Geeks Dig Metaphors: Introduction
A metaphor is a glorious thing,
A diamond ring,
The first day of summer
A metaphor is a breath of fresh air,
A turn-on,
An aphrodisiacChicks dig, dig, d-i-g, dig, dig metaphors,
Sparks
Metaphors are scraps of resemblance that tie us down. Ted Nelson
Let’s talk about the Singularity.
The Singularity is the closest thing to a religion for a large number of people who self-identify as ‘geeks’ at the moment. It’s also an idea which has been widely publicised in the last couple of weeks with the Singularity Summit having acheived some mainstream media coverage. The Singularity also *matters*, because it’s something that is believed in, to a greater or lesser extent, by a large number of tech billionaires – people who have actual influence and power.
The Singularity is a term taken from a science fiction story, and has a variety of meanings – almost one for every ‘Singulatarian’, but roughly speaking they all believe that “The Unity of Nanoscience, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science” (to borrow from the title of a book I’m currently reading ) will lead to humanity becoming gods.
From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weiner
That’s not an exaggeration. The basic belief of Singulatarians is that at some point in the future, we will have enough knowledge of biology, computing and nanotech that we can make ourselves immortal, upload our minds to tiny nanotech computers which will then take over the entire universe, turning it into computronium. We would then become immortal omniscient gods in a virtual reality indistinguishable from the real thing, except that it would be geared entirely to our personal happiness. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
The timescale of this is, of course, disputed. At one end is Ray Kurzweil, stupid person and author of the moronic The Singularity Is Near, who argues due to his ability to draw a straight line that by the year 2010 “computers will disappear as distinct physical objects, with displays built in our eyeglasses and electronics woven into our clothing” (three months to go. I hope I can afford new glasses and clothes before Christmas) and that we will all become immortal gods within his lifetime. Kurzweil is regarded as one of the greatest futurists of our time, and billionaire technologists fawn on his every word.
At the other extreme is eccentric right-wing astrophysicist Frank Tipler, who also thinks this will happen, but believes it will take about fifteen billion years for us to become immortal, omniscient and omnipotent. Also, while Kurzweil bases his argument on drawing lines (and not even very accurate lines – I’m not usually a particular fan of P.Z. Myers, but I was very pleased to see that blog post from last year, because it saved me having to write the exact same thing), Tipler’s argument (in his fascinating The Physics Of Immortality (apparently out of print) and his frankly barking Physics of Christianity, but first put forward in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle , which is also the most sensible explanation) is based on known physics and makes testable predictions. However, unlike Kurzweil, Tipler also identifies the end result of his speculations with the Christian God, so he’s regarded as a crank, rather than an eminent futurist. (He *is* a crank, as anyone who reads his recent work, like this paper arguing that Obama is evil because of the existence of the luminiferous aether and the arguments put forward against abortion by the film Starship Troopers, will recognise, but he’s less so than Kurzweil). Tipler also argues that his Singularity will be an actual physical singularity – the universe will be condensed to a single point he calls the Omega Point.
Now, these ideas are actually inordinately appealing, to me at least. I like the idea of becoming an immortal, omniscient superintelligent superbeing living in a universe which exists solely for my pleasure. That sounds like a good thing to me. And I’m probably far more likely to want the Singularity to be true than the average person, because I’m not especially attached to my body. I’m balding, asthmatic, dyspraxic, overweight, have migraines and mild psoriasis, and have various sensory issues, the combination of which means that most of the time the closest i get to physical pleasure is ‘in less discomfort’. Upload my mind into a computer capable of processing text and music, and you’ve kept 95% of my joys in life while losing 100% of the unpleasantness. That seems like a good deal to me – especially if that computer can then simulate my mind in any body I want.
Unfortunately, I see three problems with the Singulatarian view – one technical, one poilitical, and one philosophical. All of these are surmountable, but there seems to be little evidence that any of them *will* be surmounted – or that any Singulatarians even consider these to be real problems.
This post is getting much, much longer than I thought it would, so I’m breaking it into several sections. I’m still writing the other sections as I post this, but they’ll be posted as I get them done. I won’t be replying to comments til they’re all complete.
Linkblogging For 26/08/10
This month’s Superman/Batman has a good bit in it. I know, I’m as surprised as you. But here it is – The Joker and Lex Luthor as Calvin and Hobbes
I don’t know if I’ve linked to him before, but Ben Gunn is a prisoner who’s spent thirty years in prison for a murder he committed when he was a teenager. He renounced all violence, decades ago, and is now the only blogging prisoner in the UK, and is also studying for a PhD in criminology. He needs money to pay his fees this year. As someone who finds it hard enough to pay for my own Master’s degree while working, I have a huge amount of sympathy for someone trying to study with no source of income at all, and would urge anyone who can afford it to help him.
John Harris is one of the first sensible Labour supporters I’ve seen talking about the Lib Dems post-coalition.
James Ward has tried to change his name to James Ward
And hating cliches and special pleading is clearly the last acceptable prejudice
Doctor Who From The Beginning: 5 – The Keys Of Marinus
The Keys Of Marinus
Writer: Terry Nation
Director: John Gorrie
DVD availability: single-disc DVD Buy from Amazon
This one’s taken a *long* time to get around to writing about, hasn’t it? Partly that’s because my DVD player broke, but also it’s because of the nature of this story. While it might have worked well as a serial, particularly for the eight-year-old demographic at which it’s clearly aimed, watching it all in one go (which is how I’ve been doing these) is like trying to eat ten dry cream crackers. When you start you think “this will be easy!”, but after a few minutes you’re thinking “Why on earth did I think this was even possible? I want to die!”
The Keys Of Marinus is the first bad Doctor Who story. Why on earth this was saved when Marco Polo wasn’t is something we shall never know. The performances – at least those of the main cast – are as good as ever and the production design is *astonishing*, but there’s a gigantic hole in the middle of the script.
All the previous stories have been *about* something, or several somethings – An Unearthly Child was about future shock and the generation gap, The Daleks was about fascism, Edge Of Destruction was meant to show us more about the characters and bring their relationship forward, and Marco Polo was, by children’s TV standards, a pretty decent stab at showing how life was lived in another continent and another century.
But The Keys Of Marinus isn’t about anything at all except filling up six twenty-five minute TV slots between the Telegoons and Juke Box Jury. It’s the first example of someone trying to write ‘a Doctor Who story’ – it’s the first of many, many attempts to recapture the Daleks’ success, but even though it’s written by Terry Nation it comprehensively misses everything that made them a success. While the Daleks were hideous inhuman tank-robot-monster-aliens with zap guns, Yartek, leader of the alien Voord, is a bloke in a wetsuit.
It also has a rather… confused… morality. An ancient scientist kidnaps the TARDIS crew and holds them to ransom until they retrieve the pieces of his giant mind-control machine that, until someone found a way round it, was controlling the minds of every person on the planet. He’s the goodie.
But that doesn’t matter, because this isn’t really a story at all. It’s a ‘quest’, where Our Heroes have to find all the pieces of the MacGuffin, splitting up into groups and adventuring in several different ‘exciting’ locations, against various ‘scary’ foes of the psychic-brain-in-jar variety, before finally getting together to defeat the big baddie. In other words it’s the sort of plotting that had previously been a staple of Republic serials and bad superhero team-up comics, but is these days better known as video-game plotting.
In other words, this is the first example of Doctor Who being written by a lazy hack. And just how much of a lazy hack Nation is being here can be seen by the place names – Marinus (a watery planet) and Morphoton (where you’re dreaming while you’re there) must have taken whole *seconds* to think up. We also have those Terry Nation staples “plants.. that are more like animals!” (unless you’ve watched a lot of Nation’s work you’ve no idea how tedious ‘scary’ jungles can get), casual sexism (both Barbara and Susan want nothing more in the universe than a nice dress, while the Doctor wants a well-equipped lab), and a heroic character with a name like Terry Nation who saves the day. (In this case the character is called Tarran, but in future we have magical substances callled Tarranium, heroes called Tarrant and, most blatantly of all, a sexy super-spy called Sara Kingdom).
Terry Nation could, when he wanted, be a very good writer. Unfortunately, he only wanted to three times in his many years on Doctor Who – the first two Dalek stories and Genesis Of The Daleks (and it’s very debatable how much of that story he actually wrote). The rest of the time he was the absolute definition of a hack.
While reviewing the previous stories, I’ve found myself straining against my self-imposed 1000-word limit – they all have many points of interest, good lines, well-composed shots or *something*. In this case you have a bunch of good actors and an excellent set designer doing their best with terrible material, and there are only so many synonyms for ‘not very good’ you can come up with.
Doctor Who has always been a children’s programme, but the stories before this one all pretty consistently refused to use that as an excuse to be bad TV. But this is just unbelievably lazy writing, and the story is only redeemed at all because the cast haven’t yet realised that it’s OK to give a sub-par performance when handed a sub-par script. But even there, one of the chief joys of early Who is watching William Hartnell’s extraordinary performance, and he’s off on holiday for two weeks here, when the team split up.
This wouldn’t seem so bad in another context – to be honest, the script isn’t *MUCH* worse than the standard of, say, series three, much of the Troughton era, mid-period Pertwee or whatever. Whenever the programme makers get lazy and think ‘will this do?’, The Keys Of Marinus seems to be the standard to which they sink. But here it’s placed during an otherwise impeccable run of classic stories. This is the only unarguably *bad* story in the show’s first year (one can argue about The Sensorites, and we will in a couple of weeks, no doubt), and while it’s easy to see what they were trying to do, it’s amazing that this story didn’t kill off the ‘rubber-suited monster’ genre of Doctor Who for good.
Luckily, next up came one of the best stories the show’s ever produced…
The Alternative Vote system
In a little under nine months, the British people will be voting on changing our voting system from First Past The Post (FPTP) to the Alternative Vote system (AV).
The Liberal Democrats want to go much further and have the Single Transferable Vote system (STV), while the Tories hate the idea and want to keep things as they are. Labour put AV in their manifesto, but are fighting it now because that’s what Labour do.
So it’s a compromise.
But it’s a compromise that solves one of the two main problems with our voting system, and will make it easier to solve the other one, so I would urge you to vote yes in the referendum.
There are two main areas where our voting system is unfair. The first is proportionality, which AV does little to address. In the last election the Tories got an MP for every 35,000 people who voted for them, Labour got one for every 33,000, the Lib Dems one for every 120,000 and the Greens one for every million or so. That’s not fair, and should be changed, but unfortunately while the Lib Dems and Greens want to change that, Labour and the Tories don’t. I wonder why?
But there is another aspect which is equally unfair, and that is preferentiality. First Past The Post, our current system, is a winner-takes-all system. But it may well be the case that the majority don’t support the winner. Imagine a case where you have three parties – the Evil Bastard Party, the Quite Nice Party and the Very Nice Party. In a constituency, 34% of people vote for the Evil Bastard candidate, 33% for the Quite Nice candidate and 33% for the Very Nice candidate. The Evil Bastard candidate then wins – even though the Quite Nice supporters would rather have the Very Nice candidate than the Evil Bastard, while the Very Nice people would rather the Quite Nice candidate. The vast majority of people are then unhappy with ‘their’ MP, who represents ‘them’.
This kind of thing does happen – my friend Dave often uses the example of Hazel Blears, the Labour MP for Salford and Eccles, who is horribly unpopular. It’s probably fair to say that in that constituency most Lib Dems would have preferred the Tory candidate to her, and most Tories would have preferred the Lib Dem (and the Socialist Worker candidate stood as TUSC/Hazel Must Go!). So that constituency has an MP who 60% of the voters wanted out.
The Alternative Vote fixes that.
How It Works
Everyone is given a ballot on which is listed all the candidates who are standing, The voter then ranks them in order. If one candidate gets more than 50% of the first-preference votes, that candidate is the winner. Otherwise, the lowest-scoring candidate is knocked out, and the second-preference votes from them go to the other candidates. This carries on until one candidate has more than 50% of the votes. This means that whoever wins, more than half the voters think they’re not the worst alternative.
An example – imagine we have four parties (Red, Blue, Yellow and Green) and nine voters who vote as follows:
Voter 1 Yellow Green Blue Red
Voter 2 Yellow Blue Red Green
Voter 3 Red Blue Yellow Green
Voter 4 Red Blue Green Yellow
Voter 5 Yellow Green Blue Red
Voter 6 Red Green Blue Yellow
Voter 7 Blue Green Yellow Red
Voter 8 Blue Red Green Yellow
Voter 9 Green Red Yellow Blue
Round 1 – We have 3 Yellow, 3 Red, 2 Blue and 1 Green first preferences. Green is eliminated as it has the fewest first preference votes, and the votes redistributed:
Voter 1 Yellow Blue Red
Voter 2 Yellow Blue Red
Voter 3 Red Blue Yellow
Voter 4 Red Blue Yellow
Voter 5 Yellow Blue Red
Voter 6 Red Blue Yellow
Voter 7 Blue Yellow Red
Voter 8 Blue Red Yellow
Voter 9 Red Yellow Blue
Round 2 – We have 4 Red, 3 Yellow and 2 Blue , so Blue are eliminated
Voter 1 Yellow Red
Voter 2 Yellow Red
Voter 3 Red Yellow
Voter 4 Red Yellow
Voter 5 Yellow Red
Voter 6 Red Yellow
Voter 7 Yellow Red
Voter 8 Red Yellow
Voter 9 Red Yellow
We now have 5 Red votes, which is more than 50%, so Red wins
Advantages Of The System
The principal advantage of this system is that there is no longer any such thing as a ‘wasted vote’, and allows people to vote *honestly*. The VAST majority of people in this country, in my experience, don’t vote so much out of support for one party but to keep the other lot out. This is one reason, for example, why so many people are screaming ‘betrayal!’ at the formation of the coalition. Many people supported Labour, but because Labour couldn’t win in their seat, they voted Lib Dem to ‘keep the Tories out’, rather than because they actually supported us.
But of course this works every way – there are Tories who vote Lib Dem to keep Labour out and Lib Dems who vote Labour or Tory to keep the other party out. (There don’t seem to be many Labour or Tory supporters who vote for the other big party to keep the Lib Dems out, at the moment, but there probably will be in any future FPTP elections). And there are many, many supporters of smaller parties who know their party hasn’t a chance, so vote for the least-worst option.
But if we have AV, at the next election you don’t have to hold your nose. You put the party you actually support in first place, and then if the Legalise Cannabis And Criminalise Sodomy Party (or whatever tiny fringe party most closely matches your views) doesn’t come first, you haven’t ‘wasted’ your vote, and haven’t failed to keep the party you hate most out.
It also has a number of other advantages:
It brings increased representation for smaller parties, but would still keep out rabid extremists. My guess is that it would lead to more Lib Dem MPs, a couple more Greens, and possibly one or two from some of the hard left parties (especially if the various fringe parties co-ordinate their efforts like in the last election, where RESPECT and the Greens worked together). On the other hand, no party that was *hated* by the majority could get any seats, so AV would actually make it *less* likely that the Bastard Nazi Party would get in. (Other far-right extremists, like Racist UKIP, might get a seat or two, but that’s a small price to pay for greater democracy).
It would also mean that a lot of the negative campaigning – ranging from “X Can’t Win Here!” (because now they can) through to personal abuse against candidates – would have to stop. Currently if you’re a Labour politician in, say, a Labour/Conservative marginal, it doesn’t matter if you alienate every Lib Dem supporter by saying “people who vote Lib Dem worship Satan and think Jo Brand is the funniest one on QI” because you’re trying to persuade people not to vote Lib Dem. Under AV, you want them to give you a high second preference, so you’d be more likely to say “I have the greatest respect for my Lib Dem opponent, and urge my voters to give her their second preference” in the hopes that she’d say the same about you.
It would get rid of many safe seats – at the moment, Hazel Blears and her ilk are immune, because unless everyone who doesn’t want her as MP rallies round a single candidate, she gets in by default. Now, so long as she’s the least popular option, out she goes.
And for those who are unhappy with the coalition, it helps send parties a message. If, at the last election, the majority of Lib Dem supporters had put Labour second, and the majority of Labour supporters had put the Lib Dems second, then both parties would have a very strong incentive to work together, knowing that would be what their supporters wanted. On the other hand if the majority of Lib Dem voters had put the Tories second, then it would mean that the Lib Dems would have a clear answer to the cries of ‘betrayal!’
Disadvantages
The only disadvantage I can see – and it’s quite a big one – is that AV is not proportional. But then neither is our current system – and a preferential non-proportional system is better than a proportional non-preferential system like the horrible D’Hondt system we use in the European elections. The system the Lib Dems want – and that I think is the best myself – is called STV (or the British Proportional System), and is both proportional *and* preferential. But the interesting thing is that STV and AV are essentially the same system, except you merge several constituencies together and then have the top few candidates become MPs, rather than just the top one. That means that if AV goes through, it would be pretty trivial to change to STV in the future if enough people want that (and since AV would probably lead to increased representation for parties which want a proportional system, that change might happen in say ten or fifteen years).
So while AV isn’t my favourite system, it *is* my *second-favourite* system, and I’d rather have my second favourite than my most-hated. If you would too, vote “Yes” in May 2011.
Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin
So after my problems, I’ve finally downloaded Brian Wilson’s new album. After a few listens, I can safely say that this is without a doubt the second best solo album by a member of the Beach Boys to be released this year…
On paper, the combination of Brian Wilson and George Gershwin is a good one. Wilson has been obsessed with Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue since he was two, structuring his masterpiece Smile in imitation of it and often playing it on the piano while he works out other musical ideas. He’s also one of a tiny number of musicians since Gershwin’s death that one can realistically speak of as being in the same league musically – and the only one of those who might be interested in a project such as this.
And Gershwin is a composer who suits reinvention better than most. The versions of his songs with which most of us are familiar are themselves posthumous reinterpretations – Ella Fitzgerald or Miles’ Davis’ versions of Gershwin are radically different to the staid Broadway performances Gershwin himself would have heard, and Rhapsody In Blue, his masterpiece, is barely ever performed the way it was originally intended, as a jazz piece. (For those who want to hear that, archive.org have an MP3s of a performance with Gershwin on the piano, by Paul Whiteman and his band, from the day after it was premiered (part one , part two ). It’s a cut-down version, so it would fit on two sides of a 78, but it’s still far more alive than the stodgy, over-orchestrated versions one normally gets today. The same site also has a single-MP3 1927 recording by the same band, but that lacks energy compared to this).
But Brian Wilson is unfortunately not the singer he once was. When the first clips of this album became available, the usual fan cry went up “Wow! Brian is singing better than he has in years!” – this is the same thing people were saying in 1995, and 1998, and 2004, and,..
The fact is, Wilson is an elderly man with self-admitted brain damage, and he *sounds* like an elderly man with brain damage. There’s still plenty to enjoy in his vocals – he has a musical sensitivity and phrasing ability that are second to none – but he slurs his words and has occasional slight pitching problems, and whenever he gets to the top end of his range he screeches rather than sings. That’s normally OK – we make allowances because he’s Brian Wilson, and because his songs are so good – but if you’re recording, say, Love Is Here To Stay, then you’re placing yourself in a position where you’re asking for comparison with Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, two of the greatest interpreters of popular song who ever lived. just for starters. And that’s not a comparison where Brian is going to come out best, much as I love the man (and Mr Wilson’s art at its best is so personal, so communicative, that it does inspire feelings of love for the man himself).
So much as Wilson’s fans may wish otherwise, this isn’t going to be a Rod Stewart Great American Songbook style crossover hit.
But putting the issue of lead vocals aside for a minute, there’s also the much more promising area of arrangements and production, and this is where the album has more to offer. A couple of years ago Wilson did a Christmas album which completely reinvented a lot of Christmas standards as fresh, exciting pieces, and I suspect the idea behind this album was to do the same with Gershwin. In that, Wilson has at least partly succeeded.
Before I get into a track-by-track analysis, however, I should deal with the question of authorship. In recent years Wilson has leaned a great deal on collaborators. In particular, three members of his band have taken on a great amount of the work he would have done in his commercial heyday – Darian Sahanaja has acted as ‘musical secretary’ and bandleader, Scott Bennett has written lyrics (and in at least one case appears to have written most of the music for a collaborative song as well), and Paul Mertens (Wilson’s woodwind player) has provided string arrangements. Of these, Mertens’ contributions are most easily identified – he has a distinctive sound to his arrangements which is utterly unlike anything Wilson used previously, resembling 1930s European music more than anything else, while fitting Wilson’s music perfectly – while Sahanaja’s are the most difficult (Sahanaja is both an extremely good songwriter and an accomplished pasticheur of Wilson’s style – he could probably write a convincing Brian Wilson album by himself).
However, Wilson himself is still in overall charge, and the other musicians definitely see themselves as working to fulfill his creative vision rather than their own. I suspect, from what I know of Wilson’s current working methods, the way it works is along the lines of Wilson sketching out an initial musical idea, some combination of band members going off and fleshing it out in rehearsal, and then Wilson fine-tuning the result. So no matter who else has had input, I would contend that these are Brian Wilson tracks. Just be aware that they may be Brian Wilson tracks in the way that Cootie Williams improvising a solo on a Billy Strayhorn song is a Duke Ellington track.
The album starts with Rhapsody In Blue (intro), a brief statement of the main theme of the Rhapsody sung as an a capella block harmony by multi-tracked Brians (with a woodwind underneath) going into a lovely Hollywood-style orchestration of the same melody. It feels very much like a curtain-raiser, and is very, very nice.
The Like In I Love You is the first big disappointment of the album. Wilson and Scott Bennett were given two ‘unfinished’ Gershwin songs to finish off. Unfortunately, this one was not as unfinished as the publicity suggests – originally written as Will You Remember Me? , it’s been recorded before, and the original was superior. Gershwin’s elegance is here turned into something along the lines of That’s What Friends Are For or a similar Bacharach-on-an-off-day 80s track, and while Scott Bennett is possibly, other than Van Dyke Parks, the most interesting lyricist Wilson has worked with, placing his lyrics up against Ira Gershwin does him no favours at all. He comes from a much looser tradition, where rhyme and scansion don’t have to be perfect so long as they express a feeling, but up against the delicate precision of Ira Gershwin, his work just sounds careless. Not an unpleasant track, but as is so often the case with collaborations (especially posthumous ones) it’s the lowest common denominator of the geniuses involved.
Summertime is much better – Wilson hollers a little at points, but the arrangement is slow, sinuous and sexy, with Mertens’ growling sax and Sahanaja’s little vibraphone touches working wonderfully against a string arrangement full of ‘cello vibrato, with Jeff Foskett and Taylor Mills providing high vocal harmonies. One could easily imagine this arrangement being used on, say, one of Ray Charles’ better jazz albums (like his duets with Betty Carter).
I Loves You Porgy is less successful. It’s a song that depends far too much on vocal nuance, and while Wilson *almost* rises to the challenge (he makes a surprisingly decent fist of the middle eight), it doesn’t quite come off. This goes in the interesting failure category. It’s also nice to see that Wilson, who for a long time was worried about seeming effeminate in his vocals, is now perfectly happy to sing from a woman’s point of view.
I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’ on the other hand is just wonderful. Banjos, harmonica, bass harmonica, muted trumpet and xylophone all clank away on top while a swing-time pop track of the kind one would expect from Wilson plays underneath. This sounds like the more energetic, upbeat parts of Smile.
For It Ain’t Necessarily So we go back once again to an arrangement style that could have come from 50s jazz vocalists – I could hear this arrangement, other than the blues harmonica, working behind someone like Peggy Lee. And Wilson’s vocals here are the best so far on the album – he cracks and strains for the notes, but that gives it a bluesy edginess. Unfortunately the best arrangement touches (the banjo and Taylor Mills’ ‘bom bom’ vocals) come in the middle eight, which is the only where Wilson’s vocal is less than convincing. Paul Mertens again comes out with a great little string part on the fade – the strings on this album are possibly the best I’ve heard on a pop album since Colin Blunstone’s One Year. The drum sound on this track is great as well, with some great booming timpani.
‘S Wonderful is. It’s turned into a bossa nova, and while Wilson’s vocals aren’t his best, it’s almost impossible not to move to this one. Lovely flute solo from Mertens. This is probably the thinnest song on the album, but the arrangement is just sublime.
They Can’t Take That Away From Me on the other hand just doesn’t work. Done to a backing which is to all intents and purposes that of Little Saint Nick, with the backing vocals being a chant in the ‘football team singing along’ style, I can see what they were *trying* to do, but it doesn’t work. There’s one fun little touch – the “boogidy-boogidy-boogidy-boogidy-boogidy-boogidy-shoop” backing vocals in the middle eight – but it’s really very unimpressive.
Love Is Here To Stay is again a standard straight-from-the-fifties arrangement, and Wilson doesn’t do an especially good job with the vocals. This song has been done this way so many times that you have to have something very special for it to work. The instrumental break, with an almost subliminal theremin in the background giving it a Space-Age Bachelor Pad feel, works better than the vocal sections, but this isn’t that good.
I’ve Got A Crush On You is one of the more interesting reworkings here – this is turned into a perfect pastiche of 1950s doo-wop, all piano triplet chords a la Earth Angel, but then the guitar sound is… interestingly off. It’s reverbed as one would expect, but… not quite. And then the strings come in from a completely different idiom altogether. I’m not sure if this is a jumbled mess or something very clever, yet.
I Got Rhythm (which starts with another quote from Rhapsody In Blue – these have been peppered throughout the album), is another failure along the lines of They Can’t Take That Away From Me. It’s a surf-rock arrangement of the kind the person on the street would probably imagine if they were asked to imagine how Brian Wilson would approach the song, even down to Jeff Foskett singing chunks of the melody to Farmer’s Daughter (an early Beach Boys track) over the tag. The two most ‘Beach Boys’ sounding tracks are also the two least Brian Wilson sounding, at least to my ears.
Someone To Watch Over Me starts with yet another Rhapsody quote, this time ‘cello led. And *THIS* is the good stuff again. A simple arrangement based around harpsichord and acoustic guitar, this is nonetheless the best thing by far on the album. I never made the connection before, but this song of course sums up all the themes I identified in Wilson’s work in this piece I wrote for The High Hat. Possibly the nylon-string restatement of the melody on the fade is a tad overkill, but other than that there is nothing at all I can criticise about this track.
Nothing But Love, the second Wilson/Bennett/Gershwin track, works much better than The Like In I Love You, a chugalong rocker with some interesting chord changes. Oddly, the most ‘Brian sounding’ part here – the chords under “I asked her what’s timeless” – is *also* the most Gershwin sounding part. VERY far from what you’d expect from someone finishing a Gershwin track, but all the better for the lack of reverence. It’s spoiled though by easily the worst lead vocal on the album.
and then to finish we have another string and vocal fragment of Rhapsody In Blue (Reprise).
Overall, this album is somewhat less than the sum of its parts. There are magnificent sections – be they entire songs, or just fragments a couple of seconds long – but I doubt it’s an album I shall be returning to a huge amount. I’d say it’s a solid three-star effort (in comparison Wilson’s former bandmate Al Jardine’s album of earlier this year is a good three-and-a-half stars). Add a star on to that if, like me, you’re coming to this music knowing Wilson’s current limitations as a vocalist and with enough goodwill towards him to compensate for that. But knock a star off if you’re coming to this looking for something to sit in your CD rack next to Ella Sings Gershwin.
Animal Man
When I was 12, I was just starting to get into American comics, and the garage around the corner from my dad’s work did something rather odd – on its magazine rack it got in just one month’s worth of DC Comics – February ’91. It never got any others in, and as far as I could tell I was the only person who ever bought any, but I bought all of them over a period of several months.
It was actually a really good month for DC comics if you were, as I was, a bright 12-year-old boy, but crucially a 12-year-old boy. I remember Commissioner Gordon’s heart attack (“Wow! Major changes to an established character!”), the last issue of the first Lobo miniseries (“Wow! Swearing *AND* Violence! Truly comics aren’t just for kids any more!”) and an early issue of The Demon v2. All of these were written by Alan Grant, who became my idol for the next three years.
But the one that really captivated me was one of the most surreal, complex things I’d read to that point – Animal Man 32. Yes, 32.
Peter Milligan’s short (six issue) run on Animal Man is one of the best runs on a comic series I’ve ever read, and when I discovered years after reading that single issue, Schrodinger’s Pizza, that it was the follow-on to Grant Morrison’s famous run, I was quite astonished. While Morrison’s run is a near-perfect work of art on its own terms, Milligan’s run is its own unique and very strange thing, and to be honest reads as more ‘Morrisonesque’ than Morrison’s own run on the title.
The thing everyone remembers about this story is its very Doom Patrol collection of characters – The Front Page, a being made entirely of newspapers, who doesn’t speak but whose headlines change all the time in a running commentary on the action, Nowhere Man, who is molecularly dissociated and who can only keep himself together by speaking in Burroughs-style cut-ups, and most spectacularly the Notional Man.
The Notional Man is the product of a phantom pregnancy in a woman who was so determined to have a baby she gave birth *anyway*, and you can only see him out of the corner of his eye. You don’t want to let his forceps get you. In one spectacularly creepy scene, he’s kidnapped Animal Man’s daughter and forces him to start torturing himself to death using surgical implements normally used in pregnancy. He’s a genuinely chilling creation.
And Milligan wraps this all in the kind of SF story i love – travellers from the future have accidentally placed one of Animal Man’s distant proto-human ancestors into some kind of quantum superposed state, and as a result Animal Man himself is being sent through several different realities and has to get back to the real one. He even explains the difference between the Copenhagen and Everett-Wheeler interpretations of quantum physics, using a pizza in place of Schrodinger’s Cat.
(Of course Morrison’s run rather depended on Bohmian mechanics being the ‘true’ interpretation of quantum physics, but as both stories in their own ways show the futility of trying to find a single unified ‘truth’, having two different interpretations of quantum physics both be true makes sense on a meta-metaphorical level).
All that would, of course, be enough for me to love Milligan’s run on the title. But what impresses me most is how he uses this to tell a human story about mental illness and familial breakup. Buddy Baker wakes up in a world where his marriage is disintegrating and his daughter no longer recognises him, and his powers are backfiring, causing him to violently attack his wife’s lover, urinate on the street to mark his territory, and in a key scene to rip out a horse’s jugular with his teeth, at an animal rights rally. He ends up kidnapping his children after his wife applies for a protection order.
And meanwhile he’s in a world where everything seems slightly wrong – the wrong man is president, pop stars he thought dead are alive… it’s a horribly accurate portrayal of the way people’s lives fall apart when afflicted with mental illness.
There’s far more to these six issues than I’m giving them credit for, but I don’t want to go into too much detail about a work which is inaccessible to the vast majority of my readers. I’ve had to obtain the story as .cbz files, as it’s never been reprinted, and it looks like it never will, but anyone who enjoyed Morrison’s work on the title, or who likes Milligan at his best, needs this. It’s the only example I can think of of someone taking over from Morrison on a work-for-hire title and building and expanding on his work and managing to take it to interesting places.
Brian Wilson’s New Album – Why People Turn To ‘Piracy’
Before I start, for those expecting PEP! today, I’m afraid I was so overwhelmed with fielding the response for my last post I’ve had to leave it til this weekend. That’ll teach you to actually read and like things I write. But to make up for that there’s two posts today – one on comics shortly, and then one on Brian Wilson’s new album later.
But this is just a rant about precisely why people turn to ‘piracy’.
I pay for the vast majority of the music I listen to, because I believe music deserves paying for. I subscribe to eMusic and pay for a Spotify subscription. I tend only to torrent bootlegs. But more and more I wonder why.
Take Brian Wilson’s new album. It comes out today – if you live in the USA. If you’re in the UK, you have to wait til September 6. Also, you can’t buy the ‘Super Premium Edition’ (autographed vinyl, plus CD and MP3/FLAC copies) if you’re anywhere outside the USA. I might have bought that – I like vinyl. But OK, it’s a limited thing, there’s probably enough USians to buy them all up.
However, I do have an American wife, and so I have access to an American debit card, which luckily had the $9.99 available to purchase the album in MP3/FLAC format direct from Brian Wilson’s site. So I have to jump through a few hoops, but I get a confirmation of my ‘advance purchase’ – I can download a single track ‘now’ and the rest of the album ‘on August 17′. Even though it is now August 17.
But to be fair, Brian Wilson’s site is based in California, where I bought it at about 5AM, so I download the single track, and come back at 5:30 PM my time, 9:30AM theirs – a reasonable time, you would have thought. Certainly at this point the album has been downloadable at Amazon for several hours, but foolishly I chose to buy direct from the artist rather than go through a middleman (a middleman which also requires me to install proprietary software, of which there isn’t a copy for my operating system version) – and Amazon also refuse to sell the album to me anyway because my IP address is in the UK.
So at 5:30 PM I click the link provided in my email receipt, to be informed that I have ‘exceeded my download limit’. This despite the fact that I have not yet downloaded the album at all. The Brianwilson.com forums are now full of people asking when they’ll be able to get the album that they’ve already paid for.
On the other hand, checking one of the major bittorrent sites shows a full copy of the album, at the same quality as is being offered on brianwilson.com , was uploaded ten days ago.
So by wanting to pay for this music – music created by a multimillionaire who doesn’t need the money nearly as much as I do – I’ve had to obtain a debit card registered in another country, be lied to by a website, pay $10 and make a complaint through an automated system – and I’ve still not actually got the music. Had I not been able to get access to a foreign card, I would have had to wait a further month before I could even start on that process.
When you make it *THIS MUCH MORE DIFFICULT* for people to give you money for your product than to get it illegally for free, you don’t *DESERVE* the money. Wilson has another album coming out next year, apparently. If it’s sold in the same way, through the company ‘Topspin’, I shall for the first time in my life torrent one of his legitimately-available recordings rather than buying it. Because I don’t appreciate being punished firstly for living outside the US, and then again for actually paying money for the product.
ETA – Minutes after writing this, I got a reply to my complaint, and can now download the music
ETA Again – the link to the FLAC version they sent me breaks at the 2MB point. The MP3 version is downloading, though…
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