Naturally-occurring paradox

Recently I was surfing the 'net when I was distracted by this loud bass from someone playing music in my apartment building, not an unusual occurrence. After a moment I realized it was one of my songs, from the 24-hour album, which my friends upstairs were playing. It was "I Would Be Disturbed If It Weren't So Funky." I was a little disappointed that they were playing that song as it was one of the thrown-together time-filling jams towards the end of the album. I mean, it came out well for a thrown-together time-filling jam, but still. I was thinking that they probably chose to play that song because of the attention-getting title, and they would be disappointed when the song failed to be as interesting as the title. The title was really too good for the song; it would be more appropriate if the song had a title as humdrum as the song itself. But then, I thought, in a way the title's poor fit with the song makes the title as crappy as the song itself. So it's actually a good match for the song... but of course that means it's in fact not a crappy title after all. This is the first time I can recall coming across a paradox in real life as opposed to something that someone just made up. Is the title good or not? is a much more concrete question than whether some sentence that refers only to itself is true or not. Though I think the title paradox is more easily resolved than "This sentence is false."

On the other hand, I'm kind of feeling like the album title was a bad title for a good album... thus an even-worse title.

Goal

After the 24-hour album exercise I decided I want to start setting stronger goals for myself. My first goal is to finish as much as I can of the coddlefoe album I've been chipping away at (mostly home-recorded versions of the songs I do live, plus a few unfinished raps that I want to finish), get decent (not necessarily final) versions of each of the songs that will be on the album, and post it here in two weeks. If that goes well I might make a regular practice of setting goals and posting the results here.

It will be good to get that CD done... really it's been lingering around too long, I don't want it to go into next year. It could be a good way to help find audiences. I haven't been pushing myself on it to avoid jinxing the creative process but the 24-hour album showed that I can push myself and still have good results.

Something of which there is a googol

A future Facebook friend of mine posed this puzzle: "Name any material, physical, thing, of which there exist a googol." The "material" restriction excludes things like, e.g., 1/googol of a meter, or the number of different combinations of hydrogen molecules. He asserted there was nothing that existed in the quantity of a googol. Here's a possible (more interesting than satisfactory) answer.

Let f(t) be the highest number someone could reasonably give at time t to answer the question "What is the largest number of any object in the universe?"

The function f I guess has been increasing over the last couple centuries as scientists have probed deeper into the microstructure and macrostructure of the universe. If you assume it will continue with the same trajectory in the future, you can plot when it will hit a googol. So there are a googol of whatever particle scientists will have discovered at that time. You could challenge this as not being a "material, physical" object as it hasn't been discovered yet, but it is nevertheless an actual existing entity in the world now. We only need better futurology to predict its discovery with greater certainty. If you have a futurology that confidently predicts a discovery, is not the discovery as good as made? How about a futurology that is only good enough to discover the discoveries of future futurologists? If one continued this reasoning too far one might eventually get in a futurological panic analogous to the current financial panic (science research grinds to a halt as scientists re-examine all the particles and chemicals and biological processes they've been studying, disentangling the real things from discredited future projections; embarrassed science teachers announce that classes have been cancelled indefinitely) but surely any good futurology would have already taken this issue into account, the way that a good statistician makes sure to take multiple comparisons into account.

I guess my brain's been warped by the books I've recently read: Stanislaw Lem's "The Futurological Congress" (science fiction, enthusiastically recommended) and Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near" (putative science non-fiction, more cautiously recommended).

Album-A-Day, finished

I got it done within 24 hour limit! I got 3-4 hours of sleep (that's counted in the 24). So I'm somewhat affected by that now. I was really happy when it was done, after the intense effort I put in. The last song is called "Album Release Party" and it reflects my bouyant mood. I was really surprised by the quality of the results. Maybe I'm biased having been in the thick of it for the last day but a lot of it sounds very good to me. You can judge for yourself. My favorite track is "The Place Where the Hallucination Peaks", it's transcendent (at least to my sleep-deprived brain). Kazoo glissandi, who knew? "The Place Where I Start Hallucinating" and "Joke's On You, Now Could You Lend Me Fifty Dollars Man?" are teeth-grindingly catchy pop songs, and "King of Kazoos" and "Granny Can Still Lindy-Hop" are nice-sounding instrumentals, the former pretty, the latter bouncy and experimental. Those are the best, but the rest aren't bad either.

The songs are ordered in the order that I wrote / recorded them. With the last few I was running out of time and so they're much more thrown together, but still they have some value. For most of the songs I would sort of keep developing them until I got tired of them or the creative part of my brain got tired, and at that point I would start figuring out how to wind it up; for this reason they may sound a bit abortive. One of the songs ("Lots of Fun") has the lyrics, "Going to sleep now / See you next week now" -- this was the last thing I finished last night before I decided I wasn't going to stay up all night.

That was all I was doing and thinking about for the last 24 hours. It felt like ages. I still feel giddy that I accomplished it. It's pretty remarkable that I did it considering how slowly I usually progress with my music. It really helps when you don't have to worry too much about the results because it's not a "serious" project. Besides working faster, I also tried a lot of experimental ideas that I would be less likely to try normally, with good results.

When I was done I couldn't think of a title until several hours later. It was hard to sum up the range of styles and emotions in a single title. I came up with "I Was Able To Find Something Beautiful". I wanted a name that would do justice to the significance the album has to me, and how I felt on listening to it. Maybe the title's too sentimental or weighty... whatever, I had to come up with something. I don't like being flip all the time anyway. Argh, I hope I don't regret the title later.

Here's the link! http://www.archive.org/details/IWasAbleToFindSomethingBeautiful

Album-A-Day

I was using StumbleUpon (basically, jumping to cool websites at random, for those who aren't familiar) and I hit a site for something called Album-A-Day. To make an Album-A-Day, you have to write and record the entire thing within a 24 hour period; you can't use any material written before. The album is supposed to total at least 20 minutes or at least 30 songs. It's not a contest or anything, just an exercise to spur creativity, and you can post it to their website when you're done. It's preferred to do the entire thing in one contiguous period without sleep but I don't think that's worth it to me. I did start it though... when I read it, I thought for a few minutes and then went for it. Randomly stumble on a site and there goes your next 24 hours. I'll post the final product tomorrow. So far it's surprisingly good. I was just listening back to one of the songs and was like, "Damn, that's catchy"... now I have the radio on to get the fucking thing out of my head. It's really fucking catchy. The last song I did tonight, I just wanted to get out of it as soon as possible, figure out a way to end it. Started writing lyrics like "I'm going to sleep now... see you next week now...." I got pretty worn down.

So tonight starting from 6 PM I recorded six songs totalling 7.4 minutes. So I'm over a third of the way there. Looks like I'm going to have to start speeding up a bit. Unfortunate... I anticipate the remainder won't have as many sublimely catchy moments as the first part.

Ok time for bed or at least a rest.

NASCO show

Saturday night I played at a party at Black Elk co-op in Ann Arbor. The party was for the annual NASCO conference (North American Students of Cooperation), so there were people from all over the country in attendance. I think it was the best show I've played so far (out of six). I felt like I had a small breakthrough in terms of not being nervous or inhibited. I was still quite nervous before the show, but it didn't affect me during the show. My friend Kiwi also said that I performed better, with more confidence, than in previous shows. This was all very encouraging. Especially the pleased looks on some people's faces... it reminds me of the look on my housemate's face after a particularly thrilling ride when we went to Cedar Point. This is definitely what I was there to do. One guy told me that since he saw me perform, he understood how Jesse Jackson felt at Obama's victory speech.

There's definitely still room for improvement. I was pretty winded after just three songs and was thinking how in the hell was I going to get through the rest of the show. So the second half of the show ended up being more subdued than the first half, and the Crazy Man Dance wasn't quite as crazy as I would like. (Though it was fun charging into the audience; some girls looked pretty scared. Everyone had been standing around watching at a polite distance, like it was a stroll through the zoo... I just thought, Fuck this...) So, I've started jogging every day and I'm going to start going faster and farther than I used to. I'm in pretty good shape already, but not nearly enough to be able to give my all to each of 13 songs including the Crazy Man. As usual I was totally spent afterwards and feel like I've been recuperating for the past two days.

Before the show there was a problem where I tried to insert cables into my foot button board and rather than connecting with the ports, the ports just bent back into the frame until I couldn't reach them. I had to find a screwdriver in the house and open the thing up so I could hold the ports from the inside while I connected the cables to them. It's really not a good thing to be taking apart your equipment right before the show is supposed to start... it kind of put me on edge. Then when I put the button board in place under the keyboard and went to connect the other ends of the cables to the keyboard and the PC, I discovered that both ends of the same cable were connected to the two ports. So I had to open it back up, switch cables, put it back in place... and then I discovered that I plugged both ends of a different cable in the ports, same mistake again. I don't know how I managed that. I didn't take the time to screw the lid back on, I just put it on the floor and hoped nothing would get jostled out of place. It worked ok thankfully. I had a scare when in the middle of one song the buttons stopped working and I had to stop the song, but it was a completely routine fuckup for one of my shows -- just a matter of having selected (with the mouse) the wrong thing for the buttons to trigger. It's so easy to make mistakes like that... so far I think I've had only one show of the six where none of the songs got interrupted. (The Linder show last week was almost without interruptions; there was just one song where it was close to the end, I was about to play the final solo, and bang, the mic fell on the computer keyboard and the music stopped. Nice dramatic finish.) I figure the glitches are just part of the fun.

Unfortunately I didn't make contacts for future shows outside Michigan as I had hoped -- again I need to figure out how to promote myself more -- except for one girl from Austin who said I should come to the South by Southwest music festival there in March... this seems like it could be an interesting thing to do.

Later that night, the Ann Arbor band Canada played. They were surprisingly good ("surprisingly" because I'm predisposed to hate contemporary indie-rockers). The best thing about them were their strong rhythm section. They reminded me a lot of the band Mice Parade.

Halloween and a show

For Halloween I dressed as a "potato-enhanced human". I duct-taped four potatoes to my back and wired them to each other and to my fingertips, scalp electrodes, "virtual reality" sunglasses, and earbuds. The flux capacitor on my back was the idea of my friend Dave who helped wire me up, the idea being that I traveled here from the distant potato-future.Dave went as Ash from Evil Dead/Army of Darkness, he of the chainsaw-hand. I actually went with Sarah to pick up the chainsaw a week earlier.

Dave's girlfriend Sarah went as swan-dress Bjork (sewn by herself... she's really good).

You can make up your own story for what my costume is exactly... Primarily I was thinking that I was augmenting my senses with the powerful potato senses, but there's additional possibilities. Mainly I was just going for a combination of creepy and absurd... people have probably noticed that I like that combination.

In honor of my costume, I'm posting the song "I'm A Potato" by Devo [download]. Potato-humanity was a recurring theme in Devo's music, though the relationship to my costume is mostly coincidental.

We went out to a dance party at the MOCAD and then to the Old Miami where a punk band, Circus Boy, was playing. I really enjoyed their set (though the strength of the Old Miami's cocktails had a good deal to do with that). They were these old punk veterans in their 40s and 50s, just kicking out the jams, sans bullshit. I did a lot of hollering and dancing around.

Throughout the night I got a lot of questions about my costume and a few requests for photos. It was nice. Especially the girls who felt up my potatoes.

Luckily the potatoes were still edible after the night was over. Even more luckily, I had homemade chili and cheddar cheese in the fridge.

Saturday night I played a little party at Linder co-op in Ann Arbor. It went well, people were cheering and bobbing their heads and dancing a lot, and afterwards I got a lot of enthusiastic compliments. One guy in the audience DJs on WCBN (U-M college radio) and wants me to play on his radio show.

I was painfully nervous before the show, though it was considerably better than my first show. During the show I decided to ignore the audience most of the time and just play for myself... it felt better that way, compared to previous shows where I was too caught up in the effort of putting on the show which detracted from me feeling the music. It's funny, before I started actually doing this, when I would picture it it seemed so easy. I mean, obviously I had endless reserves of emotion and nervous energy, I just had to do what came naturally, right? I didn't think about how nervousness and self-doubt could dampen my enthusiasm, or how the moods when one is fired up and feeling like a rock star don't necessarily correspond to the times when one has to play. So in fact it's not easy; it's a challenge -- which makes it more worthwhile, nontrivial. The main reason I applied to grad school was that I felt I needed a challenge. Anyway I still haven't put on a show that I'm 100% satisfied with, but it's improving.