this is my second review that got in. i genuinely liked this band and they aren't friends of mine. i also wrote it the next morning after seeing the show and before going to work so i'm pretty happy about that.

What has been commonly referred to as "bizarro-pop" and also goes by "avant-garde" and "vaudeville cum circus rock" describes a genre that commonly includes more than six players on a stage, synthesizes myriad styles together, and conjures images of Tom Waits.
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, the Juan Prophet Organization, Hellblinki Sextet, Lucky Pineapple, upwards all the way to music as popular as the Dresden Dolls are strong examples of this musicality. I lump all these bands together and make broad generalizations because it appears that the failure of the institution known as the rock band, while being overtly about number ones and product endorsements produces new and exciting trends in the underground. It happened with the guitar and drum duo craze that was popularized with the White Stripes at the beginning of the decade and it's been quietly happening with this kaleidoscoped mixed bag genre.
Quiet no more, this genre is exemplified by locals Darla Farmer who've had quite a lot of press recently, and all of it is quite deserved.
I saw them play at Foo Bar last night and live i was excited by their rhythms, the melody lines coming from the horns, and the vocals, which incited thoughts of both Geddy Lee and Ween.
I loved the weird, kaleidoscoped styles and world rhythms, I loved it when they switched their instruments, in general I love a good brass section and any drummer who can channel James Brown, rag-time jazz, calypso and metal. But more than that I love good song-writing, and Darla Farmer is cleverly using all these colorful outlets to release great song writing. and that is worth spending 10 bucks on their album for.
Catch them play again this coming Saturday at the Caldwell house over near Belmont.

for denitia's show. everytime i read it i wish i had worked on it more before i sent it.

"Contrast" is Denitia Odigie's fourth EP. This review is about her CD release party held at the Rutledge on Tuesday, January 27th.


Long-time fans of Denitia Odigie have noticed a complete 180 in her music, and they didn't have to search very hard for it. The aptly and overtly named "Contrast" has shed all of Denitia's precursory alt-rock a la PJ Harvey and instead goes full steam ahead with the soul, mo-town, and gospel Denitia Odigie. There's very little room for dissention here, whether it be attributed to the recent signing with Weston Boys Entertainment publishing or a lot of trial and error combined with soul-searching, Odigie has found herself a beautiful formula for music, and if you can't recognize a little wonderfulness in it, then you don't like music.

Her comfort and charisma on stage is just the starting line for a show that was almost flawless, from the musicianship of the band to the background vocals and the general ebb and flow of all the songs.

Denitia's band, including the always amazing Dan Cohen on guitar, and Laura Ezell and Jenny Wood on back-ups managed to enhance the music instead of detract from, a feat for any singer-songwriter who spends time on stage playing those same songs sans back up band.

While Odigie blew me and everyone in the room away, and will most likely garner only kind words about "Contrast" and the performance she gives of it on stage, I know that from Odigie we still have yet to hear her masterpiece, something that combines the tried-and-true with the inner raw-ness she shows on her old EPs. Check out all her work, when you can get your hands on it, starting with "Contrast" and working back to "The Fireworks Session" and 2006's "Good Causes".

as with living organisms and ecosystems, the economy looks designed-so just as humans naturally deduce the existence of a top-down intelligent designer, humans also (understandably) infer that a top-down government designer is needed in nearly every aspect of the economy. but just as living organisms are shaped from the bottom up by natural selection, the economy is molded from the bottom up by the invisible hand. the correspondence between evolution and economics is not perfect, because some top-down institutional rules and laws are needed to provide a structure within which free and fair trade can occur. but too much top-down interference into the markeplace makes trade neither free nor fair. when such attempts have been made in the past, they have failed because markets are far too complex, interactive and autocatalytic to be designed from the top-down.

-michael shermer

"Our sensibilities, our perceptions that register through our sense organ cells evolved directly from our bacterial ancestors. Signals in the environment: light impinging on the eye's retina, taste on teh buds of the tongue, odor through the nose, sound in the ear are translated to nervous impulses by extensions of sensory cells called cilia. We, like all other mammals, including our apish brothers, have taste-bud cilia, inner ear cilia, nasal passage cilia that detect odors. We distinguish savory from sweet, birdsong from whalesong, drumbeats from thunder. With our eyes closed, we detect the light of the rising sun and feel the vibrations of the drums. These abilities to sense our surroudnings from from one kind of our bacterial ancestors that became cilia. We owe our sensitivity to a loving touch, the scent of lavender, the taste of a salted nut, or a police cruiser siren to our sensory cells. We owe the chemical attraction of the sperm as its tail impels it to swim toward the egg to its cilia. Cilia evolved from hyperactive bacteria. Bacterial ancestors swam toward food and away from noxious gases, they moved up to the well-lit waters at the surface of the pond. They were startled, when, in a crowd, some relative bumped into them.


Now that we know this we should begin to accept that bacteria, touted to be our enemies, are not merely neutral or friendly but that they are us. They are direct ancestors of our most sensitive body parts. Our culture's terminology about bacteria is that of warfare: they are germs to be destroyed. We humans should begin to see that we have always hated and tried to kill our own ancestors. Again, we have seen the enemy, indeed, and as usual, it is us."

-i don't know, but maybe richard dawkins.

"Mere volume of space is no more aesthetic than mere bounding line or surface; in order to become beautiful, it must become alive. But how can space–the most abstract thing in the world–become alive? By having the activities which it incloses felt into it. Just as our bodies are felt to be alive because our activities express themselves there, so our rooms, because we live and move within them. As we enter a cathedral and look down the long aisle, the movement of our eyes inevitably suggests the movement of our bodies; or, as we look up and our eyes follow the ribs of the vaulting, it is as if we ourselves were borne aloft; in the imagination we move through the open spaces; and since we do not actually move, we locate our impulses to movement, not in our bodies, but in the space through which we take our imagined flight. Every object suggests movement to it, and we fill the intervening space with this imagined movement, provided only we stay our activities and give time for the imagination to work its will. Thus all space may become alive with the possibilities of movement which it offers."

"at its root, cancer is a disease of multi-cellularity."
AND
"our single celled ancestors reproduced by dividing in two."


after animals emerged, about 700 million years ago, the cells inside their bodies continued to reproduce by dividing, using the molecular machinery they inherited from their progenitors. the complex, multicellular bodies animals have today were made possible by the emergence of new genes that made cells divide.
cancer, in other words, recreates within our own bodies the evolutionary process that enables animals to adapt to their environment.


Which makes a lot of sense right? And it's kind of cool to frame it that way. It is also why natural selection can make a few defenses against cancer but cannot eliminate it altogether.

"For some reasons, humans begin to lose the ability to sleep deeply around 40 years of age, at about the same time that memory begins to decline."

i'm super excited about final fantasy XII
so a quick review:

RPGs are often tedious, where your main character does a lot of busy work to level up, fights are redundant with the exceptions of the boss fights which usually just involve leveling up alot not strategy. In FF esp, you have to spend a lot of time literally running around, and talking to people who say entertaining but pointless things, and the main character (tidus in X for anyone who's played it) has lately been some ridiculously obnoxious aryan boy brat.

Final Fantasy IX, and III the exeptions to all this, seriously XII? fucking incredible, the perfect balance between leveling up, strategy, and side questing.
And the main character is an annoying little aryan brat, but the other characters are kinda phenomenal, esp the cat woman. plus the learning curve for this game: not too hard, not too easy.

so hell yeah, XII thanks for doing it right! i'm ridiculously addicted...

"we understand time not as a singular action but as a product of the infinite possibilities of itself. i wanted to create an image in which the many permutations of a given action in a defined space combine equally to create a much larger more complex whole"
-richard sarson, artist, commenting on his piece which, looks basically like a bunch of computer generated fractals but saying it that way makes it sound less cool than it is (i have no other words)

"our thoughts and consciousness do not depend on the actual substances in our brains, but rather on the structures, patterns, and relationships between parts."
-clifford pickover
i liked this because i was reading somewhere that our neurons fire in a linear fashion which is directly related to how we experience the flow of time, our neurons fire A to B and so that is how our time flows. i've said all this before, but i find this fascinating and particularly relevant for our era becauase ours is an amazing era for computers: it's kind of always been an assumption of pre-eighties sci fi that once computers pass us significantly in IQ that they would be much smarter and achieve consciousness, but the way it's looking right now is that computers, not matter how fast their neuron components fire, no matter how many neurons they have, the problem is with the structure of their CPUS. Our brain structure allows for linear processing but it's also like, parallel or something which allows multiple layers, whereas computers fire somewhat two dimensionally. i wish i knew more about this, but i've inferred, perhaps incorrectly, that it's the relationships between the transistors in our computers that can be improved to achieve higher artificial intelligence, not the number of transistors or the size.

that was much longer than intended.

i only get a limited space for my music slot so i'm going to list all the things that i bought off itunes (!! i've never done this before and so it was sorta exciting) from some list of 100 best singles of the year rolling stone but out. i downloaded like ten and these are the ones i've been playing alot today.

rihanna- SOS
lily allen- smile
christina aguilera-aint no other man
the sounds-tony the beat

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
–the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

ee cummings::

Your poems are rather hard to understand, whereas your paintings are so easy.
Easy?
Of course—you paint flowers and girls and sunsets; things that everybody understands.
I never met him.
Who?
Everybody.
Did you ever hear of nonrepresentational painting?
I am.
Pardon me?
I am a painter, and painting is nonrepresentational.
Not all painting.
No: housepainting is representational.
And what does a housepainter represent?
Ten dollars an hour.
In other words, you don’t want to be serious—
It takes two to be serious.

My theory of technique, if I have one, is very far from original; nor is it complicated. I can express it in fifteen words, by quoting The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesk, viz. "Would you hit a woman with a child?— No, I'd hit her with a brick." Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.

“Each day, the towers of central London seemed slightly more distant, the landscape of an abandoned planet receding slowly from his mind. By contrast with the calm and unencumbered geometry of the concert-hall and television studios below him, the ragged skyline of the city resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis”.

J.G. Ballard. High-Rise.

Ballard is amazing at treating architectural space like highway flyovers, corporate campuses, flooded hotels, suburban home-development projects, abandoned swimming pools, army camps in the desert. The modern built environment isn't just someplace we live, it's kind of like an extension of our own psychology, an environment which pushes us to the boundaries of our own humanity. The landscape of his novels encodes, hardwires, people into fitting their bodies into their environments. His characters have to move between and fit inside empty car parks, derelict hospitals, redundant freeways, under-subscribed exurban highrises. His "malfunctioning central nervous system in spatial form, on the scale of a whole civilization."
The buildings and cities are never backdrops in a ballard novel, no instead, they are like psychological traps built by corporations, not architects, who are testing to see which humans have survived.
Basically Ballard has taken our built environment and made it more influential on our bodies than our own bodies. It isn't our lack of serotonin that makes us crazy or unhappy and depressed it's our culture, it's our economy, it's the landscape of our society.

"Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessel are the written mythologies of memory and desire."
-- J.G. Ballard

So i've realized, after hours and hours spent writing my graduate school application essays that i've taken a different approach.
I've spent alot of time at the library pouring over books on Urban design and sustainability and formulating reasons why "i want to develop environments with good public transportation systems and an infrastructure that supports community development" which i do. but after googling "grad school essays" i realized that you're supposed to say "I" alot and talk about your past and i'm not particularly in the mood. It would be easier to write up an argument.
And i can't think of anything i really want to talk about except for J.G. Ballard who is amazing(!!) and is the most perfect reason for why i am interested in space and architecture.
The man was a science major but ended up becoming a writer and writes all sorts of lyrical hallucinations involving the built environment and its pyschological impact on the people who live in it. And maybe i should just start talking about him, and his take on life, instead of talking about how neat i think science is and why i studied it and how now i want to do something that isn't research and etcetera.

sometimes
in) Spring a someone will lie(glued
among familiar things newly which are
transferred with dusk)wondering why this star
does not fall into his mind
feeling
throughout ignorant disappearing me
hurling vastness of love(sometimes in Spring
somewhere between what is and what may be
unknown most secret i will breathe such crude
perfection as divides by timelessness
that heartbeat)
mightily forgetting all
which will forget him(emptying our soul
of emptiness)priming at every pore
a deathless life with magic until peace
outthunders silence.
And(night climbs the air

our immune systems are simply amazing (except for mine because it has quit working)
an even better statement is that our bodies and our brains are built iwth with amazing ability to learn in response to a changing (even changing cultural) environment
so we have an immune system that is built to fight the flu and colds and polio and gangrene and stuff like flesh eating bacteria. But those things haven't always been around.
Our immune systems are also built to handle viruses that haven't yet evolved.
Because of evolution we're trained to think that our bodies will simply learn from the environment. There will be a new virus, our body will try to fight it, it will try something else, and osmething else, until it is successful. (or random mutations in a population will allow the progeny to carry the one right antibody)
but instead what happens is we have this whole repertoire of antibodies that in combination with each other can deal with just about anything.
Instead of evolving antibodies for new things what we evolved instead was a set of "molecular computations" (sort of like making the puzzle pieces so that there are discrete, varying ways for molecules to fit together) and when these molecular computations combine they can handle an infinite number of conditions than any single combination on its own. Our bodies then sort of prune these combinations down based on feedback from teh environment and get a few systems with an underlying common core.

But here's a cool quote that compares this process, of infinite possiblity and then pruning to music and aesthetics:

"our minds are endowed with universal computations for creating and judging art, music, and morally relevant actions. depending on where we are born, we will find atonal music pleasing or disgusting, and infanticide obligatory or abhorrent. the common or universal core is, for music, a set of rules for combining together notes to alter our emotions, and for morality, a different set of rules for combining the causes and consequences of action to alter our permissibility judgements.
There is not only cultural variation but environmental variation over evolutionary time. What may be good for us today may not be good for us tomorrow."

"yeah but it's based on an idea of mine"


do you know who ray kurzweil is?
he's a guy that figured out how to make really cool keyboards, and he is also one of the world's leading authorities on Artificial intelligence (which sci fi has totally contorted).
his book "the age of spiritual machines" is one of the most important books i've ever read (i started highlighting it and realized i highlighted over 3/4 of the passages).
so the guy is really into developing artificial intelligence (it's already been created)
this is for ray:

"brains cannot become minds without bodies, that two-way interactions between mind and body are crucial to thought and health, and the brain may partly think in terms of the motor actions it encodes for the body's muscles to carry out.

We've probable fallen for disembodied brains because of the academic tendency to worship abstract thought. If we take a more democratic view of the whole brain we'd find far more of it being used for planning and controlling movement than for cogitation. Sports writers get it right when they describe stars of football or baseball as "geniuses"! Their genius requires massive brain power and a superb body, which is perhaps one better than Einstein."

Interactions between mind and body come out strongly in the surprising links between status and health. For Marmot, the answer lies in "the impact over how much control you have over life circumstances". The important message is that state of mind — perceived status — translates into state of body.

The effect of placebos on health delivers a similar message. Trust and belief are often seen as negative in science and the placebo effect is dismissed as a kind of "fraud" because it relies on the belief of the patient. But the real wonder is that faith can work. Placebos can stimulate the release of pain-relieving endorphins and affect neuronal firing rates in people with Parkinson's disease.

Body and mind interact too in the most intimate feelings of love and bonding. Those interactions have been best explored in voles where two hormones, oxytocin and vasopressin, are critical. The hormones are released as a result of the "the extended tactile pleasures of mating", as researchers describe it, and hit pleasure centres in the brain which essentially "addict" sexual partners to one another.

Humans are surely more cerebral. But brain scans of people in love show heightened activity where there are lots of oxytocin and vasopressin receptors.


If bodies and their interaction with brain and planning for action in the world are so central to human kinds of mind, where does that leave the chances of creating an intelligent "disembodied mind" inside a computer? Perhaps the Turing test will be harder than we think. We may build computers that understand language but which cannot say anything meaningful, at least until we can give them "extended tactile experiences". To put it another way, computers may not be able to make sense until they can have sex."

****************this quote is from alun anderson, taken from the website "the world question center" which is AMAZING!!! this is from the 2006 question: what's your dangerous idea? all the coolest people in the world answered.

"Most eras have distinct 'ways of seeing' that end up defining the period in retrospect: the fixed perspective of Renaissance art, the scattered collages of Cubism, the rapid-fire cuts introduced by MTV and the channel-surfing of the 80's. Our own defining view is what you might call the long zoom: the satellites tracking in on license-plate numbers in the spy movies; the google maps in which a few clicks take you from a view of an entire region to the roof of your house; the opening shot in Fight club that pulls out from Edward Norton's synapses all the way to his quivering face as he staares into the muzzle of a revolver; the fractal geometry of chaos theory in which each new scale reveals endless complexity. And this is not just a way of seeing but also a way of thinking: moving conceptually from the scale of DNA to the scale of personality all the way up to social movements and politics-and back again.
It is, by any measure, a difficult way of thinking, in part because our brains did not evolve tools to perceive or intuitively understand the scales of microbes or of galaxies. You can catch glimpses of the long zoom in special-effects sequences, but to understand the connections between those different scales, to understand our place in the universe of the very large and very small, you have to take it another way in."

[From "the long zoom" by steven johnson on page 50 of the new york times magazine of october 8, 2006 about elephants!! and how we are driving them crazy. it's about this new game that the guy who made Sim City is doing, and steven johnson believes it will help us conceptualize 'the long zoom'. the caption under the title reads: In an age of microscopic technologies and sweeping Google-earth panoramas Will Wright, the world's most successful video-game inventor, has set out to create the game (or is it the art form?) that will teach us how to really see.]

I've never been to Iceland but it's the same temperature there today as it is in Beloit.
It's 86 degrees in Costa Rica.
70 degrees in Orlando
61 degrees in Tucson
50 degrees in New York City
40 degrees and rainy in Juneau, Alaska

It's 45 and sunny right now!! (but i'm still wearing my snow suit)

I'm still not a fan of the midwest, but i gotta say i love some of its urban areas. I'm in minneapolis right now at a conference with my mom and the city is totally not what i expected-and i've seen every single episode of the mary tyler moore show.

I just read this really neat article called "The Arithmetics of Mutual Help" about how cooperation is the new evolution. It's ridiculously amazing, but lengthy, so hopefully i'll do it justice with my summary: So natural selection endorses individual advancements for the success of a species, individuals are sort of in competition with each other. The mechanism of cooperation is seemingly at odds with individual success because it benefits others at the expense of one's own progeny. But scientists have been investigating cooperative behavior in humans and in other animals (all the way down to microbes, and even cooler--single molecules!!) and found that cooperation happens at every level of life, and has been since its inception!!
The question is: why would anyone share a common good rather than cheat others? Social experiments have proven (when they study resources in prison--it's a famous experiment) that one takes more when they cheat others, but does so at a higher risk. The probability of walking away with the benefits is smaller (kinda like stealing).
Animals often appear to cooperate despite the lack of advantage to the donating species. Squirrels give warning to other neighboring squirrels in the presence of a predator, Scrub jays help strangers build nests, and sterile honey bees working at the nest are just a few examples. In many cases, biologists just attributed it to close kinship structures-the animals must have been related, even if distantly. After all, in a family a good deed is just a good deed, while outside a family, a good deed has to be returned to be paid off.
Scientists found that when we humans do good deeds we think about it long term. We are more altruistic with people in our own community, with people we recognize, meet repeatedly, and with those who we remember our last encounters with. In many smaller organisms, the lifespan is short or unpredictable and there is little evolutionary pressure to make the long term investment of a good deed.
The people who wrote this article believe that cooperative behavior is just imbedded in all species' DNA and they more or less imply that it arises from behavior on the molecular level-which is pretty fucking sweet.
"Prebiotic evolution, many researchers believe, may have taken place on surfaces rather than in well-stirred solutions. Catalyzing the replication of a molecule constitutes a form of mutual help; hence, a chain of catalysts, with each link feeding back on itself, would be the earliest instance of mutual aid.
Cooperative chemical reactions would have been vulnerable to ‘cheating’ molecular mutants that took more catalytic aid than they gave. Such difficulties were thought to undercut many ideas about prebiotic evolution based on cooperative chains. But researchers recently demonstrated with computer simulations that self-generated spatial structures akin to those we devised can hamper the spread of destructive parasitic molecules."