Alphabetology Vol.16

Posted: 20 May 2021

Imported from substack so the formatting is messed up, it looks better on substack.

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This is a classic 70's love song by Peter Frampton i simply uploaded it for people to enjoy, this is Peter Framptons song, not mine and it was also on family guy

- It’s Joopz, YouTube video for [Peter Frampton - Baby I Love Your Way]

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Existentialism

Achieving Goals, and Then…?

Books

(quotes) Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary (1857)

Games

Nier, Undertale, Games as Art

Music

Róisín Murphy
Jeromes Dream
* Origami Angel
Algae Bloom
Pity Sex
Pomegranate Tea

Existentialism

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Achieving Goals, and Then…?

I lied when I said I was going to write about Andy Warhol this week, but I realized I didn’t have that much to say about him. [1]

Instead, here’s this: I came across this article: [link], about a scandal in TV game shows in the 50s which led to rigging game shows becoming a federal crime (!!???). What really grabbed my attention though was the quote it ends on:

“But you bring down a major TV Show, you alter the way that TV networks conduct their business with producers. You alter the way that producers deal with sponsors. You bring about major changes in the way shows are conducted as a result of your testimony to Congress. That’s great. But what do you really do after that? What from that can you put on a resume and what job can you get hired for with that experience? I mean, it’s a big thing, but it’s not a big thing that translates to anything. You can’t take away from that kind of accomplishment to bring that kind of major change to television, but it’s not a transferable achievement. It’s nothing that you’ve can turn into anything.”

What do you do after that? The eternal question! Always applicable. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to do something like the above, make a lasting impact on television law, and have nothing to show for it. You get a story you can tell.

And that’s life, isn’t it? [2]

Books

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Madame Bovary Quotes
t. Steegmuller

Many parts of this book make me laugh but are hard to translate into bite sized quotes because they really depend on the context of… the entire book. It’s satirical but it’s not entirely satire. So these quotes are more on the somber side, because the humor is hard to capture in boiled down chunks.

She longed to travel; she longed to go back and live in the convent. She wanted to die. And she wanted to live in Paris.

Had they nothing more to say to each other? Their eyes, certainly, were full of more meaningful talk; and as they made themselves utter banalities they sensed the same languor invading them both.

Charles and the older Madame Bovary put their heads together to figure out how to improve Emma’s health:

So it was decided to prevent Emma from reading novels. The project presented certain difficulties, but the lady undertook to carry it out: on her way through Rouen she would personally call on the proprietor of the lending library and tell him that Emma was canceling her subscription. If he nevetheless persisted in spreading his poison, they would certainly have the right to report him to the police.

I like this next quote because it’s the first thing we see go through this guy’s head:

This one seemed pretty, so the thought of her and her husband stayed with him.

“I have an idea he’s stupid. I’ll bet she’s tired of him. His fingernails are dirty and he hasn’t shaved in three days.”

“Would you believe that a simple sternutative could work such havoc in the organism of a quadruped? It’s extremely curious, don’t you find?”

“Yes,” said Charles, who wasn’t listening.

Out of cowardice or stupidity, or perhaps yielding to that indefinable impulse that leads us to do the things we most deplore, he let himself be carried off to Bridoux’s.

Everyone should read Madame Bovary.

Games

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Nier, Undertale, Games as Art

There are going to be a bunch of spoilers for both Nier (Automata and Replicant) and Undertale and I’m going to mention some other games like Hotline Miami. These are the only games that I think I’ve played that have tried to do anything really meaningful with the idea of what a game is. Take heed.

This is kind of a spicy topic? I’m not sure. I always feel a little embarassed about bringing up video games in any kind of social context. It’s hard for me to get away from thinking about them as a waste of time, no matter how good they are or how untrue this may be.

On some level, games are hard to make accessible. They’re hard to share with others. [3] People complain about movies that run for longer than two hours, meanwhile every single video game takes between eight and forty hours, and also usually involves having to actually play the game and succeed at it. It’s not enough to just watch all of the cutscene or whatever. It’s kind of like TV, in a way, where you build a relationship with the characters. I sincerely believe that most games only work in any kind of artistic sense because of the immense amount of time you spend with your characters, facing the same conflicts they do.

Time spent is one of the main things that sets video games apart from other mediums. What else? Why make a video game rather than a TV show or a book? There has to be something about the interactivity that is essential to the experience. I think games that have strong artistic messages approach this in one of two ways: they take a meta-narrative approach and draw explicit attention to you as a player and your interaction with the game, or they lean into the interactivity and allow you to shape the game with your choices as you play.

Undertale and the Hotline Miami games lean strongly into commenting on the relationship between you as the player and the game. I think most games that do this kind of thing are commentaries on violence: you don’t have to inflict this virtual cruelty onto others. You can put the game down or do something else. Hotline Miami, an ultra-violent game about entering buildings and killing everyone in them in an arcade-y way, is in your face about this. It asks the player things like “Do you like hurting people?” during intermission segments. A question directed at the player character but simultaneously at the player: why are you playing this? DO you like hurting people? What kind of person plays a game where all you do is hurt people?

Undertale similarly comments on violence but gives you a lot more agency in the matter and makes your agency meaningful. Throughout the game you get to choose whether you want to fight enemies or get around them peacefully, doing things like petting dogs or telling a joke. The outcome of the game varies significantly based on this, and there are a huge number of branching paths the game can take. The feeling is really that you are interacting with the world of the game, and it responds to your actions. You change the story. It also breaks the fourth wall in a few ways, changing significantly based on actions you have taken in prior playthroughs of the game. It comments on your ability to save and load your game and make different choices: are the characters just playthings to you? Do you think you get to do whatever you want willy nilly and just erase the results if you don’t like them?

The two Nier games (Replicant and Automata) are also about violence, but more than that they deal with sentience, morality, and duty. They are very similar games in a number of ways, and both, like Undertale, use save files to turn the game into something larger than just a linear story. In the Nier games, after you finish the game once, you can replay sections and see additional dialogue and cutscenes that peel back more of what is going on behind the scenes. You revisit familiar locations and redo familiar parts of the games but with new insight into what is really going on. You may be hesitant to annihilate robots, sold to you as mindless killing machines from the start of the game, after you realize some are slowly gaining sentience and just want to live in peace. But you can’t erase what you have already done: it is knowledge you live with as a player.

Really please don’t read this next part if you plan on playing Undertale or either Nier game:

I think the really brilliant thing that Undertale and Nier do is erase your save file after you “complete” the games. They ask you to sacrifice your character to accomplish something within the games. And it’s a meaningful sacrifice for players, more than anything else the game could ask: erase hours of progress, the ability to jump back in with the characters you have grown and spent time with, just to give closure. Erasing yourself to do something good for the characters of the game.

Games like Undertale and Nier would be nowhere near as moving if they didn’t directly engage with the meta-mechanisms (like saving or opening menus) that you, as a player, use to play them. Choices are truly final - you can’t just load up an old save file and change your mind. These experiences are so radically different from what other video games offer, and leave such a mark, that they really transcend the medium. They’re what video games are capable of when they put their heart into it and try to do something meaningful. They’re absolutely beautiful games.

Music

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Róisín Murphy - Róisín Machine

This is like. Very downtempo feeling disco. Some of the sounds make me feel like an alien.

Jeromes Dream - Presents

I understand why some of these older bands put out big compilation albums on Spotify instead of their individual releases but I don’t like it!!! Anyway a lot of places online call this band emo but they seem like cut and dry grindcore to me, and grindcore is a genre I have a mixed relationship with. I like it, but I really have to be in the right mood to listen to it, it’s intentionally abrasive and grating. As far as Presents specifically, it’s good grindcore. Really good! Just make sure you’re in a good place mentally to listen to grindcore before diving in, like for example, if you are putting off vacuuming.

Jeromes Dream - Seeing Means More Than Safety

This is closer to contemporary grindcore than Presents. They do more of the classic kind of shrieking/wailing grindcore screams on this, compared to the echo-y vocals of Presents. I liked the song “The Monologue of the Century” — I wish they got into more of the tech death metal-type melodic guitar lines like on that song on the rest of the album. Otherwise, like their other album, if you’re in the mood for grindcore, A+.

* Origami Angel - Gami Gang

I love this band. Perfect party punk-y emo.

Algae Bloom - I Am Everyone I’ve Ever Met

This is a really good album. There are these videos some people do where they put noodly emo guitars over cringey tiktoks, which are funny on their own, but are also funny because they are exactly what I think a lot of the really good emotive hardcore stuff sounds like. Maybe the lyrics are too clear though, they need to be more metaphorical and sound like they’re sung in a faraway cave:

Pity Sex - Feast of Love

I’ve listened to this album a bunch and think it’s great. Great indie-rock-y shoegaze.

Pomegranate Tea - life is getting so ___.

Is it indie rock? Is it emo? Who cares. They do gang vocals, all aboard.

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[1] I have for the past year been under the mistaken impression that Warhol started out as a photographer, and, not attaining much success with his photos, decided to get into pop art because he knew it would sell. I have no idea why I thought this. For what it’s worth, I’m generally not very interested in photography, and I like his photos a lot. I like his pop art work too. He was an excellent artist. But I don’t have much to say about him besides that he was a great artist. Lichtenstein I’m a little more torn about — he made some good art but I think he had very twisted sensibilities about what “art” is and was a little too into copying. I don’t think it’s common knowledge that his “comic book” paintings are straight up plagiarised with no recompense to the original artists. I dunno. He has a Mondrian phase, he has a Picasso phase. I don’t know enough about him. Warhol, though: great.

[2] I was starting to write something about art-making and goals and that study about how happiness returns to baseline pretty soon after you accomplish a goal but. Realized I would rather just write about art making on its own without writing anything about goals. So I scrapped it!!!! But here’s a quote I was going to use, from the excellent book Art & Fear, from the section titled “ANNIHILATION”:

Annihilation is an existential fear: the common — but sharply overdrawn — fear that some part of you dies when you stop making art. And it’s true.

[3] I think Undertale is the only really accessible game of any that I listed. You could play it having never touched a video game before and have an incredible experience. Hotline Miami is difficult and doesn’t make any sense unless you’re used to how much violence video games usually have. The Nier games are kind of in their own realm? They’re like the comedian’s comedian of games. Replicant explicitly copies the style of other games at various points. Automata is independent of but contains tons of references to replicant. They are games that assume you are familiar with video games. Postmodern games. Totally possible to play and enjoy without any of that context, but very different experiences with and without an implicit “this is how video games usually work” knowledge.

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Thanks for reading, have a great day.

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Alphabetology Vol.15

Posted: 13 May 2021

Imported from substack so the formatting is messed up, it looks better on substack.

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It is not impossible for a person to pose falsely as a disc jockey, even to pose as a named one, just to get into Wikipedia

- SergeWoodzing, Wikipedia talk page for [Disc jockey]

Lest we all be tricked by people pretending to be DJs so that they can get their photos onto Wikipedia, here is this week’s iss`ue of Alphabetology.

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Books

Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary (1857)

Phenomenology

The Past, the Future, Copyright, Roko’s Basilisk

Music

* Hail the Sun
Chon
I Met a Yeti
DJ Koze

Art

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No art this week but I’m going to write a little about Andy Warhol next week.

Books

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Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary (1857)
t. Steegmuller [1]

Charles Bovary is the ultimate buffoon and this is one of the greatest books I’ve ever read. Here is a list of things that happen to Charles:

• He wears a silly hat to school as a child

• He thinks back on life with his first wife and laments how her feet were icy cold in bed

• He goes to a big fancy ball, a change from his usual provincial life, watches men playing cards for six hours, and leaves saying he didn’t understand the game at all

• He takes his wife Emma to the opera and pesters her throughout asking her to explain what’s going on as she shushes him

He’s not the protagonist! He’s just my favorite. My second favorite is over-the-top evil guy Rodolphe, who upon meeting Madame Bovary, goes home and immediately starts plotting how he will seduce her and ruin her life. I’m not exagerrating or filling in blanks, this is explicitly narrated. When it’s time to abandon her, he writes a letter with a bunch of made-up nonsense and, after some thought, signs it “your friend.” Incredible.

Absolutely everybody in this book is an absolute menace. Some characters are relatable, but nobody is likeable. Homais’ entire deal is being an annoying guy. He ruins everyone’s schemes and he gets rewarded for it at every turn. Our heroine Emma Bovary’s struggle is sympathetic but her behavior is selfish and rooted in fantasy. Her husband Charles is my favorite lovable fool but he’s completely blind to her suffering and almost non-existant in her life. León and Rodolphe both have their trysts with Emma, lead her on, and leave her when she starts becoming inconvenient. Emma’s wetnurse harrasses her for coffee beans. Their maid steals. Lheureux encourages her and Charles to take out unreasonable loans. Everyone is constantly avoiding people and trying to get other people to leave them alone. Nothing really good happens.

It’s a timeless book! Everybody is miserable, but in their misery, we relate to them on a baser level. It could have been easy to write Rodolphe off as an ass when he tells Madame Bovary that her showing up at his house all the time is unsightly, but she makes it hard because she’s cheating on her doofish husband! I don’t want her to get caught either! He abandons and lies to her, but on some level, what he does makes sense. I can tell Rodolphe behaves poorly, but I can also understand why he’s making the poor decisions that he’s making. We know or can easily imagine people acting the way he does in the present day. In so much literature, my immersion breaks when I don’t understand why a character suddenly behaves poorly. Here, even the cartoonishly debased Rodolphe is still human. There are no silly miscommunications. He makes sense. That is a rare treasure.

Madame Bovary made my heart race, it stressed me out, it made me laugh out loud. It’s a marvel of a book and an absolute pleasure to read. I can’t recommend it enough.

Phenomenology

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The Past, The Future, Copyright, Roko’s Basilisk

I stumbled across this copyright license online, called the MODIFIED RADIOACTIVE PUBLIC LICENSE. If you read it, you give up any copyright rights to any of your works, past, present, and future. It’s very cool, check it out here:

https://dcrs.xyz/copyright.php

I think it’s obvious that this is an artistic statement more than a seriously legally binding document, but there’s a lot I like about it. I like that it starts off by stating

By CONSUMING this WORK, your timeline has been ALTERED

Causing a theoretical split between people who have alterered timelines and people who don’t, à la the Mandela effect. [2]

Generally though I’m really tickled by the idea that having a private thought can permanently change how you exist in the world. This is a hard idea for me to explain because written out like that it sounds obvious. We have thoughts about what we sense and we go from there; thinking things shapes how we interact with the world. Duh. You can think something like “I was a selfish child” and all of a sudden see all of your childhood memories through a darker lens than ever before. Ta-da! You have changed the past.

But I think my interest in this is closer to something to do with “dangerous” thoughts? Thoughts that once thought, cannot be unthought, and change how others interact with you. They are both private and not private thoughts. Thought viruses, in a way. This license is an example of this, explicitly stating that reading it terminates any copyright you have and will ever hold. Just thinking it doesn’t do anything until someone else tries to use your good ideas. Thoughts like this are somehow dangerous to have.

Another “dangerous” thought like this is Roko’s basilisk. If reading that license above has caused you serious psychic damage, you should skip this part, because it’s worse.

There’s an online community of eggheads who came up with this thought experiment, which went on to be called Roko’s basilisk. The thought experiment goes as such: Imagine one day in the future, a very powerful AI is created. And this AI is a real bastard. It wants to punish anybody who knew or was aware that it would one day come about, but didn’t help bring it into existence. Presumably this will be done with some sort of “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” torture machinations.

That’s it. I don’t know what the experiment part of the thought experiment is. But now that you’ve read that, and you are aware that this AI might one day exist, if you don’t put all of your time and effort into working to create this AI, it is going to torture you when it is eventually created. Sorry.

This seems kind of like a joke when you first read it, like the nuclear license above. I think it’s interesting for similar reasons: just having had the thoughts, just knowing that it’s possible for this thing to one day exist, is worse for you than not. It doesn’t matter what you do with these thoughts and whether you act on them or not. Simply having them is enough for them to work their magic and change how you exist in the world.

For what it’s worth, this entire premise is kind of silly, and Roko’s basilisk is a lot sillier than the license. The license is making an important statement about copyright, and it’s pretty clear in that it is active as of right now. The basilisk relies on a hypothetical “well, one day this thing might exist,” which is where it falls apart. I think there’s an xkcd comic that makes fun of it by imagining a different possible AI that tortures anyone who heard about Roko’s basilisk and didn’t make fun of it. Really though, you can imagine anything you want. You can write up your own license that says it undoes the effects of the radioactive public license. You can think something like “if I have this thought I have to wear sandals for the rest of my life” if you feel like it. Private thoughts aren’t binding.

Maybe “big secret contract” is the best way to think about this stuff. I like the idea that you can enter an agreement with someone just by seeing something they wrote, like a trap. There is a secret club and you enter it by reading a contract. We get used to having our physical agency limited (you can’t go there, you can’t touch this, etc.) but not our mental agency (you can’t think this, you can’t think that). We take our mental agency for granted. It’s novel and interesting to engage with and question how much control we really have over our private thoughts, and what that means.

Music

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* Hail the Sun - New Age Filth (Post-Hardcore/Prog Rock)

For some reason it didn’t click that I could seek out and listen to proggy post-hardcore until listening to this band. I like At the Drive In, The Mars Volta, Coheed & Cambria, MCR — these are all bands with similar epic/symphonic feels to their guitars and screams. There are more like them! Hail the Sun is one of these bands and they rock. I love this album. It ebbs and swells in just the right places. My favorite songs are “Slander” and “Made Your Mark,” which I think has a really cool chorus :o).

Chon - Grow (Prog Rock)

I like the idea of prog rock like this or Animals as Leaders, I admire the bands and their musical talent, but I have a tough time getting really invested in the music when there’s no singing to accompany the more violent rock sounds (drums, math rock guitars). It doesn’t stick with me the same way.

I Met a Yeti - Camp Yeti (Emo/Prog Rock)

This was cool and I like a lot of the sounds and ideas I Met a Yeti have, but it seemed a little unrefined. I’m looking forward to future releases by this band to see where they wind up going with their music.

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[1] There are more translations of Madame Bovary than you would expect. Take a guess. Answer below.

There are 13 translations of Madame Bovary into English. Also, check out how many movie adaptations there are, including my purple link for the 2014 one which I clicked to see if I recognized it at all:

There are (at least) 8 movie adaptations and 2 television adaptations. I think this is the most movie adaptations I have ever seen of the same source content.

[2] lol

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That’s all for this week! Thanks for reading, have a great day.

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Alphabetology Vol.14

Posted: 06 May 2021

Imported from substack so the formatting is messed up, it looks better on substack.

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Ever since Brittany Spears 1st marriage that lasted 55 hours, nothing has been the same.

- Airplaneguy_DC, [Twitter thread about Bill and Melinda Gates divorcing]

Nothing has been the same!

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Art

Local Artists 2

Movies

A Colt is My Passport (1967)

Civil Engineering

In Search of Lost Scaffolding

Music

* The Killers
Spoon
Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard
The Regrets (90s post-hardcore band)
* Polvo
Weatherday

Art

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Local Artists 2

I wrote about a handful of artists I met through La Bodega Gallery a few weeks ago, here is a follow up of more local artists who I have had really fruitful discussions about our artwork with and been inspired by.

Tess Michalik creates beautiful paintings that are sometimes flowers, sometimes patterns. Her work is beautiful and captivating, blurring the line between florals and patterns with bold colors and thick textures, and has been one of the biggest inspirations on my own art.

Up next is Weihui Lu, an artist I met at an art crit at Trestle Gallery. She is one of the most thoughtful artists I know, and speaking with her and hearing her walk through her approach to art, her thought process, and the intention of her works has pushed me to try to be more coherent with my own artistic intentions. It is difficult to tread the line between overly-literal and incomprehensible when you create work this sincere, and I think she treads it beautifully. And the work is abstract! Truly an achievement.

This sample of work is not a great representation because a chunk of her work is very colorful, I just have a personal preference for the more monotone pieces.

And to round off this week’s artists we have Amelia Galgon, another artist I met at Trestle Gallery, with whom I bonded over our both being figurative painters. There aren’t as many as you’d think! Her work explores vulnerability and identity in an honest way that I think is very brave and difficult. Also, her draftsmanship is incredible — she doesn’t have any drawings on her website, so I had to pull one down from instagram, but her contour drawings are unbelievably good.

Movies

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A Colt Is My Passport (1967)

Simultaneously a western and a gangster movie, set in Japan, you get exactly what you signed up for. The opening shot is really good and the final scene is outstanding. Joe Shishido [1] plays an assassin who takes a job for a crime family to take out a different crime boss, which he does very efficiently at the start of the movie. We spend most of the movie watching him and his assistant try to make it out of Japan to hide from the consequences of the murder and the machinations that go into that. A Colt Is My Passport has some of my favorite action choreography I’ve seen in a movie, it looks fantastic, but it is also completely incongruous to the point that some parts that seem unintentionally comical in an otherwise somber and serious movie.

It’s a good movie to just throw on, and does a really outstanding job turning a Japanese crime movie into a western, but it seems like it (pardon the tired phrase) values style over substance. The twists and turns are great, it’s really predictable but engaging, it almost watches like a campy superhero movie. Within the first five minutes a mechanic asks Shishido’s partner “I understand souping up the engine, but why a second brake”? And we get our answer fifteen minutes later when it gets our heroes out of a sticky situation.

Unfortunately, anything you start thinking about falls apart instantly. A B-plot is introduced surrounding a waitress (a damsel in distress) who is stuck working at the hotel they stay at. Our hero arrives like a ray of light, except they don’t really talk at all, and he doesn’t really do anything to save her, she does the work herself. Her main antagonist just vanishes and never bothers her again immediately after his introduction, her entire presence in the movie is kind of bizarre and forced. The main driving force behind the movie is something like there being no honor among thieves, but the ending sequence flies in the face of that and is predicated on gangsters respecting our honorable assassin’s requests. A film full of half-baked ideas, partially executed.

It’s a fun movie to watch but is really a mishmash of a whole bunch of different inspirations and cool bits — it (surprisingly) works, and is very cool. Just don’t think about it too much, and enjoy. The shootout at the end is truly a marvel to behold.

Civil Engineering

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In Search of Lost Scaffolding

There’s too much of it! [2] Some new scaffolding went up in my neighborhood recently and I have had enough. A diagram of where I live and the coffee shop I like to go to:

With the main issue being that I’m not in the habit of walking the “made in the shade” route. And I suspect that if I do start taking that path, someone will rat me out to Bill de Blasio directly through a telephone hotline, and scaffolding will promptly be put up on my one remaining scaffolding-free route.

It is only people like me who have to face these kinds of horrors who truly understand what Proust means when he writes about the differences between Swann’s way and the Guermantes way. Perhaps I, too, will one day bite into a madeleine cookie and remember, in detail, the agony and difficulty of picking a direction to walk.

Music

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* The Killers - Hot Fuss (2004, Indie Rock/Post-Punk)

I listened to this album a bunch in high school when I was first “getting into music” and it sounds like a fond memory. “Mr. Brightside” is obviously an all-timer song [3], but they’re all great songs, and they’re very of the post-punk revival era, if that’s something you are nostalgic for.

Spoon - Ga ga ga ga ga (2007, Indie Rock/Post-Punk)

Gax5 (what a cool way to shorten this album name) is another album I listened to at the same time in my life as Hot Fuss, which I don’t feel as fondly about on re-listen. It doesn’t hit the same.

Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard - Yn Ol I Annwn (2019, Doom Metal)

Incredible band name, the music is a little slow, a little TOO cosmic.

The Regrets - New Directions: Results Beat Boasts (1996, Post-hardcore/Experimental)

This is cool, I really like experimental music that people record in their garage or whatever. I like how sincere and in-the-moment it sounds. The acoustic tracks on this are great.

* Polvo - Exploded Drawing (1996, Math rock/Noise rock)

A favorite album of mine — “Feather of Forgiveness” and “When Will You Die for the Last Time in My Dreams” are fantastic songs, the album works really well. I think a lot of math rock gets kind of boring and having the noise-y slant to it takes it really far.

Weatherday - Come In (2019, Emo/Noise Pop)

Yes!!!!! This is it. This is the future. Hyperpop/emo. I am super into this genre, I think it rules: it has guitars, it sounds fresh, it’s really experimental and raw sounding. Not since 2001’s The Glow pt. 2 have drums sounded this distorted. Not until a few years ago has anyone thought to do this again, and just max out every single sound. The only issue is the experimental music in these areas is all over the place with hits and misses, this album included, but there are a ton of really beautiful moments.

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[1] Joe Shishido’s cheeks look outrageous in this movie. I looked it up afterwards and he very famously got cheek implants as an up-and-coming actor to set himself apart, and it worked and landed him a bunch of roles. Incredible.

[2] There’s an excellent episode of the HBO show “How to With John Wilson” about scaffolding. Check it out, it’s a really good show.

[3] One of my favorite bits of trivia is that people in the U.K. love “Mr. Brightside” more than anyone else on earth. At the time of writing it holds their record for being on the charts (~5 years cumulatively, [link]), which is incredible to me because it’s been on and off since 2007. 14 years of “Mr. Brightside.”

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That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading, have a great day.

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Alphabetology Vol.13

Posted: 29 April 2021

Imported from substack so the formatting is messed up, it looks better on substack.

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It can be hard to sleep with Hayfever... This might not be a bad thing... There is also a lot of other things that can cause you to become a "zombie"... Tiredness has a lot of Differentials you know...

- Anonymous, Wikipedia Talk page for [Allergic Rhinitis]

My allergies are going nuts. I used to take Benadryl, which only helped a little (I would still have a runny nose and sometimes sneeze). I have tried Claritin in the past but it has never helped. This year I’m trying Zyrtec, which so far, seems to be working really well. My face has been pretty bloated, but maybe that’s the allergies and not the medicine. Who knows.

I am going to watch A Colt Is My Passport (1967) sometime this coming week.

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Art

Lucian Freud and Tremendous Hardwood Floors

Nutrition

Pine Nut Syndrome
Pine Nut Syndrome Part 2: Funny Joke

Music

* Mulatu Astatqé
Relient K
Black Pyramid
Pentagram

Art

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Lucian Freud and Tremendous Hardwood Floors

I followed a twitter account which would post a Lucian Freud painting every couple of hours and seeing these paintings day in and day out has laid upon me a curse most foul — I am unable to look at any paintings without noticing how much space hardwood floors take up in them. The reasons for this laid out below:

With the above painting, you might be tempted to think that there is a wall of some sort behind the red haired man. I assure you, that is the floor. The wooden floor stretches from the bottom to the top of the canvas. Seen more clearly below, in a more mature work with finer wood grain details:

Honestly this is such an incredible painting. I’m in awe. But also, look at the floor!!!! It takes up the entire painting. It’s beautifully rendered. But it’s inescapable. A few more examples of his gigantic, lovingly detailed floors:

And finally, possibly Freud’s opus in detailed flooring, and my favorite painting of his:

The color balancing of the photos looks off in every version of this painting I could find uploaded online, but that’s life, I guess. But look at that floor!!!! Unbelievable. Immaculate.

Look at all the floors in general! Whenever he painted someone sitting or laying down, odds are good that you would see a tremendous hardwood floor. It’s an intentional choice to make — the perspective is warped. It makes Freud, as the artist, seem 100 feet tall. He towers over his subjects, shrinking and pushing them into the corners and edges of rooms. He is domineering, standing far above, looking down. No wonder everybody in his paintings seems to be uncomfortable or in pain.

They’re excellent paitings. But at this point I am unable to look at his work without zeroing in on his floors. The settings of his works are central to them and at least as important as the people in them. And now, when I see work by other artists, and they have a lot of floor going on, my mind jumps to Freud. Do these other artists take up the mantle and tackle the very difficult task of turning their floors into living, breathing characters the way Freud did? Not often enough, I think.

Nutrition

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Pine Nut Syndrome

There’s this thing called Pine Nut Syndrome, or Pine Mouth, which are both absolutely ridiculous names. If someone told me “I have Pine Nut Syndrome” I would tell them “Yes, you do.” But it’s a phenomenon/medical issue that started popping up on people’s radars in the early 2000s which causes, a day or so after eating pine nuts, everything to taste like metal. This lasts for anywhere from a week to a month. The opposite of Covid-19 removing your sense of taste, in a way.

We don’t know why it happens. It only affects a tiny portion of the pine nut-eating population. There’s a [study] about it which had one guy who reported PNS (this is… the worst acronym… for the worst named syndrome) and they found that he is also a “PTC taster,” which means he can taste this molecule called PTC. It’s a bitter molecule and only some people taste it, depending on a genetic variation. Anyway, they have no idea if PTC has anything to do with PNS. [1] [2]

I bring this all up because I think the sense of taste is really weird. There’s this thing called a [miracle fruit] which makes everything taste sweet for an hour. As mentioned above, Covid-19 has completely eliminated some peoples’ sense of taste (at least temporarily). Some people think cilantro [3] tastes like soap. What’s kind of interesting about miracle fruit and cilantro is we, on a chemical level, understand why they cause the tastes they do. We don’t know why Covid eliminates taste and we definitely don’t know about PNS, but if we find out, it’s probably going to be on some sort of chemical/DNA level. Taste is weird. It’s weird that our experience of taste can change.

Pine Nut Syndrome Part 2: Funny Joke

Here’s a joke: A bright-eyed student arrives on campus for their first day of college, and, feeling adventurous, smokes weed for the first time. The group they are with has some other people who are also smoking for the first time, and they all decide to play a game. They write down what they think the most interesting question in the world is, and put it in a hat. One by one, they go around pulling questions out of the hat and answering them. The first question:

How do we know that we all see colors the same way? Maybe my red is someone else’s brown.

Some people glance around, confused, but there is a lively debate. Everyone is laughing and having a good time, some have had their preconceptions about the world shattered. The next question is pulled out:

What if colors are different for everyone?

Laughter abounds. Surely, it cannot be? They pull out question after question:

Do we all see colors the same way? Is my red someone else’s green?

Do you think colors are the same for everyone?

Could my red be someone else’s blue?

And everyone learned an important lesson.

Thank you for reading my funny joke. The point in including this after writing about PNS is: if you replace colors with tastes in the above, I don’t think it makes any sense. Taste seems more intuitively universal than color, even though we have proof that this is not the case (cilantro soap chemicals, PTC). I have no further comments.

Music

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* Mulatu Astatqé – Éthiopiques 4 (Ethio-jazz)

This album is so sick. Impossible to listen to and not feel great about the present, about the past, about the future. There is mystery and intrigue and life is worth living. Astatqé’s music stays with you — you’ll be able to recognize it instantly out in the wild. It is uniquely beautiful and haunting. “Yègellé Tezeta” is one of the my favorite songs ever.

Relient K – Two Lefts Don’t Make a Right… but Three Do (Pop Punk)

I liked this. I can see how people got into them, and I can see how you wouldn’t pick up on the Christian rock sensibilities from casual listening. Some of the ballady songs are not my favorite but the traditional pop-punk fare is fantastic.

Black Pyramid - Black Pyramid (Stoner/Doom Metal)

I thought this was pretty good. Some of the tracks miss, like “Visions of Gehenna,” but there’s a lot of cool stuff like “Mirror Messiah” and “Twilight Grave” to bring you back. It’s interesting to me that this band think of themselves as a doom metal band over a stoner metal band, see below for further elaboration.

Pentagram - Relentless (Doom Metal)

Metal genres are impossible to keep track of. Doom metal is just like, hard rock but about demons and witches. But wait! Andriy, that’s just stoner metal! Close. Stoner metal is not quite hard rock, and it’s usually really slow and chuggy, and the singers growl a lot. Doom metal is a genre of bands that are somewhere on the spectrum between Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath. Evil Iron Maiden.

Anyway, this is cool. I’m really glad that I have finally figured out a genre of metal that is chuggy and bluesy like stoner metal but with singing I don’t mind listening to. Doom metal! Nothing like black metal or death metal. “Sign Of The Wolf” is a great song.

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[1] I was originally planning on writing a little about the lone star tick and meat allergies after writing about Pine Nut Syndrome but decided against it, since it’s not really about your sense of taste, but about allergies.

[2] Anecdotally, I have been eating pine nuts this past week, and I have not had this experience of everything tasting bitter and terrible. My saliva tastes really metallic but I might just be hyper-tuned in, because food has tasted fine. Maybe saliva always tastes like this. I also burned the roof of my mouth eating pizza yesterday so that’s a little metallic. I don’t know. I regret writing this footnote.

[3] Cilantro is the same plant as coriander???? ????? ??? ??????? The leaves are cilantro and the seeds are coriander???? ????

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That’s all for this week. Have a great day :o)

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Alphabetology Vol.12

Posted: 22 April 2021

Imported from substack so the formatting is messed up, it looks better on substack.

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As I live in Spain, I have heard many times in the media Spain is a mine producer. But in the article i couldn't find this statement, so i searched on the ICBL web with this conviction... and there i found...COUNTRIES THAT produce CLUSTER MUNITIONS

- Josepsbd, Wikipedia talk page for “Land Mine,” 2008

For what its worth, I checked the latest reports I could find (2020) and Spain is not a producer of mines or CLUSTER MUNITIONS. The US, however, is back on the list of mine producers (and I guess never left the list of cluster munition producers) after a Trump administration policy rollback right at the start of 2020. A NYT article from earlier this month states that the DoD (although they call it the Defense Department? I’ve never seen that before) say they have no plans to undo this policy change and plan on continuing to use land mines. Very cool. [1]

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Art

Funky Pastel Portraits

Optics

Hand Telescopes

Zines

Mr. Sunday Monthly

Music

MASS OF THE FERMENTING DREGS
Mom Jeans.
* Car Seat Headrest
* Whitney
Dollar Signs
Nate Dionne

Art

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Funky Pastel Portraits

There are a few people I follow on instagram who I think do really interesting portraits that, if not made with pastels, look very pastelly.

Christian Scott does really wonderful portraits and records his process, which I think is really interesting to see. He might be the only artist I’ve ever seen use oil pastels where his finished drawings look crisp and smooth (sorry oil pastels, that’s just how it is — they always look a little janky to me). The portraits are also almost caricatures, but the distortion isn’t just exaggeration, a lot is made up - eyes moved around, shapes distorted, colors are invented, etc. Like look at the Frida Kahlo one - nothing is in the right place, but it works. He doesn’t have a website though! Just youtube and instagram.

Matt Bollinger does really moving portraits of people at work in (acrylic?) paint but with an illustration-y feel. The execution and attention to detail in his work is honestly kind of unbelievable, and they’re just overall really really good pieces. They’re really moving! Not a lot of work is!! Incredibly powerful art!!!!

And last for today we have Jeremy Sorese. He has simplified human forms like Bollinger mixed with some of the more psychedelic colors of Scott, creating art that turns everyday moments of intimacy into larger than life set pieces. Actually, more than anything, I’ve been really inspired by his hands - they’re very sausage-y but very real. Great work, great hands.

Optics

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Hand Telescopes

I’m experimenting with unreasonably long sentences in this essay so watch out.

You can make a hand telescope by curling your hand into a fist (a fist! None of this touching your thumb to your fingertips thing. We are creating a tunnel of vision) and leaving a small gap to look through with one eye, the other eye closed. You can use two hands too, if you want, for dramatic effect, but I’m not convinced it’s any better - if anything, it seems like it makes things more difficult. Better, you ask? Better for what. This is something a fool does, when they pretend to be a pirate. Why would you ever make a hand telescope. Well, let me tell you: in case you want to see something that’s far away, and your vision isn’t great, and you don’t want to get up and move closer to the thing or get your glasses, and you also want to fiddle around by spinning your fist around your eye for a minute or two. If all of these apply, you can make a hand telescope.

I spent a week, on and off, experimenting with this by reading book titles off of my bookshelf, which I normally cannot do, if not but for that I already know the titles and can guess what the squiggles I see are supposed to mean. I have discovered a few things.

• Hand telescopes have really obvious distortion effects around the edges, presumably because of light bouncing and bending around. You can actually kind of recreate these just by looking at stuff and putting your hand in the way and paying attention to how what you’re looking at is distorted a little right where your hand is. It’s a lot easier to see this if your hand is right next to your eye and you move it around a little, like imagine your hand is a windshield wiper right above your eye.

• It works!!! It might take some fiddling around and rotating and angling your hand until you get a clearer image, but you can absolutely use a hand telescope to see better. It doesn’t even have to be right next to your eye, you just have to get the angle and everything right. But it’s a lot easier if you can get the aperture of your hand pretty small, and if you can get the telescope right up to your eye to block other light from getting in.

• It probably takes more effort to get a good angle and see something clearly than it would take to just move a little closer to whatever you’re trying to read or make out.

Anyway, this is all prompted by a snippet of a TV show my parents were watching a few years ago that I caught, where someone was explaining something about vision, and said you could make hand binoculars to see stuff further away, and I thought that that was a joke, and then I looked it up, and it’s true. You can do a Looney Tunes type physical gag and it will work in real life.

There’s science behind it too, although it’s hard to look up online. It works something like a camera aperture or squinting, where it limits the amount of interfering light getting to your eye. There’s a thing called the pinhole effect, which I am reading about [here], which explains it using this neat diagram:

But essentially, the more focused you can get the light reaching your eye, the more clearly you’ll be able to see whatever you’re looking it.

I also wound up looking into pinhole glasses a bit, which take this effect and turns it into moth-man glasses instead of a crazy looking fist in front of your face.

And pinhole glasses work! They do this same exact thing with limiting the amount of light getting into your eye, making objects appear sharper. Their effectiveness has been studied and measured. Going even further, however, there are a bunch of claims about them naturally improving your eyesight, which the FTC wants to clamp down on, because that’s totally unproven. Websites about it veer into timecube [2] territory, with confidence-inducing writing such as:

Whenever I’m feeling stressed I put the pinhole glasses on. Immediately I feel my eyes relax, and I’m able to see clearly as well.

But to be honest the jury is out on what happens to your eyes after extended pinhole glasses use. In 2018 a few people ran a study where they asked subjects to wear pinhole glasses for a minimum of 20 minutes a day between 9 and 11 pm for 3 weeks, and checked their vision before and after. They found no meaningful difference. At the same time, you have a bunch of anecdotal evidence from people saying their vision has improved beyond a need for glasses thanks to pinhole glasses and eye exercises. Maybe the eye exercises are the key.

I mean, everyone selling pinhole glasses and “eye supplement vitamins” is clearly trying to defraud people. Every website selling techniques for “permanently improving your vision” has clickbait blog posts about how if you want to improve your sight you should meditate and stop eating hamburgers. What you REALLY need to do is sign up for MY vision program: 300 Hand Binocular Techniques for the Humble Office Worker.

And while we’re on the topic of telescopes, check this out:

Zines

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Mr. Sunday Monthly

The Mr. Sunday Monthly is a wonderful zine that collects Mr. Sunday comic strips and other assorted essays and cartoons by a variety of people. If you would like a preview, the Mr. Sunday comic is available online, for free, on twitter:

But the zine also contains extra commentary by the author and I think is a delightful little gift to receive in the mail each month. There is a lot of heart and soul packed into these ~15 page long issues.

Music

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MASS OF THE FERMENTING DREGS - ゼロコンマ、色とりどりの世界 (Rock?)

Great high energy rock out of Japan. It’s hard to categorize!!! The instruments are all violent like post-hardcore but the vocals are really dream-like. Listening to this band is like looking at the shards of a broken mirror.

Mom Jeans. - Best Buds (Emo)

There is (was? It might have passed) a joke in the online emo music community that Mom Jeans. is everyone’s guilty pleasure emo band. I don’t know why. I think this is a very subtly great album. “Edward 40hands” is like the epitome of 4th wave emo.

* Car Seat Headrest - Twin Fantasy (Indie Rock)

I would listen to this album on my half hour walk to and from the studio when I was renting studio space and painting. It got me through a winter together with Pile’s Dripping. It’s a masterpiece of an album. It’s personal and universal and intimate and painful and beautiful. “Beach Life-In-Death” is an absolute mountain of a song that I think everyone should hear at least once.

There are two versions of this album: one was recorded by Will Toledo on his own in 2011, one was re-recorded in higher fidelity in 2018. They’re both great, but I generally have a preference for lo-fi music. I think it sounds a little more authentic, a little more in-the-moment and raw. You can imagine Toledo having a terrible time in college and recording this all on his own with no idea whether his music is going to be popular at all. It’s such a deeply personal album. I think it makes sense to hear it as recorded by the individual experiencing all of these things.

The 2018 recording is by no means worse. He has a better grasp on how to express his ideas in the re-recording. It might be truer to his vision of how he wanted the album to sound. And there are some small differences - the bit at 4:42 on the 2011 recording of “Beach Life-In-Death” sounds very different from the same bit on the 2018 re-recording at 4:52. Toledo sounds closer to us in the 2011 recording. We are right there next to him. And the differences add up — not for the better or worse. They’re just different. There is distance and there are years between the Will Toledo recording in 2011 and in 2018.

* Whitney - Light Upon the Lake (Indie Folk)

The person who ran figure drawings at Trestle Gallery when it was still in Gowanus would play this album all the time so it’s a cozy, familiar album for me. It’s nice to just have on.

Dollar Signs - Hearts of Gold (Emo/Folk Punk)

This might be the first album I’ve ever listened to where, instead of commiserating, I felt distressed by the singer and their problems. They seem genuinely, insidiously troubled in a way that other musicians have not seemed to me. I’m not a therapist, I’m not trying to diagnose anything here. But… damn.

Nate Dionne - Love Is Always Worth It (Indie Rock/Experimental)

I looked up and listened to this because I was investigating what happened to all the members of hit Florida emo band Glocca Morra after it broke up. It’s always kind of interesting to me to see who defined which sounds of a band, and how you can hear those sounds in their current projects. Zach Schwartz now plays with The Spirit of the Beehive, an experimental rock band I’m not very interested in. Nate Dionne has this solo album. The other two members don’t look like they’ve pursued music.

It’s a really good album. It’s a little experimental and everything is kind of muted (intentionally, I’m sure) but the music is interesting and engaging. “Working 2” is a really great song. “Love Is Always Worth It” kind of makes me think of the Kino song “Любовь — это не шутка” which roughly translates to “Love is no joke.” It’s an album about what it’s like being by yourself in a cave but being unable to lose your presence in the outside world.

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[1] That “very cool” was sarcastic!!!! It’s not cool.

[2] timecube

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That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading, have a great day.

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