Curatorialist

This is the final paragraph of a fascinating study on brains and our innate desire to know what’s going to happen before it happens.

“Dopamine neurons are thought to be involved in learning about rewards – by adjusting the connections between other neurons, they “teach” the brain to seek basic rewards like food and water. Bromberg-Martin and Hikosaka think that these neurons also teach the brain to seek out information so that their activity becomes a sort of “common currency” that governs both basic needs and a quest for knowledge.”

Read the full article here.

Nice accomplishment for $12:

Homigod.

When you’re done drooling, go get as close as you want at the animators’ website. They don’t seem to mind if you stare.

I feel like I somehow get in the “L.A. versus” argument more than most people. Perhaps because I am such a staunch supporter and lover of this city, it invites criticism and devil’s advocacy. I get that. I also get why people hate on us, here. However, I think I just found the single greatest, all-encompassing reason to love this city… an ice cream truck.

Oh, this isn’t just any old ice cream truck, this is that rare crossbreed of ice cream and architecture. Two bed buddies that could only really meet each other in this town. The truck itself is a throwbacky steel Airstream trailer kind of deal with a pink 2nd story (probably permitted) on top, but the architectural references only begin there… it’s one knee-slapping architectural pun after another: the company itself is called Coolhaus and the products all have architectural references, of course (Frank Behry, Mintimalism, etc.), but it’s all earned as the owners have the appropriate pedigree to pull it off. And the cool doesn’t end there – these guys Twitter their locations, secret passwords that get you unlisted flavors and, like any good L.A. citizen, they can’t help but namedrop along the way (“Departing T Lofts in 5 minutes…headed to our friends at Dexter!!!”). And they can be booked for your party.

So, to recap: ice cream, architecture, nice rims and overall insider club vibe. But good for the kids. No city could pull all that off but ours. And although you’ll want to poke fun, in the end you have to admit… it’s cool. Or, as we like to say in LA: so wrong it’s Wright.

EatCoolhaus Website

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Article on “The Moment” NY Times Blog

If I had to pick one artist/band from each decade I’ve lived in, the one that personally defined that time period for me…. it looks like this:

60’s – Bob Dylan. I was only alive for a couple years of the Sixties, but it seems like Bob Dylan was being played since a crib really was a crib and well into the 70’s. His music defined my childhood, introduced me to song, storytelling, poetry, critical thinking and the world.

70’s – Cat Stevens. His voice IS the Seventies to me. I listened to him just about every chance I got. Because of him, I didn’t know the difference between children’s songs and adult songs (“Moonshadow” still sounds like a kid song to me) and I think I am better off for that. If Dylan gave me a view outside my private world, despite a questionable singing voice, Cat was the polar opposite: the most charming voice that has ever inhabited a singer with songs amazingly personal.

80’s – Van Morrison. Obviously, he has seminal work from the 60’s and 70’s, but for me, his music was the go-to songs of the 80’s. And since he was still making music (really good music) well into the 80’s, I feel okay about it. Van got me through a lot of hard times, he was almost a guiding voice to me. I feel like I learned as much from him as I did from a formal education.

90’s – U2. Perhaps not coincidentally, U2 being heavily influenced by its relationship with Dylan, Van and Keith Richards, became the major band of the 90’s for me, even though my favorite album of theirs was released in ‘87, my second favorite was in ‘91 and I listened to them regularly throughout. Bono’s achilles heel is his preachiness, but I respect his passion and what seems like a true desire to give equal weight to both parts of the term “pop artist.”

00’s – Beck. Like U2, you could argue that Beck is from the decade before, but it’s an imperfect concept to begin with. Regardless, Beck is to U2 what Cat Stevens is to Dylan: the introverted, or inside out, version of the other. U2 faced me outward, preached and wined about the world whereas Beck faced me inward and found a new strange inroad into the deeply personal, especially with his work in the 2000’s.

So, there you go. If you got the time and the desire, I’d love to hear your list. Throw it down…

As I watch Wilco and Feist perform together on Letterman – not on TV, mind you, but on YouTube, two days later – I’m laughing at my own comment about Indie music being one band with many voices. But as I look at the two of them and consider the long roads that lead them togehter, I realize it has become confusing as to what is Indpendent and what is just Alternative music that reached critical acclaim. It doesn’t really matter to me, so long as good music gets played.

Alt rock bands in my day were called College Rock, as they got played on the college radio stations. It wasn’t so much that they were independent as they were playing stuff that didn’t get on the corporate-owned stations. R.E.M., for example, and punk. That sense of being “outside the mainstream” and true to their own vision was appealing to me even back then, at the same time (probably not coincidentally) that the music industry was starting to harden its secret formula. Again, the silly putty metaphor – national radio starts getting squeezed, personal music pops up somewhere else. That’s not entirely different than what is happening today on the Web with artists that have no label at all. Substitute “college radio station” with sites like My Old Kentucky Blog and Gorilla vs Bear. Or even consider the role of the mix-tape for rap artists. It all amounts to the same thing: a distribution channel to match up fresh, interesting, different music with ears that enjoy it. If there weren’t a lot of people just like me, with my kinds of taste, those channels wouldn’t exist and thrive. Thankfully, music makers and music listeners always seem to be able to find each other.

It all hinges on a new kind of financial model where the “DJs” (now bloggers) are free to use their ear to choose what they play, where money is not leverage in that decision. The bloggers get their money from the ads on their site and the artists get their money from people who find them and buy their independent albums or tracks off of iTunes or go to their concerts. It is a symbiotic relationship insomuch as they DO NOT exchange money between them. This is the right model (and the same model we had before radio stations were bought by corporations who influenced what was played) as it eliminates the backroom deals that lead to compromises on quality that eat away at the genre, from the inside out to all the edges. So long as this stays true, we all win.

But the important part of it all (for me, of course), is that my kind of music has place to be discovered, promoted and played. And it’s not just my kind of music, it’s the kind of music that made music music. It’s freeing the songbird. The girl or guy who can express herself or himself better with a guitar in hand than with words or anything else. That person isn’t a business person, I don’t want them to be. American Idol (to agree with you, Hirp), promotes business music, where human expression is emulated, not felt. The contestants are egged on to have “that thing” which is a euphemism for “what emotion looks like,” not what emotion is. Some can fake it, some can’t. But make no mistake, nobody up there is singing about the human plight, or feeling the human plight. They are coddled in the sparkly glory of adoration, a part of the music-making process that should come last, not first. All part of the backwards model of success we’ve promoted these days where you are praised first and have an accomplishment later (or, as I used to call it, “Pretty Girl Syndrome”).

As the Wilco/Feist duet comes to an end and I hear that clapping, that real clapping, I am encouraged. Hooray for music that reaches into the soul and tells us we’re okay for being human, fallible, confused, angry, despondent or in love. Hooray for humans who continue to evolve and create revolutions in the arts, so we all can sing.

I’ve been listening to mostly all independent music for the last few years. Not to say I don’t have a go at more established bands, and not to say I don’t like a lot of established bands. I do. But if I’m counting my time spent on deep music-listening, it’s mostly with independent music stations, blogs and unknowns, recommended by friends. I still sit down with a CD and have a real audiophile-type listen on my real stereo every once in a while, but if I’m thinking about music the way I did when I was a kid – a form of expression that enhances my mood and soundtracks my life (my preferred listening) – it’s my go-to classics and independents. Why?

Because music-making has changed. And so has the music industry. But I have not.

The notion of an “album” is a relic from a day when music came from music stores. The ones you walked into and around, discovering. With that all but gone, most of that construct dies, including hard packaging. There’s very little reason, today, to group songs together, other than for some artistic purpose and habit. A purpose that very few young musicians grew up experiencing and so have little connection with. The album was born of necessity and became a flat round box within which an artist “had” to work. Artists thrived in that construct. As those limits vanished, nothing took its place and the industry meandered without purpose, divvying up selections of songs based mostly on time between tours, not the evolution of the artist.

“Making it,” in this day and age, means joining forces with a marketing team, of sorts, that has a formula, of sorts. However, it’s not a creative structure, it’s a selling structure. So, it doesn’t promote innovation or new kinds of personal expression. It doesn’t not want that, it just isn’t what drives the industry, so it cares about it about as much as oil companies care about car design. Artistry isn’t disliked, it just dies from neglect. It reminds me of the concept that our school system isn’t in the education business, but rather the graduate business. Or that movie theaters aren’t in the movie business, they’re in the popcorn business. This is the nature of capitalism and it has its advantages, too. One must only be aware that giant success in business is based on some kind of populism, homogeny or ubiquity and, by nature, forces out that which is odd and, often that which is deeply personal. So, I am at odds with what the industry produces, which is, for the most part, singles, not full albums. Styles played until they become played out. Vocal qualities with little regard for the words conveyed. It is music unbundled. Parts which equal no whole. At least not for me.

We are in a world of mid-fidelity. MP3s are, really, the high end of quality now. Studies have shown that Teens actually prefer the sound of MP3s to most other music types, simply because they are used to it. The way kids in Beverly Hills prefer the look of silicone-enhanced breasts. You like what you know. MP3s have unlocked a type of convenience in music-listening that trumps the subtle differences in quality. Having it on my phone, on the bus and in an airport is too good of an opportunity to say no to. And, so, knowing that high-end audio experiences have gone the way of the two-martini lunch, musicians too have relieved themselves of the pressure of the subtle nuance of music-making, trading instead in the business of hooks, vocal gymnastics and, often, just simple loudness. Imgagine if all art was only seen from moving cars; it would change the way the artist thought about how to reach people. Some distant version of that is happening to music-making.

I, on the other hand, have not changed. Popular music from the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s resonate with me more than popular music from the 90’s and 2000’s. Or, for that matter, the ’40’s or 50’s. My music collection reflects that. I have a taste for the singer/songwriter sound and music with certain amount of raw humanity to it. And I’m fairly unwavering on that. That’s what resonates with me. That is said without any judgment at all on the music that doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t regard it as “worse,” simply as not as resonant to my ears. I am, after all, born to a specific era and I am shaped by my surroundings, like anyone. So, when I seek out music to listen to that’s not part of my permanent collection, I look for something that moves me in similar ways, not necessarily something current.

What does this all leave for me? Independent music. On the whole, people are making music more to my specific preferences when they have an unbridled passion for it, sans the influence of mainstream media’s tastes and realities of today’s music industry. Fortunately, there is now an industry that surrounds being outside the industry. The best live music events of the year predminantly feature independent bands: SXSW, Coachella, Pitchfork, etc. Also, the Web is a major listening post for independent bands, who freely offer their music up, in the forms of streams, videos and promotional videos. Even satellite radio has a station for independent music, brought to you by bloggers. And that’s what I listen to.

But that comes with a certain sacrifice, too: I miss familiarity. It is said that tennis is one of the few sports where people don’t root for the underdog. We want our long-standing champions: our McEnroes, Samrpases and Federers. These people drive the sport. Music is a little like that for me, too. I want so badly for a sustained music career from an artist that I deeply enjoy. I loved runs from bands like The Police, The Clash, The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, KISS, Queen, Tom Petty, Van Morisson and The Who. These kinds of bands had both commecial success and the latitude to experiment and evolve over time. I miss that. But what has replaced it is the aggregate of all independent music. It all moves together now in a group sway kind of way. Watching themes rise and fall within the walls of this entity called Independent Music is a little like watching David Bowie go from Psychadelic to Glam to Soul to German(?) and on and on. Independent Music is like a single band that I’m really into made up of thousands of musicians who take turns at the mic.

Independent music can go places that nobody else can. Talk about things that nobody else can talk about. They can try different notes. They can afford to fail because no one’s paying them to stay the same. That to me is the heart and soul of music and nobody could have drawn it up this way which speaks to the power of music, and art. Whatever  forces push in against it, the true essence of it will continue to pop up, somewhere… like squeezing silly putty.

I was on the treadmill this morning, watching the Tour de France (which, in and of itself, could be a full blown blog entry filed under “Oddly Motivated”. The stage had just ended and I was about to step off the apparatus, when I happened upon this advert from the Versus Network (formerly Outdoor Life Network). Everything comes together in this ad: the copy is beautiful, the music soaring, the visuals and editing are spot on and the voice over is read to perfection. I ran an extra mile in its honor. Tour de France, meh. 2 minute ad… inspired!

I don’t make halftime speeches very often. Okay, never. But if I did have the opportunity I’d just give this speech. And, yeah, I’d take full credit. Why does my team need to be confused over authorship with a 20-point deficit to overcome?

This is a nice little article from a nice man with a nice talent for drawing. Something about his story reminds me of a portion of my own, and maybe just everyone pursuing a bit of fine art in their lives. He describes his sort-of happenstance way he came across his career, drawing for theater, dance and music rehearsals. And then says, “It could never happen for anyone the way it happened for me… it was all an accident.” Only that’s just sort of the thing, isn’t it? All creative careers happen that way, being an artist is opening yourself up to situations you wouldn’t otherwise come across. Yes, that particular set of events might never happen again, but equally strange ones do every day to people just like him. The key is to be like him… open to it. Read on:

“Just Drawn That Way” – The New York Times