Pink Air

On and on

I like repetitive music (which Jen finds worthy of note from time to time.) In fact, I mostly listen to semi-randomized loops running in Live. If you combine generative software with rich, effected sounds, you sometimes get something usefully soothing and interesting, with a continuously shifting emotional tone.

Which makes me think that companies should have their own generative music palettes: a recognizable set of tones, rhythms and effects that produces an infinite amount of branded ambient music that could be used everywhere. Chanel boutiques could run endless variations on Chanel Loop No. 9. Sound logos would be more interesting and diffuse, like brand perfume. Always different and always the same, like an attractive pattern.

Interesting Portland: April 9th (in Portland)

A few minutes after meeting with the organizing committee for Interesting Portland, I started vomiting. While there is no causal connection between the two events, it just goes to show that you never know what you'll get from an Interesting conference. Except interestingness. And meeting interesting people. And learning stuff. And useful thoughts, great conversations and mental revivification units.

The world is full of interesting things and interesting people who want to interest you in what's interesting. So if you're within pinging distance of Portland on April 9th, you should let them. They'll be waiting for you in the mighty Norse Hall, Portland's Little Valhalla. Admission is $11 (cheap) and free if you give a talk (cheaper and funner).

If only

This last round of food poisoning was either my fourth or fifth. In any case, it felt superfluous (in both directions.) But it did free up 48 hours in my pressing holiday schedule of baby dandling, book browsing, baby browsing and book dandling to think about the power of regret.

Food poisoning goes from 0 to 60 in about sixty seconds. One minute, I was bouncing a new colleague on my knee and the next I was sick in the gutter outside Powell's books, which was particularly galling (see what I did there?) because I'd been just about to start looking for a particular book I regretted not buying last year, a book about regret and how "people often create alternatives to reality and imagine how events might have turned out 'if only' something had been different."

If only I hadn't eaten...what was it? Food poisoning always lets you know. During the first wave of nausea you always get a mystical off-Broadway musical vision of exactly what made you sick:

It was me
Just little me
It's obvious but now it's much too late
You say you knew
You always knew
Yet you didn't hesitate to clean your plate
When we first met I made you blink
Now you're leaning over a sink
Or so you think
Why does it stink
Here on the brink of your despair
If only you'd skipped the
Palm Hearts of O'Hare

A few days later I returned to Powell's and found The Rational Imagination right where I'd left it in 2007. Ruth Byrne doesn't mention food poisoning, but outlines the kinds of places we tend to stick mental forks in the road and imagine what might have happened, if only. The incidents that trigger "if only" thoughts and the pitifully small set of factors we identify as significant variables show some regularities which are nicely visualized as "fault lines of reality." Where do we see cracks in the world that might be usefully widened into an imagined alternate reality? Why, when we hear that someone died in a car crash after he stopped for a beer, do we think, "If only he hadn't stopped for that beer" and not "If only he'd had a lot more to drink, passed out, and driven home later when the roads were a bit more clear"? Why do we think, "If only I'd ordered the salmon" rather than "If only I'd flown through a different airport"?

Byrne concludes that we regret actions, especially socially unacceptable actions, more than inactions (unless prompted to take a long term perspective). We're more likely to regret the latter elements in a perceived chain of causality. We tend to re-imagine events by changing the factors we see as controllable and that enabled the final outcome even if we know they weren't the actual cause. As an example, Byrne wonders why there was so much post-9/11 focus on the failures of security ("if only the baggage handlers had stopped the hijackers from getting on board...") rather than more direct causes ("If only Al-Qaeda didn't exist..."). She believes that some kinds of causative, if/then statements about reality immediately bring to mind more possible cause and effect combinations than others and that these are the statement/situations/factors that we tend to focus our counterfactual imagination on. We see fault lines where we are most conscious of multiple possible routes for reality to take.

Which all seems true enough, but abstracted to logical tautology: We mentally change those things we see as changeable. We focus on actions rather than inactions, unless we don't. The visceral turmoil of regret and its interaction with cognition is missing in this analysis, visible only in the real-life examples (including this concise debate over the existence of souls) and occasionally, obliquely, in the Aspergian understatement of Byrne's writing style which sometimes sounds like Mork reporting to Orson:

Cognitive differences may exist in how people think about possibilities. For example, people may differ in their ability to think about true possibilities.

Counterfactual thoughts can amplify emotions, and the emotions people experience may be affected by the sorts of counterfactual alternatives they create.

Some people seem to focus on the facts, whereas others seem to focus on the imagined alternative.

I'm a fact person myself. In keeping with the spirit of CHANGE, I'm making an effort to focus more on the imagined alternative, but I'm not making a fetish of it.

Creepy

Bruce Springsteen pointed out the dangers of having too many cable channels, but when you're jet-lagged at 4 am, it's not so bad. There weren't any zombies, so I decided to watch Hostel because a few nights before, my brother-in-law Jim was making the case that it was an interesting movie.

I'm inclined to believe Jim because he's someone who's interested in what's interesting. Besides being widely knowledgeable about everything from tarot to dinosaurs, he's expert on a number of topics like H.P. Lovecraft and New York City, and along with my sister he helps to run the media watchdog FAIR, which makes them both issues/media/politics experts as well.

And I think he's right about Hostel. It is interesting. Reviews mixed precise technical praise with diffuse moral scorn (an interesting combination). Passing recognition of the admittedly scarce political critique drops abruptly into peevish befuddlement over the apparent lack of a point. Why did they expect one?

When my car broke down in Medford last year, the garage kindly ferried us to the local mall during the repair. The van driver was about 16 and thinking about getting out of Medford but didn't know where to go. He asked where we lived and when we said Europe, he said, "Like that movie Hostel? Because I'm definitely not going there." Which might be one of the film's points and is certainly one of its effects.

But if you're after cogent political discourse in exploitation films, you really want Russ Meyer's Vixen!. Ultra-deranged along every moral, aesthetic and psychological dimension, it also contains the most reasonable debate over communism I've ever seen in a fiction film. (I think it's fiction.)

I'm a horror fan, so for me the horror is the point. I'm interested in the other things a story has to say, but I'm mainly drawn to the core points that successful horror always makes: We are fragile. The worst thing you can think of has already happened to someone just like you. Pay attention to detail. Things are not what they seem. These have become some of my points, which is what makes me a fan. A guy stopped me on the street once and asked, "Don't you think that there is something basically very wrong with the world?" He was recruiting for the Spartacist League, but I think most horror fans would agree. Which is why I harbor an unjustified, purely rhetorical belief that horror fans tend to be liberals, animated by a common belief that something is wrong in the world, but of different minds as to whether that basic fault can be addressed directly, if at all.

Take Rod Serling, outspoken liberal and great tragic thinker. The awful, creepy thing out there always turns out to be inside us so all you can do is have hope, show tolerance and offer forgiveness: liberal values. Every Twilight Zone epsiode was so deeply imprinted on my childhood memory that avoiding violent and ironic comeuppance has become my primary life goal. The bitter ironies of the endings usually cut against those who see no way but their own, so they never see it coming.

Which is why I think that Joss Whedon (Serling's true heir) often uses lead vocal melodies that intertwine so that different characters are singing from their own perspectives but we can see that they're really singing about the same thing. He uses this technique in both the Buffy musical episode and Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog ("one of the best inventions of 2008" and a good example of iro). To sing in polyphony is to consider other points of view.

Whedon and Serling each produced a short-lived, existential Western series, Firefly and The Loner, both of which are meditations on fate, losing and the morality of violence. Horror deals with the same topics, but in westerns it's laid out more starkly, geometrically. Things are what they seem. The badness is clearly human and walks in daylight. Everything is connected by lines straight as bullets. Westerns are like the sun-dried bones of horror.

 

Jolie-laide laissez-faire

I got lost on my way to the post office when I realized I wasn't going to the post office. I just grabbed the package delivery notice and walked out the door without noticing that the address on the slip wasn't the main office on the Singel, but a tobacconist in the Jordaan. Which is when I realized that I'm still not reconciled to the rebranding of the Dutch post as TNT, the courier company it acquired a few years ago.

Like a lot of national mail services, the Dutch one actually went private years ago, but the red white and blue branding stayed the same. The French are born stylists. The Dutch are born designers. But that particular color combination seems to repel the assaults of sophistication. Maybe it has something to do with color theory. Or maybe those colors are used in many cases where, for cultural or political reasons, color choice is the main element of the branding so no one (except the Dutch) ever felt the need to make it look good as well.

But aesthetic clunkiness is kind of reassuring in vital services. As one of the most visible and relied upon pieces of public infrastructure, the postal service should have an overengineered, neutral, tenured, clunky quality to it. Like British electric plugs. What is up with those things? You could buy a beryllium computing wafer activated by your thoughts but it will still be shackled to a prop from a Frankenstein movie, a memento mori of postwar scarcity and material rebuke to the transcendent aspirations of stylish electronic devices and their jumped-up pantry boy owners.

But the British love their plugs with a surprising ferocity, usually wrapped around a suspiciously rehearsed sounding list of Reasons Why The British Plug Is Technically Superior. But this defensiveness is as transparent as it is unnecessary. They love the BS 1363 because it is a cultural icon, contrapositive proof of the stoic equation of beauty with lack of character.

For my part, I don't want a Postal Service that's bright and trendy and whose CEO is on myspace (Ok, that's probably not him, but you get the idea.) Mail service should be guild-like, secure in its values, bureaucratic in the best possible way. And its visual signature should be, not ugly, but not especially pretty either.