John's Blog: April 2003

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Favorite Music

Tuesday, April 29, 2003
Update, Oct 2007: To view my most up-to-date listening, check out my Pandora.com profile.

This is one part of a two-part series, the other being Favorite Authors. I was going to have them both on a single page, but it got too wordy. I wouldn't even have bothered, since it seems sort of an egotistical exercise anyway, except that I do enjoy sometimes finding interests I have in common with others who list them in this way, so therefore I present them to you. Please feel free to leave comments below if you feel so moved, I'm always willing to talk at length about any of the topics on this page (Or any of the other pages in this section, for that matter).

The first group I ever became a real "groupie" of was Rush, in high school in the early-1980s. This band has had several distinct phases since it's founding in the late '60s. I am most partial to what I call their "middle period", which I define as from 2112 up through Moving Pictures. This period, in my opinion, is the most musically interesting, experimenting with odd time meters, extended tracks with non-standard structure, and great solos. Prior to that period is very Led Zepplin-influenced heavy metal, which is not my favorite genre, and after it, they tended to settle more into the standard 3-4 minute verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus style of song, which I always find monotonous (even when they do it).

A few remarks about some particular songs:

In college, I paid a lot of attention to art rock bands from the '70s and early '80s: Yes; Emerson, Lake, and Palmer; Jethro Tull; and Kansas. As a pianist myself, I truly enjoy listening to Keith Emerson play, even though some of ELP's music as a whole can be a bit egotistical. (Some have said masturbatory.) Some of my favorite pieces of sheet music are transcriptions of ELP's Trilogy album, which I sometimes flatter myself into thinking that I can sort of play. Must-listen Kansas songs include "Miracles Out of Nowhere", "Journey from Mariabronn", "Song for America", and "The Spider", a frenetic instrumental that doesn't stay in the same time signature for more than 2 measures at a time, mostly involving odd numbers, which I can't even begin to imagine composing. (Possibly an altered state of consciousness was involved? JUST A CONJECTURE...)

Of course, there is also jazz. I think I can say in this category that my all-time favorite is Dave Brubeck (a pianist, of course), although of course he's not so current as he was, being in his 80's now. But I did hear him perform live just a few years ago, and he was truly amazing -- he's still got it. Other jazz pianists that have caught my ear are McCoy Tyner, Laszlo Gardony, Keith Jarrett, Sir Roland Hanna, and Marcus Roberts. Non-pianists would include any of the Marsaleses, especially Wynton.

I would also put Bela Fleck in the jazz category, probably the world's premier jazz banjo player. Although most people have thought of the banjo as strictly a bluegrass instrument for the last 50 years, he correctly points out that banjo was integral to early New Orleans-style jazz, which, granted, is not the same jazz as exists today. I do have to admit, however, that I liked the group even more than I do now back when Howard Levy was with them. He is a great keyboardist *and* an amazing harmonica player. Also an all-around interesting person, from what I see on his website. I saw him live in Chicago once, in a little club where I could actually go and talk to him on break. It was great.

There's no other way to describe They Might Be Giants than Just Plain Weird. Weird lyrics. Weird music. Weird. But strangely catchy and hum-able. If I get started quoting lyrics, I won't be able to stop, so I won't start. I'll just send you to this great link, which also includes chords, some midi, and listener attempts at interpretations.

One thing I like best about TMBG is they have a real talent for writing the darkest lyrics to really catchy upbeat music, which is a very humorous effect. Listen, for example, to "Dead" from Flood, or "Turn Around" from Apollo 18, or "Where Your Eyes Don't Go" from Lincoln. Also, what other band do you know of that makes such frequent use of accordian *and* baritone sax, and sometimes breaks into polka? Or makes a song out of Pavlov's salivating dog experiment ("Dinner Bell", Apollo 18), or a string of wordplay on how an young child in America in the 1960's would mis-remember current events of the time ("Purple Toupee", Lincoln)?

I really want to learn to play the accordian and form a They Might Be Giants cover band. It would be called "They Might Be TMBG".

I first heard Brian Woodbury's song "The Oranges" on Peter Schickele's Public Radio International show Schickele Mix, and I immediately loved it, but was unable to find it until it was recently re-released by Fang Records. From the CD Brian Woodbury and His Popular Music Group, "The Oranges" combines catchy piano work with (later in the song) a trombone and violin to create a sound reminiscent of both early Chicago (the brass) and also Kansas (the violin). "The Oranges" is meant to be the opposite of "the blues" (get it - orange and blue are are opposite colors?), and the song succeeds in being totally and completey happy without being syrup-y or Pollyana-ish. It's currenty my wife's and my favorite song. Two of the other songs also happen to feature the guys from TMBG.

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Favorite Authors

This is one part of a two-part series, the other being Favorite Music. I was going to have them both on a single page, but it got too wordy. I don't generally have a single "favorite" anything. Some things seem too trivial to decide what is my favorite, such as colors. (Of course, I'm not a visual artist either.) With others, such as musical groups or authors, I find that I can't truly rate the ones on my short list relative to the others, because they are all good, but in different ways. So these two pages are mainly autobiographical, with the general favorites presented chronologically rather than ranked.

(I also recently added a seperate blurb about my favorite text editor.)

I've always liked reading, even if I didn't really like English class that much throughout most of my schooling, being more a math and science geek academically. My earliest favorites, circa junior high school, were Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. The ones I remember liking the very most were Red Planet and Tunnel in the Sky. The latter was probably one of my earliest stimulations to thinking in sociological terms, as it concerns a group of young adults stranded on an unfamiliar planet and having to not only band together for survival, but also build up their own civil government and social customs from scratch as the years go by without rescue.

A similar sociological and historical exploration may be found in Robert L. Forward's Dragon's Egg, in which he traces the development of a civilization among sentient beings who have evolved on the surface of a neutron star, and the history of contact between them and we Earthlings.

Just to show you what a math geek I was, I also read a non-fiction book by Asimov around this time (~1980) on using a slide rule, and bought one, although they were already pretty much obsolete by then. I was just curious. I never actually used it.

My liking of academic reading increased quite a bit senior year of high school, when I was in a smaller class that was configured as a discussion circle that included the teacher rather than the teacher facing the students and lecturing. The class also required individual outside reading of books. This was when I really took to John Steinbeck, first reading The Grapes of Wrath, then, liking that so much, East of Eden, which I liked even better. Grapes of Wrath was an early influence on my concern with oppression and social justice, which became more developed during college. Steinbeck in general probably helped me move away from my previously narrow literary interests of science fiction and fantasy.

Speaking of which, it was also around this time that I first read J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy (that doesn't really need a link, does it?), which I have re-read several times since. I've also started The Silmarillion about 5 times, never once having been able to finish it. I'd love to hear from anyone who has, as I don't think I've ever met such a person. :-) (J.R.R. himself never actually finished writing it anyway, so maybe we can blame his son, who compiled it from his father's notes, for the dense and difficult prose style.)

[Update, 2/4/04: I just met someone who has finished The Silmarillian. He is 13 years old. He admits that it was pretty confusing the first time, and even sort of confusing the second or third times, but that "after that, it got easier". More patience than I...]

As an adult, I discovered John Irving, my favorite books of whose include The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. If I absolutely HAD to pick an all-time favorite book, it might be that last one. Irving's books are way too complicated to summarize, so I won't even try. The Amazon.com reviews at the pages I've linked to can do that for you.

In case you are a film buff (which I am not), I'll mention that I really liked the film version of Cider House, probably because Irving wrote the screenplay himself. He most emphatically did NOT write the screenplay for Simon Burch, based (very loosely!) on Owen Meany, and I personally advise you to stay away from it! (Specifically, I thought the speakover technique was extremely cliched, and the pacing felt like they tried to stay relatively close to the book until they realized it would take too long, at which point they tacked on a horribly sacharine made-for-TV ending that had nothing whatsover to do with the book and called it finished. Very disappointing.)

Another little thing I like about Irving is his tenacious insistance on the continuing relevancy of the semicolon, although it has long since ceased to be fashionable among most modern writers.

Most recently, I really liked Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, and was inspired to also read Pigs in Heaven and Prodigal Summer. Many reviewers seem to fault Kingsolver for how overtly she inserts her politics into her books, and maybe I would agree with that from a literary standpoint, but I also happen to agree with most of her politics, so at least I admire her for making her points better than I could. I think that she is a pretty good writer whose concern for some of the issues she writes about is admirable and necessary.

[Update, 6/16/04: I'm growing fond of Richard Russo, a Maine author who won the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls (soon to be an HBO movie). I'm currently reading an earlier book of his, Straight Man. The writing reminds me greatly of Irving, and in fact, among quotes on the back cover, one compares him to Irving, and the other is from Irving himself!]



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My Favorite Text Editor

This is a blatant ad for UltraEdit, one of the best (English) text and code editors in the world. This comes as close as I've seen to a one-size-fits-all editor for many different (computer) languages. I figure why learn a half-dozen different IDE's when you can use the same familiar editor for all of them? Plus, some IDE's which are written specially for a particular language cover up too many details, or clutter up your directory with temporary or configuration files. Ultraedit is like Notepad on steroids -- no hidden details, just the text, but with plenty of cool features:


These are just the ones I am familiar with. It also has project file capability and a lot of other things.

Now, I know there are a lot of other geek types who swear by emacs, or even (shudder) vi, and that's fine. I recognize that emacs, backed up by a complete programming language, is more customizable than UltraEdit could ever be. But I don't really need all that functionality (that I've been convinced of so far), and the learning curve, to me, is steeper. Emacs might be a "better" editor in terms of versatility, but UltraEdit is more accessible. I see it as the difference between modern academic "classical" music and jazz. Both quality, and the former often backed up with more official credentials, but the latter is often more accessible to the general public.

This essay was written in UltraEdit, on a Dvorak keyboard.



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On Ethnic Tensions

Friday, April 25, 2003

In his 'blog essay "Feeling Lucky", Tim Bray discusses the fortuitous lack of ethnic tensions in Vancouver, despite the many cultures in evidence, and ventures some theories on why this may be so so. I felt I had some additional comments on why this might be so, or, more accurately, why it might not be so in other places.

I'll start by making the somewhat obvious conjecture that it will be easier for immigrant groups to integrate into a new culture if it was their choice to be there in the first place. Not that leaving the old country would have been their first choice in an ideal world, but nonetheless it was their choice (or that of their forebears) to "escape" to what they hoped would be a better life elsewhere.

On the other side of the coin, as an American, I think that two of the groups that have had the hardest time integrating into my country over many generations are precisely the groups that historically did not join the culture by choice: Descendents of African slaves brought here forceably, and descendents of the native peoples who were here first but were by-and-large forceably integrated, displaced, or eliminated. It's hard to put this into words, especially since it is not my personal experience as a 4th generation or so English/German mix, but it seems to me that the effects in these ethnic groups of this profoundly negative introduction to what has become our dominant North American culture still linger even down to the current generation. In some cases, this can take the form of continued hopelessness, cynicism, and lack of self-esteem. In any case, it's very subtle and I can't explain it too much more than this.

These groups, more than most others, I think, have had historically to form their own subcultures, and keep more to themselves, as a method of self-defense. This is more than just establishing an Irish-American club, or living in a "Little Italy" or "Little China". It has been harder, because of historical circumstance, for these groups to trust the dominant culture, hence to understand it or get along with it, much less try hard to integrate with it. And as a "white American", I can attest that it is harder for me to know how to approach American blacks and Native Americans than, say, the 2nd-generation Irish-American kid who lived down the street from me growing up. (Note: the right answer is "no differently", but intellectually knowing that does not guarentee that I can do it socially.) I know that we really have more shared experience than not, but the lack of interaction (on all of our parts) tends to only foster uncertainty and hesitation, not to mention distrust, ignorance, and even hatred among the more paranoid and scape-goating among us.

It must be said that if it sounds like I am placing all the blame on those groups for "not interacting more", that is not my intention at all. Real reasons for suspicion of the dominant culture are well-documented, from the post-reconstruction Ku Klux Klan, to real-estate "redlining" in the mid-20th century, to land grabs, to current racist groups. Bottom line, I think, is that historical difficulty in getting along is not easy to overcome. Conflict feeds negative energy all around, which lead to more conflict, in a vicious cycle.

An historical footnote: We don't hear much positive stuff in America about historical relations with our indigineous peoples, but I've been doing some interesting reading lately on pre-Revolution America and its relation with the Iroquois confederacy. When Euro-Americans numbered less than a million, and had penetrated less than a few hundred miles inland from the East Coast, relations with the Native Americans were (wisely) very friendly. They helped us defeat the French is the mid-18th century, and not only taught us a lot about survival in the New World, but also very much influenced the Founding Fathers with their system of government.

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The Iraq War: Pro and Con

Wednesday, April 09, 2003
I have generally been against this war, for a variety of reasons, to the point of standing in a vigil with a local peace group every Wednesday over my lunch hour. Unlike many peoples' stereotype of an anti-war protester, however, I do grant the complexity of the issue, and that there may be good reasons to do it. In the company of my fellow "peaceniks", my spirit would like to be against all war, but my head is not yet convinced.

Much of my opposition to this particular war, I think, is a combination of concern for the long-term effects in our relations to the rest of the world, as well as a suspicion of the motives of many of those who are pushing for the war. Bush may (!) believe that it is purely good against evil, and it is all about removing Saddam from power just because he (Saddam) is a horrible person (which he is), but I doubt that everyone around him has these same motives, and it would be naive to think that that is the only reason we are doing it. Even his motive is suspect, as it is never good to presume that your side is all good and incapable of sin. Pride is one of the Roman Catholic church's major sins, isn't it? And there's the proverb about pride going before a fall.

I could go on, but for now, I'll enumerate some costs and benefits that I'm thinking about as the war seems to be winding down, which I'll probably make into the sign to hold at today's vigil. The sign will be entitled "SCORECARD".













Benefits
Costs


  • Saddam is gone (but where?)

  • Thousands of Iraqis love us (so far)

  • 1200+ civilians killed

  • 5000+ civilians injured (Source: CNN.com, page since removed)

  • Significant danger of political chaos and humanitarian crisis

  • Hundreds of thousands around the world hate us

  • God/Allah knows how many more al-Quaida recruits

  • Undermining (further) of U.N. credibility

  • 120+ Coalition casualties

  • $100+ billion US taxpayer money


Worth it? What do you think?

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Dvorak: An Alternate Keyboard

Monday, April 07, 2003

For the last 3 years, I have been using the Dvorak keyboard layout, an alternative to the standard "QWERTY" layout. The Dvorak layout was named after its inventor, August Dvorak, and usually pronounced as the Americanized "duh-VOR-ak" (unlike the European composer Antonin "duh-VOR-zhok", although they were cousins). I had been hearing about the Dvorak layout for years, and that it was rumored to be faster and easier than QWERTY (named after the first 6 letters on the top row), so finally a few years ago, when I stumbled upon a Dvorak touch-typing practice site, I decided to give it a try. Save for the occasional times when switching to Dvorak is impractical, such as on someone else's machine, I am now a regular user.

I have touch-typed ever since a summer typing course in high school, which I like to call "the most useful computer course I ever took" -- you hunt-and-peck programmers out there know what I mean. Learning Dvorak pretty much requires touch-typing, since you're probably learning on a QWERTY-labelled keyboard, so you can't look at the keys. So you're basically re-learning touch typing. The way it works with a normal QWERTY computer keybrd is you use some special software (usually provided with the operating system) to remap the keys to the Dvorak system, despite their physical labels. (You can learn the details about that for your operating system here. [Update, 12/29/03: That older page does not include Windows XP, so here are instructions for that.]) Interestingly, learning to touch-type Dvorak took away my ability to touch-type QWERTY for a while, and even now, I have to hunt-and-peck going back to QWERTY at first. However, I am still faster at it than your average non-touch-typist, and if I do it for very long, the QWERTY touch-typing will come back temporarily. A learning theorist could probably explain how the mind does this.

You can also buy an actual Dvorak keyboard. This company's models have a QWERTY/Dvorak toggle right on the keyboard, and the keys are labelled with both layouts, Dvorak in a bigger font, and QWERTY in a smaller font in the corner of each key. These features theoretically make the keyboard usable by people with either preference, although I have found in practice that unless you are a touch-typing QWERTY'ist, you will have trouble hunting-and-pecking looking at the smaller QWERTY letters. (My co-workers hate to have to type on my computer, even when I turn Dvorak off. It's pretty good security, especially combined with a left-handed mouse!)

Although Dvorak is still known mostly for its claims to increased speed, those claims are now held by many to be exaggerated at best. However, what is in less dispute is the ergonomic benefits -- your fingers move less. Indeed, one of the reasons I switched and stay switched is my concern, as someone who types 40 hours a week, about repetitive strain injuries. Here are some interesting facts from Jared Diamond's page, The Curse of QWERTY:

One unexpected aspect of the QWERTY/Dvorak debate is that there seems to be a political dimension to it. The June 1996 issue of Reason magazine published an article (which looks to be taken from the April 1990 issue of the Journal of Law &amp Economics) which not only seeks to show that the standard "proof" of Dvorak's increased speed (studies conducted for the Navy in the 1930's by Dvorak himself) is biased, but that this is further evidence of the "liberal elite's" propensity to claim superiority for a beaucratically-conceived solution (read "socialism") over a pure market solution (read "capitalism"). At least that's my take on the point they're trying to make. You can also read rebuttals to that article here and here. All I know is, I like it better than QWERTY.



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