Forgery League

Back in high school, I played around with fractals, after finding a writeup about the Mandelbrot set in a back issue of Scientific American. The article had loads of dazzling colour renderings, the likes of which would grace psychedelic CD covers a few short years later: spidery frost patterns, seahorse-like whorls, lighting licking around tiny replicas of the snowman-shaped set.

All that colour and infinite detail came from a mind-bendingly simple equation, calculated over and over: z_n+1 = z_n² + c. The article provided a snippet of pseudocode, which I compiled in C and ran for days on end on the family PC/AT, pumping the raw results through DeluxePaint to colour them. (Later on I added a pause function so my mum and dad could use the computer again.)

It was a window into a mysterious mathematical world: look at the latest image and pick out an interesting looking bit, work out its co-ordinates, and start up the calculations again, and a day or two later, enjoy the results. There was no end to its detail no matter how much you zoomed in on it, and always with those circles upon circles. Similar but never the same: a fractal.

I hadn’t thought much about the Mandelbrot set until a few days ago, when I happened on a link to the Mandelbulb, a recently-discovered 3-D analogue to the old-school set.

It’s… a little creepy.

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My copy of Christopher Alexander’s The Phenomenon of Life arrived in the mail today (I’ve written here previously about his book A Pattern Language). It’s the first of his four-part opus The Nature of Order, an attempt at a grand theory of architecture and aesthetics.

You might have read Jonah Lehrer’s Boston Globe column about the impact of urban versus “natural” environments on cognition. In a University of Michigan study, participants spent an hour walking through the streets of Ann Arbor, or through U-M’s botanical gardens, before undergoing tests to gauge the effect on their memory and attention. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those who walked through the gardens did better.

Chalk one up for nature, then—or at least for superficial science writing. I’d like to see a lot more exploration and research, to give us a more detailed idea of the effect of different types of urban environments (bustling or empty, immaculate or run-down, a hip, bohemian neighbourhood versus a Fifth Avenue, the financial district, the suburbs) and more natural ones (a park, a formal European or Japanese style garden, a vegetable patch, a swamp, a farm, a mountain, an old-growth forest, a riverside)? How about some brain imaging?

Alexander’s research has been an attempt to build such a picture—to draw out the elements that give one place or thing more life than another. Much of his study boils down to simply presenting a subject with two objects or photos, and asking: which of these makes you feel more alive? Which makes you feel more whole? Which more closely reflects your own inner being? He concludes that there are actual, universal principles that underlie our affinity for places, things and other beings. Erich Fromm (and later E.O. Wilson) called this affinity biophilia; Alexander offers a possible structure for understanding it.

The Phenomenon of Life describes 15 essential qualities that contribute to the integrity and life of a system or structure, largely concerned with how the parts of such a system interrelate and support one another: interlock and ambiguity, strong boundaries, local symmetries—essentially extending and generalizing his work in A Pattern Language.

I’m looking forward to examining the world through this new set of lenses, and applying it to other fields (interestingly, while many architects have understandably been cool to his ideas, a number of enthusiastic computer programmers have found ways to apply them to their practice). Alexander only discusses physical objects, so relating his principles to music, for example, is going to be a fun exercise (for instance, “interlock” has strong parallels with counterpoint, and “levels of scale” applies very naturally to rhythms) and one that may finally inspire me to get back to composing.

Just finished reading Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music by Yuval Taylor and Hugh Barker. It’s an examination of the history of ideas about musical and personal authenticity, from the dawn of blues and country to the rise of disco, punk and sampling. I’m finding the topic completely fascinating - which is perhaps amusing given the name of this site…

I first heard about the book via an interview with Taylor on a public radio show from the States called The Sound of Young America. Since the book came out Taylor and Barker have continued to explore the topic on their blog, also called Faking It.

Some questions that occur to me: how has the idea of authenticity played out in other cultures? Only one chapter really gets beyond North America and the British Isles, and it restricts itself to the intersection of Western music with world music (Buena Vista Social Club, Graceland).

How universal, for example, is the celebration of primitivism - as in punk and other “back to basics” movements in rock - as more “authentic”? I’m thinking especially of an early chapter in Caetano Veloso’s Tropical Truth where he writes:

[B]ossa nova’s revival of samba evolved from a refinement of musical tastes that was influenced by high-quality American songs of the thirties and by the cool jazz of the fifties; by contrast, rock in its essence was a rejection of all sophistication, and continually proves to be so whenever it seeks its own reaffirmation… While rock was simplistic, repudiating the elegance and elaboration of a Porter or a Gershwin, with their symphonic orchestrations, Miles Davis, or Bill Evans, in João Gilberto one was witnessing an almost antithetical impulse, a continuation, rather than a suppression, of musical history… [p. 23]

On the other hand, this sort of elevation of the primitive, the artless, the naïve, is present from at least the Romantics onward - you can see it in the Fauvist painters, and in Picasso’s fascination with African tribal art. All of them yearned for a connection with something primal and natural, and saw evidence of it in art from less “sophisticated” cultures.

There’s also a parallel in the development of Zen aesthetics (I’ve also been reading Andrew Juniper’s book Wabi Sabi recently - see the Wikipedia entry for Wabi sabi for a quick intro to the topic). In a similar reaction to the ultra-refined craft that accompanied the spread of Buddhism from China, Japanese monks strove to cut away all the fussy, meaningless trappings and strike directly to the essence. The arts they cultivated, from calligraphy to pottery to the tea ceremony, were pared down to their essence, and aspired to the artlessness of nature.

Where these parallel lines diverge, perhaps, is in the realm of personality and ego. Where most authenticity-seeking artists in the West seem to strive foremost for self-expression, the Zen practitioners would seek to abandon the self, to focus on nothing but the creation.

In their discussion of Kurt Cobain, Taylor and Barker suggest that the inevitable gap between ideals and real life was what killed him in the end. They don’t offer any way out of this trap, but if there is one, it’s probably close to the Zen approach of abandoning self, ego, and all expectations - both your own and those of the audience.

Lots more thoughts to organize on this topic, but that’s enough for now. I’m off to play Rock Band with my housemates.

(It’s been a whole month since I last posted, and what a month. Lots of things are up in the air, but in general it’s been going well. There are promising job leads, I’ve had time to reorganize the studio at last, and resume work on some projects, both musical and electronic - more about those soon. Meanwhile…)

The other day, while Sean and I were out for a bite to eat, we noticed a store sign across the street proudly announcing “Claremont Confectionery - Smoke and Gifts - Complete Line of Guns & Fishing Tackle” in handsome hand-painted lettering… might have been forty or fifty years old, by the look of it. The building is now a restaurant, but the owners had apparently liked the sign enough to keep it around. It’s not the only such “historic” sign on Queen Street, either.

I like this sort of nod to the past. I’ve heard it criticized as pretentious and empty - like “façadism” in architecture, where the front of a historic building is kept, and attached to a brand new, usually much larger building. You’re appropriating a cultural artifact that has its own layered history, the argument goes, presumably hoping that some of its essence carries over into your new enterprise.

But nah… it’s pretty neat that elements like this are being kept, however superficial they might be. If it’s done with a bit of reverence and respect, they can help connect us with our surroundings, and remind us that we’re all part of this vast stretch of history.

I once designed a logo for a friend, which was eventually made into a sign that hung over her storefront on Queen West. I’d designed logos before, and web sites and business cards, but this felt different - the first time seeing something I’d created become such a visible part of her shop’s public face, physical and permanent.

Well, not that permanent, of course. It’s been gone for years now. Dozens of signs appear on and vanish from that block alone every year, only slightly more permanent than the cards, posters and other ephemera that flutter through it. It’s cool that every once in a while one survives.

(Next: decay, ruins, and aesthetics.)

This here video rocks on so many levels. (There’s a better quality version on The Fame Game site, but I’ve embedded the YouTube version here because it politely waits for you to click on it before starting to download the whole damn thing.)

Without further ado, star beatboxer Beardyman shows you how to prepare the Electro Funk Daddy Superstar break:

(Thanks to my SO at Craphammer for pointing this one out to me.)

Why is this kind of thing so damn satisfying? My guess is that it takes electronic music - virtual and abstracted, but the product of a long process of stylistic and technological evolution in its own right - and adds another layer of depth by grounding it back in the physical world again, using honest-to-goodness real-time physical virtuosity. And to top it off, it’s funny and spontaneous. In a word, it’s masterful.

Really, it’s the human equivalent of the song of the Australian lyrebird (as introduced here by Sir David Attenborough):