Rdio has been great for me to help discover new music. I like to follow “similar artists” starting with artists I know I like. The latest I’ve found is an artist named YahZarah, who used to be Erykah Badu’s backup singer. Her latest album, The Battle of the Purple Saint James, is great. It reminds me of Janelle Monae’s last album that was my favourite album a couple of years ago. It feels very much inspired by 70’s R&B, Stevie Wonder, and Chaka Kahn. Real instruments, diverse stylistically and lots of soul.

Here’s my two favourite cuts of the album: The Lie..

.. and Why Dontcha Call Me No More.

I have finished watching Season 1 of the David Simon show, Treme. Simon is the creator and a writer of my favourite show ever, The Wire. His current show, Treme, does not disappoint either. It follows the city of New Orleans, post Hurricane Katrina.

I love Simon’s style. He writes in a way that captures the deeply intertwined and dependent nature of real life, coming at a topic from the angle of many different characters, while also varying the “level” of the perspective. If he were to write a television show about baseball, he would spend an entire season each, from the perspective of good players, crappy players, managers, and general managers. As he would move on in the seasons, he would keep characters from the previous seasons so that we can see how the decisions at the higher levels affects the lower levels, and vice versa. It becomes this layered gigantic puzzle, where there are a hundred characters all intertwined.

Somehow Simon has a way of demonstrating how messed up the world is without exercising any viewer’s adrenaline. You do not get the standard, “something good happens”, then “something bad happens”, then “something good happens”, etc.. in a non-stop cycle of ridiculousness. It does not feel as though you are being “had” as a viewer, by taking the easy route to establishing a story line, through layers of coincidence. When you watch his shows at first, the things you expect to happen next usually don’t, because we’ve been trained to expect rare coincidences in television. If there is a 1 in 100 chance of something happening in real life, it is sure to happen on most television shows. The nemesis will walk in that door at the worst possible time. On a David Simon show, it won’t happen 99 times out of 100. It’s refreshing. Life is certainly complex and layered enough to cut out the coincidences, although it takes more effort and time, and is more common to books than television.

On Treme, music plays an important part, as it does in New Orleans. It’s full of live performances (and like the Wire, zero background music). The musicians are largely not actors, but real musicians playing themselves in this show. So let’s see, a David Simon show, that focuses on music.. Safe to say, it’s currently my favourite show.

Here’s one of the real artists featured on the show, Professor Longhair.

(I found this post from my old blog years ago, and I liked it enough that I thought I’d bring it over here. The old blog was getting spammed too much, so I had to take it down).

Check out this youtube vid:

Non-traditional art, sure. But to me, it just goes to show that essentially any two art forms are computationally equivalent. You can always find an algorithm to encode one inside another. They are all equally complex.

When I was younger, my father used to say that dirty jokes were inherently inferior to non-dirty jokes, and that it was easy to come up with dirty jokes.. and that they were not as complex. I would say that this was not true. There is a really easy algorithm to convert any arbitrary non-dirty joke into a dirty joke. Just add the word ‘poop’ to the end (or whatever comes to mind). Then the new joke is dirty and just as complex as the previous joke. How do I know it is just as complex? Because all the information from the original non-dirty joke is in the dirty joke. If you have the dirty joke and my algorithm, you can even uniquely recover the non-dirty joke.. so it must be as complex.

I think the same can be essentially found between any two art forms. Probably you can even turn staples and bulletin boards into an art form just as complex as any other. As a drummer, I’m always a little bit sensitive to hearing that ‘it is easy to play drums’.. Well, maybe it is easy to play badly, but that does not mean it is easy to play well. You can work on it to the extent that it is just as complex as playing any other instrument. It’s not as if they reach a point where they stop getting better.

For example, let’s take a piano piece.. the piano has rhythm, dynamics and melody. Certainly, the drums has rhythm and dynamics. Melody? Maybe.. but let’s ignore that for now. There are only 88 keys on a piano. It is really easy to encode that information in the drum part. We will map every 16th note or the piano piece to a 1/2 note of the drum piece. Play the first 16th note with the proper rhythm and dynamics of the piano piece, then the next 7 16th notes with a rhythm uniquely determines by the melody of that note (note 2^7 = 128 »88). There! We’ve encoded the original piano piece into a drum piece. It is just as complex as the piano piece! Again, all the information from the piano piece is in there. I can uniquely recover the piano piece from the drum piece. This may not be the ‘most pleasant sounding’ encoding, but you get the idea.

(Aside: for any mathies out there, this type of argument may remind you of the proof that natural and rational numbers have the same cardinality… even though the rationals have another ‘dimension’ to them, it does not mean they are more “complex”. Or a Turing Machine with a 1-dimensional scratch tape is computationally equivalent to one with a k-dimensional tape..)

Because of this, I try not to say that one art form is inferior to others. It might be that the famous people who do this art form suck, or that I haven’t taken the time to appreciate an art form, but that does not say anything about the art form inherently.

Here’s a cut from the game Plants vs. Zombies. Listen as the song progresses.

Here’s Chaka Khan:

Sound similar? Heavy bass on both, plus the synth in the background as the songs progress. A lot of the Plants vs. Zombies soundtrack reminds me of this Chaka song.

(Note: Chaka came first).

I’ve already covered my favourite.

Here’s my second favourite.

As I sit here waiting for a website for work to load, I enjoy time by listening to Tito! Tito!

Since I didn’t look for too much new music the last ten years, anything from the last decade that I find seems new to me. And Alexisonfire falls into that category. I do remember seeing some of their videos around 2000 (yes, videos on TV, as this was around the last time I had access to cable television), but I never explored further, and they never got played on any radio that was near me.

They’re really good. Super hard music, but it’s great. Definitely syncopated and melodic too. And I have no problem with screaming. Plus they’re Canadian (so I don’t feel so bad about Nickelback or Celine Dion). So far my favourite album is “Crisis”. Here’s a good cut, but they’re all good. I don’t think there is a dud on this album.

I’ve always been on the lookout for a really quick way to send links from iOS to the Mac. I almost always just browse the web on an iPad or iPhone, which I usually prefer to a full PC. But periodically I’ll come across a site that would be better to read on the Mac, whether it be because of a Flash video, or just slugginess of some sites with the lesser CPU.

I’ve tried a number of different utilities for this problem. I tried the iPhone app Pastebot which is pretty nice, and also ClipTwin. These are both dedicated to exchanging clipboard contents between iOS and the Mac. But I find them to be too clunky overall. There’s too much clicking at both ends of the transfer just to open the link. I found myself never using them because of this friction, even if I stuck the apps on my homescreen.

There are a couple of other clever apps that are nice at opening links from the Mac in iOS by sending the clipboard contents as push notifications. But almost always, I want to go in the other direction, from iOS to Mac. You can use the whole “read later” thing built into Safari and it will sync between Safari in iOS and the Mac, but I find that to be slow to sync, and requires too many clicks on both ends again.

I came across a new (free) Mac app called Send2mac. It’s a tiny Mac app (so tiny it has no interface, just running along in the background). On iOS (or maybe any phone/tablet/PC at all?), you just install a special bookmark with a unique identifier in it. There’s no app on this end.

Then, every time you click the bookmark when a webpage is open, it immediately opens that page in your default browser on the Mac. There is zero clicking on the Mac. It’s just there. If your Mac is asleep, it seems to open as soon as it wakes up. I like this whole “no clicking” thing. I think this is almost the perfect level of friction for me to actually use it.

My Stevie Wonder kick came in a couple of years ago, and I can’t shake it. He’s the best. Been digging his live album Natural Wonder.

One of my favourite Queen songs: