more phish!
for last thursday's drive, i took a trip back to what's generally thought of as the phish golden age: 1994. this is the time when the band (at least in the popular view) had melded together their pre-1994 shredding skills with a new, occasionally more measured and experimental approach, and had, on top of that recently started road-testing a ton of songs that would eventually go on to become phish live staples. interestingly, this show turned out to be about as far from the quintessential '94 phish show as i could have gotten.
setlist here.
so, last time, if you'll recall, i unilaterally decided to declare that phish shows could be split up into two types. this show, out of sheer spite, i'm sure, decided to go dramatically against my proclamation. the setlist was varied, the performances were varied, and everything was, by and large, excellent...though by the end of the show the one significant thing missing was any sense of "flow" (to use an English 101 student term). if i had played this show and then had someone tell me it was actually a mixtape, i wouldn't have been surprised.
the show opened with "loving cup", which is odd in and of itself. "foam" is always a welcome sight, and this version ended too soon. easily one of the highlights of the first set. "divided sky" as the fourth song of the show just confused me. it felt really early to have to digest a 15-minute-plus monster, and the band sounded like they felt the same way. there were no mistakes, per se, but the jamming sort of circled itself over and over for about ten minutes and then we moved on to "mound". similarly to "simple", i pretty much ALWAYS love "mound", and this version was no exception. the "down with disease" > "if i could" run was the best part of the first set. i'm one of the few (apparently) who can't get enough of "if i could", and this particular jam carried that ethereal, almost-but-not-quite-cheesy punch better than most. the transition to "my sweet one" was pretty brilliant, but the rest of the first set itself was nothing to write home (or on your blog) about.
i'd like to reiterate the comments i made last time about "bowie". this version was no different for me: i love it, but i don't know why. "wolfman's" > "uncle pen" was the highlight of the second set for me. a long, drawn-out funky jam following "bowie" was a perfect juxtaposition, and then following that with the tight, composed bluegrass of "uncle pen" made a great one-two (-three?) punch. from there on out, though, the second set (and the encore) were a bit confusing. they were an eclectic mix of pre-1994 and "new" songs, and it really just sounded like the band wasn't really comfortable with getting those two sides of their sound to cohere yet. especially, the encore, which should have some aspect (i think, anyway) of a coda or reprise or just a straight-up balls-out facemelt to it, was pretty flat. "cracklin' rosie" is always fun to hear, but it's never going to make anyone pump their fist in the air. "hold your head up" was actually just page playing the organ riff through once, which lead directly into a pretty by-the-numbers version of "bold as love". and that was that.
overall, and interesting setlist and a few great moments, but there's not much to recommend this show over, say, the previous ones i've reviewed on here. definitely check out the "if i could", though. it's good stuff.
on a scale between a compsognathus and a tyrannosaurus, this one's definitely a styracosaurus.
2010-09-06
RIDESHARE - Wilco 11.02.02
finally, something that's not phish. i've been on a bit of a phish kick lately because that's just what happens to me during late summer for some weird, probably evolutionary reason. my phish hormones start raging and i want to eat bacteria cultures and use my own dreadlocks for clothes. but none of that happens in this universe, because this is the clean-person universe.
well, now that it's fall (at least i'm wearing a hoodie indoors and not sweating), wilco will likely take over. especially because i have to get my wilco fix vicariously this year thanks to the fact that they're not touring the US this fall, leaving with my no choice but to constantly play "the lonely 1" on loop every night while tearing my tweedy posters off the wall, throwing them across the room, and then falling asleep hours later cradling them to my tearstained face and mumbling apologies.
god, i've been reading cracked.com too much.
amidst the blathering, have thee a setlist!
i picked an '02 show to listen to on a cold, dark day because i figured it would be mellow and it seemed to suit the proceedings. little did i know that i'd chosen quite literally the show that plato saw the shadow of on the wall of the cave and he knew he was looking at "mellow".
wilco shows, as is to be expected, generally don't deviate as greatly from one another as phish shows tend to, simply because the songs are mostly pop-rock songs of under four minutes in length. as such, i probably won't talk much about specific tracks in wilco show reviews, but more just about the show in general.
this show started pretty interestingly, with "hesitating beauty" sort of lazily fading in from silence, followed by "one by one". things got about as rollicking as they would ever get with "sunken treasure", and then there was an early pre-ghost is born version of "less than you think", which was pretty much just who i presume to be jay bennett on the keys while tweedy sung over it. pretty great, and lacking the 15 minutes of distortion from the studio version of that track. another highlight was the "war on war"/"kamera" combination...these songs are both mid-tempo slow-rockers in general, and they sound almost indistinguishable if you just have them on in the background, but for some reason i love them both and love hearing them back-to-back even more.
the highlight of the show (maybe) for me was a brief and totally unexpected wilco jam which took place first at the beginning of "how to fight loneliness", then led out of it in the form of a segue into "not for the season", which itself concluded with an epic, multi-minute kotche drum shower.
"poor places" and "reservations" made a good pair of closing songs for the main set, as the static from one led appropriately into the naked-sounding piano chords of the second. after a closing bit of noise-jamming, the encore started with "misunderstood" and continued to be a pretty normal wilco encore, aside from the general mellowness. it's funny how the one thing that always stays the same about wilco is their encore(s). you know you're going to get tons of loud being there songs. it was nice to hear "red-eyed and blue" and "far, far away".
overall this show was very slow and "chill" (as the kids say), and also the soundboard feed is mixed in such a way that often all you can hear is the cymbals, keys, and tweedy's voice, so a lot of times even when the band is clearly playing like they're rocking an arena, it sounds like you're listening to them play on only a piano to a small crowd in a small barn. not bad, but potentially disappointing, depending on what you expect.
this was a show that absolutely epitomizes that just-post-YHF era brooding wilco sound for me. subtract a few style points for all of jay bennett's "i'm soloing even though it's the verse because i don't respect the fact that a song has to have some level of inherent structure because i'm so different", and you have an otherwise great winter '02 show. on a rating scale based on the first five numbers of the fibonacci sequence, this show is a 2.
well, now that it's fall (at least i'm wearing a hoodie indoors and not sweating), wilco will likely take over. especially because i have to get my wilco fix vicariously this year thanks to the fact that they're not touring the US this fall, leaving with my no choice but to constantly play "the lonely 1" on loop every night while tearing my tweedy posters off the wall, throwing them across the room, and then falling asleep hours later cradling them to my tearstained face and mumbling apologies.
god, i've been reading cracked.com too much.
amidst the blathering, have thee a setlist!
i picked an '02 show to listen to on a cold, dark day because i figured it would be mellow and it seemed to suit the proceedings. little did i know that i'd chosen quite literally the show that plato saw the shadow of on the wall of the cave and he knew he was looking at "mellow".
wilco shows, as is to be expected, generally don't deviate as greatly from one another as phish shows tend to, simply because the songs are mostly pop-rock songs of under four minutes in length. as such, i probably won't talk much about specific tracks in wilco show reviews, but more just about the show in general.
this show started pretty interestingly, with "hesitating beauty" sort of lazily fading in from silence, followed by "one by one". things got about as rollicking as they would ever get with "sunken treasure", and then there was an early pre-ghost is born version of "less than you think", which was pretty much just who i presume to be jay bennett on the keys while tweedy sung over it. pretty great, and lacking the 15 minutes of distortion from the studio version of that track. another highlight was the "war on war"/"kamera" combination...these songs are both mid-tempo slow-rockers in general, and they sound almost indistinguishable if you just have them on in the background, but for some reason i love them both and love hearing them back-to-back even more.
the highlight of the show (maybe) for me was a brief and totally unexpected wilco jam which took place first at the beginning of "how to fight loneliness", then led out of it in the form of a segue into "not for the season", which itself concluded with an epic, multi-minute kotche drum shower.
"poor places" and "reservations" made a good pair of closing songs for the main set, as the static from one led appropriately into the naked-sounding piano chords of the second. after a closing bit of noise-jamming, the encore started with "misunderstood" and continued to be a pretty normal wilco encore, aside from the general mellowness. it's funny how the one thing that always stays the same about wilco is their encore(s). you know you're going to get tons of loud being there songs. it was nice to hear "red-eyed and blue" and "far, far away".
overall this show was very slow and "chill" (as the kids say), and also the soundboard feed is mixed in such a way that often all you can hear is the cymbals, keys, and tweedy's voice, so a lot of times even when the band is clearly playing like they're rocking an arena, it sounds like you're listening to them play on only a piano to a small crowd in a small barn. not bad, but potentially disappointing, depending on what you expect.
this was a show that absolutely epitomizes that just-post-YHF era brooding wilco sound for me. subtract a few style points for all of jay bennett's "i'm soloing even though it's the verse because i don't respect the fact that a song has to have some level of inherent structure because i'm so different", and you have an otherwise great winter '02 show. on a rating scale based on the first five numbers of the fibonacci sequence, this show is a 2.
2010-09-03
RIDESHARE - Phish 07.26.98
RIDESHARE: Phish 07.26.98
i spun this one on tuesday, so i need to do it quick, lest i forget.
i've really been feeling the 97-98 phish lately; something about the wide open spaces of a drive through the southeastern washington desert lends itself to spacey, 30-minute
versions of “also sprach zarathustra”. or the other way around. or something.
anyway, setlist here.
on a five-star scale where zero is a pepperoni pizza and five is a five-cheese pizza, this show would be a three-and-a-half cheese pizza.
the highs were high and the lows weren't low...let's just say there were a few times throughout the show where i caught myself realizing that i hadn't been listening for twenty minutes because i was subconsciously finding the scrub brush more engaging than the music.
"birds of a feather" is a great song and a great opener, and this version was no different...though maybe it was a sign of the show's overall "too little of a good thing" feel in that this "birds" clocked in at about six minutes, about ten minutes shorter than usual. then comes "better believe it baby", which i've heard a number of times already in various TAB shows and, no matter who plays it, i never like it. same thing here. rarely will i just not like a phish song (rather than just a particular night's interpretation of it), but that's the case with this clunker. and it came on while i was puttering through colfax, no less.
there's something that draws me to "bowie". i love the speed and precision of the intro section, especially in earlier years' shows, but then everything always just goes to shit for me in the middle. i don't know why. compared to other phish jams, i always find "bowie" jams to be loud, screechy, hard to follow and generally unpleasant...but the wait up to that last second pay-off somehow always makes me forget the middle section and want to bounce out of my seat (or car) at the end. this one was no different. the "frankie" > "reba" mashup is nicely mellow and hypnotic, while i was a bit let down by the first set closer of "funky bitch" (another one of those few phish songs i just don't like) and "good times bad times", which followed the zeppelin version a little too closely to be interesting.
the second set was marked by some pretty incredibly covers. it opens with "la grange", which i didn't even know that phish ever played, and their version was wonderfully faithful to the zz top original, albeit with a hectic blues-rock jam in the middle. this version of "you enjoy myself" takes a few extra minutes to get started, which i actually really liked...it was interesting to hear them jam out the beginning of the song a bit longer. "albuquerque" was another song that i didn't know phish had ever covered, and as the song started i immediately thought to myself "hmm, this sounds like a neil young song". and then it was and i was all "yeah!" and the guitar was all "skeedly deedly deedly!" and my car was all "vrooooom!"
so there's that.
I LOVE "SIMPLE". that's probably pretty clear by now.
after "simple" was a great version of hendrix's "bold as love" and the show closes with four solid (there's that word again) but not really outstanding songs.
i'm going to go out on a limb and say that most phish shows i listen to or attend fall into one of two categories:
1) band starts out strong, falters near the end of the first set, tries too hard at the beginning of the second set, ends on a great note after recovering
2) band starts slow, slaughters everything for the end of the first set and the beginning of the second, and then ends the show on a decent, but not impressive note.
the first gorge show from last year was definitely a Type 1 show for me, while the second gorge show and this year's blossom show were both Type 2. this tape definitely epitomizes the Type 2.
i spun this one on tuesday, so i need to do it quick, lest i forget.
i've really been feeling the 97-98 phish lately; something about the wide open spaces of a drive through the southeastern washington desert lends itself to spacey, 30-minute
versions of “also sprach zarathustra”. or the other way around. or something.
anyway, setlist here.
on a five-star scale where zero is a pepperoni pizza and five is a five-cheese pizza, this show would be a three-and-a-half cheese pizza.
the highs were high and the lows weren't low...let's just say there were a few times throughout the show where i caught myself realizing that i hadn't been listening for twenty minutes because i was subconsciously finding the scrub brush more engaging than the music.
"birds of a feather" is a great song and a great opener, and this version was no different...though maybe it was a sign of the show's overall "too little of a good thing" feel in that this "birds" clocked in at about six minutes, about ten minutes shorter than usual. then comes "better believe it baby", which i've heard a number of times already in various TAB shows and, no matter who plays it, i never like it. same thing here. rarely will i just not like a phish song (rather than just a particular night's interpretation of it), but that's the case with this clunker. and it came on while i was puttering through colfax, no less.
there's something that draws me to "bowie". i love the speed and precision of the intro section, especially in earlier years' shows, but then everything always just goes to shit for me in the middle. i don't know why. compared to other phish jams, i always find "bowie" jams to be loud, screechy, hard to follow and generally unpleasant...but the wait up to that last second pay-off somehow always makes me forget the middle section and want to bounce out of my seat (or car) at the end. this one was no different. the "frankie" > "reba" mashup is nicely mellow and hypnotic, while i was a bit let down by the first set closer of "funky bitch" (another one of those few phish songs i just don't like) and "good times bad times", which followed the zeppelin version a little too closely to be interesting.
the second set was marked by some pretty incredibly covers. it opens with "la grange", which i didn't even know that phish ever played, and their version was wonderfully faithful to the zz top original, albeit with a hectic blues-rock jam in the middle. this version of "you enjoy myself" takes a few extra minutes to get started, which i actually really liked...it was interesting to hear them jam out the beginning of the song a bit longer. "albuquerque" was another song that i didn't know phish had ever covered, and as the song started i immediately thought to myself "hmm, this sounds like a neil young song". and then it was and i was all "yeah!" and the guitar was all "skeedly deedly deedly!" and my car was all "vrooooom!"
so there's that.
I LOVE "SIMPLE". that's probably pretty clear by now.
after "simple" was a great version of hendrix's "bold as love" and the show closes with four solid (there's that word again) but not really outstanding songs.
i'm going to go out on a limb and say that most phish shows i listen to or attend fall into one of two categories:
1) band starts out strong, falters near the end of the first set, tries too hard at the beginning of the second set, ends on a great note after recovering
2) band starts slow, slaughters everything for the end of the first set and the beginning of the second, and then ends the show on a decent, but not impressive note.
the first gorge show from last year was definitely a Type 1 show for me, while the second gorge show and this year's blossom show were both Type 2. this tape definitely epitomizes the Type 2.
The Best Road Trip Slideshow Ever
so i just set up this cool new facebook/twitter/blog linky-thing, and it seems to be working. on the off chance that it actually is, and to indirectly celebrate my 1200th post and 140,000 miles on my car, i thought i would post The Best Road Trip Slideshow Ever.
test post!
pretend i'm saying something interesting!
or, just check out this photograph of a monkey playing football:
or, just check out this photograph of a monkey playing football:
divided christmas sky traveler
i was just remembering the other afternoon how freaking blown away i was when i first started listening to phish and was SURE i'd heard the middle part of "divided sky" before. eventually i figured out that john popper used phish's melody for his "christmas song", which has listened to every christmas obsessively for almost a decade prior. incidentally, it's the best christmas song ever, pretty much. evidence of awesomeness and synchronicity below.
full blues traveler song:
the relevant part of "divided sky" starts around 4:15:
full blues traveler song:
the relevant part of "divided sky" starts around 4:15:
2010-08-29
RIDESHARE: Phish - 12.29.98
awesome new feature!
to "celebrate" my new job/teaching gig in richland (i refuse to call it tri-cities because you can't be in three places at once), i've decided to institute a new feature on the blog. all summer, i've been carrying out the slow, agonizing, but largely work-un-intensive task of converting all my CDs to digital files, for easier sorting, storing, and backup. just to give you an idea of the enormity of this task: so far i've ripped over 18,000 tracks, and i'm not even close to 1/3rd of the way through all the CDs. it's insane. part of the insanity is my realizing that i have at least 100 live shows on CD that i've never listened to before. this dovetails nicely with the fact that i'm now spending about 10 hours a week in a car by myself.
so...i'll be listening to tons of phish, wilco, and RA shows (big surprise!) over the next few months and i figured i'd do short write-ups on each show as i listen, so that later when i have everything stored digitally, i can remind myself what's worth listening to again and what's not.
let's start with the only full show i got through last thursday: part of Phish's '98 NYE run, a soundboard tape from 12/29.
here's the setlist and link from etree:
Set I
Rock and Roll, Funky Bitch, Punch You In the Eye, Horn, Ginseng Sullivan, Split Open and Melt, Brian & Robert, Guyute, My Soul, Freebird*
Set II
Free, Limb by Limb, Also Sprach Zarathustra**, Boogie on Reggae Woman, You Enjoy Myself E: The Divided Sky
full show rating: ****
***** - that puddle looks a lot like my face...
**** - i'd rather listen to this than do most things.
*** - good.
** - most shows are better, but there are probably some high points.
* - i'm now actually dead from having killed myself from having listened to this.
the show starts with "rock and roll", which i have to admit that i'm partial to lately because it's a song that's been rocked out to the extreme at 2 of the 3 phish shows i've been to. plus, it's just a great opener. this version starts by following the original song quite closely for the first few minutes, and then explodes into a lot of blistering soloing...it's a lot shorter and less exploratory than the versions of the song phish has been playing lately, but it's a great start. it segues into a solid "funky bitch" and then "punch you in the eye", and doesn't really let up until "horn", which is a great song, but hey, it's still "horn" and there's nothing new here. i don't normally like "ginseng sullivan" that much, but maybe it was the driving-through-farmlands i was doing and maybe not...this particular version is really jumpy and yet the playing is really clean, and it's just a damn fun tune at this point in the set. the middle part of the first set is also all solid, but just solid. the set closes with a stellar "my soul" and the always-hilarious a capella version of "freebird" there's not much in this set beyond the first three songs in this set that jumps out, but i really really liked the whole thing...i think part of the greatness comes from the entirely wacky selection of songs, and part comes from the fact that though this show comes from the funk "era" of phish, it's packed with a lot of great blues and rock jams in the first set. it's a truly unique sounding show if you put the tape on expecting it to be a typical '97-'98 show.
the main draw (for most) of the second set will be the YEM set-closer and the following "divided sky" encore, comprising about 45 minutes of music between the two of them. each is (again) a solid version of the song, and i remember how at one point in my phish fandom the idea of these two songs back-to-back would have, by itself, made this show a must-download. however, the real draw for me here was the "also sprach zarathustra", which is the only real moment of space-funk in the entire show, but it's a doozy. things start off very atmospheric and out-there and only get...umm...spacier as time goes on. this performance, combined with the straight-out rock of "free", which is a song that rarely gets jammed out like it does here, makes this second set worth listening to.
all in all, this is a great show for the variety in the setlist, the fact that there aren't any real duds at any point (though i don't like "boogie on reggae woman" myself, the song is performed well here), and for a few very high points. if you're looking for a truly transcendent show, keep looking, but you could do much worse than this one.
to "celebrate" my new job/teaching gig in richland (i refuse to call it tri-cities because you can't be in three places at once), i've decided to institute a new feature on the blog. all summer, i've been carrying out the slow, agonizing, but largely work-un-intensive task of converting all my CDs to digital files, for easier sorting, storing, and backup. just to give you an idea of the enormity of this task: so far i've ripped over 18,000 tracks, and i'm not even close to 1/3rd of the way through all the CDs. it's insane. part of the insanity is my realizing that i have at least 100 live shows on CD that i've never listened to before. this dovetails nicely with the fact that i'm now spending about 10 hours a week in a car by myself.
so...i'll be listening to tons of phish, wilco, and RA shows (big surprise!) over the next few months and i figured i'd do short write-ups on each show as i listen, so that later when i have everything stored digitally, i can remind myself what's worth listening to again and what's not.
let's start with the only full show i got through last thursday: part of Phish's '98 NYE run, a soundboard tape from 12/29.
here's the setlist and link from etree:
Set I
Rock and Roll, Funky Bitch, Punch You In the Eye, Horn, Ginseng Sullivan, Split Open and Melt, Brian & Robert, Guyute, My Soul, Freebird*
Set II
Free, Limb by Limb, Also Sprach Zarathustra**, Boogie on Reggae Woman, You Enjoy Myself E: The Divided Sky
full show rating: ****
***** - that puddle looks a lot like my face...
**** - i'd rather listen to this than do most things.
*** - good.
** - most shows are better, but there are probably some high points.
* - i'm now actually dead from having killed myself from having listened to this.
the show starts with "rock and roll", which i have to admit that i'm partial to lately because it's a song that's been rocked out to the extreme at 2 of the 3 phish shows i've been to. plus, it's just a great opener. this version starts by following the original song quite closely for the first few minutes, and then explodes into a lot of blistering soloing...it's a lot shorter and less exploratory than the versions of the song phish has been playing lately, but it's a great start. it segues into a solid "funky bitch" and then "punch you in the eye", and doesn't really let up until "horn", which is a great song, but hey, it's still "horn" and there's nothing new here. i don't normally like "ginseng sullivan" that much, but maybe it was the driving-through-farmlands i was doing and maybe not...this particular version is really jumpy and yet the playing is really clean, and it's just a damn fun tune at this point in the set. the middle part of the first set is also all solid, but just solid. the set closes with a stellar "my soul" and the always-hilarious a capella version of "freebird" there's not much in this set beyond the first three songs in this set that jumps out, but i really really liked the whole thing...i think part of the greatness comes from the entirely wacky selection of songs, and part comes from the fact that though this show comes from the funk "era" of phish, it's packed with a lot of great blues and rock jams in the first set. it's a truly unique sounding show if you put the tape on expecting it to be a typical '97-'98 show.
the main draw (for most) of the second set will be the YEM set-closer and the following "divided sky" encore, comprising about 45 minutes of music between the two of them. each is (again) a solid version of the song, and i remember how at one point in my phish fandom the idea of these two songs back-to-back would have, by itself, made this show a must-download. however, the real draw for me here was the "also sprach zarathustra", which is the only real moment of space-funk in the entire show, but it's a doozy. things start off very atmospheric and out-there and only get...umm...spacier as time goes on. this performance, combined with the straight-out rock of "free", which is a song that rarely gets jammed out like it does here, makes this second set worth listening to.
all in all, this is a great show for the variety in the setlist, the fact that there aren't any real duds at any point (though i don't like "boogie on reggae woman" myself, the song is performed well here), and for a few very high points. if you're looking for a truly transcendent show, keep looking, but you could do much worse than this one.
summer of the memes
so i had to explain the "double rainbow song" to a (disgustingly uncultured) friend of mine today, and it reminded me that i'd wanted to write this entry awhile back and then it slipped my mind when i got caught up in fistfighting bears and writing poetry.
this summer was memorable for a lot of reasons (many of which i will someday hopefully get around to writing about before i totally forget about any of them), and somehow the soundtrack to much of the adventure and action was (for some reason) based on three ridiculously addictive/bizarre internet memes.
1) the '60s-era IHOP theme song
this one was introduced on, i think, the first day that john was in pullman. he innocently mentioned that there was some batshit insane video on youtube of an old IHOP commercial, and so, being the connoisseur of batshit insanity that i am, i had to check it out. this is what i saw:
WHAT. IS. HAPPENING.
why the voice? i mean, i understand that going to IHOP is an excuse for dressing up in your sunday best and fucking skipping across a field with a huge cloud of balloons clutched in your trembling fist because IHOP is awesome and if you are NOT caught up in a paroxysm of joy at the prospect of panqueques, there's something wrong with you.
however. this is horrifying. the singing seems to be slightly off-rhythm from the music, and both are insane. also, nobody in this commercial GETS PANCAKES. two people get vaguely italian dishes, one person gets a salad, and the fourth person gets what is obviously a now-extinct giant mollusk pulled from the depths of the sea off the shore of whatever dark, lovecraftian hamlet this IHOP is located in. thanks, IHOP. i not only never want to go to IHOP again now, i never want to go ANYWHERE again.
2) nanerpuss
this was introduced to me by lindsey, on the same day as the above commercial. here's the original:
now that's crazy, but it also has this bizarre, catchy quality to it. the kind of quality that makes you wake up in the middle of the night sweating, screaming that you are the nanerpuss, and - guess what?! - you like pancakes. it gets worse:
are you dead yet? here's my favorite:
this is the one that cracked my world in half. for weeks afterwards i would literally halt in the middle of a busy word day, and unaware if what i myself was doing would shout "I'M WHAT'S KNOWN AS THE NANERPUSS! I AM A BANANANANANANA!!!!" for serious. it was bad.
3) the double rainbow song
i'm not going to explain this one to you if you don't already know it. the first video is the necessary context. the second video is the song. this song was my ringtone all summer because it is awesome, and surprisingly catchy and song-like and good and i like it. you should listen.
this summer was memorable for a lot of reasons (many of which i will someday hopefully get around to writing about before i totally forget about any of them), and somehow the soundtrack to much of the adventure and action was (for some reason) based on three ridiculously addictive/bizarre internet memes.
1) the '60s-era IHOP theme song
this one was introduced on, i think, the first day that john was in pullman. he innocently mentioned that there was some batshit insane video on youtube of an old IHOP commercial, and so, being the connoisseur of batshit insanity that i am, i had to check it out. this is what i saw:
WHAT. IS. HAPPENING.
why the voice? i mean, i understand that going to IHOP is an excuse for dressing up in your sunday best and fucking skipping across a field with a huge cloud of balloons clutched in your trembling fist because IHOP is awesome and if you are NOT caught up in a paroxysm of joy at the prospect of panqueques, there's something wrong with you.
however. this is horrifying. the singing seems to be slightly off-rhythm from the music, and both are insane. also, nobody in this commercial GETS PANCAKES. two people get vaguely italian dishes, one person gets a salad, and the fourth person gets what is obviously a now-extinct giant mollusk pulled from the depths of the sea off the shore of whatever dark, lovecraftian hamlet this IHOP is located in. thanks, IHOP. i not only never want to go to IHOP again now, i never want to go ANYWHERE again.
2) nanerpuss
this was introduced to me by lindsey, on the same day as the above commercial. here's the original:
now that's crazy, but it also has this bizarre, catchy quality to it. the kind of quality that makes you wake up in the middle of the night sweating, screaming that you are the nanerpuss, and - guess what?! - you like pancakes. it gets worse:
are you dead yet? here's my favorite:
this is the one that cracked my world in half. for weeks afterwards i would literally halt in the middle of a busy word day, and unaware if what i myself was doing would shout "I'M WHAT'S KNOWN AS THE NANERPUSS! I AM A BANANANANANANA!!!!" for serious. it was bad.
3) the double rainbow song
i'm not going to explain this one to you if you don't already know it. the first video is the necessary context. the second video is the song. this song was my ringtone all summer because it is awesome, and surprisingly catchy and song-like and good and i like it. you should listen.
foo, you just got nailed!
last night, i heroically dealt with squads of armacham soldiers the only way i know how...with a nailgun.
i'm looking at you, valhalla
if you're in a "dance club" and you ask the DJ to play some new order and they say "who?", it's not actually a dance club.
2010-08-20
when it rains, it pours lemonade (that you made from the lemons life gave you)
so, in my 10619 days of life on earth, i've now locked my keys in my car twice. that means, on any given day, i'm .0188% likely to lock my keys in the car (and 99.98% likely to not). those are pretty good odds. unless, of course, you consider the fact that the last time i locked my keys in the car was almost a year ago today. that means that within the last year, i've actually been .55% likely to lock my keys in the car, up drastically from 0% in the previous 28 years. at the rate i'm currently going, assuming i live to be 70 years old, i will lock my keys in the car 82 more times before my death (the movement of technology away from metal keys towards biometrics notwithstanding).
all this math shit leads to a more important question: is grad school making me lose my mind?
i'm almost certain that i'm stupider than i was five years ago, though i'm not sure exactly if grad school is to blame. all the hookers and blow might have something to do with it, i suppose.
all this math shit leads to a more important question: is grad school making me lose my mind?
i'm almost certain that i'm stupider than i was five years ago, though i'm not sure exactly if grad school is to blame. all the hookers and blow might have something to do with it, i suppose.
2010-08-15
ode to bryan tower (today at 5pm you played "somewhere over the rainbow")
o great cyclopean eye
you shiver the hot night air with your
burning red glare that throws
rust-colored shadows across the edges of my books like
spilled paint
even on kamiak butte you arrest my slumber
as your unblinking gaze penetrates dreams free of
literary aspirations
now that you are fixed, i once again have will
now that you are fixed, i once again have purpose
now that you are fixed, i once again seek to kindle the fire
of mordor in the hearts of my orc army
the world of men shall fall
OHCRAPITHINKITSTIMETOEATDINNER
you shiver the hot night air with your
burning red glare that throws
rust-colored shadows across the edges of my books like
spilled paint
even on kamiak butte you arrest my slumber
as your unblinking gaze penetrates dreams free of
literary aspirations
now that you are fixed, i once again have will
now that you are fixed, i once again have purpose
now that you are fixed, i once again seek to kindle the fire
of mordor in the hearts of my orc army
the world of men shall fall
OHCRAPITHINKITSTIMETOEATDINNER
why do i even have a twitter account anymore?!
i used to think twitter was stupid, then i thought it was totally awesome, and now i think it's stupid again. does this mean that i'll eventually again think of it as the proverbial bee's knees (or as today's english students would say, the B's knee's)? or is it dumb and stupid like a broken toy when you're two years old? i haven't checked my twitter feed for eleven days and my life hasn't come to an end. i find i learn a hell of a lot more reading actual articles read through my RSS feed, and if i want to talk to people, i just talk to them in real life.
am i getting old?
why is everything suddenly in sepia tones?
why am i an envelope?!
am i getting old?
why is everything suddenly in sepia tones?
why am i an envelope?!
i'm like your mom's doorbell, everyone gets a turn
something went horribly wrong in that post title.
anyway, as a way to keep a tenuous hold on the sanity i described so incoherently in the previous post, i'm going to try to force myself to write at least one blog a day from now on. sometimes they might be about things that happened during that specific day, but i'm hoping to actually write some Writey McWriterson things as well. we'll see. if i can set aside an hour every two days to exercise my body, i should be able to set aside the same amount of time to exercise my brains (and my fingers, and my brain's fingers), right?
WRONG.
oh god, my toaster's on fire quick someone throw water on it
crash
anyway, as a way to keep a tenuous hold on the sanity i described so incoherently in the previous post, i'm going to try to force myself to write at least one blog a day from now on. sometimes they might be about things that happened during that specific day, but i'm hoping to actually write some Writey McWriterson things as well. we'll see. if i can set aside an hour every two days to exercise my body, i should be able to set aside the same amount of time to exercise my brains (and my fingers, and my brain's fingers), right?
WRONG.
oh god, my toaster's on fire quick someone throw water on it
crash
there will be a time when time won't come fast enough...
...but until then, i wouldn't mind it if things slowed down a bit. life is crash-bang-booming through the end of summer and into the beginning of fall, and in pullman that means: 1) 95-degree temperatures every day for the next month and 2) yearly existential dilemma over whether the payoff of my job is really worth the completely insane hours and less-than-minimal pay.
fortunately, #1 is easily mitigated by a few strategically placed $10 box fans.
#2 CAN be easily mitigated by a few strategically placed bottles of wine, but history has shown that that solution is impermanent at best.
author's note: i put slices of kiwi in this giant salad i made a few nights ago and then they rotted the next day, so now i'm eating huge, tasty piles of hearty salad that is really great except the one out of every ten bites that has a brown, rotting chunk of kiwi in it.
every fall, especially now with the advent of facebook, i see a tidal wave of comments, blog posts, and status messages bemoaning the end of summer, discussing one last weekend trip or party before "work" starts, or complaining about how everyone is already "stressing out". i empathize in a sense. i had (as you'll find out in forthcoming posts) pretty much the most fun, adventurous, exciting (and, conveniently, healthiest and cheapest) summer of my life this summer. it was a relief knowing that i can still enjoy life in a really fundamental, kid-with-a-cardboard-box sort of way even though i'm almost 30, and it was also just fun to have so much...fun. god, i always sound so profound when i talk about good things.
so in a sense, i'm sad to see summer go. i'm sad to ramp back up to 14-hour workdays, setting my alarm, and not just being able to say "the hell with it all" every few weeks and disappear into the hills with my tent. there's so much i have left over that i wanted to do this summer that i literally have a Google Doc listing all the places i want to hike to and camp at and climb mountains around next summer. it's a bummer to realize suddenly how enthusiastic you really are about something (traveling, hiking, playing music, you name it) just when you have to chuck it all and get your nose back to (on? in?) the grindstone.
but stress? fear? this terrifying amount of angst that so many of my fellow teachers seem to have? i don't get it. i don't feel stressed at all. either i'll succeed or i won't. i'll work to the utmost of my ability at all of the things i have in front of me before december, and if my bosses don't think i did a good enough job...what else could i have done?
i guess i've kind of always thought that way, at least since i started teaching in 2005. maybe it has something to do with my past working all kinds of crappy jobs while needing to constantly suck up to authority figures in order to keep said crappy jobs. maybe it's the fact that even though it's been five years now, i'm still really grateful to have the job i have, and while there are days that i'd rather sleep in than teach class or write a seminar paper, i've never once woken up with that horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach like i used to on a monday morning before heading off to chipotle or the gas station. and that's why i don't get the stressing out. why would you go through the incredibly rigorous process of getting a ph.d if you didn't want to? i mean, sure it's not the most pleasant process in the world, but it's not like things are going to become suddenly simpler when you finish the degree...more than likely you're going to end up doing the same thing you're doing now, somewhere else, with even more pressure on you and maybe a little more money in your pockets. and that's the GOOD option.
i'm not picking on anyone in particular here, and honestly i'm not trying to "pick on" anyone at all. i guess i'm just trying to understand...nobody just stumbles into a job teaching college the way you might stumble into selling cars or managing a chipotle. there's a long, deliberate process involved in people like myself getting ourselves to the stage that we're at. if that process is really destroying your life, do something else instead. challenge is important, but so is being happy.
i'm sad because i'm going to miss all the opportunities i briefly had during the first half of this summer to indulge in some things i don't normally have the luxury of indulging in when working 80 hours a week, but the only thing i'm going to be stressed out about is whether or not my car's going to survive the drive to tri-cities on thursday. and, hell, i'm not even that good of a teacher or student. if anybody SHOULD be worried, it should be me...
fortunately, #1 is easily mitigated by a few strategically placed $10 box fans.
#2 CAN be easily mitigated by a few strategically placed bottles of wine, but history has shown that that solution is impermanent at best.
author's note: i put slices of kiwi in this giant salad i made a few nights ago and then they rotted the next day, so now i'm eating huge, tasty piles of hearty salad that is really great except the one out of every ten bites that has a brown, rotting chunk of kiwi in it.
every fall, especially now with the advent of facebook, i see a tidal wave of comments, blog posts, and status messages bemoaning the end of summer, discussing one last weekend trip or party before "work" starts, or complaining about how everyone is already "stressing out". i empathize in a sense. i had (as you'll find out in forthcoming posts) pretty much the most fun, adventurous, exciting (and, conveniently, healthiest and cheapest) summer of my life this summer. it was a relief knowing that i can still enjoy life in a really fundamental, kid-with-a-cardboard-box sort of way even though i'm almost 30, and it was also just fun to have so much...fun. god, i always sound so profound when i talk about good things.
so in a sense, i'm sad to see summer go. i'm sad to ramp back up to 14-hour workdays, setting my alarm, and not just being able to say "the hell with it all" every few weeks and disappear into the hills with my tent. there's so much i have left over that i wanted to do this summer that i literally have a Google Doc listing all the places i want to hike to and camp at and climb mountains around next summer. it's a bummer to realize suddenly how enthusiastic you really are about something (traveling, hiking, playing music, you name it) just when you have to chuck it all and get your nose back to (on? in?) the grindstone.
but stress? fear? this terrifying amount of angst that so many of my fellow teachers seem to have? i don't get it. i don't feel stressed at all. either i'll succeed or i won't. i'll work to the utmost of my ability at all of the things i have in front of me before december, and if my bosses don't think i did a good enough job...what else could i have done?
i guess i've kind of always thought that way, at least since i started teaching in 2005. maybe it has something to do with my past working all kinds of crappy jobs while needing to constantly suck up to authority figures in order to keep said crappy jobs. maybe it's the fact that even though it's been five years now, i'm still really grateful to have the job i have, and while there are days that i'd rather sleep in than teach class or write a seminar paper, i've never once woken up with that horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach like i used to on a monday morning before heading off to chipotle or the gas station. and that's why i don't get the stressing out. why would you go through the incredibly rigorous process of getting a ph.d if you didn't want to? i mean, sure it's not the most pleasant process in the world, but it's not like things are going to become suddenly simpler when you finish the degree...more than likely you're going to end up doing the same thing you're doing now, somewhere else, with even more pressure on you and maybe a little more money in your pockets. and that's the GOOD option.
i'm not picking on anyone in particular here, and honestly i'm not trying to "pick on" anyone at all. i guess i'm just trying to understand...nobody just stumbles into a job teaching college the way you might stumble into selling cars or managing a chipotle. there's a long, deliberate process involved in people like myself getting ourselves to the stage that we're at. if that process is really destroying your life, do something else instead. challenge is important, but so is being happy.
i'm sad because i'm going to miss all the opportunities i briefly had during the first half of this summer to indulge in some things i don't normally have the luxury of indulging in when working 80 hours a week, but the only thing i'm going to be stressed out about is whether or not my car's going to survive the drive to tri-cities on thursday. and, hell, i'm not even that good of a teacher or student. if anybody SHOULD be worried, it should be me...
dim lights keep the hulk at bay
it's true. i was reading a study the other day (which i can't link because i forgot to bookmark it and now i can't refind it) that basically showed how any light level that's actually brighter than sunlight (i.e. the interior lighting of pretty much any building in the United States at any given time) is so confusing for the brain that that light level is interpreted similarly to how our brains interpret night-light. the shorter and less shittily-phrased version of that sentence is this: when it's really bright inside, humans' brains think that it's nighttime. this explains a lot about the last 29 years of my life. it also explains why i always fall asleep after turning the lights up real high to keep myself from falling asleep. it ALSO explains why this is my favorite sight to come home to after a long day of work:
i've always liked keeping the lights down rather low, to the point that certain others tend to become exasperated upon entering my office to find that, for the tenth time in a row, it's too dark for them to navigate from one end of the room to the other. in the middle of the afternoon.
of course maybe i'm just a vampire. but not one of the sparkly, effeminate, super-hunky ones. just one of the pale, effeminate, hilariously romantically inept ones.
of course maybe i'm just a vampire. but not one of the sparkly, effeminate, super-hunky ones. just one of the pale, effeminate, hilariously romantically inept ones.
2010-07-16
fifa 10 sucks.
that's pretty much it.
in the wake of the world cup coming to a totally metal, crane-kick-to-the-heart-style end, i was left missing my quadannual injection of football action, and decided that my best recourse (other than watching tons of euro league action on espn3.com in august) would be to get a soccer pc game. it's just efficient, combining hobbies this way.
anyway, i tried the demos for both Pro Evolution Soccer 2010 and EA Sports' FIFA 10. and they both suck. a lot. for years, this absurd argument over whether PES or FIFA is the more "realistic" soccer game has raged among fans of both series and i have to say after spending a few evenings tinkering with various installments in each series post-2005, that most realistic video game soccer can still be found in the FIFA incarnations of 2002-2003.
sure, the control schemes for each of the games nowadays is way more in-depth, and the ball has its own physics system, and as a result, much of what happens on the field looks more like real soccer. but it certainly doesn't play like it. why not? because for some reason even the international versions of each game bow to the hit-hard-hit-fast aesthetics that characterize american sports (and american video games).
first of all, the most glaring, and telling, issue: in neither game can you set the half length to FIFA-standard 45 minutes. the most minutes you can play per half? 10. that's it. and once you start playing the game you'll see why. all the players sprint, all the time. the CPU defense plays in a constant press, to the point that when i clear an attempt on my own goal, every time the only player on the half of the field on which the ball lands is my own goalie. every single possession is a fast-break attempt for a goal. there is no time to set up a real, complicated attack, and no need. the defense plays the midfield not at all, so there's no concern over being challenged until you get almost to the goalie box. your CPU-controlled offensive players all take off downfield as soon as you take possession, as well, so even if you try to force the issue by holding the ball at midfield, pretty much the only options you'll have are tricky through balls above and below the goalie box. the result of this is that the entire game is a trading of dramatic shots on goal and desperate sprints downfield, and more often than not, when goals are scored it's simply because the defense-cum-offense recovered from a change in possession faster than the offense-cum-defense did. it's not unusual, even against a skilled CPU opponent, to have a 10 minute half end with a score like 4-4 or 5-5. once, i altered the game's .ini file in order to force the game to last 45 minutes per half; i shouldn't have bothered. this didn't change the CPU's approach at all. by halftime, my entire team was literally completely exhausted, but that didn't stop the final score from being in the 50s.
this is ridiculous, and what's worse: the purportedly "more realistic" PES suffers from many of the same issues. if you don't believe me, check out this youtube video and see if you could have told the difference between the two games had you not been told which was which:
sure, both teams have awesome graphics, 5 million different teams with real players, and all that jazz...but neither game feels like real football. at all. sure, it feels really cool when you're given exacting control over each shot, pass, through ball, header, corner kick, penalty kick, etc...the controls are incredible, and the ball physics sure beat the hell out of the ol' 2003-era "the ball's magically stuck to your foot!" system. but when you get 25 corner kicks in a half and can cross the entire field in four seconds at a sprint over and over again, and your team expects you to do this as your default play, something's screwy. when you get 50 shots on goal and 25 goals in a half of soccer, something's screwy. and you can't even slow the game down if you want to.
i remember playing FIFA 2003 obsessively after the 2002 world cup. it was when i was first enchanted by soccer, by the rhythm of it, by the fact that it was an interesting alternative to the sports i was used to. it had the speed of basketball, but without the often-boring first 3/4ths of a basketball game, which often features 40 or so scores by each team that largely just function to set up the final 10 or so minutes of action. it had the strategy and interesting minutiae of a football or baseball game, but without the 1 minute of action for every 10 minutes of commentating, huddling, winding up, and commercial-showing. i wouldn't say it instantly became my favorite sport, but i was intrigued.
when i bought FIFA 2003, then, i got these same experiences through the game as i saw on TV. it was a game that took thinking. it wasn't just two teams taking turns shooting broadsides as each other's goal. if you played on anything but the simplest skill level, you spent most of the game (with 45-minute halves) at midfield, fighting for possession. if you got a free kick, or a corner, it was potentially a key to your (likely) 1-0 victory, just like a real game. if there was a breakaway goal, it was due to excellent offensive forethought and/or defensive failure, and not something that happened 30 times in a 10 minute half. for all the game's "ball on rails" handling dynamic, you couldn't just give the ball to a big strong dude and have him run through the entire defense like a freight train, something you can do at will in 2010-era games. if you tried that shit, you'd lose the ball faster than i go through a bottle of tapatio. i remember many an epic game that ended 1-0 or 1-1 after 90 minutes of careful planning, substitutions, formation switches, and the like. many players nowadays (according to the forum threads i read as research) seem revolted by the idea of sitting down for 90 minutes and having to dredge their way through an entire game of video game soccer...but isn't that the point? aren't these games supposed to replicate reality?
i stopped playing madden in 2003 because i started feeling like it was creating an arcade-shooting aesthetic and building it around the rules of football rather than trying to faithfully reproduce the game that, you know, real people actually play. i stopped playing nba live in 2006 for a similar reason. i mean, i understand that part of the point of video games is to put you into situations where you have importance and agency beyond what you feel you have in real life (i.e. games are awesome because you can blow shit up and save the world, which you're unlikely to do in real life unless you're wesley gibson. but i always played sports video games because they allow you a different kind of agency: the agency to be a running back, or a striker, or a home-run king on your favorite real-life team. i thought that was the point...and now when i play sports games i feel like i'm not being allowed that experience anymore. instead, i'm being guided towards a thinly-veiled reimagining of the experience of blasting the demonlord and his hundred henchmen with a rocket launcher when i'm forced to shoot off ten or twenty strategy-less goals per half to keep up with my enemy...i mean, the other team. god forbid you actually have to know a little about how to play a sport to play a sports video game. i mean, you all know that i have nothing against mindless shoot-'em-ups (after all, three of my "Best PC Video Games of All-Time", if you remember, were Unreal Tournament, Doom 2, and Serious Sam), but if i want to play Doom 2, i'll just play Doom 2. i want a soccer game that plays like real soccer and was made after 2003. but apparently that's too much to ask.
in the wake of the world cup coming to a totally metal, crane-kick-to-the-heart-style end, i was left missing my quadannual injection of football action, and decided that my best recourse (other than watching tons of euro league action on espn3.com in august) would be to get a soccer pc game. it's just efficient, combining hobbies this way.
anyway, i tried the demos for both Pro Evolution Soccer 2010 and EA Sports' FIFA 10. and they both suck. a lot. for years, this absurd argument over whether PES or FIFA is the more "realistic" soccer game has raged among fans of both series and i have to say after spending a few evenings tinkering with various installments in each series post-2005, that most realistic video game soccer can still be found in the FIFA incarnations of 2002-2003.
sure, the control schemes for each of the games nowadays is way more in-depth, and the ball has its own physics system, and as a result, much of what happens on the field looks more like real soccer. but it certainly doesn't play like it. why not? because for some reason even the international versions of each game bow to the hit-hard-hit-fast aesthetics that characterize american sports (and american video games).
first of all, the most glaring, and telling, issue: in neither game can you set the half length to FIFA-standard 45 minutes. the most minutes you can play per half? 10. that's it. and once you start playing the game you'll see why. all the players sprint, all the time. the CPU defense plays in a constant press, to the point that when i clear an attempt on my own goal, every time the only player on the half of the field on which the ball lands is my own goalie. every single possession is a fast-break attempt for a goal. there is no time to set up a real, complicated attack, and no need. the defense plays the midfield not at all, so there's no concern over being challenged until you get almost to the goalie box. your CPU-controlled offensive players all take off downfield as soon as you take possession, as well, so even if you try to force the issue by holding the ball at midfield, pretty much the only options you'll have are tricky through balls above and below the goalie box. the result of this is that the entire game is a trading of dramatic shots on goal and desperate sprints downfield, and more often than not, when goals are scored it's simply because the defense-cum-offense recovered from a change in possession faster than the offense-cum-defense did. it's not unusual, even against a skilled CPU opponent, to have a 10 minute half end with a score like 4-4 or 5-5. once, i altered the game's .ini file in order to force the game to last 45 minutes per half; i shouldn't have bothered. this didn't change the CPU's approach at all. by halftime, my entire team was literally completely exhausted, but that didn't stop the final score from being in the 50s.
this is ridiculous, and what's worse: the purportedly "more realistic" PES suffers from many of the same issues. if you don't believe me, check out this youtube video and see if you could have told the difference between the two games had you not been told which was which:
sure, both teams have awesome graphics, 5 million different teams with real players, and all that jazz...but neither game feels like real football. at all. sure, it feels really cool when you're given exacting control over each shot, pass, through ball, header, corner kick, penalty kick, etc...the controls are incredible, and the ball physics sure beat the hell out of the ol' 2003-era "the ball's magically stuck to your foot!" system. but when you get 25 corner kicks in a half and can cross the entire field in four seconds at a sprint over and over again, and your team expects you to do this as your default play, something's screwy. when you get 50 shots on goal and 25 goals in a half of soccer, something's screwy. and you can't even slow the game down if you want to.
i remember playing FIFA 2003 obsessively after the 2002 world cup. it was when i was first enchanted by soccer, by the rhythm of it, by the fact that it was an interesting alternative to the sports i was used to. it had the speed of basketball, but without the often-boring first 3/4ths of a basketball game, which often features 40 or so scores by each team that largely just function to set up the final 10 or so minutes of action. it had the strategy and interesting minutiae of a football or baseball game, but without the 1 minute of action for every 10 minutes of commentating, huddling, winding up, and commercial-showing. i wouldn't say it instantly became my favorite sport, but i was intrigued.
when i bought FIFA 2003, then, i got these same experiences through the game as i saw on TV. it was a game that took thinking. it wasn't just two teams taking turns shooting broadsides as each other's goal. if you played on anything but the simplest skill level, you spent most of the game (with 45-minute halves) at midfield, fighting for possession. if you got a free kick, or a corner, it was potentially a key to your (likely) 1-0 victory, just like a real game. if there was a breakaway goal, it was due to excellent offensive forethought and/or defensive failure, and not something that happened 30 times in a 10 minute half. for all the game's "ball on rails" handling dynamic, you couldn't just give the ball to a big strong dude and have him run through the entire defense like a freight train, something you can do at will in 2010-era games. if you tried that shit, you'd lose the ball faster than i go through a bottle of tapatio. i remember many an epic game that ended 1-0 or 1-1 after 90 minutes of careful planning, substitutions, formation switches, and the like. many players nowadays (according to the forum threads i read as research) seem revolted by the idea of sitting down for 90 minutes and having to dredge their way through an entire game of video game soccer...but isn't that the point? aren't these games supposed to replicate reality?
i stopped playing madden in 2003 because i started feeling like it was creating an arcade-shooting aesthetic and building it around the rules of football rather than trying to faithfully reproduce the game that, you know, real people actually play. i stopped playing nba live in 2006 for a similar reason. i mean, i understand that part of the point of video games is to put you into situations where you have importance and agency beyond what you feel you have in real life (i.e. games are awesome because you can blow shit up and save the world, which you're unlikely to do in real life unless you're wesley gibson. but i always played sports video games because they allow you a different kind of agency: the agency to be a running back, or a striker, or a home-run king on your favorite real-life team. i thought that was the point...and now when i play sports games i feel like i'm not being allowed that experience anymore. instead, i'm being guided towards a thinly-veiled reimagining of the experience of blasting the demonlord and his hundred henchmen with a rocket launcher when i'm forced to shoot off ten or twenty strategy-less goals per half to keep up with my enemy...i mean, the other team. god forbid you actually have to know a little about how to play a sport to play a sports video game. i mean, you all know that i have nothing against mindless shoot-'em-ups (after all, three of my "Best PC Video Games of All-Time", if you remember, were Unreal Tournament, Doom 2, and Serious Sam), but if i want to play Doom 2, i'll just play Doom 2. i want a soccer game that plays like real soccer and was made after 2003. but apparently that's too much to ask.
2010-07-09
new music news! (no, seriously)
so, you know how this usually goes: i get on the blog once every four or five months and blather on endlessly about all manner of fancy-ass music shit that i have planned. sometimes it's a new album, sometimes, it's being able to afford lots of new equipment, sometimes it's new gigs, sometimes it's a new website. often, it's a combination of these with an extra helping of a vague promise of someday selling albums on iTunes and playing a sold-out Cedar Point concert while riding a rollercoaster.
then, reality sets in and i realize i'm working upwards of 70-80 hours a week (at least during fall and winter, more like 30-40 in the summer) and making 9,000 dollars a year, and nothing ever happens. which is a bummer, because i love making music and i'd love even more to be able to approach it more seriously than i am now. but, to do so would most likely be to fail out of grad school, or at least do less than my best, which would be sort of silly at this point...i mean, i've gone to school for 24 of my 29 years on earth. i might as well finish the last two years with a bang.
anyway, i'm getting off-topic. i really liked my idea of starting a real website last year, and even better i liked my idea of consolidating my photos, essays, poems, songs, and other such fun stuff into one site. so i spent many of my off-hours for a few weeks tooling around with microsoft web expressions, trying to come up with something that represented all those different forms of media effectively. i came up with a few interesting ideas, visually and structurally, but in the end it really just came down to the fact that Facebook is a better media hosting site than what i could build myself. it's easier to upload things to, and it hosts videos and photos directly...much more of both than i would be willing to pay to host for my own site. i can link it to my blog so that every time i post a piece of writing on here, it shows up there, too, and i already have a facebook page for lazy blazers, which gets more visits and listens than my reverbnation page, or my old home page ever did. plus, all of those hosting features are wrapped up with the social networking aspect: any time i change any of the site's content, it immediately informs the 125 people i'm friends with on Facebook. i don't think ceding defeat to Facebook is all that bad; my lazy blazers page is pretty awesome, and besides, a lot of the time i would have spent designing and maintaining a website over the last few months has instead been dedicated to working on collaboration with lindsey, practicing old songs to get them back up to snuff, and playing monday nights at rico's, which is what's more important in the larger picture of music-making anyway.
so yeah...i suck and am lazy and what's the news here again?
thing 1: i'm ditching reverbnation. it's a great site, but it's for people who actually want to super-publicize and make money off of their band. i'd like to do those things, but to have to navigate that intense-as-all-hell menu system with band ratings and street team notifications and all that crazy mumbo-jumbo is not what i ever wanted in a site that i was hosting my music on. it's just intense and crazy. so i switched everything last night over to soundcloud.com. it pretty much just posts your tracks and nothing else, and allows you to post a widget into Facebook and that's it. if people want to come to my page and listen to my music, huzzah. no crazy cross-linkages or multiple clicks or any such bullshit. in case you're interested, the soundcloud page is here. you can access it directly through the lazy blazers page on Facebook (become a fan if you're not already...it won't give you cancer, i promise) or just through my normal Facebook profile as well. i also took down all the links to my youtube videos and am in the process of uploading any and all music-related videos directly to Facebook. basically i figure if i'm ditching plans for a personal music website (at least for now) in favor of Facebook, i might as well host everything there.
thing 2: lindsey's been doing excellent designs for the band recently. in case you haven't seen them yet, they're here, here, and here so far. i really want to cover all my guitars and guitar cases with stickers made from these designs, as well as the possible bumper sticker-size design i'm trying to talk lindsey into drawing.
thing 3: speaking of lindsey, she wants to make an album in the next few months, and i'll be recording, mixing, mastering, and all that jazz. i might even be playing some guitars and maybe a banjo or mandolin and singing some harmony. i might even have my cake, and also eat it. anyway, her songs are great and i'm really excited to have a copy of them to listen to WHENEVER THE FUCK I FEEL LIKE IT. besides, this fills the gap nicely when you're a guy who wants to write and play and sing new songs, but you suck too much to actually write your own.
thing 4 (the ultimate thing): actually, i have written a song. just yesterday, in fact. it's a little different than the usual guitar-and-singing thing, in that it's a chiptune. that may not be an exactly fair characterization, because i'm not using an actual amiga or commodore or NES to get the sounds...but i am using a bunch of soundfonts and VSTs to get sounds very freaking similar to the original NES sounds (i'm working, at least for now, with NES exclusively, since i grew up on its funky 5-channel music). so yeah. i spent the last few nights reading and downloading software and screwing around with samples, having no idea how to use a DAW or a tracker or anything (seriously, if you clicked on any of those wiki articles, i was reading them for the first time ever about 48 hours ago). i ended up settling on downloading a windows port of linux software called LMMS, which seems to have a lot of the same features and functionality of high-end programs like FL Studio, but for the price of free dollars. then i went here and downloaded tons of NES related sounds and junk. and it turns out, it's really freaking fun composing this stuff. what i REALLY need is a midi-compatible keyboard so i don't have to click each note in by hand with a mouse. but otherwise, it's really great. like a really need something else to halfheartedly screw around doing in my spare time, right? i mean, final fantasy 10 isn't going to beat itself. but. i wrote an original NES song, and if you want to check it out, make with the trip to clicktown:
Ascendancy (Chiptune) by lazyblazers
then, reality sets in and i realize i'm working upwards of 70-80 hours a week (at least during fall and winter, more like 30-40 in the summer) and making 9,000 dollars a year, and nothing ever happens. which is a bummer, because i love making music and i'd love even more to be able to approach it more seriously than i am now. but, to do so would most likely be to fail out of grad school, or at least do less than my best, which would be sort of silly at this point...i mean, i've gone to school for 24 of my 29 years on earth. i might as well finish the last two years with a bang.
anyway, i'm getting off-topic. i really liked my idea of starting a real website last year, and even better i liked my idea of consolidating my photos, essays, poems, songs, and other such fun stuff into one site. so i spent many of my off-hours for a few weeks tooling around with microsoft web expressions, trying to come up with something that represented all those different forms of media effectively. i came up with a few interesting ideas, visually and structurally, but in the end it really just came down to the fact that Facebook is a better media hosting site than what i could build myself. it's easier to upload things to, and it hosts videos and photos directly...much more of both than i would be willing to pay to host for my own site. i can link it to my blog so that every time i post a piece of writing on here, it shows up there, too, and i already have a facebook page for lazy blazers, which gets more visits and listens than my reverbnation page, or my old home page ever did. plus, all of those hosting features are wrapped up with the social networking aspect: any time i change any of the site's content, it immediately informs the 125 people i'm friends with on Facebook. i don't think ceding defeat to Facebook is all that bad; my lazy blazers page is pretty awesome, and besides, a lot of the time i would have spent designing and maintaining a website over the last few months has instead been dedicated to working on collaboration with lindsey, practicing old songs to get them back up to snuff, and playing monday nights at rico's, which is what's more important in the larger picture of music-making anyway.
so yeah...i suck and am lazy and what's the news here again?
thing 1: i'm ditching reverbnation. it's a great site, but it's for people who actually want to super-publicize and make money off of their band. i'd like to do those things, but to have to navigate that intense-as-all-hell menu system with band ratings and street team notifications and all that crazy mumbo-jumbo is not what i ever wanted in a site that i was hosting my music on. it's just intense and crazy. so i switched everything last night over to soundcloud.com. it pretty much just posts your tracks and nothing else, and allows you to post a widget into Facebook and that's it. if people want to come to my page and listen to my music, huzzah. no crazy cross-linkages or multiple clicks or any such bullshit. in case you're interested, the soundcloud page is here. you can access it directly through the lazy blazers page on Facebook (become a fan if you're not already...it won't give you cancer, i promise) or just through my normal Facebook profile as well. i also took down all the links to my youtube videos and am in the process of uploading any and all music-related videos directly to Facebook. basically i figure if i'm ditching plans for a personal music website (at least for now) in favor of Facebook, i might as well host everything there.
thing 2: lindsey's been doing excellent designs for the band recently. in case you haven't seen them yet, they're here, here, and here so far. i really want to cover all my guitars and guitar cases with stickers made from these designs, as well as the possible bumper sticker-size design i'm trying to talk lindsey into drawing.
thing 3: speaking of lindsey, she wants to make an album in the next few months, and i'll be recording, mixing, mastering, and all that jazz. i might even be playing some guitars and maybe a banjo or mandolin and singing some harmony. i might even have my cake, and also eat it. anyway, her songs are great and i'm really excited to have a copy of them to listen to WHENEVER THE FUCK I FEEL LIKE IT. besides, this fills the gap nicely when you're a guy who wants to write and play and sing new songs, but you suck too much to actually write your own.
thing 4 (the ultimate thing): actually, i have written a song. just yesterday, in fact. it's a little different than the usual guitar-and-singing thing, in that it's a chiptune. that may not be an exactly fair characterization, because i'm not using an actual amiga or commodore or NES to get the sounds...but i am using a bunch of soundfonts and VSTs to get sounds very freaking similar to the original NES sounds (i'm working, at least for now, with NES exclusively, since i grew up on its funky 5-channel music). so yeah. i spent the last few nights reading and downloading software and screwing around with samples, having no idea how to use a DAW or a tracker or anything (seriously, if you clicked on any of those wiki articles, i was reading them for the first time ever about 48 hours ago). i ended up settling on downloading a windows port of linux software called LMMS, which seems to have a lot of the same features and functionality of high-end programs like FL Studio, but for the price of free dollars. then i went here and downloaded tons of NES related sounds and junk. and it turns out, it's really freaking fun composing this stuff. what i REALLY need is a midi-compatible keyboard so i don't have to click each note in by hand with a mouse. but otherwise, it's really great. like a really need something else to halfheartedly screw around doing in my spare time, right? i mean, final fantasy 10 isn't going to beat itself. but. i wrote an original NES song, and if you want to check it out, make with the trip to clicktown:
Ascendancy (Chiptune) by lazyblazers
2010-07-08
that is one indolent sport coat!
so i was kicking around the idea of building a website for my professional, English-y stuff today (as it occurred to me that I probably wouldn't want to send potential future employers to lazyblazers.com to find my CV), and while checking the availability of benbunting.com, i decided to check the availability of lazyblazers.com as well, just to make sure that it would come up as unavailable. it did, but i also got a list from google of similar domain names, in case i wanted to buy one. here are some of the best they gave me:
slothfulblazers
lazysportcoat
indolentblazers
some intriguing music news coming shortly, but first: teaching awaits!
slothfulblazers
lazysportcoat
indolentblazers
some intriguing music news coming shortly, but first: teaching awaits!
2010-06-24
my smartphone's menus are hilariously intense.
it always makes me oddly sad when my mom calls when i'm in the middle of a meeting or class or something, because to reject the call, i have to hit this comically huge, bright red "REJECT" button right underneath this picture:
2010-06-22
google chrome extensions are better than everything
so i started using chrome about six months ago, when my firefox became so bloated with (admittedly) awesome plugins that it took netscape-era amounts of time to load. oddly enough, when i uninstalled all but like five plugins, firefox still insisted on sucking. thus, enter chrome. now i have a batmobile's worth of plugins for chrome, including some fiendishly awesome ones (shareaholic, rememberthemilk, gmail+, and chromedbird) and chrome's performance doesn't seem to be effected at all, even when i have like 10 tabs open (which is always). seems that separate-process-for-each-tab was a great idea after all.
that said, i wouldn't recommend running a post-2006 FPS game with graphics maxed out while minimizing a 10-tab chrome window in the background. shit goes down.
anyway, time to go eat thai food. more lightning typing in the future!
speaking of the future: jetpacks?
that said, i wouldn't recommend running a post-2006 FPS game with graphics maxed out while minimizing a 10-tab chrome window in the background. shit goes down.
anyway, time to go eat thai food. more lightning typing in the future!
speaking of the future: jetpacks?
introductions are in order
blog, meet ben. ben, meet blog. it's been awhile. welcome back to the internet of opinions.
i had a lot of feelings this summer. most of these feelings were had driving from pullman to canton to kent to nashville to canton to cambridge to sharon to kent to canton to pullman. 7000 more miles to my name.
i'm sort of implying through my tense use above that my summer is over. not nearly; however, the part where i drive around in a car and do fucking awesome things is likely over. and that's not necessarily a bad thing, because as usual, all the travelling was a great experience and gave me some always-necessary and valuable perspective on life that's just not possible to get when you're always in the same place, doing the same thing, even if that place is pullman (awesome!) and that thing is teaching and playing music at bars and eating thai food and having great friends (awesome!).
there have been so many great and noteworthy moments in the last month or two that to do my usual picture-posting-storytelling-thing would result in my absolutely leaving 95% of the coolness out. so i won't. in related news, as i've no doubt mentioned before, i now share almost all of my articles, photos, and videos and such via facebook. i know it's not everyone's favorite platform, but the fact is that almost all my real-life friends are on there and i have the fuck-yeah-tastic shareaholic plugin for chrome which lets me share with everyone in one click. so friend me if you haven't already, because facebook's going to be where the action is. this blog is just going to be where the rambling, semi-coherent madness is.
and on that note, bye for five seconds!
i had a lot of feelings this summer. most of these feelings were had driving from pullman to canton to kent to nashville to canton to cambridge to sharon to kent to canton to pullman. 7000 more miles to my name.
i'm sort of implying through my tense use above that my summer is over. not nearly; however, the part where i drive around in a car and do fucking awesome things is likely over. and that's not necessarily a bad thing, because as usual, all the travelling was a great experience and gave me some always-necessary and valuable perspective on life that's just not possible to get when you're always in the same place, doing the same thing, even if that place is pullman (awesome!) and that thing is teaching and playing music at bars and eating thai food and having great friends (awesome!).
there have been so many great and noteworthy moments in the last month or two that to do my usual picture-posting-storytelling-thing would result in my absolutely leaving 95% of the coolness out. so i won't. in related news, as i've no doubt mentioned before, i now share almost all of my articles, photos, and videos and such via facebook. i know it's not everyone's favorite platform, but the fact is that almost all my real-life friends are on there and i have the fuck-yeah-tastic shareaholic plugin for chrome which lets me share with everyone in one click. so friend me if you haven't already, because facebook's going to be where the action is. this blog is just going to be where the rambling, semi-coherent madness is.
and on that note, bye for five seconds!
2010-03-29
i've already posted this elsewhere, but...
...it's amazing, so whatever.
Wilco - Country Disappeared - A Take Away Show from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.
Wilco - Country Disappeared - A Take Away Show from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.
2010-03-28
some more mixtapes coming EXTREMELY SOON
by which i mean the next few weeks.
the only thing that ever made people read this blog in the first place (the mixtapes) will resume shortly. i didn't actually get anything written today, as i spent most of the day figuring out how to wrap up my 110 course (i really want to get back in the swing of writing, but i figure that not getting fired for just not teaching my class is more important). but. i have been listening to a lot of new good (the new mike doughty) and bad (phoenix) music. and a lot of that has ended up in a huge fucking folder called "mix" out of which i hope to develop a few new mixes. so keep your eyes peeled (and if you are an insect or something that doesn't have eyelids, just take my suggestion figuratively, and keep looking at this blog).
the only thing that ever made people read this blog in the first place (the mixtapes) will resume shortly. i didn't actually get anything written today, as i spent most of the day figuring out how to wrap up my 110 course (i really want to get back in the swing of writing, but i figure that not getting fired for just not teaching my class is more important). but. i have been listening to a lot of new good (the new mike doughty) and bad (phoenix) music. and a lot of that has ended up in a huge fucking folder called "mix" out of which i hope to develop a few new mixes. so keep your eyes peeled (and if you are an insect or something that doesn't have eyelids, just take my suggestion figuratively, and keep looking at this blog).
2010-03-26
poems from the glovebox
so, in the interest of trying to tickle out some new lyrics for a new set of songs, and also in the interest of just provoking me into writing regularly again (and reading), i've decided to force inspiration for some poems by digging through my old glovebox.
okay, that sounds weird.
what i mean is, when i first got my car in '06, i almost immediately took it on a 3500 mile road trip from ohio to the southwest and back, and throughout the course of that trip, for financial reasons, i kept every gas receipt together in my glove box. that's a lot of gas receipts. then, after the trip, for other financial reasons (i.e. not having any money at all) i didn't drive for about nine months. then, the next summer, i went cross-country again and was amused to find all these old gas receipts in my glovebox. anyway, cut to now and massive freaking amounts of gas receipts in my car, many from places i didn't even know i've ever been in (apparently i have been).
i thought it might be a good and interesting start to dig through these old receipts and spit some rhymes about them (so to speak). so i'll be starting tonight or tomorrow. wish me luck. ones that are especially good might end up cross-posted on the lazy blazers page, if i think they might work as songs. which reminds me...if you haven't become a fan of lazy blazers yet, DO IT.
okay, that sounds weird.
what i mean is, when i first got my car in '06, i almost immediately took it on a 3500 mile road trip from ohio to the southwest and back, and throughout the course of that trip, for financial reasons, i kept every gas receipt together in my glove box. that's a lot of gas receipts. then, after the trip, for other financial reasons (i.e. not having any money at all) i didn't drive for about nine months. then, the next summer, i went cross-country again and was amused to find all these old gas receipts in my glovebox. anyway, cut to now and massive freaking amounts of gas receipts in my car, many from places i didn't even know i've ever been in (apparently i have been).
i thought it might be a good and interesting start to dig through these old receipts and spit some rhymes about them (so to speak). so i'll be starting tonight or tomorrow. wish me luck. ones that are especially good might end up cross-posted on the lazy blazers page, if i think they might work as songs. which reminds me...if you haven't become a fan of lazy blazers yet, DO IT.
the light at the end of the tunnel is just a train...OF WRITING.
i'm blogging again. which means, no doubt, that some rough thing, somewhere is slouching towards somewhere else.
my exile from blogland has not been an enforced one, per se, but more just the effect of me getting hooked on twitter and then, through twitter, on facebook. then i discovered the shareaholic plugin for chrome and everything went to hell. see, many of my almost-2,000 (!!!) posts on here in the past have been simply my way of sharing cool videos or songs, or pictures or whatever with my readers (or potential readers), and now that i can share those things on facebook much more easily, and with people who are way more likely to actually see those things and read them (i.e. 150 of my friends), it just makes sense to hang out over there. as much as i have this weird feeling in doing so that i'm doing the internet equivalent of shopping at wal-mart instead of the local haberdashery, it's just much easier and more sensible. also, nowadays i find myself a lot more content and a lot more busy with my work (maybe those two are connected?) than i once was, and so there's much less time and reason for gigantic personal rants.
just for old time's sake, though, here...have a video of a dog eating a police car:
so why am i back? the answer's quite simple, really. i've forgotten how to write. seriously. somehow. even though i read and write for my job, i seem to have forgotten how to do either. and oh, what a horrible time to forget. see, i'm finishing up my last class (probably ever, after 25 years of going to school) and that means two and a half years of dissertation coming my way, starting now. unfortunately, i have no idea where to start. i'm working on revising a paper for publication right now (two, actually), and today after pouring over pages of notes, i realized that i'll essentially have to rewrite most of the paper. that realization completely floored and demoralized me. as if part of writing a paper isn't having to redraw and recast all of your ideas. i seem to remember trashing 25-page chunks of my book at one time and then rewriting them wholesale back in the day, and being able to do so with the understanding that that was just part of being a good writer...you know, the whole "kill your babies" thing. and i believe that's true, just as much for scholarly writing as it is for art-writing. or whatever. so, my current baby is a paper i wrote on heidegger's theory of dwelling and the implications of ubiquitous technology and location-aware technology for that theory. i spend about fifteen pages of this paper (and hours upon hours of crazy scribbling and reading and whatnot) unpacking heidegger and then applying my own twists to what he has to say. however, after a serious workshopping session, i've realized that this paper that i spent probably close to 50 hours on is not actually about heidegger at all. or, at least, it shouldn't be. it's about something much bigger and more important. but something that i have to delete my old work and start over to get at. no big deal, but somehow i've convinced myself that the need to revise is a failure, instead of a natural part of the process.
so here i am, trying to remember how to write. i have a feeling i'll be on here a lot more, at least for a little while. i need to find a way to keep writing and reading, even in my spare time, rediscovering the things that make me enjoy reading and writing and then find a way to work those things into my scholarly writing. or else i'll never survive the dissertation process. i'm starting to realize that.
part of my enjoyment of reading and writing has always been wrapped up in my desire to be able to think of myself as a "writer" type: the sort of person who reads for fun, under a tree, and then sits seriously at a typewriter, pen behind ear, hammering out thoughts serious and funny for the edification of those unable to express such thoughts themselves. but that's not a real motivation. that's a put-on, a costume, something to pose as so people will think i'm cool, or so i know what type of people are "my" people and which aren't. none of that helps actually getting good work done, though. which is why i have to find what parts of the work i really do like, rather than the parts i think i'm supposed to like. i'm a little afraid that i'll earnestly like less than i need to. but maybe not.
regardless, i've got a shitload to read, a shitload to revise, and i'm also feeling a distinct lack of life-quality due to not spending enough time playing music and taking photos. that's a lot to undertake at once, but hell, it's spring. so why not try it all at once?
my exile from blogland has not been an enforced one, per se, but more just the effect of me getting hooked on twitter and then, through twitter, on facebook. then i discovered the shareaholic plugin for chrome and everything went to hell. see, many of my almost-2,000 (!!!) posts on here in the past have been simply my way of sharing cool videos or songs, or pictures or whatever with my readers (or potential readers), and now that i can share those things on facebook much more easily, and with people who are way more likely to actually see those things and read them (i.e. 150 of my friends), it just makes sense to hang out over there. as much as i have this weird feeling in doing so that i'm doing the internet equivalent of shopping at wal-mart instead of the local haberdashery, it's just much easier and more sensible. also, nowadays i find myself a lot more content and a lot more busy with my work (maybe those two are connected?) than i once was, and so there's much less time and reason for gigantic personal rants.
just for old time's sake, though, here...have a video of a dog eating a police car:
so why am i back? the answer's quite simple, really. i've forgotten how to write. seriously. somehow. even though i read and write for my job, i seem to have forgotten how to do either. and oh, what a horrible time to forget. see, i'm finishing up my last class (probably ever, after 25 years of going to school) and that means two and a half years of dissertation coming my way, starting now. unfortunately, i have no idea where to start. i'm working on revising a paper for publication right now (two, actually), and today after pouring over pages of notes, i realized that i'll essentially have to rewrite most of the paper. that realization completely floored and demoralized me. as if part of writing a paper isn't having to redraw and recast all of your ideas. i seem to remember trashing 25-page chunks of my book at one time and then rewriting them wholesale back in the day, and being able to do so with the understanding that that was just part of being a good writer...you know, the whole "kill your babies" thing. and i believe that's true, just as much for scholarly writing as it is for art-writing. or whatever. so, my current baby is a paper i wrote on heidegger's theory of dwelling and the implications of ubiquitous technology and location-aware technology for that theory. i spend about fifteen pages of this paper (and hours upon hours of crazy scribbling and reading and whatnot) unpacking heidegger and then applying my own twists to what he has to say. however, after a serious workshopping session, i've realized that this paper that i spent probably close to 50 hours on is not actually about heidegger at all. or, at least, it shouldn't be. it's about something much bigger and more important. but something that i have to delete my old work and start over to get at. no big deal, but somehow i've convinced myself that the need to revise is a failure, instead of a natural part of the process.
so here i am, trying to remember how to write. i have a feeling i'll be on here a lot more, at least for a little while. i need to find a way to keep writing and reading, even in my spare time, rediscovering the things that make me enjoy reading and writing and then find a way to work those things into my scholarly writing. or else i'll never survive the dissertation process. i'm starting to realize that.
part of my enjoyment of reading and writing has always been wrapped up in my desire to be able to think of myself as a "writer" type: the sort of person who reads for fun, under a tree, and then sits seriously at a typewriter, pen behind ear, hammering out thoughts serious and funny for the edification of those unable to express such thoughts themselves. but that's not a real motivation. that's a put-on, a costume, something to pose as so people will think i'm cool, or so i know what type of people are "my" people and which aren't. none of that helps actually getting good work done, though. which is why i have to find what parts of the work i really do like, rather than the parts i think i'm supposed to like. i'm a little afraid that i'll earnestly like less than i need to. but maybe not.
regardless, i've got a shitload to read, a shitload to revise, and i'm also feeling a distinct lack of life-quality due to not spending enough time playing music and taking photos. that's a lot to undertake at once, but hell, it's spring. so why not try it all at once?
2010-03-11
some thoughts on depression
so, i was combing through my feed reader this morning, eating myself some breakfast of a soft taco and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (today was a late rising day), and i came across this ProfHacker post. it was really interesting, and i spent the next hour or so chasing links. the primary piece of interest here is this recent article, which suggests that in some respects that depression may be an evolution-like response to various social and personal dilemmas. in short, depression is a sort-of side effect of your brain winding its problem-solving skills into overdrive in order to solve a particularly prickly problem.
really, though, if you're interested at all, you should read the original Times article through, because it's not only interesting, it's exceedingly well-written. better than this blog.
anyway, i really really like ProfHacker; it's a really useful resource for teaching literature and comp, and i love reading their articles pretty much every day. i also haven't written this post to specifically pick on them, but more to pick on the point of view that their particular take on the Times issue seems to be emblematic of.
no, depression is not "romantic" (although "romantic", as per ProfHacker and Kramer is importantly different than "Romantic", as per the original Times article, but i digress); however, the idea that it is potentially constructive for some is an intriguing one, and one that it seems might allow the condition to be a little de-stigmatized. i guess i don't see what's so threatening about seeing depression as partially constructive behavior...maybe there's something comforting about being able to treat it like a mystery ghost that comes and goes, something we don't actively have to try to deal with because, as long as it stays mysterious, we can justify being at its mercy. oddly, one of the objections raised to Thomson and Andrews' argument (from the Times article) is that "romanticizing" depression is a destructive practice reminiscent of the "glamorization" of tuberculosis 200 years ago. i don't get this either. i'd say if there's any romanticization of depression going on, it's embodied in the idea that depression is an undefeatable, inexplicable condition that preys on us at will, and that we can only solve it by throwing medicine at the problem. the statistics provided in the Times article regarding the danger of relapse when taking patients off of depression are pretty compelling.
and, yet, of course, not all-inclusive. i think the most important part of the article is actually when Andrews acknowledges that part of the problem is that "depression" is actually an umbrella term for a number of different symptoms, and, likely, a number of different causes and solutions (something that the ProfHacker response seems to have missed). interestingly, Andrews, i think, would agree with Kramer's assertion that his analytic-rumination hypothesis is limited to a certain audience. precisely because of the assumptions it makes - that depression is a response to solvable problems - it would be useless to those suffering from depression because of a stroke or because of what Kramer calls "late-life" depression. those are problems that no amount of cognition or rumination, i imagine, can surmount. in fact, the Times article - and Andrews, and myself - are all ready and willing to admit that this one solution is not the solution to depression. but if can help some - as Andrews shows that it clearly has - why all the vitriol? why is it so important to not logically confront depression?
some of you know my own experience with depression, because i've written about it on here before, and i won't rehash it in detail. suffice to say that i have, at times, in the past, suffered from a lot of the symptoms of depression (as outlined in the WebMD link provided by ProfHacker). so i suppose i would understand the difference between "ordinary" sadness and depression, if that's worth anything. and i know i would have benefited greatly from having heard what Thomson and Andrews had to say in the past. depression, for me, has always been about wrestling with issues, whether it be a problem i couldn't - or didn't want to - solve, or adjusting to a major change that i had no direct control over in my life. the idea that the depression wasn't a hindrance to, but instead a necessary component of the adjustment process absolutely, certainly would have helped me adjust and get better a lot more quickly. i never got professional help for my own issues - though i thought about a fair amount - because i knew, on some level, that i was dealing with something i would ultimately have to work out on my own. like Andrews' heart-wrenching example, i knew my problems wouldn't be solved by medicine. instead, i just wouldn't care that those problems existed anymore. and encouraging people who can deal with those problems to just take medicine seems reductionist at best, and a lot of other horrible things at worst. i'd never presume to speak for someone else or their issues, and people are all allowed (obviously) to do what they want with their own lives; yet, when you're in the grips of depression, you're not exactly "yourself", per se, and someone else making suggestions about what might make you feel better is naturally going to have more sway over your decision than they might normally. so it has always made me very nervous that so many doctors are so medication-happy.
but that's my personal bias, which is, of course, based on personal experience. but again, if Thomson and Andrews' hypothesis is legitimately helping people, why such hostility towards it? is there something attractive about the idea that our sadness is beyond our control? about the idea that all of our problems should be able to be solved by pills? i don't know. all i do know is that something about the analytic-rumination approach really resonates with me, and i don't think it should be slighted or thrown out because it doesn't play into the idea that depression has to be an illogical, impregnable illness. don't we want solutions to be easier? i think the article makes it pretty clear that even Andrews and Thomson are pretty clear on the fact that his approach won't (and shouldn't) work on everyone, and that people who still need medicine or alternate approaches should get what they need. i don't see this new idea as romantic at all, and in fact the article's author goes to great pains throughout to characterize depression as the horrible malady that it is. so why all the grumbling?
i'm going to stop before i start grumbling, too...
grumble grumble grumble.
really, though, if you're interested at all, you should read the original Times article through, because it's not only interesting, it's exceedingly well-written. better than this blog.
anyway, i really really like ProfHacker; it's a really useful resource for teaching literature and comp, and i love reading their articles pretty much every day. i also haven't written this post to specifically pick on them, but more to pick on the point of view that their particular take on the Times issue seems to be emblematic of.
no, depression is not "romantic" (although "romantic", as per ProfHacker and Kramer is importantly different than "Romantic", as per the original Times article, but i digress); however, the idea that it is potentially constructive for some is an intriguing one, and one that it seems might allow the condition to be a little de-stigmatized. i guess i don't see what's so threatening about seeing depression as partially constructive behavior...maybe there's something comforting about being able to treat it like a mystery ghost that comes and goes, something we don't actively have to try to deal with because, as long as it stays mysterious, we can justify being at its mercy. oddly, one of the objections raised to Thomson and Andrews' argument (from the Times article) is that "romanticizing" depression is a destructive practice reminiscent of the "glamorization" of tuberculosis 200 years ago. i don't get this either. i'd say if there's any romanticization of depression going on, it's embodied in the idea that depression is an undefeatable, inexplicable condition that preys on us at will, and that we can only solve it by throwing medicine at the problem. the statistics provided in the Times article regarding the danger of relapse when taking patients off of depression are pretty compelling.
and, yet, of course, not all-inclusive. i think the most important part of the article is actually when Andrews acknowledges that part of the problem is that "depression" is actually an umbrella term for a number of different symptoms, and, likely, a number of different causes and solutions (something that the ProfHacker response seems to have missed). interestingly, Andrews, i think, would agree with Kramer's assertion that his analytic-rumination hypothesis is limited to a certain audience. precisely because of the assumptions it makes - that depression is a response to solvable problems - it would be useless to those suffering from depression because of a stroke or because of what Kramer calls "late-life" depression. those are problems that no amount of cognition or rumination, i imagine, can surmount. in fact, the Times article - and Andrews, and myself - are all ready and willing to admit that this one solution is not the solution to depression. but if can help some - as Andrews shows that it clearly has - why all the vitriol? why is it so important to not logically confront depression?
some of you know my own experience with depression, because i've written about it on here before, and i won't rehash it in detail. suffice to say that i have, at times, in the past, suffered from a lot of the symptoms of depression (as outlined in the WebMD link provided by ProfHacker). so i suppose i would understand the difference between "ordinary" sadness and depression, if that's worth anything. and i know i would have benefited greatly from having heard what Thomson and Andrews had to say in the past. depression, for me, has always been about wrestling with issues, whether it be a problem i couldn't - or didn't want to - solve, or adjusting to a major change that i had no direct control over in my life. the idea that the depression wasn't a hindrance to, but instead a necessary component of the adjustment process absolutely, certainly would have helped me adjust and get better a lot more quickly. i never got professional help for my own issues - though i thought about a fair amount - because i knew, on some level, that i was dealing with something i would ultimately have to work out on my own. like Andrews' heart-wrenching example, i knew my problems wouldn't be solved by medicine. instead, i just wouldn't care that those problems existed anymore. and encouraging people who can deal with those problems to just take medicine seems reductionist at best, and a lot of other horrible things at worst. i'd never presume to speak for someone else or their issues, and people are all allowed (obviously) to do what they want with their own lives; yet, when you're in the grips of depression, you're not exactly "yourself", per se, and someone else making suggestions about what might make you feel better is naturally going to have more sway over your decision than they might normally. so it has always made me very nervous that so many doctors are so medication-happy.
but that's my personal bias, which is, of course, based on personal experience. but again, if Thomson and Andrews' hypothesis is legitimately helping people, why such hostility towards it? is there something attractive about the idea that our sadness is beyond our control? about the idea that all of our problems should be able to be solved by pills? i don't know. all i do know is that something about the analytic-rumination approach really resonates with me, and i don't think it should be slighted or thrown out because it doesn't play into the idea that depression has to be an illogical, impregnable illness. don't we want solutions to be easier? i think the article makes it pretty clear that even Andrews and Thomson are pretty clear on the fact that his approach won't (and shouldn't) work on everyone, and that people who still need medicine or alternate approaches should get what they need. i don't see this new idea as romantic at all, and in fact the article's author goes to great pains throughout to characterize depression as the horrible malady that it is. so why all the grumbling?
i'm going to stop before i start grumbling, too...
grumble grumble grumble.
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