sunny.khemlani.net

Entwined rhymes by MC Paul Barman

skhemlani — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 19:32:26 +0000

MC Paul Barman rhymes and raps like nobody I’ve ever heard. I’ve been listening to him for years now but it was only when I was describing and analyzing some of his work with friends of mine over the weekend that I realized how passionate I am about his music. At once ironic, egotistical, self-deprecating, erudite, and crude, what impresses me most about Barman’s work is his ability to string together beautifully compact rhymes to make profound statements.Here’s an example:

Defining God as aligning a divining rod with your reclining bod. (”Excuse You” from Paullelujah)

Barman experiments heavily with rhymes, meter, and pronunciation, and it wouldn’t be out of line to call him avante garde when it comes to rap. If his allusions and references are any indication, he certainly sees himself as a member of the avante garde: in his songs he’s referenced MF Doom, Jeff Koons, DAS FX, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, John Cage, Noam Chomsky, and the Black Mountain School to name a few iconoclasts. His form of experimentation manifests technically in the actual construction of his rhymes as well as conceptually. Here’s a video of him rhyming to the letters of American Sign Language:

Here’s another video of him rhyming about chess in response to Rza’s Wu Chess challenge:

I have nothing but praise for Barman’s decidedly eclectic work and I think anyone who’s serious about rap should pay close attention to him. Look out for his upcoming album Thought Balloon Mushroom Cloud coming out later this year.

Utility theory and The Clash

skhemlani — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 15:05:24 +0000

Remember that Clash song, “Should I Stay or Should I Go”? For the unintiated, check out a great live performance here. Seems to me that some of the song’s lyrics are an exercise in irrationality:

Should I stay or should I go now?
Should I stay or should I go now?
If I go there will be trouble
An if I stay it will be double
So come on and let me know!

The decision should be pretty obvious here by any utility function — come on Clash, get your asses outta there. But it remains difficult, and I think this is prime evidence to suspect von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theories. Now, I know, I know, you’re probably gonna say that there’s already a wealth of evidence in behavioral economics against utility theory and that prospect theory is more psychologically plausible. But I think economists and psychologists have underestimated the impact of The Clash.

The Bad Plus’ cover of “Flim”

skhemlani — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 02:55:50 +0000

One of my favorite Aphex Twin songs is “Flim”, an ethereal breakbeat exploration with an upbeat, trippy piano melody. In fact, the melody is both whimsical and haunting, which seems contradictory but isn’t. In any event, the Aphex Twin version is enough to satisfy, but as my luck has it, the Bad Plus’ cover of the song is equally as engaging. Check it out:

The Bad Plus capture the mood of the song, only they do it live. What I find most impressive is the drummer, Dave King; King manages to interpret the frenetic simplicity of the breakbeats in the original into something richer, something more — dare I say it — human and flawed. It’s not so important that King misses a beat here and there, because the precision isn’t as central to the cover as it is to the original. The lack of a steady percussive element, and the fact that it’s replaced with drumming that changes over the course of the song, gives the song an organic texture.

Solar by Robert Hodgin

skhemlani — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 22:01:45 +0000

Robert Hodgin has created a gorgeous audio responsive visual technique that he calls Solar. It relies on FFT, pitch, frame, and sample data. It also circumvents automated beat detection in the usual, brute-force way: manual beat analysis. The latter technique may be inelegant, but the end result is absolutely stunning. Take a look:

Hodgin also takes the time to integrate lyrical cues (from Goldfrapp’s “Lovely Head”) into the visualization at various time points. The end result is astonishingly fun to watch. The visuals were created in Processing, demonstrating once again the sheer flexibility of the language. I’ll offer you only the condensed version of my rave of why Processing kicks copious amounts of ass, but needless to say, a programming language based on the need for simplicity, speed, and adaptability is a boon for any contemporary new media artist. And, back to my original point: nice job, Robert Hodgin.

Argumentation and disagreement

skhemlani — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:55:26 +0000

Paul Graham (to nerds: the Paul Graham, the guy who advocated Bayesian spam filtering and the use of Lisp) has recently written an article about how to disagree on the internet. It applies to a lot more than the internet, though, as it offers a primer on argumentation and debate in general. He hails refutation, and in particular, refutation of the central point of an adversary’s argument, as the highest form of disagreement.

On the downside, Graham doesn’t adequately discuss what refutation is, what counts as a refutation, and whether there are grades of refutation. To this latter issue, a logical purist would probably say that a refutation — a proof of invalidity — or counterargument is as good as another. But I imagine psychologists would disagree, and suggest that the strength of an argument, a refutation, and a counterexample are all flexible constructs.

In any event, Graham presents an interesting read and an ambitious decree that, of course, will change nothing in the way individuals disagree with one another, online or off. Still, kudos to him for trying.

Douchebag of the day

skhemlani — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:58:53 +0000

If the allegations are correct in today’s New York Times (and, come on, they are) then some punk kid named Efraim Diveroli is a douchebag. I can’t even make this stuff up. Check it:

…But to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man [Efraim Diveroli] whose vice president was a licensed masseur [David Packouz].

With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces.

The nightly news is turning into a bloopers reel of American democracy.

Daim and contemporary abstraction

skhemlani — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 02:12:18 +0000

As an ardent fan of the modern abstraction that dominated the early part of the 20th century, I’m always a bit intrigued by contemporary adaptations and extensions of the style. The trouble is, very rarely are artists able to produce non-derivative works. There has been some work in computational expressionism and interactivity that I find fascinating, but for the most part artists who dabble in contemporary abstraction don’t live up to Kandinsky’s or Mondrian’s vision of a complex, visuo-linguistic medium.

I’ve been largely intrigued by the work of Daim, though. Daim is a polymath graphic artist who specializes in graffiti-esque art. He seems to meet the constraints of abstraction while touching upon contemporary graphic design issues of semiotics, thereby elaborating on the movement. Here is a wall of his in Wuppertal, Germany:

What’s impressive is not just his attention to detail, his careful chiaroscuro, and his use of layers, but also his direct use of symbols (e.g., the arrow) that signify directionality (but nothing more) for the viewer. It’s a style of his that’s taken nearly a decade to perfect, but one that extends abstraction in a very interesting way.