The two sides of the brain...one for arts, the other for science, yet as I scientist I always feel that my art side needs some time. I start here to journal these thoughts.
Monday, January 12, 2004
Already in the post 2004 blah. A leap year, so we have to tidy up the world, keep the springs tugged tight. Nobody wants to fall apart and not know which day to plant the crops.
Music and science have fallen to pieces in my mind. I've stopped listening to music, at least seriously for at least a few months now. I have tons of recorded music, records, tapes, compact discs, yet I just look at them with disgust. The sounds are so innocent. Even jazz has fallen out of favor in my head. I still enjoy it, but can't seem to pop on an album and really listen to it. I just have it in my ears and not my head. On my way to work I listen to talk-radio, the guys in the morning chatting about funny stuff. Nothing real, nothing on the news, at least nothing we should worry about. Is news just made for us to know about information that if normally we wouldn't hear about we would not worry. Ignorance is bliss. On my way home I flip through radio stations back and forth, a few classic rock, a few modern rock, and a few in between.
Just listen to a song long enough to despise it. I listen now not for the song but for the recording. Is the recording better, more clear, more distinct. Was the mix done well? Is this a new super audio cd with more clarity, more separation. I probably listen to my car radio more than anything else on a daily basis. Redid my stereo at home, souped up and all nice to look at and listen to, yet I rarely pop a cd in when I am at home. If I do it is a short time and rarely enough time for the stereo to really soak in and become melded.
Science has also gone down the drain. This is because I have no stimulation. No work to keep me excited. No conversations of science. No thrills and chills about new discoveries. Just boring and dull day to day filling of time, like this thing.
I decided to learn the bagpipes a few months ago. Why not? A totally new concept in music for me. I played the trombone as a kid, for years, since 4th grade. Only 9 years old and I was eager to learn. I practiced and practiced and got pretty good and played solid through the end of high school and a bit in college, then gave it up. I picked up drums, at least a drum pad, and had lessons for about 1 1/2 years. It was great, I learned to roll, learned some beats, even picked up a set for a bit. Then I moved and I never kept it up and now I can roll and play a few beats, but it is largely lost. So I need something back, playing music is more enjoyable than listening perhaps.
In one of those moments of it was meant to be, I was looking for drum lessons in Orange County. Figured it would be better to pick back up something I already knew something about. I found a website for a local pipes and drums band. They offered both bagpipes and drum lessons. I thought about it for a while and decided, what the hell, I should learn the bagpipes. It's a challenge, really a big challenge. It's a very hard instrument, one of the most difficult. It's an entire sub-culture of players across the world and instrument makers that still make the instruments from scratch. Solid wood instruments that have been played for hundreds of years. The tradition of the tunes go back for some 500 years. There is even a classical music for just the bagpipe.
So that's where I am learning a new instrument. It's one of the most difficult things I have done in my adult life. It doesn't just come easy. It isn't one of those things you learn how to do and then can do it. It is more like you are shown how it supposed to be done and then you have to practice and build up your fingers for the next year to even come close. Quite a challenge!
I am annoyed by music right now. Nothing seems interesting. Bands are all so young and singing about things I don't find important anymore. The tunes are all the same and nothing is really jumping out at me, making me excited about music. I feel rather nomadic right now, with my job, my life, and my interests. There are things I want to do and perhaps even work up to, but right now things are as they are and I am working towards nothing. I have no goals, no direction, no next step. There was always a next step and when there isn't, I have difficulties accepting my current situation. We work for years in school to do well to move onto the next grade. We work hard to get into college. We work hard in college to get good grades, so we can get a good job or get into graduate school of our choice. We work hard in graduate school to finish faster or write a paper or get money to continue doing more work to get more money....it is a vicious circle.
I find it difficult at times to understand the concepts of academic science. We write papers so that when we are applying for grants, we get a good score and get the grant, which then gives us more money to write more papers and ultimately apply for the grant again. The point in there, somewhere, is that we are doing all of this to further our knowledge of scientific understanding. We ask hard questions and try to answer them and hope that others enjoy the papers we write. In the beginning, though, we get little that drives our ego about these papers. Nobody responds to the fact that I am an author on an interesting paper. It is simply out there. It's like writing this blog, nobody will probably ever read it, except my wife, and so..why should I write it when I already tell her everything I am writing in person. I have looked up the papers I have published to see how many times they have been referenced and usually it is very very few, mostly by other papers coming from the same lab. So...am I actually contributing to science or simply publishing information that will never be thought about by anyone else. The best novel in the world, but nobody has ever read it.
Then we just use the fact that we have written dozens of papers to gain status, perhaps moving up in rank (more pay maybe), or being asked to write a paper for the purpose again that nobody will read it. Do we write papers to gain credibility in our thoughts. We do research and then ask others to verify that the research was worth doing....only after the fact, yet we have already been approved to do the research by a grant that is ultimately reviewed by the same people (usually) that review the paper. It is as if a network of our peers tells us that it is okay to do research and then afterwards tell us again that it was okay that we did the research. What was the point of doing the research, then? I guess in the name research we are trying to answer questions and figure out something that nobody else understands, moving ahead human understanding. We are historians...all of us. We are not studying human history, politic events, wars, famous people, etc., but we are studying natural history. All of biology is simply a means of discovering what is already there. Sure we invent tools that appear on the surface to do something beyond what is natural, but in the end we simply use that tool to understand what is already there. We are not inventors of any sort.
Physicists do the same thing. They invent very sophisticated machines to study particles that already exist. Now the atomic bomb, that was an invention. Harnessing energy that does exist, but not in this state. That was research that lead ultimately to a new device of which nature did not intend. All of the science behind the bomb, though, was simply uncovering the information that was already there, yet was not fully discovered. Chemistry, perhaps the only original science, strives to create compounds that do not normally exist. It is a quest to make something new and unnatural. Chemists, in reality, are those that further the market by creating new drugs that interact in ways that the biologists have figured out. If the biologist had not figured out what was already there, then the chemist would not be very successful....but this is not completely true anymore. Now the chemist can randomly design compounds of all types with no purpose in mind and the biologist must then devise a method for trying to fit these orphan compounds into a useful slot.
So even now I strive to create assays that better can detect what is already there, what was always there, and what nature has always known. It is amazing that we pay so much money to uncover history in better ways. It is like paying someone more and more money to invent a pick or an axe and ultimately design a steam shovel.
I am sad by these thoughts because I ask myself what is the point. It seems like a vicious circular game. Sure we want to help people live better and longer lives....and make our lives simpler and easier, so we simply get fatter and less healthy because our lives are so easy. It is a paradox in fact. Technology works hard to make us more sedate and then medicine has to come in and reverse the pitfalls we have created, that of sloth and a life of liesure. Man is creating his own demise. We make things simple and then tell people to reverse that and go work out. What is working out but recreating a life that we have tossed behind us, one that we have stived to get rid of...one that we have fought hard to despose of, so we can sit around all day and the world comes to us without moving a muscle. Poetic justice in a way...man makes himself sick and then pays to understand how we can trick nature into reversing this sickness.
We would all be healthier if we had less available food, less processed food (less technology), had to work harder for the food, had to work harder to live and still plowed a field or hunted. Instead we devised a way of moving ourselves without applying more than a slight pressure on our foot and have made jobs where we simply stare at a screen from a comfy chair and type all this information to each other without ever having to get up and walk to meet someone else. We have instant messaging now and e-mail that makes it unecessary to really get up and go anywhere, and yet remain in contact with the world.
It really is the ultimate paradox....our own technology will be our own demise.
Things have been both good and bad in my daily life. I constantly fall in love with my wife over and over again, she is just so amazing. I am a lucky man. The bad is in work, although it is sometimes work I quite enjoy, at other times I wonder why I must be a constant nomad across a sea of limited-potential jobs. I look out there at what I find fascinating, but then think about the amount of schooling involved in this direction and have to think what can I do with what I have now.
Music hasn't had much of a place in my head lately. I barely even turn on my stereo. There just isn't anything that is exciting me....everything sounds the same. I started thinking about the structure of songs and how we as a society are constantly reinviting the same sounds...something to do with what we as humans are drawn to and enjoy or find enjoyable. I wonder where rock music will go...perhaps nowhere...maybe it will some day become like classic or jazz or blues and just another music that had its day and then was pushed out of the mainstream. Maybe I am just getting older now and don't feed on music for my life and passions. The words in songs don't have any relevance to me...the teenage angst is a far ago thought and even my 20's have now passed. I am older than most of the musicians that make it to the radio. I am even older than the age at which the classic rock musicians made their best songs. John Lennon was only 30 when the Beatles broke up, so although I love the Beatles music..the thinking of those years that was put into the songs is maybe not even part of my life anymore. It's confusing to say...but I guess we all grow up eventually...we all get stalled in our music interests and suddenly realize that buying a cd isn't realy very important.
I was pleased recently when I got a poll from a local radio station that consisted of the most played songs and whether it was enjoyed by the audience and whether it had been played too much. I voted, but it probably doesn't reflect so much the bands I thought were played or overplayed too much as much as those bands I really enjoy hearing.
When I got my first job after college and was making a great salary...I used to buy at least a half dozen cds every month, sometimes even more. It was a great time for it, so many new bands were bursting on the scene and alternative was at its height. Lots of new music, I was in heaven. Then as I decided to go back to graduate school, this boom of music buying ended. I still bought cds, though, as this was always an interest of me, to keep up in a way. However, the music scene had really died down, the latter half of the 90's was just miserable. I had to delve into other types of music and new scenes which were always there, but I just didn't know much about them. I got into death metal, industrial, the real underbelly of local bands and punk and the bands in the 1980's that were not part of the pop culture. This music also reflected a bit of where I was, tucked away from the public world inside a university, a bit more protected. I even got so sick of the current state of rock music that I jumped head first into the world of jazz. Not the horrible jazz on the radio that was little more than acoustic instruments being played over fusion melodies on cheap casio keyboards, no way. I got into bebop and hard bop and avant garde jazz, the 1940's-1960's. The days when jazz were the top of the music chain. When music heroes were Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach and John Coltrane.
I have a fairly large collection of jazz cds now, mostly the stuff that has been remixed to sound absolutely brilliant. I really like this stuff, even though at times I have to be in the right mood. As a child of rock and bands like the Beatles, it is sometimes hard to listen to bebop and grasp anything about it. It is perhaps too complicated and takes too much concentration to understand. I had played the trombone as a kid and later learned drums, but I never really learned blues or jazz or the concepts of scales in a solo. These were and still are a bit foreign to me. I get the idea of them, but I am not sure I appreciate the brilliance of one player compared to another in the actual notes they play. I like one trumpet player over another based on the tunes they played and the tone in which they played and especially their choice in ensemble, but does one solo stick out over another, not quite yet. It's still a bit of a mystery. I like Eric Dolphy quite a bit and have even read his biography. I think he is really a fascinating figure in jazz, but I don't quite understand his solos or why they are so brilliant. I like Clifford Brown and think he was the greatest of all jazz trumpet players, but I wonder whether this was an opinion I gained from reading views about him more so than the songs he played. I discovered him after Lee Morgan and others that were influenced by Clifford Brown, so it was hard to know the progression directly unless I read about it.
Today as I live through music history it is easier to understand how one band influenced another and I can hear the progression because the timeline is clear, but when it comes to jazz, it is all history. I pick up an album and I really could not place it in a time that would necessarily show the progression of an individual player or an ensemble, it is simply an album. Maybe that is why I strive to collect so much music, to really understand this influence. I haven't yet sat down and in chronilogical order listened to my jazz collection to actually hear the progress and influences. It's interesting to think about, though.
In the science world, well, it is a dark world. My company took quite a hit this week and I am sad about it. I am sad for the state of science and its constant struggle with money. There are so many fascinating ideas out there that we should be researching, but instead all of science research is being thought of as one big company. The business side decides what should be studied and this is then set down and told to the researchers. It is as if academics is just one big company with the bosses a little more vague than a small company. Strange to think about, but probably more true than ever in these lean times. There is no freedom to research...and I think great discoveries will become less and less because our science is dictated to us. Too bad.
I haven't been much in the mood to write a new post, things just a bit too hectic. I did hear something interesting on the news this morning about music, though. A study was done back in 1993 that showed that music, Mozart in particular, as background music during studying for a test helped the individual to retain information and get a better score on an exam. It was more recently shown that fast tempo, major key music was the 'key' to this success, not just classical music. I always felt that songs I knew well, usually oldies classic rock, were helping me study. It reminds me of my years in New Jersey when I would take the Path train from Hoboken into NYC. It was always so noisey, bumpy, crazy, yet I was able to read books along the way. I got so used to it that I was unable to sit quietly and read a book. I always needed background noise or, at least, something that was bothering me that I didn't want to think about, so reading was an escape from that. That latter part is a bit hard to explain, mostly dealing with escapism. So much of our lives is the need to escape our actual life. We watch movies, tv, read books, listen to music, as not only a time filler, but to escape just sitting there bored to death. It's sad in a way, though, because we also grow up with the sense that distraction and faster and faster distractions, short attention span, in other words, are the key to our existence. We grow up a bit stupider than the last generation.
I've always wondered at the great knowledge the writers of the early 1900's had of the world, the ancient world, the artistic world, even the scientific world. They seemed to know references that people today have essentially lost. However, now that I think about it, it could simply be that these references were commonplace for the time, much like pop culture references are to us. These great works of literature, artistic works, etc. were in discussions, in books, in magazines, etc. and were simply well known by most people. I wonder if the average reader knew these references as well as the writer. Maybe. So reading a book from another time simply casts the particular story in a time when references to antiquity and other aspects we now consider upper class knowledge were commonplace.
A short passage today as the thoughts are uncontrolled.
This morning on the radio was discussion of bands or musical arists that are considered by some to be the worst bands ever. There are a number of bands that most of us that enjoy music simply don't get. Blender magazine put out a top 50 worst bands. On the list I have heard are the Doors. Some will sware up and down that the Doors were/are simply amazing and that Jim Morrison was truly the Lizard King. Others say he was simply a drunken bufoon that was out-going enough to have his rants and raves heard by the masses and put on record. Was it poetry or just dribble? I think the Doors were simply a unique band and the reason for their often abused place in people's minds is that they did not have followers, nor did they fit into the sound of the time. The year that released such huge albums as Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper and Are You Experienced? and so many more great albums also included the 1st album by the Doors.
I sometimes wonder, though, whether the band or any band, for that matter, is really artistically a great band or just hype that has perpetuated through history. Often in science there is this exact problem. An idea will be tweaked or distorted from the actual data and inserted into a discussion or introduction. The next person doing research in the same area and believes that this tweaked idea somehow is true also puts this information in their introduction or discussion. Eventually the real data, if there ever was any, that only vaguely supported, if at all, the notion is buried and last and only the perpetuated exaggerated or even false statement is left to forever be written in new papers. I have run into this often in my research and even today can read papers where I know the data does not support an idea, yet the idea is believe by so many, especially the more ignorant general public.
In music it is the same way. Were the Doors really such a huge musical entity that should be considered simply amazing and brilliant or were they simply a ghastly live show that everyone exaggerated about because it was Jim Morrison. Some could say the same for a current band like Marilyn Manson. The act is there, the make-up, the stance, the showmanship, but is the musical talent there, the staying power, any actual words and music that should be perpetuated? Then again, who decides these things? Critics or fans? It, of course, should be the fans, those buying the records, memorizing the lyrics and the song in its original form, note for note.
And how do we judge what music is great and what isn't? I have always wondered this. In science a paper has to be peer reviewed, but in music one band is rarely reviewed by other bands before they go public. If that were the case then maybe all bands would sound similar, maybe not. Although the situation with record labels today reminds me of the location of fast food stores. When one fast food restaurant goes up and it draws a crowd, another one pops up next store or across the street since obviously if there are people for one place, there must be people for another with pretty much the same food. Much like music, record labels are doing the same thing. If one band is popular, why not 20 others that sound exactly the same. This happened with grunge, happened with punk, and is happening now as we speak. The radio playing essentially the same song from each band and this same song sounds like any other song, not particularly unique and mostly the same thing over and over.
So then what makes one band better than another? Is it the band that started the sound that others followed? Yet each time a new band starts they are compared to others...until that fateful day when suddenly new, younger bands release albums and they are compared to the first band and no longer compared to the band before them...then you are considered an influence and thus, you must be great. This has happened a number of times also...the Velvet Underground...barely selling records, always a small audience, yet so many bands followed their sound. I'm not sure what bands these are since I've heard the Velvet Underground and to this day I really can't name a band that sounds like them.
In another case, a band that I adore, Kyuss, came rushing out during the heart of the grunge era. They were quickly compared to other grunge bands, even though they weren't from Seattles, where all good grunge bands apparently must come from...yet do they all sound the same? Maybe. Kyuss sold poorly and never had a big following in their day. Today, though, an entire movement of hundreds of bands believe Kyuss truly created a new genre. And today we have an entire genre, sub-titled stoner rock, but really simply bands that play with real guitars....it is a hark back to classic rock with a slightly heavier edge and more effects pedals. Often called Black Sabbath on acid with Hendrix guitar and a spice of punk, the esthetic more than the sound.
Were Kyuss a briliant band that will remembered forever? I personally love two of their albums and enjoy all 4 of their albums probably more than any music I own. It is simply my taste and perhaps as I have mentioned before a wall full of memories cast in stone forever in these songs. Few today listening to music would even know the name, yet maybe they should? They certainly didn't write lyrics that changed people's lives. They were not poets...they didn't write love songs or even songs that anyone could understand the lyrics. You don't hear them on the radio or in movies or really anywhere, so does that mean they are not a good band? I don't know.
I think everyone is unique in their taste for music and what is considered good or the best or the greatest could simply mean what a majority of people agree upon in a top ten list, those few across the lists that might match, yet on each list there are plenty of others that are loved by the individual and may even sound similar to the more well-known bands on the list, yet are simply ignored by the public..ignored by radio or don't have a video.
Does a band become great because they had the best publicity? Because they are backed by their label and pushed onto the radio stations? Or can they really become great on their own? Word of mouth. How many bands simply play live exactly what their record sounds like? Maybe it is done for a reason. We connect with the song exactly as we first heard it. If the song changes, then all the feelings we had for that song are lost and have to be rebuilt, yet the changed song is only heard once and quickly forgotten. Our memories are good, but not note for note good.
That is all I want to say on this subject for now. I must still think about this issue, it is a tough one. One man's trash is another man's treasure is a good quote to think about when it comes to music. One man can hear music in a dripping faucet, another finds it to be torture. Hmm...
I will continue my musical history later, but for now just put in some inner thoughts. I have been in a weird music mood lately, mostly just listening to the radio, constantly switching stations to try to hear some song I might want to hear. I joggle between a modern rock station and a few classic rock stations. I have noticed something interesting. The classic rock songs sound so much better than I ever remember. I don't know if it is the digital improvements, since I mostly heard these songs previously on old records, or radio improvements, or my car's stereo system. In any case, songs I have heard probably hundreds of times suddenly sound like a new song and I am fascinated all over again. Not true of the modern rock songs, since I probably have only heard them in digital form and for the first time in my car or at home on my stereo.
The modern rock stations play about 10 songs over and over and of these 10 songs that originate from about 5 bands, most of which are now long gone or from albums put out over 10 years ago. Does this say something about the state of music today? There are few good bands, even fewer albums from these bands, and of these only a handful of songs worth playing. Of course, it is not as if the classic rock stations are any better. They have been playing the same 5 songs (at most) from the same artists for the last 20 years or more. Only classic rock has now moved forward in time to include more 70's and 80's songs and even songs from the 90's that come from classic rock artists. The same Led Zeppelin songs, the same Who songs, and the same Boston songs over and over. It can all get a bit annoying. Sure all the radio stations have play lists and they have to play songs that a majority of listeners enjoy, but please please mix it up a bit.
The funny part about the modern rock stations is that they are defining the songs that will one day become the songs played on the classic rock stations. Of course, few of the bands that exist now will ever become classic rock, they just don't fit the sound, if there is one. The even funnier part is that the songs being played on the modern rock stations sound as if they are just weaker versions of the once mightier powers of the rock legends now only played on the classic rock stations. The type of music the masses like has just not changed all that much. Is there anything really new in the guitar band that wasn't already done? It's just a matter of coming up with a new riff. The parody of Spinal Tap and the life of AC/DC just about mimics what rock music has become.
Searching for that new sound is a holy grail that almost never comes. The defining moments of rock are only 3 records....The Beatles "Meet the Beatles," The Sex Pistols "Never Mind the Bullocks," and Nirvana "Nevermind." These are the first, middle, and currently last word in rock. The funny part is they are easily a definition of each other. The Beatles putting out all that was tuneful and exciting about the early days of rock'n'roll. The Sex Pistols finally throwing out the gauntlet and ripping rock out of the dulldrum it had fell in...and Nirvana doing it again by mixing both the punk side of the Pistols with the melody of the Beatles. The question really is what can be the next step? Is there a progression that can even occur or are we stuck in a rut simply to keep reinviting the past. Meet the Beatles came out in 1964, Never Mind the Bullocks in 1977, and Nirvana's Nevermind in 1991. If we consider the fact that Meet the Beatles was really a repackaging of the official first album of the Beatles, Please Please Me, which came out in 1963, then we see that it has taken exactly 14 years for a new cycle to occur. We could hope, then, that in 2005 we will see the next defining moment of rock. Maybe it'll happen.
The modern rock station plays mostly Nirvana, while the Sex Pistols are rarely played their influence in punk bands can be heard repeatedly on the airwaves, and the Beatles, well, classic rock still plays them and the recent Beatles 1 was still one of the biggest selling albums in history. It's amazing.
Switching sides, the science world has had some interesting discoveries lately. A fascinating story of targeting. Red blood cells used to target clots from within and kill them by releasing a toxic drug held on their surface. In other news, work that has been very difficult and looks like has finally made some progress, the discovery of genes associated with angiogenesis, the growth of blood vessels.
A quote to end these thoughts that fits life in general....eventually there is a next generation and they just don't know any better.
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." - Max Planck
