Veritas Lux Mea...an educational resource?
Over the weekend I was surprised to find out that Veritas Lux Mea and our good friend The Torture Garden were mentioned in coursework for an Introduction to Culture and Communications class taught at McMaster University. Here's what the course teacher had to say:
For the last couple of weeks of the semester we will focus largely on new circuits of culural flows whether it be P2P file sharing or social networks. For me, one of the most interesting developments is the MP3 blog. Napster started something that I don’t think can ever be stopped–people like to share things and find out what other people like. This isn’t just some utopian notion; it is a fundamental element in the ongoing construction of meaning and unfolding of culture. We are all positioned in relation to many different systems of meaning and this is process of sharing and learning is partially how we actively take part in the construction of meaning.
What I like about MP3 blogs, as opposed to straightfoward P2P activity (eg. like bit-torrenting) is that you don’t necessarily know what you are looking for and you always find something new. If you don’t know where to start, check out Hype Machine, an MP3 blog aggregator–it gets updated automatically whenever participating blogs post something new and you can listen to the song before deciding whether you want to download it or not. Such sites have been extremely important for indie labels as they allow their music to circulate in circuits not yet fully controlled by the major media conglomerates. There are a number of Canadian bands who have made it big, in large part due to MP3 blogs, like The Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, and McMaster’s own Junior Boys.
What I like about this post is that it is so creative in connecting a play list to an important historical event–in this case, the 1956 democratic revolution in Hungary that wass crushed by Stalinist Russia. And theere is also some pretty good music; check out Neutral Milk Hotel (’In the Aeroplane Over the Sea’ is one of the best albums of the 90s!), Bloc Party, The Decembrists, Regina Spektor, Bell x1 (Damien Rice before he went all folky), and +/- (which your classmate Jeff described as “their sound is akin to Sloan meets Elliot Smith meets Death Cab and they all made love with their musical instrument attached and plugged in.”).
There is one last blog to check out [here's where I come in], given what we have been studying this semester (and the fact that I think Regina Spektor is an amazing artist). After all, where else can you get information on the fact that Doogie Howser (maybe before your time?) has come out of the closet, more stuff on Borat, the fact that the moustache of the lead guy from The Killers is a new fashion statement, and MP3 tracks from a new form of music called ‘psychadelic hip hop’? Check it out.
What do you think? Are MP3 blogs new global cultural circuits? What role are we playing then to help define, mold, or create new forms of culture? There's a lot I'd like to lay on your plate about this subject since I spend the better part of my graduate education studying the same thing, but I'll spare you the theoretical details and just say it's an interesting question that I hope you'll take into consideration.
Somewhat related story:
The Truth About Language by Joe Palmer
She speaks eighteen languages. She can't say no in any of them. - Dorothy Parker
Anybody who speaks a language can teach it, can't they? No. In truth, language teaching is a waste of time and money. It doesn't work. It's like teaching someone to play the harp, or Ingmar Berman's old joke about how to play the cello: "First, spread your legs." With the help of a tutor you can learn to make a rough translation from a language similar to your own, like French and German. But you can also do it by yourself. Learning a language requires living in the language, not fooling around with it.
There was a time when school learning beyond the elementary level - the ABCs and how many bushels a wagon holds - was Latin and mathematics, as if Latin, a dead language thought to be the perfect expression of a Golden Age, and mathematics, the science of numbers, would sharpen the mind. The effect was to foist prescriptive grammar based on Latin onto the users of a Germanic language, English, and to make its speakers feel guilty, and to make generations of people wonder what the square of the hypotenuse was good for.
People think that being able to speak another language is like being a foreigner, but speaking or reading a language is not a state of being or a stage of development. It is an activity, like walking and running. Some people have to use crutches. Others march with the crowd. Speaking a second language is merely getting along with the people who speak it to their satisfaction. Like Richard Burton in disguise you go on the Hajj to Mecca, and no one suspects you are an infidel, then you can be said to speak Arabic, in a sense. If like Burton you pretend to be a Pashto-speaking Afghani, it's all right. Your halting Arabic is good enough. As Theodore Bickel used to say, "It's close enough for folk music," a little out of tune, maybe. Who cares?
Who cares is one who cannot accept your being different, like an immigrant's child...[READ MORE]
Rogue Wave - "Nourishment Nation"
When Sex Sucks: On Fitness, Fruit Flies, and Gene Pools
Are you hoping that breeding with somebody with "good genes" will help you have a child who is somehow better then you are? So are a lot of creatures. Unfortunately, it looks like some good genes can't be passed on. In fact, the very genes that make your mate seem spicy might actually hinder your kids' success in the mating game later on.
A couple of Canadian biologists at Queens University in Ontario published a study in PLoS Biology (a Public Library of Science journal) a couple of weeks ago that suggests women who pick mates "fitter" than themselves have very little chance of passing that fitness on to their daughters. Same goes for men who mate with women fitter than themselves: sons born from such a union are actually less fit than sons born to low-fitness ladies. In the genetic war between the sexes, genes that are good for one sex aren't necessarily good for the opposite-sex children who inherit them.
Biologists Alison Pischedda and Adam K. Chippindale discovered this by forcing a bunch of fruit flies to have sex in various combinations of fit and unfit. Fitness wasn't measured in sexiness or success in fly politics -- the scientists measured it by how many offspring a fly could have. In other words, fitness equals how much influence a fly will have over the gene pool...[READ MORE]
I guess that ruins my "Nice legs...wanna swap genes?" pickup line.
Animal Collective - "Prospect Hummer"
Sports
Music Blogger Basketball League Update
1. B+A Urban Achievers 54
2. Veritas Lux Mea 52
3. Blackbeard's Delight 49
4. High Street Robbers 43
5. sand is overrated 41
6. Airstrikes 34
7. Scatter o' Light 29
8. So Much Silence 22
So we're a couple weeks into the Music Blogger Fantasy Basketball League now and things are looking good for yours truly as I had expected. Unfortunately, my boy Kevin and my favorite blogger gal C are heading up the bottom of the pack.
Remember folks that it's a roto league; theoretically, you could just set your lineup and run with your best players when they play, but chances are you're going to want to substitute players now and then to fill up your stat sheet. It doesn't get to be much of a problem until the second half of the season when the 82 game max starts to draw near for each position...so I guess you can fill them up now or wait it out...but at 22 points you better start doing something, bro.
Music
Featured Album: Beck, The Information
I got my hand on Beck's latest release over the weekend, The Information. Now let me just preface this by saying I've never been a big fan of Beck. I enjoyed his earlier work a lot more than I have his more recent, and while I do think his previous release, Guero, is a good album, I think there's a lot I'm missing. Certainly, there are tracks off both Guero and The Information that are funky, dancey, and fun...but maybe I long for the loser, baby of Beck's younger years. Whatever The Information is, I haven't decided; maybe it will take another twenty listens, maybe it won't...but I certainly respect what the album is attempting to do, as explained in the PopMatters review below:
The Information, Beck’s ninth studio album and third with producer Nigel Godrich, is, in some respects, an overload of 21st century post-post-modernism, a rhythmic bulk of terrestrial instrumentation and space-junk miscellanea that makes giddy revelry out of its own contradictions. There’s the funky rumpus “Elevator Music”, a one-chord drone living a checkered dance floor’s Saturday-night dream, and then there’s real elevator music, “Movie Theme”, a slo-mo hallucination of transcendence under sheets of synthetic soft rock. A piano hook straddles a rift between ‘70 Stones and Abba in “Strange Apparition”; Love-worshipping chamber pop haunts the atmosphere of “Think I’m in Love”; “Motorcade” teases out the genesis of a DFA-inspired descent into fuzzed-out repetition; and Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze make cameo appearances at the tail-end of the ten-minute closing track, “The Horrible Fanfare/Landslide/Exoskeleton”, discussing illuminated manuscripts, aversions to change, and space travel while backwards sound effects manufacture a Kubrickian air of skittish distrust.
Furthermore, the record is speckled with architectural inconsistencies that declassify each U-turn into new territories of sub-genre exploitation: pop hooks sabotage the funk jams, krautrock sprouts from old-school rap cadences, blues riffs find themselves surrounded by an infestation of surly catcalls. It’s these concurrent oddities, absurdities, and stylistically-ignorant endearments, rifling through the album’s gooey and often cavernous headspace, that cause The Information to congeal with unexpected ease. Perhaps the absence of this kind of collective subtext is what elicited the routine condemnation of last year’s similarly eclectic Guero, which lacked an absurdist thread. Though it was unfairly criticized by some, Guero will most likely be seen, in hindsight, as a safer warm-up to The Information‘s wildly successful risk-taking. It’s held together by its space-age hip-hop affectations, by its neo-psychedelic flashbacks, by its underlying acknowledgement that each “fun” element has some kind of consequence embedded on its flipside. This may not sound like music of the future, but it’s the kind of music that only the future could possibly make...[READ MORE]
Beck - "Cellphone's Dead"
Beck - "Nausea"
Beck - "I Think I'm In Love"