No Comfort in Broken Music

I think I’ve always wanted to be a more anal person than I actually am. I’ve tried to be the person who puts every task immediately into an app, schedules it, and adds the perfect emoji (the important part.) I allowed myself to obsess over minimalism and Marie Kondo, trying to transform my home into the clean white soulless void of an Apple store. I feel in love with the ideas of Zettlekasten and Roam Research where every fart and hiccup in my brain is meticulously connected to all the others like a perfect meth-smoking spider’s web. I wanna meditate every day, take clod showers, get in my reps, nail my macros, and hustle hustle hustle. I want to use footnotes. But honestly, I just don’t give that much of a fuck about any of it. My real life is a maelstrom of monotony and chaos. I spend my days reading books, scribbly sloppy notes on paper, and hoping I can read them when I sit down to right one of these posts. I count days by how many clean pairs of underwear I have left until I’m forced to do laundry. My living space leans more towards piles than it does toward organization. My analytical mind is easily distracted by emotion, novelty, cartoons, and hormones.

Oh well. That’s who I am. I improve what I can, and move along with the rest.

As I write this I’m watching the screen saver on my Apple TV as it shows slow-motion drone footage of people on a beach and carnival rides on a pier (likely Santa Monica.) I hate the way it makes me feel. I look at it and I don’t see tomorrow. I don’t think “I can’t wait to go to the beach again.” I look at it and I see the past. I see something lost. I see a world that feels like something we may never make our way back to. I’m sure you feel it too. It’s not every day, but it’s there: the part of our brain that wonders if hugging, and crowded festivals, and movie theaters will ever feel normal again. Or will the trepidation and caution forever follow us?

Oh well. That’s life. Improve what we can, and move along with the rest.

“there’s a gun in the room”

I’m sure you noticed the audio file above. I’m sure some of you thought it was a podcast. I wonder how many of you were unable to scroll onward without clicking it first. I would have.

I’ve been playing my guitar a lot recently, and have been sending 1-2 minute little pieces to my friend Johnny (who will probably be the first person to open this and read it. Hi Jon.) I went down a rabbit hole for an hour the other day looking at looping pedals until it hit me: “I have an iPhone.” So I’ve been screwing around with laying guitar pieces in Garageband for iOS.

The audio above is one of those pieces. I like playing with dissonance—which can come across as jazz. I think to some degree it does here, which is why I tried to play with the timing in each guitar line (of which there are five,) and make it feel a little broken and discombobulating. In the lead line, I even threw in a bend (which is more blues than jazz.) And the keys for each line are different. I wanted to see how they would weave together, going in and out of harmony.

All of this was going through my head but don’t get the idea that I was sitting and planning out every note. I’ve always been more instinctual than technical. I think the reason I’ve never been the kind of guitar player who can sit down and strum an Eagles song or solo like Slash is that music is more of an experiment for me. “What happens is if do this and do this?” This often leads to awful results (the song above might be an example of that to you.) It’s not about writing songs, it’s about exploration. It’s curiosity not product. Charlie Kaufman not Aaron Sorkin.

Almost everybody knows by now how much I love the Rolling Stones, but I’ve never been interested in making music that sounds like the Stones (in fact I’ve never even bothered to learn how to play any of their songs.) My own music always veers more towards Sonic Youth, John Cage, Captain Beefheart, Harry Partch, everything post-punk, and The Velvet Underground. Somehow, even I forgot about that.

I intend to explore my weirdo nature more. Expect more broken music.

the velvet underground

Speaking of music, I finally sat down and watched the Apple TV+ documentary on The Velvet Underground. I loved it. It’s exactly what I needed.

I’m glad Todd Haynes was the one who directed this. The standard music documentary format would have been very un-Velvet Underground. I can think of no better director than Haynes whose first film was the Karen Carpenter story told via Barbie dolls. His use of split-screen here makes sure that nothing ever feels standard or boring (especially at the beginning where he uses Warhol’s copious footage of the band members staring non-stop into the camera.)

La Monte Young & John Cale were creating drones (referring to long musical notes, not the flying quad-copters that watch you when you’re naked in the swimming pool.)

We found that the most stable thing we could tune to was the 60 cycle hum of the refrigerator because 60 cycle hum was, to us, the drone of western civilization. — John Cale

I’ve long been fascinated by the drone of the microwave often harmonizing my voice to it as I waited for something to cook.

I looked up La Monte Young but couldn’t find any recordings of him. I did find Noël Akchoté playing guitar arrangements of some of his compositions.

The bass line for “The Ostrich” by The Primitives (basically Lou Reed, John Cale, and some friends) sounded really familiar.

Then I placed it. It seems Sebadoh borrowed it for “Flame.”

christine

I read Christine by Stephen King. I’m a latecomer when it comes to King. Before this year the only thing by him I had ever read was On Writing. Having read The Shining earlier this year and now having read Christine, I think I’ve discovered what makes King such a tremendous writer. He does the work.

Stephen King comes up with the most ridiculous concepts (teenage nerd falls in love with a dilapidated car which over time possesses him,) yet rather than descending into camp, he accepts the concepts. He doesn’t criticize the ideas, he embraces them and embodies them. “If this was real, what would it look like.” He fills the books with so much character and detail that even the most absurd concepts become legitimate.

the righteous mind

I read The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. Here are some key points:

People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.

We have intuition (the elephant) and reasoning (the rider.) The rider is not in control like a pilot is over a plane; the rider serves mostly to understand the actions of the elephant. Our reason writes the story of our intuitive action. Rather than appealing to someone’s reasoning (as we normally do,) we should find a way to appeal to their intuition. Lead the elephant and the rider comes along.

The foundations of morality:

care/harm

liberty/oppression

fairness/cheating

loyalty/betrayal

authority/subversion

sanctity/degradation

The liberal foundation favors care, liberty, and fairness with care being the most favored. The libertarian foundation favors liberty & fairness with liberty being the most favored. The conservative foundation favors all six equally.

Nonetheless, if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire, and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism—which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity—is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.

media bias

After reading all of these political books I’ve been thinking a lot about the inherent biases of our media sources. In the process, I discovered this tremendous website called Media Bias / Fact Check. You can look up any media source and it will show you it fits on the left/right spectrum as well as the factual/not factual spectrum.

Personally, I like to get differing perspectives (without dipping into extremism and outright falsehoods.) Some of my favorite media sources are:

Reuters: least biased / very high factual

The Economist: least biased / high factual

The Christian Science Monitor: least biased / high factual

Newsweek: left-center / high factual

Business Insider: left-center / high factual

Texas Monthly: left-center / high factual

The Wall Street Journal: right-center / mostly factual

The Spectator World: right-center / mostly factual

Reason: right-center (libertarian) / high factual

btw

I had intended to write a bunch more but this is so long already. I think I will post a supplemental in a few days. If I continue writing as much as I have been lately, then this may become ongoing (no promises.)

debatable ideas

Debatable Ideas is a weekly curation of the ideas that stand out to me from the week. That can mean something I see truth in, something worth contemplating, something questionable, something I'm bothered by, something ridiculous, something that I think is false, or something that will make you shake your phone like you caught a snake while waiting in line at Starbucks. It's up to you to decide what you think—and politely discuss in the comments.

The ideas are numbered for easy reference. addition, if you run across any fascinating, horrifying, insane, bonkers, and entertaining ideas, please direct me to them in the comments.

Judaism was the foundation of my childhood. As a child, I attended Jewish day school and Jewish summer camp and regularly celebrated Shabbat and the Jewish holidays. Some of my most enduring childhood memories are at the Shabbat dinner table, where my parents and their friends would discuss world affairs and important societal issues. There were always multiple viewpoints expressed. My mother is a rabbi, and my parents always taught us that such disagreements were the essence of living Jewishly—to argue, as the rabbis taught, for the sake of heaven. Jew vs. Jew

Information vacuums are common in breaking-news events in the social-media era. In the early moments after a mass shooting or a natural disaster, or in the unknown moments after the polls close but before votes are tabulated in an election, there is a higher demand for definitive information than there is supply. These moments offer propagandists, trolls, pundits, politicians, journalists, and anyone else with an internet connection the opportunity to fill that vacuum with … something. It’s a treacherous situation, where rumor, speculation, and disinformation have the power to outpace verified information. Traditional breaking-news events tend to have a short half-life but, as we’ve found with COVID coverage, information gaps can last weeks or months. Sometimes, the definitive information we want (when will the pandemic end?) is basically unknowable, or too hard to pin down. The Omicron Information Vacuum

The collapse is inevitable: Virtually every world power that ever existed has eventually declined, failed, and disappeared. The Soviet Union had survived for nearly 70 years, the British Empire for more than 400, and ancient Egypt for almost 30 centuries. But even though the land of the pharaohs was long crowned with success, its decline and destruction were unstoppable. History tells us it’s not a question of whether a world power will eventually be destroyed but rather a question of when. Secrets and Lies That Brought Down Empires // Ideas and Discovery Magazine - Dec 2021

In other words, pretty minimal changes to get a tractor working on Mars. So if you want to imagine the future in ten years, picture a big Martian construction site busy with people in spacesuits driving John Deere tractors around. It is, in other words, frontier work. The aesthetics of human space colonization is Firefly, or the grit of the original Star Wars, not the sleek bureaucratic competence of Star Trek. NASA and SpaceX are establishing the first Martian city by 2030

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