John & Belle Have A Blog

Tex Arcana

Long day. Nothing about it comes to mind. Amuse yourselves with this instead.

Reality Bites

I have been meaning to respond to this post from Crooked Timber on food technology and modernity for a while, because I think there is one area of confusion. Chris is "revolted by the suggestion that one day we might synthesize all our food." He links this visceral reaction to a more general concern about the alienating effects of modernity and even what it means to be human.

This is an understandable feeling, but I think it differs from concerns about Transhumanists in an important way, one which is brought out quite clearly in Chris' quote from Orwell. (The character in Orwell bites into a disgusting fish sausage, which fills him with queasy rage against the plasticene modern world.) That is, our feelings about "artificial" food are inevitably colored by the fact that all artificial food developed so far tastes incredibly bad. We associate the possibility of synthesized food with the dubious foods we have already been offered, always with the smiling assurance that it tastes just as good as the real thing - and is so much more convenient! Just consider products such as margarine, canned peas, frozen corn, instant oatmeal, instant coffee, frozen pizza, powdered milk, canned biscuits, etc. etc. Not to put too fine a point on it, they all taste like shit. And in addition to the injury of the bad food, one is made to suffer the insults of marketers who deem you too stupid to know the difference. This is the quintessential experience of "artificial" foods so far.

But if I imagine that the synthesizing process is perfect, I find that most of my objections evaporate (I can't speak for Chris here.) What if I had in my home a Star Trek-style food replicator (ignoring for the moment the amount of energy needed to run the matter/energy conversion the other way)? Now, instead of flaccid, tasteless, huge strawberries, deceptively red on the outside, with mealy crystals forming around a hollow core, I can have tiny fraises de bois, still warm from the sun, each the equal of the best strawberry I ever ate as a child. Gone forever would be the depressing ratio of truly good peaches to bad ones. Every dinner I made would start with the absolute finest fresh ingredients: still-living oysters from perfect water; unpasteurized (but perfectly safe) milk just that instant taken from the foaming pail; asparagus so fine and tender they are a form of vegetable infanticide; a gallon of huckleberries that would have taken me two days to pick myself.

Anf for those who don't cook, the machine can be dialled to produce ready meals, scanned (in some mysterious way) from the products of the world's best chefs. No more lonely packets of ramen; instead you may have hand-made somen in delicate miso broth, with glistening pieces of salmon on top. Instead of Stouffer's french bread pizza, with its little extruded turds of ground beef, how about a small margherita from your favorite Neapolitan pizza place?

Now, do we really think the diners in these scenarios are being deprived of a deep connection to the world? Is it not rather the case, no matter what the raw materials of this process are, that they are more in touch with real food than the average margarine-eater today?

Juice From Hell

From Pedantry, this inspired rant against Noam Chomsky. (Although it does seem to trail off into confusion on the subject of Cambodia at the end. I say stick it to him.) It reminded me of a funny story about Chomskian linguistics, told to me by my old boyfriend (a linguist). A speaker of some hill-tribe language in Burma (I can't remember which one, maybe Lisu?) was recruited as a linguistic informant for a Berkeley seminar. They spent the whole semester learning things about his language; it was a great seminar. He was a refugee from Burma where his tribespeople, and his family in particlar, were being oppressed by the SLORC. His father was a Christian (converted by some missionary back in the day) and had translated the entire Bible into their language. In the end, this guy was admitted to Berkeley to get his degree in linguistics, a very positive result for all concerned.

Apparently this guy read that there was going to be a conference about his language on the East Coast somewhere and arranged to attend. He was excited about having someone to talk to. All the speakers were Chomskians, though, and so all the talks were about X-bar movement and who knows what all. Erroneous examples of the language were bought out to support various tortured parsings. Our hill tribe hero got up to object that the sentences on offer were malformed, and was shut up with an airy suggestion that if the language wasn't constituted this way, it ought to be. His comment: "I thought that the conference would be like a refreshing drink. But it was like a juice -- from hell!"

Auld Lang Shin

"Daddy leg!"
"Yes. Daddy's leg."
"Daddy other leg!"
"Yes. Daddy's other leg!
"Zoë leg!"
"Yes. That's Zoë's leg."
"Zoë other leg!"

I thought I was doing pretty well, inventory-wise. Four on the floor, and four for four. A certain stanza, due to Philip Larkin, springs to mind.

"And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist."

Then she got me.

"Toast!"
"You want a piece of toast?"
"No, TOAST!"
"Oh [playing for time], all right."
"CHEERS!" [knocks her shin against mine.]
"Oh, toast!"
"Other leg!"
"CHEERS!"

Then we sang Auld Lang Shin and she tottled off to bed.

Hey, You Got Destiny in My Spirit!

I knew about the existence of mashups or bootlegs (in which two or more songs are combined to create a new track) before, but I never listened to any until this weekend. I love the internet; there, I've said it. Song links go right to the file, so you might want to right (or option-) click and save to be a nice internetty person, or not click at all if you have some crappy dial-up account. Sorry about that. But, you're probably at work anyway, so no problem, right? Oh, and I guess that you'll be (cue Beavis and Butthead) "breakin' the law! Breakin' the law!"

This Destiny's Child/Nirvana mashup by Grant McSleazy Smells Like Teen Booty is justly famous; hearing them chant "Beyoncé - can you handle this? Michelle - can you handle this?" above the rocking guitar-only opening is really funny. Similarly, this well-known Christina Aguilera/Strokes mashup A Stroke of Genie-us by Freelance Hellraiser is catchy in its own right, and brings out the fact that Little Miss Nasty has actually got a great voice, something I had never noticed before in my studious efforts to avoid her skank ass. (As an aside, I have to note the fundamental injustice of a world in which someone gets paid - and I don't mean just makes a little money but gets PAID - for writing the line "hormones racing at the speed of light.")

This electro version of Nirvana's Nevermind is amazing, too (by Dsico). I know, everyone is so tired of electroclash that they're abandoning Williamsburg en masse and moving to a scene that's not played out - the Lower East Side (!?). (This really seems like an article in search of a trend, possibly written by an envious Manhattan-dweller, but there you go. For what it's worth, Gawker (scroll down) (who lives on the -cough- Lower East Side - cough) agrees.) But too bad, this song still rocks. You don't have to put on leg-warmers or anything.

The best of the ones I've found so far is Dsico's Missy Elliot/Joy Division mashup Love Will Freak Us. It's Get Ur Freak On over Love Will Tear Us Apart (plus some guitar strumming which may be from a Who song?). In this case, I like the mashup better that either of the two source songs. The trademark Missy E. samples in the original are undeniably brilliant, but I find them off-putting. The Joy Division song is really good, but it has a thin, synthy aspect. This mashup turns the Joy Division song into more of a rocker with the addition of the extra guitar track and removal of the '80's vocals. It also showcases Missy's verbal dexterity; you're not distracted by the space-aliens-are-falling-down the-stairs samples in the background.

Now I wonder how much those Sound Forge Pro type software packages are, because this is music you could make yourself. But I have a novel to write, so what the hell am I thinking? Lots of other songs are available here, and check out this good article on the phenomenon. The author argues that while some mashups are just novelty tracks (Eminem vs. the Magnum P.I. theme song, I'm calling your number) others are new works of art of an interesting, if illegal kind. I was surprised to learn that Beck (among others) had refused permission for his songs to be used in this way. That seems wrong.

(Post has been updated to correct the identification of the Joy Division song, which I had spaceily attributed to New Order. Duh. This is the first time anyone has fact-checked my ass! It feels tingly.)

Junky bear liked to sleep, died.

These anti-drug posters can be seen on lots of billboards and such-like spaces in Singapore these days. And you can get them as free post cards. (I've collected them all except for Mr. Sun the junky bear who liked to sleep and died.) I really like the textural, fabric-form renderings of the various animals. Really. I'm not kidding. They remind me of this book I had when I was a kid that I really, really liked. (Yeah, I wish I remembered what it was called.) The posters look even better four feet tall. I like the fact that Nash, the anti-heroin cat, is covered in numerals. (Is this some sort of John Nash 'beautiful mind' reference?) I like the fact that Fiona Chameleon has words like 'tomato red yellow sky' emblazoned. on her tartan cloak. I like Mak the Rabbit's pseudo-hippy stylings. (You know he's always offering to give the girl bunnies back-rubs.) The poetry, however, is just atrocious. It may be the worst poetry I have ever read. It isn't that hard to write limericks, on just about any subject, that cause the mind's tongue to trip on to the end rather than lurching to a halt. These poems are just uncannily bad.

What do you think?

Oh, and here are anti-drug billboards from past years. I think the ones with kid's photos superimposed on sprawled junkies are actually quite effective. Some of the later ones just look like Tool video out-takes, however. Which is more fun to look at on the train than some things, but not a lot of things.

Religion and Reasons

Via Matthew Yglesias' comment section for this post, a link to this interesting Pew Research Center report on American attitudes towards religion and politics. I'll snip the bit that caught my eye:

The survey shows that a significant number of Americans would be reluctant to vote for a well-qualified candidate if he or she were a member of a particular religious group, especially a Muslim (38%). But many more express reservations about voting for a candidate without religion than one with a specific faith (52%). In all, 64% of Americans admit that a candidate's religion, or lack thereof, could lead them to vote against a well-qualified candidate from their own party.

The same pattern is evident among respondents who were given a different form of the question, which asked if there are "any reasons" not to vote for a candidate with a particular religious affiliation if he or she were nominated by the respondent's preferred party. In this case, slightly fewer (41%) say there are reasons why they would not vote for an atheist far more than say that about a Muslim, an evangelical Christian, a Catholic or a Jew.

Atheism is a particular concern for white evangelical Protestants and African-Americans, majorities of each say there are reasons why they might not vote for an atheist if one received their party's presidential nomination.

Since 52 is larger than 41 (last time I checked the calendar) it would seem to follow that a significant number of Americans - at least 11% and possibly significantly more (think about it) - believe they would not vote for an atheist and believe they would do so for no reason. So they are confessing to an unusually pure form of bigotry against a minority group - namely, bigotry that knows itself for what it is: groundless animus.

Not so long ago I had some fun kicking Daniel Dennett around. Looks like I owe him at least a partial apology. (But I'm still not going to use the term 'bright'.)

Risk

Did you ever play a game of Risk that just. wouldn't. end? I just did.

The Cat Returns

Just saw the new Studio Ghibli production, "The Cat Returns". For those not in the know, Ghibli is the base of operations of anime genius Hayao Murasaki - who brought us "Spirited Away", "Princess Mononoke", "Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind", "My Neighbor Totoro", "Kiki's Delivery Service" and some others I can't find links for. "The Cat Returns" is Hiroyuki Morita's, however. He's a lesser light in the Ghibli pantheon. So this movie is the worst-but-two Ghibli movie ever made, and better than all but six major Disney features. So it's very worth watching. There's a sort of 'what if Japan looked like Denmark?' aesthetic that is very much a Ghibli trademark (cf. "Kiki's Delivery Service".) It's all very clean and astringent, like if Ikea opened a sushi franchise. Little girl descends from the sky on a stairway of birds. Other nice images. But it doesn't have the beautiful, innocent gravitas and spiritual potency of Murasaki's own work, usually generated by compositionally deft juxtapositions of friendly but vaguely primordial beanbags and child-like entities with weirdly assymetrical features (the signature having been demonstrably forged since by such disparate productions as "Final Fantasy" and "Lilo and Stitch".) Everyone who knows animation knows all about this stuff already, but if you haven't checked out at least "Mononoke" and "Spirited Away" from your local video store - they are distributed now by Disney, I believe - you owe it to yourself. And no child should be deprived of "My Neighbor Totoro". That's practically the main reason I made a kid - so I could have someone not to deprive of it, in a couple years. Really, the meaning of life is watching "My Neighbor Totoro", then reading Tove Jannson's Moomintroll books; after that - there's sex, yes, but for the rest it's all just feeble attempts to recreate the simple beauty of early experiences.

Whither Aberystwyth?

Now that D-squared said something nice about me I can finally ask him something I've been wanting to for a while. I was afraid to e-mail him before. It's kind of like e-mailing Strong Bad; I was sure I'd spell Aberystwyth wrong or something and he'd mock me in front of his hundreds of readers.

There's been some discussion of his Welsh identity on his blog (in the comments to this post), but I can't be alone in wanting to know more [no, there's probably someone else. - ed.]. Like, in Scotland they apparently batter and deep-fry Mars bars in rancid fish-and-chip shop fat - are there any Welsh culinary delights like that? No, actually, I wanted to know if he listens to Gorky's Zygotic Mynci. They are the greatest Welsh band ever. They are amazing. (Super Furry Animals are pretty good, but they're no GZM.) The name is silly, granted. As they say, "If we'd known that we would do so well we'd have chosen a better name". But, honestly, when you go to a school called Ysgol Bro Myrddin, it's either that or start plotting to raise an orc army and lay waste to the lands of men.

If you like The Apples in Stereo, or Mojave 3, or The Doves, or maybe some alternate universe version of The Rasberries crossed with the Louvin Brothers, then you'll like GZM. Psychedelic, but not in a cheesy "paisley underground" way. Beautiful, folksy, unforgettable, make-you-tear-up songs. Some are in Welsh too, like Sbia Ar y Seren - what is that about?

If I lived in Wales I would go see them all the time. But maybe Daniel doesn't live in Wales anymore and he's some sort of expat in England? The whole country is only like 500 miles across; he could just drive back to Wales and see them anyway. They're playing on August 3rd at Cyfarthfa Castle.