what music looks like

Since this dates to 2001, this is old news, but I just ran across it last week and thought it was gorgeous:

[The Shape of Song, Martin Wattenberg]

Wattenberg developed this kind of diagram, the arc diagram, to visualize "repetition at varying scales within a linear sequence":

"The diagrams in The Shape of Song display musical form as a sequence of translucent arches. Each arch connects two repeated, identical passages of a composition. By using repeated passages as signposts, the diagram illustrates the deep structure of the composition."

Both macro patterns and micro patterns are documented, with the difference in scale between those patterns immediately obvious. Since that's probably not a very clear explanation, I recommend going to read Wattenberg's own explanation (the explanatory diagrams make all the difference in explaining diagrams). A shorter explanation can be found here.

A number of other people have used this diagramming methodology (or a variation on it) to explore other kinds of data; perhaps my favorite is "Visualizing the Bible", which maps cross-references within the Bible into an interactive diagram.

is barack obama a socialist?

The New Republic asks this important question:

"Is Barack Obama a socialist? Well, let's see. His campaign platform makes no mention of proletarian revolution or nationalization of industry, and he trumpets his belief that "America's free market has been the engine of America's great progress. It's created a prosperity that is the envy of the world." Not quite Leninesque. On the other hand, Tom DeLay has made a logically rigorous counter-argument sure to convince second-graders everywhere: "I have said publicly, and I will again, that unless he proves me wrong, he is a Marxist." No word on whether DeLay proceeded to put his fingers in his ears and hum loudly."

Maybe this is some sort of residual disease I contracted in the philosophy department, but I have a real problem with imprecise labeling (which is not the same thing as saying I'm not guilty of it at times). Words have meanings. I'm pretty sure the meaning of 'socialist' is not "someone who I disagree with", but that's what it seems to be reduced to in some quarters (this would, of course, be reflected on the other side by those for whom, for instance, "evangelical" means "someone who I disagree with"). So when I'm told that Obama is a socialist (as I have been), I have to assume that the person I'm talking to is probably more interested in using words as verbal baseball bats than as means to communication. (Which, again, is not to say that I am never guilty of using words in that fashion.)

[The article that I linked to is actually a discussion of the methodology used by the National Journal to arrive at their rankings for the relative liberalism/conservatism of senators, and worth reading for that.]

youtube jukebox k

Animal Collective, Comfy in Nautica (Live)

Not being a graduate of an elite university, I am extremely sympathetic to this argument

I am not familiar with the author or the publication, so I cannot comment on the biases that might be expected, but I thought this article "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education" by a William Deresiewicz was worth reading.

The disadvantages are apparently:

1. "It makes you incapable of talking to people who aren't like you."
2. "An elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth."
3. "It is profoundly anti-intellectual."

I'm not saying he's right; I am saying its interesting.

Sun smells too loud

New Mogwai track out... I can't say that I'm the world's biggest Mogwai fan, but every now and then the mood hits me. This one is pretty good -- somewhat summery, a bit lazier than the average Mogwai song.

Bonus: Its not the greatest version of xmas steps, but I enjoy the part where the guitarist jumps when the bass kicks in:

That's not a spoon in the garbage disposal, its Lars

Fellow former UCer Lars Gotrich had his own episode of All Songs Considered last week; finally got around to loading it on the ipod this morning, so I can now officially endorse it. I can also inform you that the tagline from NPR is misleading (if humorous); there is nothing on it that sounds like a spoon in a garbage disposal (unfortunately). I'll admit I was hoping for something a little bit less listenable than Harvey Milk to represent metal, but we'll have to make do with what's on there. I found the Polish composer Jacaszek (Lars seemed very excited about how depressing he is) and Dirty Projectors-related medieval post-punk band Extra Life particularly compelling.

Listen online here, download here or navigate to All Songs Considered in iTunes.

I think he means "conscious"

Ah, the angst felt by the children of Mountain Brook:

"I found Dwight Garner's review of Joseph O'Neill's "Netherland" (May 18) to be virtuosic in nearly every respect, but that is not why I write. Garner struck a chord with me, and probably the vast majority of younger readers, when he so impeccably communicated the longing for, the necessitation of that transcendent Great Post-9/11 Novel: "the bracing, wide-screen, many-angled novel that will leave a larger, more definitive intellectual and moral footprint on the new age of terror," he writes so consummately.

Don't worry; we're working on it. You've heard it straight from the tropical mouth of a teenager who is entirely conscientious of the metamorphoses in ideas, principles (or lack thereof) and influences being undergone by your Youth right under your collective noses: the next Great American Novel will come not from Pynchon, Wallace, DeLillo (he's already had his turn anyway) or any other of your literary heroes.

It will spring from the iMac-fettered keyboards of the young, challenging, Facebook-and-MySpace-addled minds that you have so hastily jettisoned as literary jetsam, from those who see and comprehend, still to the delirious ignorance of the villainous Powers That Be, incalculable brands of grade-A terror being perpetrated unabashedly both by those whom we trust and those whom we loathe.

The literary call to arms sounded long ago (only many neglected to listen), and, Mr. Editor, well, we've been whiling away for a long time, persisting on raw fish and Red Bull in the frozen caverns of the blogosphere; and we don't mean to boast, but, to be perfectly honest, we think you'll be more than impressed. We're standing beneath the adit of our long-desolate cave, proffering a sheaf of papers that you might consider a manuscript.

Perhaps it would not trouble you to take a peek.

ALEC NIEDENTHAL
Birmingham, Ala."

Small towns and the Tower of Babel

Ryan has a very interesting post up which begins by discussing a book called The Big Sort (which I have not read), the basic thesis of which is apparently that "Americans have been segregating themselves on the basis of ideology--a divide that tracks class and race to some extent--since about the mid-1960s." While I can't really comment on the statistical evidence for that, I completely agree with the introduction of the intuitive evidence for the (at least partial) validity of the claim that Ryan provides: "Listen to partisan Democrats and Republicans for about five minutes and this should be intuitively correct: it sounds like they aren't even speaking the same language. They're talking right past each other." Yup.

And where Ryan ends up after developing this intuition for a few paragraphs (really, you should just go read the whole thing) is exactly where I ended up a few years ago, through a mixture of cynical observation and reading of various outsider-ish commentators on the state of American culture and politics (Alasdair MacIntyre comes to mind, but there are others):

"America has done this. And no, it isn't because we allow gay marriage or because we don't pray in schools or because there are nekkid women in movies. Those may be symptoms, but they're not the problem. The problem is that we, on both sides of the political spectrum, are constantly violating the First Commandment: You shall have no other gods before me. We are, in essence, attempting to do without God, but more to the point, we give the glory due to God to ourselves.

"Before" doesn't just mean "prior to" or "ahead of." It also means "in the presence of," just as one appears before a House subcommittee. We shall have no other gods in His presence. As he's omnipresent, that means anywhere, so basically no other gods at all. The Left's god seems to be man himself. "Just give people enough support and we can do anything! We're all good inside!" The Right's god is man too, though they come about it a different way. Tim Keller has some insight here, as did John Gerstner, who said "The thing that really separates us from God is not so much our sin, but our damnable good works." The Right seems to think that by legislating a proper moral society, banning homosexuality, and punishing criminals, God will just have to reward us. He'll just have to love us. We'll play by his rules because that's the name of the game, but we're really what it's all about."

I can't really disagree with Ryan's solution (as a Christian, its hard to disagree with the observation that the way out of our idolatry is the gospel). However, I want to connect this to another post I read recently, by Rod Dreher, which observes that, despite the relatively poor economic outlook and general social conformity that exists in small towns (or perhaps because of those things), small towns are often characterized by social solidarity, by the communal sharing of burdens, in a way that larger, more prosperous places are not. And the loss of this general sense of place not just as where one lives but as a community to which one belongs is exactly, I think, the thing that enables the factionalization that Ryan points to. (Is it the only thing? Nah, I doubt it. But enmeshment in a community tied to a place certainly serves as a bulwark against factionalization based on ideology, though it might be argued that it partially does that by enforcing conformity to the prevailing ideologies of the community).

So is another part of the answer to the difficulty of the Tower of Babel restructuring our lives in order to become invested in and tied to community and place? I'm not totally sure (there are certainly benefits, particularly economic efficiencies, created by the American arrangement), but I'm inclined to think that the answer is at least partly yes. Which is probably why I'm drawn to a church that argues that the gospel compels us to live in particular places, not just as consumers or users of those places, but as creators and contributors.

Best Post Title Ever

Thunderclass.

Plus the discussion is fairly interesting, and it includes a link to Strange Maps, which is a great site for wasting time.

The Conservative Eater

A couple of articles in the latest issue of the American Conservative discuss the interesting (and, I think, very positive) convergence between the foodie left and the traditionalist right (Michael Pollan and Wendell Berry, or Alice Waters and Rod Dreher). First, John Schwenkler's cover article, "Food for Thought", makes a simple but cogent case that what we eat and how we eat ought to be of concern to conservatives:

Today's children, Waters goes on to say, "are bombarded with a pop culture which teaches redemption through buying things." But schoolyard gardens, like the one she helped create at the middle school a few blocks from my home in Berkeley, "turn pop culture upside-down: they teach redemption through a deep appreciation for the real, the authentic, and the lasting--for the things that money can't buy: the very things that matter most of all if we are going to lead sane, healthy, and sustainable lives. Kids who learn environmental and nutritional lessons through school gardening--and school cooking and eating--learn ethics." Good cooking, she writes in the introduction to her 2007 cookbook, The Art of Simple Food, "can reconnect our families and communities with the most basic human values, provide the deepest delight for all our senses, and assure our well-being for a lifetime."

The proposal, put slightly differently, is that our attitudes toward food--which nourishes and sustains us, which binds us most fundamentally to place, family, market, and community--provide a measure of our respect for what Russell Kirk called the "Permanent Things." We are not just what we eat but how we eat. The cultivation and consumption of our meals are activities as distinctively human as walking, talking, loving, and praying. Learning to regard the meal not merely as something that fills our bellies and helps us grow, but as the consummate exercise of beings carnal and earthbound yet upwardly and outwardly drawn, is a crucial step in the restoration of culture. The suggestion that the inculcation of such values might be an essential part of an adequate education ought to resonate beyond the confines of the doctrinaire Left.

Adopting an alternative view of food does not require rejecting the possibility of a free and prosperous market economy. Indeed, the rise of the New American Diet--meals eaten in a rush and very often alone, made from processed and prepackaged ingredients--was not solely or even primarily the product of Adam Smith's invisible hand. Historian Harvey Levenstein has argued that the spate of government regulations in the wake of early 20th-century food-safety scares played a crucial role in the rise of industrialized agriculture and centralized food processors. Early nutritionists and home economists, many distinctly of the quack variety, found a key ally in their attempts to reform American cuisine in Herbert Hoover's Food Administration. The goal of reducing consumption of scarce foods and eating in accordance with "scientific" principles was tied to the cause of Allied victory in the First World War.

Second, there's also an interview of Michael Pollan by Rod Dreher:

DREHER: In cultural terms, how has consumer capitalism as applied to food traditions worked to undermine the family and, by extension, the community?

POLLAN: Look at what food marketing does to the family dinner. The American food industry spends $32 billion a year marketing 17,000 new products to us. They are trying very hard to undermine parents' roles as gatekeepers of the family diet. You have kids clamoring for dinners--as described to me by marketers at General Mills--that consist essentially of serial microwaving. Every family member microwaves his own entree and then they kind of cross paths at the table for a little while.

Food marketers work very hard to get us to eat 24/7, and if you look at the images on television, you see families too hurried to cook a meal. They're so busy that all they can do is grab a cereal bar on the way out the door. All of this emphasis on snack food has the effect of eroding the crucial institution of families sitting down together. One of the great blind spots in American conservatism is not appreciating the role of consumer capitalism in eroding values such as the family dinner.

DREHER: And communal values. You are talking about how food traditions are a social glue...

POLLAN: It's about sitting down and breaking bread among family or friends or even enemies--the rituals of eating together and cooking for people.

Reducing food to fuel or entertainment, which seems to be the goal of so much food marketing, takes away something important. Movements like Slow Food are fighting against this...

DREHER: I mention Slow Food in my work and find it ironic that it was started by an Italian Marxist...

POLLAN: Communist.

DREHER: Yeah. But it's very conservative.

POLLAN: It is. I always saw myself as being to the Left of center, although whenever I write about food or nature, I feel like I am actually to the Right. Somebody just sent me a blog post from the Tory Anarchist--you're mentioned in it, too--that says, "You might call it the Wendell Berry-Michael Pollan Right." I had not seen all those words strung together before, but it points to why this issue mixes up the usual categories--and it should.

I think that this movement will find trends on the Right. You see signs of it in Matthew Scully's work coming at animal welfare from the Right, which makes perfect sense as soon as you start reading it.

I think a lot of the problem is with the cultural signifiers, the fact that the movement's DNA comes out of the '60s. I wrote about this in Omnivore's Dilemma--the counterculture and its discovery of organic food--but you go back a few decades and organic food is very much a Tory issue in England.