Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

reviews

Make You Feel Real Blue

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A few weeks ago Lindsay, Dante Bucci, and Bill McConney were playing a tiny living-room style show in a just-off-South coffee shop called Cafe Grindstone that had an entire vegan menu and a shelf of random used textbooks to peruse.

As I put back the book that taught me that pigeons are superstitious a flyer on a lower shelf caught my eye with a familiar logo – Alexandra Day.

I picked up the flyer and scanned it. A Monday night show at Tritone on South Street – not a twenty minute walk from my house – with one of the best songwriters in Philadelphia. Doesn’t take much convincing.

Then I continued to read. She would be splitting a bill with a band whose name I didn’t recognize, who would play the entirety of Joni Mitchell’s Blue.

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Improbably, I currently name as Blue my second favorite album of all time. That puts it above albums that I played on repeat for entire days of my youth. Albums that taught me what music was.

How, then, can that one LP – that I didn’t hear a single song from until college – come to eclipse all else in my collection?

It’s the color of it. Blue is rooted in a palette of different blues, explicit and implied: midnight sky outside of a plane window on “This Flight Tonight;” the melancholy emotional blues on “All I Want” and “My Old Man;” the twinkling blue tinge of frost on “River;” and the blue tv screen light in “A Case of You.” It is music that makes me see color, every single time I hear it.

It’s also the sureness of it – the way threads of blueness and yearning to get back to California are woven through the album. The sureness of Joni’s indelible performance, and the perfection of the tracking. In my opinion it is nearly the ultimate in a singer-songwriter album, and if you are assembling an album you ought to spend some serious time listening to Blue to understand how to make its formula your own.

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I mentioned the upcoming show to as many people as would listen, but I have other promotional duties as well, and I couldn’t seem to hook anyone with the play-through of the Joni album. I wound up tired and alone Monday night, installed in the back corner of the Tritone wrapped in a jacket and scarf, sipping cranberry juice.

Alexandra came by my table, her usual whirlwind of energy and vinyl pants, but she immediately caught on that I was at an unavoidable ebb.

“This is a good bar to just sit in,” she advised. “I’ve come here many times just to sit in the corner. And, you’re really going to like the band.”

The band, I learned, was Ellipsis – a local jazz trio. They assemble the second Monday of each month with as many additional players as necessary to make it through the entirety of an album. In the past two months I had missed a swing through Jeff Buckley’s “Grace” and Neil Young’s “Harvest.” And, Alexandra said the word in the room was that next month’s artist would be Bjork.

My excitement was paired with skepticism that any band could replicate the magic of Blue, especially a jazz band who I discovered in short order did not have a guitarist: piano, upright bass, drum kit, and hand percussion, plus a young jazz vocalist. Joni Mitchell’s best album without a guitar?, I mused. Is there any point?

The band set up a projector beside the stage that shone a series of images – the cover of the album, long dusty fields, empty starless nights – across their bodies and onto the wall to their right. Without much preface, they began “All I Really Want,” possibly my favorite Joni song.

My skepticism continued for a verse – the arrangement on this one was measured mimicry, and the vocalist was treading delicately around Joni’s words. Then we reached my favorite point of the song, exuberant in new love even as it plumbs its unsure depths:

All I really really want our love to do
Is to bring out the best in me and in you
I want to talk to you, I want to shampoo you
I want to renew you again and again
Applause, applause – life is our cause
When I think of your kisses
My mind see-saws
Do you see – do you see – do you see
How you hurt me baby
So I hurt you too
Then we both get so blue

I hadn’t noticed, but as the verse continued I leaned farther and farther from my seat, as if I thought the song could just reach out and envelop me. By the time Samantha Rise reached that melancholy pinnacle, “we both get so blue,” my ass was barely in the chair. I was in love and wrapped in the color of her voice.

The show that followed is one of the best I’ve ever witnessed. A silkier, surer version of “My Old Man” that sent a chill through my body. The quiet menace of the quickly descending fifth in the b-section of the otherwise pretty “Little Green.” A raucous, celebratory turn through “Carey,” stripped down to it’s upright bass and percussion and then built again (here I exchanged a glance of incredulous amazement with Alex and she just laughed and turned back to watch the show). A perfect, absolutely verbatim rendition of “Blue.” A saucy, jazzy version of “California” that transformed directly into a racing, free-form take on “This Flight Tonight” complete with scatting. “River,” bare of it’s jingle bells and with a frostier pulse. A subtle, measured read on the oft-covered “Case of You,” possibly the best lost-love song ever written. And, the sometimes superfluous “Last Time I Saw Richard” transformed into a incandescent elegy for the entire album, although in its narrative it perhaps comes first – her old man gone and married to some chick who skated around on the iced over river.

At the end I was breathless and teary. I witnessed something unique and transformative, unusual and terrific. I saw all of the colors that Joni painted into the album, and so many more.

It was a show that should have played to a packed club, or even on the main stage of the Kimmel Center, and I was watching it from the back corner of what is effectively a living room with a bar and a stage along with twenty, maybe thirty fans.

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I’m inexplicably nervous to talk to other musicians, a condition that’s becoming increasingly paradoxical as I play more frequently. I am one, so shouldn’t I understand how to approach one?

Samantha – delicate and composed on the stage – was twinkling and approachable off it it. I think I heard her boasting to another fan that she could defeat him at any Mario-based game. Eventually I noticed her by herself at the bar and plunged in.

“That was so good. Blue is one of my favorite records, ever. You really did it justice.”

“Wow, thank you. It’s one of mine too!”

And so we just talked, just for a minute or two – the easy chatter of two people who love music. She shook my hand and jotted down her information on the pad I had been sketching out my next Trios on, and parted with a nod and a smile, settling in to enjoy Alexandra’s equally amazing set.

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Three days later and I still can’t get her and Ellipsis out of my head. In that last post I wondered if I still saw colors in the world, but Samantha answered that question neatly. Sometimes you just need someone to show you where to look.

The Burn Ward Theater Company puts on its Mittens

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Saturday night brought me to the upstairs at Plays and Players Theatre on Delancey Street to see the inaugural Fringe Festival effort from The Burn Ward Theater Company.

Burn Ward presented three one acts – two brief scenes, and one more substantial play. The scenes were well-acted distractions, and the play – Mittens Descending – was an utterly hilarious farce. I wish I could go back and see it again.

Mittens is named for an anthropomorphized, caustic, middle-aged, gin-swilling cat with an eye for mischief and an encyclopedic appreciation of classical music. He’s the debatably imaginary best friend of Lenny, who we first meet as a Batman-loving seven-year-old frustrated by the Barbies and make-believe of his little-girl neighbor, Rebecca.

Lenny and Mittens are an inseparable team when on adventures battling pirates and nightmare kings, but in the real world Mittens is more high maintenance than any friend or pet should be. He demands constant attention and obedience from his young charge, but in exchange offers only capricious, catty companionship. When the two have a brief falling out over Lenny’s weak streak for anarchy Mittens leaves in a huff, en route to other unspecified mischief.

We are then reintroduced to Lenny, now an angsty teen who hasn’t heard from Mittens in years. A breakup with his now-girlfriend Rebecca leaves Lenny’s life spinning out of control, which is compounded by the misguided efforts of his laughably inept therapist. After a disappointing visit to Dr. Goldstein’s office Lenny has hit rock bottom, and it’s at this moment that Mittens makes an ignoble return to wreak havoc on Lenny’s life.

From there the play escalates to a life-and-death struggle between Lenny’s actual responsibilities and the fey, narcissistic logic of Mittens, now on his eighth life and looking to relive past glories.

As a character Mittens reminded me perversely of Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer – a whimsical-yet-toxic antagonist so well-played that you hope he will show up in every scene. Rachel Gluck crosses gender (and species) to inject understated panache and a throaty purr into a role she originated at Drexel University. Bedecked in elaborate face paint, a shabby jacket, and tufted ears poking through her hat, she’s as much the charming Harvey as the chilling Frank of Donnie Darko.

Though the plot’s trajectory grows increasingly dire the script is full of humor, and not just from Mittens. Lenny is an amusingly thorough failure at everything from convincing his girlfriend why she shouldn’t leave him to writing songs for his ridiculous vampire rock band. And, while Lenny’s life is a black comedy, his visits to Dr. Goldstein are wry verging on slapstick. The doctor is a misplaced beach bum who will do anything to get his patients to leave him alone, offering kumbayas along with fistfuls of Wellbutrin.

Despite being a group of recent college grads who still throw keggers as fundraisers, Burn Ward’s presentation was all-pro. Fringe too often acts as an excuse for aimless efforts by groups that are more interested in making a statement (or a complete absence of one) than entertaining an audience. Mittens was the opposite – no ulterior motives, just entertainment in the form of a snappy piece of pop-culture still pervasively weird enough to be at home at the Fringe Festival.

While I expected better than amateur from a group of theatre junkies, I was honestly floored by the quality of the production. The acting was universally strong and clearly well-directed, even in the brief scenes that preceding Mittens. The entire ensemble was adept and entertaining, especially Mark Maher as Lenny.

Mr. Maher was so in-the-moment as a rambunctious kid and an over-medicated teenager that our fourth wall into his world was completely transparent. His major failings and minor successes were all-the-more resonant for watching someone actually be an angsty teen instead of just miming along to the archetype of one. His grounded performance made Mittens seem all the more real.

The upstairs at Plays and Players isn’t the kindest or roomiest space – more like a stuffy attic than a theatre. Burn Ward technical director Brian Browne made the best of it with a revolving stage that allowed Lenny to climb out of his window directly into his Rebecca’s room in real time, once even continuing conversation from one scene to the next.

The Burn Ward Theater Company is barely a year old but they have already figured out the formula for a successful show. Their biggest misstep was in choosing a venue with too-few seats; each of four Mittens performances was a sellout!

While other Fringe companies pack their bags and hibernate until next September, Burn Ward will continue to fundraise and perform throughout the year. Keep an eye on the company’s website or their FaceBook page for info on upcoming shows.

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Disclosure: Burn Ward was founded by Drexel grads, but I was never in a school production with any of them (though I later starred in show with Mr. Browne). However, I am good friends with one of the founders; she did not act in or direct this show.

I don’t think our relationship influenced my opinion, as I honestly had no idea of what to expect, and harbored a fear that it would be either painfully dreadful or dreadfully painful. Similarly, she seemed to be terrified that I would hate the show.

Happily, neither outcome proved true.

Closed Loop

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This post will (temporarily, at least) close the loop my recent discussion of good music prediction systems.

One service that initially escaped my attention was Last FM, aka AudioScrobbler. Perhaps it went unmentioned because it’s a bit of a hodgepodge when it comes to features – it tracks what you listen to, but compiles only the vaguest (and in my experience, often incorrect) statistics about your listening habits. It features some free music, but not in a predictable enough fasion that i’d use it on a regular basis.

Since it doesn’t accumulate anything but playcounts, Last.fm can only predict based on your listening habits. For someone like me who listens to 1k+ tracks a month, the approach is fascinating but ultimately scattershot, as it isn’t weighting my likes and dislikes at all. Though it has the plus side of offering predictions based on a large network of users who you can either friend or “neighbor,” the lack of any rating scheme is a major turnoff.

That said, i return my attention to Yahoo’s LaunchCast Radio.

I have been phasing this out at work now that I have a new iPod, and it’s unaccessible at home since it doesn’t work in Firefox. However, i remain convinced that it comes the closest to being the best music service out there based on the strength of its predictive abilities. It has lead me to more than a few downloads and purchases in the last month, many of which have been surprisingly obscure.

I definitely recommending trying the service, and do so with the following recommendations:

  • When you first subscribe spend a day or two listening to one of the pre-set stations that’s nearest to your tastes in order to give the service some ratings to work with. Alternately, take a sampling of your record collection and add 200-500 ratings – probably enough for the services correlative powers to kick in.

  • Unless you enjoy a *wide* swath of music in one particular genre it’s in your best interest to rate genres very conservatively, especially high-level buckets like “Rock” or “R&B.” Rating “Rock” highly partially thwarts a rating of “Don’t Play” for “Classic Rock.” Furthermore, the system seems to prefer genre recommendations to song correlations, which is increasingly frustrating as you fine-tune your song ratings. Just as bad, if not worse, if you leave genres blank Yahoo assumes you like them all equally!

  • One positive impact is that if you have a subgenre you’re interested in hearing more of, like “Big Band” or “Zydeco,” you can rank it heavily for a few days to get served a bigger sampling of songs so you can develop your opinion.

  • Similarly, only rate an artist if you want them to impact the system’s choices. You might love Madonna or Depeche Mode, but if you aren’t interested in the terrible pop they’re correlated to you might be safer just rating songs and albums. Rating a smattering of songs by an artist has an equal (or better) effect on being served more songs by the same artist as rating the artist themselves.

  • Whenever you hear a song you really like, click the song name to view its entry, which contains its similar songs. This is especially fun when listening to classic music that you don’t necessarily own, as it tends to jog your memory for other songs you’ve forgotten. (When you hear a song you really hate you should do the same thing; you might kill ten terrible-sounding birds with one well place stone. Or, you could find out a song you love is too closely correlated to the distasteful pick).

  • There’s a fixed amount of time (or number of songs?) you can consume in any given month before higher features are locked out, leaving you only with your own station with a somewhat limited pool of songs. Our office seems to hit this point about 2/3 into a month. If your tastes run mainstream the limited pool is actually not so bad, but to avoid this make sure to shut (or at least pause) the player when you leave your desk.

  • Though Yahoo’s awesome correlations per Artist, Album, or Song help support predictions of your taste, the system seems to be incapable of adapting to a non-standard correlative scheme on a per-user basis.

    For example, what if I rate “Don’t Play” on every song over five minutes? The system would learn to avoid long songs that were similar to each other, but voting no to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” and LedZep’s “Stairway to Heaven” wouldn’t necessarily protect me from Fiona’s “Never Is a Promise” or Tori’s “Yes, Anastasia.”

    A best-of-class predictive system would be able to determine your tastes not only based on correlated predictive data, but also based on your personal trend of ratings for certain song lengths, BPMs, producers, labels, or even mix levels and/or frequency response.

If you know of this promised land of music consumption, please point me in the right direction. Heaven forbid i learn enough programming/scripting to be dangerous, i might have a go at my own datamart, a la iTunes Registry.

In Search of a Magic Music Bullet

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I love music so much that i’m starting to think i need to hire a part-time “music-loving assistant” to help me love music as much as i love music.

My CD intake has become truly ludicrous over the course of the last month; since my latest acquisitions post i’ve purchased another 20+ discs, hardly any of which are bad. Yet, i hardly listen to 200 songs in my own collection a week – i average about 700 a month with iPod, and without (as i am, currently) i hover around 300. That means i’m not even listening to all of my new purchases once through iTunes.

My music loving issue is a symptom of something Coolfer was discussing earlier this week – namely, that the scarcest resource artists are vying for is not listeners’ dollars, but listener’s time. Because, an album that’s bought (out of loyalty, or advertising, or whatever) but not heard is like a tree falling in an empty forest: it might make a sound, but no one will know.

What Coolfer only begins to touch upon in their writeup is the world of music filtering tools that help the time-pressed listener discern what’s good, not only in their own collections, but in the vast realm of songs they haven’t heard.

To this point i’ve taken the recommendations of sites like Amazon or RateYourMusic with a grain of salt, often more suspicious than curious of an artist they correlate to my tastes. Plus, they’re only correlated on an album-by-album basis, when i truly operate on the song level.

To that end, lately i’ve become enamored with Yahoo’s LaunchPlayer customized station(at work only, as it doesn’t function in Firefox). In the player you can rate any level of music in a 5-point system – from the macro of Genres through Artists and Albums to the micro of Songs. Users rate via listening or, if you’re me, mass rating-drives to sync up to iTunes ratings (aside: why the fuck can’t i upload my ratings as CSV? Surely i can’t be the only person who worries about keeping ratings meticulously synced across multiple services?), and the customized stations spits out increasingly well-chosen songs (though it doesn’t plays only what you’ve rated, so rating every song by a certain artist improves its predictive abilities to find songs like those, but doesn’t mean you’ll hear more of those songs).

Even with about 2.5k ratings i’m obviously still in a calibration stage, as the player feels me out in various genres. It’s amusing how my current ratings (only synced through C in iTunes) are already yielding some of my favorite results from the rest of my music collection. However, it’s amazing how high the quality of recommendations become when the player gets on a streak; this week i was treated to a 5-song block of things completely new to me and completely excellent. Also, the player has a knack for reminding me of tracks i own but haven’t heard for years. If only i didn’t have to labor for hours on end to sync up its ratings to mine…

What i have a burning need to know is, why does this AWESOMELY PERFECT functionality need to be separated by my music collection by a brick wall of incompatibility and ratings mechanisms? The closest thing i can find as an iTunes plugin is LastFM (previously (or still?) AudioScrobbler), but the site is spotty in its tracking, can’t track my iPod usage, and doesn’t take into account my ratings (booooo). Since it can’t distinguish between a 5-Star Ani DiFranco track and a 1-Star Dave Matthews Band track, the service’s recommendations are nearly useless to me (i.e. I still manage to listen to a lot of things i don’t love, and it’s skewing my results mercilessly).

My great white hope was the iTunes Music Store “Just For You” beta feature – recommendations native to my music player! Except, they SUCK. iTMS doesn’t take your ratings (or any of your library) into account, just your purchases, and the only two distinctions it allows you to make are “Already Own It” or “Don’t Like It.” What about, “I bought it and it SUCKED!” or “Not my favorite album by that artist”? I need degrees, damnit.

I’m not sure of what my recourse is, short of a paying an assistant to make me daily playlists that combine old favorites with hitherto unearthed deep cuts and brand new singles. It seems to me like the majority of iPod users use iTunes, and a good deal of other music fans like it to, so i’m sure i’m not the only person hitting a wall in this regard.

What i’d love to know is: what’s in the pipeline? A Yahoo-like service that let’s music-head mass-upload their ratings and/or combines randomly streamed tracks with nuggets from your own library? Last.FM that also sucks in ratings and playcounts to become a better predictor (which can totally be done, as my NowPlaying sidebar is getting that same data live from iTunes as we speak). Or, an iTunes integrated monster that queues up iTMS songs as correlated to your Top 200 most played and/or highest rated?

Whatever the magic bullet is, i hope to get hit soon. Otherwise, the only thing standing between me and just listening to Immaculate Collection on repeat for days are iTunes’ Smart Playlists that mine my least-heard-but-highest-rated tracks.

Consumption: Freakonomics

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Freakonomics is an entertaining reminder that correlation does not indicate causation, proof that not all economists are interested in the economy, and a valuable deflator of a few harmful common sense truisms. It is obsessed with subtly pointing out that the word “data” is plural. It’s commentary on apples that are really oranges is purely metaphorical.

It is easy to compare this book with the similar bestseller Blink, by dust-jacket endorser Malcolm Gladwell. Indeed, the subtitle, “A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything,” seems to jive with Gladwell’s way of carefully evaluating the world through communications-theory tinged lenses.

The subtitle is somewhat of a misnomer. Levitt is considered “rogue” because he delights in applying microeconomics to thorny subjects that are not adequately explained by statistical analysis. He has no overarching theory of anything – just an endless series of slightly counterintuitive but highly logical facts about everything.

Levitt and Dubner’s “hidden side of everything” epiphanies are highly entertaining, and educational. You will certainly be the hit of the watercooler for weeks after reading this book. However, the epiphanies are not especially portable. Knowing that a swimming pool is more dangerous to children than a handgun does nothing for comparing the dangers of a trampoline against a hunting knife collection. All the authors have to say about that is that you’ll need lots of data.

Maybe the lack of long-term impact to your way of thinking wouldn’t seem like such a shortcoming if this book was anything more than a compilation of six over-long magazine articles – the main text barely tops 200 pages. Furthermore, though the book has an extensive works cited, it features no footnotes – meaning you have to turn to the back of the book every time you read something interesting to see if it came from another source.

If any of Levitt’s assertions are valuable beyond passing amusement, clearly that assertion is the link between available, legalized abortion and lower crime rates. This bombshell is dropped in the book’s introduction, and later discussed for almost a full chapter. Though the authors repeatedly disclaim that the data are not meant to support a pro-choice position, it is hard to come away with any other conclusion. Focusing on this aspect of the book might seem like an unfair attempt to politicize a exercise in economics applied to socio-politics, but you could say the same thing about books by Marx or Durkheim. Clearly, Levitt is on to something important, and the fact that he carefully disguises it behind a cleverly non-sequitur title and cover image rather than making it the focus of his first book is insulting, and maybe tragic.

The authors are clearly trying to build a sort of narrative (from drug dealers to abortion vs crime-rate, to parenting, to children’s names), but they clearly run out of steam in the sixth and final chapter, which drones on with lists of names for poor kids, middle class kids, black kids, and white kids. For every list, the findings get less revolutionary, until Levitt is pointing out facts that would barely rate as footnotes, if he had any.

Freakonomics is a quick, lightweight read chunked into six chapters that should each probably be read in only one or two sittings in order to gain their full impact. With a hefty $26 purchase price for it’s brief length it is a book that should be borrowed from the local library, unless one of it’s common-sense-deflators is extremely valuable to one of your social or political causes, or if its cover would look especially appealing on your bookshelf.