A Queen from the Urth of the New Sun Series (Or So She Seems)

"Syzygy," Lina Iris Viktor

Babymetal vs. John Zorn

John Zorn liked to talk about composing in "blocks" and Stockhausen, etc. Now here comes Babymetal:



Compare to a typical Zorn piece, Osaka Bondage (below, from Naked City's Grand Guignol). Zorn is more grating, but the juxtaposition of genres is actually much clearer in the Babymetal piece, which also includes a visual aspect. Note that this is not Zorn-bashing. I've seen him play New Years Eve shows at Tonic. But does it make a difference when someone is doing the same thing mostly for commercial reasons, and not talking about theory, or for that matter selling to people who care about it?) The point is made that Zorn was doing this 25 years ago, but it's interesting that it's now J-pop with the label confidence implied by an obvious budget.



Performances that seem to be deliberately written to fit into certain genres also force us to ask, what differentiates genre self-consciousness from straight parody? Are we sure that John Zorn and Babymetal's songs were not written by Key and Peele? As the world gets wealthier we're swimming in more art and each generation will be better at picking out the essential aspects of each genre, for ridicule or otherwise.

Modern Architecture and Bad Bathrooms: Wright's Beth Shalom Synagogue, Philadelphia

That the bathroom is the most important room in any building is self-evident. Consequently, for modern architects to so studiously ignore it is a crime. Here in California the Salk Institute is a perfect example; I haven't been in enough of the prolific William Pereira's buildings to pass judgment (but here's more on them.)

In 1997 when I still lived in Philadelphia I was on a Frank Lloyd Wright kick and the Philadelphia synagogue Beth Shalom is a Wright building. In fact it was one of his last; it was started while he was alive but he died during the construction, in 1959. It's actually a bit garish and uber-Mayan; I wonder if the guys who wrote the script for Ghostbusters got the idea for the Gozer-building from this thing. That said, the worship space is pretty nice (third picture is looking up).

Of course I wouldn't be posting this if I weren't going to complain about the bathrooms, tiny, consistent with another famous Wright, Falling Water. Look at this! For that gigantic facility, there are 2 (two) stalls in the single men's room! I guess no one ever has to defecate in the presence of Yahweh?

The Evolution of Metalheads, Or Metal as Confrontation - A Review of Immolation

I've written before about metal as a modern war dance. We'll come back to that in a second. I was listening to Immolation's Kingdom of Conspiracy, which has received great reviews.



Briefly: music is organized sound that evokes emotion - specifically, sustainable non-aversive basic emotions. That is, the basic emotions that you can experience at length and that don't make you want to get away. That means in music we have happiness, sadness, anger, but not fear, disgust or surprise. That does explain most music. And interestingly, this German-Canadian research study comparing the reactions of Europeans vs. Pygmies listening to each others' never-before-heard music shows that a given piece of music might stir different emotions, but a) they would still activate basic emotions and b) they would do so to about the same extent. That is, maybe when Pygmies are listening to Beethoven they get sad instead of happy, but they got sad to the same degree the Europeans get happy, and the Pygmies didn't get contemptuous or disgusted. I found this fascinating because these two groups of people are not only culturally isolated, they are also about as genetically unrelated as it is possible for two groups of humans to be.

Until the mid-to-late twentieth century, there was a hole in Western music in the sense that anger was not represented. Sure, we have military marches, but those are limited in exposure (because most of us are not warriors, and most of us don't have warriors in our families), and associated with large institutions that young males in need of angry music probably don't want to submit to. (Although it must be said, many metalheads also like military marches, myself included, and some metal sounds like military marches.) So it might not be surprising that in the West we re-invented war dances, right down to the posturing, threats and war paint. Seriously. Watch the by now, fully established faces and movements of metal performers and then listen to a Lakota war song or watch a Maori haka. The angry young males of the West had a vacuum in their experience and metal filled it.

So what does this mean when those angry young males become less angry, and much less young? Listening to Immolation, I wondered about two things that have changed in many venerable metalheads' appreciation after decades of listening, for art generally, and metal specifically.

1) For art generally, you become acutely sensitive to structure and format.

To this end, most death metal described as "technical" or "innovative" actually doesn't depart much from the standard format of rock in general established over half a century ago (and frankly dating to blues before that). Intro, verse chorus maybe another verse chorus, bridge, maybe solo, verse chorus outro. (The leads on this record are my favorite thing about it, but they're not new. They're kind of Kerry King meets Michael Amott.) These are the rules of metal, and deviations are reckoned against them. But the reality is that if music deviates too much from a recognizable format, it's not enjoyable, and it's hard to follow; see much of modern classical or avant garde music, which you can't remember immediately after listening to it. All nervous systems have a balance between recognizing patterns, but having enough novelty (mismatches or otherwise unexpected elements in the information) that it causes more attention to be paid. This becomes an increasingly difficult feat as a genre's possible space (given its rules) is swept out by compositions; maybe this explains why new genres tend to appear in big bangs of punctuated equilibrium as a new compositional space is broken into, rather than being best predicted by artistic gradualism. But I notice that us old metalheads, explicitly no longer value novelty like we did (or claimed we did). Someone is intentionally going to write a Part II to Reign in Blood? Sign me up! (Sadly, occasionally bands say they'll do something like this, but then they don't.)

2) For metal specifically, I'm tired of the confrontationalness of it.

As mentioned, metal songs are for the most part modern war dances. And you get past that. If you can't see the performers or the music as intimidating, you can no longer appreciate this part of it; and there's not much else to say on this front. The fantasy of powers that the music projects, either from direct threats and claims of strength or gaining power through taboo violation (a known theme in anthropology) becomes harder to take seriously; there are people and things in the world to be legitimately afraid of, and at a certain point, your boss getting angry at you or your kid getting hit by a car become much scarier than any corpsepaint ever could be, even in some state of suspended disbelief during a show. It also bears mentioning that for young genre music enthusiasts, consuming that particular genre does part of the job of establishing your identity (why should being a metalhead or hip hop fan have anything at all to do with how you dress or any other aspect of your life but what's on you iPod? But clearly they do.) As music fans get older, their identity gets filled in by other things - in particular, profession and family. You hope. Unless that profession is "musician".

The point is not to say, "I'm too old to like metal anymore, and soon you will be too." It's a call to performers and consumers to recognize that innovation for its own sake is not usually productive and it's actually preferable to focus on writing killer music within the rules; and also to establish new rules not for their own sake, but to produce new material that relies on tonal and rhythmic interaction (which itself can make you angry or scared; heard of Opeth?) and not how scary everything is supposed to be.

Oh yeah, the Immolation review. Like I said, I mostly liked the leads. There were a couple big, hummable riffs too.

Interview with Yoon Ha Lee in Clarkesworld Magazine

I've posted links to her work before. So much great in this interview, including:

Most of the time I write didactically, as if a short story were a proof. There is some object lesson, or ethical question, I want to leave the reader with. "Ghostweight" is a good example of this; it doesn't pretend not to be didactic. So when I build the character and their strengths and weaknesses and motivations, when I build the setting, the majority of it needs to be in support of that point. With a proof, you want to include all the necessary axioms and arguments, but leave out the extraneous. A short story is very similar.

Another great point she makes, in keeping with this motivation in her work, is that her characters are marionettes who serve other purposes in the story and that she's not attached to. Her clarity in this regard is one of many things which makes her prose stand out.

What Frickin Planet is This On

The answer is Arizona of course. From my new favorite website, Trailporn. One of my biggest pet peeves is when you see gorgeous non-CGI landscapes in a movie or especially somewhere on the web, and they don't tell you where this place is. Because it makes it harder to go there dammit. (Cross-posted to my outdoors and trailrunning blog, MDK10 Outside.)

The 70s Science Fiction Landscape of California

This is cross-posted to my California travel and outdoors/trail running blog, MDK10 Outside.



The Theme Building at LAX, from theinterrobang.com

The same guy (William Pereira) designed all of these buildings. [Edit - added later: incorrect! The LAX control tower was designed by the under-rated Gin Wong, who was a partner at Pereira and ultimately the CEO of the firm.] In order roughly from south to north:

San Diego: San Diego Airport, Grossmont Hospital, Scripps Clinic, and Geisel Library at UCSD

Irvine: the entire city more or less, including UC Irvine

Newport Beach: the entire city more or less

LA: USC's campus (he was a professor there), and that weird central building at LAX

San Francisco: SFO, and the TransAmerica Pyramid


Geisel Library at UCSD. The first time I saw this I literally stumbled across it, and I started looking around for Gort and Clatu.

Pereira was a major science fiction fan and intentionally designed things to look futuristic. Talk about life imitating art. (And some of these buildings ended up being used later in science fiction movies - that's the UC Irvine campus at that last link.) That said, a lot of these buildings do look pretty dated; to paraphrase the Simpsons, they look like what they thought the twenty-first century would look like in 1970.* But it's amazing that one person is responsible for so much of the iconic construction of this state, and more amazing that he's not more famous. One of Pereira's students also went on to some fame - Frank Gehry.

The whole state of California is named after a fictitious country in a sixteenth century science fiction novel, so maybe this kind of reification isn't so surprising.


*Ah, you read the footnote for more architecture-bashing! Excellent. Modern architecture in general often gets dated quickly because the ways it tries to be original become inextricably linked to a very narrow era - you don't look at a medieval cathedral and think "Oh my gosh, that's so tacky, it just screams fourteenth century." Another mid-to-late twentieth century American architect was Eero Saarinen, and his best-known works are probably the Arch in St. Louis, the international terminal at JFK, and the terminals at Dulles (you know, the ones that require a custom-made land-crawler as a shuttle. Stupid.) Note that of these, only the Arch has avoided looking dated, at least from outside, probably owing to its basic geometricality. Even Saint Wright suffers from this to some degree. Probably the worst offense in all architecture is here in San Diego, the Salk Institute, perpetrated by Louis Khan. Horrifyingly, every day one can find packs of drooling architecture students visting from Europe and Asia, memorizing this Golgotha of right angles, excited to return home and desecrate their own cities with a similar pile of cinder blocks. Just as with Wright's work and that of other famous architects, the bathrooms in the Salk are awful. (RE Wright, in Falling Water they're bad but in the Beth Shalom synagogue in Philadelphia they're criminal. Tiny, dungeon-like, insufficient for the facility, their function damaged by their size and remoteness - seemingly not an afterthought, but the victims of deliberate malice. The bathroom is the most important room in the building!)

Galactus Devouring One of His Heralds

Now, that we may ennumerate all the manners in which a thing may be awesome; surely, whatever be the accounting thereof, all are present here.

Sky Burial by Vulture

"...the Parsi community here intends to build two aviaries at one of its most sacred sites so that the giant scavengers can once again devour human corpses." How can you not get excited about a NYT article that starts that way? Diclofenac, a pain drug given to cattle, ended up killing the vulture population in part of India, which is why vultures have to be induced to return. (I worked on a U.S. formulation of this drug briefly and in my initial research ran across these kinds of articles. Wacky.) Tibetans have a very similar ritual, which makes sense if you live somewhere with low O2 and rocky soil.

Why am I posting this? Come on. Vultures eating corpses. How metal can you get?

I don't know if Italian artist Greta Alfaro had these rituals in mind when she conceived this art piece, but the vultures here (who show up after about 1m15s) make similar short work of this elegant vineyard-side table-setting.

Soviet Pressure Suits in 1939: Before Kittinger and Baumgartner

"As he was about to touch down, he realized he had only a few seconds' supply of air before suffocating; the suit had indeed proved to be hermetically closed. Steering clear of treetops, Yakov made his landing in the countryside, at the edge of a village. A woman carrying two buckets of water from the well saw what must have been the scariest thing in her life: a man in a bright-red fur suit — the color was to make Yakov easier to spot for the rescue team — with a glass cylinder on his head falling from the sky...Yakov touched down. He rushed to a tree and beat his head against the trunk to crack the helmet loose."

More here on this early jump from what we now call cruising altitude.  In some ways he seemed closer to Newton than NASA.

The suit description makes me think of Max Ernst. As a loyal J.G. Ballard fan that's never difficult for me. Here is 1940's Robing of the Bride (from http://www.artexpertswebsite.com/).

Oration On UCSD Architecture

"UCSD’s continued expansion into a science-fiction nightmare: It’s been a growing monstrosity for decades. Where there once stood mighty eucalyptus groves and quaint ’70s wooden ranch architecture, there are now mostly big gray concrete boxes. Nothing’s human scale. One of the last campus sweet spots, the charming University Center, with its 1950s Camp Matthews bungalows and grass field, was leveled a few years ago to make way for the giant, hideous Jacobs School of Engineering building. Wanna feel like a cyborg sent for reprogramming in a dystopian future? Borrow $80,000 and get a degree from the University of California. "

Well that's nitpicking isn't it.

I might not join the writer of this erstwhile San Diego preservationist in UCSD-bashing, but in all seriousness, I'm not a big fan of the nearby Salk Institute. Like many people I'm not a big fan of mid-to-late twentieth century institutional modern architecture in general. Anything that attempts to create its own style looks dated very quickly (ever see the quaintly 60s international terminal at JFK? Eero Saarinen, same guy who did the St. Louis Arch. Only the Arch remains in good taste since it's too simple to identify with any one era.) And the worst thing about modern architecture, since it's clearly meant to impress one-time visitors rather than the people that work there? The bathrooms always suck. This is the most important room in the building as far as I'm concerned, and in the Salk they're a disaster, just like in many of Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings. Beth Shalom Synagogue in Philadelphia, one of his last structures, is a perfect example.

The Stuff on the Radio Really Does Suck

And now we have quantitative evidence. This shouldn't be surprising. If you're hearing it on a for-profit radio chain, why should it appeal to taste? It just needs to be inoffensive; the Budweiser of music as it were. This is even truer of film, where the medium requires greater initial investment so business interests are more risk-averse. Profit and business are great, but not necessarily for producing great art. When we pay attention to what organizations are maximizing, the world makes more sense.

The Completely Context-Dependent Power of Art

Joshua Bell played his violin as a panhandler in a metro station in Washington D.C. Interesting, because Bell is considered one of the greatest living violinists. Here's Bell performing Schubert's Ave Maria, one of the pieces he performed in the metro:



The experiment was whether the abstract power of his talent, and of the music he was performing, would cut through the fog of people's commutes. The unstated assumption is that if it doesn't, there's soemthing wrong with us.

The WaPo article deserves some criticism, but not for the questions it's asking. As such the piece is a really incisive look into high-cultural values that most of us are not comfortable questioning so explicitly, and Gene Weingarten deserves kudos for having the cajones for approaching Joshua Bell with the idea. As does Bell, who followed through on the experiment and seemed very forthcoming about his subjective experience. Indeed that may be the most interesting part of the piece. The rest is entirely predictable.

The problem with the article is the unstated assumptions buried in this experiment, and the often moralistic tone employed in discussing the whole enterprise and its outcome. Weingarten beats the reader over the head with said assumptions roughly enough that it seems he was intentionally trying to get us to notice them - but if that was really the point of his whole experiment, he doesn't ever allow that he realizes this. Some of them are:

Assumption #1: Beauty in art is context-free. The experience of beauty should radiate through and wake us up, regardless of our background. Kandinsky is often held up as an example of someone whose art showed his belief in context independence, and consequently as the classic example of the failure of modern art, precisely because it could not be reduced and purified to its essence. The National Gallery Curator in the article understood this clearly and was unusually frank about it; Joshua Bell did not. What's most interesting about believing artistic beauty is so strongly objective and context-free is that this would also mean it would be easy to build a machine to measure beauty, which (I would wager) most people who think art is context free would not want to believe.


Wassily Kandinsky, Yellow Red Blue

Assumption #2, related to the first one: Beauty in art exists on a one-dimensional spectrum. Should these people in the transit station have reacted the same way to someone playing Slayer, or Elvis, or to the world's best mime? If not, why not? The obvious answer is the presumption that classical music is better.

Even leaving aside debates about the virtue of one over another set of esthetic values (i.e. metal vs. classical, of course) I do not have adequate ability even as a music appreciator to hear why Bell is so much better than anyone else. (I do however claim such abilities where metal is concerned, and exercise them frequently on this very blog, of course for your benefit dear reader.) Again, this a) assumes the existence of only one dimension along which skill can be appreciated, but also b) requires special effort from appreciators, which wouldn't be so bad if c) there wasn't a moral judgment and presumptuousness that so few people have this skill.

Assumption #3: There is a moral failure in modern life if it does not lead us to appreciate artistic beauty - when and where the artists want us to. The fact is that we're saturated with media today, and we hear far more music and see far more art than people did even fifty years ago. (Indeed, American Gen X and Yers are more likely to listen to classical music than our parents.) Notice that it was the children in this story who stopped and listened to the violinist, because it was probably the first time they'd heard a violin. If we lived in medieval Europe when most people rarely heard music, they would have stopped too, not because medieval peasants could appreciate artistic beauty better or their lives were somehow more in balance, but out of sheer novelty, just like the children did.

But more important here is the sheer presumptuousness of such an attitude on the time of the passersby. I say this is good art, and if you don't take time out of whatever is important to you to look at it, there's something wrong with you! This was in Washington D.C.; if you're American, most of those people in the station are running your government, and here's this guy distracting them with a violin! I imagine a smartass artist response to this would be, "Exactly - their lives are out of balance." Next time this same hypothetical smartass is running somewhere, to their job or to pick someone up at the airport or to meet someone for lunch, let's take ten minutes of their time and ask them to just calm down and listen to some Miles Davis before they jump in the car, and we'll see whether they're concerned with balance then. The point is, there are lots of people who enjoy Joshua Bell and classical violin, and when they want to, they go to the symphony and do it there, on their schedule, when they're expecting to. Not completely out of context when they're trying to do their jobs.


To reiterate, Bell was gracious and brave to undertake such an experiment, as was Weingarten to approach him - but the article is better as a starting point for surfacing the assumptions we have about the esthetic demands that high culture makes on our attention.

Roberto Venosa

Drugs. Drugs now. Venosa's website here.