Month: June 2013

Music, the Paradox of Choice, and Love

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2013-06-05 Twilight_soundtrackI have to start this post with a frank admission of guilt: I really like the Twilight soundtrack. Something about the music, the constant rain, the muted color palette, and the absence of concern for any of the characters made watching the film a relaxing, mesmerizing experience. I may even have watched it more than once. (I’m honestly not sure.)

One of the best things about the soundtrack is that in addition to really strong tracks from bands I already love (like Muse, Iron & Wine, and Paramore), it also introduced me to some great tracks from bands that I had never heard of: “Full Moon” by The Black Ghosts, “Spotlight” by Mutemath, and “Eyes on Fire” by Blue Foundation.

There are few things I love in life more than the feeling that comes over me when I hear something for the first time and think “Wow, I could really fall in love with this song.” My relationship with music is a lot like my relationship with people. It’s always fun to meet new people and exciting to learn the things you have in common, but it takes time for a true, strong friendship to build. At any given moment my roster of favorite tunes is filled with songs from both ends of the spectrum: those  that I love because I just discovered them and those that I love because they’ve been with me for years and I’ve sung along enough to memorize all the lyrics.

There aren’t that many bands, albums, and songs at the older end of the spectrum, however, because a lot can go wrong along the way. A lot of the times the lyrics–which I often don’t catch the first time around–end up letting me down. Other times, the song ends up being an unusual standout from an otherwise mediocre band. Of all the songs that I’m thrilled to hear the first time, only a small number make the “must have” list and get locally stored on my iPhone.

Other than the intrinsic excitement of hearing a good new song, there are two more things to anticipate. The first is sharing new finds with my friends. The second is the prospect of more where that came from. One good song is like a nugget of gold in a prospector’s pan: I immediately want to know if there’s more gold in them hills.

2013-06-05 Moby PlaySo, over the years, I’ve got my music-prospecting strategy fairly well-refined. I use a combination of Pandora, NPR, TV commercials (if they’re good enough for Moby they’re good enough for me), soundtracks and sometimes even the radio to generate new leads. Then I get on Spotify and start listening. I’ve discovered lots of my current favorite music this way, from DJ Shadow to Lecrae to Ludovico Einaudi. And yet, despite a steady stream of new music, I still find myself often thinking “I have no idea what to listen to right now.”

I keep trying out new schemes to organize the music that I’ve discovered, and I keep failing. I’ve tried making playlists many, many times but I invariably start strong with a handful of tracks and before I’ve got a single album’s worth the initial focus of the playlist (a particular emotion? an associated activity? a genre?) has grown so muddy that I find they’re all starting to run together and I can’t tell if a song should go in or not. I’ve also tried the opposite approach: throwing a bunch of music into a playlist, and then tossing back out the songs that I don’t like as I listen. But, since I’m usually listening while I work, I end up being bothered enough by bad songs to notice, but not enough to remember to toss them out. So far, nothing works.

I’m starting to think that despite the huge access to great new music, in some ways the days of CD collections were actually better. I don’t think I ever had more than 2 or 3 dozen CDs in high school in the late 1990s, but that meant that choosing what to listen to was easy: I could flip through my entire collection (mentally or physically) in just a few seconds. I had the tracklisting of every album memorized, and I could skip any tracks I didn’t like without even thinking about it. My music collection felt like my hometown. I didn’t exactly choose it in the sense that most of my first CDs were hand-me-downs and even the one’s I bought were based on extremely limited knowledge, but they were mine. I knew them inside and out. Now? I feel like I don’t have a musical home anymore. Even in my own collection I’m a foreign tourist visiting a stranger’s soundscape.

Part of this is what economists call the Paradox of Choice. The original theory (that more customer choices lead to fewer sales)  has started to fall out of favor, but the basic realization that deliberation is costly is certainly true. I don’t think it’s just that I used to have fewer music, but I think it’s that–because I had less to listen to–what I listened to I learned very well. It became a part of me, so choosing was second-nature. Now, with so much to choose from, my exposure to any given song or album or band is fleeting and glancing. It’s not just that I have more to go through when I’m deciding what to listen to, it’s that I have to think a lot harder about every single option because I don’t really know them that well. The result is that even tracks that are unbelievable good when I think to listen to them fall through the cracks. My wife put on Regina Spektor’s “All the Rowboats” in the car the other day, and I was stunned that I had forgotten such an awesome song was in my collection. It feels like getting lost in my own home.

I started writing this piece as a way of asking for help and advice about how to better track my music. And I’m still curious to hear what folks have to say, but maybe I’ve already identified the real problem. I’ve been trying to find an easy way to build my musical mansion. Maybe that’s impossible. Maybe another quaint economics axiom applies: there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Maybe if relationships with music are like relationships with people, then trying to a satisfying and easy relationship is like asking for a full-length abridgment. Maybe easy outside options are the enemy of all relationships that require investment to grow.

There’s got to be a better take away then just “things were better back in the day”, and I think there is. Trying to pretend that it’s still 1997 and I’m still living at home might help me recapture some of the lost sense of connection with my tunes, but even if it did, dialing back 1/2 my life doesn’t sound like a good candidate for Plan A. After all, the whole problem is that it’s the weight of incredible musical potential that’s dragging me down. Can’t let go of the weight without letting go of the promise. So, I guess I’ll just start dedicating more time and effort to listening to all this great music, giving it some of the respect it deserves, and wait with stubborn patience to build back the bridges of nostalgia, but bigger, brighter, and more solid than mere memories.

Beware the Healthy Eating Internet Education!

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2013-06-05 Close Enough Food Pyramid

Hilarious article on the perils of trying to eat healthy in a world saturated with (mis)information. Favorite line?

Some people say it’s a little fringe, but you are committed to live a healthy lifestyle. “Okay,” you say, “let’s do this shit,” as you fry your caribou steak and seal liver in rendered whale blubber. You lose some weight which is good, but it costs $147.99 a pound for frozen seal liver out of the back of an unmarked van at the Canadian border.

There’s plenty more, though. Read the whole thing!

To All Heartbroken Game of Thrones Fans: Neener, neener.

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2013-06-04 George R. R. Martin
Everyone knows this man is a grumpy, time-traveling hobbit, right?

[Here there be spoilers!]

Allow me to regale you with a tale of my relationship to George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. Once upon a time, long, long before most of you who watch Game of Thrones had ever heard of it, I read the first book. I was immediately impressed by Martin’s craft. The man can write, and I would never question that. But what he chose to write really rubbed me the wrong way. Specifically: I felt like the books were engineered to manufacture a sense of realism by deliberately doing horrible things to likable characters. When Ned Stark got executed at the end of the book I set it down, and I’ve never been tempted to pick up another one.

So, when all the Red Wedding stuff started breaking out over Twitter, it took me a few days enough to bother to investigate. When I eventually read a description of what had happened, I felt incredibly vindicated. And it’s not just that Martin killed off more likable characters, but it’s why he does it.

The Mirror has a couple of quotes from Martin that confirmed all my suspicions about his authorial decisions. See if you can spot the problem: 

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The Real Story on Mormon Missions

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2013-05-07 Book of Mormon Musical

Betsy VanDenBerghe has an excellent piece on Real Clear Religion giving the real scoop on what Mormon missions are like. VanDenBergh explains that she’s mostly writing in response to the Book of Mormon Musical:

Pardon my complicating what’s proved an entertaining, laughable, lucrative stereotype, but a Mormon mission fundamentally consists of a whopping dose of reality, humility, and soul searching.

Citing movies (which I didn’t find compelling) and her own experiences (which I did, because they mirrored that of myself and my friends and family), VanDenBerghe proceeds to dismantle three major myths about Mormon missions:

  1. It’s all about converting.
  2. It’s an insular bubble protected from the world.
  3. Missions foster intolerance.

I thought the piece was informative and accurate. I’m not going to say that everything about Mormon missions is perfect because I don’t believe that to be the case. Although some of the things that initially irritated me about missions came to make sense over the course of my own mission (served in Hungary between 2000 and 2002), there were definitely changes that I would have liked to have seen and–in fact–there have been important and constructive changes since I went home. I’m sure there are still many ways that the Church could improve, but in terms of just getting a good understanding of what missions are honestly like, this is a good piece to start with, especially if you’re not a Mormon but are interested in our religion and culture.

Why I Blog

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2013-06-03 Duty Calls
I use this image a lot because it has so much truth in it.

There’s an old rule: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” I think we could retrofit that for bloggers as: “If you don’t have anything new to blog, don’t blog at all.” The trouble, of course, is that in that event most of us would stop blogging.

For example, I’ve wanted to write a post about the myth of evil for quite some time. What I mean by this is the belief–reaffirmed by media in the wake of every horrific crime–that evil acts are committed by evil people, and that evil people are a different kind of entity than good people. In other words, it’s the opposite of what Sirius Black tells Harry Potter: “The world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters. We’ve all got both light and dark inside us.” Contrast that with, for example, the hopeless attempt to use DNA to find out what caused the Sandyhook shooting. That is the 21st century equivalent of looking for demonic possession: an attempt to reaffirm the myth that those who do great evil are essentially different from the rest of us.

When I started writing the post, however, I decided to do a quick Google search first. Turns out, there’s already a book: “The Myth of Evil explores a contradiction at the heart of modern thought about what it is to be human: the belief that a human being cannot commit a radically evil act purely for its own sake and the evidence that radically evil acts are committed not by inhuman monsters, but by human beings.” That took the wind right out of my sails. I don’t know if the book actually makes the same specific arguments I was going to make, but I would feel like a fraud for not reading it first to find out. And if I have to read a book before I write every single blog post…

This isn’t an isolated incident. When I was 10 years old I wrote a piano song of my very own, and then heard the melody played on the radio a couple of days later. Once I spent an entire semester working on a complex systems project that turned out to be just recreating the basics of reinforcement learning. I’d never heard the term before, and neither had most of the folks in the class, but when I gave my final presentation one of the other students pointed out that there was already a textbook. In grad school I spent a lot of time thinking about economic equality and came up with the idea that it had to be measured in terms of opportunity to make any sense. Turns out, that’s part of what got Amartya Sen his Nobel Prize. Everyone’s heard the idea that there are no new stories, but there are new facts and new theories. I just keep thinking up old ones instead. So: why blog? 

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