If you only discover one new band this year, hell this decade, make it Freelance Whales. I found these guys yesterday thanks to The Album Project (a site you should be subscribing to if you love good music.)

Now I love most music, and can usually appreciate and enjoy most music even if I’m not exactly crazy about it. But every once in a while I run into a band that absolutely floors me and I can’t stop listening. Freelance Whales has done that.

These guys have a sound that is truly unique and just plain fun. And good. I understand the tendency to equate “creative, fun, unknown band” with “had a cool idea but not much talent.” Trust me, this is quality music that will have you catching yourself closing your eyes and bobbing your head in public places. Add some of the best writing, lyrically, that I’ve heard from a new band in a while, and you’ve got a great album.

How to describe their sound… Imagine if you could combine Modest Mouse (okay, that’s pretty vague I know, think songs like Float On and Missed the Boat) with Death Cab. Yeah, that good.

So go to their MySpace. Do it now. Every song on it is a hit. I mean that. My personal favorite is “Hannah,” and I was tempted to tell you to start there. Don’t do it. “Generator” is one of the best “track 1″s out there, and when you get to the end and finish up with “Great Estates…” Don’t be shocked if you feel a burning need to play it again.

Recession is a band I’ve been following for a few years now. Most of the members go or have gone to my college, so I was introduced to them just by simple proximity. The music was good so I started popping down for their shows around Pittsburgh, even got a chance to play with them in a couple fundraiser’s and coffee houses on campus.

Since then I’ve kept up with the band and their sound has really grown into something excellent. It’s original and very rich musically while still being accessible. I’m listening to a demo CD of some of the tracks they’ve newly recorded right now and it’s great, just great. You can hear a few of them on there myspace here:

http://www.myspace.com/recession

I especially love that “Lose Your Head” is finally among the songs available online. It’s one of their older songs now, but it’s always been a favorite of mine at their shows. And the next online track, “Contagious” well… let’s just say you’ll be hitting repeat the second it’s done.

Anyway, I had meant to write a review of the band for an older site that’s no longer really living. Shamefully, it never went up, and now seems like a great time to remedy that, because there’s every indication that the band will be making some major moves soon.

Guitarist Brian Schultz told me recently that they had sent off a few tracks to LA to be mixed and promoted by Bernd Bergdorf, who’s worked with Green Day, Pink, Spearhead, Tom Waits, The Bangles, and even my personal hero’s the Brian Jonestown Massacre.

The name’s they’ve been sharing stage with have gotten increasingly impressive as of late as well. Among the one’s that have stood out to me are Love Drug, Mae, Plain White Ts, and Augustana. (I was lucky enough to make the night with Augustana. That was a hell of a show.)

Also, at the very moment I write this, several major labels are browsing through recessions online catalog and presence. This is a band with a great sound that’s really starting to catch some attention… I can’t help but anticipate big things in the near future. Keep an eye out for these guys.

(Oh, and while you’re on their myspace, feel free to post and tell them that they ought to get a recording of “Meant To Shine” up already. That song kicks.)

Nostalgia.

Coffee and cream,

.bitter and black

.smooth and white

Uppers and downers,

.bitter and biting

.a smoke and a drink

Buzz and a blanket,

A kiss goodbye.

So a little while ago I discovered ThinkGeek this has been a wonderful terrible thing.  Wonderful because there are more than enough incredibly awesome useless gadgets to keep me entertained for a few lifetimes.  Terrible because within minutes of checking out the site I had already purchased a universal remote for my key-chain, a packet of miracle berries for some friends and I to play with, an old school usb cell phone attachment for my brother (x-mas gift) and a book on cognitive neuroscience called Mind Hacks.  As fun as all of the above have been, it’s the book that has inspired this argument.

It’s basically a primer on cognitive neuroscience.  Trust me, that kind of thing is actually fun to read if it’s well written.  Most chapters actually include some easy try-at-home experiments that demonstrate interesting little things about how your mind works.  One of the coolest ones I’ve come across so far is the McGurk effect.

To experience the McGurk effect, scroll down and watch the video of the dirty looking white guy at the bottom of this post.  Listen to what he’s saying.  Make sure you watch him as you do this.  What sound is he making?

Most people hear “Da Da” when they watch this video.  A couple times I’ve also heard people tell me it sounds like “La Da.”

Now close your eyes or look away and listen without being able to see the video.  You can now hear him very clearly saying “Ba Ba.”  What’s going on?

In reality, our dirty white guy here was filmed saying “Ga Ga” but the audio that goes along with the video is of him saying “Ba Ba.”  Your eyes and your ears are giving you conflicting signals so your mind interprets them as a sound that can make sense of (for the most part) both sources of input.  The wild thing is that now, even though you know he’s saying “Ba Ba” you can still only hear “Da Da” when you’re watching his mouth, no matter how hard you try to hear the correct sound!

It’s a really cool reminder that the “sounds” we hear are not actually floating around out there.  It’s just the way that our mind interprets vibrations picked up by our ear drums, and obviously it takes more than one sense into account.

Pretty cool.

Now I’m off to go buy a Titanium Spork.  What in the world could I ever need a Titanium Spork for?

…

…quit asking stupid questions.

Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder?

We’ve all most likely heard this phrase at some point.  It’s a proverbial sounding way to say that beauty is a subjective quality.  That the only true standard for beauty is that the observer finds the object to be beautiful.  Something might be beautiful to me but not to you.

Because there are always differing opinions on things, it’s natural to assume that something like beauty is a subjective quality.  This is especially true in our modern “everyone is right” society in which it’s taboo to say that any opinion can be wrong.  But is beauty really solely in the eye of the beholder?  If you and I look at the same thing, and one of us finds it beautiful and the other doesn’t, are we both right?  Or is one of us missing out.

I’ve thrown this question around on a few forums and discussed it with some friends.  It seems that most people want to answer that yes, beauty is subjective.  They usually then wind up siting something that they find beautiful that other people may not.  When the question is phrased differently though, opinions tend to change.

Think of something specific that you find incredibly beautiful.  A person, a work of art, something in nature, an emotion, a past experience, anything that is, in your opinion, one of the most beautiful things in the world.  Got it?  Good.

Now tell me this.  If you were the only one on earth who thought that was beautiful, would it still be beautiful?  Most people answet that question with “of course.”  But how about this one.  What if no one, including you, thought it was beautiful?  Nothing has changed about the object or experience, it still has all those same qualities that have made you choose it as something beautiful.  The only thing that’s different is that no one, not even you, holds the opinion that it is beautiful.  Now, at this point, is it still beautiful?  Does it retain that beauty that you’ve ascribed to it even if no one believes it?

Interestingly, most people, the same people who at first thought beauty was subjective, will answer yes to that last question.  Something inside us is not willing to believe that the things we find beautiful would lose their beauty if they went unrecognized.  Now, if we believe that, then we have to believe that beauty comes from somewhere other than our own opinions.  Something about that beautiful object must make it beautiful.  This means that beauty must be a concrete objective quality which has standards.  Otherwise, if beauty is simply rooted in opinion, then an object cannot be beautiful without some person there to think it’s beautiful.  It has no actual beauty, nothing does.

So logic takes me to a point where I have to believe that beauty is either an objective quality… or it simply doesn’t exist.  It’s just an illusion of perception.  I have a hard time believing that an idea that has played a major role in society since before written history isn’t based in some sort of truth.  That, and as someone with a passion for art I’m rather obligated to believe in beauty. ; )

So I’ve arrived at this idea that there are concrete standards for beauty.  What are they?  I’m not sure to be honest.  I’ve got some ideas, but not a workable definition that hasn’t fallen apart yet.  I think I’ll throw a few more posts on this topic if I come across any interesting in my little quest for a standard.  I’d also love to see your comments.  And while I feel pretty convinced about the whole objective/subjective thing, I won’t stick to my guns without reason.  I want to hear if you agree or not.

Triumphant Returns

As a self confessed Third Eye Blind fanatic (if I had to choose a favorite band of all time…) and a lover of all things “90s alt rock” I haven’t been on this much of a musical high since the 2006 re-release of Slow Motion with the full lyrics intact.

Third Eye Blind’s new album “Ursa Major” is slated to come out this spring sometime, but 5 days ago (that’s the 18th folks) they release a digital-only EP “Red Star.”  You can stream the album from the band’s MySpace.  It includes the three brand new songs: Red Star, Why Can’t You Be, and NonDairy Creamer.  Music reviews are not my forte, this is not one.  I just felt a need to do a quick little spotlight on this release because it’s got me more excited then I’ve been in a long time.

If I wasn’t excited enough about Ursa Major already, Red Star has done the trick.  Listening to the EP makes me feel like the 90s is coming back.  With so many artists trying to re-invent themselves to keep up with trends today, it’s great to hear 3eb sounding like themselves.  The song Red Star especially takes you back to their first two albums and really embodies they feel that the band has always embraced. 

Why Can’t You Be has the remarkable ability to make me laugh and bring a tear to my eye in the same 5 minute time span.  In part because it’s recorded live for the EP and begins with the deep philosophical words of Stephan Jenkins “…but I’m drunk!” Why Can’t You Be seems at first to have a deceptively light tone.  Then you really start to hear the lyrics and you realize “oh man… any one who’s ever been in a relationship is gonna feel this somewhere deep.”  And suddenly the line “a water massager’s the purest love I’ve ever known” doesn’t just make you laugh… it makes you wonder if it might not hold some truth.

NonDairy Creamer is downright fun to listen to, and is the kind of song I’ll wind up singing in the shower.  It takes a bold stab at some of the issues we deal with in today’s crazy world, treating our media and politicians to heaping helping of satire.  After the song apparently raised some controversy on Stereogum, Stephan Jenkins commented on the song.

“The great thing about music is that it brings all types of people together, and I remain astonished at the capacity of lyrics to move things. Don’t know why 3eb’s lyrics have been so controversial in the past — they are about as racy as your current novel. Most importantly, I continue to be inspired by our audience, which is mostly college kids. While we as a band try to move past politics, I personally had been on the campaign trail in a grass roots fashion for many months supporting Obama, which leads me to this song.

“In regards to “Non-Dairy Creamer,” indeed humor is the intent, both musically and lyrically. I’ve felt provoked and poisoned by our politics and culture in the last few years. I wanted to amplify that provocation with some irony and take a knock at some of these fear-based phrases like “threat level orange.” All kinds of hypocrisy in current headlines then popped into my head and I rhymed em. I meant for it to be a hoot (though I know it has some teeth). Bombastic humor being the balm to move past a pretty nasty period.“

The EP’s been out almost a week now, but even a day after it’s release it had already made it to the ears of countless fans.  Jenkins had this to say on the Third Eye Blind’s MySpace blog:

“I am totally freaked out at how many people are finding and listening to these songs. There’s a line in the song Red Star “the system shut us down now, we find each other in the underground”. There’s also a line in Non-Dairy Creamer that says “I sincerely want to thank you all for listening… I thank you all.” That’s what I have to say today. I’m currently nursing a sore throat which I hope will be gone by this Friday in New Orleans and I’m in the studio today trying to finish songs for Ursa Major. I have tingles going up the back of my neck today, and it came from you guys.“

Again, I can’t even describe how much hearing 3eb back and sounding like themselves puts me on cloud nine.  Can’t wait for Ursa Major.  I’m gonna go rock out to Wounded now.  Peace.

Gamers, Check This Out

The video game industry suffers from a surprising lack of celebrities.  It’s a little odd when you think about it.  Games nowadays are becoming every bit as much an art form as films and some cult classics have fan-bases large enough to be capable of subjugating a small country.  So it’s surprising we don’t see as much developer buzz as you might expect.  Of course everyone knows who Shigeru Miyamoto is, and Spore fans will know Will Wright just like Fable fans will recognize Peter Molyneux.  But even though a God of War junkie might know all about David Jaffe, would they recognize the name of combat designer Jason “Shirts” de Heras who’s working on the God of War 3 right now?  Chances are they wouldn’t.

Sexy Videogame Developerland is the brainchild of Leigh Alexander, news director at Gamasutra.  (Check out her personal blog Sexy Videogameland.)  It’s an interesting little project that encourages video game industry professionals to submit little blurbs/bios/fun facts about themselves.  The goal isn’t to create some comprehensive database of developers, but simply to give readers a look at some of the people responsible for putting together the games they love.

SVGDL, now up and running with nine developer bios, takes a relaxed and humorous look inside the video game industry.  If you’re a video game junkie like myself you need to check this out, if only to ask yourself whether Fred Zeleny of Bethesda really wears a necklace of human teeth. ; )

Movies – How do they move us?

I was having a great discussion with a few friends the other day.  We had gotten on the topic of movies and the incredible power they have to influence our feelings and emotions.  It’s incredible really.  Think of those moments when you’ve really been drawn in to a movie.  Usually you don’t even realize it, it kind of catches you off guard.  You suddenly realize that you’ve been holding your breath for the last minute, or that you’re about to fall off the edge of your seat.  It’s wild when you think about.  We know going into a movie that we’re about to see fiction.  There’s absolutely no illusion of reality here.  We know this is fake.  So you would think it shouldn’t be able to affect us so intensely.  Yet time and time again, it does.

So we were throwing back and forth some ideas of why this might be, what it is about movies that makes us buy into them so easily.  We came up with a few intriguing ideas, and one stood out as being very interesting and potentially pretty valid.

That Guy with the Hat on VH1

I don’t know if anyone out there actually spends a significant amount of their time watching VH1’s reality shows, but there’s one running right now called “The Pick Up Artist.”  (I promise this will relate to the topic I started, just stick with me for a paragraph or two.)  The show, if you haven’t seen it, features this guy who goes by the moniker “Mystery” and is apparently the guru on picking up women.  They hand him a bunch of socially awkward 25 year old virgins and he teaches them his trade to varying degrees of success.  The show is somewhere between hilarious, pathetic and oddly voyeuristic, and I’ll admit I’ve watched more than one episode.  Some of the guys on there are the sort of car wreck you just can’t look away from.

Anyway, one of the concepts that “Mystery” introduces to his students is the idea of a “false disqualifier.”  Baiscally, in the first few mintutes of approaching a beautiful woman, they are supposed to throw in some kind of comment that disqualifies them as a “potential partner.”  It could be as simple as “you know why we’d never work? You’re way to nice for me.”  The thought is that if you can get her not to think of you as potential she won’t feel threatened by your presence, and will relax her defenses, allowing you to flirt with her.

So the that’s the concept of a “false disqualifier.”  Keep that in your mind, we’ll come back to it.  You can forget the Mystery man in the fuzzy hat.  We’re done with him.

Keeping Tabs on Reality

I have wild dreams.  I mean wild.  Long, involved, epic, intricate dreams that resemble movies written by cracked out new-age artsy types.  I remember them often too, rarely is there a night where I don’t remember at least one dream.  However, I almost never lucid dream.  (Again, I promise I’ll tie this all together at the end.  Just trust me.)

The thing is, I’ve always wanted to lucid dream.  Who wouldn’t?  Once you realize you’re dreaming you can pretty much go nuts, or even if you don’t have that “I can fly if I want” kind of control that some people have, you can at least fully appreciate the crazy things going on.

So a few weeks ago I decided to check out some literature on lucid dreaming and see if there are any techniques for inducing it, that kind of thing.  Along with a few other resources, my search led me to a site called Dream Views.  Now it didn’t take long for me to lose interest in trying to keep a dream journal and train myself to lucid dream, but there was one idea that stuck in my head.  Reality checks.

A reality check is just that, a simple assessment of whether or not what’s going on around you at any given moment is “real.”  According to the website, we do this naturally on occasion in everyday life.  Most often when we’re surprised or when things don’t make sense.  It’s as simple as thinking you heard someone say something odd and asking “wait, what?”

Dream Views reccomends training yourself to perform reality checks often as a great way to train yourself to lucid dream.  For example, if you can get used to doing things like checking your watch to make sure that the time it shows makes sense with how long it’s been since lunch, checking to see if lights work, or looking at a sign twice to make sure it still says the same thing during your everyday life, you’ll start to do it in your dreams as well.  This increases the chance that you’ll notice that something is up – like “hey, my watch says 2pm, but it’s dark out…” – and realize that you’re dreaming.

So how am I gonna relate Pick Up Artists and Lucid Dreaming to Movies?

This is the part where I exclaim “I’m so glad you asked!” even though you probably didn’t.  But here’s the basic idea.

I think the screen is sort of a false disqualifier.  When we sit down to watch a movie, we know from the get go that we’re not looking at anything real.  We don’t feel any need to make judgements about what is real and what isn’t in a movie, because we know that none of it is.  So we relax – that’s what we’re there to do after all, relax and enjoy – and we stop making reality checks.  We drop all of our defenses and open ourselves up to whatever input is shot at us.  We’re not going to actually believe the events on the screen are taking place, but while we’re watching that horror movie, we’ll let all the signals of fear, tension and anxiety right in, so that when that frightening face appears in the window we’re ready to jump out of our seats.  Or we’ll get wrapped up in that love story and accept all of the passion, desire, joy and grief that’s being flashed at us so that when x has to leave y at the end we feel almost as heartbroken as the characters.

It’s that obvious realization that everything is fake that makes us drop our gaurds.  If you look at it from that angle, its no wonder some movies can effect our emotions in such powerful ways.

This is an issue of hypocrisy that has been bothering me for a while now, and I felt in the mood to go ahead and say a little something about it tonight.

There are certain religions out there that I feel are being treated a little unfairly, and they’re not the one’s you probably think I’m going to talk about.

We are far too prone, it seems, to judge any sort of group by it’s worst elements rather than its best.  All skateboarders, for example are tattooed young delinquents who damage property and disrespect the law.  Now to the audience reading this, that’s probably a laughable stereotype, but we know that opinion used to be a popular on and is still held by many.  Most of us would be quick to point out how unfair such an assumption is.  We’d say the same about any racial stereotype as well.

So many of us, however, apply the same prejudices to religions and don’t realize that we’re making the same sort of judgments that we would call unfair.

If someone tries to claim that all Muslims are terrorists, we get all over them.  We claim that it’s an unfair stereotype, that the followers of a legitimate faith can’t be blamed for the actions of a few extremists.  And that’s completely true.

However, we (and I keep saying we because I’m plenty guilty of this myself) turn right around make assumptions like “ah, ‘Buddhist’ huh? She probably does a little yoga, tries to be a vegetarian, knows jack about actual Buddhism and is following a trend more than a faith.”  Or, “Christian?  Okay, so that means he’s an asshole who thinks he’s better than me and will shove his bible down my throat until I choke.”

Somewhere along the line we went and picked which stereotypes are unfair and which are absolutely fine, when of course no stereotype is fair.  No one member of any group, religious or otherwise, should be judged based on the actions of the other members, especially not the actions of the worst examples.

It happens easily.  If three Jehovah’s Witnesses came to your door and smacked you across the face, and you met an fourth… well you’d obviously be apprehensive.  That fourth person, however, has yet to wrong you in anyway.  You know nothing about him in particular.  It’s not fair to assume anything about him, even if several other members of his faith have acted poorly towards you.

Anyway, I can always tell when I hit the point in a post where I’m about to start rambling and repeating myself.  This one’s just about there.  I’ve just had this on my mind a while and felt like vomiting it on to the page for a moment.

Harajuku station.  A stop on the JR East Yamanote Line, and the cultural birthplace of the fashion trend sporting the same name.  On a weekend, especially a Sunday, the area around the station is packed with teens in some of the worlds most extreme outfits.  The wildest styles come together in Harajuku; goth, punk, lotita, cosplay and myriad others meshing together and taking on completely new life independent of the contributing styles.

You take any of the many looks born of Harajuku culture and most people just plain won’t get it.  Reactions range from “aw… kinda weird, but cute,” to “that’s fucked up.”  I’d bet, however, that most of these kids aren’t out there to be understood.  Which of course raises the question, “then why?”

Really, it’s a valid question to ask about pretty much anything we do.  So why?  What inspires a trend like this?  What motivates these kids to go out every weekend and put incredible effort into a look that most people either won’t approve of or won’t take seriously.

There are the obvious answers of course.  They probably just want to fit in, or they feel stifled and want to express themselves, or they’re trying to be artistic, or they just need the extra money that tourists will pay to get a few pictures taken.  Those are legit answers to our “why” question, and I’m sure they all probably play some part, but I think we’re being too shallow.

If you ask me (and you didn’t, but who cares) these kids are dressing up for the same reason that I write.  It’s the same reason that you read books, watch movies, play video games and fanatically follow your favorite athletic team.

It’s the same reason that people buy into conspiracy theories, talk to ghosts, search for alien life and have been watching the same soap opera for twenty years.

It’s a simple lack of satisfaction.

We aren’t satisfied – at least not most of us – with the world as it is.  Our day to day lives simply don’t hold enough interest, enough excitement.  We’re not satisfied with this, so we look for a way to do something about it.

In reality, I’ll never be responsible for the safety of the world.  I’ll never fight for my survival against insurmountable odds.  I’ll never solve a mystery and bring down a crime boss.  And I’ll never pull off a massive heist and rob a bank or casino.

But what I can do is write.  What I can do is create a world, fill it with characters, give them a story and have complete control over all of it.  I can live through them.

I’ll never slay a dragon or an evil wizard, but when I read Tolkien I can lose myself in the world he’s created.

You’ll never be a professional athlete, but you can follow your favorite player or team and watch every one of their games.

Our own lives aren’t good enough.  With the exception of the rockstars among us, the average person spends their life working so that they can make money, so that they can spend money to keep on living.

And we’re just not satisfied with that.  It’s just not good enough.

So we write, and we watch, and we follow, and we play, and we read, and we find hundreds of ways to experience what we can never truly live.

A lot of people might say that that’s a little sad or pathetic.  That we can’t find satisfaction in our day-to-day life so we look for all these ways to “pretend.”  Personally, I think it’s a testament to our humanity.  Imagination is one of the things that sets us apart from other organisms, one of the reasons we’ll never really think of human beings as “animals” no matter what we learn in biology.  We don’t need to be satisfied with our lives, because we have the ability to experience, through one means or another, the things we’ll never truly live.

There’s the people who get lost in it.  There are the one’s who become so addicted to their fantasies that they never leave the chair in front of their computer.  That is sad, because there is plenty to miss out on in our real lives.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not claiming that the real world is some terribly mundane place.  Weekends with friends, nights out with the guys from work, finding a loving partner, rasing a family… these are things to be excited about, and there are many of them.

But the fact that when I want to, I can – at least in some sense if not completely – be or do anything I please, is a beautiful thing.  It’s amazing when you really think about our capability to look beyond our own realities.

These Harajuku kids are doing just that, consciously or not.  The girl with the hard pink hair and spiked gas mask is probably an average high school student during the week.  She goes to school, works hard in class, comes home to dinner with the family and some nights goes out with her friends (and better call if she’s not back by eleven.)

But on the weekend, outside Harajuku station, she’s every bit as edgy and exciting as a character out of some intense cyberpunk comic.

Everyone should be so bold.

I think, maybe, that it’s a dengerous thing to ever be satisfied.  When we stop wanting more… what do we miss out on?  What could have been ours that we’re simply no longer reaching for?  Be careful of satisfaction.

We should always be content… but we should never be satisfied.

So here’s to Harajuku – much more than a fashion trend – a bold response to a lack of satisfaction.