overwhelmingly great music. Why can't they make top 40 songs like this anymore?

When I got home, I looked up one of the songs on YouTube:



I almost regret finding this, since I've been watching it compulsively over and over. It might not be the best song ever, but it's at least in the running.

Not only does rock music not cause suicide, but...

. . . "merely describing a song as ‘suicide-inducing’ or ‘life-affirming’ leads listeners to perceive it as such."

So, "by labelling music as suicide-inducing, campaigners and legislators may be helping to create the problem they aim to eradicate."

How much of a problem is it that you don't have enough time in your whole life to become "reasonably well-read"?

Linda Holmes observes, on NPR's website:

The vast majority of the world's books, music, films, television and art, you will never see. It's just numbers.

Consider books alone. Let's say you read two a week, and sometimes you take on a long one that takes you a whole week. That's quite a brisk pace for the average person. That lets you finish, let's say, 100 books a year. If we assume you start now, and you're 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you're 80. That's 6,500 books, which really sounds like a lot.

Let's do you another favor: Let's further assume you limit yourself to books from the last, say, 250 years. Nothing before 1761. This cuts out giant, enormous swaths of literature, of course, but we'll assume you're willing to write off thousands of years of writing in an effort to be reasonably well-read.

Of course, by the time you're 80, there will be 65 more years of new books, so by then, you're dealing with 315 years of books, which allows you to read about 20 books from each year. You'll have to break down your 20 books each year between fiction and nonfiction – you have to cover history, philosophy, essays, diaries, science, religion, science fiction, westerns, political theory ... I hope you weren't planning to go out very much.

You can hit the highlights, and you can specialize enough to become knowledgeable in some things, but most of what's out there, you'll have to ignore. (Don't forget books not written in English! Don't forget to learn all the other languages!) . . .

We could do the same calculus with film or music or, increasingly, television – you simply have no chance of seeing even most of what exists. Statistically speaking, you will die having missed almost everything.

That's a very quantitative way to look at it, as if the main thing that matters is what percentage of "everything" you've consumed. I don't see why that should be the standard.

It's analogous to the way people marvel at how "insignificant" humanity is because we're so small relative to the entire universe (which, by the way, would seem to imply that physically larger people are more important than smaller people — and surely we don't believe that). How big would we need to be in order to be "significant"? How much would we need to read, view, or listen to in order to be "well-read" or "cultured"?

Tyler Cowen's Discover Your Inner Economist offers a different way to look at this, which I find more meaningful. In the book's chapter on art, Cowen says we've become "cultural billionaires" — we just need to realize and take advantage of this fact. An overwhelming amount of great art is available to us for amazingly little money via libraries, museums, architecture (which you can see for free by walking down the street), Netflix, YouTube . . .

That doesn't solve the quantity problem. But we have so much access to such an astoundingly high level of quality that it would seem ungrateful to fuss over not having enough hours to get to most of it. We have enough time to live lives that are incredibly rich in literature and other art.

I happily admit there are whole genres of music that I consistently don't pay any attention to. "But that's so close-minded!" Well, it is and it isn't. I'm not making an objective judgment that these genres aren't worthwhile for anyone to spend time on. It's just that I, like everyone, have my own time management strategies. I've listened to Beethoven's symphonies a ridiculous number of times, always knowing there was some other piece of music I hadn't heard before, which I could have spent that time listening to . . . and I'll never hear it now. But I'm confident I've had good reasons for making such choices. I'm not worried I might be a little more ignorant of other musical genres, or novels I could have been reading at the time. I actually like the fact that I know much more about my own tastes than the vast majority of all content, of which I'm ignorant. This is part of the joy of life.

You wouldn't dream of trying to live in every city in the world, or even 10% of them, because that would mean you'd spend less time at home. Quality is more important than quantity.

The fact that everyone experiences such a limited number of books, paintings, songs, and cities adds to each individual's uniqueness. These experiences shape our identities. If we were all somehow able to read every book, and live in every city, we'd be much more similar to each other, and that would be really boring.

ADDED: Mindy Kaling has a related insight:

Don't worry about having perfect taste. People with perfectly curated taste usually have no original voice.

Happy 107th birthday to Alice Herz-Sommer, who survived the Holocaust with music

Here's her Wikipedia entry, which links to this article:

I played Chopin as they sent my family to their deaths

That article explains:

In 1943, with her husband and their six-year-old son, she was deported from Prague to the Nazis' "model" concentration camp at Terezin ....

Her mother had already been deported and killed by Nazis a year earlier. The article goes on:

In Terezin, despite appalling conditions, she was determined to live for her son and for her music. In the camp, music became part of daily life. She gave more than 100 concerts there. Many of her fellow inmates were artists, musicians and writers, but there was nothing remotely philanthropic about the Nazis' encouragement of the arts in Terezin. "It was propaganda," she says contemptuously. "This was something they could show the world, while in reality they were killing us."

Her husband was taken away to Auschwitz and later Dachau, where he died of typhus six weeks before the end of the war. His parting words to her were: "Do nothing voluntarily." She believes this saved her life and their son Raphael; other women, offered the chance to follow their husbands, were sent to their deaths.

In this documentary, you can see her talking and playing piano recently, at age 106:



"My world is music. I am not interested in anything else. ... Beethoven, he is a miracle. His music is not only melody, but what is inside. ... Music is the only thing that helps me to have hope. It's a sort of religion, actually. Music is God. In difficult times you feel it especially — when you are suffering."

"A lot of German journalists come and want to ... speak with me and so on. Before they enter my room, they ask, 'Are we allowed to enter your room? Do you not hate us?' So my answer is, 'I never hated. I would never hate. Hatred brings only hatred.'"

Does, or should, your taste in music express your personality?

Penelope Trunk has a couple wry observations about how people perceive your taste in music:

[1.] People judge other people by their playlists. (Which is why Ramones t-shirts outsell Ramones albums ten to one.) . . .

[2. P]eople have positive impressions of people who like jazz. This is surprising to me because people do not have positive judgments toward blog posts that are like jazz—complicated and difficult.

Her link on the "people who like jazz" sentence talks about a 2008 study of how musical taste is correlated with personality. Over 30,000 subjects were asked questions to reveal their personality traits and their opinions of about 100 music genres. One of the researchers explained how the findings defied stereotypes:

"One of the most surprising things is the similarities between fans of classical music and heavy metal. They're both creative and at ease but not outgoing.

"The general public has held a stereotype of heavy metal fans being suicidally depressed and of being a danger to themselves and society in general. But they are quite delicate things."

Back to Penelope Trunk -- she says she wants to choose her playlists to have more "focus":

I like to think that I know myself well enough to present a consistent and insightful portrait of myself. And when Eva, from Songza, emailed me to see if I’d put together a playlist that they could use on their music streaming site, I said sure. . . .

When I sent my song list to Eva I asked her to analyze me. I said, “I bet you read song lists like I read resumes, so can you tell me what you see?”

She said she usually doesn’t see such a wide a range of songs on one list.

On a resume, lack of focus is bad. And in a life, doing many different things at once is bad.

But one of the great things about listening to music is that it's not like making a resume: you don't have to worry about the impression you're making on anyone else. There are many situations in life where you can't afford to simply "be true to yourself" (as we were talking about the other day). Choosing what music to listen to is not one of those situations.

I'll repeat what I've said before, paraphrased from Ben Folds:

You should choose the music you listen to entirely based on what you want to listen to, regardless of whether it's a reflection of your personality.

There's no need to worry about whether the person who likes Bach can also like Pantera.* Like whatever you like, and everything else will fall into place.

* I decided to link to Pantera's song "I'm Broken" because the title reminded me of the researcher's comment that metal fans are "delicate things."

Books that haven't influenced me the most

Now that I've taken stock of which books have most influenced me, I also want to look at what kinds of books haven't been as influential.

Most people would find the most striking omission from my list to be fiction. But I've gotten used to this. Fiction just doesn't reach me the way nonfiction does. Even when nonfiction tries to be engaging by using personal narratives, I often lose patience with the details and just want the writer to get to the abstract point.

What stands out most to me is the lack of history books, even though I own a lot of them. I've enjoyed reading these books and learning about history. In retrospect, though, I'm not sure they've fundamentally changed my views. I even wonder if anyone really "learns lessons" from history, or if we just interpret everything to fit our preconception of the world.

There's also nothing in my list about a huge interest of mine, music (except for parts of Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow). I have read illuminating books about music, but the reading process is subordinate to the everyday listening process. On the other hand, I can't say that the books in my list are subordinate to the everyday thinking process; it's often the opposite.

Why politics and policy are less important than music and art

I'm reading Confessions of a Philosopher, a 1997 book by Bryan Magee. It's the best long-form account I've read of how philosophical issues impose themselves on one's life. (I deliberately speak of the issues as animate things acting upon a passive person — this is a main theme of the book.)

In a chapter called "Mid-Life Crisis," Magee describes his anguished struggle with the problem of the absurd (which I recently blogged about at the end of this post). He says:

I used to look at people going about their normal lives with everyday cheerfulness and think: "How can they? And how can they suppose that any of what they're doing matters? They're like passengers on the Titanic, except that these people know already that they're headed for total and irremediable shipwreck. . . . Above all, I was baffled by the fact that the middle-aged, who were so close to death, tended to be even more cheerful than the young. . . .

Under the influence of these thoughts my values went through sea changes. Everything that was limited to this life and this world came to appear insignificant. Only what might possibly point beyond them, or have its basis outside them — beauty, art, sex, morality, integrity, metaphysical understanding — could even possibly be worth anything. . . . Success and fame were worse than nothing, because anyone pursuing them was actively throwing his life away. (253)

This leads him to contrast following politics (apparently as a hobby or an occupation) with experiencing art (again, apparently as an audience member or performer, amateur or professional). I was pleased to see his description, because it articulates why I've been feeling increasingly uninterested in politics:

Even on their own terms the politics and business of the world were absurdly evanescent. One week politicians, people who worked in the City, and people whose job it was to report their doings would all be kept out of their beds by a financial crisis which, six months later, would be little talked of. By that time perhaps there would be . . . a corruption scandal in local government, which would then be followed by a flurry of public concern over crimes of violence, which in its turn would be pushed out of people's minds by their fury over some proposed new tax; and so it would go on. Each of these things would seem important for a time, then each would pass away and scarcely matter again except to historians. In fact, the truth is that most of them made little or no difference even to the daily lives of most of the population living through them. People immersed in this stream of ever-changing events were filling their minds with . . . ephemera and trivia, what people in electronics mean by "noise." (254)

I should note that he was a Member of Parliament for about 10 years, so he's not simply apathetic about politics by nature.

Not only do I agree with that passage as a description of current-day American politics (even though it was written in the UK in the '90s), but I find it especially silly that people get so worked up about one tax or one appropriations bill without seeming to care much about what taxes are like on the whole, or how much the country spends on different kinds of things overall. The specific bills that happen to be pending in Congress can only be validly assessed against this backdrop of broader understanding. But the media rarely gives us this information for fear of seeming to lack "objectivity" (whatever that is). And those who aren't concerned about being objective are usually too unreliable to be taken seriously. A subtle, balanced analysis of the tax structure is never going to achieve the level of interest generated by a report on the latest dumb comment by Sarah Palin (for the left) or President Obama (for the right). Magee goes on:

It is not as if were no alternatives. Time spent listening to great music, or seeing great plays, or thinking about issues of lasting importance, was not in this category. In those cases the object of one's activities retained its interest and importance for the rest of one's life. If I spent an evening listening to Mahler's Third Symphony, that symphony was still going to matter to me in six months' time, or ten years, or thirty: it was part of my life, for always. In fact such things more often than not increased in interest and value with the passage of time. If I spent two or three months saturating myself in, let us say, recordings of Mozart's piano concertos, and then did not return to them like that for another four years or so, I would find when I came back to them that I engaged with them on a deeper level than before. And the same was true of most great art. . . .

There were times when I felt, after all, that I was living to the full in face of death. Many men of action who are also writers have described the bliss induced in them by the sound of bullets smacking past their ears, and said that it intensified their awareness of being alive to an intoxicating level. The things that came closest to doing this for me when I fully realized I was facing death were my love affairs and friendships, philosophy and the arts. Never have I reacted to these things more intensely than I did in my late thirties and early forties. It was as if Shakespeare and Mozart were addressing me personally. . . . Had it not been for my need to earn a living I would have immersed myself in them entirely. (254-5)

Although I was more than satisfied by this explanation, some would respond, "But what about political art?" His answer to this is, again, exactly how I feel:

Those that treated political, social or historical levels of explanation as fundamental now seemed to me to be treating externals and surfaces as if they were foundations, and to be superficial and point-missing. In the world as it was at that time the most conspicuous example of this was Marxism, though there were others too. Marxism had a complete explanation of the arts in terms of political power, economic interests and social classes, and this seemed to me a grotesque attempt to explain the greater in terms of the less. Not only was there a lot of Marxist criticism around at that time, there were innumerable Marx-influenced stage productions which had the effect of superficializing the works they dealt with for precisely this reason, that they treated social and political externals as fundamental, while remaining oblivious to what actually was fundamental. Arguing with people who produced or supported this kind of thing was a dislocating experience, because it seemed self-evident to them that the metaphysical, personal and interpersonal dimensions of things were of secondary importance compared with the social and political. Indeed, they often denied that there was any metaphysical dimension at all, either to reality or to works of art. (255)

Some people will respond: "But art should say something about society. It shouldn't be just meaningless fluff to make you feel good. It should disturb people and wake them up to social injustices." (Yes, I've heard all of this said.) Of course I agree that art can say important things about society and that this can be a fine thing to do. It's not that I totally dismiss this function, and I don't think Magee does. But these aren't the most important functions of art, nor are they requirements of great art.

And as for anyone who considers art "meaningless" if it doesn't contain a social critique, or if isn't "appreciated in the social context in which it was made," I feel sorry for them for what they're missing . . .



(That's Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20, conducted and performed by Mitsuko Uchida.)

Sooner or later, love is gonna get ya

Two weekends ago, four days shy of a year after our first date, we made a peaceful, level-headed, and final decision to end our relationship. I don't plan to say much about it here, due to obvious privacy concerns. If that means I have to settle for a blog post like this that's somewhat dull and abstract, instead of publishing the more vividly revealing thoughts in my head, then so be it.

I have an unfortunate tendency, which I'm sure is very common, to obsess after a breakup over all the things that seemingly went wrong. A couple different kinds of regret are inevitable, but important to transcend: (1) feeling bad about all the things that, in retrospect, were wrong with the relationship (how could I have been so blind to how deeply problematic factors X, Y, and Z were?), and (2) feeling bad about how good things used to be (how am I ever going to find such a perfect match again?). It's like Woody Allen's lame joke in Annie Hall: relationships are the restaurant where people say, "The food at this place is really terrible ... and such small portions." In response to point 2: I know, and I try to remember, that you can never get back the past. It doesn't matter whether you'd like to or not; you won't. (This is true of relationships in general, not just breakups.) In response to point 1: I'm reminded of some wise words someone told me years ago:

If you make sure that nothing bad ever happens to you, you'll also make sure nothing really good ever happens to you either.

I wouldn't trade the mix of good and bad times (mostly good, by far) that we had together over the past year for anything. They were flawed and beautiful. No one other than two people will ever know about them; I simultaneously relish and cringe at that fact. 2009 may have been a pretty dismal year for the country as a whole, but it was a great year for me. At the same time, I have to believe there's someone better out there, for both of us. It's popular and palatable, as a single person, to claim you're "not looking for a relationship." I'd love to say I'm totally self-reliant and don't "need" someone else. But it's not true. I just don't know who it is yet.

For now, I'll be reflecting on how I can fine-tune "what I'm looking for," consciously doing things we used to do together and accepting that they're still worth doing, overinterpreting every love song playing in the background...

The best blog posts of 2009

Here they are, collected by Church of Rationality. He categorizes them by length and by "low-brow"/"mid-brow"/"high-brow."

I am biased since one of my blog posts is on the list. Mine is "long, mid-brow."

The post of "random thoughts" is full of life observations that I can strongly relate to. I do this all the time:

Have you ever been walking down the street and realized that you’re going in the complete opposite direction of where you are supposed to be going? But instead of just turning a 180 and walking back in the direction from which you came, you have to first do something like check your watch or phone or make a grand arm gesture and mutter to yourself to ensure that no one in the surrounding area thinks you’re crazy by randomly switching directions on the sidewalk.

This is the one observation from that post that stands out as being off the mark: 

I like all of the music in my iTunes, except when it’s on shuffle, then I like about one in every fifteen songs in my iTunes.

I have the opposite experience. If I look for music to listen to by scrolling through my iPod library arranged by artist, I always feel disappointed with how little of it I actually want to listen to compared with how much work I've put into building up the library. But if I put it on shuffle, I instantly realize that it's full of great music. My theory is that I enjoy the process of actually creating my own library more than the goal of having all the music I want. This might be why setting the music on shuffle is more enjoyable than trying to answer the question, "What's the very best music I could listen to right now?" -- because the shuffle simulates the more unpredictable process of discovering music in the first place.

The time-management theory of appreciating art and thought

LemmusLemmus swiftly refutes Ayn Rand's philosophy in this post on his blog, The Church of Rationality. 

I've never read Ayn Rand. And now that I've read that blog post, I feel fine about missing out on her work. Is that ignorant or close-minded of me?

Well, LemmusLemmus goes on to say:

And that's it with Ayn Rand and me. Of course I could read all of her books and see whether she has addressed this rather obvious objection anywhere, but given that time is a scarce resource I prefer to spend mine on stuff that promises to be more worthwhile. The fact that pretty much everyone acts like this is the reason that most people who call someone's work overrated aren't terribly qualified to make that judgment.

This is the same point I quoted from a Metafilter commenter in the post about "simple concepts":

By the time you have paid enough attention to a work of art to know whether it was a waste of time to take seriously, it is already too late for the answer to be useful.

I also made this point in my post about "my problem with rap":

I have a finite amount of free time in my life for listening to new music. Like every other person in the world, I can't build up an encyclopedic familiarity with every music genre in existence, so the most I can do is thoroughly explore some of them while writing off others as not worth my time. That's a time-management strategy, not an objective judgment. I'm sure there's brilliant rap music that I'm missing out on. (I loved the Outkast song "Miss Jackson" from a few years ago, for instance.) But I've heard enough from rappers about "bitches," "hos," and "niggers" to decide: my time would be better spent on music that might not make a single controversial statement about society but is challenging to the listener in more unexpected ways.

For the sake of simplicity, from now on I'll refer to this general observation as "the time-management theory of appreciating art and thought."

"PRO TIP: A rousing chorus of 'It's Raining Men' will often trick people into an accidental 'Hallelujah.'"

Advice for a parlour game.

"Songs you used to love"

Didn't you?

Hey, I still love #198. (And I'm even anti-rap!)

And doesn't everyone love #185? What is it about that one? Is it another "this is what it's all about" song?

#182 has sort of an "it's so bad, it's good" vibe. But once it gets to the guitar solo, it's just good. That's kind of how I feel about the whole band.

Fans of The Office should particularly enjoy #180. (Think: branches merging.)

Do you think it's too embarrassing to admit I still have a soft spot for #178? It instantly transports me to my freshman year at UW-Eau Claire, when this song was inescapable.

If there's one song you can count on to make a group of people burst out singing deliriously, it's #171.

I could do this all day...

Rap, gender, race, and degradation

"OM," writing on the excellent website Butterflies and Wheels, says:

I wrote to the women's studies list yesterday to ask for thoughts on sexist epithets....

Here's one of the replies she got:

"Recently, I was standing at the bus stop with a young man who was singing along to rap music. Suddenly, he yelled "Bitch!" and I almost ran for cover.

But he was just singing along to the music.

Can anyone wonder why young women are treated so badly when the music kids listen to describes them as bitches, evil, and mean?"

This degradation -- of women and society -- reminds me of an anecdote recounted by John McWhorter in this column from 2003:

Not long ago, I was having lunch in a KFC in Harlem, sitting near eight African-American boys, aged about 14. They were extremely loud and unruly, tossing food at one another and leaving it on the floor.

What struck me most was how fully the boys’ music - hard-edged rap, preaching bone-deep dislike of authority - provided them with a continuing soundtrack to their antisocial behavior. So completely was rap ingrained in their consciousness that every so often, one or another of them would break into cocky, expletive-laden rap lyrics, accompanied by the angular, bellicose gestures typical of rap performance. A couple of his buddies would then join him. Rap was a running decoration in their conversation.

Many writers and thinkers see a kind of informed political engagement, even a revolutionary potential, in rap and hip-hop. They couldn’t be more wrong. By reinforcing the stereotypes that long hindered blacks, and by teaching young blacks that a thuggish adversarial stance is the properly “authentic” response to a presumptively racist society, rap retards black success.

PREVIOUSLY: "My problem with rap."

Haydn's brilliant blandness

I've been on a classical-music kick lately. I was just listening to Haydn's "London" Symphony (No. 104), and longing for the days when the second movement ("Andante") could be considered the height of entertainment.



The first couples minutes of the movement are about as ploddingly bland as you could imagine: slow, major key, regular meter, etc. But the blandness is worth it for the section starting at 2:45, where he incongruously switches the main theme to a minor key as a way to segue into the energizing pay-off.

Then, at 3:20, the energetic section gets abruptly cut off, and there's an awkward pause -- one of Haydn's wonderful trademarks. For the next few seconds, you feel like it's going to go back to the plodding blandness -- but no, it's still energetic for a while. Then, at 3:50-4:00, he transitions back to the slow theme from the beginning of the movement -- a smooth, gentle transition that's the perfect foil to the earlier awkward pause.

At that point, we really are back to the slow, quiet music that we started out with, but -- this is the beauty of classical music -- the original theme takes on a new, richer character now that we've been through the adventure in the middle.

I find it hard to imagine something like this being written today, with this much trust in the listener's attention span. I don't mean by a contemporary "classical" composer (since classical music has stopped having much cultural relevance), but by a popular songwriter. There'd be too much concern about the audience losing interest before the pay-off.