John Gruber on the Best Picture:

Putting WALL-E up against Bolt and Kung Fu Panda rather than letting it compete against Slumdog Millionaire and Benjamin Button is like requiring a 13-year-old chess prodigy to compete only against other children, regardless whether he could stand his own against adult grandmasters.

You didn't miss anything. I was only gone for a long weekend, but felt the same way. It's a nice reminder.

And now for a long weekend on the other side of the States.

Hemispacial neglect, or hemineglect, is a "condition following brain damage in which patients fail to be aware of items to one side of space."

The Killers of Eden was a group of orcas off the coast of Australia that helped the local whalers, the Davidson family in particular. The orcas would go out and round up baleen whales. The orcas would even invite the Davidsons out to join them---they'd swim up the bay and splash their tails when they were ready to go on the chase. The orcas worked a lot like dogs round up sheep or corner foxes. After the baleens were killed, whether by teeth or harpoon, the orcas would eat the lips and tongue and the rest would go to the whalers. The relationship continued for decades up until 1930, when Old Tom died. Old Tom was the most celebrated orca in the pod, the one the Davidsons were probably closest with. He seemed to have a sense of humor about him, and he was also known for grabbing a rope on the boats and taking the whalers for a joyride. If you find this all as mind-blowing as I do, you might like to see the names and photos of some of Eden's killer whales or read more about Eden's whaling history.

This bit of trivia and more can be found in the surprisingly excellent book I recently finished, Thousand Mile Song. These animals are smart.

In the imagination of the fake nerd, the nerd is attractive because he is unaffected, untrendy to the point of primitivism, a kind of inert noble savage.

American Nerd: The Story of My People covers a pretty good range of history and culture, tying together various forms of the outcast and how this one particular version came together: the unathletic, socially dysfunctional, mathlete type (did I mention I was captain of my HS academic team?). It starts to get really good a few chapters into the book, when Benjamin Nugent dives into historical/literary precedent for today's nerds and normals, e.g. Mary Bennet vs. Elizabeth in Pride & Prejudice, Tibby in Howard's End, Victor Frankenstein. He also has a great section on the history of sport and the beginnings of the nerd/jock split, and why it became so important for young men to be strapping and not Jewish (see: Muscular Christianity).

Drawing on T.S. Eliot's essay, The Metaphysical Poets, he also delves into a split between feeling and thinking, the intellectual and the reflective. The works of Donne and his comrades were a sort of pinnacle of heart/brain unity; later writers like Tennyson, rebelling against the "rationative," not so much. Eliot:

The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets... Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

Quality of the poetry aside, the split between feeling and thinking anticipates a social divide. Nugent:

Since the Romantic era, we have been in an age in which machines have the capacity for some minimal semblance of rational thought, performing tasks that once would have been the exclusive domain of humans. Reason is no longer quintessentially human; spontaneity is. People more inclined toward logical deliberation than spontaneous expression have started to become somehow less totally human...

The pathos of being a nerd is to feel that because you are comfortable with rational thought, you are cut off from the experiences of spontaneous feelings, of romance, of nonrational connection to other people. A nerd is so often self-loathing because he accepts the thinking/feeling rift, and he knows and cares that other people accept it, too. To be a nerd is often to live with a nagging feeling of one's own incurable heartlessness.

The first half is great, but the book goes astray in the second. The second used more case studies and memoir. It had an anthropological observation sort of bent that doesn't hold up nearly as well compared with the earlier chapters. I preferred Nugent's wide reinterpretation of culture and history and literature.

But the second half does have a nice section on hipsters and the contemporary appeal of the nerd aesthetic, where I got the opening quote from. He ties it in with Norman Mailer's essay The White Negro. There's a nice connection between hipsterdom and the creative professions...

... a choice on the part of the privileged to identify with the outsider. The outsider in this case is the nerd, because nerds are people incapable of, or at least averse to, riding cultural trends. When your greatest fear is that you will become a loser because your intuition will fail to keep up with tastes, you embrace the nerd...

There's also a nice bit on the connection between nerdiness and autism:

The idea that having a capacity for empathy, for expressing and understanding emotion, is part of being a normal male is fundamentally contemporary and a way of asking that men learn a traditionally feminine virtue. When men were in an unquestioned position of control in the economy---when the bedrock of the nuclear family was a single male wage, a flow of income largely unavailable to women---there was less force compelling men to make themselves attractive mates through understanding the feelings of others and expressing affection. The Asperger's population is 90 percent male; it's likely that one reason Asperger's got "discovered" and then "boomed" is that the rest of us have slowly been revising our expectations of men.

I like this idea of working up drum patterns via text editor. It's disorienting to see the instruments listed that way (bass on top and the hats on the bottom), but looks cool.

"I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life." I can understand the surface appeal, but this always seemed like a very bad idea to me. [via link banana]

You don't know how to play better just because you've suffered. The blues don't come from picking cotton.

I've never read anything quite like Miles on Miles: Interviews and Encounters with Miles Davis. The book collects about four decades' worth of his life, broken up across a couple dozen interviews that were published in small jazz magazines all the way up to big serials like Newsweek and Rolling Stone. Some were with notable music journalists, a few with overmatched college radio station DJs.

The interviews start up in the late 1950s, about 10 years after he got his start with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and a couple years after he kicked his heroin habit. The general consensus, even back then: he was bleeping brilliant, charismatic, deeply flawed. Behind the gruff, badass facade was a sensitive, needy man. As the book goes on, it's cool to see how the different interviewers sum up the career to date, through the shifting bands, radical changes in style, divorces, illness, new addictions. At some points in his life, he's gregarious, absurdly fit from boxing, full of ideas. Later, for several years, he pretty much didn't do much aside from drugs, rarely even leaving his house.

I don't like to lay back. I don't like to relax. Show me a motherfucker that's relaxed, and I'll show you a motherfucker that's afraid of success.

You might have to like Miles to make it through his harangues. There weren't a whole lot of brilliant comments or analysis of music. He usually avoided commenting on his own music, insistent that the past is dead, and I didn't see a whole lot of criticism of other artists.

I usually don't buy jazz records. They make me tired and depressed.

But I loved seeing how he phrased things, how he responds to similar questions over the years, and how he remembers and retells things differently. And there are occasional asides that I never would have expected:

I don't know where I want to live. But the best time I ever had in my life, other than playing trumpet, was when I was out in the country riding horses.

Brian Eno, Thinking about Miles Davis in an un-Miles Davis like way:

Miles was an intelligent man, by all accounts, and must have become increasingly aware of the power of his personal charisma, especially in the later years as he watched his reputation grow over his declining trumpeting skills. Perhaps he said to himself: These people are hearing a lot more context than music, so perhaps I accept that I am now primarily a context maker. My art is not just what comes out of the end of my trumpet or appears on a record, but a larger experience which is intimately connected to who I appear to be, to my life and charisma, to the Miles Davis story. In that scenario, the 'music', the sonic bit, could end up being quite a small part of the whole experience. Developing the context---the package, the delivery system, the buzz, the spin, the story---might itself become the art. Like perfume...

Professional critics in particular find such suggestions objectionable. They have invested heavily in the idea that music itself offers intrinsic, objective, self-contained criteria that allow you to make judgments of worthiness. In the pursuit of True Value and other things with capital letters, they reject as immoral the idea that an artist could be 'manipulative' in this way. It seems to them cynical: they want to believe, to be certain that this was The Truth, a pure expression of spirit wrought in sound. They want it to be 'out there', 'real', but now they're getting the message that what it's worth is sort of connected with how much they're prepared to take part in the fabrication of a story about it. Awful! To discover that you're actually a co-conspirator in the creation of value, caught in the act of make-believe.

Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville invented the Dreamachine, which I first heard about at last week's Film Love at Eyedrum. It uses a record player to spin a cylinder with patterns cut in it. With a light inside, it makes a strobe for drug-free psychedelia. I found an online Dreamachine that makes a similar effect. Move close to the monitor, close your eyes, and it's good for a few seconds of trippy colors. Mind your epilepsy.

Over the course of more than a decade, Alan Pollack analyzed every Beatles song. Lyrics, form, melody, harmony, arrangement, performance. Wow.

The 14-Second Work Year. Parody may not be timeless, but it can be very satisfying.

Miles Davis on drawing as therapy:

Yeah, you know, I stopped for a while. I really started to sketch again after I married Cicely. Because she takes so long. You know how actresses are. They take so long to get ready for anything, you know. Rather than scream at her, I just started sketching.

"You practice and you get better. It's very simple."

"Connolly’s Number, the largest number of songs that you can realistically maintain a meaningful relationship with: 1,000."---from a footnote to a thoughtful essay. Thankfully I hate clutter enough that I never amassed much of a cd or vinyl collection.

I get a kick out of nerdcore rapper ytcracker's album DCPD Bangerz:

my friend mikey pasted me a link in skype to this police department’s site -

http://www.dekalbpolice.com/

EVERY page on this website was filled with the most banging beats i had ever heard. whoever picked these beats for this website seriously needs to be an a&r for a major record label.

i decided to make a concept album using some of the hot beats on these pages and creating a backstory for the song based on what information was on the page. the songs are all named after the .html you can find the beat and story on.

I live in DeKalb, so it was a nice surprise to come across this. I think index_home.html [mp3] is my favorite, but executive_command.html is a very close second. [via decatur metro]

A road trip to hang out with my grandparents, with a friend en route.

It's just so damn easy to look upon someone else and jealously think, "Wow, he sure got lucky." Real people did not have great opportunities fall in their lap. Mostly, crappy opportunities come along, and in the meantime, you make the best of them.

---Po Bronson [via powazek]

My favorite part from Randy Pausch's book, The Last Lecture:

I'll take an earnest person over a hip person every time, because hip is short-term. Earnest is long-term.

Earnestness is highly underestimated. It comes from the core, while hip is trying to impress you with the surface.

"Hip" people love parodies. But there's no such thing as a timeless parody, is there? I have more respect for the earnest guy who does something that can last for generations, and that hip people feel the need to parody.