At Christmas time, I shared with my wife that I was thinking about getting a vinyl turntable and records. She had asked for gift ideas, and being pretty content with things and not feeling immediately drawn to any shiny new toy, I reflected that I’m starting to look for gift ideas to help me slow down and appreciate things more. With all the access to music through streaming services, listening to music sometimes feels disposable – something you put on in the background instead of silence. I thought with a turntable, it would force me to be more mindful of the activity. I had grown-up with a turntable in the house, but I never appreciated it until my adult life. There is something alluring about a single-purpose device that is a centre-point of a room. You put on a record and sit and listen to it. It doesn’t last very long before you have to flip sides, so you can’t just walk away to do something else. It’s a point of focus in the room; something people can gather around.
My wife, being the wonderful partner she is, surprised me with a turntable and my first album. While I tested it out at Christmas time, it was only this week that I finally set up the space in my office with the turntable. It was great to quietly sit and listen to music, doing nothing else. The pops and crackles of the needle, creating a sense of imperfection, gave the affair a unique analogue experience compared to the perfect replication of digital playback.
Of course, I noticed right away a difference of pitch in the playback, indicating that the turntable was playing slightly off from the 33-1/3 speed it was set to. With new toys come new maintenance responsibilities if we want to keep enjoying things. Still, despite the altered playback, I found the sensory experience a satisfying way of capping off my day. Always more to learn.
While I don’t condone thinking of capitalism, consumerism and consumption as hallmarks of Christmas, it’s something that is nevertheless on my mind. After a record year for some big box (or big warehouse) retailers last year, many folks in the ethical space really hammered home that we must vote with our money wisely and choose more ethical options when it comes to shopping. Supporting local, supporting products or services that aren’t wasteful, supporting employers that pay good wages are all values that hit louder when we felt safer just staying home and shopping from our phones.
This year, I’ve made some attempts at being more mindful of my shopping, though with a toddler at home during a pandemic, my flexibility is a little more constrained than in the past. Recently I came into an ethical shopping scenario that I found difficult to find a perfect solution for, and it involves comic books.
I’ve been a nerd for a long time and loved comic books as a kid. While I didn’t always have the means or funds to regularly purchase comic books, I would try to keep up with stories through alternative sources like the now shuttered Wizard magazine. Now that I’m older, with more disposable income, I’d like to step back into comics and attempt some regular readership.
Off the top, my goal would be to support local and to ensure I’m paying for the art, rather than finding easy, cheap access to the stories. The first constraint is, as of writing, we don’t have a comic book shop here in town. There is a shop that’s closer to me the next town over, however I feel a deeper connection to the comic shops in Kitchener-Waterloo, a town not that far from me, but still a commitment to travel to for things like this.
The second constraint is I’m trying to be mindful of the environment and the fact that I tend to be a packrat, and I’ve accepted that I don’t intend to collect comics, but just want to read the books, so I would be fine with paying for digital versions of the comic books. However, there is no service that I can find that would purchase the rights to read the stories from comic book shops. Instead, the near-universal option would be to pay for digital books from a platform called Comixology, which is unfortunately a subsidiary of Amazon (side bar – many publishers have their own digital archives that you can pay for access to, though Comixology seems to be the only service that allows you to buy current books, whereas publishers seem to have a lag of when the stories appear in their lists). I already have an Audible subscription, and I purchase way too much from Amazon already, so I am hesitant to give more money to the big A.
The way I see it, there is no easy solution for this – I can pay money to a big corporation for the ease of reading at home (and hoping that the money spent through Comixology makes its way back to the creators fairly – which I doubt given the comic book industry, artists and writers are not compensated well) but then I’m not supporting local businesses, or I can make special trips into town to buy from the local shop, which is inconvenient, requires driving, and requires me to purchase physical books.
In the end, I made a trip into town (I had other errands to run, so it was a more efficient trip) and bought recent releases at the shop, AND (in full, shameful disclosure), I bought a collected series on Comixology that wasn’t available in the shop. While this was hardly the most ethical solution in the moment, I still think it was a good exercise in thinking through the options and consequences of my choices.
Not fully related to the comics example, but in parallel to this consideration is voting with your money on art worth making. Chris Stuckmann released a short meditation recently on films and the question of why movies aren’t made like they used to be (in the sense of artistic films that were riskier box office bets, rather than the safe intellectual properties we see coming out all the time). The same conversations are being had in music, where it’s harder for bands to get a foothold in the world of streaming, and the only big acts tend to be bands that were big before streaming.
In his essay, Stuckmann reflects that our choices to see certain kinds of film sends messages to studios and the system of what works are likely to make money, so the incentives are to continue making only those kinds of art. I’ll let his video speak for itself, but it gives me something consider when I’m choosing how to support art and how to consume more ethically (if such thing is really possible under capitalism).
Last week I shared some thoughts on appreciating musical languages developed beyond the European music theory standard, and how it can be inappropriate to judge musical modalities using the vocabulary and standards of your cultural (musical) heritage. This isn’t to say that viewing art through different lenses can’t bring about interesting discoveries of the artform, but rather using one standard to pass a value-judgement of the merits of an artform can be fraught with problems.
Thanks to YouTube’s algorithm, the recommended videos feed provided some great gems appreciating the original. Through a drum cover, I learned the original was in 7/4 time (whereas I thought it might have been alternating 2/4-2/8 measures; sounds like I missed a 1/8 beat).
And here was another drum cover with some artistic interpretations on the beat.
I was able to learn a bit more about Konnakkol, and how it builds increasing complexity to the music.
And here was a great beatbox cover that got a shoutout from the male performer in the original video, Somashekar Jois.
Finally, I found that Somashekar Jois has a YouTube channel where he teaches lessons in Konnakkol. I was a little nervous about posting this since one of his past videos was an artist’s endorsement for Prime Minister Modi of India, but I still felt it important to provide the link here to learn more about the artform. If possible, I’m trying to focus on the art, rather than the artist (or his whatever his politics happens to be).
Oh, and a recent video from Adam Neely again touched on the problems with passing judgement on musical performance when you don’t critically engage with the sources of your musical taste. At best, you are falsely applying a single standard as a universal judge of taste, and at worst you are using music theory to justify sexist bullying of people just trying to have fun creating.
Tim Ferriss recently shared the following video in his newsletter. From the video’s description, we are treated to a short but wonderful performance “on the most traditional, classical and ancient vocal percussive art form of India; the mother of all percussive languages – Konnakkol.”
I found as I was watching the video, I was trying to discern the time signature being used (I suppose in the hope of finding the cadence to bob my head along with the rhythm). Most of the song sounds like it switches between some sort of 2/4 and 2/8 back to back rhythm, alternating one bar of each. For a brief moment, I was going to push this out to my network to see what my music theory friends would say, since I consider myself an amateur at best.
But then I realized that the folks who I thought would be better equipped to give me an answer were likely trained in classic music theory; that is to say, European music theory. But applying a European music theory framework would be wholly inappropriate for classical Indian music. I don’t mean inappropriate in a politically correct sense (quite the contrary, it would be a fun exercise to apply European music theory as an exercise to see where the similarities and differences are between the two music styles), but instead it would be inappropriate from a practical sense. The two musical styles share the common thread of using percussion and pitches to “tell a story” but the similarities end there. They are two styles with differing underlying grammar and syntax. Applying a different musical theory lens would be inadequate to capture the nuances of the performance, and possibly miss a richer historical context to give the performance more meaning.
It reminds me of a video Adam Neely put out almost a year ago that’s well worth a revisit because he raises important points about what we choose as our defaults – what “counts” as music. If we judge everything based on what’s been given primacy over the last few hundred years, we at best have an impoverished understanding of music and culture, and at worst continue to perpetuate a systemic bias (read: racist) in favour of some kinds of music to the exclusion of others that we deem inferior (coded as foreign, exotic, world, or worse).
This isn’t to say you have to like any one kind of music – let your tastes take you wherever and drink in the art of whomever speaks to you. It’s just important to remember that art extends far beyond the preferences we think of as universal, and that our taste should not be placed at the centre of culture.
This past weekend, I had the privilege of seeing Hamilton the musical on stage. As I noted in my Instagram post, I was blown away by the experience, and was moved to tears by the performance. My emotional reaction was due, in part, to my having completed the audiobook a few weeks back. Had I not already been familiar with the story of Alexander Hamilton, I think I would have struggled a bit with the fast paced delivery of the lyrics.
In my mind, the musical is perfect – it is a shining example of why art exists and what it is capable of. Hamilton the musical takes a 35-hour book, of which spans the nearly 50-year life of Hamilton, and distills it down into a powerful 2-hour performance.
There are so many fantastic elements of the play. I don’t want to spoil the experience, but I can’t not list some of my favourite parts.
For instance, in the second song, a throughline is set-up that spans Hamilton’s life where he ambitiously declares that he won’t throw his shot (waste an opportunity to advance himself). But, at the end of his life, when he is dueling Aaron Burr over a matter of honour, he chooses to “throw his shot” (raise one’s weapon in the air to waste your shot, signalling that you are not participating in the duel) as he becomes morally opposed to dueling. It was haunting to hear this theme get set up so early.
I loved the use of space on stage. The floor was set up with two circular discs that could rotate in different directions, which meant that the actors could allow the stage to carry them around the space to give the illusion of traversing great distances.
Speaking of those discs, there were a few moments in the play where things could freeze in time or rewind. The actors could halt in tableau, but the discs would rotate them around, giving the appearance that they were reversing in time. This was so cool to see – we were able to watch a scene play out twice: once from Hamilton’s perspective, and one from the narration of a side character who was singing her motivations while guiding the scene along.
I’m not normally a great fan of dancing, but even the bodily movements of the performers had me transfixed. The ways they moved around to evoke things like battlefield war, or Hamilton feeling at the centre of a hurricane made me forget I was watching a play on stage.
So many other elements came together in amazing ways – how they used space on the stage to signal travelling over vast distances, how costumes took on symbolic meanings, the politics of ceding from England through the Kings’ songs, and the incredible attention to detail of every word spoken, rapped, and sung by the cast. The last straw was Eliza getting the final word. So. Good!
The experience was so wonderful and memorable, I can’t put into words what it meant for me to see it. I simply don’t have the vocabulary developed to articulate how smart and charming the musical was. It was a pure masterclass of how to put together a modern piece of art to tell the story of one of the United State’s founding fathers – a man whose impact lasts through to today, but whose legacy is unknown to most everyday persons.
I’ll end with one final note. In the premiere week of the show in Toronto, the CBC news company ran a short piece about the show. Within the segment, they showed a clip of an interview with the musical’s writer and original-run star, Lin Manuel Miranda, where he gives advice to up and coming playwrites. Now, granted, his words are meant to speak to marginalized voices who fall outside of what is deemed normal or popular art. However, his words, more generally applied, can speak to the creative urge in all of us.
“Well, I’ll tell you the only advice I can give is: write what’s missing. Write what you don’t see on stage. I started writing in the Heights because I really wanted a life in musical theatre and so I wanted to write the kind of show I wasn’t seeing. So, don’t write the next Hamilton. Write what isn’t Hamilton. Write the story that only you can write.”
Last week, I gave a highlight of the best books I read in 2019. Below, I present what I read in 2019. By comparison to 2016, 2017, and 2018, last year was a paltry year in reading for me.
Title
Author
Date Completed
Pages
1
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
J.K. Rowling
6-Jan
640
2
The Bullet Journal Method
Ryder Carroll
31-Jan
320
3
Daring Greatly
Brene Brown
4-Feb
320
4
Trumpocracy – The Corruption of the American Republic
David Frum
25-Feb
320
5
Drive
Daniel H. Pink
4-Mar
288
6
Twilight
Stephenie Meyer
10-Mar
544
7
The Gift of Failure
Jessica Lahey
12-Mar
304
8
Better – A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance
Atul Gawande
27-Mar
288
9
The Graveyard Book
Neil Gaiman
11-Apr
368
10
Bad Blood
John Carreyrou
9-May
352
11
Atomic Habits
James Clear
23-May
320
12
Built to Last
Jim Collins
25-May
368
13
Digital Minimalism
Cal Newport
30-May
304
14
Right Here Right Now
Stephen J. Harper
14-Jun
240
15
Mastery
Robert Greene
20-Jun
352
16
Complications – A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science
Atul Gawande
25-Jun
288
17
Vagabonding
Rolf Potts
29-Jul
240
18
Becoming Superman
J. Michael Straczynski
4-Aug
480
19
A Game of Thrones
George R.R. Martin
11-Aug
864
20
Ultralearning
Scott H. Young
31-Aug
304
21
Reader Come Home
Maryanne Wolf
11-Sep
272
22
The Threat
Andrew G. McCabe
14-Sep
288
23
Indistractable
Nir Eyal
19-Sep
300
24
Permanent Record
Edward Snowden
22-Sep
352
25
The Path Made Clear
Oprah Winfrey
19-Nov
208
Total:
8924
I have a few thoughts as to why my reading rate dropped off significantly last year and what I can do about it in the year to come.
Life Pressures
Last year had a few significant pressures on my life that might have affected my desire to read. We started basement renovations early in the year, only to discover our basement’s foundation was cracked, requiring us to source quotes and opinions for repairs. This delayed our basement renovation, which didn’t finish until the summer. The protracted project weighed heavily on our minds throughout the year as we questioned whether we were making the right decisions for our home repairs, or whether we would need to make additional fixes later down the line.
Another big change for me was a change of my job at work. While I wouldn’t say it affected me as strongly as the basement renos, it disrupted my routine enough to impact my desire to focus on reading when I came home from work. Couple that with another full year as Board Chair for the non-profit I head up, and it left me with less cognitive bandwidth for self-improvement.
Podcasts and Music
If 2016 was my year of purchasing books, 2017 saw me start to utilize Libby to access the library, and 2018 was an all-out race for me to go through as many audiobooks as my brain could absorb, I felt a greater push away from books in 2019. Instead of working my way through 8-15 hours of content for one piece of work, I found the shorter format of podcasts more satisfying on my commutes. I enjoyed the variety in topics, shows, and voices.
However I also found I was drawn back to listening to music instead of information. With the sheer volume of books I’ve consumed in the last three years, it was nice to go long stretches without a goal of getting through books (or trying to learn new things) and instead allow the melodies, riffs, percussion, and lyrics sweep me away.
Book Burnout?
Overall, my rate for the year was a bit varied. I started slow in January and February, then picked back up in March. April only saw one book completed, then I found my footing again through May onward. However, October is when my wife and I traveled abroad for our honeymoon, and I never recovered my reading habit for the rest of the year.
Given that I spent most of the last three years focusing on business, personal development, and productivity books, I didn’t feel a strong desire to read those books in 2019. Even among the books I did read from that area, I found looking back that I don’t remember anything of note from those books. Neither the book’s theses nor the examples they offered have stuck with me as I enter the new year.
I’ve mentioned a few time the concept of the animated bibliography on this blog, and I think I’ve hit peak saturation for the genre. I’ve read the canon, and find that reading new books in the genre is resulting in diminishing returns; that is, I’m not really seeing a lot of new insights being offered that leaves me wanting more.
In my list last week, I commented that the books that I’m drawn to now is starting to shift away from business and productivity and more towards moral lessons found in fiction, biography/memoir, and journalistic explorations of current events. That’s not to say I won’t continue to be tempted to pick up the latest book that promises to fix my life, but it does mean that I’m intending to be more selective in what I choose to prioritize.
Assuming I continue to live a somewhat healthy life that is free from accidents, I figure that I have around 45-50 more years of life left. If I read around 3 books consistently per month, I will get another 1,650 books in my lifetime (4 per month is 2,208 books, and 5 books per month is 2,760 more books before I die). While that sounds like a lot, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the number of books that come out each year and the books that have already been written. There is more to life and learning than being more productive or seeking more meaning in one’s life. I’ve grown to appreciate the value of storytelling this past year, and there are a lot of stories out there to sink into. If I only get access to a few thousand more stories, I should make sure they count.
A few months back, I published a post about one of my favourite visual metaphors captured from Killswitch Engage’s video for “In Due Time.” While my impressions from that post stand, I like to add the image above to moments that make me happy.
The image was taken from KSE’s latest music video “The Signal Fire” from their track released this month, “Atonement.”
The track features guest vocals from former KSE frontman Howard Jones, who replaced the original and current frontman Jesse Leach (confusing, I know) when Jesse stepped away from the mic for personal reasons prior to the band soaring to popularity in the mid-2000’s metalcore scene.
Howard fronted the band for nine years through it’s early commercial success before departing the band in January 2012, and Jesse returned later that year. While all parties involved remained friendly and supportive of each other’s projects since, this collaboration was a welcomed surprise and I thoroughly appreciate that this is a thing that exists.
I liked this image for two reasons. First, I love that despite the personal reasons for people to decide to end things (see last week), it doesn’t mean there needs to be hard feelings for it. In every interview on the topic, the remaining band members acknowledge that it sucks their friend had to leave, but that they understand and respect the decision, and they are supportive that the departing person leaves because it’s for their own wellbeing to walk away. It’s a very mature reaction to what is likely a very difficult decision.
Second, the fanboy in me loves that despite the changes, it’s a nod to my nostalgic recent-past. I stumbled across the band during the Howard years while I was in undergrad. I once had an opportunity to see the band play in town, but couldn’t justify paying for the ticket, so I didn’t see them. A few years later, Howard departed the band, and I felt that I had missed out on seeing something awesome. Don’t get me wrong, I like Jesse and have enjoyed the subsequent albums the band has released since his return. I have seen the band 7 or 8 times, at one point not missing their tours through Ontario over a 4 year period. Yet, this moment harkens back to many happy memories I had while a student, and seeing them fistbump on camera is a little nod to that idyllic time of my not-so-youthful youth.
And now for something lighter. The last few weeks, I’ve been discussing some pretty heavy topics, so I thought for Family Day, I’d share something a little on the lighter side that makes me happy.
Killswitch Engage (KSE) is a band that I really like. I think since 2012 I’ve seen them play every time they’ve swung through Ontario on tour with the exception of once, tallying around 7 or 8 shows. A friend who accompanies me to the shows joked that it’s getting to the point where we buy tickets to KSE shows for an excuse to see the other bands they are touring with.
Six years ago this month, they released their lead track and video from 2013’s Disarm the Descent, In Due Time.
The video kicks off with some behind the scenes footage of the band and crew, interspersed with footage of the band playing their instruments. While this is going on, the camera follows behind the band’s vocalist, Jesse, as he enters the space, walks up to grab the microphone, and launches into the song’s vocals.
If you know nothing about the band, you might not connect the visuals with the band’s history, but let me show you why this is such a cool visual metaphor. I’m not entirely sure that it was intentional (I haven’t read anything to support my idea), but even if it was deliberate it’s a really cool way of visualizing the band’s history up until that moment.
The band, while going through a few member changes in its early days since forming in 1999, was made up of guitarists Adam and Joel, bassist Mike, drummer Justin (who joined in 2003), and vocalist Jesse. In 2002, just as they released their sophmore album Alive or Just Breathing, Jesse announced abruptly that he had to quit the band for personal reasons. It was a sudden departure that left the band hanging. The band added Howard Jones to the lineup, and they broke it big with 2004’s The End of Heartache, which launched them into the charts and cemented them as one of the biggest bands in the genre.
Fastforward to 2012, and Howard announces his departure for the band. There was some uncertainty at the time as to whether the band would continue and under what conditions, but it was quickly announced that Jesse would return to the mic. Jesse was not a stranger to making music at the time, having worked on a side project with some of the members of KSE called Times of Grace in 2011. KSE toured and completed their album through the end of the year and released Disarm the Descent in early 2013.
Now, if you take the history of the band into account, go back and watch the video from the start through around the 34 second mark, and what you see is a visual representation of the band up until that point. You see the band playing, making music but without a vocalist to sing their lyrics. Then, from outside, you watch Jesse walk up to the group, rejoining them in time to begin the first verse. The band was an entity that was already out there, working hard, and Jesse gets welcomed back, fitting in naturally with the group. The group had continued on without him, and Jesse returned to help give voice to their music.
It’s a beautiful representation, and something of an easter egg for the fans.
A Paramedic's Notebook 