Check out Popular Science‘s Mental Muscles of Steel. I, uh, didn’t perform so well on their quiz (just under fifty percent).
Via Paul Riddell.
Hmmmmmm….maybe there were TWO turkeys….
I’m not sure what the person doing this search was looking for, but I’m feeling a bit of paranoid conspiracy coming on….
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IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Interior view of the dome inside the Buffalo Savings Bank building.
I read this Christopher Alvarado post earlier today, and I was struck by the building he pictures there: I thought I was looking at the Buffalo Savings Bank, one of Buffalo’s most beautiful buildings. The Buffalo dome isn’t stained glass, but gold filigree on the outside (it’s really stunning on a sunny day) and ornate painting on the inside.
The Buffalo of the early 20th century must have been a beautiful place.
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MOVE YOUR CARTS!!
In the last year or two I’ve noticed a new habit of grocery shoppers: the parking of the cart, while they wander off down the aisle to look for something. Occasionally they’ll try to leave their cart in a position that’s not inconvenient for others, but come on, we’re talking shopping carts here; there’s really no way to do this without being a pain-in-the-ass.
So, I’m mulling over adopting the following strategy: Whenever I encounter one of these “parked carts” whose shopper is more than ten feet away, I would remove one item from their cart and deposit it later someplace else. Of course, this won’t result in any kind of “lesson” being learned, but it would at least pose an inconvenience for people who evidently believe their carts become non-corporeal objects when they release the handlebar and turn away from it.
(Or is this too evil?)
UPDATE: In comments, Sean points out that sometimes parents get overwhelmed by their kids, thus necessitating questionable cart behavior. I can understand that, to a point, but I haven’t seen too much of that, believe it or not. The main grocery store we frequent here has a playroom where we can sign in our daughter and leave her there for an hour while we shop, and they also have those nifty carts shaped like trucks so the kid can “drive” through the store. Shopping with the kid isn’t that much of a headache, really, for us!
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Oh, come now!
Surely I’m not the only one who thinks that there’s endless opportunity for speculative humor based on the idea of Presidents owning overly-talkative parrots? Come on, folks! Make me laugh!
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Of Intermittent Bloggers….
:: Nefarious Neddie has returned to posting, after a month-long hiatus. It seems that January is a pretty busy month for him, but he had time to report on possible Star Wars sequels to be filmed after the completion of Episode III. I withheld comment, since it was only a rumored thing and since I’m not sure I’d want more Star Wars movies after next year’s: I like the whole idea of the Extended Universe, even though I don’t much follow it anymore, but for the purposes of the movies, I prefer keeping it centered on the story of Anakin/Vader. Any post-Return of the Jedi films would have to find another “angle”.
But, TF.N reports today that it might not be a series of sequel movies, but a television production of some sort, telling stories of Vader’s “Reign of Terror”. That would be interesting.
:: Somehow it escaped my notice that fellow-Collaboratory mate Jason Streed is posting again. I can’t really single out any one of his posts for mention, because he’s really good (and not just when he’s telling his readers how good I am!). Oh, and can anyone figure out why his blog never seems to display correctly? I always have to hit F-11 twice to get it all to show up.
:: Another of the Original Collaboratory Gang, who disappeared from blogging for a long time, is Christopher Alvarado, who will be going up on my blogroll as soon as, well, I remember to get him up on my blogroll. Interesting stuff there, especially his Cleveland-centric posts. Living in Buffalo, for a number of years now I’ve thought of Cleveland as an example of what Buffalo could be like if they’d ever get things figured out; it turns out that all isn’t entirely rosy at the other end of Lake Erie. Check him out.
:: Finally, I figure that Michelle will start posting again once she finally finishes reading all twenty of Patrick O’Brian’s “Aubrey & Maturin” novels. Of course, by that time, Guy Gavriel Kay’s new novel might be out, and that will delay her again (probably for only a few hours, though).
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What is Art? Can we define “art” as….oooooh, Cheetos!
Lynn Sislo points out a comment thread that is heading for definitions of art. It all began with another thread somewhere that asked if a classical listener attends a Chopin recital and reports a “great” experience, and a rock listener attends a Black Sabbath concert and likewise reports a “great” experience, can both listeners be said to have experienced “greatness”? My personal feeling is “Absolutely” — I’ve never believed in the inherent superiority of classical music, even when I was a music major neck-deep in studying the stuff — but that’s not what interests me just now. There’s a commenter named Bill Kaplan who argues thusly:
“The premise of this discussion is that both Chopin’s music and Black Sabbath’s show are art. This seems a dubious premise. I would argue that only Black Sabbath’s show is art and that Chopin is merely decoration for the ear.
There are numerous definitions for what art is and isn’t, but most have meaning as a central condition. “Art is a lie that shows us the truth,” says Picasso. “Art is a selective representation of reality based on the artist’s metaphysical value judgements,” says Rand. Where is there any element of truth or value in purely musical expression? I say there is none unless it is coupled with some element of meaning, generally lyrics.”
Kaplan is receiving quite a bit of, shall we say, negative reaction to his apparent belief that Chopin is not art. Ultimately, of course, we arrive at the age-old question, “What is art?” Kaplan seems to want to define art as having something to do with “meaning”, which he then assumes refers to specific representational connections, I guess, between an art work and the “world out there”. (He doesn’t identify which Rand he’s quoting here, but I have the sinking feeling it’s Ayn Rand, the citation of whom in nearly any conversation makes my eyes droop and my soul grow weary.) Art, Mr. Kaplan appears to believe, must be representational of something.
Thus, Kaplan’s definition of art is, in my eyes, exclusive to an almost absurd degree, because it appears to rule out abstraction almost completely, and pays no attention at all to emotion (which, actually, is the central consideration in my definition of art). However, in the course of riding his argument right off the rails, he has hit on something important:
Music is fundamentally abstract.
Take, for example, a Chopin nocturne. Chopin was a Romantic — in fact, along with Schumann, he’s probably the quintessential Romantic composer for pianists. But Chopin rejected an idea that’s been common ever since the Romantic era, i.e., that music could have extramusical significance, and that music could, in and of itself, depict things in the real world. This, however, music cannot do. Chopin knew this, and that’s why he doesn’t give his pieces wistful-sounding titles: one of his most hauntingly beautiful works does not bear a moniker like “Elms Swaying In the Breeze”, but just the prosaic description of genre and key: “Nocturne in E flat major”.
This, I think, is a premise in Kaplan’s argument. Musical tones, by themselves, can’t describe or depict, in concrete terms, anything in the real world. I learned this in, of all places, a fifth-grade music class: our teacher gave us all sheets of paper and some crayons, put some music on the stereo, and told us to “draw” the music. The piece she played was the first movement of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, but no one in the class — twenty-four of us, roughly — came up with any kind of picture even remotely suggestive of The Arabian Nights. So unless we are told, up front, what a composer says his or her music is “depicting”, we are vanishingly unlikely to realize it on our own.
But this isn’t a fault with music, and neither does it undermine music as an art form, as Mr. Kaplan seems to think. Not every truth can be encapsulated in words, and not every work of art need exhibit a one-to-one relationship with something in the world. Leonard Bernstein once summarized the position I outline above by saying of a Chopin etude: “If Chopin could say in words what he was trying to say with this etude, why should he use musical notes at all?” Further, Kaplan seems to totally ignore the role of form in art, and form is probably more important in music than in any other art: pure form, I’m talking about here: not how perfectly representational something is, but how its composite parts interact with one another for complementary effect.
Perhaps this is too mystical of an approach to art for Mr. Kaplan, but I’ve arrived at this view purely through my own experience. Great music does express “truth” — whether it has “lyrics” or not — but it’s not truth that can be said in words. (Or if it is, it would take a poet to do it, and I am certainly not a poet.) Music expresses musical truth, purely emotional truth. It’s not a definable truth, and it’s not an easy truth, which I think partially explains why the lyricists tend to be favored over the composers these days. We’re accustomed to looking for truth and meaning in words; non-linguistic truth is harder, more nebulous, more redolent of hippies “goin’ with the flow”.
Well, I’ll take it. So, I think the proper response to Mr. Kaplan comes from Shakespeare: “There are more things on Heaven and Earth than are dream’t of in your philosophy.”
(My own definition of Art is this: “Art is any activity whose primary purpose is the provocation of aesthetic response.”)
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How fast DOES time fly, anyway?
I was poking about my archives just now for a couple of pieces I wrote last fall, because something came up on another blog that reminded me of a point I thought I’d made before, and I wanted to check it out. So I looked through my September archive, and nothing; then my October archive, and nothing. I was pretty sure it wasn’t in November, but no dice. And then I started noticing something weird: certain posts in September that I have no memory of writing, and others that I feel like I wrote last week.
The posts I was seeking finally turned up in my April archive.
Man, does time whip by. It’s like sand, you know….sands in the hourglass….[head explodes]
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So ya wanna be an evolutionary biologist….
PZ Myers has a quiz to determine if you should seek a Ph.D. in biology.
If he really wanted to get elaborate with this, he could do one of those Quizilla things with this, complete with radio buttons and keying each question so that, if you get a really good score, you’re Steven Jay Gould, while if you get a really bad score, you’re Duane Gish.
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Oh, the Apprentice….oops….
I forgot about The Apprentice last night completely, owing to the presence of American Idol on FOX. I’ve found Apprentice mildly interesting, and I at least wanted to see if that guy who fell asleep on the job last week got fired this week. Well, I saw on this morning’s Today Show that this character did, in fact, get the axe. Strangely, he seemed perfectly normal and jovial this morning, whereas on The Apprentice he was depicted as a complete nutbar. I wonder which was “real”?
But, the news wasn’t all bad for this guy (Sam, I think his name was). He already owns his own company and on the Today Show, he proposed — live — to his girlfriend, who accepted. Awwwwww….my coffee’s empty. ‘Scuse me….
(Right now I’m wondering how many of my newer readers are suddenly learning about my TV viewing habits and recoiling in horror….)