The Queen B of Pop

     Several months back, I listened to Britney Spears' "Hold It Against Me" for the first time. If you read my post about sawtooth waves in pop music, you only have to listen to the first eight seconds or so to understand why I was instantly fascinated by it. Britney has a strange amount of longevity on the fickle thrones of music charts and, with this song as my Rosetta Stone, I thought I'd figured out the source of it. But I needed to put some research behind the theory. Based on Billboard chart records, here's a list of Britney's top singles from every album, with links to the songs if you don't already have them memorized. For the sake of space, I wont embed every song I think you should listen to, so just know that every following link in this post is a link to a song.

Year	Album	Top Single	Top Chart Position
1999	...Baby One more Time	"...Baby One More Time"	1
2000	Oops!...I Did It Again	"Oops!...I Did It Again"	9
2001	Britney	"I'm a Slave 4 U"	27
2003	In The Zone	"Toxic"	9
2007	Blackout	"Gimme More"	3
2008	Circus	"Womanizer" / "Circus"	1 / 3
2009	The Singles Collection	"3"	1
2011	Femme Fatale	"Hold It Against Me"/"Till The World Ends"	1 / 3

     "Circus" gets honorable mention since it topped almost everything before it, and the battle between "Hold It Against Me" and "Till The World Ends" is still hot. "3" isn't on Britney's main line of studio albums, but hit #1 on the charts in 2009 so is worth mentioning. Perhaps by looking at this timeline in detail, we can gain some insight on how Britney Spears became such an inexorable part of the pop pantheon.

—————————

"...Baby One More Time" / "Oops!...I Did It Again"

     Ah, the breakout hits. I grouped these two songs because they're very much the same (even the titles are weirdly similar). They both feature a simple head-bobbing beat, staccato piano for emphasis, and a hint of funk — the exact sound that made the Spice Girls popular in the States immediately prior (admittedly, with the sass toned down a couple notches). The writers/producers for these two Britney tracks were also responsible for early Backstreet Boys and N'Sync hits which sound markedly different. Instead of keeping with their style of songwriting, the dominating pop sound was likely put aside for the sake of mimicking what had recently worked for female pop vocalists of the time.

"I'm A Slave 4 U"

     There's that touch of funk again. The overall style is a little different though. The accented beat (normally represented by a snare drum) now sounds more like a hand clap/rim shot, which are staples of hip-hop and R&B music. Incidentally, this is the point where hip-hop and R&B began to usurp the reign of boy bands. Following suit, the strength of this song is in the rhythm. Britney sings a melody, but one that is not harmonically well-supported with the percussive instruments. In fact, one of the only recurring extended tones in the song is detuned, which makes it actively resist being harmonized with. If you can't figure out which sound I'm talking about, it's the one that happens every few beats and sounds like a cartoon flower wilting — an appropriate symbol for the teenage innocence Britney had totally abandoned by this point in her career.

"Toxic"

     This video is a monument to Britney's power as an sexual symbol so I can't help but mention the visual sexplosion. And the scenes are so badly hyperbolic they become good again. She freaking dances through a laser grid! How stupidly awesome is that?!...But anyway...


     The guitar is an obvious reference to the James Bond soundtrack. There have been Bond films pretty regularly since the 60s, so I doubt there was a strong enough trend to make that more than an arbitrary stylistic choice. But the other sounds have a more interesting origin. They are actually taken directly from a Hindi film called Ek Duuje Ke Liye (don't ask me to pronounce that). More specifically, the song, "Tere Mere Beech Mein." The film and song are from 1981 and probably foreign to Britney fans, both literally and figuratively. The popular trend followed here was not the source of the sounds used, but the fact that they were used at all. This is called "sampling" and is common in electronic music, which (alongside R&B/hip hop) was gaining a substantial footing in popular culture by the time "Toxic" was written. Additionally, the beginning of the song and the point starting at about 2:21 are lo-fi versions of the sound that drop back into a heavy beat after a few measures — a musical technique I hear most commonly in electro-pop, used for a dance-able and energizing emphasis to otherwise repetitive songs.

"Gimme More" / "Womanizer" / "Circus"

     The hand clap/rim shot return with bass lines that are easy to follow — another tip-of-the-hat to hip-hop. Unlike previous songs, the instruments in these are unabashedly digital. There are also several more post-production edits than we've heard before (digital filters, vocal effects and such). The forte of a song with a hip-hop feel but electronic sound will necessarily be where those styles overlap: the strong beat and rhythm. This super dance-able lovechild of the two hottest trending genres creates what we now think of as the last decade's typical pop song. With Britney Spears at the forefront of their convergence, she became the reigning queen of the dance floor.

"3"

     "3" is musically simple (even for a pop song) and therefore particularly easy to get stuck in your head. I suspect that's the only reason it climbed the charts like it did because it's also boring, goes nowhere, uses stock synth sounds, and really doesn't say anything significant about Britney's musical progress. "3" deserves a spot on the charts like I deserve a spot on the senate. If nothing else, the simple nature of this outlier makes it good remix fodder.

"Hold It Against Me" / "Till The World Ends"

     If you've heard "Hold It Against Me" before, you already know what happens at 2:17. It's a drop! Like from dubstep, the not-so-underground DJ movement favoring the dirty, filthy sound that's currently trending in pop music as a result. In textbook dubstep style, it drops to a throbbing 66.5 BPM, a cutting saw wave, and a heavy, low-frequency oscillator. Both of these songs are a (dub)step in the right direction for the current trends. The influence is more subtle in "Till The World Ends," but you can still hear comparable elements. Not surprisingly, "Till The World Ends" was co-written by Ke$ha, perhaps explaining the vocal wailing in the chorus and the excessive use of a saw synth.

—————————

     I wasn't so in touch with popular music trends until the last year, so the secret to Britney's longevity eluded me until hearing "Hold It Against Me." Dubstep hadn't been on the mainstream scene very long before that song was made. After looking (and listening) to all this, hopefully you noticed what I noticed. She and her producers are consistently among the first to adopt the trends of whatever musical season they're writing for. Pop music is frequently not about innovating anything, but rather giving as many people as possible the sound they want at any particular time. And it's a gold rush: The first people to the mines are the ones who get rich, leaving only flinders of wealth for the late-comers to glean while everyone searches for another deposit.

"Why, yes indeed!"

     When talking about Britney Spears, it's often unclear whether you're talking about the actual person or the pop sensation created by musical minds working silently behind the glamorous curtain. Britney is definitely not the same type of musician as the other contenders for the title "Queen of Pop" (which include Madonna, Janet Jackson, and Lady Gaga) but she's still a juggernaut. Every single one of her albums over the past twelve years has been a chart-topper. And just because her existence is mostly a symbolic one doesn't mean she's undeserving of the crown. Right, Elizabeth?

     Madonna is old news (53-year-old news, to be exact), Janet Jackson is inconsistent (is she even on the radio anymore?), and Lady Gaga is only a toddler on the scene (plus her aesthetic parlor tricks are growing stale). These lovely ladies all have their place in the ranks of pop royalty. But with the veritable key to pop music stashed in her back pocket, who truly deserves the throne? It's Britney, bitch.

Delay

A new post is in the queue! It will be up tomorrow after I put it through the necessary revision process.

In the mean time, I should put some thought into scaling scale back my blog endeavors a bit. It seems like every post I make takes twice as much effort as the one before it. At this rate, I'll die from exhaustion.

...though on the other hand, "death by exponential growth" sounds like a pretty badass way to go.

-anthony-

Friend Project (update)

I've been getting carried away with the verbiage lately. Short post this week, I promise. (But don't expect such mercy next week.)

The Craigslist Friend Project has had a tiring consequence. Each meeting seems to require that I spend more time on administrative tasks like responding to emails, coordinating schedules, making plans, and commuting than actually being around anyone. The process is not allowing me the volume of exposure I need to feel like I'm honing any social skills. Constant reflection and analysis have made me significantly more aware of what's happening when I do get to meet with someone, but this is like trying to become a better guitarist by rationalizing and researching guitar music while rarely ever touching the instrument (also something I do, incidentally).

I have my seventh meeting on Monday, then I have to decide if I want to keep this project going or not. The zugzwang is between meeting new people in an exhausting and inefficient way and not meeting people at all. Though honestly, I'll happily give up social improvement if it means I get to focus on more fruitful activities like writing music and posting blog entries. Next month I'll be moving into a house with a handful of well-tuned social beings and this imminent immersion therapy is probably a better means to the same end anyway. (Does that sound too defeatist?)

Harry Potter and the Magical Divergence.

The Deathly Hallows pair was sorely disappointing. I'm no expert on cinema, but I can say pretty confidently that one of the big problems was the music. I found it weird that the music took a downward turn in Deathly Hallows when I actually liked the music from The Half-Blood Prince. Turns out the production switched composers for the 7th and 8th movies from Nicholas Hooper to some guy named Alexadre Desplat who, in my opinion, should be composing music for daytime soap operas, not epic finales. Nicholas Hooper also did the music in Order of the Phoenix. As I recall, the scores for both movies were okay, but the main reason I liked the music in The Half-Blood Prince was because it was pretty stylistically diverse for a Hollywood movie. I caught emotional tones well outside what I expected to hear and yet, somehow, it worked. During several places, Hooper even seemed to be channeling Aaron Copland. You're probably familiar with Aaron Copland, even if you don't recognize the name.

This is a clip from Copland's "Hoe-Down." His music is used in everything from commercials to firework shows and represents Americana at its purest: The wild west; purple mountains majesty; cowboys; and humble country living. So what is his spirit doing in a movie that couldn't be less about America? And more importantly, why does it work so well?

When we think about a kind of romanticized historical America, we generally think of the point in history starting right around the California gold rush of 1849. People were packing their belongings and following the Oregon Trail to cheap land and a new life. The Civil War ended in 1865, connecting the north and the south, and the first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, connecting the east and the west. America was no longer a cluster of settlements but a sprawled and united nation. The era from about 1850-1880 is the America we hear depicted retroactively in Copland's music and see in countless dumb paintings.

Thomas Edison's light bulb of 1880 changed everything though, and not just in America. Electrical work by Edison and adversary Nikola Tesla ushered in the Technological Revolution around the world and the relatively primitive tools of the Industrial Revolution slowly became replaced with more convenient (and often electrical) devices.

Now notice that the technology present in Harry Potter's wizarding world is consistent with real-world technology up until exactly this point. The Industrial Revolution was a boom in our ability to create and produce while the the Technological Revolution was a boom in our ability to make creation and production cheaper and less demanding of manpower. Yet only "muggles" need manpower to be managed for them in such a way. To a wizard, a lightbulb is illuminated with no greater ease than a candle. Both just require a flick of the wrist, so why even bother with the bulbs? Why buy a Model T when you've already had enchanted brooms for centuries? And who needs telephones when you can just force your head into someone's fireplace via the Floo Network? The Technological Revolution was mostly irrelevant to anyone with magical power, so that seems to be the precise point where the wizarding world and muggle world diverge.

Nicholas Hooper's occasional Copland-inspired music in The Half Blood Prince reminds me of the point immediately before the magic-tech divergence which is why I think it works so well. It puts the listener in the real-world era that he/she can most easily parallel with the world on the screen, making the imaginary world a little more accessible. I found it most obvious during the credit sequence. Listen for a couple minutes:

It's curiously reminiscent of "Hoe-Down," right? The 6th Harry Potter story line is arguably the most emotionally dark story in the series but, as the credits roll, the music transitions and turns the bleak ending into an upbeat harvest festival. It's a bold move but feels strangely okay. My guess is that it's because we already know this to be the veritable soundtrack of 1850-1880—the era that agrees most with the world we were just staring at for 2+ hours. It's an amazingly clever way of engaging the audience, don't you think? However, I've admittedly never heard the magic-technology divergence of 1880 explicitly mentioned anywhere else so I can't tell for sure if Hooper consciously wrote a masterfully manipulative score around it or if he just got lucky.

What's most interesting is that even though I haven't seen this idea discussed, the time period associated with the magic-tech split is definitely not limited to the Potter-verse. In all of the typical fantasy worlds I'm familiar with, any technology invented in the real world past about 1880 is represented by something magical, if at all. Even quintessential fantasy universes that seem more aligned with late Medieval/early Renaissance Europe often have more recent inventions like flint-lock pistols or steam-powered trains. For example, the game, World of Warcraft, has an entire class of items that can be "engineered" by players but even the most advanced of these items are still powered by either gears and cranks, steam, or 19th-century-style combustion engines. That's apparently where the line is drawn and it's fascinating to me that literally different universes can agree across all media about where their technological limitations are. Are these universes just complying with decisions made by the forefathers of fantasy or has this paradigm stabilized over time to its most sensical state?

(An "advanced" gun from WoW. Basically a decorated 18th-century blunderbuss with a steam pressure chamber up top and presumably some kind of mystic gem housed above the trigger.)

And how aware was Nicholas Hooper to all this when he wrote the 6th Harry Potter Score? Either way, his music felt appropriate. I'm curious how other countries responded to it though. Even today, we Americans hear Copland's music used repeatedly in the context of historic U.S. patriotism so referencing his musical nationalism brings us back to the magic-tech divergence pretty easily. But Copland was only one of many composers (and one of the later ones at that) in an era when music honoring one's home country was a worldwide trend. 1850-1880 sounds way different for, say, Spain than it does for America. Try watching those credits again or imagining your favorite Half-Blood Prince scene, but this time mute it and play this in the background:

¡Harry Potter y el Misterio del Príncipe!
...No?
Oh well...

What do you do?

I've met with three new people under my Craigslist Friend Project and I think I can finally say something about it. One thing I noticed during all three meetings is my tendency to feel comfortable when listening, but very uncomfortable when talking. Particularly when talking about myself. I respond to what others say with eye contact, head nods, and murmurs of agreement/understanding, and I have no problem finding the appropriate places to interrupt the person while they're talking in order to ask quick clarifying questions ("Wait, so this was before you were offered the job or after?"). This behavior is totally automatic for me and comes from being sincerely interested in the person talking. In other words, I'm an expert active listener.

However, I don't respond well when other people are sincerely interested in me. If I get asked a factual question like "Do you have any siblings?" I answer tersely. If I get asked a more personal question like "How was your weekend?" I speak vaguely or try to pass my answer off as trivial by saying something like "Pretty boring" or "It's a long story." Even if I don't say those exact words, the intonation of my answer is enough to suggest that I don't think what I'm saying is worth being interested in.

The questions I have the most trouble with are questions more directly related to identity ("What kinds of things are you interested in?" or "What skills do you have?"). The most notorious of these questions is, of course, "What do you do?" You've probably been asked this question just about every time you've met someone new in your adult life. I could write an entire book on "What do you do?" but the main problem I have with that question is that it links my personal identity to the projects I've obligated myself to. As a person who is admittedly obligated to very little, I feel like telling people what I do is a poor means of telling them who I am, which is really what they're asking.

I was recently at a barbecue attended mostly by older adults. "What do you do?" came up a lot between them and the conversations invariably revolved around the social roles each person felt they filled. There was a math teacher who only discussed his math classes, a social worker who just talked about the state of society, and a software engineer who contributed to conversations primarily by tossing in computer programming jokes. Even note my wording there. "A math teacher" versus, say, "a person who teaches math." It sounds perfectly normal to say that the thing they contribute to society is equivalent to who they are. And based on what these people wanted to talk about, it's reasonable to assume that they identified themselves by these contributions, too.

The work you do to enrich your society is the first (and sometimes only) piece of information people use to discover what type of person you are. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. It's actually an efficient way of learning about others and helping others learn about you since what a person does is often reflective of more complex components of their identity such as their values, skills, beliefs, or interests. It just puts me at a disadvantage. Telling people I'm a student is basically my excuse for not having a social role into which they can neatly box me. I don't really "do" anything. I don't have a career, long-term goals, a particularly developed skill, a robust knowledge on any valuable subject, or even a strong interest in any one thing over any other thing.

My answers to identifying questions don't represent the type person I am and the only thing I can do to protect my ego from that fact is to avoid those questions altogether. Right now, the type of person I am is the type who spends his time and energy trying to figure out what type of person he is. That's difficult for me to express and even more difficult for others to accept. It seems that to be comfortable telling people about myself, my options are to either find the kind of identity people expect me to have or to be okay with the fact that I just don't have that. Self-discovery might be an endeavor too big for the Craigslist Friend Project, but we'll see how far I can get.

Dirty, Filthy Sound

I finally got around to reading through This is Your Brain On Music by Daniel Levitin. It's an excellent read even for non-musicians. Now, inspired by micro-scale analyses, I'm taking a look at what makes current popular music "tik" (you'll get that joke in a minute). It's deeper than just composing a catchy tune. You can engineer the next hit single down to literally a hair's width of sound. To appreciate that though, we need to know a bit about acoustics. If you never made it that far in your physics courses (don't worry, I didn't either), here's the illustrated, non-math version.

A pure sound is plotted over time as a sine wave, which looks like this.
------------------->
Keep in mind that this is just a single oscillation, so the sound it represents takes place over a tiny fraction of a second. The amount of oscillations that happen per second is the frequency in Hertz (Hz) and determines the pitch we hear. The height of the wave at any point (the amplitude) determines the loudness of the sound.

Sound is somewhat analogous to light though. The "white" light we see from the sun is not actually white, but rather a blend of many wavelengths of light that we don't perceive unless something external separates them for us, like a prism or an object that reflects only a certain color. Sound is similar in that a note produced by a musical instrument is not what we think of as a single pitch. The sound is composed of several different wavelengths stacked on one another (called harmonics), and are usually in multiples of the lowest frequency being played. So if a saxophone plays the middle "A" note, which is an oscillation of 440 cycles per second, what we really hear is a collection of layered frequencies:

440Hz (1st harmonic),

880Hz (2nd harmonic),

1320Hz (3rd harmonic),

1760Hz (4th harmonic)...

... etcetera, usually at decreasing levels of volume. Our brain then collapses the layers and tells us we're hearing only the first harmonic, the "A" at 440Hz.

When you add those higher harmonic pitches to the original sine wave at varying loudness levels, the shape of the wave starts to change. There's some intense math involved in the transformation process, but if your study habits are anything like mine, math homework is easily avoided with YouTube videos:

That animation shows us that by adding just the odd-numbered harmonics to a sound, the wave gradually becomes square-like. There are an endless number of final shapes depending on which harmonics compose a sound and what loudness each harmonic is at. And even though we only hear the 1st harmonic, our brain tells us what type of sound we're hearing based on that summative shape. Each musical instrument has its own, unique set of harmonics which is why we can tell a piano apart from a saxophone, for example, even when they're playing the same note.

Oh my, Saxophone! What sharp spikes you have!

The sum of the saxophone's unique set of harmonics creates sharp and rapid ups and downs which is part of what makes the sound much more cutting and abrasive than that of the piano. With computers, we can synthesize even sharper changes -- some too sharp to occur naturally.

These two staple synthesizer shapes are particularly strange because of the instantaneous amplitude changes in each oscillation. This will never occur in nature since it's impossible for an object to go from one position in its vibration to another position in zero time. Imagine a ball bouncing. No matter how hard you throw it at the ground, some amount of time will always have to pass for it to go from the ground to the height of its bounce. Synthesizers do a pretty good job of approximating these impossible jumps though, giving us the opportunity to hear unique and interesting sounds we wouldn't otherwise be able to experience. For fun, here's a range of frequencies for each wave form. Pay close attention to the lower frequencies and see if you can hear the shape. They sound about how they look.

Even if your ears are musically untrained, you can probably hear the sharp edges in the sound. You may not be able to count them at such high frequencies, but you can feel them -- a sort of rapid popping at the lower frequencies moving toward an artificial, electronic buzz at the higher frequencies. There's a sweet spot in these shapes from about 30Hz-200Hz where you can distinguish both the note being played and the shapes' characteristic popping. Make a melody with these frequencies and you'll have a tune where every note sounds like it's coming from something being violently ripped apart. The result therefore sounds destructive, cutting, and dirty.

And that's the hot thing right now. American popular music at the moment leans toward dance music (the extreme in visceral stimulation) so think of the potential these wave forms have! Imagine if you put a square or saw wave melody to a drum track that vibrates the room and then set the whole thing to a tempo of about 120-130 beats per minute to emulate the heartbeat of a dancing nightclub patron. You'd have one of the most physically energizing sounds possible! Oh, wait...

This general formula for success is already all over Top 40 lists. As much as I hate to subject you to Ke$ha, Tik Tok is pretty easy to parse: Square waves during the verses; low-frequency saw wave during the chorus; unrelenting drums; and a tempo of exactly 120 BPM. And did you catch the two saw wave bits in the first few seconds of the video, thrown in for good measure? If you want a more recent chart-topper and a bit more of a listening challenge, check out Britney Spears' Till The World Ends, which has squares and saws running at the same time.

The key to being a pop artist is to understand what's trending, then pack as much of it in your songs as possible. And that might mean exploiting even subtle cognitive processes like the way the saw wave's ripping sound evokes aggressive energy. Certainly Ke$ha's song wouldn't be as popular or dance-able if the synthesizer were replaced with, say, a piano (though our friend, Saxophone might be a contender). If Ke$a's producers can just tap into a formula of trends to create a hit track, shouldn't anyone with that formula be able to mechanically do the same? Consider this the intro to an inevitable future blog post entitled, "How To Write A Hit Single."

Tall Order

I was at the Northwest Coffee Festival this past weekend. The festival also heavily featured chocolate since the two have similar flavor profiles. Samples varied in bean species, origin, farming methods, roasts, brew/extraction methods, and preparations. To those sensitive enough to flavor, each of these things alone has a dramatic effect on the end result. But the general pattern I noticed is that the more time and effort required to make the coffee or chocolate, the better it will taste -- even down to things outside human control. With chocolate for example, there are three main types of cacao trees:

1. Forastero: Resistant to disease, can grow in several climates, grows quickly, and has a high yield of fruit.
2. Criollo: A more fragile tree. Requires specific climates, grows slowly and has a low fruit yield.
3. Trinitario: A blend between the above two and the precise midpoint in their distinctive qualities

Can you guess which one is considered the most delicious bean? Exactly. Criollo. For some reason, fragility seems to be associated with quality and I wondered why that is. The quick and dirty biological explanation is that the criollo can afford to spend more of its energy further developing qualities that happen to be relevant to a good flavor when less energy is spent making poisons like disease resistances and insecticides (which we are evolutionarily inclined to dislike anyway). We could infer then that the criollo bean tastes the best because the elements contributing to flavor are more chemically complex than in the forastero or trinitario. But why should complexity lead to better flavor at all? We could again argue from a biological standpoint and say that the composure of the blah receptors blah..... chemically... blahdy blah co-evolved.... micronutrient.....yadda yadda etcetera. But this link between a thing's complexity and its quality is in everything. Here's a jargon-less Internet reference:

Without reading into meaning, accessing previous knowledge, or responding to personal associations, the Trogdor on the right is cooler. I enjoy it more than the Trogdor on the left. I wrote about what makes something cool a while back by talking a bit about how we decide we like something based on our interpretation of it. There's something even simpler in this case though. There's a sort of basic, surface-level, sensory pleasure we got from observing complexity.

It seems like at pretty much every level, conscious or unconscious, what we really take pleasure in is experiencing order. It's even conceivable that our brains are able to appreciate order down to a micro scale, as we might with the criollo bean. Though certainly this is trumped by other things like personal preference as demonstrated by the accelerating resurgence of pixel art

The simplicity in pixel art is appealing to some either for the sake of nostalgia, artistic intent, resistance to convention, or whatever else. Just like I might prefer what others would consider a poorly made cup of coffee if I take pleasure in it because it, say, reminds me of my father or if I think the barista is an artist trying to convey a message through the flavor. But then the desire to experience sensual complexity is outweighed by a desire to experience something that stimulates more complex cognitive faculties such as memory or interpretation. Cognitive or sensual, we still have a tendency to favor complexity and order.

And there's something kind of existential about that. Coffee and chocolate aside, all matter of creation is the process of actively resisting entropy. As beings who seem to be both designed and programmed to embrace order, what is the purpose of life if not to do exactly that? Maybe I won't create an artistic masterpiece or a powerful bit of technology in my lifetime -- Maybe I won't even create a good cup of coffee tomorrow morning -- but thinking that I exist to try is inspiring. If creation defines purpose, then the only question left for me to ask is, "What are my creative limits?"

It's amazing how therapeutic a cup of coffee and a bit of chocolate can be.

Revisiting and Reviving

Well, hello again!

It's been a while. I reactivated my Facebook (long story) and then just let this blog go. Partly because it would have been redundant of Facebook and partly because there's little point in keeping a public blog if no one is reading it. But after reviewing my handful of entries, I feel like I had (and have) enough to say that even a passing reader might appreciate the words. I sat down to write a blog-resuscitating entry but thought "What do I write about?" At that point I realized that in order to give this blog new life I need to define a reason for having it at all.

While consulting the previous entries to find a common thread, I had a meta moment and found that looking for that common thread is exactly what most of my writing tries to do and is, in fact, what I am most interested in. This blog is about pattern recognition. Whether we're exploiting patterns, defying patterns, or even just identifying them, I think that being sensitive to recurring qualities in anything is the foundation for any kind of analytical skill. My entries are my means of practicing that. I share them in hopes of inspiring or, if not, amusing -- even if the only person inspired and amused is me after a long departure from the blog.

So, assuming I can manage some sort of regularity in posting, I will see you all soon. ♥

Love,
Anthony

Dove Epic Body Wash

An amusing little thing I threw together.
The tricks used in film to make something look dramatic are largely overlapped by the tricks used to make something look sensual:

• Close-ups
• Saturated colors
• Slow motion
• Fluid and/or circular motion

And beautifully, this particular sensual segment is rife with visual punctuation which perfectly mirrors the sharp rhythm of cinematic music. Maybe you'll recall this article I wrote a while back called "How To Remix Anything." By those standards, this video was practically begging to be created.

Change

Good lord, it's been a while since I've written anything here! I lacked Internet for two weeks, was poisoned for a couple days, and simply didn't have motivation for however much time the previous two excuses don't account for. Today I will remedy this dry spell. Inspired in part by recent events in my life and in part by my developing capacity to generate my own philosophies on life, I want to talk about the concept of change.

"Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living."

-Henry David Thoreau, "Walden"

Thoreau suggests that irrelevant wisdom is the only thing our elders can offer and that adopting said wisdom retards the progress of society. Things inevitably change and for old people to teach the young is for them to prepare new generations to deal with old problems. We've all heard older people say things like, "You kids have it so easy these days with your cell phones and your Internet" as if we of the new generation are spoiled because we don't have to walk twelve miles to school every day in the snow or fetch our water from a well or carry home the mammoth we tracked for a week and then killed with pointy rocks at the ends of sticks. Old people have experienced and learned to deal with problems that are not likely inherited by their children because of how rapidly human society has begun to evolve from one generation to the next. Old people demonstrate resistance to (or perhaps ignorance of) change when they fail to realize that new generations have as many problems and labors as the old ones did - the problems are just different. While it's true that we don't have to chop firewood every day or wash our clothes by hand in the local stream, we have to deal with things like competitive job markets, complex computer software, and diagnoses for medical ailments that were either totally unaddressed or simply did not exist a hundred years ago. Worst of all we have to deal with the shit those same old people left for us to resolve, like racial and gender discrimination and homophobia. I think it's worth respecting our elders for the energy they've invested in creating a good life for themselves and others, but the pleasantness of society and life in general will never increase further if we blindly adopt the antiquated ways they think we're missing out on. Improvement and invention are very often the stimuli for change so to resist change is to resist beneficial development. To put it bluntly:

"Tradition is the enemy of progress."

-Sign on a Native American boarding school.

You may ask then, am I anti-religion because of its emphasis on tradition? No. Religion does good things for many people. It strengthens the people who might otherwise be weak, unmotivated, or feel like their life has no purpose. Religion can enable them to do other things that benefit themselves and others. The unfortunate side-effect of religion is that it often inhibits the presently prosperous person from developing new ideas, values, and reasons. This prevents change from occurring by forcing young people to make decisions based on the values passed down from old people - values which Thoreau and I have already said may or may not be relevant or even rational in our modern age. My strong preference to make decisions based on my own rational thought over faith in the thoughts of others is why I personally am an atheist (for all intents and purposes) and a subscriber to the endless importance of change.

I will not, however, denounce stagnation like Thoreau so tersely does. I realize that a person's opinion on change depends on a deep-rooted (and perhaps even unconscious) philosophy about what the purpose of life is and therefore change carries with it no objective moral value. If you think the purpose of life is to improve the world as much as possible to make the experience of life a happier one, change is your friend because it represents progress. If you think the purpose of your life is to breed happiness by cherishing and spreading the ideas and bounty with which you and the rest of the world have already been blessed, then to you change represents digression. The world needs those anti-change "maintainers" just as much as it needs those pro-change "innovators." We can't all be artists and inventors because then there will be no one left to farm our vegetables or teach math to our children. But if we were all teachers or farmers or priests, we wouldn't have the luxuries or efficiency of 21st century life.

My advice to you this entry is to invest some thought into which philosophy of life most strongly influences the decisions you make and whether those decisions are the products of your own thinking or the result of trust in the thinking of others. Then realize that people who behave or think oppositely are not necessarily wrong or evil - the most likely explanation is that their goals for the future and for change are simply different than yours but no less righteous. Because of the symbiosis between "maintainers" and "innovators," I guarantee you that the philosophies you reject will at some (or many) point(s) benefit the ones you accept, so as long as a person's goals do not outwardly harm society or its people, don't judge or guilt the person for the philosophy they choose. You may find the wisdom of your elders to be either priceless treasure or anachronistic garbage but regardless of whether you tend to resist change or embrace it, at the very least, do not fear it.