canned dragons
The new anti-toxicity feature on Bluesky that allows a user to detach their original post from a quote post is ingenious. I can’t believe no one has shipped anything like this until now. In hindsight, it seems obvious.
I loved the “Pack Lunch, Drop Kids Off, Skate,Work” short photo essay from the NYT (gift article). The women who were either returning to skateboarding or picking it up afresh in their 40s were inspiring. Having a mini ramp in my my house was always a secret dream of mine (and one that will never come to fruition).
While I think the journaling addition to HEY calendar looks very inviting, the idea of storing something as important as a journal in a proprietary format that will be inaccessible if you cancel your account, the company drops the feature or goes out of business, seems like a very bad idea.
Back To Worship
I missed Divine Liturgy last week because I had to bid goodbye to my wife’s aunt, who just moved up North. Maybe it was the longing for worship I had missed that made this piece by Zac Settle about discovering Orthodoxy so appealing to me, but there was a lot that resonated.
The chanters might be intoning away during Orthros while the priest is hearing confessions while the altar staff are replacing candles or tidying up while the greeters are setting baked goods in the hands and laps of visitors, setting chairs aright in an imperceptibly off-kilter row, or setting candles in front of the iconostasis, the row of icon panels between the altar and the sanctuary. The choir is upstairs rehearsing, an elderly parishioner wheels in or a child in a chair is wheeled in, and a half-dozen candle-bearers trickle down for the half-hour or so before Divine Liturgy begins. There’s whispering in confession, lines read at the altar, chanting to the right, chattering among those in the nave, and greetings among the worshippers who are standing about. Somewhere, someone has lighted that incense. A father brings his young children to kiss the icons and tell them their stories. Nobody seems to be on their phone, but that can’t be true.
The sense of awe that this is something truly different upon discovering an Orthodox service brought back some nostalgic feelings for me. It’s all there, though, still, week after week. It doesn’t change. When the world feels like it’s going a million miles an hour, and everything is hailed as being “unprecedented,” something that feels like rhythm is welcome.
The bumper sticker that Settle imagines, “Honk 40 times if you’re Orthodox,” tickles the funny bone because, as they say, “if you know, you know.”
Noble Oak - Eveningstar
Recently, a friend on Mastodon asked followers about their first cassette purchase. I had no trouble recollecting getting Starship’s Knee Deep In The Hoopla when I was in the fourth grade as my introduction to the world of music on tape. I wore that tape out playing the all-too radio friendly songs like “We Built This City” (some might say the song was pandering — the shoutout to all the cities hasn’t aged well). Following that popular anthem in the track sequencing was “Sara,” a ballad at a time when that was almost a separate genre within a genre. Rock bands used to touring arenas had their slower, more romantic songs interspersed with the more upbeat anthemic fare on their records.
The rocker vs. the ballad dynamic was perhaps never more obvious than on hair metal albums. The rockers were dangerous, lecherous and debauched while the ballads were tender and romantic. The ballads were always fewer in number, but reminded fans — especially those of the female variety — that even the baddest boys (the ones with most Aqua Net and makeup) had a softer side.
Noble Oak’s “Eveningstar” is a balled in the rock tradition. Like Starship’s “Sara,” the song has an sophisticated urban sheen with its immaculate mix of keyboards and guitars. The lyrics flirt with unabashedly straightforward metaphors around love and loss. Lines like “the memory of you becomes a shining light, when you were in my life,” would have sounded perfect in the earnest and overdramatic eighties.
Noble Oak - Eveningstar (YouTube)
One Actress and a Melon
The creative forces behind Ginger Root have a concept for a show featuring one actress (it’s all they had the budget for). Their Japanese protagonist changes looks and activities often to keep people of the world glued to their sets. In the end, it seems, what suits her best is rockin’ out.
The song “There Was A Time” itself has a breezy 70s feel, with a healthy dose of tropicalia in the mix and a smidgen of psychedelia. There is a warped cassette haze on the whole track that wouldn’t sound out of place in the heyday of chillwave a little over a decade ago (this could be due to the Toro Y Moi influence). Ginger Root’s mastermind, Cameron Lew, describes the project as “aggressive elevator soul.” “There Was A Time” is a fun listen and matches the rest of the currently available tracks from the upcoming Shinbangumi in style.
Ginger Root - “There Was A Time” (YouTube)
Shinbangumi by Ginger Root will be released on 9/13/2024 by Ghostly International. The cloud vinyl version includes a pop-out paper building!
Your Analyst Was A Placekicker For The Falcons
I woke up at 4 AM a few days ago, hungry from fasting. I decided to check out what the internet had in store for me and ended up perusing through videos on YouTube. My early morning restlessness led me to a very strange video from singer Caroline Polachek and I followed that rabbit trail to an interview with her.
As with other times I’ve seen her interviewed, Polachek is lively, engaging and articulate. One part that struck me, though, is when she talks about the magic of crowds at her shows singing in unison. She understands the positive power that a group of people singing together brings. However, when she tries to come up with an instance of people coming together to sing in a way that expresses transcendence, the best analogy a creative and intelligent woman like Polachek can come up with is… a sporting event!
This seems strange to me, since at least once a week, I go and sing with others in praises to God in church. I think it’s another oddity of living in the post-Christian West that people now have a kind of ignorance of religious traditions. Apparently, I’m not the only one who finds this to be odd or concerning. Even atheists are lamenting the disconnection from religious roots. Derek Thompson writes for The Atlantic about the decline in church attendance.
That relationship with organized religion provided many things at once: not only a connection to the divine, but also a historical narrative of identity, a set of rituals to organize the week and year, and a community of families. PRRI found that the most important feature of religion for the dwindling number of Americans who still attend services a few times a year included “experiencing religion in a community” and “instilling values in their children.”
Despite his own unbelief, Thompson recognizes the value that a church community provides. Justin Brierly is a Christian who is capturing the stories of those who realize how much our culture is indebted to Christian values in his documentary podcast The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. Shocking as it may seem, prominent new atheist, Richard Dawkins, is now calling himself “a cultural Christian” (though this may be due to his xenophobia more than anything else).
Recently, author and professor Gary Shteyngart wrote a much-discussed and sometimes hilarious piece for The Atlantic about his time aboard a Royal Caribbean cruise. He was interviewed about the piece by Hanna Rosin. His experience of the fervor of the cruise aficionados sounded a familiar tone to what others have been describing about filling in the gap left by declines in religious observance.
So, on this ship, what I was seeing was people desperately trying to belong to some kind of idea. And I feel like the cruising life because these people are so obsessed with the cruises that they wear these—half the people or more were wearing T-shirts somehow commemorating this voyage on the first day of the cruise. So I think I really offended a religion. I insulted not just a strange hobby that people engage in, but a way of life.
And I think that’s the future. Trying to understand America today is to try to understand people desperately grasping for something in the absence of more traditional ideas of what it means to be an American, right? And this is one strange manifestation of that. But it was, for me, an ultimately unfulfilling one.
There are, of course, more direct ways that people are trying to replace traditional religious practices with secular ones. There are churches for humanists and just plain atheists under the premise that if you just take out the supernatural stuff, church services could be kind of cool. My hunch is that trying to create something based on nothing will not work, in the long run.
I go back and forth about how I like to listen to music and on what media. I’ve been doing this for 30 years, so I probably won’t be settled anytime soon. Wes Davis writes for The Verge about vinyl outselling CDs for the second year in a row.
But it’s not hard to see why record sales are trouncing optical discs. CD players aren’t nearly as ubiquitous as they used to be. New cars mostly don’t ship with them anymore, and neither do computers. Plus, it’s impossible to impress anyone with your collection of jewel cases. But invite either your cool audiophile friend over or their nostalgic parent, and either is probably equally likely to pore over the tattered spines of your collection of garage sale scores, special-edition records, and concert trophies — and engage with you when you say things like, “Vinyl is cool, but it’s not actually better than a CD.”
Hey, I’ve got my CDs (most of which don’t come in jewel cases anymore) in some pretty cool storage bins in my Ikea Kallax shelves. It makes for a nice-looking display. Although, I won’t be hanging those things on my wall like my vinyl.
I’m going to assume that part of the reason vinyl is outselling CDs is that increasingly, music is released to stream and download and physically on vinyl with no CD version. I frequently see this on Bandcamp. The big exception to this trend is Japan, where CD sales continue to outpace vinyl.
CJ Chilvers has a post about why he is buying more CDs now. He gives a bit of background on how this came about, which involves recordings he loves being changed on the streaming services. Since your two real choices for music on physical media are vinyl and compact discs (sorry cassette lovers), he goes into why he favors the latter.
CDs have the best sound quality. At least they have the best potential for sound quality in physical media. They don’t always use that potential. But, for the music I love most, CDs often have the same or greater dynamic range compared to vinyl, without the degradation over time that vinyl experiences (or distortion, clicks, and pops).
I tend to think the longevity of my vinyl collecting is one of the reasons I now gravitate towards CDs. As I have discovered over the last 30 years, vinyl just doesn’t age that well. For this reason, I’ve always been wary of buying used LPs. I would rather not buy an LP that’s already been worn out by someone else. I’ve also gotten to a point where I don’t want to wear out my music media myself, either. The cool factor that vinyl has comes with some serious drawbacks in terms of durability.
In all, Chilvers lists 14 reasons to underscore the rationale for his decision. The one that struck me most was that last item on the list.
It’s fun. I could eliminate all other reasons from this list and I would still be OK with buying CDs just for the fun of it. It’s why I would never discourage anyone getting into an all-vinyl hobby either. Since I’ve started buying CDs again, I’ve listened to way more music than I have since my 20s. I’ve also learned about good audio equipment: what it is, where to find it cheap, and how to restore it. I’ve found the best-mastered versions of favorite albums in bargain bins, while lower-quality “remasters” sell for 10 times as much. I’ve met new people, listened to new artists, and had new sonic experiences. What more could you ask for in a hobby?
I have only recently resigned myself to the fact that remasters are not always better. This is helpful to know when I get the urge to replace a perfectly good CD from decades ago with a fresh new remaster. Not only that, but a dozen vinyl variants of an album are starting to come across as desperate money grabs. The artist Billie Eilish talked about this in a recent interview focused on sustainability.
Eilish: We live in this day and age where, for some reason, it’s very important to some artists to make all sorts of different vinyl and packaging … which ups the sales and ups the numbers and gets them more money and gets them more…
Some trends, such as saturating the market with variants of the same album, portend hitting peak vinyl, but people have been predicting that for years, so who knows?