Pick the Notes You Really Mean

One of my favorite writers and all round cool guy Haruki Murakami writes in the NYT about how he would never have become a writer if it weren't for his love of jazz:

One of my all-time favorite jazz pianists is Thelonious Monk. Once, when someone asked him how he managed to get a certain special sound out of the piano, Monk pointed to the keyboard and said: “It can’t be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!”

I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.

Killing In the Name Of

Mohsin Hamid's Moth Smoke is one of those books I've had sitting on a shelf for ages before I finally decided to delve into it. And it's excellent. Anyone who has little idea about what's going in modern-day Pakistan (i.e. most of us) should really pick it up to see just how dramatically life there differs from how you'd probably expect. For one thing pot and ecstasy use figures heavily in the plot. And the default position for feelings towards religious fundamentalism among the novel's inhabitants is disdain. From the reviews I'd read, I expected Moth Smoke to be an engaging read; I didn't expect it to be a cross between Rashomon and Chuck Palahniuk. I've already bought Hamid's latest, The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

Though it's only a single thread in this remarkable novel, I found the following passage about murder particularly provocative:

You can always justify killing animals on the grounds that you want to eat them, or wear them, or that they smell bad, look funny, bother you, threaten you, and have the bad luck of being in your way. What about killing humans? Well, aside from a few die-hard individualists on the fringe, the general consensus among people these days seems to be that eating and wearing other people is just not on. Wearing a suit which costs as much as a farmer will make in his lifetime is acceptable, but actually putting his eyeballs on a string a letting them dangle above tastefully exposed cleavage is bad form.

That said, killing someone because of the other reasons we mentioned above (smell, looks, bother, threat, or bad luck) is quite acceptable. You want deoderants, you know that one in 6.87 million will die from a violent allergic reaction, you shrug and churn the stuff out, and some poor fellow suffers a pain in the armpit beyond imagining and dies, and that's that: acceptable. You drive cars, knowing eventually you will probably kill someone or be killed, but "Hurry up, I don't want to be late for my threading," and you're off. No regrets. Or someone who has never been to your farm and seen the cute dimples your youngest daughter is already showing when she smiles decides a line on a piece of paper should be a little to the left, and in the name of God and all that is right, to war boys: kill, kill, kill! Yours not to reason why, but damn it hurts when a land mine blows off your leg.

What an excellent, angry passage.

The ideas of acceptable risk and "collateral damage" are nothing new, of course, but at what point do we become uncomfortable with the results? If a cell phone explodes and someone's burnt to death, you can bet that will make the news and that one person's death may actually result in changes to the product's construction. But how many dead bodies do we have to see (given the opportunity to actually be exposed to them, of course) before we accept significant increases in the price of, oh, petroleum, shall we say? I'd venture, it's far, far more than one.

Related:

• CNN: Man Dies as Cell Phone "Explodes"
• Iraq Coalition Casualties
• Iraq Body Count
• French DJ SebastiAn's remix of Rage Against the Machine's "Killing In the Name" [mp3]
  

Charlie 2.0

Charlie Rose has a new site, which is chock-full of great interviews. There are seven interviews with one of my favorite authors Martin Amis alone.

Only thing I can't figure out: why is it so darn hard to get to a larger view of each video? The results lead to these tiny little screen, which activate at the same size when you click on them. But when you click on "comments," you get a much larger, user-friendly version of the video with comments below. Huh? Bad usability. If I'm overlooking something obvious, someone please let me know.

Herzog

I shouldn't make movies anymore. I should go to a lunatic asylum.
- Werner Herzog during the making of Fitzcarraldo

Werner Herzog must be my favorite insane director. Which I mean in the nicest possible way. In this New York Times slideshow, he talks about the making of his new movie, Rescue Dawn. Christian Bale does his whole Machinist radical weight-loss thing again. Tangentially, I like the simple elegant design the NYT uses for its slideshow, too.

Dept. of We Report You Decide

Wherein we juxtapose two distinct but related items and allow you to draw your own conclusions.

Ted Nugent in The Wall Street Journal today:

Forty years ago hordes of stoned, dirty, stinky hippies converged on San Francisco to "turn on, tune in, and drop out," which was the calling card of LSD proponent Timothy Leary. Turned off by the work ethic and productive American Dream values of their parents, hippies instead opted for a cowardly, irresponsible lifestyle of random sex, life-destroying drugs and mostly soulless rock music that flourished in San Francisco. ... I saw first-hand too many destroyed lives and wrecked families to ever want to drool and vomit on myself and call that a good time. I put my heart and soul into creating the best music I possibly could and I went hunting instead. ... While I salute and commend the political and cultural activism of the 1960s that fueled the civil rights movement, other than that, the decade is barren of any positive cultural or social impact.

Ted Nugent's lyrics to "Catch Scratch Fever" from his album of the same name in 1977:

I make the pussy purr with
The stroke of my hand
They know they gettin' it from me
They know just where to go
When they need their lovin man
They know I do it for free

They give me cat scratch fever
Cat scratch fever

That's the first song from the album; the second being "Wang Dang Sweet Poontang."

Official Stribs Workout Playlist

• Foo Fighters - "Best of You"
• Chemical Brothers - "Galvanize"
• Groove Armada - "Suntoucher"
• Faithless - "Muhammed Ali"
• Vitalic - "My Friend Dario"
• Elbow - "Station Approach"
• Nine Inch Nails - "Survivalism"
• Jay-Z & Linkin Park - "Numb/Encore"
• Bjork - "What Is It (Vitalic Remix)"
• The Prodigy - "Girls (Geht's Noch?)"
  

Mr. Stribley reserves the right to update to update this list at any time without forethought or explanation; so, for example, if Tiny Tim's "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" no longer appears in this listing upon further visits, please refrain from forwarding emails of protestation.

Nakha Chitra

Via a co-worker, this elegant and delicate artwork created with the artist's fingernails: nakha chitra. From Mumbai, India, Suhas Tavkar has been performing this rare art form for over 50 years and his work will be on display at the New York Public Library (the Donnell Center on 53rd) from June 9th. He'll be doing a live demonstration of fingernail embossing there next Saturday the 7th at 1pm.

Because You Are Neither Surly Nor Flamboyant

Of all places, CRACKED magazine offers this superlative, short-'n'-sweet explanation of why bands like My Chemical Romance are rubbish:

You think that in 20 years people will be performing karaoke to “Son when you grow up, would you be the savior of the broken, the beaten and the damned?” Or will they be screaming “Scaramouche, scaramouche, will you do the fandango?!” Epics are either really fun or kickass: you can either be funny and flamboyant like Queen or surly and awesome like Lynard Skynard.

Exactly!

Sailor Maid

Dateline: Coney Island, New York:

This weekend, at the annual Mermaid Parade, I learned that many mermaids have tatts. Of the New York parades I've been to, this was the hottest and most crowded. But with lots of great people watching.

More Brazil pics up on my Flickr site, too.

The Reinforcement of Belief

This extraordinary Fox News clip (well, it's hardly extraordinary in the sense that it's typical) demonstrates how the news organization is not interested in the pursuit of knowledge, but in the reinforcement of belief. The priest interviewed unreels so many unchallenged fallacies, it's mind-bending, and when he speaks of the "the intricacy of a human eye" (revealing his tremendous ignorance of evolution, since Darwin himself expected and countered this very argument in The Origin of the Species in 1859) the hosts nod appreciatively, one of them adding "that whole miracle of pregnancy," ironically unaware of the reams of evidence for evolution that pregnancy offers.

It's important to note, too, that the priest dismisses Dawkins and others as straying from their respective fields, then continues by offering his limited understanding of human biology and evolution as evidence for a Creator. It he truly sought knowledge, he could have found countless books, essays, and scientific documentaries detailing the evolution of the eye. To employ this argument reveals one of two things: either (1) a simple ignorance of the subject or (2) intellectual dishonesty. Of course, the latter is a distinct possibility, since many well-known pushers of Creationism have been confronted with the evidence which counters this argument (the eye's intricacy) repeatedly, yet many of them continue to employ the argument, safely assuming that the flock hasn't been exposed to its thorough rebuttal.

With this modus operandi in mind - employed by propagandists of every stripe, whether religious or political - and with this sort of ignorance on the loose, is it any wonder that 40% of Americans still think there was a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11?

Related: Watch this excellent video on the evolution of the eye on YouTube.

Additionally, today, The New York Times posted an excellent series of articles about evolution and especially the relatively new field of evo-devo.

Nice Guy Finishes First

If you've been following the amazing story of singing cellphone salesman Paul Potts, the one human being I've seen consistently send a silly, helpless grin to Simon Cowell's face, his story had a very happy ending this weekend.

If you haven't been following, do yourself the favor of a quick recap by starting here, then here, then finally here. And see a shy bloke from South Wales bring a crowd to its feet and to tears with opera.

Got to be the most inspiring thing I've ever seen on the internets.

Fuck the FCC

Mark Morford sums up my thoughts on the recent New York appeals court ruling against the FCC. Should've known such a ruling would've come out of New York, I guess (conservatives will agree but for different reasons), as you'd be forgiven for thinking "the f word" was invented here.

BTW, the post title above ain't my words. Far be it from me to employ such harsh language on my humble PG-rated blog! Just quoting good ol' Steve Earle.

Grandma Laughlin

Rest in peace, "rangar." I wish we all could've been there.

You were long-suffering. You taught us to be kind. Not to mention tolerant. And I reckon you're where we all got our off-kilter sense of humor, too.

Kisses from afar, grandma.

Bom Dia

I'm in lovely Salvador, Brazil, where I have a stunning view of the bay and Pelourinho, the old historic center of Salvador. For 25 bucks a night. That's the view from my window above. Unfortunately, it's raining cats and dogs today, so I'm stuck inside this adorable little Internet cafe Bahia blogging, instead of strolling the cobblestone streets and garnering a few more blisters on my feet, as I did yesterday, when I walked all the way down to the Atlantic Ocean - and then some.

Oh yeah, and we found out last Friday that AARF (or rather our parent company Aquantive) got bought by Microsoft. So now I work for Bill Gates. Hiya Bill.

Guess since it's raining today, I'll make some good headway on Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, so far, one of the best books I've read in ages.

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing direction. You change direction, but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you, something inside you. So all you can do is to give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand does not get in, and walk through it, step by step. There is no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverised bones.

- Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

Update: Loads of Brazil pics over on my Flickr site

A Is for Aardvark

Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.

- Jules Verne

For my money, the Encyclopedia of Life would have to be the single most exciting project Avenue A | Razorfish has been associated with since I began working there. AARF has produced a video and preliminary IA and design for the Wiki-like site, which intends to catalog the earth's 1.8 million named species.

The Boston Globe has a great writeup, which quotes the eminent biologist, E. O. Wilson, one of the program's founders:

Our ignorance is dangerous. Life forms with which we've shared the planet are going extinct at an alarming rate -- usually before we even determine what they are and what role they play in the ecosystem. Our knowledge of biodiversity is so incomplete that we are at risk of losing a great deal of it before it is even discovered.

The Washington Post also has an article, which reminds us that perhaps as little as 10% of the world's species have been cataloged.