David Byrne: Still Awesome

David Byrne, of the Talking Heads, has always been part of my life. The wacky, sunny pop on “Little Creatures” perfectly captures my dad and his irepressible optimism; that album was in heavy rotation while I was growing up. Among my peers, “Psycho Killer” became first a codeword for cool and later a karaoke staple. “This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)” must be on every love-drunk mixtape I’ve ever made. And last year I actually saw the big suit. In person.

Now the patron saint of urban biking, Byrne’s continued to make fantastic music, working with Dizzee Rascal and The Dirty Projectors and Brian Eno. It’s possible the guy is as hip as one man can be.

Byrne’s new project is a collaboration with Norman Cook, better known as Fatboy Slim. It’s a dancey concept album about Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Phillipines. Santogold, Cindy Lauper, Tori Amos, and just about everyone else is contributing vocals. If all that’s not enough, it sounds amazing.

Here Lies Love comes out April 6. Pick it up.

Broadcast Journalism 101

Ever watch the news and think, where have I seen this before? BBC 4 shows us how it’s done.

I have to agree with those randomly selected strangers: I really don’t care what randomly selected strangers think.

The Voices In Your Head

First, some background. Synesthesia is a surprisingly common condition that causes two different sensory pathways to interact in unusual ways. Synesthetes may perceive letters as having dedicated colors, or numbers as having personalities. Read more here. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran is a neurologist: a doctor, a researcher, and an occasional Radiolab guest. Listen to him explain how he performed the first ever phantom-limb “amputation” here.

John Colapinto, in New Yorker profile of Ramachandran last May, found him speculating about the nature of creativity:

The most common synesthesia is number-color. Ramachandran believed it was not coincidental that the fusiform gyrus, where number shapes are processed in the brain, lies next to the area where colors are processed. He suspected that a cross-wiring in the brain, similar to that in phantom-limb patients, was responsible. Brain scans confirmed his hunch: in synesthetes, there are excess neural connections between the two brain centers. This suggested to Ramachandran that the syndrome arises from a defect in the gene responsible for pruning away the neural fibres that connect the various centers of the brain as it develops early in life. “What do artists, poets, and novelists have in common?” Ramachandran asked me. “The propensity to link seemingly unrelated things. It’s called metaphor. So what I’m arguing is, if the same gene, instead of being expressed only in the fusiform gyrus, is expressed diffusely throughout the brain, you’ve got a greater propensity to link seemingly unrelated brain areas in concepts and ideas. So it’s a very phrenological view of creativity.”

It can feel uncomfortable to examine the biology behind creative talent, which we’ve always treated as kind of magical, or divine. But science addressing questions that philosophers and priests once had a monopoly on is a wonderful thing. Nothing is more fascinating or important to us than our own nature, and beginning to build real, concrete knowledge about it is an enormous blessing. Reading about neurology leaves me awed, excited, and impatient. The brain is so marvellously complicated, as are the questions we ask, that our best efforts fall far short of sating our curiosity.

One of the most magnificent puzzles is consciousness itself: why we’re aware of our own thinking, and how we came to be this way. It’s a favorite subject for people who believe that some mental phenomena exist outside physical, testable reality, those who jeer at evidence-based approaches to these unknowns. But Ramachandran is willing to speculate on consciousness, too. Like his hypothesis about metaphors, these ideas are likely wrong, one of the many errors that “trial and error” requires. Still, it’s provocative stuff:

Mirror neurons play a role, he thinks. “One of the theories we put forward,” he said, as he packed up his bag, “is that the mirror-neuron system is used for modelling someone else’s behavior, putting yourself in another person’s shoes, looking at the world from another person’s point of view. This is called an allocentric view of the world, as opposed to the egocentric view. So I made the suggestion that at some point in evolution this system turned back and allowed you to create an allocentric view of yourself. This, I claim, is the dawn of self-awareness.”

I confess I find this possibility absolutely thrilling, especially compared to vague, untestable stories about “supernatural” mechanisms. But of course it doesn’t matter that it’s an appealing story; we have to figure out ways to challenge it, test it, until we know whether it’s true or false. “What we’re hoping,” Ramachandran says, “is that we can grope our way toward the answer, finding little bits and pieces, little clues, toward understanding what conciousness is. We’ve just scratched the surface of the problem.”

Amid insights on vision, autism, and the brain’s body-image map, one last passage caught my eye. “You know that when people think to themselves you get unconscious movement of the vocal chords?” Ramachandran asks. (It’s fun to try to notice this.) Well.

In the case of schizophrenia, whose sufferers often complain of “hearing voices,” Ramachandran suspected damage of deficit in a sensory mechanism in the vocal chords which, when normal people think, sends a signal to the brain indicating “This is simply a thought; no one is actually saying this.” If this mechanism was damaged, the subconscious movement of the vocal chords could be interpreted as an outside voice speaking in one’s head.

“By the way,” Ramachandran continued, “I have a theory that if you take people with carcinoma of the larynx, and you remove the vocal chords, and they think to themselves, they may actually start hallucinating. A prediction.”

A prediction. That’s where we start. Isn’t it great to be alive now?

History of The World: Part 1 (through 100)

The British Museum is producing a series of stories attempting to tell the story of the human race. They selected 100 objects from their collection, and with BBC Radio 4, are building fifteen minutes of radio around each, releasing them in chronological order.

It’s worth noting the disenchantment over how the museum acquired these pieces, and the institution’s claims to universal importance; the imperial roots of this collection are clearly audible as you listen. The skillful storytelling and the range of experts you’ll hear goes a long way towards selling this project despite that, but the gorgeous story itself is the draw here: how humanity developed, grew, and changed over these last thousands of years.

No one account can do world history justice, but it would be criminal to give up trying. Nothing gives me a greater thrill than great big stories about the shape of the human story, and like other entries in this genre, A History of the World reminds you how complex and amazing this story really is.

We have accountants to thank, for example, for our species’ most important achievement: writing. What we would call literature was content with spoken language, memorized and performed generation after generation. The first bureaucrats, on the other hand, looked to reliable, physical accounting to administer an expanding state. Some of the earliest surviving writing concerns itself with rationing beer in 3000 BC.

It doesn’t hurt that Radio 4 delivers everything in a British accent and peppered with dry humor. One of the learned experts, on the topic of beer as currency, quips, “no liquidity crisis here.” Then he chuckles to himself. It’s so bad it’s awesome.

You can stream episodes here, but the site’s pretty messy. I recommend downloading the podcasts.

An article in The Economist first convinced me this project was worth following. The kicker is delicious: “Of the 100 objects, only one has not been selected yet. Mr MacGregor is waiting until the last possible moment to pick out the best symbol of our own time. Suggestions, please, on a postcard to: British Museum, London WC1B 3DG.”

Happy Valentine’s Day

This week every sitcom, column and podcast dutifully released a Valentine’s Day episode. Studio 360’s solicited ideas on resdesigning the holiday and produced this bacon bouquet. Which is awesome.

Romantic and delicious.

If you’re alone this weekend, in lieu of bacon you get a free pass to wallow in self-pity. 30 Rock had a lonely Liz Lemon celebrate with the Lifetime Original, “My Stepson is My Cyberhusband.” All Songs Considered took the opportunity to play breakup songs for a full hour. They missed my favorites, so I’m putting them here (with cheapo YouTube links!). The first is perfect if you’ve been broken up with, and the second is essential if you’re doing the breaking.

Sometimes I Still Feel The Bruise (Trembling Blue Stars)

It Ain’t Me, Babe (Bob Dylan)

Whether you celebrate it or not, don’t miss the only great pop song specific to this odd holiday. “Valentine’s Day” by Andre 3000, the best thing behind “Hey Ya” to come out of OutKast’s overflowing double album, is guaranteed to put a smile on your face whether you’re mooning or moping.

It’s The Future: Chatroulette!

In the campy sci-fi classic Logan’s Run, our eponymous hero, in a funk, decides to put himself on the “The Circuit,” a cross between a television and a transporter. From the comfort of your living room, The Circut brings you face to face with a random sucession of fellow surfers looking for anonymous sex.

Chatroulette, the latest crazy thing to do on the internet, bears more than a passing resemblance to Logan’s machine. The site connects you to a series of video chats with randomized strangers, and you flip to a new partner with a cold “next,” just like in the film, but the similarities don’t end there. As described by Sam Anderson, in an arresting piece in New York Magazine, Chatroulette channels some of the same nihilistic boredom, sexual longing, and bracing loneliness as the fictional Circuit. It is also fueled by the same hope, however desperate and unlikely, that we can find real connections in impersonal, virtual spaces.

The stories he tells are funny, creepy, touching, and strange. If you’re tempted to interact with Chatroulette’s users, already 20,000 strong, be forewarned: “one out of every ten chatters is a naked masturbating man,” Anderson writes, and your lack of control (beyond that ever present “next”) leads to several flavors of unpleasantness. Still, he says, the effect is powerful, and the site not easily written off. Some interactions are quite affecting. And then there’s the possible evolution of this idea:

I found myself fantasizing about a curated version of ChatRoulette—powered maybe by Google’s massive server farms—that would allow users to set all kinds of filters: age, interest, language, location. One afternoon I might choose to be thrown randomly into a pool of English-speaking thirtysomething non-masturbators who like to read poetry. Another night I might want to talk to Jets fans. Another night I might want to just strip away all the filters and see what happens. The site could even keep stats, like YouTube, so you could see the most popular chatters in any given demographic. I could get very happily addicted to a site like that.

If you want to check out the messy, unfiltered reality, give it a try. Full disclosure: I loved this article but have no desire to wade in, not in this form. But who knows where this idea will take us? I can imagine a real demand for randomized social contact, with significant implications, if in the future people feel boxed in to a narrow demographic. Nothing like a roulette to shake up group-think and other social stasis.

Logan certainly learned how disruptive it can be. When The Circuit pops Jessica 6 (the lovely Jenny Agutter) into his life, she refuses sex and instead leads him to an adventure involving love, the Library of Congress, and a homicidal robot named Box. It upends his whole world, and ends up freeing the human race. So, you know, anything could happen.

Talkin’ Web 2.0 Blues

Anyone who’s spent more than a few minutes worrying over their various online profiles or talking about nothing with strangers has experienced the weariness that Scott Blaszak captures in this hilarious song. His perfect imitation of the “talkin’ blues,” a folk staple, collides deliciously with his subject and its absurd invented vocabulary. Really, who came up with “Orkut”?

Download the song here, or check out the whole Studio 360 segment here.

For some context, listen to Bob Dylan singing “I Shall Be Free No. 10” here.

The First Pop Star

There have always been outsized personalities. Before mass media, talent was recognized and rewarded locally, in parlors and living rooms or on modest stages. Once modern technology let us find these performers and broadcast them around the world, however, a new set of skills developed: how to be a star.

Lady Gaga

The art of mythmaking and headline grabbing is a curious mixture of PR and performance. Honed by The Beatles and Madonna, it was perfected by Lady Gaga, who has made herself news with astonishing skill and speed. But nothing she’s done is new— save a few tweaks for the social media age, she’s learned from the best.

And Eva Tanguay was the best. She put on propulsive, kinetic extravaganzas, changing costumes every three minutes. She wore elaborate, outrageous outfits, had expensive taste and a “raucous love life” (including a black man!), and carried on high profile feuds with other celebrities. She sang about herself and her own fame, and even about her copycats, performing a precursor of “The Real Slim Shady” called “Give an Imitation of Me.”

Most importantly, she made sure everyone knew every juicy detail, along the way creating celebrity as we know it. Jody Rosen, writing in Slate, found the story:

She was the first American popular musician to achieve mass-media celebrity, with a cadre of publicists trumpeting her on- and offstage successes and outrages… She was the first singer to mount nationwide solo headlining tours, drawing record-breaking crowds and shattering box-office tallies from Broadway to Butte. Newspaper accounts describe scenes of fan frenzy that foreshadowed Frank Sinatra at the Paramount Theatre and Beatlemania.

This brazen and thoroughly modern career, built around the desirability and the desires of one willful, self-made woman, lasted from 1904 to 1920.

Eva Tanguay

Rosen again:

She concocted publicity stunts (“Eva Tanguay, the Only Actress in the World Who Ever Made a Balloon Ascension”); threatened to retire before making splashy “comebacks”; contrived tell-all confessional interviews for magazines; and struck an ironic attitude toward these machinations, confessing her lust for attention in songs like “I’d Like To Be an Animal in the Zoo” (1911).

All of Tanguay’s story is like this: fascinating, eerily familiar, and unfairly forgotten. The Queen of Perpetual Motion only made one record and ended her life ignored and alone, but she paved the way for every media savvy superstar we’ve seen since. Read Rosen’s whole article, which goes into amazing detail about her singing and dancing and includes a sample of her voice. It’s well worth your time.

There’s a wonderful postscript to this story. Tanguay’s chart topping hit, the one she recorded, was “I Don’t Care.” It’s the “My Prerogative” of 1904: “I don’t care / What they may think of me / I’m happy go lucky / Men say that I’m plucky / I’m happy and carefree.” Shortly after Rosen’s article ran, Slate found and posted a clip of one of Tanguay’s most famous descendants performing “I Don’t Care.” Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Britney Spears.

That little girl can sing. What ever happened to her? How come these things never turn out well?

Dinosaur Colors Discovered!

I can’t and won’t try to compete with the web’s many wonderful science news sites and blogs. But this story makes the ten year old inside me oh so very happy.

When I was that age, reading all about dinosaurs, we didn’t know what they looked like. Not really. The colors in those drawings I poured over were only someone’s best guess. After learning this, imagining dinosaur herds became both more exciting and more uncertain. The mystery—likely permanent, I understood—frustrated and aroused me.

Turns out they had red feathers. At least, one of them did. For the first time, evidence of dinosaur pigmentation has been found. Look at a rendering here, read about the discovery here, and check out the Nature abstract here.

Hearing the news, I felt what I learned to feel when I was ten, paging through science books: gratitude, wonder, and pride. For some reason, the driving curiosity and hard work a discovery like this represents make me feel like a proud parent sitting in the bleachers, cheering on the scrappy but dogged efforts of our home team.

Gladwell on Drinking

I don’t know how he does it. Once again, Malcolm Gladwell has managed to sound original, insightful, and entirely common sense.

Turns out we misunderstand the effects of drinking: it doesn’t simply remove inhibitions.

Alcohol makes the thing in the foreground even more salient and the thing in the background disappear. That’s why drinking makes you think you are attractive when the world thinks otherwise: the alcohol removes the little constraining voice from the outside world that normally keeps our self-assesments in check. Drinking relaxes the man watching football because the game is front and center, and alcohol makes every secondary consideration fade away. But in a quiet bar his problems are front and center—and every potentially comforting or mitigating thought recedes. Drunkenness is not disinhibition. Drunkenness is myopia.

Drinkers get loud and rowdy because they respond to signals sent “by the pulsing music, by the crush of people, by the dimmed light, by the countless movies and television shows that say that young men in a bar with pulsing music on a Friday night have permission to be loud and rowdy.” This means that intoxication in a different setting, with different rules and different expectations, presents very differently.

The article recounts several fascinating experiments and case studies that demonstrate this effect. Gladwell concludes that our efforts to “moralize, medicalize, and legalize” alcohol abuse are ultimately less effective than providing “a positive and constructive example of how to drink.”

Read the piece here (abstract only without subscription, unfortunately) and check out more of Malcolm Gladwell’s work here (including full articles, 1996-2009). He really doesn’t need the plug—I already seethe with jealousy at this guy’s career—but the writing’s just so good.

Look for future admiring posts: Gladwell on underdogs, Gladwell on invention, Gladwell on entrepreneurs…

“We Are Searching For Haiti”

This week Studio 360, an arts and culture podcast, went to Brooklyn to profile Djarara. All fifteen members of the rara band lost someone in the earthquake. The musicians do a beautiful job explaining how and why they look to music and tradition in the aftermath of the disaster. “Haiti will get better,” one says. “We are searching for Haiti. For a better Haiti… But don’t worry. Haiti will be Haiti again.” Listen:

Courage in Creole

Explore Haitian aid donations here (J.P.Morgan Chase, 1 million; Czech Republic, 1.25 million; Gisele Bundchen, 1.5 million). The Red Cross was reporting on January 18th that around half of its donations, or seven million dollars, had come in by text.

Djarara in Prospect Park

Learn more about rara and Studio 360.

“Moments” by Radiolab

If possible, watch this fullscreen with a minimum of distractions.

There’s very little I can add to that.

I remembered this video writing about “John Smith” by This American Life, which is similar except it lasts an hour and might be even more beautiful.

Radiolab is a an extremely ambitious and innovative radio show on WNYC, always worth listening to. Check out their podcast and blog.

Ira’s App is Awesome

And he explains why you should buy it in an adorable video.

He could sell me anything with that little self depreciating laugh. We’re lucky he only uses his powers for good. And not, say, ShamWow. Because I would own one.

Come on, it’s a This American Life app. You don’t really need to watch the video, do you? Just buy it now.

If you haven’t seen it, “John Smith,” episode six, season two of the television series, is breathtaking. Watch it on that new “This Am Life” app you just bought.

It’s The Future: Photosynth City

The first of an occasional series. It is the future: let your jaws drop.

Microsoft’s photosynth software constructs 3D models of individual monuments from tourists’ photos. This takes it a step further. You can begin to appreciate what the world will look like to our children.

Google Earth and Street View are only a few years old, and already we take them for granted. Don’t forget! These are miracles; we are blessed. For more on modeling Dubrovnik, read the Gizmodo article.

By the way: Facebook turns six years old tomorrow, February 4.

8 Countries, 5 States

And the District of Columbia.

That’s the marriage equality tally today. The only jurisdictions currently marrying same-sex couples are: The Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, Norway, Sweden, South Africa, Portugal, New Hampshire, Iowa, Massachusetts, Vermont and Connecticut. And the District of Columbia.

The year the Supreme Court ruled that interracial marriage was a constitutionally protected right, only 20% of Americans condoned it. Today, fully 40% support gay marriage. The number is closer to 60% in those under thirty.

Perry v. Schwarzenegger, hoping to do for gay marriage in 2010 what Loving v. Virginia did for interracial marriage in 1967, is on its way to the Supreme Court. Margaret Talbot’s New Yorker story about their prospects is amazing.

In other news, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell seems to finally be on its way out. Congratulations, America! The total cost? 13,000 soldiers dismissed since 1993. But it’s not like we were fighting any wars at the time.