Tag Archives: Excessive links to wikipedia

Sharing Something: Boxes

09 Monday Jan 2012

Posted by in Ideas, Music, Sharing Something

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When I started my senior year of college, I needed to complete one more piece to fill my senior composition recital. I went into my first composition lesson with two ideas: one for a performance piece of just two performers sitting on stage, each holding a box with a single cricket inside, the other for a string quartet that would be different every time it was played. It wasn’t my intention when I presented those ideas that the cricket idea would make the otherwise outlandish string quartet more palatable to my composition professor, but I suspect that I wouldn’t have been able to move ahead with that project if I hadn’t come up with an even weirder alternative. The string quartet became my favorite piece to date, but the cricket idea has languished ever since.

The idea is built around an old trick used by farmers, campers, and other outdoorsy types to estimate the temperature by counting cricket chirps. As cold-blooded animals, it makes sense that their activity level would be affected by the ambient temperature, but Snopes has a pretty good article on the subject, for those of you who don’t want to take my word for it.  Anyway, as I was falling asleep one night in the summer of 2009, I could hear two crickets from my window, their slightly different chirping rates generating a complex polyrhythmic pattern.  It occurred to me that what I was hearing were microclimates, small areas that differ in climate from the surrounding area.  In this case, proximity to our warm brick house or a cool, mossy patch of soil may have altered the crickets’ body temperatures ever so slightly, changing their rates of chirping.  The temperatures weren’t very different, and in fact, the less different the two rhythmic rates are, the more complex the polyrhythm.  I thought this was a fascinating phenomenon, and set to trying to figure out how to use it in a piece.

My concept left the concept of microclimates and the idea of cricket chirping rates relatively unadorned: in a performance of the piece, two performers would sit on stage, each holding a box containing a single cricket. Hopefully, their slight differences in the body temperatures of the performers would effect the chirping rates of the crickets, creating a complex polyrhythm that might even change throughout the performance of the piece. I say might because I don’t know — the piece never really left the planning stages, but that hasn’t stopped me from planning it to death.

I had tinkered with the idea of soundproof boxes and using microphones, but it turns out that, as a general rule, if something doesn’t transmit sound efficiently, it also won’t transmit temperature changes efficiently. I decided, then, to use thin aluminum boxes that would allow both temperature changes and sound to pass through relatively unfettered. This simplified one aspect of the piece, removing an electronic component, but it added a question of how to start and stop the piece; if there’s no mic to turn on or off, how do you start and stop the sound?

My answer was that the aluminum boxes should be carried on and off stage in larger, soundproof boxes. The piece would begin when the performers removed the aluminum boxes from their containers, and would end when they returned them. I initially conceived of making those boxes out of whatever dense wood I could get my hands on. Serendipitously, as I was returning to this idea at the end of the summer, I discovered that my new job has a pretty impressive wood shop, and more than a few skilled woodworkers willing and excited to help me with whatever projects I could come up with. I immediately set to drafting plans for the wooden boxes, which you can see here. Of course, I don’t have drafting software, so those plans were actually made in Word, which I think is hilarious.

After finishing these plans, one of my handy coworkers suggested that the best material would actually be vinyl decking material, which is super dense and super cheap. The only issue: it won’t take adhesives, so my biscuted and glued design wouldn’t work.  It was back to the drawing board, which is where the project stalled out. I still plan on completing this project, which is unusual for Sharing Something, but it has still been a good long time since I’ve made any effort to do so. There are all kinds of excuses, but I just need to start doing it if I want to get it done. Hopefully, posting the idea here will get me motivated again.

Fairweather Fandom Friday: Facebook

28 Friday Oct 2011

Posted by in Fairweather Fandom

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I saw a woman on the bus yesterday with three face tattoos.  Three.  They were arranged symmetrically across here face, so I suppose they could be considered part of one artistic statement, but still, it was a face tattoo.  like 99.9% of the planet, when I see a person with a face tattoo, the phrase “what the hell was this person thinking?” runs on repeat through my head with varying levels of bemusement (the remaining 0.1% either have or will get face tattoos).  It boggles my mind that a person could hear the words “face” and “tattoo” in the same sentence and have anything close to a positive emotional reaction (let alone thinking it’s a good enough idea to get one themselves).  Our culture only brings up face tattoos to mock Mike Tyson, who only got one in the first place because he hadn’t done anything attention-grabbingly stupid and tasteless in a while.  A face tattoo would be the perfect analogy for a terrible decision that someone is forced to wear on their face for the rest of their lives if it weren’t for the fact that that’s literally exactly what it is.

What actually got me a bout this woman, however, wasn’t just that she had a face tattoo, but that she was on her cell phone, talking about when she would be getting home, carrying on like she didn’t have permanent marks engraved on her face.  Under certain circumstances, the message I might take away from seeing this could have been that we’re all the same, in spite of our face tattoos.  Yesterday, however, I couldn’t believe that someone could embrace so many of society’s benefits (cellphones, public transportation, etc.) while simultaneously disregarding one of its most central rules of discourse, that is, not having stupid fucking marks on your face.

I’m realizing that I don’t see the parts of society we embrace as a personalized constellation, but rather a bucket which we can fill as high or as low as we choose.  At the very bottom of the bucket are society’s most basic tenants (thou shalt not…) and increasingly more esoteric societal rules as you move up the sides.  This is why serial killers tend to have bad haircuts, since their bucket isn’t even filled past the no-killing line, it doesn’t even come close to the caring-about-your-appearance line.  This is also why it’s so jarring to see a homeless person on a cell-phone–we assume having a place to live is lower in the bucket than being able to receive text messages.  We expect things higher in the bucket to be supported by water below, so that someone who practices medicine also practices good hygiene.  I don’t have even a general order that things should be in the bucket, but this is really the model I think we operate on–we’re all dealing with the same society, we only have control over the degree to which we participate.

Where I’ve set my own level of participation defines a lot of what I feel I can’t or won’t do.  I don’t care about showering everyday, so I can’t care about wearing something different everyday; I don’t care about shaving, so I can’t care about my hair; I don’t care about vampires, so I can’t care about relating to pre-teen girls.  It’s easy to order things in your life in this way as long as those things fulfill narrow purposes–I don’t need entertainment news, but I do need toiletpaper–but the task becomes much more complicated if you’re trying to place something that could fulfill multiple purposes.  Modern technology has produced so many multifaceted tools that its become difficult for me to place them in the bucket; some aspects of a smart phone, say, are identical to those of the dumb phone I already own, but other aspects are not only superfluous, but beyond my bucket depth.  Nowhere is this more apparent than with Facebook.

Much of Facebook’s value comes from the fact that it does so many different things: it’s a mode of communication, it’s a public photo album, it’s a way to track down long lost friends or research strangers.  I don’t really know all of the things people use Facebook for, because I’ve never had an account.  I suspect part of the reason is that I didn’t know how to place it in my bucket.

When I arrived at college, I had never heard of Facebook.  This is partially the result of timing–Facebook was still pretty new–and partially due to my own ignorance.  Suddenly, everybody I knew was somehow already on Facebook; by the time I was aware of it, I was a latecomer.  My poseurphobia makes me reluctant to do anything new if everyone else has already done it, but that attitude is really limited to experiences I feel I can avoid.  I’m not afraid to start a new job or sign a lease or to even enjoy a classic movie, mostly because I view each of these things as inevitable.  Facebook has quickly gone from visiting-a-trendy-website-level inevitable to getting-your-driver’s-license-level inevitable–it’s by no means required, but it’s common enough for people to assume that you’ve done it and to expect you to have a good reason if you haven’t.  I certainly never envisioned that it could become so central to social interaction when I decided I wanted nothing to do with it, but I still don’t see it as the inevitability the rest of the world seems to.   I recognize that I’m an incredibly stubborn person–I’ll rationalize and re-frame even my worst decisions as meaningful, intentioned choices–so the fact that I’ve stuck with my decision to avoid Facebook may not hold up to close scrutiny.  The only way to find out is to start looking.

The one thing that defensive Facebookers always hold up as the reason to be on Facebook is that it allows you to stay in contact with friends.  I’ve never been particularly impressed by this argument.  I already have at my disposal analogues for all of the ways Facebook can be used to communicate and then some (gchat, email, actual mail, skype, telephones, and, you know, actually seeing people), so there’s really nothing preventing me from staying in contact with friends.  The argument is usually then modified to say that it makes staying in contact easier.  This claim is even more off-putting because: 1. making staying in contact easier devalues staying in contact.  Some friends are worth the effort of staying in contact with; others aren’t.  Facebook throws them all together.  2. it also makes it easier to stay in contact with people I’m happy to politely grow apart from.  I don’t like the idea of them seeing my business for all eternity, or abruptly cutting them off from my business for all eternity.  Growing apart is a natural and important part of many interpersonal relationships.  3. I actually like that even close friends can grow apart.  I place a lot of value in transience, mostly because I think there’s something beautiful and natural about things that end.  I don’t just love my friends, I love the time and place and memories I shared with them.  Stringing any relationship beyond its natural end point ends up feeling like a cheap movie sequel; sure, the characters are the same, but the situations don’t have the same excitement.  This isn’t to say that I don’t value staying in touch–pretty much all of my close friendships are cultivated long-distance now that I’ve moved away from the midwest–but that I value it too much to do it with everyone.

Of course, staying in touch isn’t the only thing people use Facebook for.  In particular, my girlfriend claims to only be on Facebook for access to people’s photos.  She likes reliving memories and seeing what her friends are up to, and pretty much everyone posts those photos on Facebook (unlike dedicated photo-publishing sites).  I can see that being a compelling reason for someone who likes photos, but I am not one of those people.  I would be surprised if the photos, digital or otherwise, I have of myself or anything number in the double-digits.  This is another manifestation of the value I place on transience; my memories are most special to me because they don’t exist anymore.  Keeping a totem or reminder takes memories out of the private space of personal thought, diminishing their power.  I’m similarly not interested in looking at other people’s photos.  Yes, it’s sad if I miss something I would have liked to have been there for, but pictures are no consolation.  I either experience something or I don’t; vicariously reliving something through pictures is an insult both to the people who actually experienced it as well as the very concept of experiencing something.

The capacity to use Facebook to research new friends or to keep tabs on old acquaintances is perhaps the most compelling to me, but I think that’s actually an argument against it.  I value knowledge, any knowledge.  If it were possible to know every little thing about the ins and outs of so-and-so’s life, I would, creepiness be damned.  My only saving grace is that it currently isn’t possible for me to know those things.  I don’t need more sources of information of things I don’t need to know.  Wikipedia is really more than enough.

The only other compelling case I’ve heard for Facebook is that it could be a valuable professional networking tool.  The world of music composition relies particularly on schmoozing just about everyone you can in order to be on their minds when they’re putting together programs or commissions.  I find this kind of politicking incredibly off-putting, but it may simply be necessary to compete in the current new music market.  I still need a lot of convincing on that front, but I’m not even sure I want to compete in that market at all.  I love composing, but I don’t like being a salesman, so I think trying to make a living composing just isn’t for me.  I find myself perfectly fulfilled composing in my free time and maintaining a day job (which also offers things like job security and health benefits).  The point is, I’m not sure I need professional networking now, either.

Maybe the main selling points of Facebook are lost on me, but I think the main reason I’m still not on it is that I don’t like it as a way of sharing information.  It’s just too free and open–there are too many “if”s to know who knows what information.  I like knowing exactly who knows when my birthday is, and I like only being expected to know it’s someone’s birthday because they told me.  There’s something I don’t trust about granting people access to information they’re not willing to ask me in person, and something I find presumptuous about people putting their own information out there in case anyone wants to know.  The fact that this blog does that a little bit makes me uncomfortable, but at least I have a therapeutic goal in putting this out there.  I don’t really know what purpose a list of my favorite movies would serve.

I wonder if I’m missing something.  Perhaps Facebook has charms I’m not seeing, or that the ones I do see are more valuable than my estimations.  I have limited experience with Facebook, so I can’t really know.  I’m happy to hear people’s thoughts in the comments.

Blame it on your upbringing

10 Monday Oct 2011

Posted by in Ideas

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I have a problem.  I’m poseurphobic.  This isn’t to say that I fear kids who shop at certain stores, or people who love von Trier but write off Tarantino as “too violent.”  I definitely have my problems with those people, but irrational fear isn’t one of them.  My problem is that I fear being a poseur, which I guess is a way of saying  I fear being perceived as a poseur.  It’s gone from being a fun quirk my friends can laugh at to a real hang-up that prevents me from participating in things I may actually enjoy (say, the pithy, context-free possibilities of twitter), to things that might even be useful (say, biking to work).  I’d like to examine where I think this attitude comes from, but first, I think I need to clarify what I mean by poseur.

Generally, people draw a line between people who genuinely enjoy something, and the poseurs who pretend to.  Essentially, anyone who is disingenuous on either their 1. interest or 2. knowledge of a subject.  This is the definition I’m working from, but I’ve tweaked it quite a bit.  For the interest bit, I draw the line at anyone who exhibits absolutely any affectation at all, whatsoever.  If that sounds like a wildly broad definition, bear with me, because it gets worse.   I’ve also extended the definition to include anyone who participates in the activities generally associated with the people I’ve already defined as poseurs in a kind of poseur-by-association (to me, both blogging and using the word “poseur” fall into this category, as does irony, so the very existence of this blog is a big step in overcoming my phobia).  As for the knowledge bit, to me, simply existing constitutes a profession of certain kinds of knowledge, so ignorance itself is an act of poseurism.

That last point really reveals the depths of my phobia, since that’s where it takes a sharp turn outside of logic.  If ignorance makes me a poseur, then I must not reveal my ignorance of anything to anyone.  The repercussions of this are manifold: 1. I spend a lot of time on wikipedia beefing up my cursory knowledge of anything I find to be worth knowing 2. I am unwilling to admit my ignorance in public, which is kind of necessary to learning and 3. this occasionally means pretending to know about something in spite of my ignorance.  All of these repercussions are a little crazy, but those last two are absolutely batshit.  My fear of being ignorant make me reluctant to learn, and my fear of being a poseur makes me act like a poseur.  All this is to say that my definition of what it is to not be a poseur is nearly impossible to reach, which is why I’d like to spend the rest of this post examining where that standard comes from.

I imagine any kid growing up in the 90s couldn’t avoid the two favorite pet morals of children’s entertainment, the fist of which was, “we are all unique, beautiful snowflakes.”  There’s no doubt in my mind that people internalized this message.  People are remarkably empowered to have their own tastes, no matter how esoteric, and to externalize their personalities in the way they dress and carry themselves.  Now, I’m tempted to throw the tired old line about how dressing and acting like your friends doesn’t really make you unique, which I think is at least part of the reason I’m resistant to the affected subcultures, but I think the bigger reason is that I so strongly internalized the 90s message-to-children number two, “superficiality is bad.”  For someone who truly believes that book covers should be ignored, advertising your taste and personality on your sleeve isn’t just gilding the lily–it’s downright morally reprehensible.  You mix that sensibility with some good old fashioned midwestern modesty, and you’ve got someone who not only avoids advertising their tastes, but is averse to even letting on that they might be an interesting person.  There’s more to get at here, which I’ll save for another post, but I think this at least starts to outline why I object to affectation of any kind.

Now for the ignorance part, which I suspect largely comes from having an incredibly competitive older brother.  A four-year difference means a lot when you’re young, both in terms of physicality and mental development, so I grew up the perpetual loser to my older brother’s ungracious winner.  I think this has affected me in a lot of ways, including my general lack of interest in sports, but it manifested itself the strongest when I was in junior high.  I still couldn’t compete with my brother, but it was then that my peers presented themselves as worthy adversaries.  My friends were as sports-averse as I was, but were incredibly smart, so I was always interested in being the smartest.  Not doing as well as the others on a test, or even not knowing much about the subject of conversation were big sources of embarrassment for me.  When that mentality is combined with some standard can’t-stop-and-ask-for-directions macho posturing, and you end up with someone who is just shy of flat-out refusing to admit his ignorance.  Again, there’s more to talk about here (including my culpability in all of this), but I’ll save the major unpacking for another post.

These have always been vague unwritten rules of conduct for me, so it’s weird to write it down, and weirder still to ask myself why I think this way.  I’m uncomfortable just thinking about this, let alone posting it for others to see (as public masturbatory/therapeutic gestures are also acts of poseurism), but I think pushing myself out of my comfort zone is a big point of this blog.  My hope is that this will give people an opportunity to talk about poseurphobia (which I suspect is a fairly widespread phenomenon), but at the very least, it will give me a space to sort out my own struggles with it.

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