Cover-a-Week #33: "Creepy Doll" by Jonathan Coulton

It's Hallowe'en! Ergo, today's the day for a spooky song:


http://youtu.be/f1hddcJiGZ8

This was such a fun piece to cover! (Jonathan Coulton is an evil genius.)

I was tempted to make Coraline-style button eyes out of construction paper to really get in the spirit of "Creepy Doll," but I realized that I couldn't see very well out of the tiny buttonholes...

Boston

I went to Boston this weekend to visit one of my oldest friends (we've known each other for most of our lives). It was wonderful to experience a different city with someone who knows the lay of the land. Here are some highlights of the weekend...

My trip apparently coincided with a major sporting event, so there were people wearing Boston gear all over the city. Someone decided to clothe the Public Garden's decorative brass ducks:

And this is what looks like a ballroom in the main branch of the Boston Public Library:

It's a stunning space, with wood panelling and frescoes running the entire length of the walls. I could imagine a medieval ball being held here.

This library could give the New York Public Library at Bryant Park a run for its money. It has an interior courtyard that looks like it was airlifted from Renaissance Europe:

I'm reminded of the courtyard of the Frick Museum. I could imagine Juliet leaning on the rail of the balcony on the left, beckoning to Romeo in the garden below. I've never been to Verona, but in my mind, it looks something like this.

Boston is also home to the world's only Curious George store! I didn't know this a few days ago.

This was taken on a bridge over a particularly scenic stretch of the Charles River:

I believe it was the Longfellow Bridge, which was named for the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He was one of the preeminent poets of his day; one of his most famous works, "Paul Revere's Ride," is a classic in the American canon. There is a plaque in his honor, and the poem is engraved on a stretch of the footpath on the bridge. I didn't think to get a photo of it at the time; I was too busy walking backwards reading the poem!

And that was Boston. It's such a quaint place (cobblestone streets! trolleys!) with so much history tucked into the fabric of the city.

Cover-a-Week #32: "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Pt. 1" by The Flaming Lips

Because it was recently Ada Lovelace Day:


http://youtu.be/K0Y8pf009yo

I have a lot of friends from college who were female computer scientists and engineers. I'm very proud of them -- of what they do, what they represent, and the hard work and extraordinary talent I know it took (I was there, after all). They might not be fighting pink robots, but they are, every day, combating the societal forces that created this unequal world. They're "destroying the status quo, because the status is not quo" -- and I love them for it. This one's for you, ladies.

Knights vs. Snail in Medieval England

A whimsical curiosity from the British Library's medieval manuscripts blog (the librarians post some fascinating stuff -- the rest of the blog is definitely worth a peek too):

http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2013/09/knight-v-snail.html

The motif of knights fighting giant snails is apparently quite common in medieval illuminated manuscripts, though nobody knows why, or what it was supposed to have signified. (There's even snail jousting! And monkeys!) Was it all just marginalia? Bored monks -- who were only human, after all -- having a bit of fun with their transcription? Did snails moonlight as agents of Satan when not making nuisances of themselves in the monastery vegetable patches? Even among the eminent scholars at the British Library, nobody knows.

While the world of medieval archivists puzzles over this mystery, the rest of us get some Easter eggs in our manuscripts. Happy Monday, everyone!

Cover-a-Week #31: "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" by Green Day

I used to listen to this song all the time in high school:


http://youtu.be/CDMJUeJTKcM

All I need are some strings in the background...

Also, I just had my seventeenth video (out of thirty-one) hit a hundred (a hundred?) views. I don't know who you are, but thanks for listening! (It's "Somewhere Only We Know" -- in case you were wondering.)

Cover-a-Week #30: "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen

I love this song (cliché but true):

http://youtu.be/1RbR-VORCAo

I'm getting over a cold, so I suppose I'm channeling more Jeff Buckley than Leonard Cohen here...

Statistics, Demographics, Music, Art

Last night, I went to Vienna Teng's concert at the Highline Ballroom with Brett, who was in town this week. Vienna's touring her new album, Aims. Her sound in this record is rather different from her earlier work -- it's louder, more electronic, more contemporary. But it's still the Vienna we all know and love, and it's not the first time she's tried something new (see "Grandmother Song" and "Radio" from her previous album, Inland Territory).

One of the aspects of Vienna the songwriter that I admire is how she incorporates a wonderfully diverse array of experiences, abstract concepts, and places into her work. One never forgets that she's a true renaissance woman -- she just finished up a dual degree in business and environmental science (one of her passions is environmental sustainability), and she was a computer scientist out of Stanford undergrad. Aims's album artwork, for example, is quite inspired -- it's a population density map of Detroit:

http://viennateng.com/album/aims

It makes the demographics/stats/sociology nerd in me really happy. I've always loved maps -- centuries-old ship's maps, star charts, subway maps, hilariously inaccurate classical and medieval maps (like those inspired by Herodotus, for example), Tolkien's maps... (The maps room is probably the coolest underrated exhibit in the Vatican Museums compound.) Maps that convey information beyond mere geography, like this one, are even better.

On the subject of demographics... I can't wait until The Signal and the Noise comes out in paperback! It's another case of excellent concept meets brilliant cover design (the art department at Penguin has turned out some really thoughtful covers these few years; Moonwalking with Einstein and The Painted Boy come to mind):

http://www.us.penguingroup.com/static/pages/features/the_signal_and_the_noise

I get the sense that Vienna must have read some Nate Silver, and not just because she's an intelligent, multi-talented person with a mathematical brain and two advanced degrees. This occurred to me while listening to two particular songs on the Aims album, "In the 99" and "The Hymn of Acxiom." The former includes the phrase "said the signal to the noise" -- while the phrase (or a variation thereof) didn't originate with Nate Silver, Vienna does use the line in a song about social (im)mobility and economic stratification. "The Hymn of Acxiom" was, more obviously, inspired by Acxiom, a marketing/advertising company that compiles databases of personal information. It's actually rather creepy how much it knows about us -- Vienna even said as much when she was introducing the song. (Just a year and a half ago, she'd said in an interview that she was trying to figure out how to merge the worlds of music and sustainability -- I suppose she found it!) Even in her Inland Territory days, one could sense from her music that she was highly aware of, and engaged with, the social context in which she was writing (see "Stray Italian Greyhound," inspired by the 2008 presidential election, and "No Gringo," a commentary on the illegal immigration issue). 

The first step to addressing any issue is understanding it -- which is especially difficult with broad, longterm problems like climate change, food security, infectious diseases, &c. I particularly admire people like Vienna Teng and Nate Silver because they're not necessarily on the front lines, not really within the system or calling the shots, but they've nonetheless found ways to achieve great things in fields that they love and simultaneously contribute to our understanding of how our world works and how we might face the challenges of living in it. (Vienna's taken the approach of having two mostly separate careers, music and sustainability, that inform each other; Nate Silver has found an innovative way to apply his expertise, quantitative analysis, to a largely unrelated field.) Interestingly -- and I'm sure it's no coincidence -- all of these areas deal with multitudes, the masses, the People.

One of the great advantages of civilization, which elevates homo sapiens above non-sentient species, is our ability to consider and attempt to solve problems which affect humanity as a whole, as opposed to merely dealing with issues that affect our genetic kin and the small populations we interact with regularly. We're capable of viewing our species (and indeed, our world) as collectively valuable -- even the pieces we can't see -- and of thinking in the big picture, in the long-term, in lightyears rather than miles and millennia rather than mere decades. We acknowledge that which is greater than the individual, the genetic, even the human, and embrace the possibility that comes with it. (I am one, but I am of the many, and my words, actions, ideas may one day sway the multitudes, whether they know it or not.)