Categories
albums

My Favorite Albums

From time-to-time I used to review books [confusion.cc] on this site —or at least I used to give my opinion on my favorite reads, I never tried to review all the books I read. The last book I reviewed was back in 2020… and that was after almost a decade. It’s not that I stopped reading, or even reading books I think are worth posting a review about; it’s that my posting on Confusion dried up a lot during that decade. Since the pandemic started I have tried to ramp up my posting, with some success. But I only did a few book reviews. I need to get back to that, there are at least two amazing books I wanted to post about that I was just too lazy, and now it’s been years since I read them… But anyway, this post is about starting a new category of reviewing music, specifically albums that are part of my personal canon, albums I continue to go back to over and over again even long after they faded for the charts.

I think that my musical tastes are very diverse. Covering everything from classic rock, new wave, heavy metal, industrial, grunge and alternative to techno, trance, southern rap and various sub-genre of jazz. My tastes have shifted dramatically at different points in my life, so this will be a wild ride.

I wonder if my eclectic tastes are a result of being in high school during the height of the “alternative music” scene and rise of rap into the mainstream? In my memory the radio and MTV of that period played a wider range of music what I remember of earlier or later formats when a single genre dominated. Maybe I’m just biased, or more likely this was the time when I paid the most attention and was most impressionable. But in any case we listened to Soundgarden and Sarah Mclachlan, Garbage and Greenday, The Eagles and Everclear, Metallica and 10,000 Maniacs, Beastie Boys and Bjork. All on the same station. At the same time R&B and rap were in the middle of their meteoric rise, so we and changed stations and listened to Dr. Dre and Biggie, Tribe Called Quest and 2Pac. And at night we raved to euro dance, techno, Chicago house and early trance.

I’ve read that your musical tastes are set when you are in your early teens, due to the way our brains are evolving, but also that the nostalgia factor is high, that you listen to music which corresponds to specific times or events that you want to remember. I associate the diversity in my music taste to a bit later in my life, my late teens and early twenties but also to specific periods in my life, influenced by significant people, both friends and girlfriends.

Key musical eras and locations in my life often overlap, some periods lasted years, others a few months but all left a big impression on my tastes and library. The key “periods” and places include:

  • High School: my first few years at Albemarle High School coincided with the explosion of grunge and alternative. This is the period when I really got into music. I got a walkman and started buying music. Watching MTV on one TV, while playing Sega Genesis in the other room every morning at K████’s house while waiting for the bus to drive past and then running out to catch it on the way back. Later I got a portable CD player and spent so much of my junior and senior year with my headphones on I’m not sure how I managed to talk to my friends outside of class.
  • Automotive Freedom! After getting my drivers license and a job I spent countless hours driving the back roads of Albemarle county and, often, the surrounding counties. Driving around with M█ and listening to Tribe Called Quest, Pharcyde, Dre, and the Bone Thugs. I spent too much money to put a good stereo in my car, an Alpine CD player, at big amp and even bigger sub-woofers and mid-range speakers. I always had to remember to turn the music down when I got close to home to avoid the neighbors, or my dad, complaining about the noise. But driving down the highway with the windows down blasting music was the best feeling in the world after a long day of school or work.
  • Raves and Club 216: My senior year I got big into Techno and Raves. Traveling around with O███ to attend raves around Virginia and even further afield. Some of the first and most influential were in the basement of Club 216 in downtown Charlottesville. From here some of us eventually ended up going to Club 216. I was a regular there, even though 216 was the “gay club” in town and you had to be a card carrying member of the Piedmont Triangles Society and I’ve never been gay I credit my time spent there with helping to form my view of inclusivity. I mingled with openly gay and lesbian people and met many a drag queen all in the name of good dance music. Still other then the people I went with I didn’t tell anyone in high school that I went there, though later I met a number of people from high school there after we graduated and the music became more popular.
  • T█████, my first serious girlfriend after high school and a key influence in listening to heavy metal and hard rock, new and classic. Thrash metal and big hair 80’s metal. Also, reintroduced me to the The Cure and I’ve never kicked that habit. The breakup was bad, and I ended up with some of her music but she ended up with a lot of mine, some CDs that years later I would be like “hey, I should listen to that” only to find that I had an empty CD case or nothing at all though I know I owned that. I took until the streaming era to have access to some of that, and some of it I will never get back as they were bootlegs…
  • The Fish Store: working at the fish store for several years introduced me to a lot of music from before I really got into music because J███ was into music. He furnished the store with NHT speakers and an Adcom CD player and amp. We listened to the 80’s hiphop and bands and albums I’m not sure how he found: Cibo Mato and Soul Coughing. And lots of Ben Folds Five.
  • The Napster Era: I was in college in Northern Virginia when Napster broke the music industry. I am guilty of misusing the free university internet to download and share copious amounts of music for a while. Burning CD after CD of dance music from Europe; techno, trance, jungle, and anything I could get find. So many Essential Mix shows. Wish I still had them. I trashed most of my ill gotten music when I had a change of heart about piracy long ago. With the exception of live shows that were never released ;-)
  • London: When I went to study overseas I unhappy to start with, alone and lonely. I spent a lot of time wondering around a few used CD shops in Angel and Islington. Flipping through thousands of used CDs and listening to anything with a cool cover or from artists I knew. Just to past the time. Within a few months I had made friends and was out of my funk just in time for my girlfriend, in Germany, to dump me. So I spent a lot of time listening to darker music to match my mode. But by the end of my time in London I was also listening to more pop music as I was spending a lot of time in clubs and bars with my friends who were big into current pop/dance music to party to.

Those are the big ones. After returning to the US from London I started working and there has not been different eras punctuated by specific people or places. I continue to seek out new music, but it’s not associated with a specific person or place. Looking at that list, it all happened within a little more than a decade…

Many articles also say that we stop discovering new music after about 30. Which explains top 40 and classic rock radio. But I’m going to buck that trend too as several of the albums in my list I plan to cover were released long after I was past 30 and some of them by artists that I didn’t know or styles of music that were not really my thing. We’ll see.

I do feel it’s gotten harder to discovery music though serendipity, CD shops are not really a thing. Radio, at least in Singapore, is über formulaic and “safe”. I don’t have a group of friends that I get together with and listen to music. It’s funny that with steaming I have access to functionally infinite amount of music but I can’t find a good discovery mechanism.

I know my teenage daughter does a lot of music discovery via social media —YouTube and TikTok mostly, but I can’t get into it. I introduced my daughters to a lot of my music over the years in car rides home. Listening to The Cure, Rammstein, Pink Floyd, The Weeknd, P!nk, Linkin Park, Led Zeppelin, Outkast, DJ Shadow, Run The Jewels and many more. So, I hope they find and enjoy music for the rest of their lives. As Nietzsche said: without music, life would be a mistake. ‘Mistake’ seems a bit harsh, but life would be less full of wonder and beauty.

In any case I hope this is going to be wild ride.

Categories
quotes ranting

Feed the Algorithms…

You have no free speech — not because someone might ban your account, but because there’s a vast incentive structure in place that constantly channels your speech in certain directions. And unlike overt censorship, it’s not a policy that could ever be changed, but a pure function of the connectivity of the internet itself.

Sam Kriss, from The Internet is Made of Demons [damage.com], published on Damage

The Internet is Made of Demons is a fun article from a few weeks ago, published on Damage.com. It’s a roundabout review of The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, A Warning by E. H. Smith. The review starts with this argument that Social Media is brainwashing us all, like some Pavlovian demon conditioning us to salivate over likes, shares and retweets, training our thoughts and actions. We are all being trained by the demons of the internet to please the almighty algorithms. Everyone is a content creator, not a person talking to other people, but a person talking at other people to generate views and sell ads.

No doubt. We all want people to value our creations. To validate our existence, to inflate our self-esteem. Why else would anyone post things on the internet?

The internet exploded, in large part, while I was in college as a way to connect with people IRL, a tool to enhance social contact not replace it. Applications like ICQ, AIM and many more allowed us to communicate when we were apart. Free campus internet allowed us to leave the messenger running when we were away from the dorm, in an era largely before people had laptops or cellphones. Napster was a tool to download music to play in your dorm for your IRL friends. But over the past two decades the internet has not just crept into more and more aspects of our daily life, it has replaced them. And for too many people this has lead to less real social activity.

[The Internet] simulates the experience of being among people

I can relate to this. There are so many “friends” on my social media that I am not really in touch with —setting aside people who “friend” or “follow” every person they ever meet or hear about, I’m talking about people I know or, at least, knew. The fact that I see their posts, that I know what is going on in their life, or at least that part of their life that they choose to share; I know people get married, go on holiday, have kids. Or, maybe, I see their comments on things others have posted, and I know their politics or, preferably, their sense of humor. It feels like I am “in touch” with these people. But, I’m not, not really. I haven’t seen most of these people in years —or in decades— I have no real connection to them. Just a simulation of a connection. And this model of social media seems to be fading as it evolves from conversations to one-way self-advertisement.

Part of this, this feeling that I’m informed by not connected is that many, if not most, of the people on my social media live in other countries; the US, Japan, Sweden, England, Italy, Australia… I’m very bad about maintaining actual contact in real life, in IRL. I don’t call and I don’t even text or email people. I tied to get better at it, I set some reminders to reach out to a few people who live overseas… And I kept finding myself saying “I should call/text so-and-so today.” But always at the wrong time and I was too tired to do it or just forgot it later.

I can barely keep in contact with people who are physically nearby. My work colleagues or ex-work colleagues who live here in Singapore, we go out regularly when we are in the same company, but then when they leave it become more and more seldom… Some of these people are “friends-of-convenience,” meaning we would not naturally be friends outside of the shared experience of work… but others are people I think would be friends regardless of work —true friends. I was better at it during the height of the COVID lockdowns, I would randomly call groups of people for “virtual coffee” sessions to replace the in person coffee breaks at the office. I don’t even do that any more… I’m too lazy. Should start again.

I do have to admit that I have been able to use social media to create moments of serendipity that would not have happened without it: three times I have been in foreign countries for work or holiday and found out, via social media, that someone from my past was also there and we have been able to meet up. This would not have happened without social media.

But moving out, this sort of replacing IRL interaction with simulated online interaction is not the real point of the review. The review is more concerned that the form of “communication” we have through the internet is destroying our empathy, our humanity to each other:

As more and more of your social life takes place online, you’re training yourself to believe that other people are not really people, and you have no duty towards them whatsoever. 

The reviewer cites stats that younger, more internet native generations show reduced empathy when tested. I can’t agree or argue with this, I don’t have enough young or IRL friends to judge it. But I don’t disbelieve it.

From there the review goes a off the rails, talking about books on demonology and medieval cryptography. Seemingly to make a point that the internet is a natural evolution of our need to communicate widely with others across distance claiming “telecommunications” is as old as humanity. I told you it was fun. But I think the key points are those at the beginning about simulating social connection and causing us all to focus on feeding the algorithms rather than helping to deepen friendships.

Categories
quotes ranting

Life after Dobbs

In the day after the Dobbs ruling was formally published, POLITICO ran an article full of statements from various thinkers on the potential impact of Dobbs. POLITICO is a very left leaning site, but there are some quotes from pro-life people. The opinions range from bleak “there will be civil war” (from an opinion that reads as a hypothetical future paralleling the the next 10 years with the 10 years leading up to the US Civil War) to hopeful (opinions which to me sound extremely naïve, fairy tale ending, wishful thinking, in the afterglow of victory.)

What I fear most is that the rollback of Roe will confirm for younger Americans, those who don’t remember the ’60s or ’70s, that this meanness, small-mindedness and flat-out oppressiveness is what American politics is fundamentally all about — and that movements for collective good are on the fringe, a pipe dream. With this view they will not assume, as I did, that good change is a hard fight but in a democracy is inevitable. They won’t fundamentally see this country as a democracy. And that’s chilling.

Erin Aubry Kaplan

I can hardly remember a time when that was not the way of it. I expect everyone things “it used to be better” not really understanding how it was before they were old enough to remember but I do see the straight line from the 1990’s to today. Bob Dole and his Rush Limbaugh hypnotized legions.

Litmus tests overwhelm reason, and rage drowns out prudence.

Charles Sykes

That just sounds like the status quo. Single issue voting, pushed by single issue, money rich lobbying groups.

What happens when states such as Louisiana treat the decision to obtain an abortion as a criminal homicide. Like many other states, Louisiana allows a bystander to “use force or violence or to kill” if they “reasonably believe” it necessary to protect a person. Such “defense of others” provisions in criminal codes, on their face, would allow someone to use force — even deadly force — to stop a woman crossing state lines to secure an abortion. That is, it would be perfectly lawful to draw a firearm on a woman traveling outside the state to get medical care.

Aziz Huq

That’s from a law professor. And given that anti-abortion and pro-gun Venn diagram is just a circle… Totally plausible. Gives the lie to the “pro-life” label. They don’t care about life. They care about abortion, they have been whipped into a rabid frenzy by a fanatical few who’s focus is —was now— on overturning Roe. “Pro-life” would imply they would be fighting for other things, like abolition of the death penalty.

On the “pro-life” side. I have to admit I read their statements and I feel like “wow” these people are crazy… but they worked hard over decades and they got what they wanted. It’s more scary crazy than funny crazy.

Many of these young people can’t imagine a world in which abortion is illegal. But this disregard for human life and family has been a wrecking ball to our society. Easy access to abortion has fostered a culture of people who have lost respect for the dignity of their own lives and the lives of those around them.

Kristan Hawkins

This is the most self-propagandizing (that’s a word?) sounding one to me. Moving on, this one is less crazy sounding, more thought out and also a bit depressing. Basically arguing that the battle lines were drawn long ago and nothing will change just because the Supreme Court actually overturned Roe:

Abortion, like guns, has been at the center of our culture war debates for decades. The data suggest that voters who were going to be motivated by those issues — for or against — have already been voting and have already sorted themselves into their respective parties. It’s hard to see how a Supreme Court decision will change that’s

Sarah Isgur

And this guy just sounds delusional… I can’t imagine American’s learning to “talk to each other” about divergent political issues. My opinion of the average American is much to low, we have fallen too far, too many people bought into their own tribes political propaganda about the other side, about all-or-nothing positions.

[W]ithout Roe and Casey, over the next 10 years, the American people will be forced to talk to one another, reason together and learn that their political opponents are not enemies, but people of good will who are trying to care rightly for those they love.

O. Charter Snead

And Finally:

Abortion opponents will not be appeased until abortion is entirely eliminated from our country, and they will without a doubt force this onto the entire nation should they ever gain full control of all three chambers of government.

Robin Marty

That sounds about right, overturning Roe was always just one step. Now they need to get it outlawed everywhere, state-by-state if they can’t get a national ban. As several of the writes note, the next logical step is a “Fetal Personhood” ruling or amendment.

Categories
ranting

Roe, Roe, Roe your vote…

So it’s official. Roe is no more. The next phase of this long running culture war starts. There will be reams of analysis and plans and emails filled with both righteous indignation and celebratory zeal… and, of course, pleas to donate money to the fights to come.

The court is supposed to rule on constitutionality of things. But both sides of this fight know that this was pure politics. The result of years of political maneuvering, scheming and massive spending by a minority over years to win a verdict that does not reflect will of the American public. The fact is, most Americas wanted the status quo to remain the law of the land. Fivethrityeigtht [fivethirtyeight.com] has a good summary of where people actually stand, it’s a nuanced topic, as most things are but the headline is clear; a large majority of Americans wanted things to stay as they were. The will of the majority lost to the zeal of the minority. The tyranny of a minority restricting the rights of all. Why? How?

Two things that people should learn from this:

  1. The opinions of the majority matter little to those fighting the culture wars
  2. Long term planning and focus pays off

So many Americans believe in conspiracy theories; Q-anon, Lizard people, satan worshiping pedophiles, the illuminati and much more. The truly bazaar thing is that there is a clear cabal of shady types running the US right in front of us, no conspiracy theories required: lobbyist, PACs, special interests.

These groups rely on the fact that you and I are too busy putting food on the table, working for a that promotion, helping the kids with their homework, living our life. They are laser focused on their issue, full time.

These group, and the power they have have over politics, have destroyed democracy in America. Our government does not reflect what people actually think and want. They have learned to game the systems through the time and money they put into pursuing their chosen cause; their crusade, their jihad. They have corrupted the system.

The pro-gun and anti-abortion fanatics have pushed there agenda for so long, and they have become so effective at it, that they managed to shift laws away from the view of the majority and to the extremists. They turned congress into a waste of time, the presidency into a sad reality show and the courts into… something.

Their goals are not supported by a majority of Americas and yet they have been so effective for so long at crushing anyone who opposes them they have eliminated cooperation and compromise and left obstruction and intransigence in their place.

They succeed with long term planning and focus. Special interest groups holding extreme views are not unique to the conservative side of politics —the liberal side has it’s own extreme views that are only supported by small vocal minorities— but they have been at it longer and playing a long game. Anti-abortionists started the work to overturn Roe immediately after it became the law of the land. For most of the past 50 years. While of America thought of abortion as a settled issue, they planned, they maneuvered and they fought to get their way with single-minded focus. No doubt opportunistic politicians “used” the causes and their supporters to advance their careers, but in the end they were only thinking short term, the anti-abortionists were in it for the long term. They remember and they call in their favors.

The gun nuts perfected the art of political assassination, how appropriate. Taking out any politician who crossed them. Breeding spineless politicians who won’t stand up to them for fear of it ending their career in the next primary.

The anti-abortionists and the pro-gun cabals captured the politics, gaming the system of primaries and caucuses to push their extreme positions. My mobilizing their one-issue voters in the primaries, before the majority of people were even involved in an election, they shifted the whole field to the extremes. After the primaries the winners “pivot to the center” to win votes but they were still beholden, for re-election to the extremists, who watch and remember. Extremists on the left learned from this and have used the same tactic to push their party further from the center, but they lack the longevity of the conservatives.

The end result is we are all fucked, the long term planning and laser focus of the extremist minorities on the left and right have eviscerated American democracy. There is no more room for politics, no compromise or common ground. The parties have been pushed so far apart that they have become unable of governing.

The extremists have built an unassailable position; they have burned system down on their way to success. By gaming the system they have broken the system, we have fallen into their trap, electing politicians who are so far to the extremes that all they can do in Washington is scream insults back and forth across the aisles.

They destroyed congress, they destroyed the presidency and they have destroyed the supreme court.

I don’t see how we will fix the system from within the broken system. How do you ever overcome the gerrymandering, lobbying, career politicians, PACs, and the apathy? I’d say vote, but I can’t see how voting will fix it… the extremist will kill any candidates who want to work with the other side, it to big a risk to their agenda. Its a zero sum game that only leads to more and more extreme positions.

Categories
ranting

The Soylent Vats are Coming

It’s a headline right out of a near-furture dystopian sci-fi novel:

Worlds Largest Vats for Growing No Kill Meat to be Built in US

Using the word “vats” makes it sound distinctly unappetizing. Like they are trying to make it sound bad, to make it dystopian. But, as a non-religious vegetarian I see this as a good thing.

I don’t miss meat, I don’t crave it but there are things that you can’t make without meat that it would be nice to eat again, fake meat only goes so far. If we can make meat without the cruelty, without the environmental damage and all the other objectionable things that factory farming methods of raising livestock for food cause… then I’m all for it. My Hindu friends may disagree but I don’t think there would be any issue for me to eat this, being vegetarian for ethical and not religious reasons.

The company building the vats, Good Meat [goodmeat.co], has been selling it’s cultured chicken in Singapore since 2020. I have not tried it, as it has only been available at one restaurant. But I will try it when I can. The article also notes Good is building a new, bigger, reactor in Singapore to expand.

The quality of plant based meats has gotten so good in the past few years, with Beyond and Impossible that it will be interesting to see if cultured meat has a niche. Veggies or people looking for limit their “real meat” intake can use these plant based meats for burgers, sauces and much more, but you can’t make a stake, it only comes in a faux minced form. So maybe if Good Meat can make t-bones and fillets then they will have a market. We’ll see.

One day I’ll get around to trying the cultured meat. And according to the article, most of us will in our not to distant dystopian future where, I guess, only the rich will be able to afford real meat:

Most of the meat people eat in 2040 will not come from slaughtered animals [theguardian.com], according to a 2019 report from the consultancy Kearney that predicts 60% will be either grown in vats or replaced with plant-based alternatives.

Worlds Largest Vats for Growing No Kill Meat to be Built in US [theguardian.com] published by The Guardian.

One thing I do wonder is what this will lead to… If we can grow meats in a vat what types of vat-meat would there be a market for? Beef, chicken, pork for sure. Vat grown bacon will be a hit if it tastes like the “real” deal. Mutton and lamb? Or venison? What about fish and shellfish? Can they grow scallops and crab legs?

And how deep does the rabbit hole go? Can we grow things like whale and dolphin? More exotic? Bush meat? Gorillas and Chimpanzees? Rare and endangered species? And the ultimate: human meat?

I mean if no one is harmed (beyond a few cells taken from volunteers), what would be wrong with vat grown human meat? This will happen, people will go there and there will be controversy. But if there is no law against it there will be people who will do it. Volumes might be small, not many will demand to dine on humans, but that just means it will be expensive and exclusive. That is a truly dystopian thought, rich people sitting in exclusive restaurants, or even more exclusive closed door gatherings dining on vat gown human flesh. Maybe they will even pay to grow meat from specific people, celebrities. Soylent Green won’t be forced on the masses but indulged in by the rich. So no “Eat the rich”, the rich will eat the famous. Is it cannibalism?