Music As Of Late

Got around to reading two Alex Ross books over the past few weeks: The Rest is Noise, a history of music throughout the 20th century, and Listen To This, a collection of music essays about stuff from Björk to Brahms. It's inspired me to get onto a bit of a music kick, so this post feels appropriate.

Links are to the songs/albums in question on iTunes.

• Different Trains by Steve Reich – I was introduced to this one through a facilitator at Shimer. He only played us about three minutes of it because of time constraints. Which is kind of a shame, really – it's like playing fifteen seconds of a Beatles song; it won't do a whole lot for you. Initially the music is kind of repetitive, but once you get over that and just let it sweep over you, you start to notice little changes in the music that feel weirdly monumental. Kronos Quartet (the folks who played that Requiem for a Dream song that you hear in every film trailer) play along with recordings of people discussing very different experiences with trains circa World War II. The performances bring out musicality in the voices that make them almost seem as if they're auto-tuned.
• The Velvet Underground and Nico by The Velvet Underground – I'd always thought this album was just okay – aside from the lead track "Sunday Morning," which I thought was one of the best damn things I'd ever heard from the first few seconds – but now it's settled on me quite a bit more. A good album for a cloudy day with rain pouring down, the sort of day we've had to deal with every now and then in Chicago as of late.
• Frontier Psychiatrist by The Avalanches – A song made of a very eclectic mix of voice and music samples. The music video is one of the most wonderful (and strange) I've seen.
• Bartók: Complete String Quartets performed by New Budapest Quartet – Still making my way through these, but I really really like what I hear so far. The best stuff on here is atonal without sounding like complete anarchy. Listening to it is like watching an unhinged retail employee; at first polite, but after while it becomes clear that shit's about to go down.
• McCartney by Paul McCartney – This one was reissued and remastered recently. The audio's top notch, but it really brings a lot of the instrumental sloppiness to the foreground. The sloppiness is to be expected, to a certain degree. Sir Paul played all the instruments on this one, recording it not long before he announced that The Beatles were no more. The album feels a lot like a break – like an incredibly talented guy messing around with a tape-recorder – which in many ways it is. The imperfections that become clear through the newly-mastered version bring a certain needed humanness to a lot of the tracks; on the other hand, it makes the immaculate "Maybe I'm Amazed" sound just a little bit wimpier as a result.
• Gay Bar by Electric Six – There is something about this song that is awesome, hilarious and oh-God-they're-going-to-kick-my-ass all at once.

Meeting Ray Charles (Maybe)

I can't remember ever being not interested in the piano. Seriously. I have some very early memories of fascination with the thing. And my family didn't have one until I was about five or so – and that piano wasn't really a piano. It was a Casio light-up thing, about the size of the keyboard on my MacBook Pro. (Though much thicker – and the battery life was worse, too.)

I also watched a lot of TV when I was young. There were the typical young child standbys, of course: Sesame Street, Barney, Mister Rogers, Carmen Sandiego, a bunch of stuff on Nickelodeon – mostly the game shows. So that led to a fascination with Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy that I still can't quite explain.

And also I really had this thing for The Graham Kerr Show. He was a chef who would start every episode by jumping over a chair. That's mostly why I liked it, I think. Because he'd jump over a chair.

But anyway. With all that TV watching as a three year old, I was exposed to a lot of commercials. And one  that I particularly loved was an ad with Ray Charles singing about the wonders of Diet Pepsi. It wasn't the Pepsi or the singers that got me excited – it was the piano. And also he was wearing sunglasses. That really got to me. I wore sunglasses too! Except I had to wear them because my eyes were very sensitive and the sun was always too bright and made me cry. He wore them because he was blind, my mom said, which meant that he couldn't see. (You'd think this would make me wonder why he wore sunglasses to begin with, but nope. It didn't.)

So one day my mom took me to the mall. She said that Ray Charles – the man from the Pepsi commercials – was going to be there, playing the piano in Von Maur. I usually didn't like Von Maur since it was a boring clothes store; the only awesome part was the piano players they had, even though their music was kind of slow. But the Pepsi singer was going to make it great.

I don't remember much more about that day. I know we stopped by Babbage's, (as I always begged my parents to) a software store that has since been bought by GameStop. I remember that the man working behind the counter was kind of amused that I was excited to see Ray Charles.

And then we walked past him. Ray Charles. There he was. Playing the piano. Swaying his head around. Right in the middle of Von Maur. And nobody else seemed to notice or care.

We walked past him kind of quickly. But I walked real close to him. And he turned toward me and said, smiling huge and so happy, "Hi."

And that made me nervous so we kept walking.

This memory confuses me. The idea of Ray Charles visiting Valley West Mall in West Des Moines, Iowa to play piano in a not-quite-upscale department store has always seemed kind of absurd. And there's another red flag, too: the turning-to-me-and-saying-hi thing, which I'm ashamed to admit that I only recently realized was shifty.

There are a couple of possibilities here. One could be that I imagined it – maybe it was a dream that I confused with reality. Maybe that Ray Charles was actually a Ray Charles impersonator and my mom wanted to keep the moment magical. (You can probably relate to this with shopping mall Santa Clauses. I can relate to this because of a story involving Vanna White.*)

Or maybe it really was Ray. Maybe his extraordinary sense of smell allowed him to detect a child's admiration.

* That story, in case you care: when I turned three, "Vanna White," Wheel of Fortune letter toucher extraordinaire, called our home to wish me a happy birthday. I got very nervous and shy, smiling all hugely, giggling. After the conversation with "Vanna," I put the phone down and proceeded to pretend I was Miss White; I ran up to our tiled fireplace, pretended that the tiles were blank letters, and asked for my parents to call out letters. (This was not a spontaneous thing; it was something I had done many times before.) It turned out that "Vanna" was actually one of my female cousins. My parents pre-arranged for her to call a couple of days before. I didn't learn this until my I recounted the story to my parents many years later. Anyway, I swear I am not making this story up. My parents recorded it on home video; I think that would be worth uploading to YouTube.

History Lesson

When I worked at a certain unnamed large chain bookstore that I'm sure I've mentioned in previous posts, I usually worked the register. On occasion I would work at the Information Desk – which was a lot more enjoyable than cashiering – but it was a rarity.

Once this old guy wearing big rimless glasses walked in.

"I'm looking for a book," he said. This is something that customers at bookstores say a lot.
"It's by da coat ville."

Pause.

"I'm sorry?" I said.
"Da coat ville."

I typed a bunch of possible spellings into the computer. Dacoatville. Ducoatvill. Duhkoteville. No luck.

"Could you spell the name for me?" I asked.
"I'm not sure how it's spelled," he said, growing impatient.

I probably spent another minute trying various hypothetical spellings of the name, hoping that the system's did you mean...? feature would help me out, though the thing was usually as helpful as a dyslexic kindergartener at the National Spelling Bee.

The manager-on-duty walked by. I flagged her down.
"Can you help me with this?" I said. "This man's looking for the coat ville. Da coat ville. I don't know."

She stepped up to the computer and effortlessly typed in the name. Tocqueville.


And that's how I learned who the writer of Democracy in America was.

Thoughts on Netflix and Price

In case you're unaware: here's a few words from Netflix on their new price plan.

Netflix is doing this because streaming services are costing them more and more: Operating the Watch Instantly service – from a technical standpoint, I mean – probably requires a significant amount of effort on Netflix's part. Netflix is said to be responsible for a quarter of all of the US's web traffic. Do you realize how many gigabytes – no, terabytes – that is? Do you realize how much time, money and effort Netflix has spent on its internet infrastructure? Not just developing it, I mean – but maintaining it, too? For all the bandwidth that Netflix pushes on a daily basis, its uptime is pretty damn remarkable.

(Though, before I continue, I should note that according to this Techland article, it costs Netflix 20 times less to stream a video than to send it to you by DVD. So you can understand why Netflix has been trying to get away from being a by-mail service, though it's still got a while to go before that happens.)

Tech costs, though, are nothing compared to the cost of streaming rights. The more popular that streaming video becomes, the more cash that entertainment companies want. An analyst estimates in this Hollywood Reporter article that Netflix will pay $700 million for streaming rights this year – and then maybe something like $1.2 billion next year. (Fun fact: that's about .074% of the US's gross domestic product!)

The price increase sucks, but let's face it: ten bucks a month for a DVD out of a time plus all-you-can-watch streaming content seemed too good to be true. And it turns out – especially in the wake of rising licensing costs – it was. And speaking of a price increase:

Claiming these are Netflix's "lowest prices ever" is a dumb PR move: It's true that it's become a little cheaper to be a one-DVD-out-at-a-time subscriber. It used to cost about $10 a month for that plan, and you had to pay for streaming whether you liked it or not. And now it's down to $7.99 a month. (No streaming included, of course.)

Good news for the DVD only folks, but bad news for the rest of us. Instead of having to pay a little under ten bucks for both options, getting the two combined now costs about $16 a month. And you don't have to be an economist to realize that that's not a win for your wallet; it's about a 40% increase in costs if you want to keep watching by disc and internet.

Piracy: I don't doubt that more than a few folks will cancel their service with Netflix, unwilling or unable to pay the extra cash for both streaming (which offers convenience) and DVD access (which offers a catalog that streaming still can't touch). Some of these folks will undoubtedly try to get their movies and TV shows elsewhere. There's plenty of high-quality free video (albeit of questionable legality) on shady streaming and torrent sites. (Also worth noting – as far as downsides go – the difficulty a non-techie may have in accessing such content, let alone watching it on their snazzy TV.)

A loss of subscriptions would obviously hurt Netflix's profits. A hurt in profits would probably lead to less streaming revenue for film/TV companies, not to mention a rise in profits. Though I'm aware that I still need to examine this thread a bit further before coming to any solid conclusions, I can't help but wonder what sort of effect this will have on the industry in the long term.

Now I can get work done: Not gonna lie – I waste a lot of time watching stuff on Netflix. Though the Watch Instandly catalog still leaves something to be desired as far as selection goes (boy, I feel like I've said that before!), it still keeps me plenty entertained.

I'm not going to cancel my Netflix account. But I do think I'm going to switch to a DVD-only plan. That's mostly for the selection. But my reasoning has a thing or two to do with my life outside of watching stuff on a screen.

See, having access to DVDs and DVDs alone keeps me a trifle more productive. Not having internet access for a few months last summer – but still having a DVD arrive every few days or so – kept me in a good place between being entertained and being able to get done what I needed to get done on a daily basis.

To me, having access to less means doing more. In a weird way, the TV/film industry and Netflix are keeping me more enmeshed in the real world by nudging me away from their products. That probably isn't a good thing for them. But it's definitely a good thing for me.

The Stars

Spent the past week in Iowa. I spent a lot of time feeling kind of bored, a little time playing with/harassing my cat, and a lot of other time wishing I was at Emily's farm. And then I went down there and all was good.

I had a much needed shower the day after the farm. All the water that splashed off of me turned this lovely brown color. It was like I was preparing for going back to Chicago, watching rural Iowa slither off of me down into the drain.

I also spent a bit of time at my family's lakehouse. It's also in rural Iowa, but it's not nearly as rural; the presence of electricity and running water makes it feel a lot less legit, as the kids say. The highlight of my visit there occurred at midnight one night. I got a chance to look up at the stars without any bright lights or police sirens to interfere.

I've done it many times before, but it never fails to be absolutely beautiful. A weird joy swept over me. I smiled involuntarily. I couldn't quite figure out why I was so happy to see the stars, but I've tried to piece it together since.

For one thing the sky at night looks a lot more dome-like than its daytime counterpart. There's this sense of being in a giant tent, which appeals to me in a way that I can't quite articulate.

There's also the sense of timelessness that it entails. Though I saw occasional satellites fly by – or maybe they were just fireflies trying out a new look – I felt displaced from time in a wonderful Zen sort of way. Again, it's difficult to articulate.

But most of all it's just beautiful. Though I like to be articulate and logical when I explain things, I'm kind of hitting a wall here. You can guess what's coming next: there weren't and aren't any words that can quite do it justice.

Maybe that means I should just stop this post now.

Fridge

It's about three in the morning. Was hit by a wave of insomnia about an hour ago. Played a bit of Ocarina of Time for the 3DS, then tried to be responsible and do some dishes. There's something very strange about doing dishes at three in the morning.

A couple of nights ago, just as I was about to fall asleep, I had a weird semi-disassociative moment. I started thinking about the fact that I am legally a grownup. And that I have an apartment. And that having an apartment entails a lot of other things. Like doing laundry, making meals for myself, and having a fridge.

It was that last one that really got me. I started to feel this burst of energy – not quite anxiousness, but this curious feeling that was almost like disbelief. The feeling was too much to let me keep lying in bed, so I got up and messed around on the computer for a little bit.

I thought that was very strange. I haven't ever had that sort of sensation before. Regardless, I haven't been so peculiarly struck by a fridge since watching Requiem for a Dream.