Wednesday, March 09, 2011
Monday, March 07, 2011
reviewing the king of limbs after one listen
most people threw up some opinions on the king of limbs after just one listen, the day it was released. i'm going to happily share my opinions a few weeks after release, still having only listened to it once.
i listened to king of the limbs in it's entirety on headphones on the way to work, having never heard it before (except for putting it on in the background when we had guests, after 4 other new albums, so it was kind of lost in the mix)
I got about half way through, and realised i was still waiting for something to happen. by the end, i'd heard a couple of fairly nice songs (in a supra-keane sort of way) in the second half, but wasn't satisfied.
listening to an album once is never enough to know it; none of my favourite albums have been so highly regarded after just one listen, and that's especially true of radiohead, whose albums i've always found to be growers. but king of limbs just annoyed me; after one listen, it seems closest to thom yorke's pitiful 'feeling pulled apart by horses' single, while also harking back to the absolutely classic amnesiac b-sides. but four tracks in and i dunno, i just hadn't heard any songs, or riffs.
'In Rainbows' was fantastic. I might not have realised how good it was on the first listen, but it didn't put me off. I don't mean put me off in a 'slipknot' kind of way - hearing that when i was 17 was thrilling, but too much - or in a 'trout mask replica' kind of way - as in, the genius could initially only be drank in in small quantities. or Race Horses' 'goodye falkenburg', which i initially thought was a limp version of their live set, but after a few listens i absolutely adored. not like those; this feels more like ephel duath's 'through my dog's eyes', an album I never found a space for. listening to 'limbs' was a frustrating, empty experience. I want to go back to it because radiohead have never let me down before, and others have said it's good, but i honestly don't look forward to the experience or listening to it again.
So, how did listening to it actually make me feel? like a twerp. The lack of publicity just underlined the disappointment for me, it's like they just weren't bothered by it. they'd done it, they were going to shit it out regardless. it's all puffy, rich beats and nothing else; yorko's warblings come across with no lyrical warmth, no harmony, no clever instrumentalism. i don't remember anything from the album except some piano on track 6. i think i found it irritating, which is often a sign that i'm grumpy about something, perhaps something i can't deal with.
So, i guess i'll give it a few more listens, then maybe give up, then do another 'disappointing albums' post in a couple of years. i hope i realise i was wrong, but part of me just wants to dislike the record. is that because i've got an unreasonable grudge, or is it because i feel dumped by it?
edit:
i think one of the things i didn't like about it is that all the songs are about 5 minutes long and go nowhere. it's like... if you do a two minute track that goes nowhere, well fine, it's just like a flavour, a taster, or something; extending it to five minutes is a trick, a smokescreen, like saying 'there's something in this track that deserves to be 5 minutes long' when there isn't. like blowing a doodle up to dramatic proportions in order to make it look like a work of art, which gives it some meaning it didn't originally have. now, i know music is different; a groove can take hold when jammed out. or it can become annoying. i mean, the first discernable riff on the album is track 3, and that's just such an arbitary melody, like they just found some notes and said 'fuck it, that'll do', without considering whether it was catchy or just sounded like a shit version of 'go to sleep'.
i listened to king of the limbs in it's entirety on headphones on the way to work, having never heard it before (except for putting it on in the background when we had guests, after 4 other new albums, so it was kind of lost in the mix)
I got about half way through, and realised i was still waiting for something to happen. by the end, i'd heard a couple of fairly nice songs (in a supra-keane sort of way) in the second half, but wasn't satisfied.
listening to an album once is never enough to know it; none of my favourite albums have been so highly regarded after just one listen, and that's especially true of radiohead, whose albums i've always found to be growers. but king of limbs just annoyed me; after one listen, it seems closest to thom yorke's pitiful 'feeling pulled apart by horses' single, while also harking back to the absolutely classic amnesiac b-sides. but four tracks in and i dunno, i just hadn't heard any songs, or riffs.
'In Rainbows' was fantastic. I might not have realised how good it was on the first listen, but it didn't put me off. I don't mean put me off in a 'slipknot' kind of way - hearing that when i was 17 was thrilling, but too much - or in a 'trout mask replica' kind of way - as in, the genius could initially only be drank in in small quantities. or Race Horses' 'goodye falkenburg', which i initially thought was a limp version of their live set, but after a few listens i absolutely adored. not like those; this feels more like ephel duath's 'through my dog's eyes', an album I never found a space for. listening to 'limbs' was a frustrating, empty experience. I want to go back to it because radiohead have never let me down before, and others have said it's good, but i honestly don't look forward to the experience or listening to it again.
So, how did listening to it actually make me feel? like a twerp. The lack of publicity just underlined the disappointment for me, it's like they just weren't bothered by it. they'd done it, they were going to shit it out regardless. it's all puffy, rich beats and nothing else; yorko's warblings come across with no lyrical warmth, no harmony, no clever instrumentalism. i don't remember anything from the album except some piano on track 6. i think i found it irritating, which is often a sign that i'm grumpy about something, perhaps something i can't deal with.
So, i guess i'll give it a few more listens, then maybe give up, then do another 'disappointing albums' post in a couple of years. i hope i realise i was wrong, but part of me just wants to dislike the record. is that because i've got an unreasonable grudge, or is it because i feel dumped by it?
edit:
i think one of the things i didn't like about it is that all the songs are about 5 minutes long and go nowhere. it's like... if you do a two minute track that goes nowhere, well fine, it's just like a flavour, a taster, or something; extending it to five minutes is a trick, a smokescreen, like saying 'there's something in this track that deserves to be 5 minutes long' when there isn't. like blowing a doodle up to dramatic proportions in order to make it look like a work of art, which gives it some meaning it didn't originally have. now, i know music is different; a groove can take hold when jammed out. or it can become annoying. i mean, the first discernable riff on the album is track 3, and that's just such an arbitary melody, like they just found some notes and said 'fuck it, that'll do', without considering whether it was catchy or just sounded like a shit version of 'go to sleep'.
Saturday, March 05, 2011
the black swan
I am angry with the world of publishing.
A few years ago, a saw a bunch of posters for 'the black swan' (the book, you dolt), and was basically suckered into buying it. it sounded like freakonomics, but more high-brow, and obscure, or something. It looked like exactly the book i wanted to read.
I didn't finish it because it's basically a made up pack of shit, with a very insightful basic idea, which i think i can summarise like this:
let's say there's a power law that relates how things that happen frequently don't change the world very much, and as things get more important, they get more rare. so far, so obvious. Taleb marries this to the long tail, and a pinch of chaos theory - the rarer, and therefore harder to predict, something is, the more it affects the world. right at the end of the tail, you get things that almost never happen, that totally change everything, that you could never predict.
i really like that idea, even if it is pretty pessimistic. but Taleb runs with, makes up a load of fictional evidence - i'm not kidding, he tells a story that he cites as evidence and then admits he made it up - and furthermore, the idea is fairly self-defining and tautologous. but what really irks me is beyond the book, and goes back to penguin's marketing for the book.
my excellent brother Dan recommended i read Iain M. Banks*' books "excession" as grist for the conceptual piece we're working on. i've just finished it, and it's a pretty complex book, but very good if you can keep up with it, or just surf along not understanding, knowing that what's going on will probably make sense when you get a few more chapters in. The plot deals with an "outside context problem", the kind of problem "most civilisations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop."
i was reading the wikipedia page on excession, and guess what i read: "The situation has been more recently described as black swan theory." The link leads to a page on black swan theory, not the book itself, as if Taleb had any kind of formal definition of the theory, or had written an academic paper not a straight-to-paperback pop-science book.
edit: the link to the black swan theory page is also in the opening paragraph of the article. which is wierd.
this page is basically just an advert for the book (there is some discussion on the talk page as to why it exists and how it should be merged into the page for the book); and what are the chances of me coming across this link - unless it's not as uncommon as i expected. so i started thinking - have they just plastered the link all over wikipedia? what about the rest of the internet?
a quick site search brings up 113 pages that mention 'black swan theory' - many of which are talk pages or user pages and so on. but that's still a lot of pages directing wikipedians towards this page. a broader search brings up 259 pages across the internet that link to it. I'm unable to tell how many of these are people using the term in general parlance, and how many are what i suspect - deliberate insertions of the link across the interweb to boost sales of the book by viral marketeers. I say 'viral marketeers' because they're linking to the 'theory' not the 'book' - they're selling an idea, not a product. they're trying to turn wikipedia, which is freely editable, into a web of adverts. I hate that.
*nothing to do with 'rosie m. banks', the author bertie wooster pretends to be in jeeves and wooster.
On a different tack, the recent controversy over the Old Man Murray page on wikipedia really reminds me of arguments between Minds in Excession. there's something about the anarchy - as in, self-organisation - the independence, the distance between people. we depend upon them, and when individual ones become corrupted by the power, the group steps in to set things right. the user who suspended the OMM page has been reprimanded, and the comments here are just like dialogue between various characterful craft. the thrill of peeking behind the curtain is just the same in excession (where the human's plotline is completely pointless) as with wikipedia.
A few years ago, a saw a bunch of posters for 'the black swan' (the book, you dolt), and was basically suckered into buying it. it sounded like freakonomics, but more high-brow, and obscure, or something. It looked like exactly the book i wanted to read.
I didn't finish it because it's basically a made up pack of shit, with a very insightful basic idea, which i think i can summarise like this:
let's say there's a power law that relates how things that happen frequently don't change the world very much, and as things get more important, they get more rare. so far, so obvious. Taleb marries this to the long tail, and a pinch of chaos theory - the rarer, and therefore harder to predict, something is, the more it affects the world. right at the end of the tail, you get things that almost never happen, that totally change everything, that you could never predict.
i really like that idea, even if it is pretty pessimistic. but Taleb runs with, makes up a load of fictional evidence - i'm not kidding, he tells a story that he cites as evidence and then admits he made it up - and furthermore, the idea is fairly self-defining and tautologous. but what really irks me is beyond the book, and goes back to penguin's marketing for the book.
my excellent brother Dan recommended i read Iain M. Banks*' books "excession" as grist for the conceptual piece we're working on. i've just finished it, and it's a pretty complex book, but very good if you can keep up with it, or just surf along not understanding, knowing that what's going on will probably make sense when you get a few more chapters in. The plot deals with an "outside context problem", the kind of problem "most civilisations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop."
i was reading the wikipedia page on excession, and guess what i read: "The situation has been more recently described as black swan theory." The link leads to a page on black swan theory, not the book itself, as if Taleb had any kind of formal definition of the theory, or had written an academic paper not a straight-to-paperback pop-science book.
edit: the link to the black swan theory page is also in the opening paragraph of the article. which is wierd.
this page is basically just an advert for the book (there is some discussion on the talk page as to why it exists and how it should be merged into the page for the book); and what are the chances of me coming across this link - unless it's not as uncommon as i expected. so i started thinking - have they just plastered the link all over wikipedia? what about the rest of the internet?
a quick site search brings up 113 pages that mention 'black swan theory' - many of which are talk pages or user pages and so on. but that's still a lot of pages directing wikipedians towards this page. a broader search brings up 259 pages across the internet that link to it. I'm unable to tell how many of these are people using the term in general parlance, and how many are what i suspect - deliberate insertions of the link across the interweb to boost sales of the book by viral marketeers. I say 'viral marketeers' because they're linking to the 'theory' not the 'book' - they're selling an idea, not a product. they're trying to turn wikipedia, which is freely editable, into a web of adverts. I hate that.
*nothing to do with 'rosie m. banks', the author bertie wooster pretends to be in jeeves and wooster.
On a different tack, the recent controversy over the Old Man Murray page on wikipedia really reminds me of arguments between Minds in Excession. there's something about the anarchy - as in, self-organisation - the independence, the distance between people. we depend upon them, and when individual ones become corrupted by the power, the group steps in to set things right. the user who suspended the OMM page has been reprimanded, and the comments here are just like dialogue between various characterful craft. the thrill of peeking behind the curtain is just the same in excession (where the human's plotline is completely pointless) as with wikipedia.
Friday, March 04, 2011
Thursday, March 03, 2011
cancer link dump
cancer keeps cropping up. i mean, in the news.
well, you can always draw a straight line between two points, but we've got carl zimmer on cancer in whales (or lack of) and the prevalence of a transmissible form of face cancer in tasmanian devils - surely the only case outside dogs, and possibly Henrietta Lacks.*
speaking of which, i might as well throw adam curtis' documentary about HeLa cells because it's brilliant, real *must watch* stuff.
I just think it's fascinating that we've got those two extremes out there at the moment - whales with their inexplicably low rate of cancer, and devils with a form of cancer so virulent that it's threatening their whole species. the killer quote: "Tasmanian devils are so genetically similar to one another that their immune systems don’t recognize infectious cancer cells from another individual as foreign"
i suppose it humbles me, how much we have yet to learn.
anyway, here's cancer: the musical, because mansun say it better than i ever could.
*edit: apparently, syrian hamsters too. surprised that the wikipedia article hasn't picked up on hela cells - while they were not transmissible to other humans, they seemed awfully virulent.
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