32.9% of individuals less than 65 years in Durham County NC are uninsured.
(2010 ACS)
3.30.2012
3.22.2012
3.09.2012
3.01.2012
Daytona 500
"Mercury raps is roughed then God just shown like taps
Red and white Wally's that match, bend my baseball hat
Doin forever shit, like pissin out the window on turnpikes
Robbin niggaz for leathers, high swipin on dirt bikes
Voice be metal like Von Harper radio barber
Murder sleep away camp, the fly lady champ
The arsonist, who burn with his pen regardless
Slaying all these earthlings and fake foreigners
In the Phillipines, pick herbal beans, bubbling strings
Body chemical CREAM, we burn kerosene
The conviction of my tape is rape, wicked like Nixon
Long-heads inscriptions with three sixes in
Kiss the pyramid experiment with high explosive
I slapbox with Jesus, lick shots at Joseph
Zoomin like binoculars, the rap blacksmith
Money's Rolex, with sparkles, Chef ragtop is spotless
I'm Iron Man no cheap cash metal I'm steel alloy
True identity hidden inside secret tabloids
Breathe oxygen both sides of my jaw carry oxes
The track hit like the bangers, in hundred watt boxes
Yo jostling these cats while Little J be deli-ing
Sip Irish Moss out of Widelians”
Red and white Wally's that match, bend my baseball hat
Doin forever shit, like pissin out the window on turnpikes
Robbin niggaz for leathers, high swipin on dirt bikes
Voice be metal like Von Harper radio barber
Murder sleep away camp, the fly lady champ
The arsonist, who burn with his pen regardless
Slaying all these earthlings and fake foreigners
In the Phillipines, pick herbal beans, bubbling strings
Body chemical CREAM, we burn kerosene
The conviction of my tape is rape, wicked like Nixon
Long-heads inscriptions with three sixes in
Kiss the pyramid experiment with high explosive
I slapbox with Jesus, lick shots at Joseph
Zoomin like binoculars, the rap blacksmith
Money's Rolex, with sparkles, Chef ragtop is spotless
I'm Iron Man no cheap cash metal I'm steel alloy
True identity hidden inside secret tabloids
Breathe oxygen both sides of my jaw carry oxes
The track hit like the bangers, in hundred watt boxes
Yo jostling these cats while Little J be deli-ing
Sip Irish Moss out of Widelians”
2.29.2012
2.10.2012
1.24.2012
11.26.2011
11.15.2011
11.11.2011
11.07.2011
11.02.2011
From Conrad's "Lord Jim"
"'Yes! Very funny this terrible thing is. A man that is born falls
into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out
into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns- nicht
wahr?... No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit
yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water
make the deep, deep sea keep you up. So if you ask me- how to be?'
"His voice leaped up extraordinarily strong, as though away there in the dusk he had been inspired by some whisper of knowledge. 'I will tell you! For that, too, there is only one way.'
"With a hasty swish swish of his slippers he loomed up in the ring of faint light, and suddenly appeared in the bright circle of the lamp. His extended hand aimed at my breast like a pistol; his deep-set eyes seemed to pierce through me, but his twitching lips uttered no word, and the austere exaltation of a certitude seen in the dusk vanished from his face. The hand that had been pointing at my breast fell, and by-and-by, coming a step nearer, he laid it gently on my shoulder. There were things, he said mournfully, that perhaps could never be told, only he had lived so much alone that sometimes he forgot- he forgot. The light had destroyed the assurance which had inspired him in the distant shadows. He sat down and, with both elbows on the desk, rubbed his forehead. 'And yet it is true it is true. In the destructive element immerse.'... He spoke in a subdued tone, without looking at me, one hand on each side of his face. 'That was the way. To follow the dream, and again to follow the dream- and so- ewig- usque ad finem....' The whisper of his conviction seemed to open before me a vast and uncertain expanse, as of a crepuscular horizon on a plain at dawn- or was it, perchance, at the coming of the night? One had not the courage to decide; but it was a charming and deceptive light, throwing the impalpable poesy of its dimness over pitfalls- over graves. His life had begun in sacrifice, in enthusiasm for generous ideas; he had travelled very far, on various ways, on strange paths, and whatever he followed it had been without faltering, and therefore without shame and without regret. In so far he was right. That was the way, no doubt. Yet for all that the great plain on which men wander amongst graves and pitfalls remained very desolate under the impalpable poesy of its crepuscular light, overshadowed in the centre, circled with a bright edge as if surrounded by an abyss full of flames. When at last I broke the silence it was to express the opinion that no one could be more romantic than himself.
"His voice leaped up extraordinarily strong, as though away there in the dusk he had been inspired by some whisper of knowledge. 'I will tell you! For that, too, there is only one way.'
"With a hasty swish swish of his slippers he loomed up in the ring of faint light, and suddenly appeared in the bright circle of the lamp. His extended hand aimed at my breast like a pistol; his deep-set eyes seemed to pierce through me, but his twitching lips uttered no word, and the austere exaltation of a certitude seen in the dusk vanished from his face. The hand that had been pointing at my breast fell, and by-and-by, coming a step nearer, he laid it gently on my shoulder. There were things, he said mournfully, that perhaps could never be told, only he had lived so much alone that sometimes he forgot- he forgot. The light had destroyed the assurance which had inspired him in the distant shadows. He sat down and, with both elbows on the desk, rubbed his forehead. 'And yet it is true it is true. In the destructive element immerse.'... He spoke in a subdued tone, without looking at me, one hand on each side of his face. 'That was the way. To follow the dream, and again to follow the dream- and so- ewig- usque ad finem....' The whisper of his conviction seemed to open before me a vast and uncertain expanse, as of a crepuscular horizon on a plain at dawn- or was it, perchance, at the coming of the night? One had not the courage to decide; but it was a charming and deceptive light, throwing the impalpable poesy of its dimness over pitfalls- over graves. His life had begun in sacrifice, in enthusiasm for generous ideas; he had travelled very far, on various ways, on strange paths, and whatever he followed it had been without faltering, and therefore without shame and without regret. In so far he was right. That was the way, no doubt. Yet for all that the great plain on which men wander amongst graves and pitfalls remained very desolate under the impalpable poesy of its crepuscular light, overshadowed in the centre, circled with a bright edge as if surrounded by an abyss full of flames. When at last I broke the silence it was to express the opinion that no one could be more romantic than himself.
10.30.2011
10.20.2011
Music Structure, Music Taste
I posit that
there are deep structures that determine musical taste. These
structures are organized into three levels:
1) Sound spectrum. Any given individual sound.
2) Phrase. Within the song, there are phrases, or bars that are repeated, like a backbeat.
3) Song. The most macro level of the song.
1) Sound spectrumSound spectrum can be represented by any given individual sound in the song. Is the sound spectrum highly distorted or very "clean". For example, this is the difference between a trumpet holding a clean crisp brassy tone and rock guitar holding a highly distorted, reverbed, fuzzy note. This difference between distorted and clean sounds can be quantified by looking at the sound's spectrograph.
2) Phrase
Between the instantaneous sound spectrum and the song itself, the song has a series of subdivisions. For instance, the break in this song repeats every two bars:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Compare that to this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
The tune by J Dilla is no less funky than that by DJ Premier (one half of the group Gangstarr), but where Premier's beat is regularly repeating, Dilla's phrases are chopped up, repeating sometimes over as little as two beats. Dilla's song is less regular, less easy to predict where it's going from measure to measure. In the Premier beat, the repeated phrase has an "open" and "close" to it. The Dilla beat, more unpredictable, seems continuously "open" and driving forward.
3) Song
This strata relates to the simplicity or complexity of the song structure. For instance, listen to Elvis' "Hound Dog":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Given the first couple of bars, you can almost sing the the entire song to yourself, even if you have only heard it once or twice.
Compare that with Charles Mingus' "Haitian Fight Song". This song has a theme, but like all Mingus tunes, its arrangement is more complex, more intricate. You might sing along, but it has not the predictability of the Elvis tune:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
"Blue Moon" would be another example of a "predictable" tune. Anything from Miles Davis' "Bitches Brew" era would be on the other end of the spectrum.
Genre
One can see the dichotomy I am drawing through each of these three strata: complexity vs. clarity; repetition of the same vs. repetition of the not-same; distortion vs. purity. I argue that music genres are marked by certain traits generally conforming to the criteria outlined above.
As a shorthand, I will use "A" as the symbol for complexity/distortion, and "O" for simplicity/regularity.
1) Sound spectrum. Any given individual sound.
2) Phrase. Within the song, there are phrases, or bars that are repeated, like a backbeat.
3) Song. The most macro level of the song.
1) Sound spectrumSound spectrum can be represented by any given individual sound in the song. Is the sound spectrum highly distorted or very "clean". For example, this is the difference between a trumpet holding a clean crisp brassy tone and rock guitar holding a highly distorted, reverbed, fuzzy note. This difference between distorted and clean sounds can be quantified by looking at the sound's spectrograph.
2) Phrase
Between the instantaneous sound spectrum and the song itself, the song has a series of subdivisions. For instance, the break in this song repeats every two bars:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Compare that to this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
The tune by J Dilla is no less funky than that by DJ Premier (one half of the group Gangstarr), but where Premier's beat is regularly repeating, Dilla's phrases are chopped up, repeating sometimes over as little as two beats. Dilla's song is less regular, less easy to predict where it's going from measure to measure. In the Premier beat, the repeated phrase has an "open" and "close" to it. The Dilla beat, more unpredictable, seems continuously "open" and driving forward.
3) Song
This strata relates to the simplicity or complexity of the song structure. For instance, listen to Elvis' "Hound Dog":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Given the first couple of bars, you can almost sing the the entire song to yourself, even if you have only heard it once or twice.
Compare that with Charles Mingus' "Haitian Fight Song". This song has a theme, but like all Mingus tunes, its arrangement is more complex, more intricate. You might sing along, but it has not the predictability of the Elvis tune:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
"Blue Moon" would be another example of a "predictable" tune. Anything from Miles Davis' "Bitches Brew" era would be on the other end of the spectrum.
Genre
One can see the dichotomy I am drawing through each of these three strata: complexity vs. clarity; repetition of the same vs. repetition of the not-same; distortion vs. purity. I argue that music genres are marked by certain traits generally conforming to the criteria outlined above.
As a shorthand, I will use "A" as the symbol for complexity/distortion, and "O" for simplicity/regularity.
|
Sound spectrum
|
Phrase
|
Song
|
||||
|
Country
|
O
|
A
|
O
|
|||
|
Indie Rock
|
A
|
A
|
O
|
|||
|
Classic Rock
|
A
|
O
|
O
|
|||
|
Metal
|
A
|
A
|
A
|
|||
|
Reggae
|
A
|
O
|
O
|
|||
|
Blues
|
A
|
O
|
A
|
|||
|
Broadway
|
O
|
O
|
O
| |||
[5.17.2021]
Same Old Mistakes
My hope is to say not that the way one has been listening to music is wrong, but here is a whole new way of listening. We can talk about music personality and music taste structurally, almost topologically as if we could trace the manifolds of one's brain.
Critics tend to only judge new music by what they know, just as generals always are fighting the last war. They miss the revolutionary moments that cut through time and rend old dogmas. Why is that? In their intelligence and encyclopedic knowledge, why are they not open to cutting edge music?
The brain is composed of pattern-seeking algorithms. The most primordial pattern is self-similarity (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34,...). When we talk about "Same, Same, Same," this is what we are talking about. The fibonacci series makes up the basis for what we consider to be the existence of beauty in the world.
The amazing thing about the brain is that it is listening for both self-similarity and non-self-similarity at the same time. The only way that it pattern-recognizes for beauty is to wade through shit. And as a result, the brain is attuned to both beauty and shit. It is the shit that structures the beauty. So to listen to something really dissonant and to find the beauty in it, that is the sensation of sublimity. And likewise, to listen to something beautiful and melodic and then to hear it chopped up, scratched and screwed, is to make that beauty all the more sensational and intense, amplified. It is by virtue of the cuts, the breaks in the record, that we come to understand it using our pattern apparatus.
Here is another example:
This is a Lacanian semiotic diagram. Based upon the curvature (bend) of the knot and the trajectory of S, one can tell approximately where S will make its second intersection or stitch. Our brains are tracing the arc or path of the horseshoe, and based upon our intuition of the changing slope of the arc, we can estimate the intersection point. This stitch is like the adequation of subject and object, or as Deleuze says, the being of becoming. When listening to music, our brains are doing the same sort of pattern recognition. We are effectively desiring difference, listening to music searching for little arcs, little pockets of beauty that will satisfy these relationships. It is because the arc is offset by dissonance that we come to find it beautiful. If a painting was just littered with 2-dimensional rainbows, that picture would be banal and stupid, as beautiful as rainbows are thought to be.
When talking about music critics, the point is that these diagrams are built (structured); they are not inherent. We might have the machinery to pattern detect, but if one never listened to Nirvana before and all one knew was Frankie Valli, one might not see the beauty in it. The perception of beauty takes a disposition of openness, but it is also work. One might need to listen many times before the feelings of dissonance are structured into comprehensible arcs that become the satisfaction of the perception of beauty, much in the same way that a book that was over one's head in high school could become beloved later on. The thing about good music is that it always has a hook - even if it is challenging, it has something that causes one to come back and listen to it, listen in a new way, to attempt to deconstruct and reconstruct it mentally and in time. Music that stands the test of time has this sense of balance and challenge which makes it gratifying to listen to again and again throughout one's life.
10.17.2011
10.16.2011
10.11.2011
My Prediction for the Economy
The recession that began in 2008 actually coincided with 7 fat years,
relatively speaking. Starting in 2014, real recession/depression with
high market volatility and global surrealism will commence (7 lean years). Investors
who stay the course and go long with oil here will do well.
My Comment to Google
So I think there were avoidable missteps with Google+.
1. You can't post on someone's wall.
2. In the name of privacy, Google went too far and now sharing with circles, etc. is too complicated. Google+ would be helpful if I had 4+ groups of people I share stuff with. I don't, and neither do many others. They just have 1 group, maybe 2. So every time I post, I just put in a couple of people's names. What is funny is that Facebook thinks it can one-up this by adding similar functionality without the complexity. We'll see.
I think Google should have taken the same approach with Google+ that it did with Gmail. Strip it down to its simplest, give it a web 2.0 interface, and generally leave it alone. If you can't build the simplest social media site, you don't really understand what it does.
Google made its name by focusing on the nerdery: Search. Start there; reduce the equation to start with the fewest possible steps to social electronic sharing. Start over; reboot if you have to.
1. You can't post on someone's wall.
2. In the name of privacy, Google went too far and now sharing with circles, etc. is too complicated. Google+ would be helpful if I had 4+ groups of people I share stuff with. I don't, and neither do many others. They just have 1 group, maybe 2. So every time I post, I just put in a couple of people's names. What is funny is that Facebook thinks it can one-up this by adding similar functionality without the complexity. We'll see.
I think Google should have taken the same approach with Google+ that it did with Gmail. Strip it down to its simplest, give it a web 2.0 interface, and generally leave it alone. If you can't build the simplest social media site, you don't really understand what it does.
Google made its name by focusing on the nerdery: Search. Start there; reduce the equation to start with the fewest possible steps to social electronic sharing. Start over; reboot if you have to.
10.03.2011
9.27.2011
On the Making of Shook Ones Pt. II
“I made that beat inside my mother’s house in Queensbridge. That house
gave me a lot of inspiration because something could happen outside and I
could go upstairs and make a beat. Like, I would have this feeling
like, ‘Let me go upstairs and make a beat of how I'm feeling right now.’" -- Havoc
From: http://www.complex.com/music/2011/04/the-making-of-mobb-deep-the-infamous/shook-ones-ii#
From: http://www.complex.com/music/2011/04/the-making-of-mobb-deep-the-infamous/shook-ones-ii#
9.26.2011
Wikiquote quote of the day:
Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten
thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity
of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a
better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.
--F. Scott Fitzgerald
<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/
Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten
thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity
of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a
better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.
--F. Scott Fitzgerald
<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/
9.24.2011
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