When one thinks of video games, surely one thinks of a particular company. That would be Nintendo. If you were to continue on, you'd probably list Capcom, Konami, Sega, Data East, Sunsoft, Rare, Grasshopper, Activison, Acclaim, and the list goes on....
....oh! and you might think of another company. First Square, then Squaresoft, and finally Square-Enix.
Unless you bought a Nintendo 64 or a Gamecube, you'd be hard pressed to NOT find a multitude of Square games.
The NES was given Final Fantasy I, II, & III among other Square products.
The SNES got Final Fantasy IV, V, & VI, Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, Super Mario RPG, etc.
The PSX got an assload of Square with Final Fantasy VII, VIII, IX, & Tactics, Chrono Cross, Vagrant Story, Xenogears, Bushido Blade 1 & 2, Parasite Eve 1 & 2, Brave Fencer Musashi, plus various Final Fantasy/Chrono Trigger remakes/re-releases, Japanese wrestling games, and other products.
The PS2 continued the assloading with Final Fantasy X & XII, Dragon Quest 8, Kingdom Hearts 1 & 2, Grandia 3, Radiata Stories, Musashi: Samurai Legend, Drakengard 1 & 2, and the list goes on.
But something happened. Once considered progressive and infallible, Square merged with Enix in 2003 to become an assumed megapower.....but that hasn't really happened.
Once content to not revisit past franchise installments, Squuenix has continually re-released old games on new formats often with little enhancements. See the many Final Fantasy re-releases on the PS1, Gameboy Advance, and DS.
Considering the lasting popularity of Final Fantasy 7, fanboys happily rioted when Squeenix announced the "Compilation of Final Fantasy 7", games that would revisit and explore the Final Fantasy 7 universe and characters. Fanboys rioted again when these games sucked. There were two cellphone games (ugh!), a 3rd person shooter starring Vincent, a CGI film Advent Children (that forgot to render a plot along with its flashy visuals), and an animated OVA. A prequel FF7 game was released for the PSP following Zack Fair recently, and it's considered to be the sole good product to come of this compilation, but it's also considered too little too late. Nearly four years ago, Squeenix showed off a PS3 tech demo of Final Fantasy 7. The hype flood began until Squeenix killed it off announcing that the tech demo was JUST a tech demo and that FF7 was not being remade. Since a remake of FF7 is the only thing anyone has ever been asking for, kinda lame one must settle for shooters and cellphone games that "expand" the FF7 universe.
And now I find myself waiting..........waiting for Squeenix who seems yet to have caught up with the next (now current) generation of hardware with exciting, must have, Square-quality games.
There's Final Fantasy XIII & Final Fantasy Versus XIII which we've seen videos of for the past couple years. These are set for release God knows when, maybe next year.
If you're a WiiBoy, you only have Final Fantasy Crystal Chonicles: My Life as a King, a downloadable Wiiware title, and Dragon Quest: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors, a point click/action RPG lite type thing. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers looks interesting with its steampunk style and the main character being a renowned superhero, but Squeeinx has promoted little of the title. Thought to have been quietly canned, Squeenix confirmed it was still in development, then went right back to showing nothing.
Outside of FF13, the Wii will be home to Squeenix's biggest game if this gen, the recently announced Dragon Quest X. Toasty!
If you're an HD boy, you don't have much to play with on the PS3 or 360. The Last Remnant and Infinite Undiscovery were RPGs meant to satisfy Western gamers, but has shown to have satisfied few.
Star Ocean, the two Final Fantasy XII games, Kingdom Hearts III, and whatever else in the HD-pipeline could and hopefully does change this.
As of now, your home for quality Squeenix is the Nintendo DS. There's the 3D remakes of Final Fantasy III and IV, re-release of Chrono Trigger that can be seen as an "ultimate edition" of sorts, Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings (a sequel to FF12), The World Ends With You, etc.
I've yet to dive into the FF3 & 4 remakes, but their receptions were positive. With portable gaming possible becoming the most convenient form of gaming for me, I may jump in pretty soon.
On the other hand, I have played the re-released Chrono Trigger and The World Ends With You.
Chrono Trigger didn't get the 3D upgrade, which sucks, but the 2D sprites appear sharper than before. There are many options for this game, providing the best of the SNES & PSX Triggers with the added comfort of the DS's dual screens. There's no enforced touching, which is a plus. Two new dungeons along with a new final boss have been added. These additions provide new backstory to further flesh out the events transpiring between Trigger and Chrono Cross. Though not 3D, it's the best Chrono Trigger release and worth having.
The biggest [positive] Squeenix surprise is a new IP, The World Ends With You (aka "It's A Wonderful World" in Japan). With an interesting artstyle and premise as while as excellent execution, it's the Squeenix game I didn't know I wanted.
Add to that, the DS is also getting Dragon Quest IX this year.
But that's handheld. Where's our console Squeeinx?! Since 2006 we've been promised much. Near three years later, they're delivered little. Hell, hardly any! We're still seeing non-in-game videos of the Final Fantasy XIIIs. Still nothing on Kingdom Hearts III. The Chrono announcement proved not to be a third game nor a 3D remake. Dragon Quest IX was "lost"to the DS. Dragon Quest X has been announced for Wii, but that's still a couple years off at best.
One might as well venture outside and have a social life, maybe even tan, as we wait for Squeenix.
Lastly, anyone have any opinions on Final Fantasy IX? I keep reading that its the best of the PS1 FFs, but also the most overlooked (along with Chrono Cross) as it was released just before the PS2. It's going for $15 new on amazon and I'm probably going to buy it at some point.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Quantitative Analysts of the World Unite!
Just wanted to post a quick link to an article by Bill James, a statistician, advocating that quantitative analysts effectively go on strike by refusing to allow the BCS to incorporate their computer rankings in its algorithm. Among other things, he points out that the BCS limits the computer rankings' inputs to such an absurd degree that it's impossible for them to make unique and meaningful contributions.
More interesting is James' assertion that participation in the BCS actually hurts the reputation of the field of quantitative analysis, since rightly or wrongly, when the BCS malfunctions, the knee-jerk reaction from practically everybody is to blame the computers. He says statisticians should refuse to continue playing whipping boy for the BCS. The BCS can hang itself with its own rope.
More interesting is James' assertion that participation in the BCS actually hurts the reputation of the field of quantitative analysis, since rightly or wrongly, when the BCS malfunctions, the knee-jerk reaction from practically everybody is to blame the computers. He says statisticians should refuse to continue playing whipping boy for the BCS. The BCS can hang itself with its own rope.
Aesthetic Experiences for Artists
Sean,
I think you put your finger on something interesting where you suggest that it's easier to admire a work of art when one's own fingerprints are not the only ones on it. I think you're right that Vinnie might have an easier time admiring Less Than Jake's output as a result of its collaborative nature. But more on that in a second.
Likewise, I accept your correction regarding the chronological perspectives (short versus long term) from which Vinnie and Joey, respectively, were speaking. As I was wrapping up my last post in this thread, I think I had come to the conclusion that, really, that distinction was less important than the one between Joey speaking as an artist and Vinnie speaking as a promoter, but I never got around to saying so.
But let me go back to what you said about it being easier to appreciate other people's work than one's own. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if it's even possible to have an aesthetic experience of one's own work. I mean, I can talk about liking or not liking "Beer Goggles" using the same language that Joey Cape can. But if I say that I don't like it, do I mean the same thing that he means when he says that he doesn't like it? I don't think so.
It seems to me that as a listener, when determining whether I like a song, I determine how much awe it puts me in. (Of course, I'm using that word to cover more ground than it ordinarily would). But as a writer of music, if I ask myself whether I like a song I've written, I determine how much pride it induces in me. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but it seems to me that there is a qualitative difference between pride and awe; that is, a difference other than whether the emotion is self- or other-directed.
To put it in particulars, to the extent that I admire a poem that I've written, I don't think that my emotions are so much different from those of a contractor who admires the building he's just erected, or of a mechanic who admires his handiwork in repairing a broken engine. With respect to my own work, I can't get past the pre-aesthetic level: the level of craftsmanship. My emotions when reading my own work bear no resemblance to my emotions when I read Tennyson's "Ulysses" or Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium"; those works elicit a tingle in me that my own do not, and I don't think it's only because they are much, much better than mine.
I think you put your finger on something interesting where you suggest that it's easier to admire a work of art when one's own fingerprints are not the only ones on it. I think you're right that Vinnie might have an easier time admiring Less Than Jake's output as a result of its collaborative nature. But more on that in a second.
Likewise, I accept your correction regarding the chronological perspectives (short versus long term) from which Vinnie and Joey, respectively, were speaking. As I was wrapping up my last post in this thread, I think I had come to the conclusion that, really, that distinction was less important than the one between Joey speaking as an artist and Vinnie speaking as a promoter, but I never got around to saying so.
But let me go back to what you said about it being easier to appreciate other people's work than one's own. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if it's even possible to have an aesthetic experience of one's own work. I mean, I can talk about liking or not liking "Beer Goggles" using the same language that Joey Cape can. But if I say that I don't like it, do I mean the same thing that he means when he says that he doesn't like it? I don't think so.
It seems to me that as a listener, when determining whether I like a song, I determine how much awe it puts me in. (Of course, I'm using that word to cover more ground than it ordinarily would). But as a writer of music, if I ask myself whether I like a song I've written, I determine how much pride it induces in me. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but it seems to me that there is a qualitative difference between pride and awe; that is, a difference other than whether the emotion is self- or other-directed.
To put it in particulars, to the extent that I admire a poem that I've written, I don't think that my emotions are so much different from those of a contractor who admires the building he's just erected, or of a mechanic who admires his handiwork in repairing a broken engine. With respect to my own work, I can't get past the pre-aesthetic level: the level of craftsmanship. My emotions when reading my own work bear no resemblance to my emotions when I read Tennyson's "Ulysses" or Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium"; those works elicit a tingle in me that my own do not, and I don't think it's only because they are much, much better than mine.
¶
aesthetics,
Joey Cape,
music,
poetry
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Concerning the differences between Joey Cape and Vinnie
Ryan, you made an excellent point about comparing Joey and Vinnie, but I don't know that it's quite apples to oranges in the way you suggested. Going back to Joey's interview, after mentioning the time and work spent writing songs, then the recording phase, and then on to producing, Joey finishes by saying, "By the time a record comes out, I usually, really honestly never want to hear it again." Considering Vinnie already had a cut of the album, I don't think they're quite so far apart in terms of perspective.
I think the reason it might be wrong to compare them has more to do with their respective roles. Vinnie writes lyrics and plays percussion, but most of the composition duties fall to Chris and Roger, and I'm not really certain how involved Vinnie is with the recording and production. On the other hand, Joey Cape does all the writing, most of the composing, and is very involved in all phases. I didn't take into account that Joey was responsible for a much higher percentage of his music. While I still don't care for how much Vinnie loved the new album, I don't think it's nearly as tasteless when we consider that he could legitimately be enjoying the work of his bandmates rather than his own contributions.
I also agree that there must have been some stage in the process where Joey Cape appreciated his work, and I think I would have pressed him a bit further on that issue if I were conducting the interview. Just as not being satisfied helps you grow, there still must be some degree to which you appreciate your work, because how else can you distinguish between bad, good and better? I think I would have asked him to look back at all his experiences through all stages of writing songs, and if he could, pick the one song that gave him the most momentary satisfaction with his efforts as an artist. Or more simply, which song was he most proud of at any given moment?
I think the reason it might be wrong to compare them has more to do with their respective roles. Vinnie writes lyrics and plays percussion, but most of the composition duties fall to Chris and Roger, and I'm not really certain how involved Vinnie is with the recording and production. On the other hand, Joey Cape does all the writing, most of the composing, and is very involved in all phases. I didn't take into account that Joey was responsible for a much higher percentage of his music. While I still don't care for how much Vinnie loved the new album, I don't think it's nearly as tasteless when we consider that he could legitimately be enjoying the work of his bandmates rather than his own contributions.
I also agree that there must have been some stage in the process where Joey Cape appreciated his work, and I think I would have pressed him a bit further on that issue if I were conducting the interview. Just as not being satisfied helps you grow, there still must be some degree to which you appreciate your work, because how else can you distinguish between bad, good and better? I think I would have asked him to look back at all his experiences through all stages of writing songs, and if he could, pick the one song that gave him the most momentary satisfaction with his efforts as an artist. Or more simply, which song was he most proud of at any given moment?
Against Playoffs
The college football postseason winds down Thursday night when the Oklahoma Sooners and the Florida Gators finally meet in Miami. For a lot of people, the BCS national champion is going to be crowned illegitimately, because the system used to select the champion does not involve a playoff. The debate over a playoff in college football has raged for a long time, but as far as I'm aware, advocates of the system presently in place have always played defense in these debates. They say that the present system preserves the importance of the regular season; that it preserves the unique pageantry of the bowl season; they say that college football already has a playoff, and it's called the regular season.
What they don't say is that a playoff is a less efficient and less accurate method of determining the national champion than the present system is. Maybe they should.
The idea of crowning a champion is that we want to recognize the "best" team. Underlying this definitional matter is the assumption that each year, there is one, unique, "best" team. The hard part is identifying the best team. All systems will identify the wrong team as the best occasionally; the goal should be to maximize the percentage of seasons when the correct team is identified.
A playoff has its good points in this analysis. By giving more than two teams a chance to play for the title, a playoff increases the probability that the best team will make it into the mix. But there's a countervailing concern. The more teams allowed into the playoff, the more rounds it will require; the more rounds it requires, the more likely it is that the best team will lose.
That's right, because sometimes deciding it on the field means the better team loses. According to Coleman's rankings, which minimize the number of losses by a higher ranked team to a lower ranked team, the better team lost to the worse team no less than 9.22% of the time during the 2008 regular season. It's likely though that these so-called ranking violations occur more often than strictly mathematically necessary. Massey's consensus rankings—which are more in line with popular opinion than Coleman's are—place the percentage at 18.4%.
Note also that those numbers are across all games; where the opponents are more evenly matched, as they would be in a playoff scenario, the numbers would be significantly higher. So let's say that among the top 32 teams, the weaker beats the stronger with a probability of 32%. In each round, as the competition gets stiffer, the probability that the weaker beats the stronger increases by 4%, so that in the final round, the weaker team has a 48% chance of beating the stronger team. Obviously these assumptions are simplified (especially since they ignore the effects of seeding), but they seem reasonable enough.
So now let's estimate the probability that the best team will be included among those invited to the playoffs. Here, I'll fly a little more by the seat of my pants and say that the probability that the best team is among the top 2 is 50%; the probability that it's among the top 4 is 75%; the probability that it's among the top 8 is 87.5%; and so on.
So to calculate the probability that the best team is crowned champion, we multiply the probability that it has been invited by the probability that it wins all of its games once it's there. Let's see:
2 team playoff (current system):
P = 0.5 x 0.52 = 26%
4 team playoff:
P = 0.75 * 0.56 * 0.52 = 21.84%
8 team playoff:
P = 0.875 * 0.6 * 0.56 * 0.52 = 15.29%
16 team playoff:
P = 0.9375 * 0.64 * 0.6 * 0.56 * 0.52 = 10.48%
32 team playoff
P = 0.96875 * 0.68 * 0.64 * 0.6 * 0.56 * 0.52 = 7.37%
Based on my numbers, which clearly are open to debate and criticism, the current system gets it right more often than any of the extended playoff scenarios, crowning the correct champion a whopping 26% of the time. (One of the interesting things revealed by this exercise is just how pathetic even the best system is in the face of a problem this intractable).
A rejoinder from the pro-playoff camp at this point might be that the point of a playoff is not to crown the "best" team, but rather to crown the team that has accomplished something great, the team that is the last one standing atop a pile of defeated contenders. A playoff is a well-honed instrument for ensuring that this is the result: at the conclusion, one entrant is undefeated, and the rest have one loss. No arguments.
But that structure is wholly artificial. We all know that it's a mathematical impossibility to answer the question "Who's the best?" by answering the question "Who beat whom?" The regular season is full of contradictions and vicious circles that have to be wrestled into submission, not casually cast aside. A playoff is a machine that is not engineered to crown the best team; it is a machine engineered to put an end to arguments, without regard for whether the champion it produces is the best team or not.
What I will say for it, though, is that it would make for quite a spectacle.
What they don't say is that a playoff is a less efficient and less accurate method of determining the national champion than the present system is. Maybe they should.
The idea of crowning a champion is that we want to recognize the "best" team. Underlying this definitional matter is the assumption that each year, there is one, unique, "best" team. The hard part is identifying the best team. All systems will identify the wrong team as the best occasionally; the goal should be to maximize the percentage of seasons when the correct team is identified.
A playoff has its good points in this analysis. By giving more than two teams a chance to play for the title, a playoff increases the probability that the best team will make it into the mix. But there's a countervailing concern. The more teams allowed into the playoff, the more rounds it will require; the more rounds it requires, the more likely it is that the best team will lose.
That's right, because sometimes deciding it on the field means the better team loses. According to Coleman's rankings, which minimize the number of losses by a higher ranked team to a lower ranked team, the better team lost to the worse team no less than 9.22% of the time during the 2008 regular season. It's likely though that these so-called ranking violations occur more often than strictly mathematically necessary. Massey's consensus rankings—which are more in line with popular opinion than Coleman's are—place the percentage at 18.4%.
Note also that those numbers are across all games; where the opponents are more evenly matched, as they would be in a playoff scenario, the numbers would be significantly higher. So let's say that among the top 32 teams, the weaker beats the stronger with a probability of 32%. In each round, as the competition gets stiffer, the probability that the weaker beats the stronger increases by 4%, so that in the final round, the weaker team has a 48% chance of beating the stronger team. Obviously these assumptions are simplified (especially since they ignore the effects of seeding), but they seem reasonable enough.
So now let's estimate the probability that the best team will be included among those invited to the playoffs. Here, I'll fly a little more by the seat of my pants and say that the probability that the best team is among the top 2 is 50%; the probability that it's among the top 4 is 75%; the probability that it's among the top 8 is 87.5%; and so on.
So to calculate the probability that the best team is crowned champion, we multiply the probability that it has been invited by the probability that it wins all of its games once it's there. Let's see:
2 team playoff (current system):
P = 0.5 x 0.52 = 26%
4 team playoff:
P = 0.75 * 0.56 * 0.52 = 21.84%
8 team playoff:
P = 0.875 * 0.6 * 0.56 * 0.52 = 15.29%
16 team playoff:
P = 0.9375 * 0.64 * 0.6 * 0.56 * 0.52 = 10.48%
32 team playoff
P = 0.96875 * 0.68 * 0.64 * 0.6 * 0.56 * 0.52 = 7.37%
Based on my numbers, which clearly are open to debate and criticism, the current system gets it right more often than any of the extended playoff scenarios, crowning the correct champion a whopping 26% of the time. (One of the interesting things revealed by this exercise is just how pathetic even the best system is in the face of a problem this intractable).
A rejoinder from the pro-playoff camp at this point might be that the point of a playoff is not to crown the "best" team, but rather to crown the team that has accomplished something great, the team that is the last one standing atop a pile of defeated contenders. A playoff is a well-honed instrument for ensuring that this is the result: at the conclusion, one entrant is undefeated, and the rest have one loss. No arguments.
But that structure is wholly artificial. We all know that it's a mathematical impossibility to answer the question "Who's the best?" by answering the question "Who beat whom?" The regular season is full of contradictions and vicious circles that have to be wrestled into submission, not casually cast aside. A playoff is a machine that is not engineered to crown the best team; it is a machine engineered to put an end to arguments, without regard for whether the champion it produces is the best team or not.
What I will say for it, though, is that it would make for quite a spectacle.
Monday, January 5, 2009
The Vinnie Paradox
Sean,
Speaking from my own experience writing music, poetry, and prose, I can say that if I work at it for a sufficient amount of time, I can come up with something that I love. On the other hand, virtually without fail, if I come back to that same work a year or two later, its flaws are obvious to me, and I'm embarrassed to have ever loved it, and I hate it a little for not being as good as I remember.
I think something like that could account in part for the difference between Joey Cape's opinion of his work, and Vinnie's of his own. Joey Cape was clearly taking a long-haul perspective, whereas Vinnie was talking about an album that was still fresh and new to him. The two are apples and oranges.
At the same time though, I won't fault you for feeling that Vinnie's extollation of the new album was a turnoff. Vinnie is in a tough spot, because he has always taken such an enthusiastic approach to promoting LTJ and all the bands on Fueled by Ramen. Back when the albums were unmitigated triumphs (like Losing Streak and Hello Rockview), his enthusiasm felt warranted. But as the quality of the music has steadily declined, Vinnie's rhetoric hasn't changed a bit, and as a result, he's started to sound shrill and hucksterish. When he says the new album is great, I have a hard time thinking anything except, "That's what you said last time."
The problem for Vinnie has got to be that he's taken it upon himself to be the band's biggest promoter, and that fact clouds his view of what he's accomplished (or failed to accomplish) as an artist. I don't think we'll ever hear him say that in retrospect Anthem and In With the Out Crowd disappoint him artistically, because he spilled so much ink telling us how great they were during their promotional phases. He may be so far gone at this point that he could never even imagine the albums being anything less than superlative, the dual roles of artist and promoter having become so intertwined. And even if he can bring himself to think it, he certainly can't say it, because it would look like he had been lying to the fans in the first instance. Still, I think that if we could retroactively split those two roles, and somehow talk to just Vinnie the artist (not Vinnie the promoter), he'd sound a lot more like Joey Cape does in the interview you quoted.
I'll add that I think there's something really embarrassing and gauche and tasteless about writing to one's fans that you've been driving around Gainesville listening to your new album and LOVING IT. It's always been sort of an awkward question—do bands listen to their own albums recreationally?—and the affirmative response is just so ridiculously and needlessly narcissistic that I really feel like a person ought to be too embarrassed to admit it even if it's true. To me, it would be like saying, "I love how I sound on voicemail."
But really that's all about comportment; it's not about how the artist feels, but rather what he says about how he feels. So I'll respond directly to the question you posed: should an artist love what he makes?
I do think that, at least in the short run, an artist ought to love the things he creates. In the long run, it's important to see where you could have done better, and inevitably that probably means falling out of love with your old work. But it's the pleasure of putting the pieces together and making them work, even when they don't perfectly instantiate your vision, that keeps you coming back to the drawing board. Of course you have to work and improve, but nobody works to improve skills whose exercise doesn't bring pleasure in the interim. Again, I don't think this view puts me at odds with what Joey Cape was saying; I just think that in responding to the question he was asked, he had the long view firmly in mind.
Speaking from my own experience writing music, poetry, and prose, I can say that if I work at it for a sufficient amount of time, I can come up with something that I love. On the other hand, virtually without fail, if I come back to that same work a year or two later, its flaws are obvious to me, and I'm embarrassed to have ever loved it, and I hate it a little for not being as good as I remember.
I think something like that could account in part for the difference between Joey Cape's opinion of his work, and Vinnie's of his own. Joey Cape was clearly taking a long-haul perspective, whereas Vinnie was talking about an album that was still fresh and new to him. The two are apples and oranges.
At the same time though, I won't fault you for feeling that Vinnie's extollation of the new album was a turnoff. Vinnie is in a tough spot, because he has always taken such an enthusiastic approach to promoting LTJ and all the bands on Fueled by Ramen. Back when the albums were unmitigated triumphs (like Losing Streak and Hello Rockview), his enthusiasm felt warranted. But as the quality of the music has steadily declined, Vinnie's rhetoric hasn't changed a bit, and as a result, he's started to sound shrill and hucksterish. When he says the new album is great, I have a hard time thinking anything except, "That's what you said last time."
The problem for Vinnie has got to be that he's taken it upon himself to be the band's biggest promoter, and that fact clouds his view of what he's accomplished (or failed to accomplish) as an artist. I don't think we'll ever hear him say that in retrospect Anthem and In With the Out Crowd disappoint him artistically, because he spilled so much ink telling us how great they were during their promotional phases. He may be so far gone at this point that he could never even imagine the albums being anything less than superlative, the dual roles of artist and promoter having become so intertwined. And even if he can bring himself to think it, he certainly can't say it, because it would look like he had been lying to the fans in the first instance. Still, I think that if we could retroactively split those two roles, and somehow talk to just Vinnie the artist (not Vinnie the promoter), he'd sound a lot more like Joey Cape does in the interview you quoted.
I'll add that I think there's something really embarrassing and gauche and tasteless about writing to one's fans that you've been driving around Gainesville listening to your new album and LOVING IT. It's always been sort of an awkward question—do bands listen to their own albums recreationally?—and the affirmative response is just so ridiculously and needlessly narcissistic that I really feel like a person ought to be too embarrassed to admit it even if it's true. To me, it would be like saying, "I love how I sound on voicemail."
But really that's all about comportment; it's not about how the artist feels, but rather what he says about how he feels. So I'll respond directly to the question you posed: should an artist love what he makes?
I do think that, at least in the short run, an artist ought to love the things he creates. In the long run, it's important to see where you could have done better, and inevitably that probably means falling out of love with your old work. But it's the pleasure of putting the pieces together and making them work, even when they don't perfectly instantiate your vision, that keeps you coming back to the drawing board. Of course you have to work and improve, but nobody works to improve skills whose exercise doesn't bring pleasure in the interim. Again, I don't think this view puts me at odds with what Joey Cape was saying; I just think that in responding to the question he was asked, he had the long view firmly in mind.
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Joey Cape vs. Vinnie Fiorello: The Potential Flaw of Appreciating One’s Own Creative Endeavors
A few years ago, I was reading about Less Than Jake’s upcoming album on their website. Songwriter/percussionist Vinnie Fiorello had posted an update detailing how excited he was about the album. He said he had a copy of it and constantly listened to it in his car, driving around Gainesville, drumming on his steering wheel. In short, he thought the album rocked. He LOVED it (he might have actually used ‘love’ in all caps to describe it). While I didn’t really delve into it at the time, it definitely struck me as odd, and more than anything, I counterintuitively became more worried about the quality of the album. If I like a band’s music, and they say their new stuff is great, why should I be worried?
I got the album when it came out, and I didn’t really like it at all. It generally lacked all of the elements that I liked about their music. Rather than the quirky songs with fanatical bass lines and creative vocal harmony, I found the new album to be little more than fairly unoriginal rock music. That was the last album I bought from them, and that fact has much less to do with how much I liked that album than what Vinnie said about it. I think most everyone with a critical ear would admit that even their favorite artist/band has songs they don’t care for, and enough of those songs can make an album, but a bad album isn’t enough by itself to shake my faith that a band can still put out good songs. Vinnie’s glowing endorsement was a sign to me that the band was clearly going in a direction that I opposed.
All talk of directions aside, my question is this: Is it a flaw for a musician to like their music? Before I’d even heard the new LTJ album, Vinnie’s affinity for it raised red flags in my mind. Perhaps I had subconsciously surmised the direction the band was taking from the progression of their previous records, but I don’t think that’s what triggered in my head. Rather, I suspect that on some level, I simply could not identify with being a satisfied creator. My experience with writing songs is far too limited to draw on, but if I can take anything from my other efforts (writing, for instance), it’s that I’m never satisfied with anything, sometimes to a paralyzing extent. I can’t help but be aware that everything I’ve done could be better, potentially much better, and that makes it very difficult to even say something is good enough, much less great or exceptional.
Then there’s this excellent interview with my favorite artist, Joey Cape, in which he discusses exactly this in response to being asked to pick his favorite song that he’s written:
I got the album when it came out, and I didn’t really like it at all. It generally lacked all of the elements that I liked about their music. Rather than the quirky songs with fanatical bass lines and creative vocal harmony, I found the new album to be little more than fairly unoriginal rock music. That was the last album I bought from them, and that fact has much less to do with how much I liked that album than what Vinnie said about it. I think most everyone with a critical ear would admit that even their favorite artist/band has songs they don’t care for, and enough of those songs can make an album, but a bad album isn’t enough by itself to shake my faith that a band can still put out good songs. Vinnie’s glowing endorsement was a sign to me that the band was clearly going in a direction that I opposed.
All talk of directions aside, my question is this: Is it a flaw for a musician to like their music? Before I’d even heard the new LTJ album, Vinnie’s affinity for it raised red flags in my mind. Perhaps I had subconsciously surmised the direction the band was taking from the progression of their previous records, but I don’t think that’s what triggered in my head. Rather, I suspect that on some level, I simply could not identify with being a satisfied creator. My experience with writing songs is far too limited to draw on, but if I can take anything from my other efforts (writing, for instance), it’s that I’m never satisfied with anything, sometimes to a paralyzing extent. I can’t help but be aware that everything I’ve done could be better, potentially much better, and that makes it very difficult to even say something is good enough, much less great or exceptional.
Then there’s this excellent interview with my favorite artist, Joey Cape, in which he discusses exactly this in response to being asked to pick his favorite song that he’s written:
[I don’t like my songs. I think it might be an actual flaw when people that write music tell you they love the music they write. I don't really understand that. Most songwriters that I meet are always trying to perfect their art or trying to be better at what they do, so they're just basically not all that satisfied with anything they do, and I think that's what makes most artists at least capable or good at what they do.]If I was leaning towards that opinion before, hearing it from someone I respect more as an artist than anyone has only strengthened that stance. I don’t mean to say that it’s impossible for a good artist to appreciate his work, but I figure it’s likely that any artist that does has reached his peak, and that peak is probably far lower than I’d like it to be.
Tongue in Ear?
This past New Year’s Eve was a two-year anniversary for me, so I was working on a post about the [somewhat weird and not that hot] romantic/sexual practice of placing one’s tongue in someone’s ear, and how it’s still largely considered sexy whereas similar acts such as tonguing eyeballs have failed to achieve such good publicity. Having experienced the act, I did not find it to be sexy in the least. I’m not going to say there was nothing sexy about it, because there’s certainly something sexy about a girl liking you that much in that way, but I fail to understand how anybody is so interested in what is essentially a wet willie without the middle man.
Then I had my first phone conversation with a friend I met on OkCupid. I mentioned I was working on a post for this group blog and she asked what I was writing, and upon hearing my topic, related to me that she orgasms just from guys whispering in her ear.
WITHDRAWN…
Then I had my first phone conversation with a friend I met on OkCupid. I mentioned I was working on a post for this group blog and she asked what I was writing, and upon hearing my topic, related to me that she orgasms just from guys whispering in her ear.
WITHDRAWN…
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Book Review: The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen
I just finished reading Andrew Keen's 2007 book, The Cult of the Amateur. The thesis of the book is that Web 2.0 technologies (think blogging, wikis, social networking, and file sharing) are undermining the cultural and economic institutions that, up until now, have made the world work. In particular, Keen's great phobia is a world where expert opinions are inaudible over the throng of amateurs shouting at each other.
To illustrate that point, Keen tells the story of Dr. William Connolley, a global warming researcher who was editing Wikipedia's "Global Warming" entry. Connolley's Wikipedia permissions were limited when another user (not a global warming researcher) complained that Connolley was "strongly pushing his POV with systematic removal of any POV which does not match his own" (p. 43). Keen's view is that in the ensuing appeals process, the Wikipedia staff should have considered Connolley's expertise and rescinded their order limiting his permissions.
I guess there's something bothersome about the story. It's true that I find myself sympathizing with Connolley. If I wanted facts about global warming, I would trust what he told me more than what the complaining user told me; if the complaining user tried to interrupt his explication in polite conversation, I'd tell the user to shut it, because I'm trying to learn something. But at the end of the day, I just can't get all that riled up about this story. There are plenty of things that Wikipedia is good for, like looking up Bob Dylan's discography, or the average annual rainfall in Rio de Janeiro, or a diagram of a generic drilling rig. But I don't know anybody who thinks that Wikipedia is the place to go to learn the unassailable facts underlying a scientific controversy. Frankly, it probably won't even give you enough background to meaningfully describe the parameters of the debate. In short, the entry on Global Warming is not what Wikipedia is good for. Of course, maybe I'm overestimating people's ability to rationally rate the reliability of information on the web.
Keen makes similar arguments about blogs usurping the role of the traditional media. Again, maybe I'm behind the times, but I don't read blogs to get the news, I read them to get opinions. If a fact sounds fishy, I try to corroborate it at a reputable news site.
In other chapters, Keen takes on the future of music (there will be so much selection that you'll never be able to find anything you like), the future of the book (in which there really is only one text), as well as privacy concerns and the evils of Internet addiction. The book is at its best though when it begins to hint at a sort of malaise infecting the concept of authorship itself. Information technology has progressed to the point where every presently existing art form can be encoded in binary. And with disk space to store the ones and zeros, processors to manipulate them, and networks on which to share them, (what we now call) plagiarism runs rampant, and amateurish remixes and mashups abound.
When the barriers to entry were higher, when it was harder to get eyeballs on your work, only the most talented had any real incentive to try and get "published." Now though the Internet is an echo chamber of mediocrity: a lot of teenagers on Xanga posting their poetry, trolling other teenager's poems, and writing, "I like that - come read one of mine, and leave a comment!" The talented all of a sudden have less to aspire to, because it is harder to see that there is anything fine and glorious and noble left in the work of art.
But all those hard drives and processors and networks make this possible too, and I don't know that I would trade it. It's just that the paradigm of authorship is shifting, and I'm nostalgic for it before it's even all gone.
Anyway, The Cult of the Amateur is one of the more poorly reviewed books that I've ever looked at on Amazon. Maybe you can imagine that there would be a natural bias among online reviewers, but it really does have problems. There are good ideas in there, but they are somewhat inartfully expressed, and I found myself doing most of the mental heavy lifting when it came to organizing and analyzing Keen's ideas. The chapters on privacy and Internet addiction felt sort of tacked-on. Also, the tone in some places is extra curmudgeonly. I can't really recommend it very highly unless the topics interest you on their own; the writing alone will not be enough to hold your interest.
To illustrate that point, Keen tells the story of Dr. William Connolley, a global warming researcher who was editing Wikipedia's "Global Warming" entry. Connolley's Wikipedia permissions were limited when another user (not a global warming researcher) complained that Connolley was "strongly pushing his POV with systematic removal of any POV which does not match his own" (p. 43). Keen's view is that in the ensuing appeals process, the Wikipedia staff should have considered Connolley's expertise and rescinded their order limiting his permissions.
I guess there's something bothersome about the story. It's true that I find myself sympathizing with Connolley. If I wanted facts about global warming, I would trust what he told me more than what the complaining user told me; if the complaining user tried to interrupt his explication in polite conversation, I'd tell the user to shut it, because I'm trying to learn something. But at the end of the day, I just can't get all that riled up about this story. There are plenty of things that Wikipedia is good for, like looking up Bob Dylan's discography, or the average annual rainfall in Rio de Janeiro, or a diagram of a generic drilling rig. But I don't know anybody who thinks that Wikipedia is the place to go to learn the unassailable facts underlying a scientific controversy. Frankly, it probably won't even give you enough background to meaningfully describe the parameters of the debate. In short, the entry on Global Warming is not what Wikipedia is good for. Of course, maybe I'm overestimating people's ability to rationally rate the reliability of information on the web.
Keen makes similar arguments about blogs usurping the role of the traditional media. Again, maybe I'm behind the times, but I don't read blogs to get the news, I read them to get opinions. If a fact sounds fishy, I try to corroborate it at a reputable news site.
In other chapters, Keen takes on the future of music (there will be so much selection that you'll never be able to find anything you like), the future of the book (in which there really is only one text), as well as privacy concerns and the evils of Internet addiction. The book is at its best though when it begins to hint at a sort of malaise infecting the concept of authorship itself. Information technology has progressed to the point where every presently existing art form can be encoded in binary. And with disk space to store the ones and zeros, processors to manipulate them, and networks on which to share them, (what we now call) plagiarism runs rampant, and amateurish remixes and mashups abound.
When the barriers to entry were higher, when it was harder to get eyeballs on your work, only the most talented had any real incentive to try and get "published." Now though the Internet is an echo chamber of mediocrity: a lot of teenagers on Xanga posting their poetry, trolling other teenager's poems, and writing, "I like that - come read one of mine, and leave a comment!" The talented all of a sudden have less to aspire to, because it is harder to see that there is anything fine and glorious and noble left in the work of art.
But all those hard drives and processors and networks make this possible too, and I don't know that I would trade it. It's just that the paradigm of authorship is shifting, and I'm nostalgic for it before it's even all gone.
Anyway, The Cult of the Amateur is one of the more poorly reviewed books that I've ever looked at on Amazon. Maybe you can imagine that there would be a natural bias among online reviewers, but it really does have problems. There are good ideas in there, but they are somewhat inartfully expressed, and I found myself doing most of the mental heavy lifting when it came to organizing and analyzing Keen's ideas. The chapters on privacy and Internet addiction felt sort of tacked-on. Also, the tone in some places is extra curmudgeonly. I can't really recommend it very highly unless the topics interest you on their own; the writing alone will not be enough to hold your interest.
Friday, January 2, 2009
Beta design
I've posted a beta design for this site at http://otherthaneven.blogspot.com. It's still pretty close to the Blogger default, but with a little bit more visual interest, I hope. If you both like it, I'll import the skin to this site.
¶
beta,
web design
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